Information seeking and use by low-level students

This paper reports on an exploratory study of information seeking and use in high school students with a low level of information skills and academic competency. Seven students in the 11th grade Remedial Education Program class in American Literature and Composition completed a class project that involved somewhat comprehensive information seeking and use. Data were collected through observation and interview (with students, the teacher, and two library media specialists). All documents each student produced in completing the class project were gathered for data analysis. The preliminary findings of the study indicated that students experienced a great deal of difficulty in the cognitive and affective demands that their tasks required and suggested that technological and instructional mediation would motivate the students’ interest in their information seeking and use. The paper concludes with some important implications that can provide a basis for de! signing information literacy instructions for low-level students

Information Use and Meaningful Learning

This study investigates how high school students use information to learn. Conducted within the broad conceptual framework of a constructivist adaptation of learning theory, the study defines the "success" of students' infonnation seeking as it relates to their meaningful learning experience as a whole. In order to study students' information seeking as a meaningful learning experience, four foreshadowing questions were set out: 1) How do students initially understand information and information sources? 2) How do information structures of information sources affect students' understanding about their topics? 3) What strategies do students use for restructuring information? and 4) How is students' inforn1ation use reflected in their products related to learning tasks? Within the methodological framework of naturalistic inquiry, the study used a combination of concept maps and interviews as a unique method for investigating changes in students' understanding based on their use of information. Twenty-one high school juniors in an honors class in persuasive speech were observed in their library media center while perfonning required learning tasks; eight of the students, their teacher, and the library media specialist were interviewed. Data were analyzed both manually and with the support of data management software. Overall, the findings suggest that students' learning in an information-rich enviromnent is dynamic and that students learn interactively and serendipitously. Several streams of analysis suggest more specific findings within these larger ones. To structure part of the analysis, Mayer's (1999) three processes for meaningful learning-selecting, organizing, and integrating--were extended to include two additional processes particularly important in infonnation seeking: gathering and using. Findings suggest that all of these five processes are intertwined and dynamically related and the process of "using" information had a particular effect on students' understanding about their topics as they created their final products. Additionally, four types of changes were identified as students conducted their information seeking and created their final products: simple, analytic, organizational, and holistic. Analyzed within the framework of the revised Bloom's Taxonomy ofEducational Objectives (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001 ), the data revealed that students' learning progressed through all six levels of the taxonomy as they engaged with information

Acute Oral Toxicity and Kinetic Behaviors of Inorganic Layered Nanoparticles

Layered double hydroxide (LDH) nanoparticles, also known as anionic clays, have attracted a great deal of interest for their potential as delivery carriers. Recent studies showed that LDH nanoparticles can efficiently deliver drugs or bioactive molecules into cells, which are highly related to their endocytic pathway. However, the efficient cell permeation capacity of LDH may also raise concern about their toxicity potential. In this study, the acute oral toxicity of LDH nanoparticles was assessed, and their kinetic behaviors, such as plasma concentration-time curve, tissue distribution, and excretion, were also evaluated in mice. No significant effects of oral LDH nanoparticles on behaviors, body weight gain, survival rate, and organosomatic index were observed up to the dose of 2000 mg/kg for 14 days. Serum biochemical parameters did not significantly increase, indicating that LDH nanoparticles did not cause acute liver or kidney injury. Plasma concentration of LDH nanoparticles rapidly decreased within 30 min depending on exposure doses, but they did not accumulate in any specific organ. Their excretion via urine and feces was observed within 24 h. These findings suggest that LDH nanoparticles do not exhibit acute oral toxicity and favorable kinetic behaviors in mice and, therefore, will be promising candidates for biological and pharmaceutical applications

Nutrigenomic Functions of PPARs in Obesogenic Environments

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are ligand-activated transcription factors that mediate the effects of several nutrients or drugs through transcriptional regulation of their target genes in obesogenic environments.This review consists of three parts. First, we summarize current knowledge regarding the role of PPARs in governing the development of white and brown/beige adipocytes from uncommitted progenitor cells. Next, we discuss the interactions of dietary bioactive molecules, such as fatty acids and phytochemicals, with PPARs for the modulation of PPAR-dependent transcriptional activities and metabolic consequences. Lastly, the effects of PPAR polymorphism on obesity and metabolic outcomes are discussed. In this review, we aim to highlight the critical role of PPARs in the modulation of adiposity and subsequent metabolic adaptation in response to dietary challenges and genetic modifications. Understanding the changes in obesogenic environments as a consequence of PPARs/nutrient interactions may help expand the field of individualized nutrition to prevent obesity and obesity-associated metabolic comorbidities

Disentangled dimensionality reduction for noise-robust speaker diarisation

The objective of this work is to train noise-robust speaker embeddings adapted for speaker diarisation. Speaker embeddings play a crucial role in the performance of diarisation systems, but they often capture spurious information such as noise and reverberation, adversely affecting performance. Our previous work has proposed an auto-encoder-based dimensionality reduction module to help remove the redundant information. However, they do not explicitly separate such information and have also been found to be sensitive to hyper-parameter values. To this end, we propose two contributions to overcome these issues: (i) a novel dimensionality reduction framework that can disentangle spurious information from the speaker embeddings; (ii) the use of a speech/non-speech indicator to prevent the speaker code from representing the background noise. Through a range of experiments conducted on four different datasets, our approach consistently demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance among models without system fusion.Comment: This paper was submitted to Interspeech202