Asymmetric total synthesis of alkaloid natural products without external chiral sources

The chirality of a starting material having a chiral sp3-carbon can be preserved under some circumstances in the reaction product even though the reaction proceeds at the chiral carbon as a reaction center through reactive intermediates. This process is defined as Memory of chirality (MOC). MOC is an attractive strategy for asymmetric synthesis, but it has found limited applications. There are only few reports of MOC being applied in the total synthesis of natural products. In recent years, we have been involved in the total synthesis of biological interesting alkaloid natural products and their analogues without the aid of external chiral influences. Representative alkaloids of such interest include penibruguieramine, drupacine, lepadiformines, salinosporamides, and oxazolomycins. The principle of MOC is applied for the asymmetric synthesis of these alkaloids using an appropriate amino acid as the only chiral source. In this presentation, I would like to share our old and new progress on this subject. A mechanistic rationale would be discussed for the excellent stereochemical outcome of MOC reactions.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Memory Encoding and Retrieval of Discourse Structure in Human Language Comprehension

An extensive amount of work has shown the way the working memory architecture supports language comprehension. However, while language comprehension inevitably takes place in a discourse context, less is known about how information related to discourse is organized and managed in working memory. The project particularly focuses on two known processes in the working memory involved in language comprehension, namely encoding and retrieval. I investigate the way discourse structure information guides retrieval and how the information affects the encoding process in real-time comprehension. To this end, I use two types of sentence structures that are minimally different in their discourse status. While both sentences in (1) contain the information that the waitress is “Kelly’s sister,” the discourse status of such information differs when it is contained in a restrictive relative clause (RRC) (1a) or an appositive relative clause (ARC) (1b). While the content inside an RRC (1a) is part of primary, essential information (i.e., main discourse information), it becomes secondary, and side-commentary (i.e., subordinate discourse information) when it is contained inside an ARC (1b). (1a) The waitress who is Kelly’s sister sat next to Bob. (1b) The waitress, who is Kelly’s sister, sat next to Bob. Given the contrast of main vs. subordinate discourse information status, I examine how this division affects the retrieval process and what effects this information results in during the encoding process. To address these questions, I make use of two of the well-established linguistic phenomena in the sentence processing literature to examine the contrast: number agreement attraction effect, and pronoun resolution. I conduct a series of experiments using behavioral measures such as reading times using a self-paced reading task and eye-gaze times implementing a visual world paradigm. The findings suggest that discourse structure information imposes a constraint on the memory retrieval process. Specifically, the active state of discourse question in the given discourse structure guides which linguistic entities can be targeted for retrieval. Furthermore, the results show that discourse structure information affects retrieval even when it is not necessarily used for governing the grammaticality of linguistic dependency. While the distinction in discourse status does not affect grammaticality for resolving the dependency, it impacts the ease of dependency resolution in real time. The results also suggest that the parser actively uses discourse structure information during the encoding process, to the extent that the overlap of this information between encoded linguistic representations leads to a competition, encoding interference effect.</p

Divorces of Marriage Immigrants in South Korea: An Examination of Factors Affecting Divorce

In South Korea, as of 2013, ten out of a hundred newlywed couples included a marriage immigrant, i.e. someone who came to the country for the purpose of getting married to a native (Statistics Korea). South Korea, a traditionally homogeneous society, has seen an increase in marriage immigrants, primarily women, in recent years. Multicultural families face a variety of challenges. Marriage immigrants experience cultural and lifestyle differences, language problems, poverty, and domestic violence. In 2011, the divorce rate in multicultural families reached 10 percent and the average length of a marriage that ended in divorce was 4.9 years (Statistics Korea). High divorce rates in marriage immigrant families not only have a negative effect on divorced couples and their family members, they also play a role in dismantling social integration. This study examines the factors that lead to high divorce rates of marriage immigrants. The divorce factors vary. Through a review of the available literature, I chose multiple variables: immigrant\u27s age at marriage, couple\u27s age gap, immigrant\u27s education level, Korean proficiency, geographical area, job, spouse\u27s job stability, household monthly income, couple\u27s previous marriages, length of marriage, whether or not the couple has children, and domestic violence. To determine the effect of these variables on the divorce rates of marriage immigrants, the dataset includes both marriage immigrants who are already divorced and those who are still married. This data was obtained from Korea Immigration Service in 2014. I used a logistic regression model to analyze the data. I found five variables to predict the probability of divorce: domestic violence, Korean proficiency, geographical area, employment, and household monthly income. Out of these variables, domestic violence has an indisputable impact on the divorce of marriage immigrants. Based on the results, I recommend the authorities play a supportive role in curbing the dissolution of multicultural families. The Korean language education that marriage immigrants voluntarily participate in should become a compulsory course. Local communities, especially in urban areas, should pay attention and support marriage immigrants in the early stages of marriage. Self-sufficiency programs like job training and employment counseling should be provided to marriage immigrants without a job and low household income. Lastly, domestic violence support programs, such as a legal clinic offering advice to marriage immigrants, a program for developing and educating communication skills among Korean males, and a program for family counseling for husbands and wives, should be expanded to reduce couple conflict and improve conjugal relations

