Improve the performance of transfer learning without fine-tuning using dissimilarity-based multi-view learning for breast cancer histology images

Breast cancer is one of the most common types of cancer and leading cancer-related death causes for women. In the context of ICIAR 2018 Grand Challenge on Breast Cancer Histology Images, we compare one handcrafted feature extractor and five transfer learning feature extractors based on deep learning. We find out that the deep learning networks pretrained on ImageNet have better performance than the popular handcrafted features used for breast cancer histology images. The best feature extractor achieves an average accuracy of 79.30%. To improve the classification performance, a random forest dissimilarity based integration method is used to combine different feature groups together. When the five deep learning feature groups are combined, the average accuracy is improved to 82.90% (best accuracy 85.00%). When handcrafted features are combined with the five deep learning feature groups, the average accuracy is improved to 87.10% (best accuracy 93.00%)

Retrieving and recontextualising VET theory

To what extent can we speak of theory specific to vocational education and training (VET) and what is its relevance today? This Special Issue 19 of bwp@ aims to (re)ignite academic discourse on VET theory, retrieving earlier theorisation specific to this field, mainly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (the DACH countries) and connecting it both with international perspectives and contemporary debates. We invite papers in English or German that engage with these debates. From an international perspective, the DACH countries are extraordinary both in their proposition of theories of VET sui generis and especially in their influence on the field of policy and practice. By contrast, for example in English-speaking countries, influential theories that address the question of vocational study, whilst drawing extensively on philosophical and social science concepts, developed largely in opposition to policy and practices that positioned vocational learning as an inferior pathway and narrowed its educational scope. The dual apprenticeship model has been widely imitated internationally but without regard to the social partnerships, labour markets and education workforce developed in Germany, and the theories that shaped this system are neither translated nor widely discussed in other languages. While there are several approaches to VET theory, the core of all these approaches is a framework of normative goals of education, a characterisation of how these goals can be reached through vocational education in particular and the formulation of (education) policy implications that are necessary for successful implementation. For example, Kerschensteiner (1901, 1966/1904) in his emphasis on civic virtues as a central aim of education, drew attention to the possibility of attaining such virtues through work, but acknowledged the necessity of a foundation in general education. In contrast, post-war critical approaches, which regularly draw on critical theory (see Habermas 1968; Horkheimer & Adorno 1947), and can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s, identify autonomy and emancipation as central objectives of education (e.g. Lempert 1971; Blankertz 1974, 1979, 1982). The main challenge of VET theory was to explain how these goals also can be reached through vocational education. Blankertz’s answer lay in emphasizing the role of the VET school in widening and deepening knowledge associated with the workspace. The value of these approaches for contemporary VET is dependent on their adaptation to contemporary problems that VET and society are experiencing: migration and integration; climate change and resource consumption, digitisation and globalisation. The tertiarisation of both the economy and of education, as the service sector employs a greater proportion of the population and a growing number of young people enter higher education, even in Germany, also calls into question the relevance of established VET theories. As the structures and forms of organisation that have sustained VET since the 1970s have given way to new social formations and new forms of precarity, the relevance of theories developed during the long period of post-war growth is called into question. Correspondingly, whether a critical standpoint can still be clearly located after the “fall of metaphysics” (Adorno 1998/1965) has also been deemed as questionable (cf. Schäfer 2005). Furthermore, a succession of de-centring approaches including post-structuralist, postmodernist and post-anthropocentric paradigms has suggested the erosion of earlier ‘grand narratives’, the supersession of the ‘enlightenment project’ and even questioned the progressive potential of human labour that explicitly VET theories tend to take for granted. Call for Papers bwp@ Spezial 19 2 Against this background, the bwp@ Special invites contributions that address both VET theory and its application to contemporary issues. The aim is to stimulate a discussion on the continuing significance of VET theory. The aim is to provide space for ideas on how the discipline and its subject could position itself, both nationally and beyond national borders, in its normative-theoretical contours and/or in relation to VET policy and VET practice

The family-specific α4-helix of the kinesin-13, MCAK, is critical to microtubule end recognition

Kinesins that influence the dynamics of microtubule growth and shrinkage require the ability to distinguish between the microtubule end and the microtubule lattice. The microtubule depolymerizing kinesin MCAK has been shown to specifically recognize the microtubule end. This ability is key to the action of MCAK in regulating microtubule dynamics. We show that the a4-helix of the motor domain is crucial to microtubule end recognition. Mutation of the residues K524, E525 and R528, which are located in the C-terminal half of the a4-helix, specifically disrupts the ability of MCAK to recognize the microtubule end. Mutation of these residues, which are conserved in the kinesin-13 family and discriminate members of this family from translocating kinesins, impairs the ability of MCAK to discriminate between the microtubule lattice and the microtubule end

A universal high energy anomaly in angle resolved photoemission spectra of high temperature superconductors - possible evidence of spinon and holon branches

A universal high energy anomaly in the single particle spectral function is reported in three different families of high temperature superconductors by using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. As we follow the dispersing peak of the spectral function from the Fermi energy to the valence band complex, we find dispersion anomalies marked by two distinctive high energy scales, E_1=~ 0.38 eV and E_2=~0.8 eV. E_1 marks the energy above which the dispersion splits into two branches. One is a continuation of the near parabolic dispersion, albeit with reduced spectral weight, and reaches the bottom of the band at the gamma point at ~0.5 eV. The other is given by a peak in the momentum space, nearly independent of energy between E_1 and E_2. Above E_2, a band-like dispersion re-emerges. We conjecture that these two energies mark the disintegration of the low energy quasiparticles into a spinon and holon branch in the high T_c cuprates.Comment: accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

A quality monitor and monitoring technique employing optically stimulated electron emission

A light source directs ultraviolet light onto a test surface and a detector detects a current of photoelectrons generated by the light. The detector includes a collector which is positively biased with respect to the test surface. Quality is indicated based on the photoelectron current. The collector is then negatively biased to replace charges removed by the measurement of a nonconducting substrate to permit subsequent measurements. Also, the intensity of the ultraviolet light at a particular wavelength is monitored and the voltage of the light source varied to maintain the light a constant desired intensity. The light source is also cooled via a gas circulation system. If the test surface is an insulator, the surface is bombarded with ultraviolet light in the presence of an electron field to remove the majority of negative charges from the surface. The test surface is then exposed to an ion field until it possesses no net charge. The technique described above is then performed to assess quality