Invasion ecology, the study of how organisms spread in habitats to which they are not native, asks both about the invasiveness of species and the invasibility of habitats: Which species are most likely to become invasive? Which habitats are most susceptible to invasion? To set the stage for considering these questions with regard to plants, we offer a two-way classification of nativeness and in...

Although is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners’ although output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners’ although employment in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. The study is a corpus-based analysis launched under the analytical framework of contrasti...

One of the most fundamental and unsolved problems in speech recognition is the mismatch problem. Speech systems trained by a specific group of speakers, e.g. adults, do not work well with another group, e.g. children. In the case of CALL, when a student receives a bad score from a system, it may be just because he is an outlier to the system. The problem is that he cannot know whether he is an ...

Speaker-invariant structural representation of speech was proposed [1], where only the phonic contrasts between speech sounds were extracted to form their external structure. The acoustic substances were completely discarded. Considering a mapping function between speaker A’s acoustic space and B’s space, the speech dynamics was mathematically proven to be invariant between the two irrespective...

Due to the essential role that the three-dimensional conformation of a protein plays in regulating interactions with molecular partners, wet and dry laboratories seek biologically-active conformations of a protein to decode its function. Computational approaches are gaining prominence due to the labor and cost demands of wet laboratory investigations. Template-free methods can now compute thous...

In -value analysis, the effects of mutations on the folding kinetics are compared with the corresponding effects on thermodynamic stability to investigate the structure of the protein-folding transition state (TS). Here, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations (totaling 0.65 ms) have been performed for a large set of single-point mutants of a 20-residue three-stranded antiparallel -sheet peptide. B...

The study of lexical bundles, among types of text analysis, is gaining importance over the others in the last century. The present study employed a frequency-based analysis approach to the use of lexical bundles. The discussion section of 60 political science articles, with corpora around 253,063 words were investigated in three aspects of structure, form, and function of lexical bundles. The p...

We explore the effect of surface tethering on the folding process of a lattice protein that contains a trefoil knot in its native structure via Monte Carlo simulations. We show that the outcome of the tethering experiment depends critically on which terminus is used to link the protein to a chemically inert plane. In particular, if surface tethering occurs at the bead that is closer to the knot...

In his philosophical novel, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1883–85), famously wrote, ‘God is dead,’ signifying that God no longer credible as an absolute moral compass. Over a century later, Paikeday (1985), proclaimed The native speaker dead! in book title, implying the arbiter of what correct language obsolete. This paper discusses this complex, contentious ideological issue from assessme...