The tumor-educated-macrophage increase of malignancy of human pancreatic cancer is prevented by zoledronic acid.

We previously defined macrophages harvested from the peritoneal cavity of nude mice with subcutaneous human pancreatic tumors as "tumor-educated-macrophages" (Edu) and macrophages harvested from mice without tumors as "naïve-macrophages" (Naïve), and demonstrated that Edu-macrophages promoted tumor growth and metastasis. In this study, Edu- and Naïve-macrophages were compared for their ability to enhance pancreatic cancer malignancy at the cellular level in vitro and in vivo. The inhibitory efficacy of Zoledronic acid (ZA) on Edu-macrophage-enhanced metastasis was also determined. XPA1 human pancreatic cancer cells in Gelfoam co-cultured with Edu-macrophages proliferated to a greater extent compared to XPA1 cells cultured with Naïve-macrophages (P = 0.014). XPA1 cells exposed to conditioned medium harvested from Edu culture significantly increased proliferation (P = 0.016) and had more migration stimulation capability (P<0.001) compared to cultured cancer cells treated with the conditioned medium from Naïve. The mitotic index of the XPA1 cells, expressing GFP in the nucleus and RFP in the cytoplasm, significantly increased in vivo in the presence of Edu- compared to Naïve-macrophages (P = 0.001). Zoledronic acid (ZA) killed both Edu and Naïve in vitro. Edu promoted tumor growth and metastasis in an orthotopic mouse model of the XPA1 human pancreatic cancer cell line. ZA reduced primary tumor growth (P = 0.006) and prevented metastasis (P = 0.025) promoted by Edu-macrophages. These results indicate that ZA inhibits enhanced primary tumor growth and metastasis of human pancreatic cancer induced by Edu-macrophages

Effects of the antiozonant ethylenediurea (EDU) on Fraxinus ornus L.. The role of drought

Ethylenediurea (EDU) is a synthetic chemical known to protect plants from the phytotoxic effects of tropospheric ozone (O3). Although many studies have proposed the use of EDU for studying the O3 effects under field conditions, its mechanism of action is not fully understood, and it is unclear whether it exerts a specific antiozonant action, or if it may also interact with other oxidative stresses. The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of EDU on forest species in a Mediterranean environment where, during summer, vegetation is exposed to multiple oxidative stresses, such as O3 and drought. The experiment was conducted on Fraxinus ornus L. (Manna ash) plants growing in six mesocosms, three maintained under full irrigation, while the other three were subjected to drought for 84 days. In each mesocosm, three plants were sprayed every 15 days with 450 ppm EDU. Gas exchange and chlorophyll "a" fluorescence measurements carried out through the experimental period highlighted that EDU did not affect stomatal conductance and had an ameliorative effect on the functionality of drought-stressed plants, thus suggesting that it may act as a generic antioxidant. The implications of these findings for the applicability of EDU in field studies are discussed

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF EDU-GAMES SOFTWARE (CD-ROM) AS MEDIA IN THE ENGLISH TEACHING-LEARNING PROCESS TO IMPROVE VOCABULARY MASTERY OF THE FIFTH GRADE STUDENTS OF SD KANISIUS WONOSARI II

The objective of this research is to know whether or not there is a significant difference in the vocabulary mastery between the students who are taught by using Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM) and those who are not taught by using Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM). This research is quasi-experimental research in which the choice of the research sample was done randomly. The sample of this research consisted of 35 students (two classes). The two classes were class 5 A as the experimental group and 5 B as the control group. The data were collected by using a vocabulary test. The two groups were given pre-test (before the experiment was conducted) and the post-test (after the experiment). During the research, the students of 5 A or the experimental group were taught vocabulary by using Edu-Games Software (CDROM) as media in the English teaching and learning process, while the control group were not taught by using Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM). From the tryout, it was found out that 37 items of the vocabulary mastery test were valid with the reliability of 0.897. The data were collected by means of a descriptive and an inferential statistics technique. The test of normality and homogeneity were conducted before the test of hypothesis was applied. The data show that the vocabulary mastery of students who were taught using Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM) is in the very high category. The mean of the gain scores of the experimental group is 5.67, while the mean of the control group is only 1.29. Moreover, it was found that there is a significant difference in the scores of students’ vocabulary mastery (to =3.654; p=0.000) between those who were taught using Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM) and those who were not. It can be concluded that the use of Edu-Games Software (CD-ROM) is good to teach vocabulary for it can increase the vocabulary mastery of the fifth grade students of SD Kanisius Wonosari II

THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE ROMANIAN COMPANIES’ MARKETING NEEDS AND MEANS OF COMMUNICATION - A MARKETING RESEARCH -

The marketing needs of the Romanian companies are very diversified, commencingwith the research of the needs and demand on the target market, going down to the 4Ps (Product,Price, Promotion and Placement) and their components. The present marketing research was performed using 11 categories of information sources:specialised publications in marketing; specialised publications in economics; national officialstatistics; publications of professional associations; publications/web sites of NGOs; reports issuedby media institutions and web sites; information provided by specialised institutions in consultancyand marketing research; information provided by individual marketing specialists; informationprovided by advertising agencies; information provided by the economic sections of the dailynewspapers; job web sites.marketing needs, Romanian companies, secondary data

The impact of the future Free Trade Agreement between the European Union and South Korea on the European and Romanian economies – a marketing research

The signing of a Free Trade Agreement between South Korea and the European Union is one of the main goals of the General Affairs and External Relations Council of the EU. The FTA between the EU and South Korea will have a significant impact on the European economy with positive and negative consequences. The goal of this study is to determine the opportunities and possible threats for the European and Romanian economies. The most important effects of this Free Trade Agreement could be summarized in the increase of productivity and efficiency and spreading of innovation within a great number of industries.Free Trade Agreement, EU, South Korea.

Using Prezi as a Library Instruction Tool

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation tool that is built with the help of many open source projects. Not only in Prezi free, but users also gain access to video tutorials, live online training sessions and webinars given by Prezi experts; and community forums where users can talk about problems, give tips, and learn from one another. Signing up for the “Edu Enjoy” account with an .edu email address provides additional benefits. This article will cover the features of Prezi, discuss pros and cons, and will conclude with ways to successfully incorporate Prezi into information literacy instruction sessions

A Deep Sequential Model for Discourse Parsing on Multi-Party Dialogues

Discourse structures are beneficial for various NLP tasks such as dialogue understanding, question answering, sentiment analysis, and so on. This paper presents a deep sequential model for parsing discourse dependency structures of multi-party dialogues. The proposed model aims to construct a discourse dependency tree by predicting dependency relations and constructing the discourse structure jointly and alternately. It makes a sequential scan of the Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) in a dialogue. For each EDU, the model decides to which previous EDU the current one should link and what the corresponding relation type is. The predicted link and relation type are then used to build the discourse structure incrementally with a structured encoder. During link prediction and relation classification, the model utilizes not only local information that represents the concerned EDUs, but also global information that encodes the EDU sequence and the discourse structure that is already built at the current step. Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms all the state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 201

The Need for Integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into Teacher Training Programmes in Nigeria

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a major factor in shaping a new global economy and producing rapid changes in society. In order to function in this new world economy, students and their teachers have to learn to deal with large amount of information. This entails the analysis of such information and making decisions based on the result of the analysis. In order to help students achieve these capabilities, the classroom teacher must be knowledgeable in the use of ICT tools. The teacher is responsible for creating a conducive classroom environment and preparing the learning opportunities that facilitate students‟ use of technology to learn, communicate and develop knowledge product. It is therefore, critical that all classroom teachers are prepared to provide their students with these opportunities. This paper therefore, sets out to highlight the importance of ICT and the need to integrate same into the teacher training programmes in Nigeria.Keywords: Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Integration, Teacher training programmes and Classroom environment

Tracking intracavernously injected adipose-derived stem cells to bone marrow.

The intracavernous (i.c.) injection of stem cells (SCs) has been shown to improve erectile function in various erectile dysfunction (ED) animal models. However, the tissue distribution of the injected cells remains unknown. In this study we tracked i.c.-injected adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) in various tissues. Rat paratesticular fat was processed for ADSC isolation and culture. The animals were then subject to cavernous nerve (CN) crush injury or sham operation, followed by i.c. injection of 1 million autologous or allogeneic ADSCs that were labeled with 5-ethynyl-2-deoxyuridine (EdU). Another group of rats received i.c. injection of EdU-labeled allogeneic penile smooth muscle cells (PSMCs). At 2 and 7 days post injection, penises and femoral bone marrow were processed for histological analyses. Whole femoral bone marrows were also analyzed for EdU-positive cells by flow cytometry. The results show that ADSCs exited the penis within days of i.c. injection and migrated preferentially to bone marrow. Allogenicity did not affect the bone marrow appearance of ADSCs at either 2 or 7 days, whereas CN injury reduced the number of ADSCs in bone marrow significantly at 7 but not 2 days. The significance of these results in relation to SC therapy for ED is discussed