How User-Generated Review Websites Impact a Hotel’s RevPar

This is a professional paper which explores the correlation between user-generated reviews on TripAdvisor.com and how a hotels’ TripAdvisor Popularity Index ranking affects a hotels’ RevPar. The study surveyed nine hotels in Dallas, TX, three hotels in the four star level, three hotels in the three star level, and three hotels at the two and one half star level. The study focus’s on the strength of TripAdvisor in the hotel industry, the credibility of reviews, influence and expectations of guest that are developed due to the reviews, and lastly the impact the reviews on TripAdvisor have on a hotels’ RevPar

A Study of Host Factors that Affect Herpes Simplex Virus 1 Pathogenesis: The Role of Cold Sore Susceptibility Gene 1 (CSSG1) in HSV1 Replication

Numerous factors that affect herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1)-mediated pathogenesis have been identified. Such factors directly impact the replication of HSV1 as well as modulate host immune responses following HSV1 infection. In this work, I characterize how HSV1 replication is impacted by expression of the protein encoded by C21orf91, or “Cold Sore Susceptibility Gene” (CSSG1), that has been linked to HSV1 reactivation in humans. I investigated expression of CSSG1 mRNA expression in various tissues and found that CSSG1 mRNA was present in several tissues of importance in HSV1 disease, including brain, trigeminal ganglia (TG), cornea and spleen. Western blot analysis demonstrated that CSSG1 protein is expressed in human cells. Subcellular fractionation analysis reveals that CSSG1 is predominantly found in the cell nucleus, where it colocalizes with chromatin and with Tip60, a chromatin-binding histone modifying protein that has been shown to be essential for the replication of herpesviruses. I also discovered that CSSG1 is present in the cytosol of cells where it forms large cytosolic aggregates in presence of TRAF6, a downstream adapter that plays an important role in innate immune receptor signaling. To determine if CSSG1 directly impacts viral replication, I generated CSSG1 knockdown human cell lines. I found that HSV1 replication was reduced in CSSG1 knockdown cells compared to control cells, whereas replication of the unrelated virus, vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), was not affected by knockdown of CSSG1. I demonstrate that CSSG1 was necessary for efficient expression of HSV1 viral proteins during infection. Western blot analysis and measurement of expression of HSV1 proteins expressed at various stages of viral replication illustrates that CSSG1 was required for HSV1 replication at very early stage of infection. I also noted that CSSG1 expression impacted the DNA damage response in HSV1 infected cells. Levels of H2AX phosphorylation, a marker of the DNA damage response, were increased in HSV1-infected CSSG1 knockdown cells compared to control cells. DNA damage responses are thought to promote HSV1 reactivation from latency and HSV1 gene expression, indicating a potential mechanism for role of CSSG1 in HSV1 replication through modulating the DNA damage response. Overall, my work demonstrates that CSSG1 affects HSV1 replication and provides insight on how CSSG1 polymorphisms in humans could affect HSV1 reactivation and replication to promote cold sores. These discoveries may also lead to a better understanding of pathogenesis of other herpesviruses in humans

Horizontal Integration of Warfighter Intelligence Data: A Shared Semantic Resource for the Intelligence Community

We describe a strategy that is being used for the horizontal integration of warfighter intelligence data within the framework of the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System Standard Cloud (DSC) initiative. The strategy rests on the development of a set of ontologies that are being incrementally applied to bring about what we call the ‘semantic enhancement’ of data models used within each intelligence discipline. We show how the strategy can help to overcome familiar tendencies to stovepiping of intelligence data, and describe how it can be applied in an agile fashion to new data resources in ways that address immediate needs of intelligence analysts

Understanding the Electronic Structure and Electron Transfer Kinetics of Titanium Dioxide Photoanodes and Analyzing Parameters Affecting Flatband Potentials in Metal Oxides

