This study investigates teachers’ musical abilities in Shandong kindergartens in China, making a comparison between public and private kindergartens. For this research, five public and five private kindergartens were selected within the same city. The methods of non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. The findings show that the overall musical abilities of public kindergarten teachers were greater than those of private kindergarten teachers. This study reveals that leadership and government policy are important factors for influencing the results, and puts forward recommendations for making changes in policy to improve teachers’ musical abilities in private kindergartens.

The tribological behavior can be informative about the incipient faults of robot manipulators. This study explores the evolution of friction characteristics from cold start to thermal equilibrium through a series of steady-state friction experiments. Based on these experimental observations, a friction-based fault diagnosis framework is proposed. The fault diagnosis process primarily involves defining the healthy state, decomposing friction curves and their features, and anomaly detection. Given the dependence of friction characteristics on different sources of faults, the parameters of steady-state experimental friction model are divided into two categories: one associated with contact interactions and the other related to non-contact regimes. Subsequently, confidence regions corresponding to distinguishable friction characteristics are independently constructed. These regions encapsulate the statistical description of the healthy state, characterized by mean values and the covariance of the friction characteristic parameter vectors during the unloaded state. In addition, we conduct experiments that consider the influence of applied loads on friction behavior. These experiments serve as a test set for comparison against nominal statistics. Leveraging the similarity between the effects of wear and load on friction, we introduce equivalent load thresholds to assess the severity of joint degradation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of employing confidence region views based on friction characteristic classification for fault detection and isolation.

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system for composite vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) is a complex, highly coupled, and nonlinear system which is sensitive to external disturbances and model uncertainties. The composite VTOL UAV system consists of a multi-rotor section and a fixed-wing section. To improve observation accuracy, the compensation function observer (CFO) uses a new structure that includes velocity information. The CFO is utilised to estimate the uncertainty and the external disturbances of the system model, which performs superior estimation accuracy compared to the extended state observer (ESO). In the modeling process of the VTOL UAV, the aerodynamic moment is calculated by means of the cross-product operation of force and force arm, which solves the problem of over-reliance on aerodynamic parameters in the traditional modeling approach. The controlled object is refined by CFO, and model compensation control (MCC) is used to realise the velocity and attitude control of the composite VTOL. The numerical simulation of MATLAB/Simulink and hardware-in-loop simulation (HIL) of Rflysim were implemented, and which were used to compare the MCC, active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), and proportion integration differentiation (PID). The simulation results confirm the superiority of MCC in controlling composite VTOL UAVs in terms of anti-disturbance and tracking speed.

Egyptology has been changing. At least in the way its practitioners present their findings to a broad public audience. A selection of recent publications for general-interest readership represents something of a reorientation of perspectives on the (Western-led) archaeological ‘discovery’ of Pharaonic Egyptian remains, and the opening up of a subtle counter-narrative, which is something of an anti-archaeology. Rather than attempting to reconstruct what might positively be said of ancient events, their causes and motivations, Egyptologists are increasingly owning up to what is not known or what happened in the aftermath of the ‘main event’ that conditions the nature of the evidence we have at our disposal.

The mountain communities of late-first millennium bc Italy have been regarded as non-urban societies that reverted to city life mainly owing to Roman intervention. A growing body of archaeological evidence is uncovering the diversity of settlement forms and dynamics in the region's pre-Roman past, which included sites encompassing a range of functions and social agents. This article presents an in-depth, microscale analysis of one such site, Monte Vairano in Samnium, drawing on perspectives from comparative urbanism. Monte Vairano developed urban characteristics such as a complex socioeconomic profile and political cohesion, as well as potentially more unique features such as an apparently balanced distribution of wealth. These results can shed further light on the diversity of ancient urbanization and its sociopolitical implications in late-first millennium bc Italy and the Mediterranean.

Natural disasters, such as the eruption of the “Tajogaite” volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma, might have a high impact on the mental health of those who experience them. This study aims to evaluate the mental state of La Palma’s population on the acute phase of the event as well as two and seven months later. The main hypothesis was that levels of anxiety will decrease in time, while depression and perceived stress levels will remain stable. Levels of depression, anxiety, perceived stress and psychological well-being were measured, as well as their relationship and certain demographic variables such as age, gender and residential situation. Results showed that anxiety and perceived stress significantly decreased with time, but depression and well-being remained stable. Moreover, higher levels of depression could be partly explained by higher anxiety and perceived stress, previous pharmacological treatment, and lower levels of well-being. Also, being a woman, higher levels of perceived stress, living in a region affected by the eruption, and previous pharmacological treatment significantly predicted higher anxiety; being a woman, higher levels of anxiety and lower levels of well-being significantly predicted higher perceived stress. Finally, higher levels of well-being could be partly explained by lower levels of depression and perceived stress, and not living alone. This study was able to identify particularly vulnerable groups during natural disasters, such as the eruption of a volcano. This is important to provide early psychological care to those who need it in these situations.

We find solutions that describe the levelling of a thin fluid film, comprising a non-Newtonian power-law fluid, that coats a substrate and evolves under the influence of surface tension. We consider the evolution from periodic and localized initial conditions as separate cases. The particular (similarity) solutions in each of these two cases exhibit the generic property that the profiles are weakly singular (that is, higher-order derivatives do not exist) at points where the pressure gradient vanishes. Numerical simulations of the thin film equation, with either periodic or localized initial condition, are shown to approach the appropriate particular solution.