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This paper adopts a hybrid approach that integrates the characteristics of a position paper with those of a conceptual analysis. It integrates Taiwan’s historical trajectories, social contexts, and theoretical foundations, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and diverse sources to argue for the continued advancement of Taiwan-centric education as a foundation for Taiwanese subjectivity, democratic justice, and cultural pluralism. The analysis demonstrates that under colonial and authoritarian rule, Taiwan-centric education emerged primarily through limited grassroots awakenings and oppositional efforts. During the period of democratization, the majority of Taiwanese came to identify with liberal democratic values and institutions; nevertheless, persistent external pressures on sovereignty, identity, and historical interpretation have rendered the promotion of Taiwan-centric education both necessary and legitimate. As Taiwan participates in global discourses on democracy and human rights, ongoing educatio

The deterioration of sound localization accuracy during a listener’s head/body rotation is independent of the listener’s rotation velocity. However, whether this deterioration occurs only during physical movement in a real environment remains unclear. In this study, we addressed this question by subjecting physically stationary listeners to visually induced self-motion, i.e., vection. Two conditions—one with a visually induced perception of self-motion (vection) and the other without vection (control)—were adopted. Under both conditions, a short noise burst (30 ms) was presented via a loudspeaker in a circular array placed horizontally in front of a listener. The listeners were asked to determine whether the acoustic stimulus was localized relative to their subjective midline. The results showed that in terms of detection thresholds based on the subjective midline, the sound localization accuracy was lower under the vection condition than under the control condition. This indicates that sound localization can be compromised under visually induced self-motion perception. These findings support the idea that self-motion information is crucial for auditory space perception and can potentially enable the design of dynamic binaural displays requiring fewer computational resources.

Blind football players use head movements to accurately identify sound location when trapping a ball. Accurate sound localization is likely important for motor learning of ball trapping in blind football. However, whether head movements affect the acquisition of ball-trapping skills remains unclear. Therefore, this study examined the effect of head movements on skill acquisition during ball trapping. Overall, 20 sighted male college students were recruited and assigned to one of the following two groups: the conventional training group, where they were instructed to move leftward and rightward to align their body with the ball’s trajectory, and the head-movement-focused group, where they were instructed to follow the ball with their faces until the ball touched their feet, in addition to the conventional training instructions. Both groups underwent a 2-day training for ball trapping according to the specific instructions. The head-movement-focused group showed a decrease in errors in ball trapping at near distances and with larger downward head rotations in the sagittal plane compared to the conventional training group, indicating that during the skill acquisition training for ball trapping, the sound source can be localized more accurately using larger head rotations toward the ball. These results may help beginner-level players acquire better precision in their movements while playing blind football.

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are dysregulated in different cancer types, and thus have emerged as important regulators of the initiation and progression of human cancers. However, the biological functions and the underlying mechanisms responsible for their functions in gastric cancer (GC) remain poorly understood. Here, by lncRNA microarray, we identified 1414 differentially expressed lncRNAs, among which THAP7-AS1 was significantly upregulated in GC tissues compared with non-tumorous gastric tissues. High expression of THAP7-AS1 was correlated with positive lymph node metastasis and poorer prognosis. SP1, a transcription factor, could bind directly to the THAP7-AS1 promoter region and activate its transcription. Moreover, the m6A modification of THAP7-AS1 by METTL3 enhanced its expression depending on the “reader” protein IGF2BP1-dependent pathway. THAP7-AS1 promoted GC cell progression. Mechanistically, THAP7-AS1 interacted with the 1-50 Amino Acid Region (nuclear localization signal) of CUL4B through its 1-442 nt Sequence, and it promoted interaction between nuclear localization signal (NLS) and importin α1, and improved the CUL4B protein entry into the nucleus, repressing miR-22-3p and miR-320a expression by CUL4B-catalyzed H2AK119ub1 and the EZH2-mediated H3K27me3, subsequently activating PI3K/AKT signaling pathway to promote GC progression. Moreover, LV-sh-THAP7-AS1 treatment could suppress GC growth, invasion and metastasis, indicating that THAP7-AS1 may act as a promising molecular target for GC therapies. Taken together, our results show that THAP7-AS1, transcriptionally activated by SP1 and then modified by METTL3-mediated m6A, exerts oncogenic functions, by promoting interaction between NLS and importin α1 and then improving the CUL4B protein entry into the nucleus to repress the transcription of miR-22-3p and miR-320a.

