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This short introductory chapter defines civil wars as a persistent feature of the contemporary world. Though local in character, civil wars are global in significance and as such, need to be urgently addressed through new and innovative ways of peacebuilding. The approach to peacebuilding this book suggests is communicative. Communicative peacebuilding is essential when it comes to addressing the problem of how societies can move from the civil war conditions of discursive dehumanisation to those of discursive civility and peaceful cooperation in post-civil war settings.

Risk is the chancing of negativity—of some loss or harm. To take a risk is to resolve one’s act-choices in a way that creates or enhances the chance of an unfortunate eventuation, rendering the occurrences of something unwanted more likely. And to be at risk is to be so circumstanced that something unpleasant might happen, some misfortune occur. Risk is correlative with the chance of a mishap—and it exists whenever there are probabilistically indeterminate outcomes some of which are of negative character. Risks face us with the possibility that something untoward may occur, leaving us unable to foretell any specific outcome with categorical assurance.

The presented study deals with a familiar situation when unsecured objects are transported in a vehicle. Unsecured objects have a character of objects dedicated to daily usage – work purposes or personal purposes. That generally means laptops, cell phones, tablets, drinks in a glass bottle, objects for sports, and others. Objects of interest are considered stiff/rigid with an insignificant portion of deformability.

The results are presented of experiments on verification of the recently proposed statistical model of laminar-turbulent transition in a boundary layer subjected to elevated free-stream turbulence. It turned out to be that not all of the assumptions in this theory were completely justified. However, the most important proposition on the threshold character of the turbulent spots’ generation after the streamwise streaks reached certain amplitude was confirmed in all tests.

After the above mentioned chapters, devoted to Soft Skills with a more general character, now some Soft Skills are examined, related particularly to specific aspects of relation with others

Segmentation-free text recognition achieves successful performance because it can accurately recognize overlapping and touching characters, which is difficult for over-segmentation approaches. In contrast, character segmentation is helpful for explanations, posterior document layout analysis, and other applications. Some methods have been proposed to balance the capability of character segmentation and accurate recognition, but they cannot predict segmentation candidates for characters that can be differently segmented, which bottlenecks segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose Text-conditioned Character Segmentation (TCSeg) to improve segmentation accuracy. TCSeg segments characters differently according to each text candidate prediction by segmentation-free text recognition without affecting recognition accuracy. We also propose Overlap and Skip Error Suppression (OSESup) to suppress unintuitive errors using the estimated segmentation. An experiment on text recognition of handwritten Chinese characters shows that TCSeg segments characters more accurately than an existing segmentation method and that OSESup improves the recognition accuracy.

This chapter undertakes a theoretical discussion of the internal relations and inherent logic of the (Democratic) Developmental State. It does so by assessing its shifting state–societal relations and isolating and unpacking its entrepreneurial character. It is presented in two parts: The first part explores the nature of state–society relations found within (Democratic) Developmental States. It begins by firstly defining the concept of “state–society relations.” Thereafter, it investigates and unpacks the state–society relations inherent in the twentieth-century Developmental State model and carefully shows how it has evolved and changed to meet the requirements of the latter twenty-first-century Democratic Developmental State. The second part of this chapter investigates the entrepreneurial logic of the Developmental State. It firstly defines and discusses the concept of “state entrepreneurship.” Thereafter, it concludes by outlining the manner in which the twentieth-century East Asian Developmental States assumed the role of an entrepreneur in their rapid post-war economic recovery, growth and transformation.

Purpose: The article deals with interjectional phraseological units of the English language. An attempt to classify these multiword complexes on the basis of their lexico-semantic character is made. Another aim of the study is to establish correlation of the lexical units with expressed emotional and volitional reactions.

In this chapter, Eastman focuses on several specific forms of conflict between characters (covert, overt, structural, and multi-point), and on an ascendant form of conflict called opposition, in which characters attack one another in order to get what they want. Eastman also gives extended consideration to character webs, or logical relationships by which characters’ actions mutually highlight and define one another. This chapter uses examples from Hamlet, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and others, as well as extended examples from non-Shakespearean works like Fences, IT, Sex and the City, Beloved, The Fifth Season, and Great Expectations.

