12,510 research outputs found
The University of Alaska Anchorage experience
In the fall 2005, when two faculty librarians
at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s
(UAA) Consortium Library realized that three
people on the library staff were enrolled in
library school, they saw the perfect opportunity
to start a discussion group that would
benefit both currently employed librarians
and students entering the information field.
The original three students were enrolled
in the MLIS distance program at the University
of Washington, working in the Consortium
Library, and taking classes part-time. The
two faculty librarians had been out of library
school for more than ten years by then, so
the intent was to organize a forum with an
informal, relaxed atmosphere that would
be an engaging way to keep up with current
curricula, to learn about class projects
the students were working on, and to hear
about their experiences. While the librarians
learned from the students, the students could,
in turn, share their new expertise with the
library faculty.
That was the beginning of what came
to be known as FLIP: Future Library and
Information Science People.1 Now, nearly
seven years later, FLIP is still going strong.
What the name stands for has changed
slightly—to Future Librarians and Information
Professionals—and the membership has
expanded to include anyone considering a
career as a librarian or enrolling in an MLS
or MLIS program. Characterizing FLIP as a
“mentoring” program misses the mark, since
so much more than just mentoring is happening.
Because the benefits go both ways, we
prefer the term “un-mentoring” to describe
FLIP. Regardless of its definition or description,
however, the original purpose remains
the same: to provide an informal discussion
forum that enriches library school studies
with librarian expertise, advice, and insight
Unified explanation of the Kadowaki-Woods ratio in strongly correlated materials
Discoveries of ratios whose values are constant within broad classes of
materials have led to many deep physical insights. The Kadowaki-Woods ratio
(KWR) compares the temperature dependence of a metal's resistivity to that of
its heat capacity; thereby probing the relationship between the
electron-electron scattering rate and the renormalisation of the electron mass.
However, the KWR takes very different values in different materials. Here we
introduce a ratio, closely related to the KWR, that includes the effects of
carrier density and spatial dimensionality and takes the same (predicted) value
in organic charge transfer salts, transition metal oxides, heavy fermions and
transition metals - despite the numerator and denominator varying by ten orders
of magnitude. Hence, in these materials, the same emergent physics is
responsible for the mass enhancement and the quadratic temperature dependence
of the resistivity and no exotic explanations of their KWRs are required.Comment: Final version accepted by Nature Phy
A New Optimal Stepsize For Approximate Dynamic Programming
Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) has proven itself in a wide range of
applications spanning large-scale transportation problems, health care, revenue
management, and energy systems. The design of effective ADP algorithms has many
dimensions, but one crucial factor is the stepsize rule used to update a value
function approximation. Many operations research applications are
computationally intensive, and it is important to obtain good results quickly.
Furthermore, the most popular stepsize formulas use tunable parameters and can
produce very poor results if tuned improperly. We derive a new stepsize rule
that optimizes the prediction error in order to improve the short-term
performance of an ADP algorithm. With only one, relatively insensitive tunable
parameter, the new rule adapts to the level of noise in the problem and
produces faster convergence in numerical experiments.Comment: Matlab files are included with the paper sourc
A Cholecystokinin B Receptor-Specific Aptamer Does Not Activate Receptor Signaling
Targeted nanoparticles which deliver effective doses of chemotherapeutic drugs directly to pancreatic tumors could improve treatment efficacy without the toxicities associated with systemic drug administration. One protein on tumor cells that can be targeted by nanoparticles is a G-protein coupled cell surface receptor, the cholecystokinin B receptor (CCKBR). Previously, we had shown that attaching the CCKBR ligand gastrin to the surface of nanoparticles can enhance their up-take by tumors. The drawback of using gastrin is that it can also activate the receptor, causing tumor cell growth. This study shows that a DNA aptamer that binds to the CCKBR and enhances nanoparticle up-take by tumors does not activate this receptor.
PANC-1 cells, a cultured human pancreatic cancer cell line, were treated for 24 h with CCKBR aptamer 1153. Cell lysates were run on Bis-Tris gels, transferred to membranes, blocked in 5% BSA and incubated overnight with primary antibodies, including antibodies directly against phosphorylated-Akt (Ser473), total Akt, and beta-actin, a protein loading control. Although the CCKBR aptamer 1153 is internalized by pancreatic cancer cells in a receptor-mediated fashion, it does not stimulate cell proliferation. Because of this, we anticipate that it will not activate CCKBR signaling. If aptamer 1153 does not activate downstream receptor signaling, our future work will test whether the aptamer could be used to specifically direct drug-containing nanoparticles to tumors, making chemotherapy treatments for pancreatic cancer patients more effective with fewer off-target effects and toxicity
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