The Role of the State in Industrial Relations

This article examines the role of the state in industrial relations, which has been highly neglected in the literature. It examines the nature of the state and proposes a typology of four distinct roles of the state that affect industrial relations: (1) a third party regulator of labor relations; (2) a regulator of markets; (3) an establisher of the welfare system; and (4) its own employer and policy maker. In doing so, the article sheds light on the importance of the concepts of power and politics in industrial relations that have been unnoticed by industrial relations orthodoxy; that is, it attempts to clarify how each of the four roles of the state affects the power relations between labor and management.This work was supported by the new faculty research fund of Ajou University

AKVSR: Audio Knowledge Empowered Visual Speech Recognition by Compressing Audio Knowledge of a Pretrained Model

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) is the task of predicting spoken words from silent lip movements. VSR is regarded as a challenging task because of the insufficient information on lip movements. In this paper, we propose an Audio Knowledge empowered Visual Speech Recognition framework (AKVSR) to complement the insufficient speech information of visual modality by using audio modality. Different from the previous methods, the proposed AKVSR 1) utilizes rich audio knowledge encoded by a large-scale pretrained audio model, 2) saves the linguistic information of audio knowledge in compact audio memory by discarding the non-linguistic information from the audio through quantization, and 3) includes Audio Bridging Module which can find the best-matched audio features from the compact audio memory, which makes our training possible without audio inputs, once after the compact audio memory is composed. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method through extensive experiments, and achieve new state-of-the-art performances on the widely-used datasets, LRS2 and LRS3

MLN51 and GM-CSF involvement in the proliferation of fibroblast-like synoviocytes in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an inflammatory autoimmune disease of unclear etiology. This study was conducted to identify critical factors involved in the synovial hyperplasia in RA pathology. We applied cDNA microarray analysis to profile the gene expressions of RA fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLSs) from patients with RA. We found that the MLN51 (metastatic lymph node 51) gene, identified in breast cancer, is remarkably upregulated in the hyperactive RA FLSs. However, growth-retarded RA FLSs passaged in vitro expressed small quantities of MLN51. MLN51 expression was significantly enhanced in the FLSs when the growth-retarded FLSs were treated with granulocyte – macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) or synovial fluid (SF). Anti-GM-CSF neutralizing antibody blocked the MLN51 expression even though the FLSs were cultured in the presence of SF. In contrast, GM-CSF in SFs existed at a significant level in the patients with RA (n = 6), in comparison with the other inflammatory cytokines, IL-1β and TNF-α. Most RA FLSs at passage 10 or more recovered from their growth retardation when cultured in the presence of SF. The SF-mediated growth recovery was markedly impaired by anti-GM-CSF antibody. Growth-retarded RA FLSs recovered their proliferative capacity after treatment with GM-CSF in a dose-dependent manner. However, MLN51 knock-down by siRNA completely blocked the GM-CSF/SF-mediated proliferation of RA FLSs. Taken together, our results imply that MLN51, induced by GM-CSF, is important in the proliferation of RA FLSs in the pathogenesis of RA

Antitumor activity of sorafenib-incorporated nanoparticles of dextran/poly(dl-lactide-co-glycolide) block copolymer

Sorafenib-incoporated nanoparticles were prepared using a block copolymer that is composed of dextran and poly(DL-lactide-co-glycolide) [DexbLG] for antitumor drug delivery. Sorafenib-incorporated nanoparticles were prepared by a nanoprecipitation-dialysis method. Sorafenib-incorporated DexbLG nanoparticles were uniformly distributed in an aqueous solution regardless of the content of sorafenib. Transmission electron microscopy of the sorafenib-incorporated DexbLG nanoparticles revealed a spherical shape with a diameter < 300 nm. Sorafenib-incorporated DexbLG nanoparticles at a polymer/drug weight ratio of 40:5 showed a relatively uniform size and morphology. Higher initial drug feeding was associated with increased drug content in nanoparticles and in nanoparticle size. A drug release study revealed a decreased drug release rate with increasing drug content. In an in vitro anti-proliferation assay using human cholangiocarcinoma cells, sorafenib-incorporated DexbLG nanoparticles showed a similar antitumor activity as sorafenib. Sorafenib-incorporated DexbLG nanoparticles are promising candidates as vehicles for antitumor drug targeting

Altered expression of thioredoxin reductase-1 in dysplastic bile ducts and cholangiocarcinoma in a hamster model

