Alignment of Classroom Instruction with Indonesian National Standards

This study examines the degree of alignment between classroom instruction and national curriculum standards. This alignment may vary as a function of teacher characteristics. Using self-reports from teachers about their experiences teaching the national curriculum standards, the study explores the extent to which classroom instruction aligns with Indonesian national standards in the following nationally-assessed subjects: Indonesian, English, science, and mathematics. A mixed multilevel regression analyses was used to examine the relationships between alignments and teacher characteristics. The study involved 501 junior secondary school teachers from three western provinces in Indonesia (Lampung, Jakarta, and East Java).  The findings showed that the majority of teachers taught 100% of the topics outlined in the national curriculum standards. However, a small number of teachers had taught less than 100% of the required topics. In fact, some of them had only taught less than 70%.  As the Indonesian educational system used standards-based national exams, skipping topics in classroom instruction may significantly affect student achievement because test items are developed based on the curriculum standards.  In terms of the relationships of alignments with teacher characteristics such as gender, working status, college major, level of education, years of teaching experience and professional development, the findings suggested that these relationships varied. Theoretically, this research provides two contributions: (1) lacking research in the area of curriculum standards and classroom instruction as mediator of student competencies, the findings of this study make an important contribution to the current research of the standards-based education system; (2) predicting alignments as a function of teacher characteristics in this study contributes to the theoretical discussion of teacher characteristics and their possible effects on classroom instruction

Individualized Novel Therapies for Patients with Tumor Suppressor Genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 Mutated Epithelial Ovarian Cancer

Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death in women with gynecological cancer, since a large proportion of patients are diagnosed at later stages of the disease. The incidence of ovarian cancer in the general population is 2%, but patients with germline mutations in the BRCA genes have a risk of developing ovarian cancer of up to 2050% with a cumulative risk of ovarian cancer at 70 years of age of 40% in BRCA1 and 18% in BRCA2 mutation carriers. Although it is a chemosensitive tumor, most of the patients after surgery and chemotherapy based on taxanes and platinum will relapse later in life. Due to the high risk of developing ovarian cancer in patients with BRCA germline mutations, new treatments rely increasingly on histological and molecular characteristics of the primary tumor, achieving greater selectivity and lower toxicity compared with standard cytotoxic agents. Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARPS) inhibitors are the first biologically active agents for patients with ovarian cancer with alterations in the DNA repair pathway, particularly in the high-grade serous subtype of ovarian cancer

Provider Counseling, Health Education, and Community Health Workers: The Arizona WISEWOMAN Project

Background: The Arizona Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for Women Across the Nation (WISEWOMAN) project used provider counseling, health education, and community health workers (CHWs) to target chronic disease risk factors in uninsured, primarily Hispanic women over age 50. Methods: Participants were recruited from two Tucson clinics participating in the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP). Women were randomly assigned into one of three intervention groups: (1) provider counseling, (2) provider counseling and health education, or (3) provider counseling, health education, and CHW support. At baseline and 12 months (1998–2000), participants were measured for height, weight, waist and hip circumference, and blood pressure. Blood tests were conducted to check blood glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. At each time point, participants also completed 24-hour dietary recalls and questionnaires focusing on their physical activity levels. Results: A total of 217 women participated in baseline and 12-month follow-up. Three fourths were Hispanic. All three intervention groups showed an increase in self-reported weekly minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, with no significant differences between the groups. Significantly more women who received the comprehensive intervention of provider counseling, health education, and CHW support progressed to eating five fruits and vegetables per day, compared with participants who received only provider counseling or provider counseling plus health education. Conclusions: All three interventions increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity but not fruit and vegetable consumption. The intervention group with provider counseling, health education, and CHW support significantly increased the number of women meeting national recommendations for fruit and vegetable consumption

Approximate Profile Maximum Likelihood

We propose an efficient algorithm for approximate computation of the profile maximum likelihood (PML), a variant of maximum likelihood maximizing the probability of observing a sufficient statistic rather than the empirical sample. The PML has appealing theoretical properties, but is difficult to compute exactly. Inspired by observations gleaned from exactly solvable cases, we look for an approximate PML solution, which, intuitively, clumps comparably frequent symbols into one symbol. This amounts to lower-bounding a certain matrix permanent by summing over a subgroup of the symmetric group rather than the whole group during the computation. We extensively experiment with the approximate solution, and find the empirical performance of our approach is competitive and sometimes significantly better than state-of-the-art performance for various estimation problems

Brief Report: Endothelial Progenitor Cell Phenotype and Function Are Impaired in Childhood‐Onset Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112288/1/art39149.pd

Low-intensity continuous ultrasound to inhibit cancer cell migration

In recent years, it has been verified that collective cell migration is a fundamental step in tumor spreading and metastatic processes. In this paper, we demonstrate for the first time how low-intensity ultrasound produces long-term inhibition of collective migration of epithelial cancer cells in wound healing processes. In particular, we show how pancreatic tumor cells, PANC-1, grown as monolayers in vitro respond to these waves at frequencies close to 1 MHz and low intensities (< 100 mW cm(-2)) for 48-72 h of culture after some minutes of a single ultrasound irradiation. This new strategy opens a new line of action to block the spread of malignant cells in cancer processes. Despite relevant spatial variations of the acoustic pressure amplitude induced in the assay, the cells behave as a whole, showing a collective dynamic response to acoustic performance. Experiments carried out with samples without previous starving showed remarkable effects of the LICUs from the first hours of culture, more prominent than those with experiments with monolayers subjected to fasting prior to the experiments. This new strategy to control cell migration demonstrating the effectiveness of LICUS on not starved cells opens a new line of action to study effects of in vivo ultrasonic actuation on tumor tissues with malignant cells. This is a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate the physical effects of ultrasound stimulation on tumor cell migration. An in-depth biological study of the effects of ultrasounds and underlying biological mechanisms is on-going but out of the scope of this article.This work is financed by the Spanish National Plan projects PID 2021-128985OB-I00: "New Non-invasive technology to inhibit growth of solid tumors by low intensity ultrasounds", DPI 2017-90147-R and intramural research project IRYCIS (2018/0240)