Nashville Dolphins Volunteer Training Development

This doctoral capstone project was completed through a partnership with Nashville Dolphins. The Nashville Dolphins offer free swim lessons and swim team programs for children and adults with disabilities. They serve over 300 participants each season and the programs are entirely run by volunteers. The focus of this project was to identify current needs and develop more volunteer training resources. These resources incorporate; sensory processing strategies, behavior management techniques, visual schedule information, communication strategies, description of specific water properties, skill development tips, equipment recommendations, and general tips for teaching children with disabilities. Volunteers were provided with a resource guide and in water training during the lessons

Анализ средств разработки информационной технологии по профориентации школьников

In this article the main approaches to career guidance of school students are described. The choice of information approach for the solution of an objective is reasonable. The analysis of development tools of information technology on career guidance of school students is carried out

Zmiana granic w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej? Wzorce migracji i reakcje polityczne

Celem tekstu jest przedstawienie zagadnienia migracji do Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej oraz polityki migracyjnej, prowadzonej przez nowe państwa członkowskie UE, z wykorzystaniem pojęcia pogranicza. Koncentracja na granicach i obszarach, jakie te granice dzielą pozwala uwzględnić nową perspektywę naukową, znajdującą wyraz w nowych terminach, takich jak „topograficzny” i „przestrzenny.” Tekst ma zatem podwójny cel. Z jednej strony usiłuje prześledzić i wyjaśnić ruchy migracyjne powodujące napływ oraz odpływ imigrantów z nowych państw członkowskich UE oraz reakcje tychże państw. Z drugiej stawia pytanie, co te ruchy ludnościowe mówią nam na temat Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej jako pogranicza w nowym, ewoluującym systemie politycznym UE. Aby zrealizować te dwa cele zastosowano metaforyczne pojęcie pogranicza. Nie posiada ono ustalonej definicji. Stosuje się je raczej dla określenia różnych zjawisk związanych z pograniczem, takich jak otwartość bądź zamknięcie granic, intensywność wzajemnych relacji pomiędzy obiema stronami granicy, różnorodny rozwój po obu stronach, polityczne i społeczne podejście do granic w szerszej polityce dotyczącej granic. W związku z tym, zagadnienia pogranicza nie można po prostu sprowadzić do kwestii napięć pomiędzy granicami otwartymi a bezpiecznymi.Celem tekstu jest przedstawienie zagadnienia migracji do Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej oraz polityki migracyjnej, prowadzonej przez nowe państwa członkowskie UE, z wykorzystaniem pojęcia pogranicza. Koncentracja na granicach i obszarach, jakie te granice dzielą pozwala uwzględnić nową perspektywę naukową, znajdującą wyraz w nowych terminach, takich jak „topograficzny” i „przestrzenny.” Tekst ma zatem podwójny cel. Z jednej strony usiłuje prześledzić i wyjaśnić ruchy migracyjne powodujące napływ oraz odpływ imigrantów z nowych państw członkowskich UE oraz reakcje tychże państw. Z drugiej stawia pytanie, co te ruchy ludnościowe mówią nam na temat Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej jako pogranicza w nowym, ewoluującym systemie politycznym UE. Aby zrealizować te dwa cele zastosowano metaforyczne pojęcie pogranicza. Nie posiada ono ustalonej definicji. Stosuje się je raczej dla określenia różnych zjawisk związanych z pograniczem, takich jak otwartość bądź zamknięcie granic, intensywność wzajemnych relacji pomiędzy obiema stronami granicy, różnorodny rozwój po obu stronach, polityczne i społeczne podejście do granic w szerszej polityce dotyczącej granic. W związku z tym, zagadnienia pogranicza nie można po prostu sprowadzić do kwestii napięć pomiędzy granicami otwartymi a bezpiecznymi

A Screen Of One\u27s Own The Tpec And Feminist Technological Textuality In The 21st Century

In this dissertation, I analyze the 20th century text, A Room of One\u27s Own, by Virginia Woolf (2005), and I engage with Woolf\u27s concept of a woman\u27s need for a room of her own in which she can be free to think for herself, study, write, or pursue other interests away from the oppression of patriarchal societal expectations and demands. Through library-based research, I identify four screens in Woolf\u27s work through which she viewed and critiqued culture, and I use these screens to reconceptualize a room of one\u27s own in 21st Century terms. I determine that the new room is intimately and intricately technological and textual and it is reformulated in the digital spaces of blogs, social media, and Web sites. Further, I introduce the new concept of the technologized politically embodied cyborg, or TPEC, and examine the ways 21st Century TPECs are shaping U.S. culture in progressive ways

Die Europäische Union: ein außenpolitisches Chamäleon? Eine systematische Bestandsaufnahme

"Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der außenpolitischen Performanz der EU und stützt sich dabei auf drei verschiedene Betrachtungsweisen: den Realismus und die Theorien der EU als imperiale bzw. der EU als normative Macht. Mit Hilfe eines auf Basis dieser drei Theorien entwickelten Analyseschemas werden fünf Politikfelder analysiert, wobei die Studie zu dem Ergebnis kommt, dass die Imperiums-Theorie dem Auftreten der EU in ihren Außenpolitiken am nächsten kommt. Ein weiterer Fokus liegt auf der Frage, inwiefern die Performanz eines Akteurs in Zusammenhang mit seiner inneren Konstitution – seinen Akteursqualitäten steht. Dazu werden im Fazit drei Hypothesen formuliert, die jeweils einen bestimmten Grad an Akteursqualitäten für eine bestimmte Performanz des Akteurs annehmen." (Autorenreferat

