Design Principles and Mechanistic Understandings of Non-Noble-Metal Bifunctional Electrocatalysts for Zinc-Air Batteries

Zinc-air batteries(ZABs)are promising energy storage systems because of high theoretical energy density,safety,low cost,and abundance of zinc.However,the slow multi-step reaction of oxygen and heavy reliance on noble-metal catalysts hinder the practical applications of ZABs.Therefore,feasible and advanced non-noble-metal elec-trocatalysts for air cathodes need to be identified to promote the oxygen catalytic reaction.In this review,we initially introduced the advancement of ZABs in the past two decades and provided an overview of key developments in this field.Then,we discussed the work-ing mechanism and the design of bifunctional electrocatalysts from the perspective of morphology design,crystal structure tuning,interface strategy,and atomic engineering.We also included theoretical studies,machine learning,and advanced characterization technologies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the structure-performance relationship of electrocatalysts and the reaction pathways of the oxygen redox reactions.Finally,we discussed the challenges and prospects related to designing advanced non-noble-metal bifunctional electrocatalysts for ZABs.

Farmers’ Understandings of Weeds and Herbicide Usage as Environmental Influences on Agricultural Sustainability

Little comparative research has specifically used farmers’ understandings of agricultural weeds and herbicides usage as important indicators of their environmental decision making and behaviours. This paper proposes that “organic’ farmers”, already attuned to environmental ideas, may be more likely to have favourable understandings and behaviours towards agricultural weeds as an integral part of environmentally sustainable agricultural farming systems than “conventional” farmers. Using a behavioural approach, the ways in which farmers’ (situated in central-southern England) understandings influence their environmental behaviours were examined. Most “conventional” farmers’ fields were kept relatively weed-free through herbicide usage. This contrasted with “organic” farmers having less concern about removal of weeds (with their associated invertebrates and seeds) which they understood contributes significantly towards biodiversity and agricultural sustainability. A remarkably high 92 per cent of “organic” farmers were critical of “conventional” farmers’ using herbicides and pesticides, asserting that lack of pesticide and herbicide usage as core reasons for their sustainability. This contrasted with most “conventional” respondents who claim they used as few chemicals as practicable to minimise environmental damage to soil and water, while maintaining adequate crop levels. Nevertheless, such environmental understandings and behaviours may not always be indicative of any differences that may be found between those farmers commonly classified as “organic” and “conventional” in the UK as a whole.

Optical microcavities: new understandings and developments

Optical microcavities have attracted tremendous interest in both fundamental and applied research in the past few decades, thanks to their small footprint, easy integrability, and high quality factors. Using total internal reflection from a dielectric interface or a photonic band gap in a periodic system, these photonic structures do not rely on conventional metal-coated mirrors to confine light in small volumes, which have brought forth new developments in both classical and quantum optics. This focus issue showcases several such developments and related findings, which may pave the way for the next generation of on-chip photonic devices based on microcavities.

Semantic segmentation via pixel-to-center similarity calculation

Since the fully convolutional network has achieved great success in semantic segmentation,lots of works have been proposed to extract discriminative pixel representations.However,the authors observe that existing methods still suffer from two typical challenges:(i)The intra-class feature variation between different scenes may be large,leading to the difficulty in maintaining the consistency between same-class pixels from different scenes;(ii)The inter-class feature distinction in the same scene could be small,resulting in the limited performance to distinguish different classes in each scene.The authors first rethink se-mantic segmentation from a perspective of similarity between pixels and class centers.Each weight vector of the segmentation head represents its corresponding semantic class in the whole dataset,which can be regarded as the embedding of the class center.Thus,the pixel-wise classification amounts to computing similarity in the final feature space between pixels and the class centers.Under this novel view,the authors propose a Class Center Similarity(CCS)layer to address the above-mentioned challenges by generating adaptive class centers conditioned on each scenes and supervising the similarities between class centers.The CCS layer utilises the Adaptive Class Center Module to generate class centers conditioned on each scene,which adapt the large intra-class variation between different scenes.Specially designed Class Distance Loss(CD Loss)is introduced to control both inter-class and intra-class distances based on the predicted center-to-center and pixel-to-center similarity.Finally,the CCS layer outputs the processed pixel-to-center similarity as the segmentation prediction.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model performs favourably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Classification of Conversational Sentences Using an Ensemble Pre-Trained Language Model with the Fine-Tuned Parameter

