Hypobranching Induced by Both Environmental Antioxidants and ROS Metabolism Gene Knockouts in Neurospora Crassa

Previous work suggested a role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) metabolism on branch density, the statistical distribution of physical distances between branch points along a growing hypha in Neurospora. Here we report the results of experiments designed to ask more generally about the relationship between ROS and branch density by examining the branching effects of selected ROS metabolism gene knockout mutants as well as the impact on branching of exogenously added antioxidants. In all ROS metabolism mutants tested, growth was shown to branch less densely (hypobranching) when grown at lower temperatures, a shift not observed in the wild-type. Interestingly, this holds true for knockouts of genes expected to reduce ROS as well as those expected to produce them. In addition, in tests on wild type Neurospora, added ascorbic acid produced unusual branching patterns. Hypha exposed to exogenous antioxidants display dose dependent hypobranching with hypha becoming more hypobranched as doses increase. At higher doses, however, the branch distribution becomes bimodal with one maximum continuing to shift toward hypobranching and the second maximum representing a spike of very closely spaced branch points

Assessment of Key Parameters Affecting Compressive Behavior of uPVC-Confined Concrete

Experimental work was conducted to evaluate the strength capacity of uPVC filled-concrete (CFPT) stub columns under different environmental conditions. The effect of three curing conditions, open-air, water, and sealed, on the CFPT specimens was examined. The water absorption of CFPT was also determined to evaluate the confining device's performance in protecting concrete in humid environments. Test results show that the plastic tube effectively reduced the water absorption of the confined concrete by more than 80%. In order to assess the influence of key parameters on the performance of CFPT under the applied load, a database was established that covered 186 axial compression test results of CFPT specimens. A detailed discussion of the key parameters affecting the overall behavior of CFPT also presented

Memperkokoh Pendidikan Karakter Melalui Mediasi Aktivitas Jasmani Berbasis Nilai

Aktivitas jasmani dan olahraga dapat merupakan pilihan mediasi yang tepat dalam pendidikan karakter. Pilihan tepat ini didasarkan pada: (1) hampir semua siswa melakukan aktivitas jasmani (termasuk olahraga); (2) aktivitas jasmani dan olahraga adalah bagian dari unsur budaya; (3) aktivitas jasmani dan olahraga melibatkan aktivitas moral. Suatu proses belajar-mengajar yang di- orientasikan pada pendidikan nilai, reflektif, dan contekstual serta relevan dengan sistem kehidupan nyata merupakan pintu masuk untuk mempengaruhi perilaku siswa, melalui perlibatan dan inter- vensi PECS (physical, emotional, cognitive, dan social). Pendidikan karakter melalui aktivitas jasmani berbasis nilai dapat merupakan alternatif untuk mendidik karakter siswa dengan memfokuskan pada lima tingkatan partisipasi, yaitu: (1) menghargai/menghormati hak dan perasaan siswa lain; (2) ke- berupayaan; (3) pengarahan-diri; (4) membantu siswa lain; dan (5) merefleksikan pada kegiatan di luar pendidikan jasmani

PVC Plastic Tube with Concrete Infill Strengthened with FRP: A State-of-the-art Review

The strength and energy absorption capacity of concrete compression members are a significant concern when considering the structural performance under axial and lateral loads. A lot of methods and different techniques have been proposed in the past to improve the behavior of concrete columns under the applied loads. One such technique is the concrete filled-plastic tube (CFPT) strengthened externally with fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP). Such a system can improve the durability of the structural members. A review of the research work on the durability of the new system under axial and flexural loads is presented. Moreover, a comparison and a brief discussion of the reported results are displayed. &nbsp

E-Internship Management Model for Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia

A key factor which makes Web Based Applications (WBA) highly recommended over stand alone system is centralized mechanism used in those applications. Internship Management in Islamic Development Bank (IDB) use variety of systems which are mostly mixture of WBA and some manual procedures. This study would try to enhanced the process of the current management procedures by converting it entirely into a WBA which solved some of the critical issues which were not supported by the current system. The proposed system adopted Extreme Programming (XP) and Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology in order to fulfill its objectives

