Thyroid hormones status during pregnancy in normal Iranian women

Pregnancy is associated with significant, but reversible changes in thyroid function studies, which are among the most profound seen as a result of a normal physiologic state. The present study was carried out to find out alterations in thyroid function tests in each trimester in normal pregnant women as compared to non-pregnant women in Tabriz-Iran. A case-control study designed with 229 normal pregnant women that randomly selected from the first (64 samples), the second (92 samples), and the third (73 samples) trimesters and 250 randomly selected non-pregnant healthy female controls. Age range in both groups was 16–40 years. Thyroid function tests carried out by measuring serum levels of thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), free and total thyroxin (FT₄, TT₄), and free and total triiodothyronine (FT₃, TT₃) by commercially available radio immunoassay kits. We found that mean TT₄ increased progressively during pregnancy. Our study showed increasing in serum levels of TT₃ in the second trimester and then declining during the third trimester compared with non-pregnant women. We showed that FT₄ strongly decreased during the third trimester. Free T₃ showed declining in the second and third trimesters. Mean TSH did not show significant difference in each trimester compared with non-pregnant women. The thyroid function tests in pregnancy should be interpreted against gestational age-related reference intervals to avoid mis-interpretation of thyroid function during pregnancy.     

Parental perceptions of life context variables for involvement in their young children's education

The purpose of this study was to discover Turkish parents’ perceptions of life context variables, including personal knowledge and skills and personal time and energy for involvement activities in their young children's education. The scales used in this study were based on parents’ self-report, and included: (1) Parental Perceptions of Personal Knowledge and Skills for Involvement Activities and (2) Parental Perceptions of Personal Time and Energy for Involvement Activities. Moreover, a demographic survey was developed and used as the second instrument in this study. The results suggested that parents as a group tend to have positive perceptions of life context variables for involvement in their young children's education and their income is the strongest predictor of these perceptions.     

The effects of function-based communication intervention for a student with emotional disturbance in a general education setting

Research has shown that most children with emotional disturbance (ED) are struggling to use communication skills and they may tend to use inappropriate behaviours as a form of communication to disclose their needs. A function-based communication intervention might be an effective approach to decrease inappropriate behaviours of children with ED. The purpose of this single-case multiple baseline reversal design (ABAB) study was to examine the effectiveness of the function-based communication intervention for on-task and disruptive behaviours of an 8-year-old student with ED. Functional behavioural assessment (FBA) was conducted and based on the findings of FBA, a colour-coded communication system, was implemented during reading and math classes. The findings indicated that function-based communication intervention was effective in increasing on-task as well as decreasing disruptive behaviours. Furthermore, the function-based communication intervention improved communication between the teacher and the student that resulted in decreasing disruptive behaviours in a general classroom setting. The generalisability of the findings due to the limited number of participants was an important limitation for this study. Future directions, as well as implications for practices, are discussed.     

Neural embedding-based indices for semantic search

Traditional information retrieval techniques that primarily rely on keyword-based linking of the query and document spaces face challenges such as the vocabulary mismatch problem where relevant documents to a given query might not be retrieved simply due to the use of different terminology for describing the same concepts. As such, semantic search techniques aim to address such limitations of keyword-based retrieval models by incorporating semantic information from standard knowledge bases such as Freebase and DBpedia. The literature has already shown that while the sole consideration of semantic information might not lead to improved retrieval performance over keyword-based search, their consideration enables the retrieval of a set of relevant documents that cannot be retrieved by keyword-based methods. As such, building indices that store and provide access to semantic information during the retrieval process is important. While the process for building and querying keyword-based indices is quite well understood, the incorporation of semantic information within search indices is still an open challenge. Existing work have proposed to build one unified index encompassing both textual and semantic information or to build separate yet integrated indices for each information type but they face limitations such as increased query process time. In this paper, we propose to use neural embeddings-based representations of term, semantic entity, semantic type and documents within the same embedding space to facilitate the development of a unified search index that would consist of these four information types. We perform experiments on standard and widely used document collections including Clueweb09-B and Robust04 to evaluate our proposed indexing strategy from both effectiveness and efficiency perspectives. Based on our experiments, we find that when neural embeddings are used to build inverted indices; hence relaxing the requirement to explicitly observe the posting list key in the indexed document: (a) retrieval efficiency will increase compared to a standard inverted index, hence reduces the index size and query processing time, and (b) while retrieval efficiency, which is the main objective of an efficient indexing mechanism improves using our proposed method, retrieval effectiveness also retains competitive performance compared to the baseline in terms of retrieving a reasonable number of relevant documents from the indexed corpus.     

