Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping

Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage [1, 2]; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements [3]. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and statistical cues [5, 9] are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language

Ethical innovation through Confucian teaching

This research explores innovation from an ethical perspective. With increasing number of Chinese business applying Confucius teaching into business management and employee training, this research explores the influence of Confucius values of harmony, familial collectivism and reciprocity. It aims to evaluate the teach ing of these key Confucius ethical values to staff in a private owned Chinese organisation, and its impact on business movement. Taking a case-study approach, this research is conducted in Good-ark, a private-owned semi-conductor manufacturing company in Suzhou, China. Data has been collected from semi-structured interviews and company's annual reports and training records. The results demonstrate that Confuci anism teaching enhances both employees' and managers' commitment towards the organisation. Through such ethical innovation, it reduces the organisation's employee turnover and forms a strong cohesion within the organisation, and improves individuals and organisational performance. Furthermore, Confucius teaching helps extend people's understanding of Confucius ethical values, which are further applied into a wider social context. The practical implication and limitations of the current research are also discussed

Modulation spectra capture EEG responses to speech signals and drive distinct temporal response functions

Speech signals have a unique shape of long-term modulation spectrum that is distinct from environmental noise, music, and non-speech vocalizations. Does the human auditory system adapt to the speech long-term modulation spectrum and efficiently extract critical information from speech signals? To answer this question, we tested whether neural responses to speech signals can be captured by specific modulation spectra of non-speech acoustic stimuli. We generated amplitude modulated (AM) noise with the speech modulation spectrum and 1/f modulation spectra of different exponents to imitate temporal dynamics of different natural sounds. We presented these AM stimuli and a 10-min piece of natural speech to 19 human participants undergoing electroencephalography (EEG) recording. We derived temporal response functions (TRFs) to the AM stimuli of different spectrum shapes and found distinct neural dynamics for each type of TRFs. We then used the TRFs of AM stimuli to predict neural responses to the speech signals, and found that (1) the TRFs of AM modulation spectra of exponents 1, 1.5, and 2 preferably captured EEG responses to speech signals in the δ band and (2) the θ neural band of speech neural responses can be captured by the AM stimuli of an exponent of 0.75. Our results suggest that the human auditory system shows specificity to the long-term modulation spectrum and is equipped with characteristic neural algorithms tailored to extract critical acoustic information from speech signals

First-principles study on the effective masses of zinc-blend-derived Cu_2Zn-IV-VI_4 (IV = Sn, Ge, Si and VI = S, Se)

The electron and hole effective masses of kesterite (KS) and stannite (ST) structured Cu_2Zn-IV-VI_4 (IV = Sn, Ge, Si and VI = S, Se) semiconductors are systematically studied using first-principles calculations. We find that the electron effective masses are almost isotropic, while strong anisotropy is observed for the hole effective mass. The electron effective masses are typically much smaller than the hole effective masses for all studied compounds. The ordering of the topmost three valence bands and the corresponding hole effective masses of the KS and ST structures are different due to the different sign of the crystal-field splitting. The electron and hole effective masses of Se-based compounds are significantly smaller compared to the corresponding S-based compounds. They also decrease as the atomic number of the group IV elements (Si, Ge, Sn) increases, but the decrease is less notable than that caused by the substitution of S by Se.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Successful Pregnancy after Treatment with Chinese Herbal Medicine in a 43-Year-Old Woman with Diminished Ovarian Reserve and Multiple Uterus Fibrosis: A Case Report.

OBJECTIVE: To highlight a natural approach to coexisting oligomenorrhea, subfertility, luteal phase insufficiency and multiple fibroids cohesively when in vitro fertilisation (IVF) has failed. CASE PRESENTATION: A 43-year-old woman with diminished ovarian reserve and multiple uterine fibroids had previously been advised to discontinue IVF treatment. According to Chinese Medicine diagnosis, herbal formulae were prescribed for improving age-related ovarian insufficiency as well as to control the growth of fibroids. After 4 months of treatment, the patient's menstrual cycle became regula r and plasma progesterone one week after ovulation increased from 10.9 nmol/L to 44.9 nmol/L. After 6 months, she achieved a natural conception, resulting in a live birth of a healthy infant at an estimated gestational age of 40 weeks. CONCLUSIONS: The successful treatment with Chinese Herbal Medicine for this case highlights a natural therapy to manage infertility due to ovarian insufficiency and multiple fibroids after unsuccessful IVF outcome

Priority-driven self-optimizing power control scheme for interlinking converters of hybrid AC/DC microgrid clusters in decentralized manner

Hybrid AC/DC microgrid clusters are key building blocks of smart grid to support sustainable and resilient urban power systems. In microgrid clusters, the subgrid load-priorities and power quality requirements for different areas vary significantly. To realize optimal power exchanges among microgrid clusters, this paper proposes a decentralized self-optimizing power control scheme for interlinking converters (ILC) of hybrid microgrid clusters. A priority-driven optimal power exchange model of ILCs is built considering the priorities and capacities in subgrids. The optimization objective is to minimize the total DC-voltage/AC-frequency state deviations of subgrids. To realize the decentralized power flow control, an optimal-oriented quasi-droop control strategy of ILCs is introduced to not only achieve a flexible self-optimizing power flow management, but also provide an ancillary function of voltage support. Consequently, as each of ILCs only monitors the local AC-side frequency and DC-side voltage signals, the whole optimal power control of the wide-area microgrid clusters is achieved in a decentralized manner without any communication link. Thus, the proposed control algorithm has the features of decreased cost, increased scalability, reduced geographic restrictions and high resilience in terms of communication faults. Finally, the proposed method is validated by case studies with four interconnected microgrids through hardware-in-loop tests