Applying tangible story avatars to enhance children's collaborative storytelling

Software avatars are increasingly applied to support children's collaborative storytelling because avatars may serve as a transparent shield or as embodied agents to facilitate creativity in children. However, when using avatars, it is not easy for children to practise and refine their speaking skills by narrating their stories to an audience. The programming difficulties involved in that process tend to distract attention away from the collaborative storytelling activity itself. This study therefore proposes an interaction model featuring tangible story avatars (TSAs) that can serve as a platform to scaffold collaborative story creation, revision and narrative. A 9‐week study with 16 children aged 8 years was conducted to evaluate the interaction model with the TSAs. The results suggest that the TSAs may play three primary roles in facilitating collaborative storytelling: as a tool for developing confidence, as a tool for reflective story development and as a group artefact. Researchers and educators may find it valuable to consider these three roles in designing the TSAs in support of collaborative storytelling in similar contexts.     

高校校园文化育人功能的实效性途径探讨

校园文化建设作为高校大学生教育的有效载体,是高校全面育人不可或缺的重要环节。其"软约束性"的教育引导功能日渐凸显。通过研究、分析校园文化育人所面临的新问题、新情况,以构建与时俱进、满足师生需求文化育人的实效性途径,不仅具有理论的探讨价值,更具有现实的实践意义。     

Understanding the Philosophical Foundations of Disabilities to Maximize the Potential of Response to Intervention

In the United States and elsewhere in the world, disabilities are being studied by two different schools of thought: special education and disability studies. In the field of special education, analyses are often pragmatic and instrumental. In contrast, analyses in the field of disability studies are often historical and cultural, explaining disabilities as constructed by social value. This lack of agreement about disabilities leads us to ask: How can practitioners and researchers begin to address the issue of which students might need intensive interventions for their disabilities through the response to intervention (RTI) approach when disabilities are viewed so differently by scholars in the field? In this article I compare and contrast the philosophical foundations of disabilities in special education and disability studies and conclude that the dimensions of pragmatic, instrumental, historical, and cultural factors must be taken into account in order to achieve both the macro and micro levels of RTI implementation.     

Accelerated Online Learning: Perceptions of Interaction and Learning Outcomes Among African American Students

This study investigated student interaction, satisfaction, and performance in accelerated online learning environments with the use of an online learning course-management system. The interactions assessed in this study included learner–learner interaction, learner–instructor interaction, and learner–content interaction. The participants were African American students from a university in the southeastern United States. Quantitative approaches including correlation and regression analyses were performed to examine the contribution of interaction predictors to student satisfaction as well as the relationship between student satisfaction and student performance. In addition, Internet self-efficacy and its impact on interaction was investigated. The results showed that learner–content interaction was the only significant predictor of student satisfaction whereas interaction among students or with the instructor did not significantly predict student satisfaction. Internet self-efficacy was positively correlated with three types of interaction. Student satisfaction was found to be related to student performance.     

The Heroine of Free China: A New Image of Diplomatic Envoys and the Female Body of the Liangyou Women’s National Basketball Team in the 1950s

The Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and Communist Party that ended in 1949 caused a confrontation between the ‘Free China’ in Taiwan claimed by the Republic of China, the KMT that retreated to Taiwan, and the ‘New China’ established by the People’s Republic of China. The sport policies of the ‘Two Chinas’ were based on the respective political positions, which were affected greatly by the Cold War. Taiwan, ruled by the KMT affiliating with the camp of the capitalists led by the USA, was the revival base to connect with Chinese in several East and Southeast Asian countries and to connect with other Asian anti-Communist countries. Political and military policies contributed to Taiwan women’s basketball development during the Cold War in East Asia and the first national team named Liangyou thus emerged. The Liangyou’s life symbolized the beginning and the phased ending of women’s basketball development in Taiwan, and skilful players of noble character practised loyal diplomatic missions and publicized the strong body-mind heroine image of Free China. Their healthy and cheerful character along with a passion for basketball provided new ideas of women’s roles in post-war Taiwan. Trips for overseas competitions let players experience the outside world.     

A framework of cloud-based virtual phones for secure intelligent information management

As mobile networks and devices being rapidly innovated, many new Internet services and applications have been deployed. However, the current implementation faces security, management, and performance issues, which are critical to the use in business environments. Migrating sensitive information, management facilities, and intensive computation to security hardened virtualized environment in the cloud provides effective solutions. This paper proposes an innovative Internet service and business model to provide a secure and consolidated environment for enterprise mobile information management based on the infrastructure of cloud-based virtual phones (CVP). Our proposed solution enables the users to execute Android and web applications in the cloud and connect to other users of CVP with enhanced performance and protected privacy. The organization of CVP can be mixed with centralized control and distributed protocols, which emulates the behavior of human societies. This minimizes the need to handle sensitive data in mobile devices, eases the management of data, and reduces the overhead of mobile application deployment.     

Responses of endothelial cells to extremely slow flows

The process of blood vessel formation is accompanied by very minimal flow in the beginning, followed by increased flow rates once the vessel develops sufficiently. Many studies have been performed for endothelial cells at shear stress levels of 0.1-60 dyn∕cm(2); however, little is known about the effect of extremely slow flows (shear stress levels of 10(-4)-10(-2) dyn∕cm(2)) that endothelial cells may experience during early blood vessel formation where flow-sensing by indirect mass transport sensing rather than through mechanoreceptor sensing mechanisms would become more important. Here, we show that extremely low flows enhance proliferation, adherens junction protein localization, and nitric oxide secretion of endothelial cells, but do not induce actin filament reorganization. The responses of endothelial cells in different flow microenvironments need more attention because increasing evidence shows that endothelial cell behaviors at the extremely slow flow regimes cannot be linearly extrapolated from observations at faster flow rates. The devices and methods described here provide a useful platform for such studies.     

生态信息:内涵、特点、运动过程与运动规律研究

界定生态信息内涵,并从生态信息内涵角度入手,揭示符合生态信息属性的五大特点:公平性、生态性、效用性、真实性、知识性。在唯物辩证法思想的指导下引入物理学势能、动能概念,从势差存在的维度研究生态信息势能运动,从愿望匹配产生动能的维度研究生态信息的动能运动。在对其运动属性深入分析后总结生态信息两运动规律:势差律及选择-匹配律。     

Analytical and experimental bearing capacities of system scaffolds

We investigated the structural behavior and bearing capacity of system scaffolds. The research showed that the critical load of a system scaffold structure without diagonal braces is similar to that of a door-shaped steel scaffold structure. Joint stiffness between vertical props in system scaffolds can be defined based on a comparison between analytical and experimental results. When the number of scaffold stories increases, the critical loads of system scaffolds decrease. Diagonal braces markedly enhance the critical load of system scaffolds. The coupling joint position between vertical props should be kept away from story-to-story joints to prevent a reduction in critical loads. The critical load of a system scaffold decreases as the quantity of extended vertical props at the bottom of the structure increases. A large Christmas tree set up by system scaffolds under various loads was used as an example for analysis and to check the design of system scaffolds.     

粉色春天

桃花情结粉色桃花最有中国文人情结。《诗·周南》“桃之天天”,描写其娇艳繁茂态貌。春秋息国国君夫人息妫容颜美丽,被人称作“桃花夫人”。在中国文化中,有桃花色一说。唐诗中“1人面桃花相映红”的名句,以女子相比于桃花。粉红桃色也便象征女性。桃花,作为一种自然物,本来不具有“文化”的涵义。