Compliments and compliment responses in Kunming Chinese

Turning big data into personalised diabetes care

In order to successfully steer a ship, a man, ship’s watch officer, or commander of the ship must be physically ready and must know the maneuvering characteristics of the ship he steers, as well as the forces acting on him. For that, it is necessary for him to know the specifics of the ship because each ship has its own "mood", its specific properties that depend on the type, and size of the ship. Therefore, maneuvering properties differ even in ships of the same type and therefore it is important to know the specifics of a particular ship. Also, the same ship will behave differently in different situations. When the ship finds itself in situations that require urgent reaction during the voyage, then the experience and skills of the ship's captain come to the fore. Then it is important that the captain, based on his experience, chooses the right maneuver, but also that he always has at least one reserve maneuver in his head. That decision in certain situations must be made in a very short period of time, and the future of the ship and human lives often depends on it, as well as the resources on board. Every skill is acquired through practice, and it is logical that the commander will react faster and more correctly in every new situation. Precisely because of this, the most intensive training is necessary for the formation of quality ship commanders. For that reason, the training of future ship commanders on ship simulators gives excellent results. On ship simulators, they can gain a lot of experience and go through countless scenarios. In this paper, the use-value of ship simulators from the aspect of the training was verified through the Search and Rescue (SAR) exercise realized on the ship simulator Wärtsilä Navigation Simulator NTPRO 5000. It has been shown that the simulator can successfully check and recognize the optimal SAR pattern, maneuvering characteristics of the ship, as well as practice, maneuvering the ship and resolving specific situations that ship commanders may encounter in real situations. Training on ship simulators cannot completely replace training in real situations, but it can be used to get acquainted with the maneuvering characteristics of the ship, train in working with navigation devices, and be a good starting point in preparing people who are trained to perform tasks in real situations. The use of hydrological data of relationships between different types of data using an autoregressive model (AR model) can contribute to the creation of more realistic scenarios on ship simulators. It is also possible to apply data in the modeling of the environment and connect them with the current hydrological situation of the waterway. In the exercise evaluation process, we can see if the ship's captain used the hydrological data in the right way.

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 11 • No. 2 • February 2021 doi:10.30845/ijhss.v11n2p12 113 Acquisition of the Multicultural Competence by the University of Burundi English Majors: The Case of the Speech Acts of Requests and Apology. Ildephonse Horicubonye, University of Burundi Department of English Language and Literature BP: 1550 Bujumbura-Burundi Abstract Multicultural competence that enables communication between people from different backgrounds is a very important requirement for an effective communication today. Burundi Government has initiated education system reform aiming at enabling University graduates to respond to the demands of intercultural understanding required for the globalized society. In this perspective, the University of Burundi offers English courses to all the students, especially English majors. Given that students take English courses after six years of exposure to this language, it is legitimate to wonder about whether or not they can achieve effective communication with people from different cultures. This paper seeks to analyse how English majors from the University of Burundi express the speech acts of apology and requests and attempts to answer the following question: (1) Are the Burundian English majors able to interpret appropriately utterances containing speech acts of requests and apology? This question was answered by administering a questionnaire to a sample of students, who were also involved in role plays. The questionnaire was elaborated in the form of a discourse completion test (DCT) on the speech acts under study –request and apology. The role plays were also prepared on the same speech acts. Responses on apology were categorized following the semantic formulas (Cohen and Olstain, 1983), their syntactic structures, and the semantic structure (Wierzbicka, 1991). Requests were analyzed following their semantic formulas ((Blum-Kulka, House &Kasper,1989, p.123) and their semantic structures (Wierzbcka, 1991). They were afterwards analyzed following Searle’s (1969) speech act theory and Goffman’s (1957) and Levinson’s (1987) notion of face. Results indicate that Burundian English majors have learned the semantic formulas used to express the speech acts under study. However, they fail to use them appropriately in different situations. Furthermore, it was noted that they do not know that the order in which the semantic formulas are arranged in utterances convey different illocutionary forces. From these results, it can be posited that this inappropriate acquisition of English cultural elements by Burundian English majors can result in miscommunication with non-Kirundi speakers of English.

