An Online Multimedia Resource in Behavioral Neuroscience

The advance of web-based technology has stimulated innovation in education. This paper discusses the development and evaluation of an online multimedia resource for undergraduate-level behavioral neuroscience education. This resource surveys four major subject areas: language, attention and perception, thinking, and autism. It employs audio and video streaming, online demonstration experiments, computer simulation, and internet links. This online resource has two distinct advantages over a paper textbook. First, a considerable proportion of the content is conveyed using multimedia, thus making the learning experience more vivid and dynamic. Second, its interactive components provide opportunities for students to participate in the various experimental tasks introduced in the text and to compare their own performance with those of others. This hands-on experience not only enables students to gain in-depth procedural knowledge of the tasks but also has positive effects on their motivation. Feedback from three undergraduate classes that used this resource as supplementary material showed that students were highly positive about its pedagogical values. This free resource is available on the web at http://psych.rice.edu/mmtbn/

Effectiveness of Simulation Training on Transfer of Statistical Concepts

The effectiveness of simulations for teaching statistical concepts was compared to the effectiveness of a textbook. The variable Medium (simulation versus textbook) and Question specificity (Specific versus Nonspecific), were manipulated factorially. Question specificity was defined as follows: Subjects were presented with a scenario in which gumballs were sampled from an urn. Subjects in the “Specific” condition were given a specific question about the outcome of the sampling procedure to consider; subjects in the “Non-specific” condition were asked generally to consider what would happen. A no-treatment control was included. The subjects consisted of 115 college students. The dependent variable was performance on problems requiring subjects to apply what they learned to ill defined everyday problems. Subjects trained by simulation performed significantly better than those trained with a textbook. Subjects in the “Specific” condition performed better than those in the “Non-specific” condition, although the difference did not reach conventional levels of significance. These results support the increasing use of simulation in education and training

Cryptanalysis and improvement of password-authenticated key agreement for session initiation protocol using smart cards

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is one of the most commonly used protocols for handling sessions for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based communications, and the security of SIP is becoming increasingly important. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a password authenticated key agreement protocol for SIP by using smart cards to protect the VoIP communications between users. Their protocol provided some unique features, such as mutual authentication, no password table needed, and password updating freely. In this study, we performed cryptanalysis of Zhang et al.'s protocol and found that their protocol was vulnerable to the impersonation attack although the protocol could withstand several other attacks. A malicious attacker could compute other users’ privacy keys and then impersonated the users to cheat the SIP server. Furthermore, we proposed an improved password authentication key agreement protocol for SIP, which overcame the weakness of Zhang et al.’s protocol and was more suitable for VoIP communications

Efficient and flexible password authenticated key agreement for Voice over Internet Protocol session initiation protocol using smart card

Providing a suitable key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol is crucial to protecting the communication among the users over the open channel. This paper presents an efficient and flexible password authenticated key agreement protocol for session initiation protocol associated with Voice over Internet Protocol. The proposed protocol has many unique properties, such as session key agreement, mutual authentication, password updating function and the server not needing to maintain a password or verification table, and so on. In addition, our protocol is secure against the replay attack, the impersonation attack, the stolen-verifier attack, the man-in-the-middle attack, the Denning–Sacco attack, and the offline dictionary attack with or without the smart card

Robust and efficient password authenticated key agreement with user anonymity for session initiation protocol-based communications

A suitable key agreement protocol plays an essential role in protecting the communications over open channels among users using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This paper presents a robust and flexible password authenticated key agreement protocol with user anonymity for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) used by VoIP communications. Security analysis demonstrates that our protocol enjoys many unique properties, such as user anonymity, no password table, session key agreement, mutual authentication, password updating freely and conveniently revoking lost smartcards etc. Furthermore, our protocol can resist the replay attack, the impersonation attack, the stolen-verifier attack, the man-in-middle attack, the Denning-Sacco attack, and the offline dictionary attack with or without smartcards. Finally, performance analysis shows that our protocol is more suitable for practical application in comparison with other related protocols