In Lecture 41, we discussed about the expectation value of a given physical quantity and how this important concept relates the formalism of Classical Mechanics to Quantum Mechanics. To give an image, the evolution of a particle is understood through the evolution of its expectation value. If you read the George Gamow book “The wonderful world of Mr. Tompkins”, you can image the character trying to kill the quantum fly using a quantum splash and hitting the dense part of the shadow cloud which represents the quantum fly description. The foundation of this description is based on the following (Ehrenfest’s theorem) Consider an observable \(\hat{A}\) in a quantum system whose Hamilton operator is \(\hat{H}\). Then, the time-dependent Schrodinger equation leads to $$\dfrac{d}{dt}\left\langle \hat{A} \right\rangle =\dfrac{1}{i\hbar }\left\langle [\hat{A},\hat{H}]\right\rangle +\left\langle \dfrac{\partial \hat{A}}{\partial t}\right\rangle $$ .

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the direct speech used by the eight main characters (Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas), combining linguistic analysis with literary interpretation. Generally, the language used in the direct-speech parts is marked by archaisms which mix with modern words and usages.

The standard notion of iconicity, which is based on degrees of similarity or resemblance, does not provide a satisfactory account of the iconic character of some representations of abstract entities when those entities do not exhibit any imitable internal structure. Individual numbers are paradigmatic examples of such structureless entities. Nevertheless, numerals are frequently described as iconic or symbolic; for example, we say that the number three is represented symbolically by ‘3’, but iconically by ‘\(|||\)’. To address this difficulty, I discuss various alternative notions of iconicity that have been presented in the literature, and I propose two novel accounts.

Leadership is a variable and complex task that requires many skills along with opportunities to hone those skills. The development of future leaders among current college students includes its own complexities, but these complexities are increased in depth and breadth when the college is also a military academy, shaping men and women who will be commissioned as officers and expected to lead upon graduation. In partnership with the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA), our team developed and tested a platform to support leader and character development through mentoring relationships. The platform, known as Advance, provided tools to support reflection, action planning, leadership portfolios, and non-academic training opportunities. Our project included an iterative development model that involved multiple rounds of testing with Air Force officers, USAFA faculty, and cadets. Through this approach we were able to refine the model, improve the mentoring process, and implement the platform.

Violent struggle is as old as humanity. War is a violent conflict amongst states or amongst various powers. Violent struggle took the character of war probably when the ‘rise of nation-state’ happened.

This introductory section summarizes the key characteristics of health and medical geography. It also illustrates how these characteristics have shaped what’s currently known concerning the practice health geography in Africa. The chapter ends by briefly describing the different chapters of the book and how these illustrate the diverse character of the practice of health geography in Africa.

We have developed a method for entering Japanese hiragana characters using a 1-in. circular screen. The circumference of the smartwatch screen is divided every 90°. Hiragana is divided into 10 groups of 5 characters each, so the first half of the group is assigned to the left segment and the second half is assigned to the upper segment.

Text can be widely found in natural scenes. However, it is considerably difficult to detect and recognize the scene text due to its variations and distortions. In this paper, we propose a three-stage bottom-up scene text spotter, including text segmentation, text rectification and text recognition. The text segmentation part adopts a feature pyramid network (FPN) to extract character instances by combining local and global information, then a joint network of FPN and bidirectional long short-term memory is developed to explore the affinity among the isolated characters, which are grouped into character flows. The text rectification part utilizes a spatial transformer network to deal with the complex deformation of the character flows, thus enhancing their readability. Finally, the rectified text is recognized through an attention-based sequence recognition network. Extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmarks, showing that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Text recognition is a popular topic for its broad applications. In this work, we excavate the implicit task, character counting within the traditional text recognition, without additional labor annotation cost. The implicit task plays as an auxiliary branch for complementing the sequential recognition. We design a two-branch reciprocal feature learning framework in order to adequately utilize the features from both the tasks. Through exploiting the complementary effect between explicit and implicit tasks, the feature is reliably enhanced. Extensive experiments on 7 benchmarks show the advantages of the proposed methods in both text recognition and the new-built character counting tasks. In addition, it is convenient yet effective to equip with variable networks and tasks. We offer abundant ablation studies, generalizing experiments with deeper understanding on the tasks. Code is available.

In this chapter Rhys Jones argues that Welsh language revitalisation strategy has been dominated by an assumption thatWelsh language use takes place in an unplanned, unmarked manner within face-to-face community settings, which are largely uniform, rural and territorially bounded in character. He contends that this understanding is no longer fully functional given the ways Welsh speakers now live their lives, in light of increased mobility and connectivity, and that Welsh language policy should consider alternative geographies of languageuse which reflect more network-based interpretations of social and spatial life that align more closely with contemporary reality.