Sentence classification is the process of categorizing a sentence based on the context of the sentence.Sentence categorization requires more semantic highlights than other tasks,such as dependence parsing,which requires more syntactic elements.Most existing strategies focus on the general semantics of a conversation without involving the context of the sentence,recognizing the progress and comparing impacts.An ensemble pre-trained language model was taken up here to classify the conversation sentences from the conversation corpus.The conversational sentences are classified into four categories:information,question,directive,and commission.These classification label sequences are for analyzing the conversation progress and predicting the pecking order of the conversation.Ensemble of Bidirectional Encoder for Representation of Transformer(BERT),Robustly Optimized BERT pretraining Approach(RoBERTa),Generative Pre-Trained Transformer(GPT),DistilBERT and Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding(XLNet)models are trained on conversation corpus with hyperparameters.Hyperparameter tuning approach is carried out for better performance on sentence classification.This Ensemble of Pre-trained Language Models with a Hyperparameter Tuning(EPLM-HT)system is trained on an annotated conversation dataset.The proposed approach outperformed compared to the base BERT,GPT,DistilBERT and XLNet transformer models.The proposed ensemble model with the fine-tuned parameters achieved an F1_score of 0.88.

The Positive Significance of Confucian Civilization in Peace Building

The Confucian emphasis on benevolence and empathy can be applied in conflict resolution processes.When parties in conflict embrace these values,it becomes easier to find common ground,compromise,and work towards peaceful solutions.Confucian civilization,with its emphasis on ethics,harmony,and diplomacy,offers valuable contributions to peace-building efforts in the contemporary world.By promoting virtuous leadership,fostering cross-cultural understanding,and emphasizing ethical governance,Confucianism can play a positive role in achieving and maintaining global peace.Confucianism continues to exert significant influence in the contemporary world,particularly in the context of peace-building efforts.This article explores the positive significance of Confucian civilization in contributing to peace-building endeavors globally.

The Role of Music in Multicultural Education:A Tool for Promoting Cultural Understanding and Inclusion

In this essay,it will be examined how music can be a powerful tool in multicultural education in promoting humanity and cultural sensitivity.As classroom diversity increases,the challenge lies with educators to ensure that an equal and appropriate learning environment for all students with cultural sensitivity is maintained.To address this problem,therefore,the study explores how music may be effectively incorporated into intercultural education approaches.This paper has evidence that music is a language that has transcended cultures and promotes tolerance,appreciation,and acceptance of diversity through a synthesis of literature and examples.Several implications posit that music can make people feel they belong,enhance the relations of people from diverse cultures,and provide a practical way of learning about other cultures.The potential of music as a tool to engage social justice issues and liberate oppressed groups is also discussed in this research.It exists,but with caution to cultural appropriation and stereotyping of students,thus requiring educators to be sensitive and socially-apperceived on the best practice ways on how to integrate music into classrooms.The end explains how music helps in nurturing a generation of embracing the world,more sensitive and more inclined to the happenings in society to create a society that will be more sensitive and tolerant with the growing society which is diversifying.Therefore,the current article recommends further exploration and development of music-facilitated/inclined pedagogy of ME in hopefully enhancing cultural consciousness/sensitivity and fostering more social integration.

UbD Framework in Teaching Confucian Filial Piety and Its Relevance in Modern Society

This study explores the lasting relevance of Confucian filial piety in Chinese culture that promotes individual self-cultivation, family harmony, and social stability. The Understanding by Design (UbD) framework is proposed as an effective approach for teaching Confucius’ wisdom and the reinforcement of the cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning outcomes. This approach emphasizes “backward design” which prioritizes meaningful understanding over memorization. Integrating filial piety into the UbD framework enhances students’ understanding of its philosophical foundations and modern significance, while also strengthening their intercultural communication skills. The study concludes that UbD approach develops language skills and cultural sensitivity, encouraging insights into the dynamic nature of cultural values. The meaningful outcomes through integrating the approach into filial piety curriculum design can support students’ development of self-awareness, empathy, and ethical maturity, which foster values essential for ethical leadership and community-oriented responsibilities.