Reply

Face recognition is an interesting topic in biometrics research, which can be divided into two sub-problems: face detection followed by face recognition. The application of face recognition in real life situations and pose variations still remains a challenge. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and compare various systems of face recognition based on speed and high accuracy Machine Learning algorithms. The Support Vectors Machine is a strong algorithm for mutli-classification. The feed- forward Neural Network is a popular one. Recently, Deep Learning is becoming a very important subset of machine learning due to its high level of performance across many types of data, in particular using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). A large colored Face Database is used to evaluate these three proposed and adapted architectures. The results are competitive.

This paper provides an overview of the measurement of hearing aid fitting outcomes in real life using self-report methods. Three topics are addressed: (1) why we should measure real-life outcomes; (2) seven different types of self-report outcome data; and (3) issues to consider in self-report outcome measurement- It is stressed that self-report data provide a unique view of the way that clients function and feel in their daily lives with regard to their hearing health. Self-report outcome data are multidimensional, and the different domains are only moderately correlated. When these types of data are gathered, it is essential to control relevant variables to safeguard validity and reliability.

This personal perspective on the development of archaeoastronomy over the last thirty years focuses on interpretative and methodological issues, picking up for example from the debate between Schaefer and Aveni at Oxford VII. How far we have actually progressed in the last three decades? Are we at last starting to achieve the correct fusion between the social science questions that our discipline addresses and the ‘hard science’ methods that are often involved in tackling them? In this paper I argue that the need for our hypotheses to be solidly grounded in social theory, which has rightly been recognised by most archaeoastronomers in recent years, is not an excuse for avoiding the need to be scientifically rigorous in assessing them against the actual evidence. I conclude that identifying robust methodologies for weighing together the different types of data with which the cultural astronomer is faced in different sitations, so as to infer the ‘best’ interpretation, remains at once the most challenging and the most pressing issue facing our ‘interdiscipline’ in the future.

ABSTRACTImages have been widely used in manufacturing applications for monitoring production processes, partly because they are often convenient and economic to acquire by different types of imaging devices. Medical imaging techniques, such as CT, PET, X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and functional MRI, have become a basic medical diagnosis tool nowadays. Satellite images are also commonly used for monitoring the changes of the earth’s surface. In all these applications, image comparison and monitoring are the common and fundamentally important statistical problems that should be addressed properly. In computer science, applied mathematics, statistics and some other disciplines, there have been many image processing methods proposed. In this article, I will discuss (i) a powerful statistical tool, called jump regression analysis (JRA), for modeling and analyzing images and other types of data with jumps and other singularities involved, (ii) some image processing problems and methods that are potentially useful for image comparison and monitoring, and (iii) some of my personal perspectives about image comparison and monitoring.