The main interest of the one-body states introduced in Chap. 2 is that they form a complete set of states. The complete character of the solutions of differential equations defined in a finite radial interval is straightforward to demonstrate within the regular Sturm-Liouville theory.

The applicability of the statistical method for determining the significant homogeneity of binary sequences under probabilistic moments of any finite order for solving problems of mathematical modeling of stochastic objects is proved. Approaches to the construction of the homogeneity criterion in the framework of various ways of setting probabilistic moments are described. Significant differences between the Central probabilistic moments’ initial decompositions for systems of random events of homogeneous character and digital models of processes are revealed. Brief theses of methods for finding the critical length of samples within which binary sequences have significant homogeneity over the specified raw or central probabilistic moments are presented. Areas of application of the concept of homogeneity of random sequences in classical simulation and creation of objects of cyber-physical systems are noted.

Broadly speaking, Procrustes analysis (PA) is about transforming some configuration of points in the plane/space to fit into a given specific pattern of points. PA is named after the character Procrustes from the Greek mythology, a robber dwelling somewhere in Attica (and son of Poseidon). Procrustes had an iron bed (or, even two beds) on which he forced his victims to lie. If a victim was shorter than the bed, he stretched him to fit. Alternatively, if the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off his legs to make the body fit the bed’s length.

Due to the fact that during long-term work on a fly-in-fly-out method in the Arctic, destructive changes in the specialist’s personality and activities can develop, it is necessary to take into account not only the adverse qualities formed at the hiring time, but also their occurrence and development likelihood, i.e. study the psychological risks. The most unfavorable changes in the workers’ personality are professional destruction (changes in the existing structure of activity and personality that adversely affect labor productivity and interaction with other participants in this process), which include character accentuations. As the research result, it was established that the character accentuation is more pronounced than among the southern regions representatives. The workers in diamond mining are characterized by hypertensive and cyclothymic combined with exaltation. The oil specialists are characterized by hypertensive, pedantic and cyclothymic. The fly-in-fly-out workers in the south are most markedly demonstrative and pedantic.

With the increasing demands of high-quality Chinese word embeddings for natural language processing, Chinese word embedding learning has attracted wide attention in recent years. Most of the existing research focused on capturing word semantics on large-scaled datasets. However, these methods are difficult to obtain effective word embeddings with limited data used for some specific fields. Observing the rich semantic information of Chinese fine-grained structures, we develop a model to fully fuse Chinese fine-grained structures as auxiliary information for word embedding learning. The proposed model views the word context information as a combination of word, character, pronunciation, and component. Besides, it adds the semantic relationship between pronunciations and components as a constraint to exploit auxiliary information comprehensively. Based on the decomposition of shifted positive pointwise mutual information matrix, our model could effectively generate Chinese word embeddings on small-scaled data. The results of word analogy, word similarity, and name entity recognition conducted on two public datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed model for capturing Chinese word semantics with limited data.

We consider the Sakellaridis-Venkatesh program for the rank 1 spherical variety X = SOn−1∖SOn. Using theta correspondence, we classify the X-distinguished representations in terms of the dual group X∨ in the L2-setting, the smooth local setting as well as the global setting. More precisely, we obtain the spectral decomposition of L2(X), establish local relative character identities and deduce the factorization of global period integrals. In particular, we give an alternative treatment of the theory of transfer of Schwarz functions for rank 1 spherical varieties recently developed by Sakellaridis.

In this chapter we focus on the ensemble that describes a system in contact with a thermal reservoir and is subject to a constant pressure, i.e., the so called TP ensemble. Just like the canonical and microcanonical ensembles it accounts for conservative character of the thermrodynamic field, and allows for a general expression of the thermodynamic potential, i.e. the entropy. We study the ideal gas thermodynamics, and the fluctuation-dissipation relations.

The couplet custom is one of China's intangible cultural heritage, and it occupies a pivotal position in Chinese traditional culture. The general couplet requires that the first sentence and the second sentence be opposite and semantically coherent. As a particular type of couplets, Wu-Qing couplets are related on the character level but irrelevant at the sentence level. Such characteristics make the Wu-Qing couplet significantly different in structure and semantics compared to the general couplets. In this paper, Convolutional Neural Network is used to extract structural features. Long Short-Term Memory network and vector operations are used to extract semantic features, and the Attention mechanism is used to strengthen structural and semantic information. Finally, we propose a model with structural and semantic features between general couplets and Wu-Qing couplets. The final F1 score reached 82.6, which was an increase of 5.4 compared to the baseline model.

