Sociological Perspectives on Ethnicity and Education in China: Views from Chinese and English Literatures

This paper reviews Chinese- and English-language literature on ethnic minorities and education in China. Six major research topics emerge from the Chinese-language research: (1) Marxism and ethnic minority education; (2) patriotism and national unity in education for ethnic minority students; (3) multicultural education; (4) determinants of ethnic differences in education; (5) school facilities and teacher quality; and (6) preferential / affirmative action policies. Four research themes are identified from the English-language literature: (1) policy overviews; (2) education and ethnic identity; (3) incentives and disincentives for buy-in to the education system; and (4) educational stratification. The majority of quantitative research from both Chinese- and English-language literature investigates ethnic minorities as a collective group. Qualitative research focuses on individual ethnic groups, although no one group is the focus of particular attention. More qualitative studies currently exist, but the number of quantitative studies is growing, given the growing availability of survey and census data containing information on ethnic minorities. Both literatures focus on the complex interrelationships of ethnicity with cultural, policy, development, and language issues. Yet, these literatures draw on different ideological starting points, conform to different norms of academic composition, and speak to different audiences in different sociopolitical contexts. For these reasons, the English literature tends to adopt a more critical tone. Overall, very little of the work in either language comes from the field of sociology of education. More comparatively and theoretically framed work is needed to enable the Chinese experience to be informed by and inform global research in sociology of education

Combining Green Metrics and Digital Twins for Sustainability Planning and Governance of Smart Buildings and Cities

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes the multiple facets of sustainable urban planning into consideration has not yet been identified. This paper begins with a review of recent research efforts in green metrics and digital twins. This leads to developing an approach that evaluates organizational green best practices to derive metrics, which are used for computational decision support by digital twins. Furthermore, it leverages these research results and proposes a metric-driven framework for sustainability planning that understands a city as a sociotechnical complex system. Such a framework allows the practitioner to take advantage of recent developments and provides computational decision support for the complex challenge of sustainability planning at the various levels of urban planning and governance

Augmentation of clozapine with ECT: a retrospective case analysis

Objective:We sought to assess the effectiveness of clozapine augmentation with ECT (C+ECT) in patients with clozapine-resistant schizophrenia. Methods:We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records to identify patients treated with C+ECT. We determined the response to C+ECT and the rate of rehospitalisation over the year following treatment with C+ECT. Results:Forty-two patients were treated with C+ECT over a ten year period. The mean age of the patients at initiation of ECT was 46.3 (SD=8.2) years (range 27-62 years). The mean number of ECTs given was 10.6(SD = 5.3)(Range 3-25) with the majority receiving twice weekly ECT. Seventy six percent of patients (n=32) showed a Clinical Global Impression improvement score (CGI-I) of≤3 (at least minimally improved) following C+ECT. The mean number of ECT treatments was 10.6 (SD = 5.3) (range 3-25) with the majority receiving twice weekly ECT. Sixty four percent of patients experienced no adverse events. Response to C+ECT was not associated with gender, age, duration of illness, or duration of clozapine treatment.Seventy five percent of responders remained out of hospital over the course of one-year follow up, while 70% of those with no response to C+ECT were not admitted to hospital. Three patients received maintenance ECT, one of whom was rehospitalised. Conclusion:This study lends support to emerging evidence for the effectiveness of C+ECT in clozapine resistant schizophrenia. These results are consistent with the results of a meta-analysis and the only randomised controlled trial (RCT) of this intervention. Further RCTs are required before this treatment can be confidently recommended

Protein subcellular localization prediction based on compartment-specific features and structure conservation

