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In this work, an end‐to‐end framework is proposed to achieve multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) in air traffic control (ATC) systems. Considering the standard ATC procedure, a recurrent neural network (RNN) based framework is selected to mine the temporal dependencies among speech frames. Facing the distributed feature space caused by the radio transmission, a hybrid feature embedding block is designed to extract high‐level representations, in which multiple convolutional neural networks are designed to accommodate different frequency and temporal resolutions. The residual mechanism is performed on the RNN layers to improve the trainability and the convergence. To integrate the multilingual ASR into a single model and relieve the class imbalance, a special vocabulary is designed to unify the pronunciation of the vocabulary in Chinese and English, i.e., pronunciation‐oriented vocabulary. The proposed model is optimized by the connectionist temporal classification loss and is validated on a real‐world speech corpus (ATCSpeech). A character error rate of 4.4% and 5.9% is achieved for Chinese and English speech, respectively, which outperforms other popular approaches. Most importantly, the proposed approach achieves the multilingual ASR task in an end‐to‐end manner with considerable high performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to solve the intelligent evaluation of English writing, this paper proposes a method based on the English semantic neural network algorithm. This paper first briefly analyzes the research background of the English semantic analysis system, then expounds on the relevant technologies of the English distance similarity algorithm, semantic analysis intelligent algorithm structure, word analysis algorithm, sentence part of speech analysis algorithm, sentence semantic analysis algorithm, and neural network algorithm, and finally expounds the database and method implementation of the English semantic analysis system, so as to provide guarantee for the design of the English semantic analysis system. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the BRF network for English characters can reach 96.35%, which is 7.79% higher than that of the BP network; the AUC of the BRF network reaches 0.89, which is closer to 1 compared with 0.72 of the BP network. The test results are in good agreement with the antinoise curve test results of the figure. It is proved that the English semantic neural network algorithm can effectively improve the accuracy of English translation and further improve the efficiency of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the prevalence of the Internet, a large number of users have participated in OSN (Online Social Networks), which has gradually made it the mainstream way for obtaining news or information from the Internet. However, with the rapid development of the Internet, a large amount of fake information has also been spread on the Internet. Therefore, fake information detection is of great significance at the moment. A multimodal fake information detection method is proposed in this article, which has adopted the textual and visual contents in the piece of information to make the judgments. The textual feature representation vector is firstly obtained through the pretraining of the Bert model, and then the visual feature representation is obtained through the pretraining of the VGG-19 model. From the proposed method, two MCBP (Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling) modules are adopted. The first MCBP module is adopted to obtain the visual feature representation vector with attention, and the second MCBP module is adopted to join the visual feature with the attention mechanism and the textual feature vector. Then, the joined vector can be adopted for fake information detection. The proposed method in this article is compared with two baseline methods. The experimental results on the Twitter and Weibo datasets have proved that the proposed method in this article is better than the EANN method and the SpotFake method in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leveraging suppliers and customers, in order to build closer inter‐organisational ties, is often highlighted as a competitive priority in global supply chains (SCs). The creation of relational capital (RC) within a firm is a well‐researched concept; however, few studies investigated the customer/supplier leveraging mechanisms that build relational capital in SCs. In this study, we propose a model to examine the effects of supplier and customer leveraging on the creation of RC, which impacts innovation performance (IP). The empirical data for this study were drawn from the fifth round of the Global Manufacturing Research Group survey project (data collected from 557 manufacturing plants, in 10 countries). The hypotheses were empirically tested using structural equation modelling. The findings highlight the importance of SC leveraging towards building RC, in order to enhance innovation performance. The results show that supplier and customer leveraging positively impact the RC. In turn, the RC has a significant impact on IP. We found that the effect of SC leveraging directly and indirectly (partial mediated by RC) associates with the innovation performance. These findings are underpinned by the relational view, which argues that the relationships between firms are an important unit of analysis for understanding competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Comments on the 'pedagogical content knowledge' (PCK) for teacher education program. Techniques for an effective teaching; Analysis of teaching and learning; Relevance of technical vocabulary for teachers.

Total Quality Management (TQM) has become, according to one source, 'as pervasive a part of business thinking as quarterly financial results,' and yet TQM's role as a strategic resource remains virtually unexamined in strategic management research. Drawing on the resource approach and other theoretical perspectives, this article examines TQM as a potential source of sustainable competitive advantage, reviews existing empirical evidence, and reports findings from a new empirical study of TQM's performance consequences. The findings suggest that most features generally associated with TQM--such as quality training, process improvement, and benchmarking--do not generally produce advantage, but that certain tacit, behavioral, imperfectly imitable features--such as open culture, employee empowerment, and executive commitment--can produce advantage. The author concludes that these tacit resources, and not TQM tools and techniques, drive TQM success, and that organizations that acquire them can outperform competitors with or without the accompanying TQM ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a method for analyzing narrative accounting disclosures of financial information. The authors use a computer program called WORDS to provide a content analysis of the narrative elements of financial statements by looking at word frequency. The program catalogs the words into various classifications and then creates a statistical analysis of the words. The WORDS program was used to analyze annual report disclosures from companies that may or may not have released misleading financial information.

