A comparative analysis of national media responses to the OECD survey of adult skills: policy making from the global to the local?

OECD’s Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is put forward as a landmark development in the lifelong monitoring and international comparison of education. PIAAC’s first round of the Survey of Adult Skills compared performance in Literacy, Numeracy and Problem Solving in Technology-Rich Environments across 24 countries. However, the translation of any OECD agenda into national policies is mediated by many actors including the media. This paper examines and compares how national media of Japan, England and France reported on the PIAAC results of their countries, and the extent to which these reports mirror key messages from the OECD’s Country Notes. It begins to trace how the OECD PIAAC agendas materialise into national policies. Although their role in this initial period was limited, we argue the roles of the media together with other policy actors must be monitored as they interact to shape possibilities for sustainable adult education policies

Addressing spin transitions on 209Bi donors in silicon using circularly-polarized microwaves

Over the past decade donor spin qubits in isotopically enriched $^{28}$Si have been intensely studied due to their exceptionally long coherence times. More recently bismuth donor electron spins have become popular because Bi has a large nuclear spin which gives rise to clock transitions (first-order insensitive to magnetic field noise). At every clock transition there are two nearly degenerate transitions between four distinct states which can be used as a pair of qubits. Here it is experimentally demonstrated that these transitions are excited by microwaves of opposite helicity such that they can be selectively driven by varying microwave polarization. This work uses a combination of a superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) microresonator and a dielectric resonator to flexibly generate arbitrary elliptical polarizations while retaining the high sensitivity of the CPW

Caffeine intake and the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Japanese adults

Background: To investigate the association between caffeine intake and the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among Japanese older adults, a case–control study was conducted in central Japan. Methods: A total of 277 patients with COPD aged 50 to 75 years were referred by respiratory physicians, while 340 controls were recruited from the community. All participants had their disease status confirmed by spirometry. Information on habitual caffeine intake, demographic, and lifestyle characteristics was obtained by face-to-face interview using a validated questionnaire. Results: The COPD patients drank more coffee and had a higher mean caffeine intake (311.3, SD 176.2mg/day) than the control group (278.4, SD 188.1 mg/day), p = 0.03. Relative to nondrinkers, the risk of COPD apparently increased for those drinking at least two cups of coffee daily (adjusted odds ratio 1.58, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.93 to 2.71). Similarly, total caffeine intake was associated with the prevalence of COPD—the adjusted odds ratio being 1.30 (95% CI 1.09 to 2.12) for consuming over 312mg/day when compared to a low intake of less than 184mg/day. Conclusions: The epidemiological evidence suggested a positive association between caffeine intake and the development of COPD in Japanese adults. Further study of the effect of caffeine on lung function and the risk of COPD should be undertaken

Cytotoxic T lymphocyte lysis of HTLV-1 infected cells is limited by weak HBZ protein expression, but non-specifically enhanced on induction of Tax expression

BACKGROUND: Immunogenetic evidence indicates that cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) specific for the weak CTL antigen HBZ limit HTLV-1 proviral load in vivo, whereas there is no clear relationship between the proviral load and the frequency of CTLs specific for the immunodominant antigen Tax. In vivo, circulating HTLV-1-infected cells express HBZ mRNA in contrast, Tax expression is typically low or undetectable. To elucidate the virus-suppressing potential of CTLs targeting HBZ, we compared the ability of HBZ- and Tax-specific CTLs to lyse naturally-infected cells, by co-incubating HBZ- and Tax-specific CTL clones with primary CD4(+) T cells from HLA-matched HTLV-1-infected donors. We quantified lysis of infected cells, and tested whether specific virus-induced host cell surface molecules determine the susceptibility of infected cells to CTL-mediated lysis. RESULTS: Primary infected cells upregulated HLA-A*02, ICAM-1, Fas and TRAIL-R1/2 in concert with Tax expression, forming efficient targets for both HTLV-1-specific CTLs and CTLs specific for an unrelated virus. We detected expression of HBZ mRNA (spliced isoform) in both Tax-expressing and non-expressing infected cells, and the HBZ(26–34) epitope was processed and presented by cells transfected with an HBZ expression plasmid. However, when coincubated with primary cells, a high-avidity HBZ-specific CTL clone killed significantly fewer infected cells than were killed by a Tax-specific CTL clone. Finally, incubation with Tax- or HBZ-specific CTLs resulted in a significant decrease in the frequency of cells expressing high levels of HLA-A*02. CONCLUSIONS: HTLV-1 gene expression in primary CD4(+) T cells non-specifically increases susceptibility to CTL lysis. Despite the presence of HBZ spliced-isoform mRNA, HBZ epitope presentation by primary cells is significantly less efficient than that of Tax. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12977-014-0116-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Examining Museum Visits as Literacy Events: the role of mediators

Museum exhibitions are literacy rich environments. Visitors may engage with a range of texts including texts that constitute the exhibition objects themselves, those that convey information about the objects and those that instruct visitors about how the visitors are expected by the museum to navigate through the exhibition. The ways in which visitors engage with these diverse texts are important defining factors of the visitors museum experience. For museums, understanding how texts in their exhibitions are influencing the museum experience, and the possibility of a museum experience for the broad public community is important in the fulfilment of their public mission as cultural and education institutions. In this paper, we adopt a view of literacy as a social practice, the perspective of New Literacy Studies (NLS), that offers a fruitful way for museums to consider the interactions between exhibition texts and their audiences. Such considerations, we argue, can inform museums approaches to broadening their visitor demographics to more strongly fulfill their public mission. We show that the goals of NLS resonate with some of the goals of the New Museology movement in museum studies, a movement that aims to democratize what museums represent and how

Cardiac-Specific SOCS3 Deletion Prevents In Vivo Myocardial Ischemia Reperfusion Injury through Sustained Activation of Cardioprotective Signaling Molecules.

Myocardial ischemia reperfusion injury (IRI) adversely affects cardiac performance and the prognosis of patients with acute myocardial infarction. Although myocardial signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) 3 is potently cardioprotective during IRI, the inhibitory mechanism responsible for its activation is largely unknown. The present study aimed to investigate the role of the myocardial suppressor of cytokine signaling (SOCS)-3, an intrinsic negative feedback regulator of the Janus kinase (JAK)-STAT signaling pathway, in the development of myocardial IRI. Myocardial IRI was induced in mice by ligating the left anterior descending coronary artery for 1 h, followed by different reperfusion times. One hour after reperfusion, the rapid expression of JAK-STAT-activating cytokines was observed. We precisely evaluated the phosphorylation of cardioprotective signaling molecules and the expression of SOCS3 during IRI and then induced myocardial IRI in wild-type and cardiac-specific SOCS3 knockout mice (SOCS3-CKO). The activation of STAT3, AKT, and ERK1/2 rapidly peaked and promptly decreased during IRI. This decrease correlated with the induction of SOCS3 expression up to 24 h after IRI in wild-type mice. The infarct size 24 h after reperfusion was significantly reduced in SOCS3-CKO compared with wild-type mice. In SOCS3-CKO mice, STAT3, AKT, and ERK1/2 phosphorylation was sustained, myocardial apoptosis was prevented, and the expression of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family member myeloid cell leukemia-1 (Mcl-1) was augmented. Cardiac-specific SOCS3 deletion led to the sustained activation of cardioprotective signaling molecules including and prevented myocardial apoptosis and injury during IRI. Our findings suggest that SOCS3 may represent a key factor that exacerbates the development of myocardial IRI