Soluble forms of tau are toxic in Alzheimer's disease

Accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), intracellular inclusions of fibrillar forms of tau, is a hallmark of Alzheimer Disease. NFT have been considered causative of neuronal death, however, recent evidence challenges this idea. Other species of tau, such as soluble misfolded, hyperphosphorylated, and mislocalized forms, are now being implicated as toxic. Here we review the data supporting soluble tau as toxic to neurons and synapses in the brain and the implications of these data for development of therapeutic strategies for Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies

Child Observation in Australia and the USA : A Cross-national Analysis

This article reports findings from a study of how early childhood teachers think about and use child observation in Australian and US classrooms. Qualitative research methods were used to collect and analyse data from the two nations, and the paper reports on how teachers use child observation in each country. Uses in US early child settings included: assessing academic progress, adjusting curriculum/teaching strategies, diagnosing instructional needs/readiness, gathering information for reports to parents, dealing with behaviour problems, assessing social adjustments, and documenting special needs. Australian uses included: identifying individual strengths and weaknesses, understanding children to guide their behaviour, informing work with parents and other professionals, extending shared interests among children, noting individual differences that can extend the learning of the group, reflecting on the flow of the day, and evaluating teaching. Research methods are described, similarities and differences across data sets are discussed, and implications for policy and practice are presented

Study of crack initiation and crack propagation of short fiber reinforced polyamide

This paper is about a study of the crack initiation and the crack propagation of short fibre reinforced polyamides following from cyclic loading. The crack initiation and propagation was investigated macroscopic by camera and microscopic by computer tomography

Semantic web-based adaptive hypermedia

Adaptive Hypermedia constitutes a large portion of the Web nowadays. Issues of personalization and adaptation become crucial for the efficient handling of the information on the Internet. However, current hypertext reference architectures still lack appropriate modularization and expressiveness in order to meet all the challenges of Web dynamics. In the same time, standards and technologies resulting from the field of Semantic Web and Web Engineering offer flexible solutions, applicable also to the needs of Adaptive Hypermedia. In this paper we present our view on how the current development of knowledge engineering in the context of Semantic Web can contribute to the better applicability, reusability and shareability of adaptive Web-based systems. We propose a modular Semantic Web-based Adaptive Hypermedia architecture as a service-oriented framework for adaptive Web-based systems. The main goal is to help the semantic enrichment of the information search and usage process and to allow for reasoning-based adaptive support of user activities. We illustrate our ideas in the context of the CHIME project [9] for Cultural Heritage in Interactive Multimedia Environments