Is the National Accreditation System Sufficient? Critique of the System in the United States to Vietnam and Japan Japan Foundation Japan Studies Through Collaboration

Higher education has jumped into the quality movement with expectations of enhancing the excellence of education being received by students.  Higher education institutions are becoming a business while knowledge is becoming the commodity, with all aspects of education subject to global trade.  There is a need for education to become more efficient, self-sufficient, and accountable.  Neo-liberalism reduces governmental subsidies, while shifting costs to the market and consumers.  Furthermore, it demands accountability for performance, and emphasize higher education’s role in the economy.  The injection of accountability and accreditation into the educational system is necessary for a quality global educational system.  This paper looks at the development of national accreditation within the United States, Vietnam, and Japan.  Developing an understanding of the accreditation process will contribute to the literature surrounding accreditation and quality assurance

Fungal volatile organic compounds: emphasis on their plant growth-promoting

Fungal volatile organic compounds (VOCs) commonly formed bioactive interface between plants and countless of microorganisms on the above- and below-ground plant-fungus interactions. Fungal-plant interactions symbolize intriguingly biochemical complex and challenging scenarios that are discovered by metabolomic approaches. Remarkably secondary metabolites (SMs) played a significant role in the virulence and existence with plant-fungal pathogen interaction; only 25% of the fungal gene clusters have been functionally identified, even though these numbers are too low as compared with plant secondary metabolites. The current insights on fungal VOCs are conducted under lab environments and to apply small numbers of microbes; its molecules have significant effects on growth, development, and defense system of plants. Many fungal VOCs supported dynamic processes, leading to countless interactions between plants, antagonists, and mutualistic symbionts. The fundamental role of fungal VOCs at field level is required for better understanding, so more studies will offer further constructive scientific evidences that can show the cost-effectiveness of ecofriendly and ecologically produced fungal VOCs for crop welfare

Vitamin A derivatives in the prevention and treatment of human cancer.

Vitamin A is essential for normal cellular growth and differentiation. A vast amount of laboratory data have clearly demonstrated the potent antiproliferative and differentiation-inducing effects of vitamin A and the synthetic analogues (retinoids). Recent in-vitro work has led to the exciting proposal that protein kinase-C may be centrally involved in many of retinoids' anticancer actions including the effects on ornithine decarboxylase induction, intracellular polyamine levels, and epidermal growth factor receptor number. Several intervention trials have clearly indicated that natural vitamin A at clinically tolerable doses has only limited activity against human neoplastic processes. Therefore, clinical work has focused on the synthetic derivatives with higher therapeutic indexes. In human cancer prevention, retinoids have been most effective for skin diseases, including actinic keratosis, keratoacanthoma, epidermodysplasia verruciformis, dysplastic nevus syndrome, and basal cell carcinoma. Several noncutaneous premaligancies, however, are currently receiving more attention in retinoid trials. Definite retinoid activity has been documented in oral leukoplakia, laryngeal papillomatosis, superficial bladder carcinoma, cervical dysplasia, bronchial metaplasia, and preleukemia. Significant therapeutic advances are also occurring with this class of drugs in some drug-resistant malignancies and several others that have become refractory, including advanced basal cell cancer, mycosis fungoides, melanoma, acute promyelocytic leukemia, and squamous cell carcinoma of the skin and of the head and neck. This report comprehensively presents the clinical data using retinoids as anticancer agents in human premalignant disorders and outlines the ongoing and planned studies with retinoids in combination and adjuvant therapy

Astronomical constraints on the duration of the early Jurassic Hettangian stage and recovery rates following the end-Triassic mass extinction (St Audrie's Bay/East Quantoxhead, UK)

