Competitive titration in living sea urchin embryos of regulatory factors required for expression of the CyIIIa actin gene

Previous studies have located some twenty distinct sites within the 2.3 kb 5' regulatory domain of the sea urchin CyIIIa cytoskeletal actin gene, where there occur in vitro high-specificity interactions with nuclear DNA-binding proteins of the embryo. This gene is activated in late cleavage, exclusively in cells of the aboral ectoderm cell lineages. In this study, we investigate the functional importance in vivo of these sites of DNA-protein interaction. Sea urchin eggs were coinjected with a fusion gene construct in which the bacterial chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter gene is under the control of the entire CyIIIa regulatory domain, together with molar excesses of one of ten nonoverlapping competitor subfragments of this domain, each of which contains one or a few specific site(s) of interaction. The exogenous excess binding sites competitively titrate the available regulatory factors away from the respective sites associated with the CyIIIa.CAT reporter gene. This provides a method for detecting in vivo sites within the regulatory domain that are required for normal levels of expression, without disturbing the structure of the regulatory domain. We thus identify five nonoverlapping regions of the regulatory DNA that apparently function as binding sites for positively acting transcriptional regulatory factors. Competition with a subfragment bearing an octamer site results in embryonic lethality. We find that three other sites display no quantitative competitive interference with CyIIIa.CAT expression, though as shown in the accompanying paper, two of these sites are required for control of spatial expression. We conclude that the complex CyIIIa regulatory domain must assess the state of many distinct and individually necessary interactions in order to properly regulate CyIIIa transcriptional activity in development

A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

Dialogic Teaching : Evaluation Report and Executive Summary

The aim of the intervention was to raise levels of engagement and attainment across English, maths, and science in primary schools by improving the quality of teacher and pupil talk in the classroom. The approach, termed ‘dialogic teaching’, emphasises dialogue through which pupils learn to reason, discuss, argue, and explain in order to develop their higher order thinking as well as their articulacy. The intervention was developed and delivered by a team from the Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) and the University of York. Year 5 teachers in 38 schools, and a teacher mentor from each school, received resources and training from the delivery team, and then implemented the intervention over the course of the autumn and spring terms in the 2015/2016 school year. Following the intervention, pupils were tested in English, mathematics, and science. This efficacy trial compared the 38 schools (2,492 pupils) in which the intervention took place with 38 control schools (2,466 pupils). During the intervention, the evaluation team also carried out a survey and interviews with a sample of teachers, mentors, and heads, plus case-study visits to three intervention schools

Redesigning photosynthesis to sustainably meet global food and bioenergy demand

The world's crop productivity is stagnating whereas population growth, rising affluence, and mandates for biofuels put increasing demands on agriculture. Meanwhile, demand for increasing cropland competes with equally crucial global sustainability and environmental protection needs. Addressing this looming agricultural crisis will be one of our greatest scientific challenges in the coming decades, and success will require substantial improvements at many levels. We assert that increasing the efficiency and productivity of photosynthesis in crop plants will be essential if this grand challenge is to be met. Here, we explore an array of prospective redesigns of plant systems at various scales, all aimed at increasing crop yields through improved photosynthetic efficiency and performance. Prospects range from straightforward alterations, already supported by preliminary evidence of feasibility, to substantial redesigns that are currently only conceptual, but that may be enabled by new developments in synthetic biology. Although some proposed redesigns are certain to face obstacles that will require alternate routes, the efforts should lead to new discoveries and technical advances with important impacts on the global problem of crop productivity and bioenergy production

Community Engaged Cumulative Risk Assessment of Exposure to Inorganic Well Water Contaminants, Crow Reservation, Montana

An estimated 11 million people in the US have home wells with unsafe levels of hazardous metals and nitrate. The national scope of the health risk from consuming this water has not been assessed as home wells are largely unregulated and data on well water treatment and consumption are lacking. Here, we assessed health risks from consumption of contaminated well water on the Crow Reservation by conducting a community-engaged, cumulative risk assessment. Well water testing, surveys and interviews were used to collect data on contaminant concentrations, water treatment methods, well water consumption, and well and septic system protection and maintenance practices. Additive Hazard Index calculations show that the water in more than 39% of wells is unsafe due to uranium, manganese, nitrate, zinc and/or arsenic. Most families’ financial resources are limited, and 95% of participants do not employ water treatment technologies. Despite widespread high total dissolved solids, poor taste and odor, 80% of families consume their well water. Lack of environmental health literacy about well water safety, pre-existing health conditions and limited environmental enforcement also contribute to vulnerability. Ensuring access to safe drinking water and providing accompanying education are urgent public health priorities for Crow and other rural US families with low environmental health literacy and limited financial resources