Thioredoxin reductase 1 (TrxR) is a homodimeric selenoenzyme catalyzing thioredoxin (Trx) in an NADPHdependent manner. With regard to carcinogenesis, these redox proteins have been implicated in cell proliferation, transformation and anti-apoptosis. In the present study, using a hamster cholangiocarcinoma (ChC) model, we evaluated the immunohistochemical expression pattern of TrxR in precancerous lesions and ChCs as well as in normal bile ducts. The goal of this study was to determine the potential role and importance of TrxR in cholangiocarcinogenesis. For the ChC model, we obtained liver tissue specimens with dysplastic bile ducts prior to the development of ChC 8 weeks after initiation of the experiment and ChC samples at 27 weeks. The immunohistochemical analysis showed diffuse cytoplasmic overexpression of TrxR in the dysplastic bile duct epithelial cells as well as in cholangiocarcinoma; this was comparable to the negative or weakly positive in normal and type 1 hyperplastic bile ducts. However, TrxR appeared to be considerably down-regulated in the ChCs when compared to the higher expression observed in the dysplastic bile ducts. Therefore, these results suggest that TrxR overexpression followed by down-regulation might be an important event in cholangiocarcinogenesis, especially at early stages including the cellular transformation of candidate bile ducts. Further studies are however required to determine whether TrxR may be a potential target molecule for chemoprevention against cholangiocarcinogenesis. In addition, the molecular mechanism as well as the importance of the loss of TrxR in the development of cholangiocarcinoma, following dysplastic transformation of bile duct cells, also remains to be clarified.This study was supported by Kangwon National University and Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2004-041- E00324). The authors wish to thank Dr. Min-Ho Choi, College of Medicine, Seoul National University, for providing Clonorchis sinensis

Flexible room-temperature NO2 gas sensors based on carbon nanotubes/reduced graphene hybrid films

We present a flexible room temperature NO2 gas sensor consisting of vertical carbon nanotubes (CNTs)/reduced graphene hybrid film supported by a polyimide substrate. The reduced graphene film alone showed a negligible sensor response, exhibiting abnormal N-P transitions during the initial NO2 injection. A hybrid film, formed by the growth of a vertically aligned CNT array (with CNTs 20 ??m in length) on the reduced graphene film surface, exhibited remarkably enhanced sensitivities with weak N-P transitions. The increase in sensitivity was mainly attributed to the high sensitivity of the CNT arrays. The outstanding flexibility of the reduced graphene films ensured stable sensing performances in devices submitted to extreme bending stress.open786

Prevalence and Risk Factors of Gastric Adenoma and Gastric Cancer in Colorectal Cancer Patients

Background/Aims. To evaluate the incidence of gastric adenoma and gastric cancer in colorectal cancer patients, as well as the clinicopathological features that affect their incidence. Methods. Among patients who underwent surgery after being diagnosed with colorectal cancer between January 2004 and December 2013 at Chungnam National University Hospital, 142 patients who underwent follow-up upper gastrointestinal endoscopy were assigned to the patient group. The control group included 426 subjects randomly selected. The patient group was subdivided into two: one that developed gastric adenoma or cancer and one that did not. Clinicopathological characteristics were compared between these groups. Results. In total, 35 (24.6%) colorectal cancer patients developed a gastric adenoma or gastric cancer, which was higher than the number in the control group (20 [4.7%] patients; p<0.001). Age, alcohol history, and differentiation of colorectal cancer were associated with higher risks of gastric adenoma or gastric cancer, with odds ratios of 1.062, 6.506, and 5.901, respectively. Conclusions. In colorectal cancer patients, screening with upper gastrointestinal endoscopy is important, even if no lesions are noted in the upper gastrointestinal tract at colorectal cancer diagnosis. Endoscopic screening is particularly important with increasing age, history of alcohol consumption, and poor cancer differentiation

On-chip Brillouin lasers based on 10 million-Q chalcogenide resonators without direct etch process

We present a new device platform which defines on-chip chalcogenide waveguide/resonators without directly etching chalcogenide. Using our platform, we have demonstrated chalcogenide ring resonators with record high Q-factor exceeding 1.1x107 which is 10 times larger than previous record on on-chip chalcogenide resonators. A ring cavity is designed and fabricated for Stimulated Brillouin lasing on our platform. Thanks to the high-Q factor, Brillouin lasing with threshold power of 1 mW is demonstrated. This value is more than an order of magnitude improvement than previous world record for on-chip chalcogenide Brillouin lasers. We also developed an efficient and flexible method for resonator waveguide coupling with our device platform. Coupling between a resonator and a waveguide can be varied from under coupled region to over-coupled regio