Dynamic simulation of smoke diffusion and gas pollution

Gas pollution is a common phenomenon in natural life. Aiming at the low efficiency of simulating smoke diffusion based on physical model and the poor effect of drawing gas pollution based on empirical model, a hybrid model method is proposed to draw the dynamic gas pollution caused by smoke diffusion. Firstly, the semi Lagrangian method is used to model the smoke, and the k-d tree is introduced to improve the computational efficiency; secondly, to solve the problem of insufficient details in smoke simulation, the fluctuating wind field based on linear filter method is introduced into the external force term to optimize the trajectory of smoke particles; the bidirectional shot function combined with the real smoke texture is selected for rendering to avoid the problem of obvious particle sense and significantly improve the smoke diffusion details; then, the optimized Gaussian plume model is introduced to establish the relationship between the physical model and the empirical model, and the pollution attenuation formula and the optimized Perlin noise are used to improve the lack of details of global gas pollution and increase the realism of gas pollution changes; by improving the time axis algorithm, the problem of fixed gas pollution color is solved, and the dynamic gradual gas pollution is obtained. Finally, several groups of analysis and comparison experiments are designed. The results show that this method can draw a realistic dynamic gas pollution scene in real-time

DREAMSeq: An Improved Method for Analyzing Differentially Expressed Genes in RNA-seq Data

RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has become a widely used technology for analyzing global gene-expression changes during certain biological processes. It is generally acknowledged that RNA-seq data displays equidispersion and overdispersion characteristics; therefore, most RNA-seq analysis methods were developed based on a negative binomial model capable of capturing both equidispersed and overdispersed data. In this study, we reported that in addition to equidispersion and overdispersion, RNA-seq data also displays underdispersion characteristics that cannot be adequately captured by general RNA-seq analysis methods. Based on a double Poisson model capable of capturing all data characteristics, we developed a new RNA-seq analysis method (DREAMSeq). Comparison of DREAMSeq with five other frequently used RNA-seq analysis methods using simulated datasets showed that its performance was comparable to or exceeded that of other methods in terms of type I error rate, statistical power, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve, area under the ROC curve, precision-recall curve, and the ability to detect the number of differentially expressed genes, especially in situations involving underdispersion. These results were validated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction using a real Foxtail dataset. Our findings demonstrated DREAMSeq as a reliable, robust, and powerful new method for RNA-seq data mining. The DREAMSeq R package is available at http://tanglab.hebtu.edu.cn/tanglab/Home/DREAMSeq

Numerical Investigations on Wedge Control of Separation of a Missile from an Aircraft

To make the missile safely separate from the internal weapons bay, a wedge flow control device is mounted on the front of the bay to control the variation of flow during the separation. The numerical simulations of missile separation without and with wedge flow control device under different sizes are carried out. The flow fields of different separation processes are obtained and discussed; the aerodynamic parameters and trajectory parameters of missile of different cases are illustrated and compared. Results show that, the wedge flow control device can accelerate the missile separation and has the effect of regulating the angular motion of missile. The influence of the wedge height is stronger than that of its length on the center of gravity motion and angular motion of missile

EZH2 RIP-seq Identifies Tissue-specific Long Non-coding RNAs.

BackgroundPolycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) catalyzes histone methylation at H3 Lys27, and plays crucial roles during development and diseases in numerous systems. Its catalytic subunit EZH2 represents a key nuclear target for long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) that emerging to be a novel class of epigenetic regulator and participate in diverse cellular processes. LncRNAs are characterized by high tissue-specificity; however, little is known about the tissue profile of the EZH2- interacting lncRNAs.ObjectiveHere we performed a global screening for EZH2-binding lncRNAs in tissues including brain, lung, heart, liver, kidney, intestine, spleen, testis, muscle and blood by combining RNA immuno- precipitation and RNA sequencing. We identified 1328 EZH2-binding lncRNAs, among which 470 were shared in at least two tissues while 858 were only detected in single tissue. An RNA motif with specific secondary structure was identified in a number of lncRNAs, albeit not in all EZH2-binding lncRNAs. The EZH2-binding lncRNAs fell into four categories including intergenic lncRNA, antisense lncRNA, intron-related lncRNA and promoter-related lncRNA, suggesting diverse regulations of both cis and trans-mechanisms. A promoter-related lncRNA Hnf1aos1 bound to EZH2 specifically in the liver, a feature same as its paired coding gene Hnf1a, further confirming the validity of our study. In addition to the well known EZH2-binding lncRNAs like Kcnq1ot1, Gas5, Meg3, Hotair and Malat1, majority of the lncRNAs were firstly reported to be associated with EZH2.ConclusionOur findings provide a profiling view of the EZH2-interacting lncRNAs across different tissues, and suggest critical roles of lncRNAs during cell differentiation and maturation