Canada has resettled more than 57,000 Syrian refugees since 2015 (Government of Canada, 2017). However, little is known about refugee children’s language and literacy development. The present study evaluated Syrian refugee children’s performance on language and literacy measures in English and Arabic, and examined whether the simple view of reading model is applicable in both of their languages. Participants consisted of 115 Syrian refugee children 6–13 years of age. They received a battery of language and literacy measures including word reading, vocabulary, oral narratives, and reading comprehension in both English and Arabic. Compared to the normative samples, refugee children performed poorly on English standardized measures. They also demonstrated difficulties in Arabic, as more than half of the children were not able to read in the language. Despite the relatively low performance, there was evidence to support the simple view of reading model in both languages. In addition, oral language skills played a larger role in English reading comprehension in the older group than the younger group. This age-group comparison was not carried out in Arabic due to reduced sample size. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has spread over 213 countries and territories. We sought to describe the clinical features of fatalities in patients with severe COVID-19 in an internet-based retrospective cohort study through retrieving the clinical information of 100 COVID-19 deaths from non-duplicating incidental reports in Chinese provincial and other governmental websites between January 23 and March 10, 2020. About 6 of 10 COVID-19 deaths were males (64.0%). The average age was 70.7±13.5 years, and 84% of patients were elderly (over age 60 y). The mean duration from admission to diagnosis was 2.2±3.8 days (median: 1). The mean duration from diagnosis to death was 9.9±7.0 days (median: 9). About 3 of 4 cases (76.0%) were complicated by 1 or more chronic diseases, including hypertension (41.0%), diabetes (29.0%) and coronary heart disease (27.0%), respiratory disorders (23.0%) and cerebrovascular disease (12.0%). Fever (46.0%), cough (33.0%), shortness of breath (9.0%) were the most common first symptoms. Multiple organ failure (67.9%), circulatory failure (20.2%) and respiratory failure (11.9%) are the top three direct causes of death. COVID-19 deaths are mainly elderly and patients with chronic diseases especially cardiovascular disorders and diabetes. Multiple organ failure is the most common direct cause of death.

Previous research has debated whether guanxi persists or declines with the development of formal institutions. This study addresses this debate by investigating how the development of formal institutions in China's state-owned organizations influences employees’ guanxi behavior. Building on institutional logics theory, I propose that guanxi behavior is a reaction to the socialist institutions adopted by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and is associated with the collective identity of SOEs. Thus, employees’ identification with SOEs is the mechanism that influences their guanxi behavior. A survey of 721 employees from 12 organizations compared guanxi behavior across three types of organizations with different degrees of state ownership: SOEs, public firms, and joint ventures. The results showed that the employees of joint ventures identify less with SOEs and engage in less guanxi behaviors than do SOE employees. The employees of public firms still identify with SOEs, and their guanxi behavior did not differ from that of SOE employees. Identification with SOEs mediated the effect of organizational type on guanxi behavior, whereas formalization did not. Therefore, the development of formal institutions does not necessarily decrease guanxi behavior, and its effect depends on whether the collective identity underlying guanxi is changed. This study has important implications for guanxi research, institutional logics theory, and transition economies.

Research on the bilingual development of refugee children is limited, despite this group having distinct characteristics and migration experiences that could impact language development. This study examined the role of language environment factors, alongside age and cognitive factors, in shaping the Arabic as a first/heritage language and English as a second language of recently arrived Syrian refugee children in Canada (N = 133; mean age = 9 years old; mean family residency = 23 months). We found that Arabic was the primary home language with some English use among siblings. Children did not engage frequently in language-rich activities in either language, especially not literacy activities in Arabic. Parent education levels were low: most had primary school only. Hierarchical regression models revealed that stronger nonverbal reasoning skills, more exposure to English at school, more sibling interaction in English, more frequent engagement in language-rich activities in English, and higher maternal and paternal education were associated with larger English vocabularies and greater accuracy with verb morphology. Arabic vocabulary and morphological abilities were predicted by older age (i.e., more first/heritage language exposure), stronger nonverbal reasoning skills and maternal education. We conclude that proximal environment factors, like language use at home and richness, accounted for more variance in the second language than the first/heritage language, but parent factors accounted for variance in both languages.

Since December 2019, China has experienced a widespread outbreak of COVID-19. However, at the early stage of outbreak, investigations revealed a variety of patterns resulting in the transmission of COVID-19. Thus, it is essential to understand the transmission types and the potential for sustained human-to-human transmission. Moreover, the information regarding the characteristics of transmission helps in coordinating the current screening programme, and controlling and containing measures, and also, helps in deciding the appropriate quarantine duration. Thus, this investigation reports an outbreak of COVID-19 in a family residing in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China during the month of January−February 2020.

We report a comparative experimental study of the reversal of the large-scale circulation in turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a quasi-two-dimensional corner-less cell where the corner vortices are absent and in a quasi-two-dimensional normal cell where the corner vortices are present. It is found that in the corner-less cell the reversal frequency exhibits a slow decrease followed by a fast decrease with increasing Rayleigh number $Ra$ , separated by a transitional $Ra$ ( $Ra_{t,r}$ ). The transition is similar to that in the normal cell, and $Ra_{t,r}$ is almost the same for both cells. Despite the similarities, the reversal frequency is greatly reduced in the corner-less cell. The reduction of the reversal frequency is more significant, in terms of both the amplitude and the scaling exponent, in the high- $Ra$ regime. In addition, we classified the reversals into main-vortex-led and corner-vortex-led, and found that both types exist in the normal cell while only the former exists in the corner-less cell. The frequency of main-vortex-led reversal in the normal cell is found to be in excellent agreement with the frequency of reversals in the corner-less cell. Our results reveal for the first time the quantitative role of the corner vortices in the occurrence of the reversals of the large-scale circulation.