Rutile TiO2 shows promise for being used as a photoanode semiconductor in dye-sensitized photoelectrosynthesis cells (DSPECs), devices that use sunlight to drive the production of solar fuels. The addition of a TiO2 coating or shell onto a mesoporous nanocrystalline TiO2 photoanode substrate has been shown to improve device efficiency for water oxidation, yet little is known about why this change improves the performance of DSPECs. In this research, TiOx shells were deposited using atomic layer deposition onto rutile TiO2 nanorods and the electrochemical effects of the deposition were probed to help elucidate changes to the electronic structure induced by the shell. Rutile TiO2 was found to have a monoenergetic collection of deep trap states that is positive in potential to an exponential trap distribution in the band gap below the conduction band minimum. When increasing the TiOx shell thickness, the deep trap states of rutile TiO2 shifted to more positive potentials without changing the density of these states. In addition, the band gap of the material was found to decrease as shell thickness increased as quantified using diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. From photoelectrochemical impedance spectroscopy, the calculated rates of back-electron transfer were lower for samples with a TiOx shell compared to samples of rutile TiO2 without a shell. Metal oxides like TiO2 are gaining a lot of attention for their applications in energy technologies. A useful parameter used in the application of metal oxides is the flatband potential, yet values for the flatband potential are widely variable in the literature. A meta-analysis of flatband potential values for TiO2, SnO2, and ZnO was performed to study what variables impact the flatband potential for n-type metal oxides. Flatband potential values shifted –59 mV/pH with the exception of ZnO thin film flatband potentials, which showed an apparent lack of dependence on solution pH likely. The flatband potentials for anatase TiO2 nanotubes were shifted ~ 0.4V positive of other anatase TiO2 morphologies. Without the nanotube data points, anatase TiO2 and rutile TiO2 did not have a significant difference in mean flatband potential values, in contrast to what is often assumed for these two crystalline phases. Flatband potentials for ZnO appeared to shift negatively with increasing cation concentration, though previous literature precedence with other metal oxides suggests that the flatband potential should not be affected by non-proton cations in aqueous solutions. The findings of these analyses demonstrate the need to recognize the sensitivity of flatband potentials to multiple factors and the spread of flatband potential values that exist even between similar nanomaterials.Bachelor of Scienc

Delayed multidisciplinary management of an intrusively luxated maxillary lateral incisor- A case report

Crown fractures account for the highest percentage of all traumatic injuries to the permanent dentition.This paper reports a case of delayed (1 month after the injury) multidisciplinary management of an intrusively luxated permanent central incisor. The extruded tooth was diagnosed as necrotic without coronal discoloration. Upon completion of root canal treatment, the tooth was repositioned  orthodontically and finally restored post endodontically for esthetic purposes

Contrastive Classification and Representation Learning with Probabilistic Interpretation

Cross entropy loss has served as the main objective function for classification-based tasks. Widely deployed for learning neural network classifiers, it shows both effectiveness and a probabilistic interpretation. Recently, after the success of self supervised contrastive representation learning methods, supervised contrastive methods have been proposed to learn representations and have shown superior and more robust performance, compared to solely training with cross entropy loss. However, cross entropy loss is still needed to train the final classification layer. In this work, we investigate the possibility of learning both the representation and the classifier using one objective function that combines the robustness of contrastive learning and the probabilistic interpretation of cross entropy loss. First, we revisit a previously proposed contrastive-based objective function that approximates cross entropy loss and present a simple extension to learn the classifier jointly. Second, we propose a new version of the supervised contrastive training that learns jointly the parameters of the classifier and the backbone of the network. We empirically show that our proposed objective functions show a significant improvement over the standard cross entropy loss with more training stability and robustness in various challenging settings

Cooperativity of Rb, Brca1, and p53 in malignant breast cancer evolution

Breast cancers that are triple-negative for the clinical markers ESR1, PGR, and HER2 typically belong to the Basal-like molecular subtype. Defective Rb, p53, and Brca1 pathways are each associated with triple-negative and Basal-like subtypes. Our mouse genetic studies demonstrate that the combined inactivation of Rb and p53 pathways is sufficient to suppress the physiological cell death of mammary involution. Furthermore, concomitant inactivation of all three pathways in mammary epithelium has an additive effect on tumor latency and predisposes highly penetrant, metastatic adenocarcinomas. The tumors are poorly differentiated and have histologic features that are common among human Brca1-mutated tumors, including heterogeneous morphology, metaplasia, and necrosis. Gene expression analyses demonstrate that the tumors share attributes of both Basal-like and Claudin-low signatures, two molecular subtypes encompassed by the broader, triple-negative class defined by clinical markers