The Four Dimensional Connotation Definition of Scientific Understanding of the Ocean and Human Practical Achievements

By analyzing the sustainable development process of strengthening marine environmental protection and global reporting and assessment of marine environmental conditions since the Human Environment Conference, this paper summarizes the scientific connotation of “scientific understanding of the ocean” reflected in the United Nations Global Marine Environmental Assessment Report, proposes the etymological definition and specific coverage, representative global and regional practical experience of scientific understanding of the ocean, and further analyzes and defines the human activities and cognitive evolution process of “scientific understanding of the ocean”. It marks the leap in human cognition in four dimensions: observation and evaluation, intervention and regulation, disciplinary knowledge system, and supporting guarantee system. It condenses the connotation definitions and human practical achievements of each dimension, and puts forward countermeasures and suggestions to strengthen marine environmental protection and sustainable development.

What-If XAI Framework (WiXAI): From Counterfactuals towards Causal Understanding

People learn causal relations since childhood using counterfactual reasoning. Counterfactual reasoning uses counterfactual examples which take the form of “what if this has happened differently”. Counterfactual examples are also the basis of counterfactual explanation in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). However, a framework that relies solely on optimization algorithms to find and present counterfactual samples cannot help users gain a deeper understanding of the system. Without a way to verify their understanding, the users can even be misled by such explanations. Such limitations can be overcome through an interactive and iterative framework that allows the users to explore their desired “what-if” scenarios. The purpose of our research is to develop such a framework. In this paper, we present our “what-if” XAI framework (WiXAI), which visualizes the artificial intelligence (AI) classification model from the perspective of the user’s sample and guides their “what-if” exploration. We also formulated how to use the WiXAI framework to generate counterfactuals and understand the feature-feature and feature-output relations in-depth for a local sample. These relations help move the users toward causal understanding.

A Study on High School Mathematics Teaching Design Based on Teaching for Robust Understanding: Taking the Cosine Theorem as an Example

Teachers’teaching behavior plays a crucial role in students’development,and there are problems in the current teaching behavior of mathematics teachers such as ignoring students’cognitive needs,lack of equal opportunities for students’classroom performance as well as lack of formative evaluation of students.In order to solve the phenomenon,this paper analyzes and explains how to promote teaching based on the Teaching for Robust Understanding(TRU)evaluation framework with the goal of focusing on the development of all students,taking the teaching design of The Cosine Theorem as an example,and provides ideas and methods for first-line high school mathematics teachers.

New Understandings——Accepting Burdens

YAN Cailing lives on the Loess Plateau in northwestern China. In spite of her lightheartedness and cheer, she actually leads an uneasy life. At 37,she has three children. When she was small, her family lived a hard life. Her parents couldn’t afford tuition fees for all their six daughters. She went to school without textbooks, always having to listen attentively to insure she would remember the teacher’s lessons. In winter, she wore thin clothes and ragged shoes. Even when both her feet were frostbitten, she still continued to go to school. In 1974, Yan Cailing was admitted to a senior high school but then failed to pass

Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction to Ethylene:From Mechanistic Understanding to Catalyst Surface Engineering

Electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction reaction(CO_(2)RR)provides a promising way to convert CO_(2)to chemicals.The multicarbon(C_(2+))products,especially ethylene,are of great interest due to their versatile industrial applications.However,selectively reducing CO_(2)to ethylene is still challenging as the additional energy required for the C–C coupling step results in large overpotential and many competing products.Nonetheless,mechanistic understanding of the key steps and preferred reaction pathways/conditions,as well as rational design of novel catalysts for ethylene production have been regarded as promising approaches to achieving the highly efficient and selective CO_(2)RR.In this review,we first illustrate the key steps for CO_(2)RR to ethylene(e.g.,CO_(2)adsorption/activation,formation of~*CO intermediate,C–C coupling step),offering mechanistic understanding of CO_(2)RR conversion to ethylene.Then the alternative reaction pathways and conditions for the formation of ethylene and competitive products(C_1 and other C_(2+)products)are investigated,guiding the further design and development of preferred conditions for ethylene generation.Engineering strategies of Cu-based catalysts for CO_(2)RR-ethylene are further summarized,and the correlations of reaction mechanism/pathways,engineering strategies and selectivity are elaborated.Finally,major challenges and perspectives in the research area of CO_(2)RR are proposed for future development and practical applications.

