Undergraduate Teaching Assistants and their Use of Nonverbal Immediacy Behaviors in the Basic Communication Course

Over the past two decades, perhaps no instructional communication topic has been researched as thoroughly as teacher immediacy. However, one important area of the existing teacher immediacy literature that remains underdeveloped is how undergraduate teaching assistants enact immediacy behaviors, and how, if at all, students respond to these teaching assistants differently based on the enactment of these behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to gain a clearer understanding as to what, if any, immediacy behaviors are used by undergraduate teaching assistants in the basic communication course at a large Midwestern university. The researchers conducted 50 hours of observation in an attempt to determine the different types of immediacy behaviors being displayed by undergraduate teaching assistants in the instructional context as well as examine the effects those behaviors have on students. The results of this analysis are discussed

Clinical efficacy and immune regulation with peanut oral immunotherapy

Background Oral immunotherapy (OIT) has been thought to induce clinical desensitization to allergenic foods, but trials coupling the clinical response and immunologic effects of peanut OIT have not been reported. Objective The study objective was to investigate the clinical efficacy and immunologic changes associated with OIT. Methods Children with peanut allergy underwent an OIT protocol including initial day escalation, buildup, and maintenance phases, and then oral food challenge. Clinical response and immunologic changes were evaluated. Results Of 29 subjects who completed the protocol, 27 ingested 3.9 g peanut protein during food challenge. Most symptoms noted during OIT resolved spontaneously or with antihistamines. By 6 months, titrated skin prick tests and activation of basophils significantly declined. Peanut-specific IgE decreased by 12 to 18 months, whereas IgG4 increased significantly. Serum factors inhibited IgE–peanut complex formation in an IgE-facilitated allergen binding assay. Secretion of IL-10, IL-5, IFN-γ, and TNF-α from PBMCs increased over a period of 6 to 12 months. Peanut-specific forkhead box protein 3 T cells increased until 12 months and decreased thereafter. In addition, T-cell microarrays showed downregulation of genes in apoptotic pathways. Conclusion Oral immunotherapy induces clinical desensitization to peanut, with significant longer-term humoral and cellular changes. Microarray data suggest a novel role for apoptosis in OIT

Sustained unresponsiveness to peanut in subjects who have completed peanut oral immunotherapy

Although peanut oral immunotherapy (OIT) has been conclusively shown to cause desensitization, it is currently unknown whether clinical protection persists after stopping therapy

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The family planning communication of voluntarily child -free couples

Although the phenomenon of voluntary childlessness has garnered increased attention from researchers in a number of disciplines over the past twenty years (Connidis & McMullin, 1996; Letherby, 1998; Morrell, 1993; Park, 2002), little is known about the interaction processes that comprise the family planning of these couples that result in a child-free decision. In the present study, the researcher addressed gaps in the current research on voluntarily child-free couples incorporating Communication Privacy Management (Petronio, 2002) as the theoretical framework. Adopting the interpretive paradigm in answer to three research question, the researcher described the intra-dyadic processes that comprised the family planning of the participants, the rules-based system that participants used when making choices about revealing (or concealing) their child-free decision to social network members, and the criteria and metaphors the participants used to perceive themselves as families. The researcher conducted 32 retrospective, turning point interviews with members of voluntarily child-free couples that produced 32 RIT graphs (Surra, 1987) and 1047 pages of transcripts. These RIT graphs and transcripts served as the data for the present study. Data were analyzed using Charmaz\u27s (1995) grounded theory analytic technique, whereby the researcher coded the data initially using in vivo codes, and then subsequently using focused codes. Because the focused codes that were developed from the initial stages of data analysis so closely resembled the concepts within Communication Privacy Management (Petronio, 2002), the researcher completed a final round of data analysis using this theory\u27s concepts as sensitizing concepts. First, from the analysis of data, the researcher developed four family planning trajectories that illustrate the unique pathways that voluntarily child-free couples take to interact and reach a family planning outcome. Second, the researcher described the rules-based system used by the participants in the present study when making disclosure choices about communicating the child-free decision to members of their social network. Last, the researcher presents an argument for a more inclusive, communication-based definition of the family using voluntarily child-free couples as the exemplar