Educational technologies continue to advance the ways in which we teach and learn. As these technologies continue to improve our communication with one another, computer-assisted foreign language learning has provided a more efficient way of communication between different languages. Computer-Assisted Foreign Language Teaching and Learning: Technological Advances highlights new research and an original framework that brings together foreign language teaching, experiments and testing practices that utilise the most recent and widely used e-learning resources. This comprehensive collection of research will offer linguistic scholars, language teachers and students as well as policymakers a better understanding of the importance and influence of e-learning in second language acquisition.

The International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security (CIS) is an annualinternationalconference that bringstogether researchers, engineers, developers and practitioners from both academia and industry to share expe- ence and exchange and cross-fertilize ideas on all areas of computational - telligence and information security. The conference serves as a forum for the dissemination of state-of-the-art research and the development, and implem- tationsof systems, technologiesandapplicationsinthese two broad, interrelated ?elds. This year CIS 2005 was co-organized by the IEEE (Hong Kong) Com- tational Intelligence Chapter and Xidian University, and co-sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Key Laboratory of Computer Networks and Information Security of the Ministry of EducationofChina, andGuangdongUniversityofTechnology. CIS2005received in total 1802 submissions from 41 countries and regions all over the world. All of them were strictly peer reviewed by the Program Committee and experts in the ?eld. Finally, 337 high-quality papers were accepted yielding an acc- tance rate of 18. 7%. Among them, 84 papers are the extended papers and 253 are the regular papers. The conference was greatly enriched by a wide range of topics covering all areas of computational intelligence and information security. Furthermore, tutorials and workshops were held for discussions of the proposed ideas. Such practice is extremely important for the e?ective development of the two ?elds and computer science in general. Wewouldliketothanktheorganizers: theIEEE(HongKong)Computational Intelligence Chapter and Xidian University for their great contributions and - forts in this big e

The placenta is an organ that connects the developing fetus to the uterine wall, thereby allowing nutrient uptake, waste elimination, and gas exchange via the mother's blood supply. Proper vascular development in the placenta is fundamental to ensuring a healthy fetus and successful pregnancy. This book provides an up-to-date summary and synthesis of knowledge regarding placental vascular biology and discusses the relevance of this vascular bed to the functions of the human placenta.

This book is a study of e-learning for online language learners, with particular reference to students of Modern Standard Chinese. Using desktop videoconferencing as the medium of instruction, the author documents how remote language learners may overcome distance and acquire communicative competence through synchronous one-on-one oral and visual interaction with their instructors. Through an empirical evaluation of such interaction, this study sheds light on significant issues and challenges in an emerging field, including the needs and experiences of distance language learners, videoconferencing-based task design, implementation and evaluation, and the benefits, limitations and potential of videoconferencing-supported language learning. This book will be of interest to CALL researchers, course designers, teachers, and language learners who wish to work effectively in a multimodal online environment via sophisticated learning systems.