Chronic Proliferative Dermatitis in Mice: NFκB Activation Autoinflammatory Disease

Autoinflammatory diseases are a heterogeneous group of congenital diseases characterized by the presence of recurrent inflammation, in the absence of infectious agents, detectable autoantibodies or antigen-specific autoreactive T-cells. SHARPIN deficient mice presents multiorgan chronic inflammation without known autoantibodies or autoreactive T-cells, designated Sharpincpdm. Histological studies demonstrated epidermal hyperproliferation, Th-2 inflammation, and keratinocyte apoptosis in this mutant. The mutant mice have decreased behavioral mobility, slower growth, and loss of body weight. Epidermal thickness and mitotic epidermal cells increase along with disease development. K5/K14 expression is distributed through all layers of epidermis, along with K6 expression in interfollicular epidermis, suggesting epidermal hyperproliferation. K1/K10 is only detectable in outer layers of spinosum epidermis, reflecting accelerated keratinocyte migration. Alpha smooth muscle actin is overexpressed in skin blood vessels, which may release the elevated white blood cells to dermis. CD3+CD45+ cells and granulocytes, especially eosinophils and mast cells, aggregate in the mutant skin. TUNEL assay, together with Annexin-V/propidium iodide FACS analysis, confirmed the increase of apoptotic keratinocytes in skin. These data validate and provide new lines of evidence of the proliferation-inflammation-apoptosis triad in Sharpincpdm mice, an NFκB activation autoinflammatory disease

English language education at Guangxi University, China：challenges, responses and recommendations

This study is concerned with the growing expectation of the quality of English language education in China’s universities under the pressure of globalization as well as a developing Chinese society. Since the 1980s, four national curricula for English language education at universities have been introduced by the Chinese Ministry of Education, causing an unprecedented “English craze” in China’s higher education and other areas of its society. However, despite the heavy investment in terms of capital and facilities, the quality of English language education has become a pressing problem in higher education as well as in Chinese society. The aim of the research is to explore what the challenges and resolutions are in improving English language education at Guangxi University, China. The research project draws insight from a mixed methods approach underpinned by interpretivism and the research design is a case study. The data were collected through interviews with the university administrative staff, teaching staff and students, questionnaires with teachers and students, and documentary reading. The study found that administrative staff, teaching staff, and students at Guangxi University are currently confronted by wide variety of challenges as a result of the pressures coming from three hierarchical levels, namely, the global, national and institutional levels. The findings suggest that among the various challenges the most prominent ones involve teachers’ lack of career development training, lack of information on ongoing reform, different priorities by stakeholders in College English evaluation and students’ desires being mostly overlooked. Based on the research data, the study indicates remedial strategies in four domains: administration, course design, teacher career development and learning support. With regard to its contribution to the literature, by providing an illuminative case study within a global context, the research describes various responsive strategies taken at national and institutional levels, contributing to the developing body of theory on globalization in China’s higher education. The study offers diverse and different views III and experiences about English language education at the university level, which also contributes to the research tradition of language teaching in higher education. In this sense, the study has implications for theory, practice and future research in language teaching under a global context in higher education. Key words: English language education; interpretivism; a mixed methods approach; challenges; response

Opportunities and challenges of interbasin water transfers: a literature review with bibliometric analysis

© 2015 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary Interbasin water transfers and diversions are among the most controversial water-resources-planning topics worldwide. They provide supply alternatives to receiving basins and potential challenges to the donor basins within a context of changing global water problems. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of global interbasin water transfer research between 1900 and 2014. The bibliometric analysis analyzes general characteristics of publications, the national, institutional, and personal research outputs, participating regions and their research activity, and global trends and hot issues in the field of water transfers. Our results show that the rate of annual publication of interbasin water transfer research grew steadily after 1972 and is rising quickly at present. The United States produced the largest number of single-country publications (37.4 %) and international collaborative publications (46.6 %). However, China had a high growth rate of publications after 2001, and surpassed the United States and ranked 1st in 2012, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences playing a leading role in the emergence of China’s research output. The global geographic distribution of publication activity shows that an increasing number of countries, agencies, and scholars have become part of the research enterprise. There is ample opportunity for cooperation between them to be strengthened in the future. The results of keyword evolution generally indicate that the research on interbasin water transfers expanded from 1991 through 2014. The hydrological and eco-environmental impacts of the South-to-North Water Transfer/Diversion Project in China and the corresponding long-term monitoring and conservation strategy have become one of the top topics of attention

Augmented Arnoldi-Tikhonov Regularization Methods for Solving Large-Scale Linear Ill-Posed Systems

We propose an augmented Arnoldi-Tikhonov regularization method for the solution of large-scale linear ill-posed systems. This method augments the Krylov subspace by a user-supplied low-dimensional subspace, which contains a rough approximation of the desired solution. The augmentation is implemented by a modified Arnoldi process. Some useful results are also presented. Numerical experiments illustrate that the augmented method outperforms the corresponding method without augmentation on some real-world examples

Dual-band polarimetric HRRP recognition via a brain-inspired multi-channel fusion feature extraction network

Radar high-resolution range profile (HRRP) provides geometric and structural information of target, which is important for radar automatic target recognition (RATR). However, due to the limited information dimension of HRRP, achieving accurate target recognition is challenging in applications. In recent years, with the rapid development of radar components and signal processing technology, the acquisition and use of target multi-frequency and polarization scattering information has become a significant way to improve target recognition performance. Meanwhile, deep learning inspired by the human brain has shown great promise in pattern recognition applications. In this paper, a Multi-channel Fusion Feature Extraction Network (MFFE-Net) inspired by the human brain is proposed for dual-band polarimetric HRRP, aiming at addressing the challenges faced in HRRP target recognition. In the proposed network, inspired by the human brain’s multi-dimensional information interaction, the similarity and difference features of dual-frequency HRRP are first extracted to realize the interactive fusion of frequency features. Then, inspired by the human brain’s selective attention mechanism, the interactive weights are obtained for multi-polarization features and multi-scale representation, enabling feature aggregation and multi-scale fusion. Finally, inspired by the human brain’s hierarchical learning mechanism, the layer-by-layer feature extraction and fusion with residual connections are designed to enhance the separability of features. Experiments on simulated and measured datasets verify the accurate recognition capability of MFFE-Net, and ablative studies are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of components of network for recognition

Characterization, dissolution and solubility of the hydroxypyromorphite–hydroxyapatite solid solution [(PbxCa1−x)5(PO4)3OH] at 25 °C and pH 2–9

Additional file 1: Appendix A. Supplementary data—X-ray diffractograms (XRD) of the hydroxypyromorphite–hydroxyapatite solid solution [(PbxCa1−x)5(PO4)3(OH)] after dissolution at 25 ˚C and an initial pH of 5.60 and 9.00 for 300d