348 research outputs found
Functional-heterogeneity of Human Mast-cells From Different Anatomic Sites - Invitro Responses To Morphine-sulfate
No full textLong-term survival of transplanted allogeneic cells engineered to express a T cell chemorepellent
No full textBackground. Alloantigen specific T cells have been shown to be required for allograft rejection. The chemokine, stromal cell derived factor-1 (SDF-1) at high concentration, has been shown to act as a T-cell chemorepellent and abrogate T-cell infiltration into a site of antigen challenge in vivo via a mechanism termed fugetaxis or chemorepulsion. We postulated that this mechanism could be exploited therapeutically and that allogeneic cells engineered to express a chemorepellent protein would not be rejected.
Methods. Allogeneic murine insulinoma beta-TC3 cells and primary islets from BALB/C mice were engineered to constitutively secrete differential levels of SDF-1 and transplanted into allogeneic diabetic C57BL/6 mice. Rejection was defined as the permanent return of hyperglycemia and was correlated with the level of T-cell infiltration. The migratory response of T-cells to SDF-1 was also analyzed by transwell migration assay and time-lapse videomicroscopy. The cytotoxicity of cytotoxic T cell (CTLs) against beta-TC3 cells expressing high levels of SDF-1 was measured in standard and modified chromium-release assays in order to determine the effect of CTL migration on killing efficacy.
Results. Control animals rejected allogeneic cells and remained diabetic. In contrast, high level SDF-1 production by transplanted cells resulted in increased survival of the allograft and a significant reduction in blood glucose levels and T-cell infiltration into the transplanted tissue.
Conclusions. This is the first demonstration of a novel approach that exploits T-cell chemorepulsion to induce site specific immune isolation and thereby overcomes allograft rejection without the use of systemic immunosuppression
Knowledge Author: Facilitating user-driven, Domain content development to support clinical information extraction
No full textBackground: Clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems require a semantic schema comprised of domain-specific concepts, their lexical variants, and associated modifiers to accurately extract information from clinical texts. An NLP system leverages this schema to structure concepts and extract meaning from the free texts. In the clinical domain, creating a semantic schema typically requires input from both a domain expert, such as a clinician, and an NLP expert who will represent clinical concepts created from the clinician's domain expertise into a computable format usable by an NLP system. The goal of this work is to develop a web-based tool, Knowledge Author, that bridges the gap between the clinical domain expert and the NLP system development by facilitating the development of domain content represented in a semantic schema for extracting information from clinical free-text. Results: Knowledge Author is a web-based, recommendation system that supports users in developing domain content necessary for clinical NLP applications. Knowledge Author's schematic model leverages a set of semantic types derived from the Secondary Use Clinical Element Models and the Common Type System to allow the user to quickly create and modify domain-related concepts. Features such as collaborative development and providing domain content suggestions through the mapping of concepts to the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus database further supports the domain content creation process. Two proof of concept studies were performed to evaluate the system's performance. The first study evaluated Knowledge Author's flexibility to create a broad range of concepts. A dataset of 115 concepts was created of which 87 (76%) were able to be created using Knowledge Author. The second study evaluated the effectiveness of Knowledge Author's output in an NLP system by extracting concepts and associated modifiers representing a clinical element, carotid stenosis, from 34 clinical free-text radiology reports using Knowledge Author and an NLP system, pyConText. Knowledge Author's domain content produced high recall for concepts (targeted findings: 86%) and varied recall for modifiers (certainty: 91% sidedness: 80%, neurovascular anatomy: 46%). Conclusion: Knowledge Author can support clinical domain content development for information extraction by supporting semantic schema creation by domain experts
Mitogenic response of T-lymphocytes to exercise training and stress
No full text The impact of exercise training and stress on the immune response was examined by measuring the mitogenic response of spleen lymphocytes to the T-cell mitogen concanavalin A (Con-A). Male Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into four groups: sedentary controls (n = 11), handled controls (n = 12), treadmill runners (n = 10), and voluntary runners (n = 11) housed in running wheels. The treadmill group ran at 22 m/min (0.8 mph) for 45 min, 5 days/wk for 8 wk. After the training period, spleen lymphocytes isolated from each rat were incubated with Con-A for 54 h, pulsed with radiolabeled thymidine for 18 h, and counted for tritium activity. Counts per minute per group (means +/- SE) were as follows: sedentary, 6,839 +/- 1,461; handled, 8,959 +/- 1,576; voluntary runners, 13,126 +/- 2,069; and treadmill runners, 18,950 +/- 5,975. One-way analysis of variance and Tukey's highly significant difference test found the counts per minute of the treadmill runners to be significantly different from the counts per minute of the sedentary animals. These results indicate that the responsiveness of spleen lymphocytes to Con-A increases as the level of stress and exercise increases. </jats:p
Investigation of the viability of a new type of airport called an Orbitport
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to present the concept of the Orbitport and to investigate its viability. "Orbitport" is the author"s name for the airport concept he has invented. Orbitport landing rimways have a straight and level section on which aircraft touch-down, followed by a laterally curved and banked section which completes less than a 360° turn, thus leaving a gap. Excepting the gaps, the airport terminal is surrounded by the landing runways" curved sections. Take-off runways are reached from the terminal by passing through the gaps. There are no taxiways between the landing runways and the terminal, as the landing runways and the terminal apron are contained on one uninterrupted concrete surface. In the paper an Orbitport is designed in order to: (a) present the Orbitport concept, (b) demonstrate the required planning and design methodology, (c) identify the important design parameters, (d) provide a plan of an Orbitport. The particular Orbitport designed is then compared economically and on an operations basis against comparable conventional parallel and "V" runway configuration airports. The paper concludes that more research is required before the Orbitport can be pronounced viable or not viable, but it is very promising.Industrial Engineering, Department o
Correction to: High School Follow-Up of the Dating Matters® Rct_ Effects on Teen Dating Violence and Relationship Behaviors (Prevention Science, (2024), 25, 4, (603-615), 10.1007/s11121-024-01648-z)