An Analysis of \u3ci\u3eKingdom of the Heart\u27s Content\u3c/i\u3e, Op. 11 by Joseph Baber

Kingdom of the Heart’s Content, Op. 11 is a selection of twelve sketches written between 1952 and 1956. In this work, Joseph Baber draws inspiration from his childhood memories and a variety of locations in Richmond, Virginia, using his unique blend of folk idioms, traditional forms and harmonies, and capricious metric changes to bring these vignettes to life. Kingdom of the Heart’s Content is comprised of twelve movements with the programmatic titles: Introduction: Stick Horses, Walk to Monroe Park, Charlie Short, Tag, Monument Avenue, Battle Abbey, Cycling, Sleighbells, Park Avenue Triangle, Goblins, Spring, and Finale: West End Farewell. The purposes of this DMA project are 1) to provide pianists and teachers with insight into Joseph Baber’s life, compositional style, and musical philosophy, 2) to provide a descriptive analysis and a brief performance suggestion of Kingdom of the Heart’s Content. This document will introduce the selected piano work by Joseph Baber to students and teachers; provide biographical information about Joseph Baber’s life, education, and career; and examine his compositions in the context of his personal narrative

Incremental Discourse-Update Constrains Number Agreement Attraction Effect

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) and appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in American English. In three self-paced reading experiments, we examined whether both RRCs and ARCs interfere with the matrix clause content and give rise to the agreement attraction effect. While the standard attraction effect was consistently observed in the baseline RRC structures, the effect varied in the ARC structures. These results collectively suggest that discourse structure indeed constrains syntactic dependency resolution. Most importantly, we argue that what is at stake is not the static discourse structure properties at the global sentence level. Instead, attention should be given to the incremental update of the discourse structure in terms of which discourse questions are active at any given moment of a discourse. The current findings have implications for understanding the way discourse structure, specifically the active state of discourse questions, constrains memory retrieval

Development and Initial Psychometric Evaluation of Nurses' Ethical Decision Making around End of Life Care Scale (NEDM-EOLCS) in Korea

Thesis advisor: Pamela J. GraceAs supported by extensive literature, nurses have a role to play in helping patients and families in getting their needs understood and met. This ethical responsibility includes decisions made by nurses in the context of end-of-life (EOL) care. Ethical decision-making is known to be influenced by nurses' understanding of their professional accountability and several cognitive processes that underlie moral action. Rest (1986) theorized these processes as: moral sensitivity, judgment, moral motivation, and moral character. However, few instruments have been developed to understand nurses' ethical decision-making during EOL care, and most have focused on a single dimension rather than on the multi-dimensional process. The purposes of this methodological study were: 1) to develop a scale with content domains and items capable of describing Korean nurses' ethical decision-making at EOL and 2) to evaluate the scale's psychometric properties using Korean nurses (N = 230). The criteria for participation were: Korean nurses having more than 2 years of clinical experience in the types of units where most Korean patients spend the end of their lives: critical care, general medical-surgical, and hospice units. The process followed two steps. Phase I consisted of the development of domains and items. Three domains were identified through themes derived from an integrated review of relevant literature and the findings from a preliminary qualitative study involving experts in EOL care in Korea. 95 items were generated within these three domains. Content validation was completed by a panel of six nursing ethics experts, three in Korea and three in the U.S. Next, a pilot study to test readability was conducted using three Korean nurses. During Phase II, 67 items of the NEDM-EOLCS version 3.0 were tested. After item analysis and factor analysis, a 55-item final version of the NEDM-EOLCS was established. The total scale and three subscales reported good reliability and validity. The three subscales were labeled: "perceived professional accountability," "moral reasoning and moral agency," and "moral practice at the EOL."Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009.Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing.Discipline: Nursing

Artequakt: Generating tailored biographies from automatically annotated fragments from the web

The Artequakt project seeks to automatically generate narrativebiographies of artists from knowledge that has been extracted from the Web and maintained in a knowledge base. An overview of the system architecture is presented here and the three key components of that architecture are explained in detail, namely knowledge extraction, information management and biography construction. Conclusions are drawn from the initial experiences of the project and future progress is detailed

Detecting Depression of Cancer Patients with Daily Mental Health Logs from Mobile Applications

Mobile mental health trackers, the mobile applications that gather self-reported mental logs from users, have gained recent attention from clinicians as a tool for detecting patients’ depression. However, critics have raised questions about the validity of the data collected from mental health trackers, which ask only a few simple questions using the face emoticon scale. This is the first study to address this issue, and we provide theoretical discussion that leads to the following hypotheses: (1) simpler but larger datasets collected daily from mobile mental health trackers can serve as good indicators to detect patients’ depression, and (2) higher adherence to mobile mental health trackers enhances screening accuracy. We test our hypotheses using the dataset of 5,792 sets of daily mental health logs collected from 78 breast cancer patients. Our random logistic panel regression and ROC analysis results, as well as k-means clustering analysis, provide strong supports for both hypotheses