Multimodal feature fusion based on object relation for video captioning

Video captioning aims at automatically generating a natural language caption to describe the content of a video.However,most of the existing methods in the video captioning task ignore the relationship between objects in the video and the correlation between multimodal features,and they also ignore the effect of caption length on the task.This study proposes a novel video captioning framework(ORMF)based on the object relation graph and multimodal feature fusion.ORMF uses the similarity and Spatio-temporal relationship of objects in video to construct object relation features graph and introduce graph convolution network(GCN)to encode the object relation.At the same time,ORMF also constructs a multimodal features fusion network to learn the relationship between different modal features.The multimodal feature fusion network is used to fuse the features of different modals.Furthermore,the proposed model calculates the length loss of the caption,making the caption get richer information.The experimental results on two public datasets(Microsoft video captioning corpus[MSVD]and Microsoft research-video to text[MSR-VTT])demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Broad Learning System for Tackling Emerging Challenges in Face Recognition

Face recognition has been rapidly developed and widely used.However,there is still considerable uncertainty in the computational intelligence based on human-centric visual understanding.Emerging challenges for face recognition are resulted from information loss.This study aims to tackle these challenges with a broad learning system(BLS).We integrated two models,IR3C with BLS and IR3C with a triplet loss,to control the learning process.In our experiments,we used different strategies to generate more challenging datasets and analyzed the competitiveness,sensitivity,and practicability of the proposed two models.In the model of IR3C with BLS,the recognition rates for the four challenging strategies are all 100%.In the model of IR3C with a triplet loss,the recognition rates are 94.61%,94.61%,96.95%,96.23%,respectively.The experiment results indicate that the proposed two models can achieve a good performance in tackling the considered information loss challenges from face recognition.

Cascade Human Activity Recognition Based on Simple Computations Incorporating Appropriate Prior Knowledge

The purpose of Human Activities Recognition(HAR)is to recognize human activities with sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes.The normal research strategy is to obtain better HAR results by finding more efficient eigenvalues and classification algorithms.In this paper,we experimentally validate the HAR process and its various algorithms independently.On the base of which,it is further proposed that,in addition to the necessary eigenvalues and intelligent algorithms,correct prior knowledge is even more critical.The prior knowledge mentioned here mainly refers to the physical understanding of the analyzed object,the sampling process,the sampling data,the HAR algorithm,etc.Thus,a solution is presented under the guidance of right prior knowledge,using Back-Propagation neural networks(BP networks)and simple Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN).The results show that HAR can be achieved with 90%–100%accuracy.Further analysis shows that intelligent algorithms for pattern recognition and classification problems,typically represented by HAR,require correct prior knowledge to work effectively.

Solving Algebraic Problems with Geometry Diagrams Using Syntax-Semantics Diagram Understanding

Solving Algebraic Problems with Geometry Diagrams(APGDs)poses a significant challenge in artificial intelligence due to the complex and diverse geometric relations among geometric objects.Problems typically involve both textual descriptions and geometry diagrams,requiring a joint understanding of these modalities.Although considerable progress has been made in solving math word problems,research on solving APGDs still cannot discover implicit geometry knowledge for solving APGDs,which limits their ability to effectively solve problems.In this study,a systematic and modular three-phase scheme is proposed to design an algorithm for solving APGDs that involve textual and diagrammatic information.The three-phase scheme begins with the application of the statetransformer paradigm,modeling the problem-solving process and effectively representing the intermediate states and transformations during the process.Next,a generalized APGD-solving approach is introduced to effectively extract geometric knowledge from the problem’s textual descriptions and diagrams.Finally,a specific algorithm is designed focusing on diagram understanding,which utilizes the vectorized syntax-semantics model to extract basic geometric relations from the diagram.A method for generating derived relations,which are essential for solving APGDs,is also introduced.Experiments on real-world datasets,including geometry calculation problems and shaded area problems,demonstrate that the proposed diagram understanding method significantly improves problem-solving accuracy compared to methods relying solely on simple diagram parsing.

