Antimicrobial Activity of the Quinoline Derivative HT61 against Staphylococcus aureus Biofilms.

Staphylococcus aureus biofilms are a significant problem in health care settings, partly due to the presence of a nondividing, antibiotic-tolerant subpopulation. Here we evaluated treatment of S. aureus UAMS-1 biofilms with HT61, a quinoline derivative shown to be effective against nondividing Staphylococcus spp. HT61 was effective at reducing biofilm viability and was associated with increased expression of cell wall stress and division proteins, confirming its potential as a treatment for S. aureus biofilm infections

Data Science as an Emerging Discipline: The Roles of iSchools in the Era of Big Data

Workshop 4b: Information Science to Data Science: New Directions for iSchools Part 2 of 2 - Session 2A: Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Nature of IS2DSHosts: Wuhan University School of Information Management and the Sungkyunkwan University Library & Information Science and Data Science DepartmentData science has been a hype in both academia and industry. It is a high time for iSchools to reflect the roles they are playing and how they can contribute in the data science space, specifically in the areas of education and research. This position paper reviews data science related teaching and research activities in tier 1 iSchools and discusses the potentials of iSchools in shaping up the future of Data science.published_or_final_versio

Kinetics of oxygen uncoupling of a copper based oxygen carrier

Here, an oxygen carrier consisting of 60 wt% CuO supported on a mixture of Al_2O_ 3 and CaO (23 wt% and 17 wt% respectively) was synthesised by wet-mixing powdered CuO, Al(OH)_3 and Ca(OH)_2, followed by calcination at 1000⁰C. Its suitability for chemical looping with oxygen uncoupling (CLOU) was investigated. After 25 repeated redox cycles in either a thermogravimetric analyser (TGA) or a laboratory-scale fluidised bed, (with 5 vol% H_2 in N_2 as the fuel, and air as the oxidant) no significant change in either the oxygen uncoupling capacity or the overall oxygen availability of the carrier was found. In the TGA, it was found that the rate of oxygen release from the material was controlled by intrinsic chemical kinetics and external transfer of mass from the surface of the particles to the bulk gas. By modelling the various resistances, values of the rate constant for the decomposition were obtained. The activation energy of the reaction was found to be 59.7 kJ/mol (with a standard error of 5.6 kJ/mol) and the corresponding pre-exponential factor was 632 m^3/mol/s. The local rate of conversion within a particle was assumed to occur either (i) by homogeneous chemical reaction, or (ii) in uniform, non-porous grains, each reacting as a kinetically-controlled shrinking core. Upon cross validation against a batch fluidised bed experiment, the homogeneous reaction mode l was found to be more plausible. By accurately accounting for the various artefacts (e.g. mass transfer resistances) present in both TGA and Fluidised bed experiments, it was possible to extract a consistent set of kinetic parameters which reproduced the rates of oxygen release in both experiments.This work is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC grant EP/I010912/1) and The Cambridge Commonwealth, European & International Trust as well as Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. The authors would also like to thank Mohammad Ismail for the XRD analysis and Zlatko Saracevic for the nitrogen adsorption analysis.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.10.00

A cross-cultural study of mood in K-POP Songs

Prior research suggests that music mood is one of the most important criteria when people look for music – but the perception of mood may be subjective and can be influenced by many factors including the listeners’ cultural background. In recent years, the number of studies of music mood perceptions by various cultural groups and of automated mood classification of music from different cultures has been increasing. However, there has yet to be a well-established testbed for evaluating cross-cultural tasks in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Moreover, most existing datasets in MIR consist mainly of Western music and the cultural backgrounds of the annotators were mostly not taken into consideration or were limited to one cultural group. In this study, we built a collection of 1,892 K-pop (Korean Pop) songs with mood annotations collected from both Korean and American listeners, based on three different mood models. We analyze the differences and similarities between the mood judgments of the two listener groups, and propose potential MIR tasks that can be evaluated on this dataset. © Xiao Hu, Jin Ha Lee, Kahyun Choi, J. Stephen Downie.published_or_final_versio

Use of a Chemical-Looping Reaction to Determine the Residence Time Distribution of Solids in a Circulating Fluidized Bed

The residence time distribution (RTD) of solids in various sections of a circulating fluidized bed (CFB) is of great importance for design and operation but is often difficult to determine experimentally. A noninvasive method is described, for which the RTD was derived from temporal measurements of the temperature following the initiation of a chemical-looping reaction. To demonstrate the method, a CuO-based oxygen carrier was used in a small-scale CFB, and measurements were made in the fuel reactor, operated as a bubbling fluidized bed. The measurements were fitted to the tanks-in-series model, modified to account for heat losses from the reactor. There was excellent agreement between the model and the experiment. Limitations and further improvements of the method are discussed, also with respect to larger reactors.This work is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC Grant EP/I010912/1).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ente.20160014