Profiles in Community-Engaged Learning

To provide a snapshot of the many impressive manifestations of community-engaged learning at the University of San Francisco, a 2014-2015 Faculty Learning Community (FLC), supported by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), has collected the following profiles of selected faculty members across all the schools and colleges. This report was prepared by members of the CTE’s Faculty Learning Community on Community-Engaged Learning: Kevin D. Lo, Facilitator (School of Management), Emma Fuentes (School of Education), David Holler (College of Arts and Sciences), Tim Iglesias (School of Law), Susan Roberta Katz (School of Education), Star Moore (Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good), Chenit Ong-Flaherty (School of Nursing and Health Professions), Jennifer Parlamis (School of Management) Susan Pauly-O’Neill (School of Nursing and Health Professions). Our intent with this report is to offer USF administrators and incoming faculty members a sense of what’s being done well in community-engaged learning (CEL), while also pointing out what challenges remain as we establish our identity as a university that prioritizes community engagement. (Incidentally, we prefer the term “community-engaged learning” to “service-learning,” which we feel more precisely defines the scope of our activities. For more about this designation, please see the Executive Report on Community Engaged Learning issued by this same committee in June 2015.) Community-engaged learning as defined by Eyler and Giles is “a form of experiential education where learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection as students . . . seek to achieve real objectives for the community and deeper understanding and skills for themselves. In the process, students link personal and social development with academic and cognitive development . . . experience enhances understanding; understanding leads to more effective action.” (qtd. in Bandy, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, “What Is Service Learning or Community Engagement?”). We invited at least two faculty members from each school/college to answer several questions about the application of CEL in their courses. After providing a brief overview of activities in each course, we asked each professor what works well and what challenges persist. The successes and the challenges, as you’ll see, vary widely, and yet they clearly delineate, limited though our present sample size is, the great variety and energy and commitment our faculty have demonstrated in working with community partners and students. It is our hope that this report is merely the beginning of a much more ambitious project to be taken up by the McCarthy Center which will provide many more profiles of professors in the months and years to come

Applying the Knowledge-to-Action Framework to Implement Gait and Balance Assessments in Inpatient Stroke Rehabilitation

Objectives The overall objectives of this project were to implement and sustain use of a gait assessment battery (GAB) that included the Berg Balance Scale, 10-meter walk test, and 6-minute walk test during inpatient stroke rehabilitation. The study objective was to assess the effect of the study intervention on clinician adherence to the recommendations and its effect on clinician perceptions and the organization. Design Pre- and post-training intervention study. Setting Subacute inpatient rehabilitation facility. Participants Physical therapists (N=6) and physical therapist assistants (N=2). Intervention The intervention comprised a bundle of activities, including codeveloping and executing the plan with clinicians and leaders. The multicomponent implementation plan was based on the Knowledge-to-Action Framework and included implementation facilitation, implementation leadership, and a bundle of knowledge translation interventions that targeted barriers. Implementation was an iterative process in which results from one implementation phase informed planning of the next phase. Main Outcome Measures Clinician administration adherence, surveys of perceptions, and organizational outcomes. Results Initial adherence to the GAB was 46% and increased to more than 85% after 6 months. These adherence levels remained consistent 48 months after implementation. Clinician perceptions of measure use were initially high (>63%), with significant improvements in knowledge and use of one measure after implementation. Conclusions We successfully implemented the assessment battery with high levels of adherence to recommendations, likely because of using the bundle of knowledge translation activities, facilitation, and use of a framework to codevelop the plan. These changes in practice were sustainable, as determined by a 4-year follow-up

Following the Money: The Wire and Distant American Studies

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity

Measurement of the decay rate and the parameter αK* of the decay KL → μμγ

The rate of the decay of the neutral K meson into KL0 → μμγ has been measured with the NA48 detector at the CERN SPS. A total of 59 events has been observed with an estimated background of 14 events. The overall Kaon flux was determined to be 1.2 × 109. This observation corresponds to a branching ratio of (3.4 ± 0.6stat ± 0.4sys × 10-7. Using this branching ratio the parameter αK* describing the relative strength of the two contributing amplitudes to this decay, through intermediate pseudoscalar or vectorlike mesons, was measured to be αK* = -0.04+-0.21+0.24