Habitat Preference of the Introduced Green Crab Carcinus maenas

The aim of this experiment was to determine if Carcinus Maenas (European Green Crab) hhas a habitat preference in Seadrift Lagoon located in Stinson Beach, California. This experiment was accomplished by placing crab traps on the two types of substrate in Seadrift (sand and algae). The traps were pulled up every 24 hours and the size and sex of crabs was recorded. The data was analyzed to see if there was a difference in habitat preference based upon size, sex, and number of crabs. Using a Poisson Regression model, the size and sex of crabs were not significantly different between treatments. Using General Linear Hypothesis Tests the number of crabs in algae were significantly different from the number of crabs in sand, control, and cage control traps

Im2Pano3D: Extrapolating 360 Structure and Semantics Beyond the Field of View

We present Im2Pano3D, a convolutional neural network that generates a dense prediction of 3D structure and a probability distribution of semantic labels for a full 360 panoramic view of an indoor scene when given only a partial observation (<= 50%) in the form of an RGB-D image. To make this possible, Im2Pano3D leverages strong contextual priors learned from large-scale synthetic and real-world indoor scenes. To ease the prediction of 3D structure, we propose to parameterize 3D surfaces with their plane equations and train the model to predict these parameters directly. To provide meaningful training supervision, we use multiple loss functions that consider both pixel level accuracy and global context consistency. Experiments demon- strate that Im2Pano3D is able to predict the semantics and 3D structure of the unobserved scene with more than 56% pixel accuracy and less than 0.52m average distance error, which is significantly better than alternative approaches.Comment: Video summary: https://youtu.be/Au3GmktK-S

Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments

Access to large, diverse RGB-D datasets is critical for training RGB-D scene understanding algorithms. However, existing datasets still cover only a limited number of views or a restricted scale of spaces. In this paper, we introduce Matterport3D, a large-scale RGB-D dataset containing 10,800 panoramic views from 194,400 RGB-D images of 90 building-scale scenes. Annotations are provided with surface reconstructions, camera poses, and 2D and 3D semantic segmentations. The precise global alignment and comprehensive, diverse panoramic set of views over entire buildings enable a variety of supervised and self-supervised computer vision tasks, including keypoint matching, view overlap prediction, normal prediction from color, semantic segmentation, and region classification

Imaging and Imagining Taiwan: Identity representation and cultural politics

Since the 1990s the issue of identity has been one of the most prominent and hotly-debated topics in Taiwan Studies. A rich corpus of literature has been produced in various fields in the attempt to address this problematic issue, examining questions of Taiwanese identity from political, social and cultural perspectives. Imaging and Imagining Taiwan takes a fresh approach to this important topic, examining Taiwanese identity from a visual perspective and exploring the ways in which the island is presented and imagined. In contrast to those studies that seek to address the issue of identity from an essentialist position, Imaging and Imagining Taiwan offers a new contextualization of identity, investigating the ways in which Taiwan has been represented in films, fine art, advertising, sport, and social spaces at different periods in history. Covering a diverse range of topics, the book aims to capture the fluidity, changeability, fragmentation and dynamism of Taiwanese identity as an imaginary and encompassing whole. Through seven case studies the book focuses on the ways in which Taiwan is represented, how this relates to identity politics, and how the island is imaged and imagined visually, socially, and symbolically. The essays comprising this collection are grouped into three sections, each of which focuses on a particular approach to the topic of Taiwanese identity. The first of these —Colonial Representation —deals with colonial subjectivity and traumatic experience. The second, entitled Imaging Difference, examines cultural practices in film, TV advertisements and fine art, and explores the boundaries between the inside and the outside, the difference marked by the process of othering, and the anxiety and alienation of the excluded. The third section—Identity and Place—focuses on the relationship between identity and the social construction of place, and examines the role of place-making in the new Taiwanese nation-building process. Interrogating the complex issue of Taiwanese identity from various standpoints, the seven contributors write from a range of disciplinary backgrounds (Literature, History, Film Studies, Linguistics, Anthropology and Cultural Studies) and geographical contexts (Taiwan, Europe and America). This combination of fresh perspectives and a range of disciplinary approaches offers a set of diverse yet complementary insights into how Taiwan has been envisioned and imagined, and how the Taiwanese have positioned and identified themselves at different times. By combining different themes and disciplinary approaches together in one publication, Imaging and Imagining Taiwan brings both nuance and depth to the discussion of the representation of Taiwanese identity. The book articulates and examines the complexity of identity, avoiding essentialist approaches to the topic, instead illustrating identity's multi-faceted nature and dynamic messiness. Thus, the book argues, the politics of identity is not only a politics of representation, but also a politics of positioning, whereby identity is formulated both by the construction of sameness and the inscription of difference. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by this book makes the discussion of Taiwanese identity of interest to those both studying and working in a range of subject disciplines, not limited to Taiwan Studies, but also in History, Film, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Nationalism Studies, and Urban Studies