Stroma-derived connective tissue growth factor maintains cell cycle progression and repopulation activity of hematopoietic stem cells in vitro

Funding Information: This project was supported by Technische Universität München, Graduate School of Bioengineering (GSB; http://www.bioengineering.gs.tum.de ), the German José Leukemia Research Foundation (DJCLS R 11/12), and the German Research Council (DFG OO 8/5, OO 8/9, and FOR 2033/1). We gratefully acknowledge the support of Prof. Torsten Buch, of the Expression Core Facility of the Institute of Medical Microbiology, Hygiene, and Immunology of the Technische Universität München. Publisher Copyright: © 2015 The Authors. Copyright: Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are preserved in co-cultures with UG26-1B6 stromal cells or their conditioned medium. We performed a genome-wide study of gene expression changes of UG26-1B6 stromal cells in contact with Lineage- SCA-1+ KIT+ (LSK) cells. This analysis identified connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) to be upregulated in response to LSK cells. We found that co-culture of HSCs on CTGF knockdown stroma (shCtgf) shows impaired engraftment and long-term quality. Further experiments demonstrated that CD34- CD48- CD150+ LSK (CD34- SLAM) cell numbers from shCtgf co-cultures increase in G0 and senescence and show delayed time to first cell division. To understand this observation, a CTGF signaling network model was assembled, which was experimentally validated. In co-culture experiments of CD34- SLAM cells with shCtgf stromal cells, we found that SMAD2/3-dependent signaling was activated, with increasing p27Kip1 expression and downregulating cyclin D1. Our data support the view that LSK cells modulate gene expression in the niche to maintain repopulating HSC activity.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Large Scale Application of Neural Network Based Semantic Role Labeling for Automated Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts

To reduce the increasing amount of time spent on literature search in the life sciences, several methods for automated knowledge extraction have been developed. Co-occurrence based approaches can deal with large text corpora like MEDLINE in an acceptable time but are not able to extract any specific type of semantic relation. Semantic relation extraction methods based on syntax trees, on the other hand, are computationally expensive and the interpretation of the generated trees is difficult. Several natural language processing (NLP) approaches for the biomedical domain exist focusing specifically on the detection of a limited set of relation types. For systems biology, generic approaches for the detection of a multitude of relation types which in addition are able to process large text corpora are needed but the number of systems meeting both requirements is very limited. We introduce the use of SENNA (“Semantic Extraction using a Neural Network Architecture”), a fast and accurate neural network based Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) program, for the large scale extraction of semantic relations from the biomedical literature. A comparison of processing times of SENNA and other SRL systems or syntactical parsers used in the biomedical domain revealed that SENNA is the fastest Proposition Bank (PropBank) conforming SRL program currently available. 89 million biomedical sentences were tagged with SENNA on a 100 node cluster within three days. The accuracy of the presented relation extraction approach was evaluated on two test sets of annotated sentences resulting in precision/recall values of 0.71/0.43. We show that the accuracy as well as processing speed of the proposed semantic relation extraction approach is sufficient for its large scale application on biomedical text. The proposed approach is highly generalizable regarding the supported relation types and appears to be especially suited for general-purpose, broad-scale text mining systems. The presented approach bridges the gap between fast, cooccurrence-based approaches lacking semantic relations and highly specialized and computationally demanding NLP approaches

Structuring heterogeneous biological information using fuzzy clustering of k-partite graphs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Extensive and automated data integration in bioinformatics facilitates the construction of large, complex biological networks. However, the challenge lies in the interpretation of these networks. While most research focuses on the unipartite or bipartite case, we address the more general but common situation of <it>k</it>-partite graphs. These graphs contain <it>k </it>different node types and links are only allowed between nodes of different types. In order to reveal their structural organization and describe the contained information in a more coarse-grained fashion, we ask how to detect clusters within each node type.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Since entities in biological networks regularly have more than one function and hence participate in more than one cluster, we developed a <it>k</it>-partite graph partitioning algorithm that allows for overlapping (fuzzy) clusters. It determines for each node a degree of membership to each cluster. Moreover, the algorithm estimates a weighted <it>k</it>-partite graph that connects the extracted clusters. Our method is fast and efficient, mimicking the multiplicative update rules commonly employed in algorithms for non-negative matrix factorization. It facilitates the decomposition of networks on a chosen scale and therefore allows for analysis and interpretation of structures on various resolution levels. Applying our algorithm to a tripartite disease-gene-protein complex network, we were able to structure this graph on a large scale into clusters that are functionally correlated and biologically meaningful. Locally, smaller clusters enabled reclassification or annotation of the clusters' elements. We exemplified this for the transcription factor MECP2.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In order to cope with the overwhelming amount of information available from biomedical literature, we need to tackle the challenge of finding structures in large networks with nodes of multiple types. To this end, we presented a novel fuzzy <it>k</it>-partite graph partitioning algorithm that allows the decomposition of these objects in a comprehensive fashion. We validated our approach both on artificial and real-world data. It is readily applicable to any further problem.</p