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.

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

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 Evolution of Translation Standards From a Hermeneutic Perspective

Modern hermeneutics centers on the relationship between the“author,text,and reader”in interpretation.Various schools emphasize different aspects,shifting perspectives in translation studies from the author’s original intention to the reader’s experience,acknowledging translator subjectivity,and focusing on textual analysis.Traditional standards of“faithfulness”and“equivalence”have evolved into diverse standards advocating individual differences,promoting tolerance and plurality in translation.

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.

Video-based urban expressway traffic measurement and performance monitoring

This paper presents an urban expressway video surveillance and monitoring system for traffic flow measurement and abnormal performance detection. The proposed flow detection module collects traffic flow statistics in real time by leveraging multi-vehicle tracking information. Based on these online statistics, road operating situations can be easily obtained. Using spatiotemporal trajectories, vehicle motion paths are encoded by hidden Markov models. With path division and parameter matching, abnormal performances containing extra low or high speed driving, illegal stopping and turning are detected in real scenes. The traffic surveillance approach is implemented and evaluated on a DM642 DSP-based embedded platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system is feasible for the detection of vehicle speed, vehicle counts and road efficiency, and it is effective for the monitoring of the aforementioned anomalies with low computational costs.

云南潞西三台山超镁铁岩体Os-Nd-Pb-Sr同位素特征及地质意义

滇西地区特提斯造山带具有多块体拼合的构造特点,是东特提斯造山带的重要组成部分之一,其大地构造演化对理解全球特提斯造山带具有重要的地质意义。在腾冲和保山地块之间的龙陵-瑞丽断裂带中出露超镁铁质岩石,曾被解释为两个陆块缝合的证据。本文采用高灵敏度高精度超低本底Re-Os、Sm-Nd、Pb和Rb-Sr同位素分析技术,对采自该断裂带潞西三台山的超镁铁岩样品进行了Os-Nd-Pb-Sr同位素测定。分析结果表明,这些超镁铁岩石具有强烈富集特征。分析的5个岩石样品具有高的初始^(87)Sr/^(86)Sr值(0.71074～0.71444)、低的初始ε_(Nd)值(-6.2～-10.6)、低初始γ_(Os)值(-4.8～-8.8)和较高的初始铅同位素比值,其Os同位素模式年龄值(t_(RD))为0.97～1.71Ga。Nd-Os同位素组成特征表明,三台山超镁铁岩具有古老的富集大陆岩石圈地幔岩石的特征,不能作为腾冲和保山地块的缝合证据。

Mirror neuron system as the joint from action to language

Mirror neuron system （MNS） represents one past decade, and it has been found to involve in multiple of the most important discoveries of cognitive neuroscience in the aspects of brain functions including action understanding, imitation, language understanding, empathy, action prediction and speech evolution. This manuscript reviewed the function of MNS in action understanding as well as language evolution, and specifically assessed its roles as the bridge from body language to fluent speeches. Then we discussed the speech defects of autism patients due to the disruption of MNS. Finally, given that MNS is plastic in adult brain, we proposed MNS targeted therapy provides an efficient rehabilitation approach for brain damages conditions as well as autism patients.

Research on the Interrelationship among Understanding, Memory and Oral Expression in Listening Teaching of non-English in Higher Vocational College

This is a research report on the interrelationship among understanding, memory and oral expression in listening comprehension training. The research investigated 150 non-English majors through a questionnaire in a higher vocational college. The result indicates that the interrelationship among understanding, memory and oral expression in listening classes which are determined by the listening materials and teaching method directly influences students' listening proficiency and speaking ability. It is suggested that some strategies to be used to foster students' abilities in these three areas so as to improve their listening ability.

Failure of Aspired Understanding Among the Human Race——On the Theme of A Passage to India

The author attempts to interpret the theme of A Passsage to India by analyzing the major events and characterization. It is indicated in the thesis that E.M.Forster highlights the failure of aspired understanding between different races, different people and even within a person. In other words, in many cases people have aspirations for understanding, but in reality the real understanding is very difficult to fulfill.

哲学概念翻译的格义、立名与正名——以understanding的汉译为例

哲学的核心问题是概念考察,概念翻译成为哲学翻译的核心问题。哲学概念因其含义丰富而使翻译尤其困难,其译名从诞生到接受往往会经历一个漫长而复杂的过程。借用美国修辞学家伯克的新修辞学思想,以洛克认识论核心概念“understanding”汉译史上先后出现的“悟性”“理解”“认识”“理智”等几个代表性译名为例探讨哲学概念翻译过程中的格义、立名与正名现象,并对其中的动因及影响进行分析,以期对哲学翻译,尤其是哲学概念的翻译有所裨益。

Translating Means Translating Meaning

美国著名翻译理论家尤金·奈达说 :“翻译即译意 (Translating m eans translating m eaning)。”就实质而言 ,翻译即译意。就是把一种语言表达的意义用另一种语言表达出来。翻译分理解与表达两个步骤。理解是翻译的基础 ,表达直接决定译文的成败与优劣 。