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While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

The closure of school buildings due to COVID-19 and the resulting rapid transition to online education dramatically altered the lives of educators, students and parents. While previous literature demonstrates the vital role of parents in effective online education (Hattie, 2020; Liu et al, 2010), pre-pandemic literature focuses on parents and students who have opted in to online education. As such, the outbreak of COVID-19 has presented new challenges for understanding the relationship between parents and their child/ren's online learning. Since the start of the pandemic, studies have emerged exploring parental experience adjusting to their child/ren's online remote learning (Bhamani et al, 2020; Brom et al, 2020; Dong et al, 2020; Garbe et al, 2020; Lee et al, 2021). However, less is known about the online learning experiences during COVID-19 of families with children enrolled within international schools. Accordingly, the present study draws upon insights from 44 parents of children attending international schools who took part in 22 focus groups, across three countries and in three languages. The study investigates the parental experience with online education and unpacks four themes that emerged from the data: challenges faced by parents, parental perception of their child/ren's wellbeing, impressions of the learning quality and parental suggestions for consideration by school leadership. With these findings, school leaders have a unique opportunity to leverage lessons learned and support parental growth so that families, educators and students may all contribute to the promise of a brighter educational future.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020, school buildings across the globe closed, leading educators, students and families to transition rapidly to online education. It is clear that schools will in the future continue to employ online learning, even as students and educators return to school buildings. While the education community has over a number of years generated a range of practical tips and guidance about online education--especially since the onset of COVID-19--many are not supported by research (DiPietro et al., 2010) and neglect international school settings (Barbour, 2014). This study investigates the experiences of sixty-one K-12 international educators via nineteen focus groups, contributing to the literature base on pedagogical, leadership and practical strategies needed to support effective online learning. Four lessons learned emerged from the data: technological challenges are exacerbated during a crisis; educators adapted to revise pedagogical strategies when under pressure; student and parent experiences were inconsistent and complex; and school leaders play an important role during a transition to online education. Although COVID-19 posed challenges, educators are resilient, adaptable, and deeply committed to student learning. School leaders now have an opportunity to reconstruct a model of education which offers students the best of face-to-face learning augmented by the most effective use of virtual technologies. This is more than planning for potential crises; this is reimagining the future of education.

We take "mathematical structure" to mean the identification of general properties which are instantiated in particular situations as relationships between elements or subsets of elements of a set. Because we take the view that appreciating structure is powerfully productive, attention to structure should be an essential part of mathematical teaching and learning. This is not to be confused with teaching children mathematical structure. We observe that children from quite early ages are able to appreciate structure to a greater extent than some authors have imagined. Initiating students to appreciate structure implies, of course, that their appreciation of it needs to be cultivated in order to deepen and to become more mature. We first consider some recent research that supports this view and then go on to argue that unless students are encouraged to attend to structure and to engage in structural thinking they will be blocked from thinking productively and deeply about mathematics. We provide several illustrative cases in which structural thinking helps to bridge the mythical chasm between conceptual and procedural approaches to teaching and learning mathematics. Finally we place our proposals in the context of how several writers in the past have attempted to explore the importance of structure in mathematics teaching and learning. (Contains 1 figure and 3 footnotes.)

Numerous studies have recognized collaboration as an effective way of learning. When collaboration involves students from different cultural backgrounds, a question arises: "Will cultural differences influence the manner in which roles are adopted within collaborative learning?" In this study, a correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between cultural factors and emerging roles among collaborating students from two universities in different countries (China and USA). The cultural factors that might hypothetically affect their collaboration were approximated to thinking styles by using Sternberg's thinking styles inventory. The roles that students adopted according to preferences were coded with an adapted coding scheme. The results indicate a significant relationship between student thinking styles and the adopted roles of students. This finding implies that cultural factors, exhibited as thinking styles, could explain the emerging roles that are adopted in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). The results could guide teachers in assigning appropriate roles to students with different backgrounds to improve the efficiency of collaboration during cross-cultural CSCL.