Clinical effects of stereotactic radiation surgery in patients with metastatic melanoma

We examined the effectiveness of stereotactic radiation surgery (SRS) in 14 patients with brain metastasis in our hospital. The age of the patients ranged 45-85 years old (mean, 65). Brain metastasis was detected by neurological symptoms in seven patients and by regular imaging examination in the remaining patients. The number of metastatic lesions in the brain before SRS ranged 1-11 (median, 2). The treatment number of SRS was 1-4 times (median, 2). Six of 14 patients had neurological symptoms before SRS. Overall survival (OS) after SRS was 1.721.2 months (median, 8.2). The progression-free survival (PFS) after SRS was 0.9-10.5 months (median, 2.2). The result of univariate analysis showed that the application of two or more courses of SRS was significantly related to OS (P = 0.005). Single metastatic lesion (P = 0.051) and no extracranial lesion (P = 0.055) showed a slight tendency to be related to disease-free survival (DFS). Neither lactate dehydrogenase nor neurological symptoms were significantly related to OS or DFS. Although OS and DFS after SRS were not very long, the treatment of brain metastases has the potential to prevent neurological events. Repeating SRS may be accepted as a local therapy in the multimodal approach including new molecular targeting drugs for metastatic melanoma.ArticleJOURNAL OF DERMATOLOGY. 40(8):626-628 (2013)journal articl

Fucosyltransferase 1 and 2 play pivotal roles in breast cancer cells.

FUT1 and FUT2 encode alpha 1, 2-fucosyltransferases which catalyze the addition of alpha 1, 2-linked fucose to glycans. Glycan products of FUT1 and FUT2, such as Globo H and Lewis Y, are highly expressed on malignant tissues, including breast cancer. Herein, we investigated the roles of FUT1 and FUT2 in breast cancer. Silencing of FUT1 or FUT2 by shRNAs inhibited cell proliferation in vitro and tumorigenicity in mice. This was associated with diminished properties of cancer stem cell (CSC), including mammosphere formation and CSC marker both in vitro and in xenografts. Silencing of FUT2, but not FUT1, significantly changed the cuboidal morphology to dense clusters of small and round cells with reduced adhesion to polystyrene and extracellular matrix, including laminin, fibronectin and collagen. Silencing of FUT1 or FUT2 suppressed cell migration in wound healing assay, whereas FUT1 and FUT2 overexpression increased cell migration and invasion in vitro and metastasis of breast cancer in vivo. A decrease in mesenchymal like markers such as fibronectin, vimentin, and twist, along with increased epithelial like marker, E-cadherin, was observed upon FUT1/2 knockdown, while the opposite was noted by overexpression of FUT1 or FUT2. As expected, FUT1 or FUT2 knockdown reduced Globo H, whereas FUT1 or FUT2 overexpression showed contrary effects. Exogenous addition of Globo H-ceramide reversed the suppression of cell migration by FUT1 knockdown but not the inhibition of cell adhesion by FUT2 silencing, suggesting that at least part of the effects of FUT1/2 knockdown were mediated by Globo H. Our results imply that FUT1 and FUT2 play important roles in regulating growth, adhesion, migration and CSC properties of breast cancer, and may serve as therapeutic targets for breast cancer

Seasonal fluxes and sources apportionment of dissolved inorganic nitrogen wet deposition at different land-use sites in the Three Gorges reservoir area.

To identify seasonal fluxes and sources of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) wet deposition, concentrations and δ15N signatures of nitrate (NO3−) and ammonium (NH4+) in wet precipitation were measured at four typical land-use types in the Three Gorges reservoir (TGR) area of southwest China for a one-year period. Higher DIN fluxes were recorded in spring and summer and their total fluxes (averaged 7.58 kg N ha−1) were similar to the critical loads in aquatic ecosystems. Significant differences of precipitation δ15N were observed for NH4+-N between town and wetland sites in spring and between urban and rural sites in summer. For NO3−-N, significant differences of precipitation δ15N were observed between town and rural sites in spring and between urban and town sites in autumn, respectively. Quantitative results of NO3−-N sources showed that both biomass burning and coal combustion had higher fluxes at the urban site especially in winter (0.18 ± 0.09 and 0.19 ± 0.08 kg N ha−1), which were about three times higher than those at the town site. A similar finding was observed for soil emission and vehicle exhausts in winter. On the whole, DIN wet deposition averaged at 12.13 kg N ha−1 yr−1 with the urban site as the hotspot (17.50 kg N ha−1 yr−1) and regional NO3−-N fluxes had a seasonal pattern with minimum values in winter. The contribution to NO3−-N wet deposition from biomass burning was 26.1 ± 14.1%, which is the second dominant factor lower than coal combustion (26.5 ± 12.6%) in the TGR area during spring and summer. Hence N emission reduction from biomass burning, coal combustion and vehicle exhausts should be strengthened especially in spring and summer to effectively manage DIN pollution for the sustainable development in TGR area