A palindrome is a string that reads the same forward and backward. A palindromic substring w of a string T is called a minimal unique palindromic substring (MUPS) of T if w occurs only once in T and any proper palindromic substring of w occurs at least twice in T. MUPSs are utilized for answering the shortest unique palindromic substring problem, which is motivated by molecular biology [Inoue et al., 2018]. Given a string T of length n, all MUPSs of T can be computed in O(n) time. In this paper, we study the problem of updating the set of MUPSs when a character in the input string T is substituted by another character. We first analyze the number d of changes of MUPSs when a character is substituted, and show that d is in \(O(\log n)\). Further, we present an algorithm that uses O(n) time and space for preprocessing, and updates the set of MUPSs in \(O(\log \sigma + (\log \log n)^2 + d)\) time where \(\sigma \) is the alphabet size. We also propose a variant of the algorithm, which runs in optimal \(O(1+d)\) time when the alphabet size is constant.

Recently, the generation of Chinese characters attracts many researchers. Many excellent works only focus on Chinese font transformation, which is, Chinese character can be transformed into another font style. However, there is no research to generate a Chinese character of new category, which is an interesting and important topic. This paper introduces a radical combination network, called RCN, to generate new Chinese character categories by integrating radicals according to the caption which describes the radicals and spatial relationship between them. The proposed RCN first splits the caption into pieces. A self-recurrent network is employed as an encoder, aiming at integrating these caption pieces and pictures of radicals into a vector. Then a vector which represents font/writing style is connected with the output from encoder. Finally a decoder, based on deconvolution network, using the vector to synthesize the picture of a Chinese character. The key idea of the proposed approach is to treat a Chinese character as a composition of radicals rather than a single character class, which makes the machine play the role of Cangjie who invents Chinese characters in ancient legend. As a kind of important resource, the generated characters can be reused in recognition tasks.

This paper presents a novel approach for recommending movies based on weighted Character Graphs. This approach proposes a dedicated crawler that gathers movie screenplays and a methodology of character graphs generation that contains all the necessary information needed for the representation of movie plots. A representative vector is extracted for each graph and used along with user ratings, as an input for a gradient boosting algorithm to predict movie ratings. The proposed method is tested on a publicly available MovieLens dataset and it was experimentally shown that it outperforms the fundamental collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms.

Simple as it is, the numeral yi (one), an indispensable constituent element in Chinese idioms, demonstrates many meanings. Taking memetics into consideration, this paper studies the transmission mechanism of Chinese idioms whose initial character are yi from linguistic memetic perspective. It is found that Chinese yi-item idioms can be classified into strong linguistic memes and weak linguistic memes. Furthermore, Chinese yi-item idioms have their transmission mechanism. Specifically speaking, their meanings can be divided into two groups, that is, one group with the same content being inherited in various forms and the other group with the same content being inherited directly, while their forms pertain to the mode of the identical set pattern being followed by different contents. The findings are expected to help people explore forms and meanings of Chinese yi-item idioms from different perspectives.

Teaching probability and statistical data analysis begins at the primary school level and continues through higher levels of mathematics education. At the middle school level, mathematics teaching standards related to the topics dealing with random phenomena and their disciplined description emphasize mathematical modeling, the appropriate use of physical and digital teaching tools, and the experimental character of situations associated with uncertain outcomes.

The terms “glocalization” and “glocalized” refer to the increased rate of interconnectivity of local communities with the rest of the world and the interplay of global and local trends. This chapter addresses the global influences on local youth cultural scenes and their global connections as well as local manifestations and characteristics. Using empirical data as well as existing literature, the chapter describes and discusses in which ways four specific youth cultural activities on social media have a more global character or a more local character. The four youth cultural activities are self-presentation on Instagram, playing multi-player online games, self-production of music videos on TikTok, and political participation on Facebook and YouTube. The results show that these youth cultures on social media have a strong global character but local manifestations in certain contexts. The discussion leads to assume that local references are more important in political (youth cultural) contexts than in contexts such as video selfies on TikTok which mainly refer to the globalized pop-culture.