There is hardly any cross-cultural research on the measurement invariance of the Brief Multidimensional Students' Life Satisfaction Scales (BMSLSS). The current article evaluates the measurement invariance of the BMSLSS across cultural contexts. This cross-sectional study sampled 7,739 adolescents and emerging adults in 23 countries. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis showed a good fit of configural and partial measurement weights invariance models, indicating similar patterns and strengths in factor loading for both adolescents and emerging adults across various countries. We found insufficient evidence for scalar invariance in both the adolescents' and the emerging adults' samples. A multi-level confirmatory factor analysis indicated configural invariance of the structure at country and individual level. Internal consistency, evaluated by alpha and omega coefficients per country, yielded acceptable results. The translated BMSLSS across different cultural contexts presents good psychometric characteristics similar to what has been reported in the original scale, though scalar invariance remains problematic. Our results indicate that the BMSLSS forms a brief measure of life satisfaction, which has accrued substantial evidence of construct validity, thus suitable for use in cross-cultural surveys with adolescents and emerging adults, although evaluation of degree of invariance must be carried out to ensure its suitability for mean comparisons.

In this paper we consider why students in poor and rural regions of China are dropping out of school in numbers that may be greater than official statistics admit. With questions about education quality among the most intractable in Education for All initiatives across the developing world, we sketch a portrait of education in a remote mountain village community as it might be painted from the perspective of a primary school dropout: a portrait in which education quality is well in the shadows. We indicate the limits of the view that commonly relates the phenomenon of school dropout primarily with poverty, a lack of school resources and inequities in resource distribution, suggesting that the picture is more nuanced and subtly shaded at local levels. Our research indicates that the education system in the radically transitional society that China is today brings with it values that clash with those of its citizens, particularly those who are marginalized and cannot easily adjust, perhaps because of their disadvantaged socio-economic, cultural and geographic location. In an ethnographic study in a poor, rural area in Yunnan province, we found significant disjunctions in values: between those of the school system and those of parents with regard to the aims and purposes of education; between those of the curriculum and those of teachers with regard to their role in the classroom vis-a-vis knowledge as represented in textbooks; between those of government education policy and the concerns of the remote rural poor with regard to resource distribution; and between those of a newly market-oriented society and educational ideals about teachers' and students' abilities. We also offer some insight into the scale and complexity of the problems associated with a lack of education quality and students' dropping out of school as a consequence, which cannot be revealed by the official 1% dropout rate.

The author describes the itinerary and impressions of a group (Music Educators National Conference) of American composers, dancers, and other artists who made up the first cultural delegation from the United States to the People's Republic of China since the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries. (Author/KC)

In the past decade, Beijing has experienced dramatic spatial restructuring. In this paper, we test whether the conventional monocentric model of urban spatial structure can explain recent developments in Beijing's land market. Using official land transaction data from 2008 through 2012, we find that (1) for commercial, mixed-use, and residential land parcels, both land prices and development intensities do not decline with distance from the urban center; (2) for industrial land parcels, land prices increase with distance from the urban center. These insignificant and positive land-price gradients defy the predictions of the monocentric model; such results are explained by examining Beijing's evolution from a monocentric to a polycentric spatial configuration, which has been driven by various urban planning efforts and institutional reforms. Our analysis of post-Olympic Beijing land market dynamics leads to a fresh understanding of the city's emerging polycentric metropolitan structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the current status of consumer protection regime in Hong Kong, China. Topics discussed include consumer protection against the unfair terms of the contracts, requirement of law reforms in the contracts related to consumer services in Hong Kong and laws made for the regulation of interests of local consumers of Hong Kong. It further discusses the languages used in the construction and interpretation of contracts made.

The article discusses a restatement of the law on rectification made by non-permanent judge Lord Hoffman in the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal case Kowloon Development Finance Ltd v. Pendex Industries Ltd. Topics mentioned include the facts of the case, which revolved around whether Pendex's repayments sufficed to discharge all of its debt, the court's holding for rectification on the grounds of common mistake, and an analysis of the situations in which rectification is available.

