Your search

Abstract: The Portuguese language poses several challenges for children in the initial phase of learning how to read, particularly in the case of letters that may correspond to more than one phoneme, two letters that correspond to a single phoneme and in the case of words containing complex syllabic structures. The objective of this study was to perform a psycholinguistic analysis of the reading errors of children, attending the 1st (n=175) and 2nd year (n=137) of schooling, specifically in the case of words containing digraphs or complex syllabic structures and to analyse the differences between children’s reading errors in these two years. An oral reading test was used for data collection. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the type of reading errors was conducted using words with consonant digraphs (ch, nh, lh, gu, rr, ss), and words with complex syllables <CVC and CCV>. This analysis showed that children presented greater difficulties in some specific digraphs and tended to simplify complex syllables, either by adding or deleting phonemes. The quantity and quality of the reading errors of children attending both grades were discussed in light of reading acquisition theories and children’s phonological development.

The role of hormones as modulators of aggressive behavior in fish remains poorly understood. Androgens and corticosteroids, in particular, have been associated with aggressive behavior in fish but it is still not clear if animals adjust the secretion of these hormones to regulate behavior during ongoing fights, in response to fight outcomes in order to adjust aggressive behavior in subsequent fights, or both. With its stereotyped displays and high aggression levels, the Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens is an excellent model to investigate this question. Here, we compared the behavioral and endocrine response of male B. splendens to fights where there is no winner or loser by presenting them with a size-matched live interacting conspecific behind a transparent partition or with a mirror image. The aggressive response started with threat displays that were overall similar in frequency and duration towards both types of stimuli. Fights transitioned to overt attacks and interacting with a live conspecific elicited a higher frequency of attempted bites and head hits, as compared with the mirror image. There was a pronounced increase in plasma androgens (11-ketotestosterone and testosterone) and corticosteroids (cortisol) levels in response to the aggression challenge, independent of stimulus type. Post-fight intra-group levels of these hormones did not correlate with measures of physical activity or aggressive behavior. A linear discriminant analysis including all behavioral and endocrine data was a poor classifier of fish from the conspecific and mirror trials, showing that overall the behavioral and endocrine response to mirror images and conspecifics was similar. The results show that fight resolution is not necessary to induce an evident increase in peripheral levels of androgens and corticosteroids in B. splendens. However, the function of these hormones during present and future aggressive contests remains to be clarified.

Approximately 50 million people are suffering from epilepsy worldwide. Corals have been used for treating epilepsy in traditional Chinese medicine, but the mechanism of this treatment is unknown. In this study, we analyzed the transcriptome of the branching coral Acropora digitifera and obtained its Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), EuKaryotic Orthologous Groups (KOG) and Gene Ontology (GO) annotation. Combined with multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis, we discovered three polypeptides, we named them AdKuz1, AdKuz2 and AdKuz3, from A. digitifera that showed a close relationship to Kunitz-type peptides. Molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation indicated that AdKuz1 to 3 could interact with GABAA receptor but AdKuz2–GABAA remained more stable than others. The biological experiments showed that AdKuz1 and AdKuz2 exhibited an anti-inflammatory effect by decreasing the aberrant level of nitric oxide (NO), IL-6, TNF-α and IL-1β induced by LPS in BV-2 cells. In addition, the pentylenetetrazol (PTZ)-induced epileptic effect on zebrafish was remarkably suppressed by AdKuz1 and AdKuz2. AdKuz2 particularly showed superior anti-epileptic effects compared to the other two peptides. Furthermore, AdKuz2 significantly decreased the expression of c-fos and npas4a, which were up-regulated by PTZ treatment. In addition, AdKuz2 reduced the synthesis of glutamate and enhanced the biosynthesis of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). In conclusion, the results indicated that AdKuz2 may affect the synthesis of glutamate and GABA and enhance the activity of the GABAA receptor to inhibit the symptoms of epilepsy. We believe, AdKuz2 could be a promising anti-epileptic agent and its mechanism of action should be further investigated.

In February 2020, Macau became one of the first regions where the pandemic of coronavirus or Covid-19 affected the totality of social and economic life leading to increased anxieties over movement and distance. Although Macau has had very few actual cases of the virus – 46 in total –and no deaths from it, the Macau government rapidly instituted a lock­ down. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the social experience of being in lockdown can provide insights into understanding the type of experience or condition that we provisionally term ‘anxious immobility.’ Such a condition is characterized by a total disruption of everyday rhythms and specifically anxious waiting for the normalization of activity while being the subject of biosocial narratives of quarantine and socially responsible. The paper is based upon 3 months of ethnographic research conducted by two researchers based in Macau. We also reflect upon some aspects of the politics of mobilities in the light of disruptions and friction points between Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, and the rest of the world.