BACKGROUND: Protein subcellular localization is crucial for genome annotation, protein function prediction, and drug discovery. Determination of subcellular localization using experimental approaches is time-consuming; thus, computational approaches become highly desirable. Extensive studies of localization prediction have led to the development of several methods including composition-based and homology-based methods. However, their performance might be significantly degraded if homologous sequences are not detected. Moreover, methods that integrate various features could suffer from the problem of low coverage in high-throughput proteomic analyses due to the lack of information to characterize unknown proteins. RESULTS: We propose a hybrid prediction method for Gram-negative bacteria that combines a one-versus-one support vector machines (SVM) model and a structural homology approach. The SVM model comprises a number of binary classifiers, in which biological features derived from Gram-negative bacteria translocation pathways are incorporated. In the structural homology approach, we employ secondary structure alignment for structural similarity comparison and assign the known localization of the top-ranked protein as the predicted localization of a query protein. The hybrid method achieves overall accuracy of 93.7% and 93.2% using ten-fold cross-validation on the benchmark data sets. In the assessment of the evaluation data sets, our method also attains accurate prediction accuracy of 84.0%, especially when testing on sequences with a low level of homology to the training data. A three-way data split procedure is also incorporated to prevent overestimation of the predictive performance. In addition, we show that the prediction accuracy should be approximately 85% for non-redundant data sets of sequence identity less than 30%. CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate that biological features derived from Gram-negative bacteria translocation pathways yield a significant improvement. The biological features are interpretable and can be applied in advanced analyses and experimental designs. Moreover, the overall accuracy of combining the structural homology approach is further improved, which suggests that structural conservation could be a useful indicator for inferring localization in addition to sequence homology. The proposed method can be used in large-scale analyses of proteomes

Evolutionary conservation of ABA signaling for stomatal closure in ferns

ABA-driven stomatal regulation reportedly evolved after the divergence of ferns, during the early evolution of seed plants approximately 360 Mya. This hypothesis is based on the observation that the stomata of certain fern species are unresponsive to ABA, but exhibit passive hydraulic control. However, ABA-induced stomatal closure was detected in some mosses and lycophytes. Here, we observed that a number of ABA signaling and membrane transporter protein families diversified over the evolutionary history of land plants. The aquatic ferns Azolla filiculoides and Salvinia cucullata have representatives of 23 families of proteins orthologous to those of Arabidopsis thaliana and all other land plant species studied. Phylogenetic analysis of the key ABA signaling proteins indicates an evolutionarily conserved stomatal response to ABA. Moreover, comparative transcriptomic analysis has identified a suite of ABA responsive genes that differentially expressed in a terrestrial fern species, Polystichum proliferum. These genes encode proteins associated with ABA biosynthesis, transport, reception, transcription, signaling, and ion and sugar transport, which fit the general ABA signaling pathway constructed from Arabidopsis thaliana and Hordeum vulgare. The retention of these key ABA-responsive genes could have had a profound effect on the adaptation of ferns to dry conditions. Furthermore, stomatal assays have shown the primary evidence for ABA-induced closure of stomata in two terrestrial fern species P. proliferum and Nephrolepis exaltata. In summary, we report new molecular and physiological evidence for the presence of active stomatal control in ferns

Concert recording 2013-04-25

[Track 01]. Excerpts from The water music / G.F. Handel, transcribed by L. Martinet -- [Track 02]. Villanelle / Paul Dukas -- [Track 03]. Nocturne / Reinhold Gliere -- [Track 04]. Concerto no. 1. Allegro moderato / Franz Strauss -- [Track 05]. Horn-lokk (1972) / Sigurd Berge -- [Track 06]. Sonata for horn in F. Massig bewegt / Paul Hindemith -- [Track 07]. Killer tango / Sonny Kompanek -- [Track 08]. Fantasy (1979) / Ronald LoPresti -- [Track 09]. Sextet for horns (1967) / Gregory Kerkorian

Escape from adamantane: scaffold optimization of novel P2X7 antagonists featuring complex polycycles

The adamantane scaffold, despite being widely used in medicinal chemistry, is not devoid of problems. In recent years we have developed new polycyclic scaffolds as surrogates of the adamantane group with encouraging results in multiple targets. As an adamantane scaffold is a common structural feature in several P2X7 receptor antagonists, herein we report the synthesis and pharmacological evaluation of multiple replacement options of adamantane that maintain a good activity profile. Molecular modeling studies support the binding of the compounds to a site close to the central pore, rather than to the ATP-binding site and shed light on the structural requirements for novel P2X7 antagonists

