Transitioning out of Leadership: Is There Life After Higher Administration?

This article showcases the case histories of three former higher education administrators who stepped down from their responsibilities to rejoin the faculty. From their collective experiences, they extracted the variables that tend to influence the change in professional trajectory. The authors explain how an assortment of cognitive biases can influence the success or failure of downward transitions. We conclude the article with suggestions regarding how to make a successful transition from academic administration back to faculty status

Amylopectin and Intermediate Materials in Starches from Mutant Genotypes of the Oh43 Inbred Line.

Amylopectin (AP) and intermediate materials (IM) from five endosperm mutant genotypes in a common Oh43 inbred line were isolated and examined by gel-permeation chromatography, iodine affinity, blue value (BV), and viscosity. The chain-length distributions of AP and IM were determined using an enzymatic- chromatographic method. The degrees of branching in AP and IM decreased when the amylose-extender (ae) gene was present. The dull-1 (du1) gene produced AP and IM with the highest degrees of branching among the samples. The ae starch had a significantly (P less than 0.01) longer peak average chain length (CL) of the long-B chains in the IM fraction (177 glucose units) than did the AP faction (73 glucose units) or the other starches (37-56 glucose units). The higher iodine affinity in ae starch of the IM (6.1) compared with that of the AP (2.8) supported the idea that the IM had a longer CL than did the AP. There were no significant differences in the peak CL of A or B chains in AP and IM fractions of brittle-1 (bt1), du1, ae bt1, and ae du1 starches. The IM of ae and ae du1 starches had higher BV than did the AP fractions; however, the IM of du1 and ae bt1 had lower BV than did the AP fractions. The limiting viscosity number and gel- permeation chromatography results indicated that the AP and IM fractions of bt1 and du1 starches possessed more branching and larger hydrodynamic volume properties than those of the ae, ae bt1, and ae du1 starches. The present study demonstrated that genetic background affects the CL of starch branches, degree of branching, and iodine binding properties of starches

Characterization of Starch Structures of 17 Maize Endosperm Mutant Genotypes with Oh43 Inbred Line Background.

The characteristics of starches from 17 endosperm mutant genotypes in a common Oh43 inbred background were examined by gel-permeation chromatography (GPC), iodine affinity (IA), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The chain-length distributions of amylopectins were determined by an enzymatic- chromatographic method. Each genotype exhibited distinctive GPC elution patterns of its native and isoamylase-debranched starches and distinctivemorphology as noted by SEM. The amylose-extender (ae), dull-1 (du1), and sugary-1 (su1) genes were associated with increased amounts of amylose and intermediate fractions compared with normal starch. The waxy (wx) gene was epistatic to other genes relative to the accumulation of amylopectin, which was consistent with work done elsewhere. The discrepancy in amylose percentage determined by GPC and IA in some genotypes may have resulted from the presence of a large amount of intermediate materials in those genotypes, which could not always be distinguished from amylose by the IA method. For example, in ae starch, most of the intermediate materials were measured as amylose by the IA procedure, whereas in du1, ae brittle-1 (bt1), and ae du1 starches, most of the intermediate materials were exclded from IA measurements. The intermediate fractions from each genotype in the GPC elution profiles also differed from each other, suggesting differences in molecular weight and/or branching. The proportions of long B chains and the average chain length of amylopectins were increased when the ae gene was present. In contrast, the du1 gene decreased the proportions of the long B chains of amylopectins. The mutants containing he ae gene showed low degrees of branching in amylopectin; mutants containing the du1 and/or su1 genes hd high degrees of branching. Genetic background played a major role in determining the fine structure of starch components. The effects of interactions between recessive mutant genes on the structures and morphology of different starch genotypes were evident

Glutathione S-Transferase alpha 4 promotes proliferation and chemoresistance in colorectal cancer cells

Glutathion

TimelineQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering over Timelines

Lifelogs are descriptions of experiences that a person had during their life. Lifelogs are created by fusing data from the multitude of digital services, such as online photos, maps, shopping and content streaming services. Question answering over lifelogs can offer personal assistants a critical resource when they try to provide advice in context. However, obtaining answers to questions over lifelogs is beyond the current state of the art of question answering techniques for a variety of reasons, the most pronounced of which is that lifelogs combine free text with some degree of structure such as temporal and geographical information. We create and publicly release TimelineQA1, a benchmark for accelerating progress on querying lifelogs. TimelineQA generates lifelogs of imaginary people. The episodes in the lifelog range from major life episodes such as high school graduation to those that occur on a daily basis such as going for a run. We describe a set of experiments on TimelineQA with several state-of-the-art QA models. Our experiments reveal that for atomic queries, an extractive QA system significantly out-performs a state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented QA system. For multi-hop queries involving aggregates, we show that the best result is obtained with a state-of-the-art table QA technique, assuming the ground truth set of episodes for deriving the answer is available