Robust Counting in Overcrowded Scenes Using Batch-Free Normalized Deep ConvNet

The analysis of overcrowded areas is essential for flow monitoring,assembly control,and security.Crowd counting’s primary goal is to calculate the population in a given region,which requires real-time analysis of congested scenes for prompt reactionary actions.The crowd is always unexpected,and the benchmarked available datasets have a lot of variation,which limits the trained models’performance on unseen test data.In this paper,we proposed an end-to-end deep neural network that takes an input image and generates a density map of a crowd scene.The proposed model consists of encoder and decoder networks comprising batch-free normalization layers known as evolving normalization(EvoNorm).This allows our network to be generalized for unseen data because EvoNorm is not using statistics from the training samples.The decoder network uses dilated 2D convolutional layers to provide large receptive fields and fewer parameters,which enables real-time processing and solves the density drift problem due to its large receptive field.Five benchmark datasets are used in this study to assess the proposed model,resulting in the conclusion that it outperforms conventional models.

Design of a new kind of chemical experiment container with virtual reality fusion

Background At present,the teaching of experiments in primary and secondary schools is affected by cost and security factors.Existing research on virtual experiment platforms has alleviated these problems.However,the lack of real experimental equipment and use of a single channel to understand user intentions weaken these platforms operationally and degrade the naturalness of interactions.Methods To solve these problems,we propose an intelligent experimental container structure and a situational awareness algorithm,both of which are verified and applied to a chemical experiment involving virtual-real fusion.First,the acquired images are denoised in the visual channel using the maximum diffuse reflection chroma to remove overexposure.Second,container situational awareness is realized by segmenting the image liquid level and establishing a relation-fitting model.Then,strategies for constructing complete behaviors and making priority comparisons among behaviors are adopted for information complementarity and independence,respectively.A multichannel intentional understanding model and an inter-active paradigm that integrates vision,hearing,and touch are proposed.Results The experimental results show that the accuracy of the intelligent container situation awareness proposed in this paper reaches 99%,and the accuracy of the proposed intention understanding algorithm reaches 94.7%.The test shows that the intelligent experimental system based on the new interaction paradigm also has better performance and a more realistic sense of operation experience in terms of experimental efficiency.Conclusion The results indicate that the proposed experimental container and algorithm can achieve a natural level of human-computer interaction in a virtual chemical experiment platform,enhance the user′s sense of operation,and achieve high levels of user satisfaction.

Baseline Isolated Printed Text Image Database for Pashto Script Recognition

The optical character recognition for the right to left and cursive languages such as Arabic is challenging and received little attention from researchers in the past compared to the other Latin languages.Moreover,the absence of a standard publicly available dataset for several low-resource lan-guages,including the Pashto language remained a hurdle in the advancement of language processing.Realizing that,a clean dataset is the fundamental and core requirement of character recognition,this research begins with dataset generation and aims at a system capable of complete language understanding.Keeping in view the complete and full autonomous recognition of the cursive Pashto script.The first achievement of this research is a clean and standard dataset for the isolated characters of the Pashto script.In this paper,a database of isolated Pashto characters for forty four alphabets using various font styles has been introduced.In order to overcome the font style shortage,the graphical software Inkscape has been used to generate sufficient image data samples for each character.The dataset has been pre-processed and reduced in dimensions to 32×32 pixels,and further converted into the binary format with a black background and white text so that it resembles the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology(MNIST)database.The benchmark database is publicly available for further research on the standard GitHub and Kaggle database servers both in pixel and Comma Separated Values(CSV)formats.