1,182 research outputs found
Educators’ Use and Views of Simulations as Teaching Tools within a Discipline: The Example of Hospitality and Tourism
This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning study investigated hospitality faculty members’ perceptions and use of industry-related simulations in hospitality and tourism education to help the authors understand how simulations are and can be used as educational tools. Using learning engagement theory as a framework, respondents to a survey perceived that simulations help students develop decision-making skills, increase problem-solving skills, integrate knowledge from other classes, learn to work with others, and link theory to practice, and noted that simulations are fun to use. A significant positive relationship was found between the number of semesters educators have used simulations and their satisfaction with the simulations. Perceived drawbacks to the use of simulations included that they are costly, time-consuming, too complex, and lack realism and validity. Based on the findings, suggestions are made for improving the use of simulations in hospitality and tourism education, and limitations and ideas for further research are offered
Autophagy in Adipocyte Browning: Emerging Drug Target for Intervention in Obesity
Autophagy, lipophagy, and mitophagy are considered to be the major recycling processes for protein aggregates, excess fat, and damaged mitochondria in adipose tissues in response to nutrient status-associated stress, oxidative stress, and genotoxic stress in the human body. Obesity with increased body weight is often associated with white adipose tissue (WAT) hypertrophy and hyperplasia and/or beige/brown adipose tissue atrophy and aplasia, which significantly contribute to the imbalance in lipid metabolism, adipocytokine secretion, free fatty acid release, and mitochondria function. In recent studies, hyperactive autophagy in WAT was observed in obese and diabetic patients, and inhibition of adipose autophagy through targeted deletion of autophagy genes in mice improved anti-obesity phenotypes. In addition, active mitochondria clearance through activation of autophagy was required for beige/brown fat whitening – that is, conversion to white fat. However, inhibition of autophagy seemed detrimental in hypermetabolic conditions such as hepatic steatosis, atherosclerosis, thermal injury, sepsis, and cachexia through an increase in free fatty acid and glycerol release from WAT. The emerging concept of white fat browning–conversion to beige/brown fat– has been controversial in its anti-obesity effect through facilitation of weight loss and improving metabolic health. Thus, proper regulation of autophagy activity fit to an individual metabolic profile is necessary to ensure balance in adipose tissue metabolism and function, and to further prevent metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes. In this review, we summarize the effect of autophagy in adipose tissue browning in the context of obesity prevention and its potential as a promising target for the development of anti-obesity drugs
Arsenite exposure suppresses adipogenesis, mitochondrial biogenesis and thermogenesis via autophagy inhibition in brown adipose tissue
Arsenite, a trivalent form of arsenic, is an element that occurs naturally in the environment. Humans are exposed to high dose of arsenite through consuming arsenite-contaminated drinking water and food, and the arsenite can accumulate in the human tissues. Arsenite induces oxidative stress, which is linked to metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes. Brown adipocytes dissipating energy as heat have emerging roles for obesity treatment and prevention. therefore, understanding the pathophysiological role of brown adipocytes can provide effective strategies delineating the link between arsenite exposure and metabolic disorders. Our study revealed that arsenite significantly reduced differentiation of murine brown adipocytes and mitochondrial biogenesis and respiration, leading to attenuated thermogenesis via decreasing UCP1 expression. Oral administration of arsenite in mice resulted in heavy accumulation in brown adipose tissue and suppression of lipogenesis, mitochondrial biogenesis and thermogenesis.Mechanistically, arsenite exposure significantly inhibited autophagy necessary for homeostasis of brown adipose tissue through suppression of Sestrin2 and ULK1. These results clearly confirm the emerging mechanisms underlying the implications of arsenite exposure in metabolic disorders
P1-134: Clinical Experience of Simultaneous Multitarget Irradiation using Tomotherapy in Pulmonary Metastasis
Sound-Guided Semantic Video Generation
The recent success in StyleGAN demonstrates that pre-trained StyleGAN latent
space is useful for realistic video generation. However, the generated motion
in the video is usually not semantically meaningful due to the difficulty of
determining the direction and magnitude in the StyleGAN latent space. In this
paper, we propose a framework to generate realistic videos by leveraging
multimodal (sound-image-text) embedding space. As sound provides the temporal
contexts of the scene, our framework learns to generate a video that is
semantically consistent with sound. First, our sound inversion module maps the
audio directly into the StyleGAN latent space. We then incorporate the
CLIP-based multimodal embedding space to further provide the audio-visual
relationships. Finally, the proposed frame generator learns to find the
trajectory in the latent space which is coherent with the corresponding sound
and generates a video in a hierarchical manner. We provide the new
high-resolution landscape video dataset (audio-visual pair) for the
sound-guided video generation task. The experiments show that our model
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of video quality. We further
show several applications including image and video editing to verify the
effectiveness of our method
Role of age and sex in determining antibiotic resistance in febrile urinary tract infections
SummaryObjectivesTo identify the age- and sex-specific antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of Gram-negative bacteria (GNB) in outpatient febrile urinary tract infections (UTIs) in Korea.MethodsA total 2262 consecutive samples collected from patients aged 1–101 years with febrile UTIs, during the period January 2012 to December 2014, were analyzed in this multicentre, retrospective cohort study.ResultsThe sensitivities to cefotaxime and cefoxitin were over 85% for females but under 75% for males. Sex played an important role in the susceptibility of GNB to cefotaxime (p<0.001) and cefoxitin (p<0.001). The sensitivity to ciprofloxacin (age >20 years) was under 75% in both sexes, and was not influenced by sex (p=0.204). Age distributions of the incidences of resistance to cefotaxime, cefoxitin, and ciprofloxacin (age >20 years) were similar to the age distribution of the incidence of GNB, which indicates that the resistance patterns to these drugs were not affected by age (Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, female/male: p=0.927/p=0.509, p=0.193/p=0.911, and p=0.077/p=0.999, respectively).ConclusionsAge is not a considerable factor in determining the antibiotic resistance in febrile UTIs. Ciprofloxacin should be withheld from both sexes until culture results indicate its use. Second- or third-generation cephalosporins such as cefoxitin and cefotaxime can be used empirically only in females
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