Commitment in University Students: Generator of Successful Professionals

The University has historically been regarded as the harbinger of values, human rights, and other noble pursuits. It is within this atmosphere that personal development, mutual respect, and collaboration are expected to flourish through commitment to work and study. Yet in order for meaningful and sustainable social, economic, and political changes to take root, the author opines that certain adjustments to the overall social fabric are occasionally required and can only be achieved through unyielding commitment — an essential value transmitted from person to person through both individual and collective reflection

Computing an Aggregator's Long Term Profit under Uncertain Behavior of the Agents

In the retail electricity market, consumers can subscribe a contract with a conventional retailer or cooperate through an aggregator who takes forward positions in the wholesale electricity market, modeled as a two-tiered system. We characterize analytically the core of the game and give conditions for its non emptiness. Then we propose a Machine Learning algorithm to forecast the consumers' demand and use these forecasts as inputs to optimize the aggregator's pricing strategy. The viability of the aggregator's pricing strategy is finally evaluated on a case study containing the power consumptions of 370 Portuguese consumers over four years

Commitment in University Students: Generator of Successful Professionals

The University has historically been regarded as the harbinger of values, human rights, and other noble pursuits. It is within this atmosphere that personal development, mutual respect, and collaboration are expected to flourish through commitment to work and study. Yet in order for meaningful and sustainable social, economic, and political changes to take root, the author opines that certain adjustments to the overall social fabric are occasionally required and can only be achieved through unyielding commitment — an essential value transmitted from person to person through both individual and collective reflection

On "the authentic damping mechanism" of the phonon damping model

Some general features of the phonon damping model are presented. It is concluded that the fits performed within this model have no physical content

Human monocytes tolerant to LPS retain the ability to phagocytose bacteria and generate reactive oxygen species

Tolerance to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) occurs when animals or cells exposed to LPS become hyporesponsive to a subsequent challenge with LPS. This mechanism is believed to be involved in the down-regulation of cellular responses observed in septic patients. The aim of this investigation was to evaluate LPS-induced monocyte tolerance of healthy volunteers using whole blood. The detection of intracellular IL-6, bacterial phagocytosis and reactive oxygen species (ROS) was determined by flow cytometry, using anti-IL-6-PE, heat-killed Staphylococcus aureus stained with propidium iodide and 2',7'-dichlorofluorescein diacetate, respectively. Monocytes were gated in whole blood by combining FSC and SSC parameters and CD14-positive staining. The exposure to increasing LPS concentrations resulted in lower intracellular concentration of IL-6 in monocytes after challenge. A similar effect was observed with challenge with MALP-2 (a Toll-like receptor (TLR)2/6 agonist) and killed Pseudomonas aeruginosa and S. aureus, but not with flagellin (a TLR5 agonist). LPS conditioning with 15 ng/mL resulted in a 40% reduction of IL-6 in monocytes. In contrast, phagocytosis of P. aeruginosa and S. aureus and induced ROS generation were preserved or increased in tolerant cells. The phenomenon of tolerance involves a complex regulation in which the production of IL-6 was diminished, whereas the bacterial phagocytosis and production of ROS was preserved. Decreased production of proinflammatory cytokines and preserved or increased production of ROS may be an adaptation to control the deleterious effects of inflammation while preserving antimicrobial activity.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Escola Paulista de Medicina Divisão de Moléstias InfecciosasUNIFESP, EPM, Divisão de Moléstias InfecciosasFAPESP: 2006/58744-1SciEL

Relativistic RPA plus phonon-coupling analysis of pygmy dipole resonances

The relativistic random-phase approximation (RRPA) plus phonon-coupling (PC) model is applied in the analysis of E1 strength distributions in $^{208}$Pb and $^{132}$Sn, for which data on pygmy dipole resonances (PDR) have recently been reported. The covariant response theory is fully consistent: the effective nuclear interaction NL3 is used both to determine the spectrum of single-nucleon Dirac states, and as the residual interaction which determines the collective phonon states in the relativistic RPA. It is shown that the picture of the PDR as a resonant oscillation of the neutron skin against the isospin saturated proton-neutron core, and with the corresponding RRPA state characterized by a coherent superposition of many neutron particle-hole configurations, remains essentially unchanged when particle-vibration coupling is included. The effect of two-phonon admixtures is a weak fragmentation and a small shift of PDR states to lower excitation energy. Even though the PDR calculated in the extended model space of $ph \otimes$phonon configurations contains sizeable two-phonon admixtures, it basically retains a one-phonon character and its dynamics is not modified by the coupling to low-lying surface vibrations.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Many-body effects in nuclear structure

We calculate, for the first time, the state-dependent pairing gap of a finite nucleus (120Sn) diagonalizing the bare nucleon-nucleon potential (Argonne v14) in a Hartree-Fock basis (with effective k-mass m_k eqult to 0.7 m), within the framework of the BCS approximation including scattering states up to 800 MeV above the Fermi energy to achieve convergence. The resulting gap accounts for about half of the experimental gap. We find that a consistent description of the low-energy nuclear spectrum requires, aside from the bare nucleon-nucleon interaction, not only the dressing of single-particle motion through the coupling to the nuclear surface, to give the right density of levels close to the Fermi energy (and thus an effective mass m* approximately equal to m), but also the renormalization of collective vibrational modes through vertex and self-energy processes, processes which are also found to play an essential role in the pairing channel, leading to a long range, state dependent component of the pairing interaction. The combined effect of the bare nucleon-nucleon potential and of the induced pairing interaction arising from the exchange of low-lying surface vibrations between nucleons moving in time reversal states close to the Fermi energy accounts for the experimental gap.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; author list correcte

Lipopolysaccharide-induced expression of cell surface receptors and cell activation of neutrophils and monocytes in whole human blood

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) activates neutrophils and monocytes, inducing a wide array of biological activities. LPS rough (R) and smooth (S) forms signal through Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), but differ in their requirement for CD14. Since the R-form LPS can interact with TLR4 independent of CD14 and the differential expression of CD14 on neutrophils and monocytes, we used the S-form LPS from Salmonella abortus equi and the R-form LPS from Salmonella minnesota mutants to evaluate LPS-induced activation of human neutrophils and monocytes in whole blood from healthy volunteers. Expression of cell surface receptors and reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitric oxide (NO) generation were measured by flow cytometry in whole blood monocytes and neutrophils. The oxidative burst was quantified by measuring the oxidation of 2',7'-dichlorofluorescein diacetate and the NO production was quantified by measuring the oxidation of 4-amino-5-methylamino-2',7'-difluorofluorescein diacetate. A small increase of TLR4 expression by monocytes was observed after 6 h of LPS stimulation. Monocyte CD14 modulation by LPS was biphasic, with an initial 30% increase followed by a 40% decrease in expression after 6 h of incubation. Expression of CD11b was rapidly up-regulated, doubling after 5 min on monocytes, while down-regulation of CXCR2 was observed on neutrophils, reaching a 50% reduction after 6 h. LPS induced low production of ROS and NO. This study shows a complex LPS-induced cell surface receptor modulation on human monocytes and neutrophils, with up- and down-regulation depending on the receptor. R- and S-form LPS activate human neutrophils similarly, despite the low CD14 expression, if the stimulation occurs in whole blood.Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) Disciplina de InfectologiaMax-Planck-Institute for ImmunobiologyUNIFESP, Disciplina de InfectologiaFAPESP: 2006/58744-1SciEL