In Chapters 3 and 6, we discussed the principle that people are naturally driven to invest resources in order to regain, restore, or rebound from resource loss (Hobfoll, 2012). Attempts at offsetting resource loss can take different forms, most of which are functionally adaptive in that they are employed as means of dealing with the challenges a person encounters (Holmgreen et al., 2017). However, the consequences of how a person responds to loss can vary on a spectrum ranging from adaptive to maladaptive. A functionally adaptive approach to recovering from a loss might be useful in the short-term, but it could have unfavorable long-term implications for health and well-being (Wadsworth, 2015). Resource investment responses that balance both short- and long-term ideals may be particularly useful for dealing with resource loss in a way that promotes a more enduring level of positive adjustment.

This chapter introduces the grandcanonical ensemble as the statistics that describes an open system that exchanges particle and energy with the surrounding. We highlight that the Poisson character of the statistics of particle number is central for this ensemble, and show that like the other ensembles, this as well provides a good model of thermodynamics in the sense that it generates a conservative thermodynamic field. We illustrate this ensemble with the ideal gas, of which we calculate particle and energy fluctuations. Here we discuss as well the so called Gibbs correct counting factor.

The style of reading books has shifted. People use electronic devices to read e-books. People often read books in a short time because it is difficult to have enough time for reading books at one time. If there is a time gap between readings, they may forget what has happened in the already read parts of books. Especially if people read novels where many characters appear, it is more difficult to remember what has happened for each character. Reading several stories in parallel should increase the number of rereads. The more times they reread books, the more difficult they enjoy reading. This paper proposes a support interface for remembering events in novels by visualizing time-series information of characters and their existing places. The proposed interface consists of two parts: (a) displaying of a novel text and (b) visualizing of time-series information of character names and their existing places. The proposed interface uses a historical chart as a metaphor for the visualization. If a novel text is given, the proposed interface extracts character names and places with the Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The proposed interface sets the horizontal axis as the sentence’s number and the vertical axis as character names. The existing places are mapped as labelled dots on the plane given by the two axes. We experimented the proposed interface with participants and verified that the proposed interface could support them to remember events in novels.

This chapter presents the book’s main claim, namely, that Husserl’s theory of protention reveals its richness once we move to the material analysis of protention. I discuss the senses in which protention appears as modification and the various protentional functions that are distinguished once one takes into account the peculiarities of protentional content. “Disappointment” and “phantasmatic self-affection” are given special attention. The pertinent works by Lohmar, Ferrer, and Rodemeyer serve as the main points of reference and also as the means to clarify and delimitate my approach. To illustrate protention’s function in a palpable way, I show how different protentional functions operate and cooperate at the perceptual level. This allows one to see that the specific qualitative determinations of the perceptual content correspond to the specific formal functions of protention. But since sense-perception brings us face to face with cases where protentions are disappointed, one important aspect remains to be discussed, i.e., how some cases of “disappointment” lead to a radical “corrective” transformation of our protentional horizons. In addressing the corrective transformation of protentional consciousness, we encounter the distinctively affective character of this primal experience, i.e., in irritation and surprise.

Authentic leadership has been described as when a leader says what they do and does what they say. Authentic leadership is also a style that is assigned by the followers not something declared by the leader. This chapter demonstrates how the main character is genuine about her beliefs, leading to an open and honest exchange with foreign strangers of a distinct cultural belief system. Different cultures have varying morale beliefs and values which can lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings. Socio-rhetorical analysis is used to explore the book of Joshua and the character of Rahab. Addressing the question of whether Rahab demonstrates the traits of and authentic leader.

Purpose: to conduct a comparative analysis and correlation of the key (universal) competencies and character qualities of the international version specialist with the Federal State Educational Standard of Higher Education of Russia (using the example of pedagogical directions of training), as well as identify the opinions of students and teachers on the expression of these competencies at home and their significance for pedagogical activities.

We have developed a character input method for smartwatches with circular screen, that allows you to enter one alphanumeric character with a single stroke. With this method, characters are selected by the combination of the start and end positions of the stroke.

Problem statement: To coordinate interactions in groups of robots that jointly perform a task, it is necessary to correctly distribute subtasks for each robot. In general, robots in a group can have equal ranks or be divided into subgroups, each of which contains one leader (coordinator) responsible for the distribution of tasks and coordination of interactions within the subgroup. To solve this problem, it is necessary to correctly manage such teams. Purpose of research: It is required to develop a method for flexible distribution and redistribution of tasks in teams of robots with an arbitrary group structure, taking into account changes in the current situation. Results: It is proposed to solve the described problem on the basis of the previously proposed by the authors quantitative assessments of situation awareness and its three main aspects (steps), namely perception of the essential elements of the environment, comprehending (estimation of their importance) and forecasting of possible future states. It is assumed that the work is carried out in the absence of a conscious (targeted) counteraction of the environment, that is, the task has a commercial (civilian) character. The presented approach differs by: considering both normal and emergency operation of the team under study; operative formation of areas of responsibility for each decision-making robot. Practical significance: Development allows to objectify decision-making support in teams of robots with an arbitrary organizational structure of subgroups.

