Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students, in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over the past two years. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we find that students produce questions of high quality. More than three-quarters of questions fall into categories beyond simple recall, in contrast to similar studies of student-authored content in different subject domains. Similarly, the quality of student-authored explanations for questions was also high, with approximately 60% of all explanations classified as being of high or outstanding quality. Overall, 75% of questions met combined quality criteria, which we hypothesize is due in part to the in-class scaffolding activities that we provided for students ahead of requiring them to author questions.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

In-silico and in-vitro morphometric analysis of intestinal organoids.

Organoids offer a powerful model to study cellular self-organisation, the growth of specific tissue morphologies in-vitro, and to assess potential medical therapies. However, the intrinsic mechanisms of these systems are not entirely understood yet, which can result in variability of organoids due to differences in culture conditions and basement membrane extracts used. Improving the standardisation of organoid cultures is essential for their implementation in clinical protocols. Developing tools to assess and predict the behaviour of these systems may produce a more robust and standardised biological model to perform accurate clinical studies. Here, we developed an algorithm to automate crypt-like structure counting on intestinal organoids in both in-vitro and in-silico images. In addition, we modified an existing two-dimensional agent-based mathematical model of intestinal organoids to better describe the system physiology, and evaluated its ability to replicate budding structures compared to new experimental data we generated. The crypt-counting algorithm proved useful in approximating the average number of budding structures found in our in-vitro intestinal organoid culture images on days 3 and 7 after seeding. Our changes to the in-silico model maintain the potential to produce simulations that replicate the number of budding structures found on days 5 and 7 of in-vitro data. The present study aims to aid in quantifying key morphological structures and provide a method to compare both in-vitro and in-silico experiments. Our results could be extended later to 3D in-silico models

Chandra X-ray and Gemini near-infrared observations of the eclipsing millisecond pulsar SWIFT J1749.4−2807 in quiescence

Contains fulltext : 111300.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access

Negation, Polarity, and Deontic Modals

Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items (PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I[superscript 0]; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation

Causes of Noncompliance with International Law: A Field Experiment on Anonymous Incorporation

20110302 into the Experiments on Governance and Politics Registry once that registry was begun at e-gap.org. Of those interventions registered, we report on the FATF, Premium, Corruption, and Terrorism conditions in this article. All other interventions outlined in the registered document are reported in other work. In our registration, we indicated that we would report results dichotomously as compliant or noncompliant, given a response. We still report response and nonresponse followed by a compliance level, but we expanded the set of possible types of compliance (nonresponse, noncompliance, partial compliance, compliance, and refusal). Presenting the information this way is more precise and is also consistent with the registry document because the fuller set of outcomes contains all information the dichotomized measures capture (se