In this article we aim to illustrate both the progress and the stalemates of the US and Japanese strategies to fortify the Okinawan Islands as a bulwark against China. As a conceptual tool to analyze the accommodation and resistance of militarization, we use the notion of a complex interplay of state, market, and societal actors, which showcases the process of mediating and recalibrating risks perceived by policymakers in Tokyo in response to the rise of China. In this process, risk has been shifted to individual stakeholders within society We argue that the full-scale fortification of the Okinawan Islands will be hard to achieve because of the resistance of local residents and anti-base activists, as well as China's military and commercial strategies to circumvent any form of blockade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a decision of the Hong Kong, China Court of Final Appeal case New World Harbourview Hotel Co Ltd v. ACE Insurance Ltd in which contextual approach regarding the construction of commercial contracts was approved. It reflects the importance of clear-cut tests in insurance contracts in order to determine the scope of indemnity coverage. Information on the issues relating to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and insurance policy is presented.

The article presents a personal dedication by the author to Chief Justice Andrew Li, to whom the author has indebted with as his colleague and friend. The author has stressed Chief Justice Li's stewardship in bringing changes to Hong Kong, China's judicial system, particularly on the Basic Law. The author is also particular on Chief Justice Li's view over the integration between a capitalist and a common law legal system with judicial independence.