No full text© The Author(s) 2024. cc-byThe article “High School Follow-Up of the Dating Matters® RCT: Effects on Teen Dating Violence and Relationship Behaviors”, written by Niolon, P.H., Estefan, L.F., DeGue, S., Le, V.D., Tracy, A.J., Ray, C., Bontempo, D., Little, T.D., Vivolo-Kantor, A.M., Latzman, N., Taylor, B., and Tharp, A., was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 25, issue 4, page 603–615 the author decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to © The Author(s) 2024 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The original article has been corrected
SCIENCE TEACHERS' LEARNING TO NOTICE FROM VIDEO CASES OF THE ENACTMENT OF COGNITIVELY DEMANDING INSTRUCTIONAL TASKS
No full textMembers of a profession develop a professional vision that enables them to see and understand complex situations in particular ways. This study focuses on developing science teachers’ professional vision by supporting their learning to attend to particular classroom interactions and make sense of them in particular ways. Specifically, this study investigated high-school biology teachers’ learning to notice in a professional development (PD) setting from video cases that depict classroom interactions during the enactment of high-level, cognitively demanding science tasks. A seven-session, video-based PD intervention in which teachers analyzed short video clips that illustrated students’ engagement with cognitively demanding tasks was designed and implemented. The findings focused on changes in teacher noticing from pre- to post-PD as revealed through the analysis of two sets of baseline and exit interviews with each individual teacher as well as the analysis of particular PD sessions. According to the findings, there were mostly significant changes in what teachers attended to in the video cases and how they made sense of what they saw. In addition, there was a shift towards connecting the specifics of what they noticed in the video cases to the level or kind of student thinking as outlined in the Task Analysis Guide in Science framework. The findings are promising in terms of developing science teachers’ professional vision of classroom interactions during the enactment of cognitively demanding tasks. The study findings provide implications for designing effective PD programs to support teachers’ professional vision
Using social media to connect families and kindergarten classrooms
No full textSchools are generally disconnected from all other areas of children’s lives and educational institutions have not been successful at integrating school learning with learning that occurs outside the classroom (NRCNA, 2009; Ryan, Adams, Gullotta, Weissberg, & Hampton, 1995). Addressing this problem is vital, because positive connections between school and home can increase students’ motivation to learn, achievement and well-being (Christenson, 1999; Epstein, 1994; Pianta, Rimm-Kaufman, & Cox, 1999; Fan & Chen, 2001). This case study describes a project co-designed with teachers and implemented in kindergarten classrooms that leverages social media to link home and school and increase families’ involvement in their child’s academic learning. Six kindergarten teachers and thirty-two families from a southwestern Pennsylvania lab school participated in the study. I investigated how families participated in and perceived the project, used social media, and interacted with other families. I examined ways teachers used the project to further their learning goals and the extent to which the project strengthened the kindergarten community. Data was collected through classroom, online and home observations, interviews and questionnaires. Results indicated that not all parents felt more involved as a result of the project, but most families had opportunities to be involved in new ways and families thought the project helped to bridge home and school. The project provided access to families’ “funds of knowledge”, which helped to contextualize content learning in the classroom and individualize conversations between teachers and students (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). During the project, participants learned more about one another, which in turn, strengthened the kindergarten community. This study explores a potential way forward for making families’ home culture and experiences a part of academic learning. The project is a model for using technology to support family involvement in classroom instruction and learning. This study contributes to prior literature on the Connected Learning Model (Ito, et al., 2013) by more thoroughly linking the model to learning and engagement theories and describing ways in which the model can be used to design curricular projects that bridge home and school for elementary-school children and their families
Relationship between personality type and achievement in an undergraduate physiology course.
No full text The Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI) was given to 163 students in an undergraduate Human Physiology course at a large state university. Selected MBTI personality types were compared for achievement in the course using a t test to compare total points earned. High grades were earned by students stronger in the traits of introversion (I) and judgment (J), whereas the extraverted (E) and perceptive (P) types had the lowest grades and dropped out of the course in the largest numbers. When combinations of MBTI types were compared, the highest grades were earned as follows: SJ greater than ST greater than IN greater than IJ greater than IS (S, sensing; T, thinking; N, intuitive). This ranking indicates that a sensing personality also has a strong relationship to achievement in this Human Physiology course when it is combined with judgment, thinking, or introversion. Instructors and students need to be aware of the relationship between personality and learning so they can modify their teaching style and learning behavior to enhance academic achievement. </jats:p
An analysis of test and evaluation in rapid acquisition programs
No full textThe last decade of conflict in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation New Dawn, and other contingency operations has brought about many technical advances for our Soldiers. In order to get new capabilities fielded quickly, the traditional Department of Defense acquisition cycle was modified to achieve rapid fieldlings. This paper examines how requirements are developed for programs of record (POR) and rapid acquisitions (RA), and then how test and evaluation (T&E) is administered to each. A materiel release is required for any equipment, regardless of how the requirement is generated. POR that are transitioned from RA still must go through the Joint Capabilities Integration Development System process, but the path may be shortened if the gains from the RI are capitalized upon. After examination of two POR that began as RA, we found clear examples of how to capitalize on the testing that occurred during the fielding of an RA. We recommend that all RA conduct T&E in a manner that provides usable data for decision makers and also to inform future POR. We further recommend that T&E be included during R&D phases of acquisition to reduce T&E burden in later phases of program.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Civilian, Department of the Armyhttp://archive.org/details/annalysisoftestn109454788
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