Unveiling the practices and challenges of professional learning community in a Malaysia Chinese School

Professional learning community (PLC) studies in the Asian Chinese nations remain scarce despite the emerging interest in the practice of PLC beyond the Western context. This study attempts to provide an understanding of the practices of PLC and challenges in implementing PLC in a Malaysian Chinese culture–dominated secondary school. This qualitative study used a phenomenological constructivist approach as a strategy of inquiry. Semi-structured interview data were collected from six middle leaders and ordinary teachers in a national-type Chinese secondary school in the northern region. Findings informed three existing PLC practices at the school level, namely, (a) peer coaching, (b) sharing of personal practices, and (c) professional development courses. However, the practice of PLC encounters various challenges, including excessive workload, teachers’ passive attitudes, unsupportive conditions in the school, poor execution of PLC by the school community, and a vague understanding of PLC. Interestingly, this study identified two uncovered challenges hindering the development of PLC: misconception about PLC and lack of supervision from the authority. Implications and future studies are presented

Unveiling the practices and challenges of professional learning community in a Malaysian Chinese Secondary School

Professional learning community (PLC) studies in the Asian Chinese nations remain scarce despite the emerging interest in the practice of PLC beyond the Western context. This study attempts to provide an understanding of the practices of PLC and challenges in implementing PLC in a Malaysian Chinese culture–dominated secondary school. This qualitative study used a phenomenological constructivist approach as a strategy of inquiry. Semi-structured interview data were collected from six middle leaders and ordinary teachers in a national-type Chinese secondary school in the northern region. Findings informed three existing PLC practices at the school level, namely, (a) peer coaching, (b) sharing of personal practices, and (c) professional development courses. However, the practice of PLC encounters various challenges, including excessive workload, teachers’ passive attitudes, unsupportive conditions in the school, poor execution of PLC by the school community, and a vague understanding of PLC. Interestingly, this study identified two uncovered challenges hindering the development of PLC: misconception about PLC and lack of supervision from the authority. Implications and future studies are presented

Unveiling the Practices and Challenges of Professional Learning Community in a Malaysian Chinese Secondary School

Professional learning community (PLC) studies in the Asian Chinese nations remain scarce despite the emerging interest in the practice of PLC beyond the Western context. This study attempts to provide an understanding of the practices of PLC and challenges in implementing PLC in a Malaysian Chinese culture– dominated secondary school. This qualitative study used a phenomenological constructivist approach as a strategy of inquiry. Semi-structured interview data were collected from six middle leaders and ordinary teachers in a national-type Chinese secondary school in the northern region. Findings informed three existing PLC practices at the school level, namely, (a) peer coaching, (b) sharing of personal practices, and (c) professional development courses. However, the practice of PLC encounters various challenges, including excessive workload, teachers’ passive attitudes, unsupportive conditions in the school, poor execution of PLC by the school community, and a vague understanding of PLC. Interestingly, this study identified two uncovered challenges hindering the development of PLC: misconception about PLC and lack of supervision from the authority. Implications and future studies are presented

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by finetuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapters, Parallel adapter, Prompt-based learning and Reparametrization-based methods. Moreover, we conduct extensive empirical studies on the impact of adapter types, placement locations, and hyper-parameters to the best design for each adapter-based methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of the adapters on fourteen datasets from two different reasoning tasks, Arithmetic Reasoning and Commonsense Reasoning. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on both reasoning tasks.Comment: EMNLP 2023. The code of our framework can be found at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/LLM-Adapters. We will keep all of the code open-source and continue to update the framework with new adapters, LLMs, and task