NBL1 Reduces Corneal Fibrosis and Scar Formation after Wounding

Corneal scarring is a leading cause of blindness. Currently, there is no treatment to prevent and/or reduce corneal scar formation under pathological conditions. Our previous data showed that the NBL1 protein, also termed the DAN Family BMP (Bone morphogenetic protein) Antagonist, was highly expressed in corneal stromal cells upon wounding. Here, we examined the function of NBL1 in corneal wound healing. Mouse corneas were mechanically wounded, followed by a 2-week treatment using NBL1. Wounded corneas treated with vehicle or an Fc tag served as controls. Compared with the controls, NBL1 treatment facilitated wound re-epithelialization, partially restored the stromal thickness, and significantly reduced corneal scar formation. NBL1 treatment did not decrease immune cell infiltration, indicating that the anti-scarring effect was not dependent on immune suppression. We further examined the anti-fibrotic effect of NBL1 on human corneas. Pairs of human corneas were induced to form myofibroblasts (a key player in fibrosis and scarring) upon wounding and incubation in a medium containing TGF-β1. The OS corneas were treated with Fc as a control, and the OD corneas were treated with NBL1. Compared with the control, human corneas treated with NBL1 had significantly fewer myofibroblasts, which was consistent with these mouse data. A further study revealed that NBL1 treatment inhibited BMP canonical (phospho-Smad1/5) and no-canonical (phospho-p38) pathways in human corneas. Data show that NBL1 reduced corneal fibrosis and scar formation in mice and cultured human corneas. The underlying molecular mechanism is not certain because both anti-fibrotic Smad1/5 and pro-fibrotic p38 pathways were inhibited upon NBL1 treatment. Whether the p38 pathway dominates the Smad1/5 pathway during corneal fibrosis, leading to the anti-fibrotic effect of NBL1, needs further investigation

PATH-38. ROSETTE-FORMING GLIONEURONAL TUMOR IS DEFINED BY FGFR1 ACTIVATING ALTERATIONS WITH FREQUENT ACCOMPANYING PI3K AND MAPK PATHWAY MUTATIONS

Abstract BACKGROUND Rosette-forming glioneuronal tumor (RGNT) is an uncommon CNS tumor originally described in the fourth ventricle characterized by a low-grade glial neoplasm admixed with a rosette-forming neurocytic component. METHODS We reviewed clinicopathologic features of 42 patients with RGNT. Targeted next-generation sequencing was performed, and genome-wide methylation profiling is underway. RESULTS The 20 male and 22 female patients had a mean age of 25 years (range 3–47) at time of diagnosis. Tumors were located within or adjacent to the lateral ventricle (n=16), fourth ventricle (15), third ventricle (9), and spinal cord (2). All 31 tumors assessed to date contained FGFR1 activating alterations, either in-frame gene fusion, kinase domain tandem duplication, or hotspot missense mutation in the kinase domain (p.N546 or p.K656). While 7 of these 31 tumors harbored FGFR1 alterations as the solitary pathogenic event, 24 contained additional pathogenic alterations within PI3-kinase or MAP kinase pathway genes: 5 with additional PIK3CA and NF1 mutations, 4 with PIK3CA mutation, 3 with PIK3R1 mutation (one of which also contained focal RAF1 amplification), 5 with PTPN11 mutation (one with additional PIK3R1 mutation), and 2 with NF1 deletion. The other 5 cases demonstrated anaplastic features including hypercellularity and increased mitotic activity. Among these anaplastic cases, 3 harbored inactivating ATRX mutations and two harbored CDKN2A homozygous deletion, in addition to the FGFR1 alterations plus other PI3-kinase and MAP kinase gene mutations seen in those RGNT without anaplasia. CONCLUSION Independent of ventricular location, RGNT is defined by FGFR1 activating mutations or rearrangements, which are frequently accompanied by mutations involving PIK3CA, PIK3R1, PTPN11, NF1, and KRAS. Whereas pilocytic astrocytoma and ganglioglioma are characterized by solitary activating MAP kinase pathway alterations (e.g. BRAF fusion or mutation), RGNT are genetically more complex with dual PI3K-Akt-mTOR and Ras-Raf-MAPK pathway activation. Rare anaplastic examples may show additional ATRX and/or CDKN2A inactivation