Role of Discipline-specific Vocabulary in L2 Reading by Chinese Chemistry Major Undergraduates

This study explored the contribution of second language (L2) discipline-specific vocabulary to Chinese chemistry major undergraduates’ reading of textbooks. Participants included 82 second-year undergraduates majoring in chemistry. Their discipline-specific vocabulary knowledge and chemistry textbook reading ability were measured. Their L2 proficiency and chemistry knowledge data were collected. Correlation and multiple regression analyses revealed that discipline-specific vocabulary was highly correlated with L2 proficiency and disciplinary knowledge, and discipline-specific vocabulary contributed the most to textbook reading, bigger than either L2 proficiency or disciplinary knowledge. Implications for discipline-specific vocabulary and English for academic purposes (EAP) reading instructions are discussed

Numerical Investigation of Stress Distributions in Stope Backfills

Stope backfill is important in avoiding mine collapse during and after extraction phases, ground subsidence in abandoned mines, and environmental damages. The stress distribution is one of the key factors in designing stope backfills. In this paper, we perform a numerical modeling study to investigate the stress distribution within and around the stope backfill. Importantly, our simulation results are in agreement with Marston’s (1930) plain-strain arching theory. The results show that the stress arch is critical in stope backfills. The potential effects of internal friction angle, aspect ratio, and Poisson’s ratio on stress distributions are also analyzed. The stress decreases when the aspect ratio, internal friction angle, and Poisson’s ratio increase. Our results suggest that decreasing the aspect ratio and choosing materials with a high internal friction angle and Poisson’s ratio are important for designing the stope backfill. The cohesive force index and elastic modulus also have significant effects on the stress distribution. Our findings have practical implications in designing stope backfills

Autonomous Learning of Speaker Identity and WiFi Geofence From Noisy Sensor Data

A fundamental building block towards intelligent environments is the ability to understand who is present in a certain area. A ubiquitous way of detecting this is to exploit unique vocal characteristics as people interact with one another in common spaces. However, manually enrolling users into a biometric database is time-consuming and not robust to vocal deviations over time. Instead, consider audio features sampled during a meeting, yielding a noisy set of possible voiceprints. With a number of meetings and knowledge of participation, e.g., sniffed wireless Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, can we learn to associate a specific identity with a particular voiceprint? To address this problem, this paper advocates an Internet of Things (IoT) solution and proposes to use co-located WiFi as supervisory weak labels to automatically bootstrap the labelling process. In particular, a novel cross-modality labelling algorithm is proposed that jointly optimises the clustering and association process, which solves the inherent mismatching issues arising from heterogeneous sensor data. At the same time, we further propose to reuse the labelled data to iteratively update wireless geofence models and curate device specific thresholds. Extensive experimental results from two different scenarios demonstrate that our proposed method is able to achieve 2-fold improvement in labelling compared with conventional methods and can achieve reliable speaker recognition in the wild

Case report: Anesthetic management for removal of tumor thrombus in the inferior vena cava and pulmonary artery in renal cell carcinoma

Anesthetic management of patients with renal cell carcinoma with tumor thrombus in the inferior vena cava (IVC) is challenging. This paper reports the experience of anesthesia management in a patient with advanced renal cell carcinoma with thrombus accumulation in the IVC, right atrium, and pulmonary artery who underwent radical nephrectomy and tumor thrombus removal assisted by cardiopulmonary bypass. The emboli, measuring approximately 3 × 6 cm in the left inferior pulmonary artery and 4 × 13 cm in the right main pulmonary artery, were removed completely. During incision of the IVC under systemic heparinization, significant blood loss occurred in the surgical field. The surgery took 724 min, and cardiopulmonary bypass took 396 min. Intraoperative blood loss was 22,000 ml. The patient was extubated 39 hours after surgery and stayed in intensive care unit for 3 days. At 1 year follow-up, the patient was in good health and leading a normal life