Exploration of the material property space for chemical looping air separation applied to carbon capture and storage

Oxy-fuel combustion is one route to large scale carbon capture and storage. Fuel is combusted in oxygen rather than air, allowing pure CO2 to be captured and sequestered. Currently, the required oxygen is produced via cryogenic air separation, which imposes a significant energy penalty. Chemical looping air separation (CLAS) is an alternative process for the production of oxygen, and relies on the repeated oxidation and reduction of solid oxygen carriers (typically metal oxides). The energy efficiency is governed by the thermodynamic properties of the oxygen carrier material, and how well the CLAS process can be heat-integrated with the process consuming oxygen. In this study, key thermodynamic properties have been identified and assessed using a steady state model of a CLAS-oxy-fuel power plant. It is demonstrated that energy penalties as low as 1.5 percentage points can be obtained for a narrow range of material properties. Based on density functional theory calculations, 14 oxygen carrier systems, which are novel or have received little attention, have been identified that could potentially achieve this minimal energy penalt

O Brincar como meio de aprendizagem no jardim-de-infância

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação Paula Frassinetti para obtenção de grau de Mestre em Educação Pré-Escolar.O presente relatório tem como principal objetivo compreender de que forma o brincar tem influência sobre a aprendizagem das crianças. O brincar permite que as crianças vivenciem experiências importantes para a sua vida através do lúdico, estimulando a sua criatividade, curiosidade e autonomia. O educador deve ter um papel essencial em todo o processo de aprendizagem, proporcionando atividades e condições propícias a todo o processo educativo. O relatório retrata o trabalho desenvolvido numa instituição pré-escolar, com um grupo de crianças de três anos, tendo como objetivo perceber a importância do brincar na aprendizagem das mesmas. Deste modo foi necessário conhecer os princípios da instituição, o contexto em que se insere, bem como, realizar uma caracterização do grupo de crianças. Para tal, recorreu-se à análise de diversos documentos, a observações realizadas ao longo de todo o estágio e à realização de entrevistas à educadora, à auxiliar de ação educativa e a três crianças da sala. Com este trabalho, podemos concluir que, o brincar permite que as crianças tenham aprendizagens significativas e de qualidade, contribuindo para todo o seu processo de desenvolvimento e para a sua integração na sociedade.The following report´s main goal is to understand how the way children play influence their apprenticeship. Playing allows children to live experience fundamental for their life trough playful, stimulating children´s creativity, curiosity and autonomy. The educator must have an essential role in the all process of apprenticeship, propitiating activities and propitious conditions to the entire educational process. The report portrays the work developed in a pre-scholar institution, with a 3-year-old group of children, aiming to realize the importance of playing in children's learning. It was required to know all the principles of the institution, the context where it was inserted, as well as characterizing the group of children. To do so, it was needed to analyze several documents, make observations throughout the entire time in the institution and conduct interviews to the interviews with the teacher, the educational action auxiliary and three children. With this work we can conclude that playing allows children to have significant and quality apprenticeships, contributing for their developing process and integration in society

WiMIR: An Informetric Study on Women Authors in ISMIR

Poster session 3: paper no. PS3-29Organized by New York University and Columbia UniversityThe Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community is becoming increasingly aware of a gender imbalance evident in ISMIR participation and publication. This paper reports upon a comprehensive informetric study of the publication, authorship and citation characteristics of female researchers in the context of the ISMIR conferences. All 1,610 papers in the ISMIR proceedings written by 1,910 unique authors from 2000 to 2015 were collected and analyzed. Only 14.1% of all papers were led by female researchers. Temporal analysis shows that the percentage of lead female authors has not improved over the years, but more papers have appeared with female coauthors in very recent years. Topics and citation numbers are also analyzed and compared between female and male authors to identify research emphasis and to measure impact. The results show that the most prolific authors of both genders published similar numbers of ISMIR papers and the citation counts of lead authors in both genders had no significant difference. We also analyzed the collaboration patterns to discover whether gender is related to the number of collaborators. Implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions are proposed on how to continue encouraging and supporting female participation in the MIR field.published_or_final_versio

Brain resting-state functional MRI connectivity: Morphological foundation and plasticity

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