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Background Research indicates that parents’ involvement in early literacy, particularly through book reading, matters for young children’s language and literacy development. OBJECTIVE: However, little is known about the nature and extent of family book reading across the U.S. nation or about which factors support parents’ involvement in book reading. In particular, parents’ beliefs about promoting literacy may be linked to their book-reading actions, which can foster their children’s learning.  Method We investigated several questions using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten 2011 (ECLS-K) dataset: (1) How are demographic characteristics (ethnicity, SES, and child age) predictive of parents’ literacy beliefs and home reading practices during children’s kindergarten year?; (2) How do parents’ literacy beliefs contribute to parents’ home reading practices during children’s kindergarten year?; and (3) How do parents’ literacy beliefs and home reading practices relate to children’s literacy development during their kindergarten year? We focused on data from Fall 2010 through Spring 2011, spanning the kindergarten year, and utilized descriptive and multivariate regression techniques.  Results Regressions reveal that parents’ literacy beliefs are linked to their literacy practices, net of the effects of a variety of covariates. In turn, both beliefs and practices are uniquely linked to increases in children’s reading performance over the kindergarten year, demonstrating incremental validity for both sets of variables and reinforcing the importance of both beliefs and practices as part of the home learning environment.  Conclusions The findings of this study underscore the critical role of parents’ beliefs in contributing to their home reading practices, which, in turn, are positively related to kindergarteners’ literacy development, net of the effects of variety of important covariates.

Understanding predictors and effects of teacher well-being, including job satisfaction, is crucial for both teachers' and children's development. Research on teacher job satisfaction (TJS) has indicated that many individual and contextual factors may make a difference for teachers' professional well-being. However, against the backdrop of this larger literature, relatively less attention has been paid to kindergarten teachers, despite the pivotal importance of this transition to grade school on children's long-term academic success. In this study, we first employed confirmatory factor analysis to validate the construct of TJS and then used structural equation modeling to investigate the specific predictors of kindergarten TJS (e.g., job resources, job demands, teacher job self-efficacy). Finally, we used structural equation modeling again to examine the relations between TJS and kindergarten children's academic and social development. We used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies–Kindergarten, a nationally representative dataset including American children who began kindergarten in 2011. Results shed light on the complex phenomenon of TJS in this critical school transition period.