Abstract: We investigate whether infant‐directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult‐directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) maintain that physician withdrawal-of-life-sustaining-treatment cannot be morally equated to voluntary active euthanasia. PAS opponents generally distinguish these two kinds of act by positing a possible moral distinction between killing and allowing-to-die, ceteris paribus. While that distinction continues to be widely accepted in the public discourse, it has been more controversial among philosophers. Some ethicist PAS advocates are so certain that the distinction is invalid that they describe PAS opponents who hold to the distinction as in the grip of 'moral fictions'. The author contends that such a diagnosis is too hasty. The possibility of a moral distinction between active euthanasia and allowing-to-die has not been closed off by the argumentative strategies employed by these PAS advocates, including the contrasting cases strategy and the assimilation of doing and allowing to a common sense notion of causation. The philosophical debate over the doing/allowing distinction remains inconclusive, but physicians and others who rely upon that distinction in thinking about the ethics of end-of-life care need not give up on it in response to these arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite arguments for more fully including informational text in early childhood classrooms, research suggests that young children's exposure to the genre is quite limited. This article focuses on the informational books that children do encounter, specifically through read-alouds, and describes the narrow focus of those books. Informational read-alouds are overwhelmingly on topics of life science. The authors advocate for both increasing and broadening the informational books read aloud to young children and provide recommendations for ensuring productive read-aloud experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses science textbooks that are used in primary education. The experiences of four primary school teachers at the James Weldon Johnson Leadership Academy in East Harlem, New York City are examined in terms of how they teach science. The benefits of using textbook-based instruction are examined as are the challenges that elementary school children face in trying to learn science from a book, including reading technical language. It is noted that there is an interest in increasing content area instruction with nonfiction books in the lower elementary grades. Teaching methods for helping students to deal with technical vocabulary in their textbooks include context clues and rereading. Other topics include teacher-student communication, reading strategies, the way information is presented in textbooks, and the style of writing in nonfiction textbooks.

While language enables communication, it also provides a reassuring quality more closely related with issues linked with trust, social capital, and cultural identification. Research on the role of language as a learning process is widespread but there is little evidence on its role as a signal for cultural affinity. We pursue this latter avenue of research and show that subtle language affinity is positively linked with change in socioeconomic outcome variables when using English-speaking data for cities in the Golden Horseshoe area in Southern Ontario during the period 1991 to 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qur'an 3:104 speaks of "commanding right and forbidding wrong" as a constitutive feature of the Muslim community. Michael Cook's careful and comprehensive study provides a wealth of information about the ways Muslims in various contexts have understood this notion. Cook also makes a number of comparative observations, and suggests that "commanding" appears to be a uniquely Muslim practice. Scholars of religious ethics should read Cook's study with great appreciation. They will also have a number of questions about his comparative comments. In this article, I suggest that scholars of comparative ethics should think less about the "uniqueness" of the materials examined by Cook, and more about the ways groups of human beings discipline their members, thereby constituting and maintaining themselves as communities of virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of authentic literacy activities for developing comprehension and writing. The terms authentic literacy and authentic reading and writing are familiar to many teachers because they are encouraged to include them activities in their instruction. Many believe that students need to read authentic literature and to engage in authentic writing. Authentic literacy activities in the classroom are conceptualized as those that replicate or reflect reading and writing activities that occur in the lives of people outside of a learning-to-read-and-write context and purpose.

The article discusses the use of demonstrations and realia to support the comprehension of expository text on geography. Expository texts are informational texts as opposed to narrative texts that tell stories. Engaging students to read expository texts is challenging to teachers. The use of actual objects or realia such as short video clips and picture books and demonstrations can prove useful in the geography lesson. The former helps spark interest in students while the latter allows them to engage and experience the activity. Incorporating expository texts in lessons have several benefits. Among others, it enables students to make meaning-making conversations with teachers and parents and provides them with the knowledge necessary for higher grades.

T he L inguistics of H istory. By Roy Harris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses literacy instruction that integrates reading and writing or that focuses on thematic units. Main emphasis of the integrated teaching; Cross-learning opportunities in reading and writing; Claims on the applicability of integrated teaching using thematic units; Flaws and advantages of integrated teaching using thematic units; Guidelines for integrated instruction.

This article analyzes social philosophy in relation to the vocabulary of sociology. While social science describes things as they are social philosophy prescribes or recommends how they ought to be ideally. The main task of social philosophy is the critical evaluation of ideas and beliefs about society. Its job is to ask whether these ideas and beliefs can be rationally justified and if they cannot, whether they can be replaced by others which are rationally justifiable. The author does not recommend any one concept of causation for sociology. Social philosophy is not competent to say what concept of causal explanation is apt for a particular purpose. What social philosophy can do is to point out that there is more than one concept of cause and that an unreflective imitation of a previously established field of science can involve unjustified assumptions.

This article discusses the kind of pressures, intellectual and social, which have been at work in sociology to produce a vocabulary for the analysis of complex modern societies. It is not directly concerned with the concepts in terms of which social scientists discuss the complex structures of preliterate societies. The structural functional school in social theory borrowed many of its concepts from the social anthropology of anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown. The author tries to show that the language of sociology has evolved in an attempt to discover or map the grounds of social stability and coherence through analogies of emulation with a sister social science in which these concepts have borne a heavy and respected harvest. The author also comments on some trends and problems in theoretical vocabulary.

The article examines several studies relating to social influences to child behavior. Ten types of studies that ranges from early long-range characterizations of environment and the companison of children from contrasting backgrounds to the controlled experiments and factorial analyses were considered. J. E. Anderson made a pioneer attempt to obtain a representative sampling of the entire preschool population of the United States. His study covers 4,000 young children in 3,000 families and reports size of family, type of home and education.

Comments on Indigenous Peoples Global Conference organizer Goodluck Diigbo's call for participants at a United Nations public forum to rise and identify themselves to their neighbors as a member of either an indigenous or a non-indigenous group. Definition of indigenous people; Prevalence of oppressed, culturally distinct minorities.