ABSTRACT
The outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (henceforth COVID-19) has put restrictions on travel and educational exchange. In terms of Sino-Foreign Cooperative Institutions, this pandemic has imposed a strain on normal operation of education process, as foreign teachers hardly have the access to the mainland of China for prevention and control. Thus, these institutions have to rely on online teaching as the only way to maintain teaching work. However, some courses taught online are not effective and cannot fully replace traditional classroom teaching. Therefore, this study target at the largest Sino-Australian cooperative school in Zhejiang Province of China as the research object, and conduct a survey on English teaching delivered by foreign teachers via online and face-to-face methods. Specifically, listening and reading modules are taught online while speaking and writing ones are taught face-to-face. It is found that the combination of these ways performs better from feedback students provide and can almost reach the standard of traditional classroom teaching. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.
ABSTRACT
"At present, majority of the small molecular drugs used in clinics target proteins, they exert the efficacy through the binding to specific sites on the target protein. However, the ""druggable"" protein targets account for a small portion of the total number of proteins, and ""non-druggable"" proteins account for 80%, because of not having suitable drug binding sites. In the central rule, RNA is located in the upstream of proteins and controls the transcription of proteins. The research of small molecule drugs targeting RNA can solve the problem of protein ""undruggable proteins"" in some extent. This review summarizes the representative research achievements of small molecular drugs targeting RNA in recent years, and the screening methods applied to this field, with the focuses on the latest progress of small molecular drugs targeting novel coronavirus RNA. © 2022, Chinese Pharmaceutical Association. All rights reserved."
ABSTRACT
Background: Several studies have demonstrated immunogenicity after COVID-19 vaccination in patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases (AIRD) [1], but the differences between mRNA-based and vector vaccines and the cellular responses to COVID-19 vaccines according to distinct immunogenicity in AIRD patients are still unclear. Objectives: To investigate the differences in efficacy and safety between the vector vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19/AZD1222 (Oxford-AstraZeneca) and mRNA-based vaccine mRNA-1273 (Moderna) in patients with AIRD, and to explore the cell-cell interactions between high and low anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG levels in patients with rheumatic arthritis (RA) by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). Methods: From September 16 to November 15, 2021, we consecutively enrolled 243 participants aged ≥20 years with AIRD who received COVID-19 vaccination, of whom 113 were immunized with AZD1222 and 130 with mRNA-1273. The level of serum IgG antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain on the spike protein S1 subunit was quantifed by electrochemiluminescence immuno-assay at 4-6 weeks after vaccination. Moreover, peripheral blood mononuclear cells were isolated from two RA patient with high anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG level and four RA patients with low level for scRNA-seq and cell-cell communication signal was analyzed by CellChat. Results: The anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG seropositivity rate was 78.8% (89/113) for AZD1222 and 83.1% (108/130) for mRNA-1273. The level of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG was higher in patients who received mRNA-1273 than in those who received AZD1222 (β: 30.15, 95% CI: 11.67-48.63, p=0.002) (Table 1). Prednisolone-equivalent dose >5 mg/day and methotrexate (MTX) use in AIRD patients, and non-anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α biologics and Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor use in RA patients were associated with inferior immunogenicity. ScRNA-seq revealed CD16-monocytes were predominant in RA patients with high anti-SARS-CoV2-IgG antibody level, and enriched pathways related to antigen presentation via major histocompatibility complex class II (MHC class II) were found (Figure 1). HLA-DRA and CD4 interaction was vigorous among all identifed MHC-II pathway and was enhanced in high anti-SARS-CoV2-IgG antibody group. Conclusion: mRNA-1273 and AZD1222 vaccines exhibited differential immunogenicity in patients with AIRD. Enriched pathways related to antigen presentation via MHC class II in CD16-monocytes might be associated with higher anti-SARS-CoV2-IgG level in RA patients and further study is warranted.
ABSTRACT
Wearing a facial mask has become a must in our daily life due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. However, the performance of conventional face recognition systems severely degrades for faces occluded by masks. How to combat the effect of occlusion on face recognition is an important issue. However, the performance of existing methods developed for masked face recognition unpleasantly degrades when dealing with unmasked faces. To address this issue for real-world applications, where the gallery image or the probe image may be a masked or unmasked face, we propose the concept of balanced facial feature matching and, based on it, design a robust masked face recognition system. The matching is balanced because it is performed on features extracted from corresponding facial regions. The system consists of a classification network and two feature extractors. The classification network classifies an input face image into a masked face or an unmasked face. One feature extractor extracts the feature of a full face, and the other uses a guided perceptual loss to focus the feature extraction on the non-occluded part of the face. The system is tested on both synthetic and real data. The face verification accuracy is improved by 2.4% for the synthetically masked LFW dataset, 1.9% for the MFR2 dataset, and 5.4% for the RMFD dataset. The results further show that the system improves masked face recognition while preserving the performance of unmasked face recognition. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
In December 2019, a new type of coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) broke out in China and then spread globally, causing serious harm to the lives and health of people around the world.2019-nCoV is an RNA virus that is mainly transmitted through droplets and contact.It is highly infectious, so accurate and timely diagnosis and differential diagnosis are essential for control of infection and treatment of COVID-19.Currently, clinical diagnosis projects of COVID-19 mainly include nucleic acid detection of novel coronavirus, human immunological detection and pulmonary imaging tests.Based on these clinical diagnosis projects, a series of detection methods and techniques have been developed for COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and virus mutation monitoring.This review comprehensively made a summary on the principles, advantages, disadvantages, and clinical applicable scenarios of these diagnosis methods and techniques for COVID-19 and proposes to combine laboratory indicators with clinical symptoms and signs and image tests based on different needs to jointly guarantee accurate and effective diagnosis.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of COVID-19 has pushed many teachers and students to change their traditional ways of teaching and learning, which also required them to become more familiar with using various online resources. UNESCO emphasized that more quality open educational resource (OER) materials should be made available to teachers and students. Compared to many commercial sites, OERs have been constantly criticized for their poor quality (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2020). However, so far, insufficient attention has been paid to the improvements and promotion of OERs. To fill this important gap, this paper first introduces how we use various computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies and the free resources around the world to develop a comprehensive open-source English learning site called Cool English. The content and major functions of this site are first introduced. An investigation on how the site helped teachers and students during the COVID-19 time (from February to July 2020) was carried out by analyzing the various resources used by teachers and students. In addition, we also discuss several problems and challenges of using this website and other online resources. Through the descriptions and analyses of this website, researchers might be able to gain some experiences in developing and promoting OER sites for English language learners and teachers. © 2020, National Taiwan Normal University.