Concrete Encased with Engineering Plastics

 Engineering plastic tubes are economic alternatives for the advanced composite tubing systems. The mechanical behavior of concrete-encased with engineering plastic tube (CFPT) is examined in the present study by testing short-stub CFPT columns under concentric loading. The test parameters include the plastic tube and coarse aggregate/cement ratio (a/c) ratio. Due to the low stiffness of plastic tubes, the cementitious systems have an important role to increase the stiffness of CFPT. For making concrete of consistent strength, a/c ratio is an important criterion since aggregate constitutes more than 70% of concrete. The proportion of this major component of concrete was altered in increments of 0.5 resulting in twelve mixes with a/c ratios from 3 to 8. Due to the limited test data, the mechanical performance of these structures continues to be pursued through experimental methods. The aim of the present study was to investigate experimentally the relationship between the strength of CFPT and a/c ratio which is also affected by variations in other constituent materials. The a/c ratio was the common variable in both control and CFPT specimens. The experimental results show that the ability of the engineering plastic tube in improving the load capacity of CFPT was considerably affected by the a/c ratio increment which yielded a beneficial effect on the tube confinement capacity

Dual feeding cavity resonator for efficiency enhancement in liquid heating applications

A new type of microwave resonator feeding topology is proposed to enhance the power delivered to a lossy sample for microwave heating applications. The method uses two input signals with equal phase and magnitude, instead of the usual one input. As a result, for the same total input power, the delivered power can be increased to twice the power than the case of the one input. A 2.45 GHz TM010 cylindrical cavity with dual input ports is used to heat a water sample with a total input power of 0.25 W. The efficacy of the proposed heating topology was verified by 3D electromagnetic simulation and heating measurements, including S-parameters, incident and reflected power, and thermal images. All measurement results support the increase in heating efficiency in the two port case, while using the same total amount of power as for the one port cas

RE-ORIENTASI PENDIDIKAN JASMANI KEDALAM PERSPEKTIF KEPENDIDIKAN DAN KEMANUSIAAN: MERAIH BELAJAR SISWA MENGANTAR TERDIDIK JASMANIAH SISWA

Pengajaran pendidikan jasmani dalam realita-fakta sejarah-dan fenomena gerak dan/atau olahraga telah berkembang kedalam bentuk pembinaan olahraga. Berdasar analisis filsafati, pedagogis, dan humanioris diakui perlu ada pergeseran dari orientasi bentuk sosialisasi olahraga menjadi pengajaran berbasis kritikal-konstruktivitik sosialiasi gerak agar pendidikan jasmani berjiwa kependidikan dan kemanusiaan untuk kebutuhan siswa yang menjamin jasmani dalam potensi geraknya bersenyawa dengan dirinya dan tidak memisahkan diri dengan lingkungannya. Pendidikan jasmani memiliki bukti-bukti teori dan praktik pendidikan agar siswa sebagai peserta didik menjadi terdidik dan cerdas secara jasmaniah

The development of a framework for semantic similarity measures for the Arabic language

This thesis presents a novel framework for developing an Arabic Short Text Semantic Similarity (STSS) measure, namely that of NasTa. STSS measures are developed for short texts of 10 -25 words long. The algorithm calculates the STSS based on Part of Speech (POS), Arabic Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), semantic nets and corpus statistics. The proposed framework is founded on word similarity measures. Firstly, a novel Arabic noun similarity measure is created using information sources extracted from a lexical database known as Arabic WordNet. Secondly, a novel verb similarity algorithm is created based on the assumption that words sharing a common root usually have a related meaning which is a central characteristic of Arabic language. Two Arabic word benchmark datasets, noun and verb are created to evaluate them. These are the first of their kinds for Arabic. Their creation methodologies use the best available experimental techniques to create materials and collect human ratings from representative samples of the Arabic speaking population. Experimental evaluation indicates that the Arabic noun and the Arabic verb measures performed well and achieved good correlations comparison with the average human performance on the noun and verb benchmark datasets respectively. Specific features of the Arabic language are addressed. A new Arabic WSD algorithm is created to address the challenge of ambiguity caused by missing diacritics in the contemporary Arabic writing system. The algorithm disambiguates all words (nouns and verbs) in the Arabic short texts without requiring any manual training data. Moreover, a novel algorithm is presented to identify the similarity score between two words belonging to different POS, either a pair comprising a noun and verb or a verb and noun. This algorithm is developed to perform Arabic WSD based on the concept of noun semantic similarity. Important benchmark datasets for text similarity are presented: ASTSS-68 and ASTSS-21. Experimental results indicate that the performance of the Arabic STSS algorithm achieved a good correlation comparison with the average human performance on ASTSS-68 which was statistically significant