Immigrant parents with young children face difficult dilemmas that stem from the challenges of navigating the different cultures of their home and of their adopting country (e.g., Hynie, 2018; Kim et al., 2001; Schwartz et al., 2010). Parents’ deliberations about how to raise their children are particularly challenging when their home and adopting cultures are very different (Fuentes-Balderrama et al., 2022; Lozano et al., 2022), as is the case for Chinese immigrants to the U.S. Chinese immigrants constitute the largest immigrant group in the U.S., and their parenting styles and strategies have tremendous consequences for the development of their children, the well-being of the parents and the children in their communities, the integration of the family in their new environment, and, consequently, the well-being of the larger American community.Research has often portrayed Chinese immigrant parents, and most often mothers, as negotiating a simple dichotomy of Western and Chinese parenting styles (e.g., Cheah et al., 2013; Ma, 2019; Wang et al., 2021). The literature commonly portrays these styles as discrepant on degrees of warmth, control, and discipline, with Chinese parenting viewed as cold, strict, and demanding compared with the warmer, relaxed, and lenient American way. More recent studies (Donald & Yi, 2008; Guo, 2013; Han & Chen, 2019; Liu et al., 2020) have begun to challenge this simple dichotomy and to highlight the diversity of their parenting beliefs and practices, uncovering nuanced approaches based on Chinese Confucianism and Guan, including their emphasis on learning and the establishment of high expectations, and their beliefs and practices related to children’s socio-emotional development, particularly related to parental expressions of warmth, socialization goals towards children, and beliefs about friendship and play. However, this research is in its infancy, and it lacks a theoretical framework to conceptualize the diversity of Chinese immigrant parenting approaches in the American context.In the multiple case study, therefore, I employed the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Kaplan & Garner, 2017) to conceptualize and investigate the parenting approaches and strategies of three Chinese immigrant mothers of children aged 3 to 5 in Philadelphia, PA. DSMRI allows for a nuanced understanding of individuals by considering their unique experiences, perspectives, and parenting practices. It also considers various components of role identity, such as purpose and goals, worldviews, self-perceptions, action possibility, and emotions. Besides, it explains parenting practices from a bottom-up perspective. The DSMRI framework further places significant emphasis on the relational and cultural context in which parenting occurs, recognizing the continuous construction of a mother’s role identity in relation to various family members and networks.I aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) Who are the Chinese immigrant mothers (e.g., educational background, socioeconomic status, life experiences in China, life experiences in the U.S., and life experiences as a mother)?; (2) What are the mothers’ experiences with parental involvement with their children?; (3) What are their parent role identities, including purpose and goals, self-perceptions, worldviews, and action possibilities as a mother?; (4) How can their role identities explain their decisions on parental involvement with their children?; (5) How do contextual factors (e.g., Chinese immigrant communities, school, and technology) in their environments influence their parent role identities?Three Chinese immigrant mothers of children aged 3 to 5 participated in this study. The data included life-story interviews, as well as home observations, and stimulated recall interviews centering on parental involvement with the children. The interviews were recorded, and I utilized ethnographic tools such as observation, thick descriptions, and detailed field notes to describe these mothers’ parental involvement with their children. As about data analysis, I analyzed the collected data using inductive coding techniques first to identify emerging themes. Then I delved into each theme, applying the DSMRI framework deductively to explain how parents’ role identity influenced their actions and behaviors. Finally, I interpreted and synthesized the findings, integrating the inductive themes and the DSMRI framework.The research revealed critical insights into the parenting experiences of Chinese immigrant mothers. First, it showcased the diverse backgrounds and life experiences of three Chinese immigrant mothers. Their differences encompassed childhood experiences, educational histories, socioeconomic backgrounds both in their families of origin and their own status, as well as experiences related to immigration and child-rearing (e.g., the number of children and involvement of other family members such as their husband or parents-in-laws) and the communities they were part of. Second, regarding their parental involvement, they all emphasized the following key aspects of their children’s upbringing, including language learning, reading, math education, talent development, and socio-emotional growth.Third, this study examined the mothers’ negotiation of tensions within their mother role identity, their teacher role identity within their mother role identity, and the incorporation of multiple role identities and their tensions. Specifically, the three mothers’ parent role identities helped them navigate parenting in a cross-cultural context, balancing between the Chinese and the U.S. educational and cultural systems. They integrated teacher role identity into their mother role identity, autonomously imparting essential values and skills. Moreover, these mothers negotiated multiple role identities, dealing with the complexities of balancing self, mother, and other familial role identities. Fourth, their mother role identities influenced their decisions on parental involvement in adapting and forming new role identity components, navigating tensions, setting priorities, allocating time, integrating family members, building relationships with schools, and integrating community resources. Finally, the U.S. cultural environment and other contextual factors like community and technology influenced their parent role identities.The study contribute to knowledge about the important phenomenon of Chinese immigrants’ parenting practices, and investigate the utility of a framework of identity, motivation, and action for parenting research that is grounded in dynamic complexity theory, transcending conceptions of static, discrete parenting styles for conceptualizing and instead investigating parenting as a diverse, complex, dynamic, and relational phenomenon among Chinese immigrant mothers in America.