Publisher Correction: Copper adparticle enabled selective electrosynthesis of n-propanol.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper

An Intronic Signal for Alternative Splicing in the Human Genome

An important level at which the expression of programmed cell death (PCD) genes is regulated is alternative splicing. Our previous work identified an intronic splicing regulatory element in caspase-2 (casp-2) gene. This 100-nucleotide intronic element, In100, consists of an upstream region containing a decoy 3′ splice site and a downstream region containing binding sites for splicing repressor PTB. Based on the signal of In100 element in casp-2, we have detected the In100-like sequences as a family of sequence elements associated with alternative splicing in the human genome by using computational and experimental approaches. A survey of human genome reveals the presence of more than four thousand In100-like elements in 2757 genes. These In100-like elements tend to locate more frequent in intronic regions than exonic regions. EST analyses indicate that the presence of In100-like elements correlates with the skipping of their immediate upstream exons, with 526 genes showing exon skipping in such a manner. In addition, In100-like elements are found in several human caspase genes near exons encoding the caspase active domain. RT-PCR experiments show that these caspase genes indeed undergo alternative splicing in a pattern predicted to affect their functional activity. Together, these results suggest that the In100-like elements represent a family of intronic signals for alternative splicing in the human genome

An Intronic Signal for Alternative Splicing in the Human Genome

An important level at which the expression of programmed cell death (PCD) genes is regulated is alternative splicing. Our previous work identified an intronic splicing regulatory element in caspase-2 (casp-2) gene. This 100-nucleotide intronic element, In100, consists of an upstream region containing a decoy 3′ splice site and a downstream region containing binding sites for splicing repressor PTB. Based on the signal of In100 element in casp-2, we have detected the In100-like sequences as a family of sequence elements associated with alternative splicing in the human genome by using computational and experimental approaches. A survey of human genome reveals the presence of more than four thousand In100-like elements in 2757 genes. These In100-like elements tend to locate more frequent in intronic regions than exonic regions. EST analyses indicate that the presence of In100-like elements correlates with the skipping of their immediate upstream exons, with 526 genes showing exon skipping in such a manner. In addition, In100-like elements are found in several human caspase genes near exons encoding the caspase active domain. RT-PCR experiments show that these caspase genes indeed undergo alternative splicing in a pattern predicted to affect their functional activity. Together, these results suggest that the In100-like elements represent a family of intronic signals for alternative splicing in the human genome.</p

Why do authoritarian regimes provide public goods? Policy communities, external shocks and ideas in China’s rural social policy making

Recent research on authoritarian regimes argues that they provide public goods in order to prevent rebellion. This essay shows that the ‘threat of rebellion’ alone cannot explain Chinese party-state policies to extend public goods to rural residents in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of policy making, it argues that China’s one-party regime extended public goods to the rural population under the influence of ideas and policy options generated by policy communities of officials, researchers, international organisations and other actors. The party-state centre adopted and implemented these ideas and policy options when they provided solutions to external shocks and supported economic development goals. Explanations of policies and their outcomes in authoritarian political systems need to include not only ‘dictators’ but also other actors, and the ideas they generate

Can language models learn from explanations in context?

Large language models can perform new tasks by adapting to a few in-context examples. For humans, rapid learning from examples can benefit from explanations that connect examples to task principles. We therefore investigate whether explanations of few-shot examples can allow language models to adapt more effectively. We annotate a set of 40 challenging tasks from BIG-Bench with explanations of answers to a small subset of questions, as well as a variety of matched control explanations. We evaluate the effects of various zero-shot and few-shot prompts that include different types of explanations, instructions, and controls on the performance of a range of large language models. We analyze these results using statistical multilevel modeling techniques that account for the nested dependencies among conditions, tasks, prompts, and models. We find that explanations of examples can improve performance. Adding untuned explanations to a few-shot prompt offers a modest improvement in performance; about 1/3 the effect size of adding few-shot examples, but twice the effect size of task instructions. We then show that explanations tuned for performance on a small validation set offer substantially larger benefits; building a prompt by selecting examples and explanations together substantially improves performance over selecting examples alone. Hand-tuning explanations can substantially improve performance on challenging tasks. Furthermore, even untuned explanations outperform carefully matched controls, suggesting that the benefits are due to the link between an example and its explanation, rather than lower-level features of the language used. However, only large models can benefit from explanations. In summary, explanations can support the in-context learning abilities of large language models o