Cross-culture contact : a study of factors that contribute to culture shock on ESL students\u27 adjustment in the english language institute at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The factors that contribute to culture shock among international students who study abroad have been researched continuously since 1960. However, the findings remain controversial. The purpose of this study was to identify, through survey research methodology, what demographic factors, including age, gender, marital status, nationality, length of stay in the U.S., previous travel experience in other countries, and number of American friends, were related to culture shock linguistically, socially, and psychologically among ESL students. Subjects participating in this study were 66 ESL students who were native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish at the English Language Institute at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, enrolled during the 1997-1998 academic year. The questionnaire, developed by the researcher specifically for this study, was translated into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish languages. The translated questionnaires were distributed and subsequently collected by the researcher after completion. These participants were asked to answer 40 questions to describe their linguistic, sociological and psychological difficulties, which relate to culture shock. In addition, the participants were asked to respond to six open-ended questions that reflected their feelings and perspectives of American people and American life. Statistical testing of the hypotheses was performed by using the Stat-Star program on a personal computer. The analysis of the data of the closed-ended questions was accomplished using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient method. The analysis of the data of the open-ended questions was performed using qualitative methods. The results of the analysis of the data led to the following conclusions: An ESL student\u27s age did not produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. An ESL student\u27s gender did not produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. An ESL student\u27s martial status did not produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. An ESL student\u27s nationality did not produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. An ESL student\u27s length of stay in the U.S. did produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. An ESL student\u27s previous travel experience did produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. The number of an ESL student\u27s American friend did produce a significant relationship on his/her perceptions toward the linguistic aspects of culture shock, sociological aspects of culture shock, and psychological aspects of culture shock. The narrative data indicated that ESL students felt that American life was both exciting and stressful. Students enjoyed freedom, convenient life style, advanced technology, and equal human rights. On the other hand, students felt that the American society was money-oriented, and unsafe. However, students were very impressed by Americans\u27 warm, and polite manner, and their way of respecting privacy. Interestingly, students also concluded that American people were selfish, exhibited a lack of self-discipline, and had a superior attitude. Recommendations for further research include studies exploring other demographic factors and their relationships with culture shock, replication of the study with a larger population, and with populations from different geographic areas

High speed self-testing quantum random number generation without detection loophole

Quantum mechanics provides means of generating genuine randomness that is impossible with deterministic classical processes. Remarkably, the unpredictability of randomness can be certified in a self-testing manner that is independent of implementation devices. Here, we present an experimental demonstration of self-testing quantum random number generation based on an detection-loophole free Bell test with entangled photons. In the randomness analysis, without the assumption of independent identical distribution, we consider the worst case scenario that the adversary launches the most powerful attacks against quantum adversary. After considering statistical fluctuations and applying an 80 Gb $\times$ 45.6 Mb Toeplitz matrix hashing, we achieve a final random bit rate of 114 bits/s, with a failure probability less than $10^{-5}$. Such self-testing random number generators mark a critical step towards realistic applications in cryptography and fundamental physics tests.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figure

Derivation of hypermethylated pluripotent embryonic stem cells with high potency.

Naive hypomethylated embryonic pluripotent stem cells (ESCs) are developmentally closest to the preimplantation epiblast of blastocysts, with the potential to contribute to all embryonic tissues and the germline, excepting the extra-embryonic tissues in chimeric embryos. By contrast, epiblast stem cells (EpiSCs) resembling postimplantation epiblast are relatively more methylated and show a limited potential for chimerism. Here, for the first time, we reveal advanced pluripotent stem cells (ASCs), which are developmentally beyond the pluripotent cells in the inner cell mass but with higher potency than EpiSCs. Accordingly, a single ASC contributes very efficiently to the fetus, germline, yolk sac and the placental labyrinth in chimeras. Since they are developmentally more advanced, ASCs do not contribute to the trophoblast. ASCs were derived from blastocysts in two steps in a chemically defined medium supplemented with Activin A and basic fibroblast growth factor, followed by culturing in ABCL medium containing ActA, BMP4, CHIR99021 and leukemia inhibitory factor. Notably, ASCs exhibit a distinct transcriptome with the expression of both naive pluripotency genes, as well as mesodermal somatic genes; Eomes, Eras, Tdgf1, Evx1, hand1, Wnt5a and distinct repetitive elements. Conversion of established ESCs to ASCs is also achievable. Importantly, ASCs exhibit a stable hypermethylated epigenome and mostly intact imprints as compared to the hypomethylated inner cell mass of blastocysts and naive ESCs. Properties of ASCs suggest that they represent cells at an intermediate cellular state between the naive and primed states of pluripotency.This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology project of Inner Mongolia (N0. 20130216), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.31560335) and by Wellcome Trust Investigator Award to MAS, and by a core grant from the Wellcome Trust and CRUK to the Gurdon Institute

A Multi-Source Heterogeneous Knowledge Injected Prompt Learning Method for Legal Charge Prediction

Legal charge prediction, an essential task in legal AI, seeks to assign accurate charge labels to case descriptions, attracting significant recent interest. Existing methods primarily employ diverse neural network structures for modeling case descriptions directly, failing to effectively leverage multi-source external knowledge. We propose a prompt learning framework-based method that simultaneously leverages multi-source heterogeneous external knowledge from a legal knowledge base, a conversational LLM, and related legal articles. Specifically, we match knowledge snippets in case descriptions via the legal knowledge base and encapsulate them into the input through a hard prompt template. Additionally, we retrieve legal articles related to a given case description through contrastive learning, and then obtain factual elements within the case description through a conversational LLM. We fuse the embedding vectors of soft prompt tokens with the encoding vector of factual elements to achieve knowledge-enhanced model forward inference. Experimental results show that our method achieved state-of-the-art results on CAIL-2018, the largest legal charge prediction dataset, and our method has lower data dependency. Case studies also demonstrate our method's strong interpretability.Comment: 20 page

Measurement uncertainty relation for three observables

In this work we establish rigorously a measurement uncertainty relation (MUR) for three unbiased qubit observables, which was previously shown to hold true under some presumptions. The triplet MUR states that the uncertainty, which is quantified by the total statistic distance between the target observables and the jointly implemented observables, is lower bounded by an incompatibility measure that reflects the joint measurement conditions. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the triplet MUR to be saturated and the corresponding optimal measurement. To facilitate experimental tests of MURs we propose a straightforward implementation of the optimal joint measurements. The exact values of incompatibility measure are analytically calculated for some symmetric triplets when the corresponding triplet MURs are not saturated. We anticipate that our work may enrich the understanding of quantum incompatibility in terms of MURs and inspire further applications in quantum information science. This work presents a complete theory relevant to a parallel work [Y.-L. Mao, et al., Testing Heisenberg's measurement uncertainty relation of three observables, arXiv:2211.09389] on experimental tests.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2211.0938