ELUCID V. Lighting dark matter halos with galaxies

In a recent study, using the distribution of galaxies in the north galactic pole of SDSS DR7 region enclosed in a 500\mpch box, we carried out our ELUCID simulation (Wang et al. 2016, ELUCID III). Here we {\it light} the dark matter halos and subhalos in the reconstructed region in the simulation with galaxies in the SDSS observations using a novel {\it neighborhood} abundance matching method. Before we make use of thus established galaxy-subhalo connections in the ELUCID simulation to evaluate galaxy formation models, we set out to explore the reliability of such a link. For this purpose, we focus on the following a few aspects of galaxies: (1) the central-subhalo luminosity and mass relations; (2) the satellite fraction of galaxies; (3) the conditional luminosity function (CLF) and conditional stellar mass function (CSMF) of galaxies; and (4) the cross correlation functions between galaxies and the dark matter particles, most of which are measured separately for all, red and blue galaxy populations. We find that our neighborhood abundance matching method accurately reproduces the central-subhalo relations, satellite fraction, the CLFs and CSMFs and the biases of galaxies. These features ensure that thus established galaxy-subhalo connections will be very useful in constraining galaxy formation processes. And we provide some suggestions on the three levels of using the galaxy-subhalo pairs for galaxy formation constraints. The galaxy-subhalo links and the subhalo merger trees in the SDSS DR7 region extracted from our ELUCID simulation are available upon request.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, ApJ accepte

Skin models for cutaneous melioidosis reveal Burkholderia infection dynamics at wound's edge with inflammasome activation, keratinocyte extrusion and epidermal detachment.

Funder: Research Centre of Excellence, Mechanobiology InstituteFunder: National Research FoundationFunder: Cambridge-NUS Global Alliance FundABSTRACTMelioidosis is a serious infectious disease endemic in Southeast Asia, Northern Australia and has been increasingly reported in other tropical and subtropical regions in the world. Percutaneous inoculation through cuts and wounds on the skin is one of the major modes of natural transmission. Despite cuts in skin being a major route of entry, very little is known about how the causative bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei initiates an infection at the skin and the disease manifestation at the skin known as cutaneous melioidosis. One key issue is the lack of suitable and relevant infection models. Employing an in vitro 2D keratinocyte cell culture, a 3D skin equivalent fibroblast-keratinocyte co-culture and ex vivo organ culture from human skin, we developed infection models utilizing surrogate model organism Burkholderia thailandensis to investigate Burkholderia-skin interactions. Collectively, these models show that the bacterial infection was largely limited at the wound's edge. Infection impedes wound closure, triggers inflammasome activation and cellular extrusion in the keratinocytes as a potential way to control bacterial infectious load at the skin. However, extensive infection over time could result in the epidermal layer being sloughed off, potentially contributing to formation of skin lesions

Jerantinine A induces tumor-specific cell death through modulation of splicing factor 3b subunit 1 (SF3B1)

Precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) splicing is catalyzed by a large ribonucleoprotein complex known as the spliceosome. Numerous studies have indicated that aberrant splicing patterns or mutations in spliceosome components, including the splicing factor 3b subunit 1 (SF3B1), are associated with hallmark cancer phenotypes. This has led to the identification and development of small molecules with spliceosome-modulating activity as potential anticancer agents. Jerantinine A (JA) is a novel indole alkaloid which displays potent anti-proliferative activities against human cancer cell lines by inhibiting tubulin polymerization and inducing G2/M cell cycle arrest. Using a combined pooled-genome wide shRNA library screen and global proteomic profiling, we showed that JA targets the spliceosome by up-regulating SF3B1 and SF3B3 protein in breast cancer cells. Notably, JA induced significant tumor-specific cell death and a significant increase in unspliced pre-mRNAs. In contrast, depletion of endogenous SF3B1 abrogated the apoptotic effects, but not the G2/M cell cycle arrest induced by JA. Further analyses showed that JA stabilizes endogenous SF3B1 protein in breast cancer cells and induced dissociation of the protein from the nucleosome complex. Together, these results demonstrate that JA exerts its antitumor activity by targeting SF3B1 and SF3B3 in addition to its reported targeting of tubulin polymerization

A brain-computer interface based cognitive training system for healthy elderly: A randomized control pilot study for usability and preliminary efficacy

10.1371/journal.pone.0079419PLoS ONE811-POLN