Critical reading strategies of first-year composition students: a reading-writing connections study

This graduate thesis research study measures the use, non-use, and new use of critical reading strategies (CRS) among college freshman or first-year composition students. CSU Northridge and Glendale College student respondents completed a combined total of 691 "beginning-of-semester" and 534 "end-of-semester" surveys during the spring 2005 semester. The study's statistical analysis reveals interesting relationship con-elations of respondents' historical literacy backgrounds, reading-writing connections, and computer skills. One of the study's key findings is that a majority of respondents (ESL students in particular) are either unfamiliar with, or simply do not use, 10 "advanced" college-level reading strategies compared to their greater use of the more common K-12 reading strategies. This key finding is highly relevant for both teachers and students across all disciplines. Composition theorists have long held that CRS use (especially the advanced strategies) helps students become more proficient readers and interpreters of college-level texts, and ultimately better writers.California State University, Northridge. Department of English.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-57, 87-88

On the development of a Bayesian optimisation framework for complex unknown systems

Bayesian optimisation provides an effective method to optimise expensive black box functions. It has recently been applied to problems in fluid dynamics. This paper studies and compares common Bayesian optimisation algorithms empirically on a range of synthetic test functions. It investigates the choice of acquisition function and number of training samples, exact calculation of acquisition functions and Monte Carlo based approaches and both single-point and multi-point optimisation. The test functions considered cover a wide selection of challenges and therefore serve as an ideal test bed to understand the performance of Bayesian optimisation and to identify general situations where Bayesian optimisation performs well and poorly. This knowledge can be utilised in applications, including those in fluid dynamics, where objective functions are unknown. The results of this investigation show that the choices to be made are less relevant for relatively simple functions, while optimistic acquisition functions such as Upper Confidence Bound should be preferred for more complex objective functions. Furthermore, results from the Monte Carlo approach are comparable to results from analytical acquisition functions. In instances where the objective function allows parallel evaluations, the multi-point approach offers a quicker alternative, yet it may potentially require more objective function evaluations.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

A collaborative approach to socio-economic assessment to increase coastal marsh and community resilience on the Chesapeake Bay

Sea level rise and other stressors in the mid-Atlantic U.S. are impacting the resilience of coastal communities, and increase their overall physical and socio-economic vulnerabilities. The Deal Island Peninsula on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, MD is used as a case study of a coastal heritage community that is undergoing these stressors and is involved in stakeholder-driven resilience and adaptation planning. In this interdisciplinary socio-ecological project funded by the NERRS Science Collaborative, a socio-economic analysis of a culturally rich coastal community is performed as a sub-study. The goals of the socio-economic analysis are to 1) better understand stakeholder relationships with marsh ecosystems and services they provide, 2) bring stakeholder perceptions and values of socio-ecological services into a coastal decision-making framework, and 3) bridge the gap between science and decision-making through improved communication and collaboration. The methodologies employed take the nature of a collaborative learning approach, coupled with the Q-sort technique. In this presentation, discussion topics include the collaborative approach taken toward a socio-economic assessment, preliminary results of the Q-sort, and indicators of community adaptation efforts

Language effects on bargaining

Language is critical to coordination in groups. Though, how language affects coordination in groups is not well understood. We prime distributive and integrative language in a bargaining experiment to better understand the links between group outcomes and communication. We accomplish this by priming interests or positions language in randomized groups. We find that priming positions as opposed to interests language leads to agreements where controllers, subjects with unilateral authority over the group outcome, receive a larger share of the benefits but where the total benefits to the group are unaffected. In contrast to common justifications for the use of integrative language in bargaining, our experimental approach revealed no significant differences between priming interests and positions language in regards to increasing joint outcomes for the groups. Across treatments, we find subjects that use gain frames and make reference to visuals aids during bargaining experience larger gains for the group, while loss frames and pro-self language experience larger gains for the individual through side payments. This finding suggests a bargainer’s dilemma: whether to employ language that claims a larger share of group’s assets or employ language to increase joint gains

橘の花散る里のほととぎす--「万葉集」巻8,1472,1473番歌をめぐって

R-symmetry leads to a distinct low energy realisation of SUSY with a signicantly modified colour-charged sector featuring a Dirac gluino and scalar colour octets (sgluons). In the present work we recast results from LHC BSM searches to discuss the impact of R-symmetry on the squark and gluino mass limits. We work in the framework of the Minimal R-symmetric Supersymmetric Standard Model and take into account the NLO corrections to the squark production cross sections in the MRSSM that have become available recently. We find substantially weaker limits on squark masses compared to the MSSM: for simple scenarios with heavy gluinos and degenerate squarks, the MRSSM mass limit is ${m}_{\tilde{g}}$ > 1:7TeV, approximately 600 GeV lower than in the MSSM