Video game titles with meaningful and morally relevant storylines are becoming increasingly popular and an intensely researched topic for entertainment scholars. Furthermore, virtual moral processing can contribute significantly to the understanding of human morality in general. In the current psychological laboratory experiment, N = 101 participants played four chapters of Detroit: Become Human for approx. 55 min featuring up to 13 moral decisions, which were presented either under time pressure or not. Before playing, participants were assigned to one of three conditions (playing a morally vs. immorally framed character vs. no framing/control condition). As expected, players generally preferred to act morally sound regardless of character framing. Time pressure further increased the proportion of moral (vs. immoral) decision-making. Our results underline that moral decision-making is dependent on specific contexts and that morality theories can be applied to virtual gaming scenarios.

This chapter begins with the suggestion that some of the formal discourses that permeate educational research are not the same as the discourses that circulate in the sites themselves, suggesting a need to develop different ways of approaching research sites. I introduce the club that formed the basis of this study, giving some historical context and introducing the players (human and non-human) who played a part in the club, using a series of comic-strip character sketches. I describe the video game Minecraft and ‘Banterbury’, the on-screen space created by the children. I consider my perspective as a researcher, ex-teacher and autistic person. I then detail the aims of the research project that form the basis of the book and describe its main contributions.

Drawing on notions of membership categorization analysis and stance, this chapter explores how a gay character is identified and perceived by non-LGBTQ characters, based on the categorizations they construct, in the 2018 Japanese TV drama My Brother’s Husband. The purpose of the study is to show how society’s (non-)marginalization of people in certain categories stems from categorization work. The analysis reveals consistent differences in how the gay character is identified by non-LGBTQ characters depending on the roles the latter are performing. The drama’s trajectory involves a change in the protagonist’s categorization practices regarding the gay character, indicating changes in taken-for-granted ideas about the social institutions of marriage and family. The chapter suggests that media representations can provide an arena for people to realize when such ideas become irrelevant to their everyday lives, thus potentially contributing to societal change.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games transport the player to a fantastical fictional world. This world is inhabited by characters, players and objects. Prior to the commencement of play, the Dungeon Master prepares not only the rules of the world but an account of historical events and the current world state. While the rules provide the player with boundaries of play, the character sheets store the current player state, and the back story provides context for the happenings during the game session.

The Chinese character shi (是) can indicate judgment or emphasis. When Shi (是) expresses judgment, it cannot be omitted from the sentence due to syntactic constraints. When shi (是) expresses emphasis, it can be omitted without affecting the integrity of the sentence. This paper claims that the bottom layer of Chinese language is a set of logical structures of event composed of semantic roles. Shi (是) expressing emphasis is the syntactic expression of a person’s attitude. It lies between the syntactic structure layer and the event structure layer with the function of extracting semantic roles. Shi (是) expressing emphasis can: (1) extract all event semantic roles; (2) be placed before the syntactic position of the extracted semantic role (3) be realized as deshi (的是) when it extracts the semantic role of theme.

Whereas a group possesses a single internal binary rule of composition, a ring is a set with two internal binary operations generically referred to as “addition” and “multiplication,” though the precise character of these operations may not align with our everyday understanding of those terms. Fields—of which the real and complex number systems are examples—and skew fields, such as the quaternion number system, are special cases of rings. The development of complex numbers and quaternions is placed in historical context, and we give a brief introduction to quaternion algebra. Substructures, quotients and products of rings are also described.

Using a tutoring system for English as a foreign language, we studied the impact on students’ anxiety levels of an animated agent that provides motivational, supportive feedback. We compared two types of feedback — explanatory and motivational supportive feedback — presented in three ways: by text, by voice, or by a character agent. Results showed that using an agent that gives motivational, supportive feedback decreases the learners’ anxiety levels overall. We also found that performance and gender interact with the effectiveness of the treatment for reducing foreign language anxiety (FLA). Our findings have implications for promoting equity and determining how best to improve positive emotions and reduce anxiety for all students.