Background: Case-based learning (CBL) is a long established pedagogical method, which is defined in a number of ways depending on the discipline and type of ‘case’ employed. In health professional education, learning activities are commonly based on patient cases. Basic, social and clinical sciences are studied in relation to the case, are integrated with clinical presentations and conditions (including health and ill-health) and student learning is, therefore, associated with real-life situations. Although many claims are made for CBL as an effective learning and teaching method, very little evidence is quoted or generated to support these claims. We frame this review from the perspective of CBL as a type of inquiry-based learning.Aim: To explore, analyse and synthesise the evidence relating to the effectiveness of CBL as a means of achieving defined learning outcomes in health professional prequalification training programmes.Method: Selection criteria: We focused the review on CBL for prequalification health professional programmes including medicine, dentistry, veterinary science, nursing and midwifery, social care and the allied health professions (physiotherapy, occupational therapy, etc.). Papers were required to have outcome data on effectiveness. Search strategies: The search covered the period from 1965 to week 4 September 2010 and the following databases: ASSIA, CINAHL, EMBASE, Education Research, Medline and Web of Knowledge (WoK). Two members of the topic review group (TRG) independently reviewed the 173 abstracts retrieved from Medline and compared findings. As there was good agreement on inclusion, one went onto review the WoK and ASSIA EndNote databases and the other the Embase, CINAHL and Education Research databases to decide on papers to submit for coding. Coding and data analysis: The TRG modified the standard best evidence medical education coding sheet to fit our research questions and assessed each paper for quality. After a preliminary reliability exercise, each full paper was read and graded by one reviewer with the papers scoring 3–5 (of 5) for strength of findings being read by a second reviewer. A summary of each completed coding form was entered into an Excel spread sheet. The type of data in the papers was not amenable to traditional meta-analysis because of the variability in interventions, information given, student numbers (and lack of) and timings. We, therefore, adopted a narrative synthesis method to compare, contrast, synthesise and interpret the data, working within a framework of inquiry-based learning.Results: The final number of coded papers for inclusion was 104. The TRG agreed that 23 papers would be classified as of higher quality and significance (22%). There was a wide diversity in the type, timing, number and length of exposure to cases and how cases were defined. Medicine was the most commonly included profession. Numbers of students taking part in CBL varied from below 50 to over 1000. The shortest interventions were two hours, and one case, whereas the longest was CBL through a whole year. Group sizes ranged from students working alone to over 30, with the majority between 2 and 15 students per group. The majority of studies involved single cohorts of students (61%), with 29% comparing multiple groups, 8% involving different year groups and 2% with historical controls. The outcomes evaluation was either carried out postintervention only (78 papers; 75%), preintervention and postintervention (23 papers; 22%) or during and postintervention (3 papers; <3%). Our analysis provided the basis for discussion of definitions of CBL, methods used and advocated, topics and learning outcomes and whether CBL is effective based on the evaluation data.Conclusion: Overwhelmingly, students enjoy CBL and think that it enhances their learning. The empirical data taken as a whole are inconclusive as to the effects on learning compared with other types of activity. Teachers enjoy CBL, partly because it engages, and is perceived to motivate, students. CBL seems to foster learning in small groups though whether this is the case delivery or the group learning effect is unclear.

System state monitoring and lifetime scales—II

The understanding of mutual people interaction is a key component for recognizing people social behavior, but it strongly relies on a personal point of view resulting difficult to be a-priori modeled. We propose the adoption of the unique head mounted cameras first person perspective (ego-vision) to promptly detect people interaction in different social contexts. The proposal relies on a complete and reliable system that extracts people׳s head pose combining landmarks and shape descriptors in a temporal smoothed HMM framework. Finally, interactions are detected through supervised clustering on mutual head orientation and people distances exploiting a structural learning framework that specifically adjusts the clustering measure according to a peculiar scenario. Our solution provides the flexibility to capture the interactions disregarding the number of individuals involved and their level of acquaintance in context with a variable degree of social involvement. The proposed system shows competitive performances on both publicly available ego-vision datasets and ad hoc benchmarks built with real life situations.

Utility-oriented pattern mining is an emerging topic, since it can reveal high-utility patterns from different types of data, which provides more information than the traditional frequency/confidence-based pattern mining models. The utilities of various items/objects are not exactly equal in realistic situations; each item/object has its own utility or importance. In general, the user considers a uniform minimum utility (minutil) threshold to identify the set of high-utility sequential patterns (HUSPs). This is unable to find the interesting patterns while theminutilis set extremely high or low. We first design a new utility mining framework namely USPT for mining high-&lt;u&gt;U&lt;/u&gt;tility &lt;u&gt;S&lt;/u&gt;equential &lt;u&gt;P&lt;/u&gt;atterns across multi-sequences with individualized &lt;u&gt;T&lt;/u&gt;hresholds. Each item in the designed framework has its own specified minimum utility threshold. Based on the lexicographic-sequential tree and the utility-array structure, the USPT framework is presented to efficiently discover the HUSPs. With the upper-bounds on utility, several pruning strategies are developed to prune the unpromising candidates early in the search space. Several experiments are conducted on both real-life and synthetic datasets to show the performance of the designed USPT algorithm, and the results show that USPT could achieve good effectiveness and efficiency for mining HUSPs with individualized minimum utility thresholds.

