Unpacking Faculty Engagement: The Types of Activities Faculty Members Report as Publicly Engaged Scholarship During Promotion and Tenure

While a growing body of scholarship has focused on the personal, professional, and organizational factors that influence faculty members’ involvement in publicly engaged scholarship, the nature and scope of faculty publicly engaged scholarship itself has remained largely unexplored. What types of activities are faculty members involved in as publicly engaged scholarship? How does their involvement vary by demographic, type of faculty appointment, or college grouping? To explore these questions, researchers conducted a quantitative content analysis of 173 promotion and tenure documents from a research-intensive, land-grant, Carnegie Classified Community Engagement university and found statistically significant differences for the variables age, number of years at the institution, faculty rank, Extension appointment, joint appointment, and college grouping. Recommendations for future research are discussed as well as implications for institutional leadership, faculty development programming, and the structuring of academic appointments

Unsupervised Lexicon Discovery from Acoustic Input

We present a model of unsupervised phonological lexicon discovery -- the problem of simultaneously learning phoneme-like and word-like units from acoustic input. Our model builds on earlier models of unsupervised phone-like unit discovery from acoustic data (Lee and Glass, 2012), and unsupervised symbolic lexicon discovery using the Adaptor Grammar framework (Johnson et al., 2006), integrating these earlier approaches using a probabilistic model of phonological variation. We show that the model is competitive with state-of-the-art spoken term discovery systems, and present analyses exploring the model's behavior and the kinds of linguistic structures it learns

Interleukin-4 induction of the CC chemokine TARC (CCL17) in murine macrophages is mediated by multiple STAT6 sites in the TARC gene promoter

BACKGROUND: Macrophages (Mθ) play a central role in the innate immune response and in the pathology of chronic inflammatory diseases. Macrophages treated with Th2-type cytokines such as Interleukin-4 (IL-4) and Interleukin-13 (IL-13) exhibit an altered phenotype and such alternatively activated macrophages are important in the pathology of diseases characterised by allergic inflammation including asthma and atopic dermatitis. The CC chemokine Thymus and Activation-Regulated Chemokine (TARC/CCL17) and its murine homologue (mTARC/ABCD-2) bind to the chemokine receptor CCR4, and direct T-cell and macrophage recruitment into areas of allergic inflammation. Delineating the molecular mechanisms responsible for the IL-4 induction of TARC expression will be important for a better understanding of the role of Th2 cytokines in allergic disease. RESULTS: We demonstrate that mTARC mRNA and protein are potently induced by the Th2 cytokine, Interleukin-4 (IL-4), and inhibited by Interferon-γ (IFN-γ) in primary macrophages (Mθ). IL-4 induction of mTARC occurs in the presence of PI3 kinase pathway and translation inhibitors, but not in the absence of STAT6 transcription factor, suggesting a direct-acting STAT6-mediated pathway of mTARC transcriptional activation. We have functionally characterised eleven putative STAT6 sites identified in the mTARC proximal promoter and determined that five of these contribute to the IL-4 induction of mTARC. By in vitro binding assays and transient transfection of isolated sites into the RAW 264.7 Mθ cell-line, we demonstrate that these sites have widely different capacities for binding and activation by STAT6. Site-directed mutagenesis of these sites within the context of the mTARC proximal promoter revealed that the two most proximal sites, conserved between the human and mouse genes, are important mediators of the IL-4 response. CONCLUSION: The induction of mTARC by IL-4 results from cooperative interactions between STAT6 sites within the mTARC gene promoter. Significantly, we have shown that transfer of the nine most proximal mTARC STAT6 sites in their endogenous conformation confers potent (up to 130-fold) IL-4 inducibility on heterologous promoters. These promoter elements constitute important and sensitive IL-4-responsive transcriptional units that could be used to drive transgene expression in sites of Th2 inflammation in vivo

The connections of the insular VEN area in great apes: A histologically-guided ex vivo diffusion tractography study

We mapped the connections of the insular von Economo neuron (VEN) area in ex vivo brains of a bonobo, an orangutan and two gorillas with high angular resolution diffusion MRI imaging acquired in 36 h imaging sessions for each brain. The apes died of natural causes without neurological disorders. The localization of the insular VEN area was based on cresyl violet-stained histological sections from each brain that were coregistered with structural and diffusion images from the same individuals. Diffusion MRI tractography showed that the insular VEN area is connected with olfactory, gustatory, visual and other sensory systems, as well as systems for the mediation of appetite, reward, aversion and motivation. The insular VEN area in apes is most strongly connected with frontopolar cortex, which could support their capacity to choose voluntarily among alternative courses of action particularly in exploring for food resources. The frontopolar cortex may also support their capacity to take note of potential resources for harvesting in the future (prospective memory). All of these faculties may support insight and volitional choice when contemplating courses of action as opposed to rule-based decision-making

Measuring Distances Using Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuations

Surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) are much brighter in the IR than they are at optical wavelengths, making it possible to measure greater distances using IR SBFs. We report new K' (2.1 micron) SBF measurements of 9 galaxies in the Fornax and Eridanus clusters using a 1024^2-pixel HgCdTe array. We used improved analysis techniques to remove contributions from globular clusters and background galaxies, and we assess the relative importance of other sources of residual variance. We applied the improved methodology to Fornax and Eridanus images and to previously published Virgo cluster data. Apparent fluctuation magnitudes were used in conjunction with Cepheid distances to M31 and the Virgo cluster to calibrate the K' SBF distance scale. We find the absolute fluctuation magnitude MK'= -5.61+/-0.12, with an intrinsic scatter to the calibration of 0.06 mag. No statistically significant change in MK' is detected as a function of (V-I). Our calibration is consistent with constant age and metallicity stellar population models. The lack of a correlation with (V-I) in the context of the stellar population models implies that elliptical galaxies bluer than (V-I)=1.2 have SBFs dominated by younger (5-8 Gyr) populations. K' SBFs prove to be a reliable distance indicator as long as the residual variance from globular clusters and background galaxies is properly removed. Also, it is important that a sufficiently high S/N ratio be achieved to allow reliable sky subtraction because residual spatial variance can bias the measurement of the SBF power spectrum. (abridged)Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, 44 pages, 10 Postscript figure