Air pollution in Macau has become a serious problem following the Pearl River Delta’s (PRD) rapid industrialization that began in the 1990s. With this in mind, Macau needs an air quality forecast system that accurately predicts pollutant concentration during the occurrence of pollution episodes to warn the public ahead of time. Five different state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms were applied to create predictive models to forecast PM2.5, PM10, and CO concentrations for the next 24 and 48 h, which included artificial neural networks (ANN), random forest (RF), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector machine (SVM), and multiple linear regression (MLR), to determine the best ML algorithms for the respective pollutants and time scale. The diurnal measurements of air quality data in Macau from 2016 to 2021 were obtained for this work. The 2020 and 2021 datasets were used for model testing, while the four-year data before 2020 and 2021 were used to build and train the ML models. Results show that the ANN, RF, XGBoost, SVM, and MLR models were able to provide good performance in building up a 24-h forecast with a higher coefficient of determination (R2) and lower root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and biases (BIAS). Meanwhile, all the ML models in the 48-h forecasting performance were satisfactory enough to be accepted as a two-day continuous forecast even if the R2 value was lower than the 24-h forecast. The 48-h forecasting model could be further improved by proper feature selection based on the 24-h dataset, using the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) value test and the adjusted R2 value of the 48-h forecasting model. In conclusion, the above five ML algorithms were able to successfully forecast the 24 and 48 h of pollutant concentration in Macau, with the RF and SVM models performing the best in the prediction of PM2.5 and PM10, and CO in both 24 and 48-h forecasts.

This study examined 206 casino dealers in hospitality at Macau to investigate the extent of their subjective career success and work engagement. Casino dealers were work engaged, but their subjective career success was fairly low, with significant difference between them, which indicates they have cognitive dissonance about their jobs. Several personality variables (emotional suppression and work ethic), organizational variables, i.e., organizational socialization (training, understanding, coworker support, future prospects), and distributive justice, were assessed in relation to subjective career success and work engagement. Organizational socialization, work ethic, and distributive justice were positively correlated with and predictors of subjective career success and work engagement; while emotion suppression was negatively correlated with and predictor of work engagement. This study provides evidence of extending the theories of subjective career success and work engagement in Chinese society and hospitality. Also, it identifies factors that could resolve the employees’ cognitive dissonance, and implementations for management were discussed.

In Southeast Asia, males of the Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens have been selected across centuries for paired-staged fights. During the selection process, matched for size males fight in a small tank until the contest is resolved. Breeders discard losing batches and reproduce winner batches with the aim of increasing fight performance. We assessed the results of this long-term selection process by comparing under standard laboratory conditions male and female aggressive behaviour of one strain selected for staged fights (“fighters”) and one strain of wild-types. The aggressive response of adult fish was tested against their mirror image or a size-matched conspecific. Fighter males were more aggressive than wild-type males for all measured behaviours. Differences were not only quantitative but the pattern of fight display was also divergent. Fighter males had an overall higher swimming activity, performing frequent fast strikes in the direction of the intruder and displaying from a distance. Wild-type males were less active and exhibited aggressive displays mostly in close proximity to the stimuli. Females of the fighter strain, which are not used for fights, were also more aggressive than wild-type females. Aggressive behaviours were correlated across male and female fighter siblings, suggesting common genetic and physiological mechanisms to male and female aggression in this species. The study further shows that results were largely independent of the stimulus type, with the mirror test inducing similar and less variable responses than the live conspecific presentation. These results suggest that selection for male winners co-selected for high-frequency and metabolic demanding aggressive display in males and also enhanced female aggression, opening a wide range of testable hypothesis about the ultimate and proximate mechanisms of male and female aggression in B. splendens.

The extent of citizens' trust in government determines the success or failure of e-government initiatives. Nevertheless, the idiosyncrasies of the concept and the broad spectrum of its approach still present relevant challenges. This work presents a systematic literature review on e-government trust while elaborating and summarizing a conceptual analysis of trust, introducing evaluation methods for government trust, and compiling relevant research on e-government trust and intentional behavior. A total of 26 key factors that constitute trust have been identified and classified into six categories: Government trust, Trust in Internet and technology (TiIT), Trust in e-government (TiEG), Personal Beliefs, Trustworthiness, and Trust of intermediary (ToI). The value added of this work consists of developing a conceptual framework of TiEG to provide a significant reference for future in-depth studies and research on e-government trust.

The key challenge of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for analyzing time series data is to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing complex temporal dependencies. In addition, existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods for time series data are designed to align marginal distribution between source and target domains. However, existing UDA methods (e.g. R-DANN Purushotham et al. (2017), VRADA Purushotham et al. (2017), CoDATS Wilson et al. (2020)) neglect the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, leading to misclassification of the target domain. Therefore, to learn domain-invariant representations by capturing the temporal dependencies and to reduce the conditional distribution discrepancy between two domains, a novel Attentive Recurrent Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Top-k time series pseudo-labeling method called ARADA-TK is proposed in this paper. In the experiments, our proposed method was compared with the state-of-the-art UDA methods (R-DANN, VRADA and CoDATS). Experimental results on four benchmark datasets revealed that ARADA-TK achieves superior classification accuracy when it is compared to the competing methods.