To evaluate the effectiveness of an inflatable heating blanket in preventing hypothermia during hospital transport of neonates following cesarean section, and to assess its impact on vital signs and parental satisfaction. Newborns delivered via cesarean section between June 2023 and October 2023 were randomly assigned to two groups. The control group infants were transported with the mother on a transport bed without additional warming. In the observation group, newborns were placed on an inflatable warming blanket before transport with the mother. The study included 96 newborns who met specific inclusion criteria. Vital signs, blood glucose, blood gas parameters, rectal temperature, incidence of adverse events, and parental satisfaction were compared between the two groups. There were no significant differences in basic vital signs, blood glucose, blood gas parameters, or rectal temperature between the groups at the start of the study (P > .05). However, during transport, respiratory and pulse rates increased and rectal temperature decreased significantly in the control group (P < .05). In the observation group, there were no significant changes in vital signs, blood glucose, blood gas parameters, or rectal temperature during transport (P > .05). However, respiratory and pulse rates were lower, and rectal temperature was higher than the control group upon arrival in the ward (P < .05). The observation group had higher rectal temperatures, a lower incidence of hypothermia (rectal temperature <36.5°C), and greater parental satisfaction compared to the control group, with significant differences (P < .05). Using an inflatable heating blanket effectively reduces the occurrence of hypothermia during neonatal transport after cesarean section, stabilizes vital signs, and enhances parental satisfaction. These findings suggest potential recommendations for clinical practice and could influence transport protocols in other hospitals.

This paper is concerned with the problem of predictive function control (PFC) for a class of hydraulic vibration servo control systems. Our aim is to design a new advanced control strategy such that the control system can track trajectory in a fast and accurate way. For this end, the mathematical model of the hydraulic vibration servo control system is firstly studied. By analyzing the nonlinear, time-varying, and model structure uncertainty features of the objects, the desired control strategy is presented based on PFC. Finally, the simulation results show that our proposed method is effective and can be used to improve the tracking speed, accuracy, and robustness.

The U.S. attracts a significant number of international doctoral students each year. As these students navigate cultural and academic systems, understanding their unique experiences and challenges becomes crucial. This study explores the intricate nuances of motivation and identity negotiation in the lived experiences of six East Asian international doctoral students in the U.S. using collaborative autoethnography. We examined how role identities explain our experiences by employing the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity framework. Our reflections revealed (1) the salience of role identity components and structural relations and the impact of other role identities on resolving tensions; (2) the development of our researcher and teacher role identities within doctoral student role identity; and (3) resilience as both a cultural disposition and a dynamic process that evolves through the constant negotiation and renegotiation of our identities.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a powerful tool to faithfully generate novel views for scenes with only sparse captured images. Despite its strong capability for representing 3D scenes and their appearance, its editing ability is very limited. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective extension of vanilla NeRF, named PaletteNeRF, to enable efficient color editing on NeRF-represented scenes. Motivated by recent palette-based image decomposition works, we approximate each pixel color as a sum of palette colors modulated by additive weights. Instead of predicting pixel colors as in vanilla NeRFs, our method predicts additive weights. The underlying NeRF backbone could also be replaced with more recent NeRF models such as KiloNeRF to achieve real-time editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves efficient, view-consistent, and artifact-free color editing on a wide range of NeRF-represented scenes.

Inner-reinforced girders, also known as ribs, are widely used in hydropower bifurcations. However, while they strengthen structures, they also cause energy loss. This work aims to develop an appropriate geometry form for ribs that can diminish head loss in hydropower bifurcations.The term rib/breadth ratio (RBR) is defined to describe the geometrical form of ribs. An investigation is conducted to study the flow and performance characteristics of bifurcations with ribs using computational fluid dynamics. The dependence of the head loss coefficient on the RBR is given in six working conditions. Results show that the ribs change the local flow patterns and slightly increase the water head loss in some cases. In other cases,however, the ribs make the flow smooth. An appropriate RBR is the key to improve the flow patterns in hydropower bifurcations. The head loss varies with the RBR and reaches the minimum when the RBR is 0.3.

We present Step-Video-TI2V, a state-of-the-art text-driven image-to-video generation model with 30B parameters, capable of generating videos up to 102 frames based on both text and image inputs. We build Step-Video-TI2V-Eval as a new benchmark for the text-driven image-to-video task and compare Step-Video-TI2V with open-source and commercial TI2V engines using this dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Step-Video-TI2V in the image-to-video generation task. Both Step-Video-TI2V and Step-Video-TI2V-Eval are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-TI2V.

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.