Speaking is deemed by many scholars as a fundamental skill in second language (L2) learning. From the myriad of factors playing a role in willingness to communicate (WTC) in a foreign language, communication apprehension and self-perceived competence have attracted a good deal of interest in recent decades. Furthermore, it is generally agreed that cooperative teaching can enhance learners' ling...

The main goal of modern second language (L2) pedagogy is to engender appropriate communication skills among its learners. Hence, willingness communicate (WTC) in L2 emerged as an important variable recent years. Several factors have been found influence students’ WTC directly or indirectly. For this purpose, many scales and questionnaires developed so far examine the influencing students. Howev...

Several epidemiological studies suggested an increased incidence rate of multiple myeloma (MM) among first responders and other individuals who exposed to World Trade Center (WTC) dust. In this report, we provided evidence showing that WTC dust is potent in inducing mdig protein and/or mRNA in bronchial epithelial cells, B cells and MM cell lines. An increased mdig expression in MM bone marrow ...

The attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 resulted in a serious burden of physical and mental illness for the 50,000 rescue workers that responded to 9/11 as well as the 400,000 residents and workers in the surrounding areas of New York City. The Zadroga Act of 2010 established the WTC Health Program (WTCHP) to provide monitoring and treatment of WTC exposure-related con...

BACKGROUND This study examines the prevalence of physician-diagnosed respiratory conditions and mental health symptoms in firefighters and emergency medical service workers up to 9 years after rescue/recovery efforts at the World Trade Center (WTC). METHODS We analyzed Fire Department of New York (FDNY) physician and self-reported diagnoses by WTC exposure and quintiles of pulmonary function ...

KCNQ1 forms K+ channels by assembly with regulatory subunit KCNE proteins and plays a key role in the K+ homeostasis in a variety of tissues. In the heart, KCNQ1 is coassembled with KCNE1 to produce a cardiac delayed rectifier K+ current. In the inner ear, the KCNQ1/KCNE1 complex maintains the high concentration of K+ in the endolymph. In the stomach, KCNQ1 is coassembled with KCNE2 to form the...

The connection between online users is the key to the success of many important applications, such as viral marketing. In reality, we often easily observe the time when each user in the network receives a message, yet the users’ connections that empower the message diffusion remain hidden. Therefore, given the traces of disseminated messages, recent research has extensively studied approaches t...

13 In this paper, a user-defined inter-band correlation filter function was used to resample 14 hyperspectral data and thereby mitigate the problem of multicollinearity in classification 15 analysis. The proposed resampling technique convolves the spectral dependence information 16 between a chosen band-centre and its shorter and longer wavelength neighbours. Weighting 17 threshold of inter-ban...

petition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. The four teams were Foster-Miller and iRobot (both robo...

The World Trade Center (WTC) destruction released dust and fumes into the environment. Although many community members developed respiratory symptoms, screening spirometry was usually normal. We hypothesised that forced oscillation testing would identify functional abnormalities undetected by spirometry and that symptom severity would relate to magnitude of abnormalities measured by oscillometr...