Getting diverse students and staff to talk about integration on campus, and what they say when they do: A UK-India collaborative case study.

This paper reports the early stages of a UKIERI-funded project, ‘Widening Participation: Diversity, isolation or integration in Higher Education?’.The project is concerned with greater equity, social justice, community and social cohesion within the current globalised, market oriented context of higher education (HE), and with enabling students to be better prepared for, and thrive in social networks and work-related arenas which are increasingly diverse, multicultural, interdependent and global. The main aim of this 3 year project is to explore the nature of social cohesion, integration and separation, diversity, equality and discrimination experienced by diverse, minority, disadvantaged and under-represented students attending HE in UK and India. Group stereotypes are often subconsciously held, emerging into consciousness only when they appear confirmed or confounded by personal experience or public events. Where there is little knowledge or personal experience then reliance upon group stereotypes is more likely (Kunda & Thagard, 1996). This can impact upon student and staff expectations of, responses to, and interactions with each other. Individual students’ experiences and perceptions lie at the core of this project, but the ultimate purpose is to illuminate our understanding as to how these are mediated, shaped and formed, in relation to and in interaction with the structures and contextual features of the educational environments in which they, as students, are located. It is thus framed by socio-cultural rather than psychological or therapeutic theories and is located within a social-constructivist perspective (Moore, 2000). Social constructivism facilitates the development of improved understandings of educational and social environments that shape rather than determine individual dispositions towards social diversity encountered on campus. It is highly suited to the understanding of perceptions, and exploring resonances with actions, reactions and interactions. The initial stage of this project involved inviting students and staff (academic and support staff) from five HE colleges and universities in England and India to keep a record (written and photographic) of what for them seemed to be important and relevant events relating to what they saw, heard, did and experienced on campus for a period of 1 month, in teaching, learning and social situations; namely interactions in classes and social settings; what seem to be good experiences and what seem to be negative ones; how and if their particular knowledge and experiences were used, valued and incorporated into their HE experience and learning or how they were negated. A sample size of 90 record keepers was sought across the participating institutions. Getting that sample presented significant difficulties to all but one of the participating institutions, and raised questions about • the methods initially adopted, • the general willingness of students and staff to address and share issues relating to diversity, equality, social cohesion and integration on HE campuses with researchers • cultural differences in accessing respondents to take part in the research Additional data collection methods were adopted and by January 2009 the intended sample size almost met. This paper will address the problems encountered in undertaking the first stage of this research and present initial findings from the data that were eventually obtained

Antagonistic Activity of Probiotic Organism Against Vibrio cholerae and Cryptococcus neoformans

The microbes are useful in many ways in the modern world. Probiotics one of them, which refers to, acid adherence bacteria in the intestinal cells, are able to survive at low pH and produce large amount of lactic acid. The present investigation deals with the antagonistic activity of Lactobacillus acidophilus organism against pathogens. The organism was isolated from the curd sample. Identification of bacteria was done by various biochemical testing. The present study revealed that L. acidophilus inhibits Vibrio cholerae more efficiently than Streptococcus pneumoniae and Shigella dysentriae. When L. acidophilus and V. cholerae were grown together, L. acidophilus dominated the growth and competitively inhibited the growth of V. cholerae. L. acidophilus was also found to inhibit Cryptococcus neoformans

Predicting Combinatorial Binding of Transcription Factors to Regulatory Elements in the Human Genome by Association Rule Mining

Cis-acting transcriptional regulatory elements in mammalian genomes typically contain specific combinations of binding sites for various transcription factors. Although some cisregulatory elements have been well studied, the combinations of transcription factors that regulate normal expression levels for the vast majority of the 20,000 genes in the human genome are unknown. We hypothesized that it should be possible to discover transcription factor combinations that regulate gene expression in concert by identifying over-represented combinations of sequence motifs that occur together in the genome. In order to detect combinations of transcription factor binding motifs, we developed a data mining approach based on the use of association rules, which are typically used in market basket analysis. We scored each segment of the genome for the presence or absence of each of 83 transcription factor binding motifs, then used association rule mining algorithms to mine this dataset, thus identifying frequently occurring pairs of distinct motifs within a segment. Results: Support for most pairs of transcription factor binding motifs was highly correlated across different chromosomes although pair significance varied. Known true positive motif pairs showed higher association rule support, confidence, and significance than background. Our subsets of high-confidence, high-significance mined pairs of transcription factors showed enrichment for co-citation in PubMed abstracts relative to all pairs, and the predicted associations were often readily verifiable in the literature. Conclusion: Functional elements in the genome where transcription factors bind to regulate expression in a combinatorial manner are more likely to be predicted by identifying statistically and biologically significant combinations of transcription factor binding motifs than by simply scanning the genome for the occurrence of binding sites for a single transcription factor.NIAAA Alcohol Training GrantNational Science FoundationCellular and Molecular Biolog

Recombinant Mitochondrial Transcription Factor A with N-terminal Mitochondrial Transduction Domain Increases Respiration and Mitochondrial Gene Expression in G11778A Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy Cybrid Cells

Diseases involving mitochondrial defects usually manifest themselves in high-energy, post-mitotic tissues such as brain, retina, skeletal and cardiac muscle and frequently cause deficiencies in mitochondrial bioenergetics. We have developed a scalable procedure to produce recombinant human mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM) modified with an N-terminal protein transduction domain (PTD) and mitochondrial localization signal (MLS) that allow it to cross membranes and enter mitochondria through its "mitochondrial transduction domain" (MTD,=PTD+MLS). _In vitro_ studies in a classic mitochondrial disease cell model demonstrated that Alexa488-labeled MTD-TFAM rapidly entered the mitochondrial compartment. MTD-TFAM treatment of these cell lines reversibly increased oxygen consumption (respiration) rates 3-fold, levels of respiratory proteins and mitochondrial gene expression. _In vivo_ results demonstrated that respiration increased to lesser degrees in mitochondria from tissues of mice injected with MTD-TFAM. MTD-TFAM can alter mitochondrial bioenergetics and holds promise for treatment of mitochondrial diseases involving deficiencies of energy production

Reynolds number scaling of velocity increments in isotropic turbulence

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Tracing very high energy neutrinos from cosmological distances in ice

Astrophysical sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos yield tau neutrino fluxes due to neutrino oscillations. We study in detail the contribution of tau neutrinos with energies above PeV relative to the contribution of the other flavors. We consider several different initial neutrino fluxes and include tau neutrino regeneration in transit through the Earth and energy loss of charged leptons. We discuss signals of tau neutrinos in detectors such as IceCube, RICE and ANITA.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figure