Excessive intake of high-energy diets is an important cause of most obesity. The intervention of rats with high-fat diet can replicate the ideal animal model for studying the occurrence of human nutritional obesity. Proteomics and bioinformatics analyses can help us to systematically and comprehensively study the effect of high-fat diet on rat liver. In the present study, 4056 proteins were identified in rat liver by using tandem mass tag. A total of 198 proteins were significantly changed, of which 103 were significantly up-regulated and ninety-five were significantly down-regulated. These significant differentially expressed proteins are primarily involved in lipid metabolism and glucose metabolism processes. The intake of a high-fat diet forces the body to maintain physiological balance by regulating these key protein spots to inhibit fatty acid synthesis, promote fatty acid oxidation and accelerate fatty acid degradation. The present study enriches our understanding of metabolic disorders induced by high-fat diets at the protein level.

In the context of a motivating study of dynamic network flow data on a large-scale e-commerce website, we develop Bayesian models for online/sequential analysis for monitoring and adapting to changes reflected in node–node traffic. For large-scale networks, we customize core Bayesian time series analysis methods using dynamic generalized linear models (DGLMs). These are integrated into the context of multivariate networks using the concept of decouple/recouple that was recently introduced in multivariate time series. This method enables flexible dynamic modeling of flows on large-scale networks and exploitation of partial parallelization of analysis while maintaining coherence with an over-arching multivariate dynamic flow model. This approach is anchored in a case study on Internet data, with flows of visitors to a commercial news website defining a long time series of node–node counts on over 56,000 node pairs. Central questions include characterizing inherent stochasticity in traffic patterns, understanding node–node interactions, adapting to dynamic changes in flows and allowing for sensitive monitoring to flag anomalies. The methodology of dynamic network DGLMs applies to many dynamic network flow studies.

We present an experimental study of the reversal of the large-scale circulation (LSC) in quasi-two-dimensional turbulent Rayleigh–Bénard convection. It is found that there exists a transition in the Rayleigh number ( $Ra$ ) dependence of the reversal rate $f$ with two distinct scalings: for $Ra$ less than a transitional value $Ra_{t}$ , the non-dimensionalized reversal rate $ft_{E}\sim Ra^{-1.09}$ ; however, for higher $Ra$ the scaling changes to $ft_{E}\sim Ra^{-3.06}$ , where $t_{E}$ is the turnover time of the LSC. Flow visualization shows that this regime transition originates from a change in flow topology from a single-roll state to a new, less stable, abnormal single-roll state with substructures inside the single roll. The emergence of the substructures inside the LSC lowers the energy barrier for the flow reversals to occur and leads to a slower decay of $f$ with $Ra$ . Detailed analysis reveals that, although it is the corner rolls that trigger the reversal event, the probability for the occurrence of reversals mainly depends on the stability of the LSC. This is supported by a model we proposed to predict the critical condition for the transition, which agrees well with the experimental results.

As a counterpart of energy cascade, turbulent momentum cascade (TMC) in the wall-normal direction is important for understanding wall turbulence. Here, we report an analytic prediction of non-universal Reynolds number ( $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}$ ) scaling transition of the maximum TMC located at  $y_{p}$ . We show that in viscous units, $y_{p}^{+}$ (and $1+\overline{u^{\prime }v^{\prime }}_{p}^{+}$ ) displays a scaling transition from $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{3/7}$ ( $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{-6/7}$ ) to $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{3/5}$ ( $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{-3/5}$ ) in turbulent boundary layer, in sharp contrast to that from $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{1/3}$ ( $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{-2/3}$ ) to $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{1/2}$ ( $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}^{-1/2}$ ) in a channel/pipe, countering the prevailing view of a single universal near-wall scaling. This scaling transition reflects different near-wall motions in the buffer layer for small $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}$ and log layer for large  $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}$ , with the non-universality being ascribed to the presence/absence of mean wall-normal velocity  $V$ . Our predictions are validated by a large set of data, and a probable flow state with a full coupling between momentum and energy cascades beyond a critical $Re_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}}$ is envisaged.

Maternal one-carbon metabolism during pregnancy is crucial for fetal development and programming by DNA methylation. However, evidence on one-carbon biomarkers other than folate is lacking. We, therefore, investigated whether maternal plasma methyl donors, that is, choline, betaine and methionine, are associated with birth outcomes. Blood samples were obtained from 115 women during gestation (median 26·3 weeks, 90 % range 22·7–33·0 weeks). Plasma choline, betaine, methionine and dimethylglycine were measured using HPLC-tandem MS. Multivariate linear and logistic regression models were used to estimate the association between plasma biomarkers and birth weight, birth length, the risk of small-for-gestational-age and large-for-gestational-age (LGA). Higher level of maternal betaine was associated with lower birth weight (–130·3 (95 % CI –244·8, –15·9) per 1 sd increment for log-transformed betaine). Higher maternal methionine was associated with lower risk of LGA, and adjusted OR, with 95 % CI for 1 sd increase in methionine concentration was 0·44 (95 % CI 0·21, 0·89). Stratified analyses according to infant sex or maternal plasma homocysteine status showed that reduction in birth weight in relation to maternal betaine was only limited to male infants or to who had higher maternal homocysteine status (≥5·1 µmol/l). Higher maternal betaine status was associated with reduced birth weight. Maternal methionine was inversely associated with LGA risk. These findings are needed to be replicated in future larger studies.