Summary: Introduction: Shigellosis is a leading public health issue in China, especially in Children under 5 years of age. The disease burden of shigellosis is usually underestimated by conventional culture. In this study, real-time PCR was applied to detect Shigella infection in parallel with routine culture, to investigate the true burden of disease caused by Shigella spp. Methods: Rectal swab specimens of 39 Shigella culture positive and 298 Shigella culture negative patients from a population-based surveillance study were selected randomly. Real-time PCR targeting the invasion plasmid antigen H gene sequence (ipaH) was used to detect DNA sequences characteristic for Shigella spp. Results: ipaH were detected in 174 of 298 (58%) randomly selected Shigella culture negative specimens and in 38 of 39 (97%) Shigella culture positive specimens (p < 0.001). Among 10 variables, culture results was the strongest predictive factor (OR = 15.5; 95% CI: 2.0–119.0), followed by a clinical presentation of diarrhea with fever (OR = 2.8; 95% CI: 1.2–6.2), epidemic season (OR = 2.4; 95% CI: 1.4–4.3), and female gender (OR = 1.8; 95% CI: 1.1–3.0). Conclusion: The high detection rate of ipaH in culture negative specimens through use of real-time PCR suggests that earlier estimates of shigellosis burden measured by conventional culture may have underestimated the true disease burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The chiastolite variety of andalusite contains a cross of inclusions of quartz and graphite in sections through prismatic porphyroblasts parallel to (001). The cross is always accompanied by roughly 5μm diameter rod-shaped quartz inclusions that formed by co-precipitation of andalusite and quartz during growth, a process similar to one described by Burton (1986) to explain garnet-quartz intergrowths in regional metamorphic rocks. The metamorphic fluid consisted of a mixture of H2O, CO2 and minor amounts of other gases produced by internal buffering by graphite, which was always present during crystal growth. Chiastolite porphyroblasts grew alongside sector zoned garnets like Burton''s during contact metamorphism of the Zhoukoudian aureole, Beijing, China. Crystal growth accompanied by deformation gave rise to curved quartz rods, sometimes alongside curved cracks that are not exactly parallel to cleavage. Individual porphyroblasts had multi-stage growth histories during deformation accompanied by removal of large volumes of Si in solution from the matrix. The resulting loss of volume and mechanical weakening of country rocks facilitated emplacement of the Zhoukoudian intrusive complex by ballooning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An imageodesy study has been carried out, using pre‐ and post‐event Landsat‐7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images, to reveal regional co‐seismic displacement caused by the Ms 8.1 Kunlun earthquake in November 2001. The two Landsat scenes, Kusai Lake and Buka Daban, cover an area of some 57 600 km 2 (320 km W–E and about 180 km N–S), which includes most of the fault rupture zone. The co‐seismic displacement measured in the Kusai Lake scene shows that the average left‐lateral shift along the Kunlun fault is 4.8 m (ranging from 1.5 to 8.1 m) and the maximum shift appears west of the Kusai Lake. The splayed nature of the fault to the west of Buka Daban, where the fault splits into three branches, causes the displacement pattern to become complicated. Here the average left‐lateral shift, between the south side of the southern branch and the north side of the northern branch, is 4.6 m (ranging from 1.0 to 8.2 m). Our results also illustrate that the south side of the fault is the ‘active’ block, moving significantly in an east–south‐easterly direction, relative to the largely ‘stable’ northern block. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geophysical data indicate that the lithosphere beneath the North China Craton (NCC) is ∼80 km thick with high heat flow within the craton. This is somewhat in disagreement with the presence of Archaean crustal rocks and kimberlite-hosted xenoliths that point to the existence of garnet–diamond-facies mantle beneath the craton, as recently as the Ordovician. Basalt-hosted mantle xenoliths entrained during the Cenozoic may provide a clue to Phanerozoic changes. Of particular note is the predominance of spinel-facies peridotites (75–80 km) and the paucity of garnet-facies peridotites. The modal mineralogy of the spinel peridotites is similar to that observed in peridotite xenoliths from the lower oceanic lithosphere but distinct from that of abyssal peridotites. The orthopyroxene/olivine ratio is like that of peridotites from ocean basins and tectonically active continents, and the peridotites have ‘depleted’ Sr and Nd isotopic ratios similar to those of oceanic basalts. The basalt-hosted xenolith data from eastern China support geophysical data in revealing the presence of thin, hot lithosphere with a similarity, over distances of several thousand kilometres, to that found beneath tectonically active continents or ocean basins. These data do not, however, allow us to constrain which of the thermo-tectonic processes (i.e. plume, extension, delamination) was responsible for the loss of the cold, thick Archaean lithospheric root (∼200 km) in the last 400 My. What is clear is that the pre-existent, presumably heterogeneous, Archaean lithosphere has been very effectively replaced by ‘oceanic’-like mantle. The extent to which it was totally replaced is open to debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: As an innovative approach to providing web-based health care services from physical hospitals to patients at a distance, e-hospitals (ie, extended care hospitals through the internet) have been extensively developed in China. This closed health care delivery chain was developed by combining e-hospitals with physical hospitals; treatment begins with web-based consultation and registration, and then, patients are diagnosed and treated in a physical hospital. This approach is promising in its ability to improve accessibility, efficiency, and quality of health care. However, there is limited research on end users' acceptance of e-hospitals and the effectiveness of strategies aimed to prompt the adoption of e-hospitals in China.Objective: This study aimed to provide insights regarding the adoption of e-hospitals by investigating patients' willingness to use e-hospitals and analyzing the barriers and facilitators to the adoption of this technology.Methods: We used a pretested self-administered questionnaire and performed a cross-sectional analysis in 1032 patients across three hierarchical hospitals in West China from June to August 2019. Patients' sociodemographic characteristics, medical history, current disease status, proficiency with electronic devices, previous experience with web-based health services, willingness to use e-hospitals, and perceived facilitators and barriers were surveyed. Multiple significance tests were employed to examine disparities across four age groups, as well as those between patients who were willing to use e-hospitals and those who were not. Multivariate logistic regression was also performed to identify the potential predictors of willingness to use e-hospitals.Results: Overall, it was found that 65.6% (677/1032) of participants were willing to use e-hospitals. The significant predictors of willingness to use e-hospitals were employment status (P=.02), living with children (P<.001), education level (P=.046), information technology skills (P<.001), and prior experience with web-based health care services (P<.001), whereas age, income, medical insurance, and familiarity with e-hospitals were not predictors. Additionally, the prominent facilitators of e-hospitals were convenience (641/677, 94.7%) and accessibility to skilled medical experts (489/677, 72.2%). The most frequently perceived barrier varied among age groups; seniors most often reported their inability to operate technological devices as a barrier (144/166, 86.7%), whereas young participants most often reported that they avoided e-hospital services because they were accustomed to face-to-face consultation (39/52, 75%).Conclusions: We identified the variables, facilitators, and barriers that play essential roles in the adoption of e-hospitals. Based on our findings, we suggest that efforts to increase the adoption of e-hospitals should focus on making target populations accustomed to web-based health care services while maximizing ease of use and providing assistance for technological inquiries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]