A Cross-Age Study of the Understanding of Three Genetic Concepts: How Do They Image the Gene, DNA and Chromosome?

The study was carried out with 175 Turkish students by using drawings at different ages understanding of gene, DNA and chromosome concepts. Students from 8th, 9th, 11th grades and, science and biology student teachers were simply asked to draw the structure of gene, DNA and chromosome in a cell and also to give explanations about these three concepts. Differences in understanding between the age groups were found to be significant for the concepts of gene and DNA. None of the groups exhibit sound understanding and regardless of the age levels, students in all groups had alternative ideas about the three concepts investigated.     

Allies in learning: critical insights into the importance of staff–student interactions in university education

Discussions of the quality of learning in university education often focus on curricula. Less attention is paid to the role of student–staff interactions. In a context in which a host of factors place pressure on the opportunities for students and staff to interact, it is important to use empirical insights to inform decisions about how to optimise learning. This paper uses data from a large survey of students and teaching staff in Australia to suggest that students and staff should be regarded as allies in learning. It investigates student reports to suggest that frequent interactions with those who teach them lead to higher levels of student engagement and satisfaction and lower attrition rates. The advantages do not only flow in one direction. Teaching staff gain insights into students' learning experiences, providing them with clues to better target their teaching.     

Non-fragile exponential synchronization of delayed complex dynamical networks with transmission delay via sampled-data control

This paper is devoted to the non-fragile exponential synchronization problem of complex dynamical networks with time-varying coupling delays via sampled-data static output-feedback controller involving a constant signal transmission delay. The dynamics of the nodes contain s quadratically restricted nonlinearities, and the feedback gain is allowed to have norm-bounded time-varying uncertainty. The control design is based on a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, which consists of the sum of terms assigned to the individual nodes, i.e., it is constructed without merging the complex dynamical network’s nodes into a single large-scale system. In this way, the proposed design method has substantially reduced computational complexity and improved conservativeness, and guaranties non-fragile exponential stability of the error system. The sufficient stability condition is expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities that are solvable by standard tools. The efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical examples.     

一种有效的余弦调制滤波器组的设计方法

本文给出了一种有效的余弦调制滤波器组的设计方法。这种算法采用了内插法和迭代算法相结合设计原型滤波器,目标函数表示为滤波器系数的四次方,用迭代算法来优化滤波器的系数。这种方法使需要优化的参数大大减少。最后的实例仿真,验证了此算法的有效性。     

浅谈力学教学中提升学生的创新能力与素质

力学教学对当代大学生的创新能力和素质的培养有着重要的作用.该文结合教学实践和体会,通过力学史的渗透、多种教学手段相结合、“一题多解”的训练、使用力学知识解决生活实际问题和鼓励学生参加课程实践活动等方式,不断激发学生学习兴趣,提高思维积极性,培养创新精神,加强创新能力和科学素质.     

A qualitative analysis of context-aware ubiquitous learning environments using Bluetooth beacons

The use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons is becoming widespread for context-aware learning environments. This technology can be used in indoor and outdoor settings such as museums, shops, home and schools in order to identify the location of learners and their contexts. Specifically, in the constructivist view of learning, learners can use such sensing technology for constructing knowledge and experiencing learning at any time, anywhere. However, exploration of such technology has been limited in the constructivist context-aware ubiquitous learning (U-learning) literature. For this purpose, the authors evaluated two android-based U-learning applications: one was an outdoor learning environment in a garden, the other was about locating books in a library. The applications were implemented and tested with school and university students. The qualitative results are presented in this article, and show how such sensing technology is promising for both pedagogical environments.