A need for evidence-based and multidisciplinary research to study the effects of the interaction of school environmental conditions on student achievement

With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Healthy Schools initiative, a research team from the University of Nebraska– Lincoln (UNL) is currently working on establishing how environmental conditions in K-12 school buildings impact student scholastic achievement. The objectives of the research project are: (1) to study comprehensively the impacts of a wide set of indoor environmental factors (including indoor air quality, thermal, lighting and acoustic conditions) on student achievement; (2) to investigate how these environmental conditions interact with each other to impact student achievement; (3) to rank order the environmental variables in terms of their relative impact on student achievement and (4) to determine how these effects vary with different demographic (e.g. socio-economic) groups

Draft Genome Sequence of Chromobacterium violaceum Strain CV017

We announce the draft genome sequence for Chromobacterium violaceum strain CV017, used as a model and tool to understand acyl-homoserine lactone-dependent quorum sensing. The assembly consists of 4,774,638-bp contained in 211 scaffolds

Antifungal Activity of Camptothecin, Trifolin, and Hyperoside Isolated from Camptotheca acuminate

Leaf spots and root rots are major fungal diseases in Camptotheca acuminata that limit cultivation of the plant for camptothecin (CPT), a promising anticancer and antiviral alkaloid. Bioassays showed that pure CPT and flavonoids (trifolin and hyperoside) isolated from Camptotheca effectively control fungal pathogens in vitro, including Alternaria alternata, Epicoccum nigrum, Pestalotia guepinii, Drechslera sp., and Fusarium avenaceum, although antifungal activity of these compounds in the plant is limited. CPT inhibited mycelial growth by approximately 50% (EC50) at 10-30 íg/mL and fully inhibited growth at 75-125 íg/mL. The flavonoids were less effective than CPT at 50 íg/mL, particularly within 20 days after treatment, but more effective at 100 or 150 íg/mL. CPT, trifolin, and hyperoside may serve as leads for the development of fungicides

Antifungal Activity of Camptothecin, Trifolin, and Hyperoside Isolated from Camptotheca Acuminata

Leaf spots and root rots are major fungal diseases in Camptotheca acuminata that limit cultivation of the plant for camptothecin (CPT), a promising anticancer and antiviral alkaloid. Bioassays showed that pure CPT and flavonoids (trifolin and hyperoside) isolated from Camptotheca effectively control fungal pathogens in vitro, including Alternaria alternata, Epicoccum nigrum, Pestalotia guepinii, Drechslera sp., and Fusarium avenaceum, although antifungal activity of these compounds in the plant is limited. CPT inhibited mycelial growth by approximately 50% (EC50) at 10−30 μg/mL and fully inhibited growth at 75−125 μg/mL. The flavonoids were less effective than CPT at 50 μg/mL, particularly within 20 days after treatment, but more effective at 100 or 150 μg/mL. CPT, trifolin, and hyperoside may serve as leads for the development of fungicides

Fruit salad algebra – A comparison of experts’ and mathematics teachers’ noticing

TaiGer Noticing project, funded by MOST (grant 106-2511-S- 003-027-MY3) and the DFG – (grant DR 1098/1-1 and LI 2616/2-1)

GlucoSynth: Generating Differentially-Private Synthetic Glucose Traces

We focus on the problem of generating high-quality, private synthetic glucose traces, a task generalizable to many other time series sources. Existing methods for time series data synthesis, such as those using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), are not able to capture the innate characteristics of glucose data and cannot provide any formal privacy guarantees without severely degrading the utility of the synthetic data. In this paper we present GlucoSynth, a novel privacy-preserving GAN framework to generate synthetic glucose traces. The core intuition behind our approach is to conserve relationships amongst motifs (glucose events) within the traces, in addition to temporal dynamics. Our framework incorporates differential privacy mechanisms to provide strong formal privacy guarantees. We provide a comprehensive evaluation on the real-world utility of the data using 1.2 million glucose traces; GlucoSynth outperforms all previous methods in its ability to generate high-quality synthetic glucose traces with strong privacy guarantees

On real-time optical subcarrier management in P2MP networks with mixed-strategy gaming

We developed a mixed-strategy gaming approach for distributed and real-time optical subscarrier management in point-to-multipoint networks, achieving traffic loss rates close to those by ILP-based centralized optimization.This work was supported in part by NSFC under Project 62201627, by the European Commission though the HORIZON SEASON (G.A. 101096120) projects, by the MICINN IBON (PID2020-114135RB-I00) project and from the ICREA institution.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft