Analysis of Motivation Triggers in Interactive Digital Reading for Children

Abstract Electronic teaching materials for children &apos

Therapeutic Applications and Mechanisms of YC-1: A Soluble Guanylate Cyclase Stimulator

Nitric oxide (NO) is an essential endogenous vasodilator to maintain vascular homeostasis, whose effects are mainly mediated by NO-dependent soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) which catalyzes the synthesis of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), a critical mediator of vascular relaxation. YC-1, a novel NO-independent sGC stimulator, was first introduced as an inhibitor of platelet aggregation and thrombosis. Accumulating studies revealed that YC-1 has multiple medication potentials to use for a broad spectrum of diseases ranging from cardiovascular diseases to cancers. In contrast to NO donors, YC-1 has a more favorable safety profile and low medication tolerance. In this chapter, we introduce canonical and pathological roles of NO, review activations, and regulatory mechanisms of YC-1 on NO-independent sGC/cGMP pathway and present the potential pharmacological applications and molecular mechanisms of YC-1

Disordered Fe vacancies and superconductivity in potassium-intercalated iron selenide (K2-xFe4+ySe5)

The parent compound of an unconventional superconductor must contain unusual correlated electronic and magnetic properties of its own. In the high-Tc potassium intercalated FeSe, there has been significant debate regarding what the exact parent compound is. Our studies unambiguously show that the Fe-vacancy ordered K2Fe4Se5 is the magnetic, Mott insulating parent compound of the superconducting state. Non-superconducting K2Fe4Se5 becomes a superconductor after high temperature annealing, and the overall picture indicates that superconductivity in K2-xFe4+ySe5 originates from the Fe-vacancy order to disorder transition. Thus, the long pending question whether magnetic and superconducting state are competing or cooperating for cuprate superconductors may also apply to the Fe-chalcogenide superconductors. It is believed that the iron selenides and related compounds will provide essential information to understand the origin of superconductivity in the iron-based superconductors, and possibly to the superconducting cuprates

Flood Damage Assessment in Taipei City Taiwan

In this study, we reviewed the literature on flood damage assessment and collected information for related research in Taiwan to analyze the relationships between direct flood damage, flood frequency, flood depth, and land-use. The procedure for flood damage assessment was then developed that includes the following steps: (a) Scenario simulation of inundation potential. (b) Establishment of the relationship between inundation depth and damage loss for varied land-use. (c) Risk analysis of inundation damage. Taipei City in north Taiwan was adopted as the case study to demonstrate the proposed algorithm. Flood events with return periods of 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200 years were used for flood hazard analysis to cover possible flooding scenarios. The inundation hazard maps were first generated via hydraulic modelling. The regional flood damage was then estimated using a relationship between inundation depth and damage. The flood damage exceedance probability (EP) curve for Taipei City was constructed following the association of the loss with its probability of occurrence. The flood damage EP curve was further used to integrate the damage assessments for individual flood events for a full probability range presentation of the flood risk. The expected annual damage was calculated by integrating the area under the EP curve

The squeeze film effect on micro-electromechanical resonators

The air squeeze film damping effect on the dynamic responses of clamped micro- electromechanical resonators is investigated in this study. A dynamic model for a clamped micro-electromechanical resonator with the damping consideration is derived using Lagrange’s equation. The corresponding resonator eigen solutions are formulated and solved by employing the assumed-mode method. The effect of different parameters; i.e. the resonator size, ambient temperature and pressure on the squeeze film damping characteristics were simulated and investigated. The results indicate that the squeeze film damping effect may significantly affect the dynamic responses of micro-scale electromechanical resonator

Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text

Speech and text are two major forms of human language. The research community has been focusing on mapping speech to text or vice versa for many years. However, in the field of language modeling, very little effort has been made to model them jointly. In light of this, we explore joint language modeling for speech units and text. Specifically, we compare different speech tokenizers to transform continuous speech signals into discrete units and use different methods to construct mixed speech-text data. We introduce automatic metrics to evaluate how well the joint LM mixes speech and text. We also fine-tune the LM on downstream spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks with different modalities (speech or text) and test its performance to assess the model's learning of shared representations. Our results show that by mixing speech units and text with our proposed mixing techniques, the joint LM improves over a speech-only baseline on SLU tasks and shows zero-shot cross-modal transferability.Comment: EMNLP findings 202

Identification of hot regions in protein-protein interactions by sequential pattern mining

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Identification of protein interacting sites is an important task in computational molecular biology. As more and more protein sequences are deposited without available structural information, it is strongly desirable to predict protein binding regions by their sequences alone. This paper presents a pattern mining approach to tackle this problem. It is observed that a functional region of protein structures usually consists of several peptide segments linked with large wildcard regions. Thus, the proposed mining technology considers large irregular gaps when growing patterns, in order to find the residues that are simultaneously conserved but largely separated on the sequences. A derived pattern is called a cluster-like pattern since the discovered conserved residues are always grouped into several blocks, which each corresponds to a local conserved region on the protein sequence.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The experiments conducted in this work demonstrate that the derived long patterns automatically discover the important residues that form one or several hot regions of protein-protein interactions. The methodology is evaluated by conducting experiments on the web server MAGIIC-PRO based on a well known benchmark containing 220 protein chains from 72 distinct complexes. Among the tested 218 proteins, there are 900 sequential blocks discovered, 4.25 blocks per protein chain on average. About 92% of the derived blocks are observed to be clustered in space with at least one of the other blocks, and about 66% of the blocks are found to be near the interface of protein-protein interactions. It is summarized that for about 83% of the tested proteins, at least two interacting blocks can be discovered by this approach.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This work aims to demonstrate that the important residues associated with the interface of protein-protein interactions may be automatically discovered by sequential pattern mining. The detected regions possess high conservation and thus are considered as the computational hot regions. This information would be useful to characterizing protein sequences, predicting protein function, finding potential partners, and facilitating protein docking for drug discovery.</p

Genotoxic Klebsiella pneumoniae in Taiwan

Colibactin is a nonribosomal peptide-polyketide synthesized by multi-enzyme complexes encoded by the pks gene cluster. Colibactin-producing Escherichia coli have been demonstrated to induce host DNA damage and promote colorectal cancer (CRC) development. In Taiwan, the occurrence of pyogenic liver abscess (PLA) has been suggested to correlate with an increasing risk of CRC, and Klebsiella pneumoniae is the predominant PLA pathogen in Taiwan