The end-Triassic environmental crisis with major extinctions in the marine realm is followed by successive recovery in the lower Jurassic Hettangian Stage. Accurate timing of events is however still poorly constrained. In this study, combined field observations and physical and chemical proxy records, covering the uppermost Triassic and lower Jurassic marine successions of St Audrie's Bay and East Quantoxhead (UK), have been used to construct a floating astronomical time-scale of ~2.5Myr in length. This time-scale is based on the recognition of meters thick cycles in limestone and (black) shale predominance and concurrent variability in physical and chemical proxy records. Three to five individual black-shale beds occur within these meter-scale sedimentary bundles and are interpreted to reflect precession-controlled changes in monsoon intensity, while the bundles are interpreted as forced by the ~100-kyr eccentricity cycle. On the basis of these findings, we propose an astronomically constrained duration of the Hettangian stage of 1.8Myr in the UK and unequal duration of Hettangian ammonite zones (Psiloceras planorbis zone: ~250kyr; Alsatites liasicus zone: ~750kyr; Schlotheimia angulata zone: ~800kyr). Within this astronomical framework, the extinction interval and coinciding negative CIE represent 1 to 2 precession cycles (~20-40kyr). The amount of time succeeding the end-Triassic negative carbon isotope excursion (CIE) and preceding the first Jurassic ammonite occurrence (in the UK) is constrained to 6 climatic precession cycles (~120kyr). Cyclostratigraphic correlation to the astronomically-tuned sedimentary record of the continental Newark basin (USA) allows to locate the stratigraphic position of the marine defined Triassic-Jurassic and Hettangian-Sinemurian boundary in the continental realm. Continuous low δ13CTOC values throughout the Hettangian and early Sinemurian, succeeding volcanic activity in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), may suggest a long-term change in Earth's global biogeochemical cycles, which do not fully recover for several million years. © 2010 Elsevier B.V

Integrated magnetic tweezers and single-molecule FRET for investigating the mechanical properties of nucleic acid

Many enzymes promote structural changes in their nucleic acid substrates via application of piconewton forces over nanometer length scales. Magnetic tweezers (MT) is a single molecule force spectroscopy method widely used for studying the energetics of such mechanical processes. MT permits stable application of a wide range of forces and torques over long time scales with nanometer spatial resolution. However, in any force spectroscopy experiment, the ability to monitor structural changes in nucleic acids with nanometer sensitivity requires the system of interest to be held under high degrees of tension to improve signal to noise. This limitation prohibits measurement of structural changes within nucleic acids under physiologically relevant conditions of low stretching forces. To overcome this challenge, researchers have integrated a spatially sensitive fluorescence spectroscopy method, single molecule-FRET, with MT to allow simultaneous observation and manipulation of nanoscale structural transitions over a wide range of forces. Here, we describe a method for using this hybrid instrument to analyze the mechanical properties of nucleic acids. We expect that this method for analysis of nucleic acid structure will be easily adapted for experiments aiming to interrogate the mechanical responses of other biological macromolecules

Evidence for northeastern Tibetan Plateau uplift between 25 and 20 Ma in the sedimentary archive of the Xining Basin, Northwestern China

The growth history of the Tibetan Plateau provides a valuable natural laboratory to understand tectonic processes of the India-Asia collision and their impact on and interactions with Asian and global climate change. However, both Tibetan Plateau growth and Asian paleoenvironments are generally poorly documented in pre-Pliocene times and reflect limited temporal coverage for different parts of the plateau. Here we present magnetostratigraphic results from the Xining Basin, at the NE margin of the Tibetan Plateau, precisely dating the record between the earliest Oligocene (similar to 33 Ma) to the middle Miocene (similar to 16 Ma). The pattern of observed paleomagnetic polarity zones is unequivocally correlated to the geomagnetic polarity time scale (GPTS) indicating relatively constant and low sediment accumulation rates (32 m/Myr) except for a peculiar period of unstable accumulation between 25.3 and 19.7 Ma. At the beginning of this interval, a marked permanent increase in magnetite content of the sediments is observed and likely relates to a change in provenance. We directly relate this unstable period of sediment accumulation and provenance change to the coeval exhumation recently reported by low-temperature thermochronology from the Laji Shan range, which subsequently formed the southern margin of the Xining Basin. Evidence for NE Tibet tectonism at 25-20 Ma can be associated with widespread deformation over the entire Himalayan-Tibetan orogen at this time, which may be linked to the coeval appearance of monsoon climate in Eastern Asia and the onset of central Asian desertification.</p