Although flexible and portable virtual reality technologies have simplified measuring participants' perception of acoustic space, their clinical adoption remains limited, often lacking ecological fidelity. In clinical practice, participants are typically instructed to remain still when testing sound localization, whereas head movements are crucial in daily life. Additionally, assessing spatial hearing extends beyond measuring accuracy to include meta-cognitive evaluations like perceived effort and confidence, which are rarely adopted. Our study hypothesized that allowing head movement during sound localization, compared to a static head condition, would reduce perceived listening effort and enhance confidence in normal hearing participants. Conducted across three audiology and otology hospital services in Northern Italy, the study involved personnel inexperienced with our VR equipment. This also tested the feasibility and usability of our VR approach in clinical settings. Results showed that head movements reduced subjective effort but did not significantly affect perceived confidence. However, during the active condition, participants reporting higher confidence exhibited less head movement and explored the space less. Similarly, those with less head movement reported lower listening effort. These findings underscore the importance of allowing natural posture to capture the full extent of spatial hearing capabilities and the value of including metacognitive evaluations in assessing performance. Our use of affordable, off-the-shelf VR equipment effectively measured spatial hearing in clinical settings, providing a flexible alternative to current static systems. This approach highlights the potential for more dynamic and comprehensive assessments in clinical audiology.

We study the yielding behavior of a model glass under cyclic athermal quasistatic deformation and at finite rate and temperature, computationally, and show that yielding is characterized by the discontinuous appearance of shear bands, whose width is about ten particle diameters at their initiation, in which the strain gets localized. Strain localization is accompanied by a corresponding change in the energies and a decrease in the density in the shear band. We show that the glass remains well annealed outside the shear band, whereas the energies correspond to the highest possible energy minima at the given density within the shear band. Diffusive motion of particles characterizing the yielded state are confined to the shear bands, whose mean positions display movement over repeated cycles. Outside the shear band, particle motions are subdiffusive but remain finite. Despite the discontinuous nature of their appearance, shear bands are reversible in the sense that a reduction in the amplitude of cyclic deformation to values below yielding leads to the healing and disappearance of the shear bands.

Visual and audio events simultaneously occur and both attract attention. However, most existing saliency prediction works ignore the influence of audio and only consider vision modality. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning method for audio–visual saliency prediction and sound source localization on multi-face video by leveraging visual, audio and face information. Specifically, we first introduce a large-scale database of multi-face video in visual-audio condition, containing eye-tracking data and sound source annotations. Using this database, we find that sound influences human attention, and conversely attention offers a cue to determine sound source on multi-face video. Guided by these findings, an audio–visual multi-task network (AVM-Net) is introduced to predict saliency and locate sound source. AVM-Net consists of three branches corresponding to visual, audio and face modalities. The visual branch has a two-stream architecture to capture spatial and temporal information. Face and audio branches encode audio signals and faces, respectively. Finally, a spatio-temporal multi-modal graph is constructed to model the interaction among multiple faces. With joint optimization of these branches, the intrinsic correlation of the tasks of saliency prediction and sound source localization is utilized and their performance is boosted by each other. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms 12 state-of-the-art saliency prediction methods, and achieves competitive results in sound source localization.

There is compelling evidence that the human cerebellum is engaged in a wide array of motor and cognitive tasks. A fundamental question centers on whether the cerebellum is organized into distinct functional subregions. To address this question, we employed a rich task battery designed to tap into a broad range of cognitive processes. During four functional MRI sessions, participants performed a battery of 26 diverse tasks comprising 47 unique conditions. Using the data from this multi-domain task battery, we derived a comprehensive functional parcellation of the cerebellar cortex and evaluated it by predicting functional boundaries in a novel set of tasks. The new parcellation successfully identified distinct functional subregions, providing significant improvements over existing parcellations derived from task-free data. Lobular boundaries, commonly used to summarize functional data, did not coincide with functional subdivisions. The new parcellation provides a functional atlas to guide future neuroimaging studies.