Tumor-derived GDF-15 blocks LFA-1 dependent T cell recruitment and suppresses responses to anti-PD-1 treatment

Immune checkpoint blockade therapy is beneficial and even curative for some cancer patients. However, the majority don’t respond to immune therapy. Across different tumor types, pre-existing T cell infiltrates predict response to checkpoint-based immunotherapy. Based on in vitro pharmacological studies, mouse models and analyses of human melanoma patients, we show that the cytokine GDF-15 impairs LFA-1/β2-integrin-mediated adhesion of T cells to activated endothelial cells, which is a pre-requisite of T cell extravasation. In melanoma patients, GDF-15 serum levels strongly correlate with failure of PD-1-based immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Neutralization of GDF-15 improves both T cell trafficking and therapy efficiency in murine tumor models. Thus GDF-15, beside its known role in cancer-related anorexia and cachexia, emerges as a regulator of T cell extravasation into the tumor microenvironment, which provides an even stronger rationale for therapeutic anti-GDF-15 antibody development. Experimental cancer immunology and therap

Interleukin-6 trans-signaling is a candidate mechanism to drive progression of human DCCs during clinical latency

Although thousands of breast cancer cells disseminate and home to bone marrow until primary surgery, usually less than a handful will succeed in establishing manifest metastases months to years later. To identify signals that support survival or outgrowth in patients, we profile rare bone marrow-derived disseminated cancer cells (DCCs) long before manifestation of metastasis and identify IL6/PI3K-signaling as candidate pathway for DCC activation. Surprisingly, and similar to mammary epithelial cells, DCCs lack membranous IL6 receptor expression and mechanistic dissection reveals IL6 trans-signaling to regulate a stem-like state of mammary epithelial cells via gp130. Responsiveness to IL6 trans-signals is found to be niche-dependent as bone marrow stromal and endosteal cells down-regulate gp130 in premalignant mammary epithelial cells as opposed to vascular niche cells. PIK3CA activation renders cells independent from IL6 trans-signaling. Consistent with a bottleneck function of microenvironmental DCC control, we find PIK3CA mutations highly associated with late-stage metastatic cells while being extremely rare in early DCCs. Our data suggest that the initial steps of metastasis formation are often not cancer cell-autonomous, but also depend on microenvironmental signals. Metastatic dissemination in breast cancer patients occurs early in malignant transformation, raising questions about how disseminated cancer cells (DCC) progress at distant sites. Here, the authors show that DCCs in bone marrow are activated via IL6-trans-signaling and thereby acquire stemness traits relevant for metastasis formation

Targeting of preexisting and induced breast cancer stem cells with trastuzumab and trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1)

The antibody trastuzumab (Herceptin) has substantially improved overall survival for patients with aggressive HER2-positive breast cancer. However, about 70% of all treated patients will experience relapse or disease progression. This may be related to an insufficient targeting of the CD44(high)CD24(low) breast cancer stem cell subset, which is not only highly resistant to chemotherapy and radiotherapy but also a poor target for trastuzumab due to low HER2 surface expression. Hence, we explored whether the new antibody-drug conjugate T-DM1, which consists of the potent chemotherapeutic DM1 coupled to trastuzumab, could improve the targeting of these tumor-initiating or metastasis-initiating cells. To this aim, primary HER2-overexpressing tumor cells as well as HER2-positive and HER2-negative breast cancer cell lines were treated with T-DM1, and effects on survival, colony formation, gene and protein expression as well as antibody internalization were assessed. This revealed that CD44(high)CD24(low)HER2(low) stem cell-like breast cancer cells show high endocytic activity and are thus particularly sensitive towards the antibody-drug conjugate T-DM1. Consequently, preexisting CD44(high)CD24(low) cancer stem cells were depleted by concentrations of T-DM1 that did not affect the bulk of the tumor cells. Likewise, colony formation was efficiently suppressed. Moreover, when tumor cells were cocultured with natural killer cells, antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity was enhanced, and EMT-mediated induction of stem cell-like properties was prevented in differentiated tumor cells. Thus our study reveals an unanticipated targeting of stem cell-like breast cancer cells by T-DM1 that may contribute to the clinical efficacy of this recently approved antibody-drug conjugate