A Korean EFL Teacher's Agency and Identity Construction Process: A Discourse Analysis Approach

This paper explores the discursive practices of a South Korean middle school English teacher in light of the growing gap between South Korean education’s social and cultural ideologies and the teacher’s sense-making process under contradicting circumstances. In contrast with the image of South Korea portrayed by foreign media and Western scholarship as one of the leading countries for education in general and English education in particular (Jenks, 2017; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002; Shim & Park, 2008), workers in the field of education in this country appear to be in agony (Kim, 2017; Namgung et al., 2020). To examine such a contradiction, a semi-structured interview with one South Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher was conducted to investigate her work discourses in relation to concepts of teacher agency (Bourdieu, 1977; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wertsch, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978) and teacher identity (Sachs, 2005). Analysis utilized the discourse analytic tools of positioning (Bamberg, 2004) and footing (Goffman, 1981) to better understand the deontic discursive practices that comprise the social practice of claiming the authority to dictate how education should be done in South Korea. The findings show that although there seems to be strong resistance to the impositions and demands by the hostile parties at the workplace, evidence indicates some instances of coping strategies in the same discourses

Wireless charging pad detection and alignment using a fisheye camera for electric vehicles

The market for electric vehicles is growing day by day and electric car chargers can be seen often on pavements of the major cities and towns. With this growing market, industry is already looking for another breakthrough, i.e. wireless vehicle charging. This is much like charging smart phones using wireless charging pads instead of plugging the vehicle in. Industry is exploring ways to charge Electric vehicles wirelessly when the car is parked over a charger on the ground beneath it. For the wireless charging to work, both elements must be well aligned. This paper explores using vision based approaches to provide the automatic recognition, localisation and tracking of an inductive plate for wireless car charging. Visual feedback is provided to a motion control system for accurate charger alignment

The impact of employee’s perception of organizational climate on their technology acceptance toward e-learning in South Korea

To better understand the relationship between e-learning integration and organizational factors in South Korea, this study explored the influence of employees’ perceptions of organizational climate on their technology acceptances toward e-learning in the workplace of South Korea. Employees’ perceptions of organizational climate was evaluated using Litwin & Stringer’s Organizational Climate Questionnaire (LSOCQ) and employees’ technology acceptance toward e-learning was measured by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). A canonical correlation suggested that employees’ perceived organizational climate can influence their acceptance levels toward e-learning, which implies the importance of addressing organizational issues while integrating e-learning into workplaces in South Korea

CSGM Designer: a platform for designing cross-species intron-spanning genic markers linked with genome information of legumes.

BackgroundGenetic markers are tools that can facilitate molecular breeding, even in species lacking genomic resources. An important class of genetic markers is those based on orthologous genes, because they can guide hypotheses about conserved gene function, a situation that is well documented for a number of agronomic traits. For under-studied species a key bottleneck in gene-based marker development is the need to develop molecular tools (e.g., oligonucleotide primers) that reliably access genes with orthology to the genomes of well-characterized reference species.ResultsHere we report an efficient platform for the design of cross-species gene-derived markers in legumes. The automated platform, named CSGM Designer (URL: http://tgil.donga.ac.kr/CSGMdesigner), facilitates rapid and systematic design of cross-species genic markers. The underlying database is composed of genome data from five legume species whose genomes are substantially characterized. Use of CSGM is enhanced by graphical displays of query results, which we describe as "circular viewer" and "search-within-results" functions. CSGM provides a virtual PCR representation (eHT-PCR) that predicts the specificity of each primer pair simultaneously in multiple genomes. CSGM Designer output was experimentally validated for the amplification of orthologous genes using 16 genotypes representing 12 crop and model legume species, distributed among the galegoid and phaseoloid clades. Successful cross-species amplification was obtained for 85.3% of PCR primer combinations.ConclusionCSGM Designer spans the divide between well-characterized crop and model legume species and their less well-characterized relatives. The outcome is PCR primers that target highly conserved genes for polymorphism discovery, enabling functional inferences and ultimately facilitating trait-associated molecular breeding

Effectively identifying regulatory hotspots while capturing expression heterogeneity in gene expression studies

Expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping is a tool that can systematically identify genetic variation affecting gene expression. eQTL mapping studies have shown that certain genomic locations, referred to as regulatory hotspots, may affect the expression levels of many genes. Recently, studies have shown that various confounding factors may induce spurious regulatory hotspots. Here, we introduce a novel statistical method that effectively eliminates spurious hotspots while retaining genuine hotspots. Applied to simulated and real datasets, we validate that our method achieves greater sensitivity while retaining low false discovery rates compared to previous methods

Shear-solvo defect annihilation of diblock copolymer thin films over a large area

Achieving defect-free block copolymer (BCP) nanopatterns with a long-ranged orientation over a large area remains a persistent challenge, impeding the successful and widespread application of BCP self-assembly. Here, we demonstrate a new experimental strategy for defect annihilation while conserving structural order and enhancing uniformity of nanopatterns. Sequential shear alignment and solvent vapor annealing generate perfectly aligned nanopatterns with a low defect density over centimeter-scale areas, outperforming previous single or sequential combinations of annealing. The enhanced order quality and pattern uniformity were characterized in unprecedented detail via scattering analysis and incorporating new mathematical indices using elaborate image processing algorithms. In addition, using an advanced sampling method combined with a coarse-grained molecular simulation, we found that domain swelling is the driving force for enhanced defect annihilation. The superior quality of large-scale nanopatterns was further confirmed with diffraction and optical properties after metallized patterns, suggesting strong potential for application in optoelectrical devices

The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability by instruction tuning with CoT rationales. In order to achieve this goal, we first introduce a new instruction-tuning dataset called the CoT Collection, which augments the existing Flan Collection (including only 9 CoT tasks) with additional 1.84 million rationales across 1,060 tasks. We show that CoT fine-tuning Flan-T5 (3B & 11B) with CoT Collection enables smaller LMs to have better CoT capabilities on unseen tasks. On the BIG-Bench-Hard (BBH) benchmark, we report an average improvement of +4.34% (Flan-T5 3B) and +2.60% (Flan-T5 11B), in terms of zero-shot task accuracy. Furthermore, we show that instruction tuning with CoT Collection allows LMs to possess stronger few-shot learning capabilities on 4 domain-specific tasks, resulting in an improvement of +2.24% (Flan-T5 3B) and +2.37% (Flan-T5 11B), even outperforming ChatGPT utilizing demonstrations until the max length by a +13.98% margin. Our code, the CoT Collection data, and model checkpoints are publicly available.Comment: EMNLP 2023 (Main Conference

Quantitative modeling of the behaviour of microfluidic autoregulatory devices

We develop a theoretical model for a fluidic current source consisting of a via, a detour channel, and a push-up type micro-valve. The model accurately describes the non-linear behaviour of this type of device, which has been previously measured experimentally. We show how various structural parameters and material properties of the device influence the saturated flow rate and the minimum driving pressure required for the device to function as a current source. Conversely, the model can be used to design a fluidic current source with a desired saturated flow rate and low operational pressure. The present model can be straightforwardly applied to microfluidic circuits composed of many functional autoregulatory devices

Ammonium Inhibits Chromomethylase 3-Mediated Methylation of the Arabidopsis Nitrate Reductase Gene NIA2

Gene methylation is an important mechanism regulating gene expression and genome stability. Our previous work showed that methylation of the nitrate reductase (NR) gene NIA2 was dependent on chromomethylase 3 (CMT3). Here, we show that CMT3-mediated NIA2 methylation is regulated by ammonium in Arabidopsis thaliana. CHG sequences (where H can be A, T, or C) were methylated in NIA2 but not in NIA1, and ammonium [(NH4)2SO4] treatment completely blocked CHG methylation in NIA2. By contrast, ammonium had no effect on CMT3 methylation, indicating that ammonium negatively regulates CMT3-mediated NIA2 methylation without affecting CMT3 methylation. Ammonium upregulated NIA2 mRNA expression, which was consistent with the repression of NIA2 methylation by ammonium. Ammonium treatment also reduced the overall genome methylation level of wild-type Arabidopsis. Moreover, CMT3 bound to specific promoter and intragenic regions of NIA2. These combined results indicate that ammonium inhibits CMT3-mediated methylation of NIA2 and that of other target genes, and CMT3 selectively binds to target DNA sequences for methylation