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the effects of different Chinese terms for mental illness and related symptoms on the attitudes of adolescents towards sufferers of a mental illness. METHODS: A survey of 578 secondary school students attending 4 schools in Macao was conducted. Each student read a short passage about a new student with a mental illness joining their class. Different versions used different labels to refer to the illness of the new student. The symptoms describing the new student also varied: either describing positive symptoms of schizophrenia or mild negative symptoms only. The attitudes of participants to the new student described were measured. RESULTS: There were significantly more negative attitudes towards the sufferer of a mental illness referred to with a psychiatric label, compared with a general label 'illness'. Participants also expressed significantly more negative attitudes when positive symptoms of schizophrenia were used to describe the new student. The results are discussed in terms of the influence of labels and symptoms on attitudes towards mental illness. CONCLUSIONS: These results supported the existence of 2 additive costs in terms of negative attitudes towards sufferers of mental illness, one associated with the label and the other associated with the symptoms.

The visual analysis of cardiotocographic examinations is a very subjective process. The accurate detection and segmentation of the fetal heart rate (FHR) features and their correlation with the uterine contractions in time allow a better diagnostic and the possibility of anticipation of many problems related to fetal distress. This paper presents a computerized diagnostic aid system based on digital signal processing techniques to detect and segment changes in the FHR and the uterine tone signals automatically. After a pre-processing phase, the FHR baseline detection is calculated. An auxiliary signal called detection line is proposed to support the detection and segmentation processes. Then, the Hilbert transform is used with an adaptive threshold for identifying fiducial points on the fetal and maternal signals. For an antepartum (before labor) database, the positive predictivity value (PPV) is 96.80% for the FHR decelerations, and 96.18% for the FHR accelerations. For an intrapartum (during labor) database, the PPV found was 91.31% for the uterine contractions, 94.01% for the FHR decelerations, and 100% for the FHR accelerations. For the whole set of exams, PPV and SE were both 100% for the identification of FHR DIP II and prolonged decelerations.

In this essay, we respond to Dustin Crummett’s argument that one cannot consistently appeal to body count reasoning to justify being a single-issue pro-life voter if one is also committed to the usual response to the embryo rescue case. Specifically, we argue that a modified version of BCR we call BCR* is consistent with the usual response. We then move to address concerns about the relevance of BCR* to Crummett’s original thesis.

The physiological mechanisms underlying variation in aggression in fish remain poorly understood. One possibly confounding variable is the lack of standardization in the type of stimuli used to elicit aggression. The presentation of controlled stimuli in videos, a.k.a. video playback, can provide better control of the fight components. However, this technique has produced conflicting results in animal behaviour studies and needs to be carefully validated. For this, a similar response to the video and an equivalent live stimulus needs to be demonstrated. Further, different physiological responses may be triggered by live and video stimuli and it is important to demonstrate that video images elicit appropriate physiological reactions. Here, the behavioural and endocrine response of male Siamese fighting fish Betta splendens to a matched for size conspecific fighting behind a one-way mirror, presented live or through video playback, was compared. The video playback and live stimulus elicited a strong and similar aggressive response by the focal fish, with a fight structure that started with stereotypical threat displays and progressed to overt attacks. Post-fight plasma levels of the androgen 11-ketotestosterone were elevated as compared to controls, regardless of the type of stimuli. Cortisol also increased in response to the video images, as previously described for live fights in this species. These results show that the interactive component of a fight, and its resolution, are not needed to trigger an endocrine response to aggression in this species. The study also demonstrates for the first time in a fish a robust endocrine response to video stimuli and supports the use of this technique for researching aggressive behaviour in B. splendens.

Since the launch of the One Belt and One Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the internationalisation of China’s tertiary education has entered a new stage. Central to the BRI is investment and strategic planning for talent cultivation, knowledge production, and transmission. This paper explains how the BRI redirects, reinforces, and intensifies China’s strategic planning and actions for internationalising its education. It adopts a policy analysis approach and reviews three key aspects of development and shifting emphasis of internationalisation under the impact of the BRI: international education networks along the Six BRI Economic Corridors, vocational colleges as new players in international education, and promotion of the Chinese language as a new global language. The analysis captures an important moment in which international education processes are being visibly altered through China’s strategies to take the lead in economic globalisation and to compete for a central place in the world via the BRI.

Employees are vital for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty in service organizations because their proactive involvement is an essential part of delivering the services offered. With the recent rapid growth of tourism in the Macau SAR, service employee workloads are clearly increasing, and consequently one would expect that the incidence of job burnout is rising. This study uses the well-known Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to investigate the relationship between service employees' burnout and their willingness to deliver quality services. Self-administered questionnaires from 110 operational staff in three hotels in Macau have been analyzed. The results indicate that job burnout reduces staff's willingness to deliver quality services and that this effect is moderated by individual staff's level of affective organizational commitment, and their perceptions of the extent of organizational and supervisor support provided by the organization. Based on these results, practical managerial strategies to improve service performance are identified.