The need for powerful validation methods for hydrological models including the evaluation of internal stages and spatially distributed simulations has often been emphasized. In this study a multi-criterial validation scheme was used for validation of TOPMODEL, a conceptual semi-distributed rainfall–runoff model. The objective was to test TOPMODEL's capability of adequately representing dominant hydrological processes by simple conceptual approaches. Validation methods differed in the type of data used, in their target and in mode. The model was applied in the humid and mountainous Brugga catchment (40 km2) in south-west Germany. It was calibrated by a Monte Carlo method based on hourly runoff data. Additional information for validation was derived from a recession analysis, hydrograph separation with environmental tracers and from field surveys, including the mapping of saturated areas. Although runoff simulations were satisfying, inadequacies of the model structure compared with the real situation with regard to hydrological processes in the study area were found. These belong mainly to the concept of variable contributing areas for saturation excess overland flow and their dynamics, which were overestimated by the model. The simple TOPMODEL approach of two flow components was found to be insufficient. The multi-criterial validation scheme enables not only to demonstrate limitations with regard to process representation, but also to specify where and why these limitations occur. It may serve as a valuable tool for the development of physically sound model modifications. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The need for powerful validation methods for hydrological models including the evaluation of internal stages and spatially distributed simulations has often been emphasized. In this study a multi-criterial validation scheme was used for validation of TOPMODEL, a conceptual semi-distributed rainfall–runoff model. The objective was to test TOPMODEL's capability of adequately representing dominant hydrological processes by simple conceptual approaches. Validation methods differed in the type of data used, in their target and in mode. The model was applied in the humid and mountainous Brugga catchment (40 km2) in south-west Germany. It was calibrated by a Monte Carlo method based on hourly runoff data. Additional information for validation was derived from a recession analysis, hydrograph separation with environmental tracers and from field surveys, including the mapping of saturated areas. Although runoff simulations were satisfying, inadequacies of the model structure compared with the real situation with regard to hydrological processes in the study area were found. These belong mainly to the concept of variable contributing areas for saturation excess overland flow and their dynamics, which were overestimated by the model. The simple TOPMODEL approach of two flow components was found to be insufficient. The multi-criterial validation scheme enables not only to demonstrate limitations with regard to process representation, but also to specify where and why these limitations occur. It may serve as a valuable tool for the development of physically sound model modifications. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In recognition of a lack of suitable and age specific educational material for young people with type 1 diabetes it was decided to develop a new resource for the local area. The author decided on using the multimedia format of a DVD due to its ability to portray images and real life situations. A patient focus group approach was used to establish the main areas to be incorporated within the DVD which, to name a few, included diagnosis, school/college, alcohol, injections and drug use. The same patients then agreed, along with their families, to discuss these areas on camera using a non‐scripted approach.The DVD has been positively evaluated by 21 health care professionals undergoing the Warwick Diabetes Care course. In all, 81% rated it as excellent and 19% as good with no negative feedback. Patient feedback was also sought from 12 patients who had transferred from the paediatric service. This was done in the form of verbal feedback. Patients commented on the DVD showing what living with diabetes is like for ‘ real people’ with the main theme being that ‘ diabetes is just another part of life’.The DVD started out as a small local project but it has since become possible to have 1000 copies produced and these are now available free of charge to all diabetes centres in the UK. Further evaluation of the impact of the DVD for patients and health care professionals is planned. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.