Self-regulatory Behaviors and Approaches to Learning of Arts Students: A Comparison Between Professional Training and English Learning.

This study investigated the self-regulatory behaviors of arts students, namely memory strategy, goal-setting, self-evaluation, seeking assistance, environmental structuring, learning responsibility, and planning and organizing. We also explored approaches to learning, including deep approach (DA) and surface approach (SA), in a comparison between students' professional training and English learning. The participants consisted of 344 arts majors. The Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and the Revised Learning Process Questionnaire were adopted to examine students' self-regulatory behaviors and their approaches to learning. The results show that a positive and significant correlation was found in students' self-regulatory behaviors between professional training and English learning. The results indicated that increases in using self-regulatory behaviors in professional training were associated with increases in applying self-regulatory behaviors in learning English. Seeking assistance, self-evaluation, and planning and organizing were significant predictors for learning English. In addition, arts students used the deep approach more often than the surface approach in both their professional training and English learning. A positive correlation was found in DA, whereas a negative correlation was shown in SA between students' self-regulatory behaviors and their approaches to learning. Students with high self-regulation adopted a deep approach, and they applied the surface approach less in professional training and English learning. In addition, a SEM model confirmed that DA had a positive influence; however, SA had a negative influence on self-regulatory behaviors.

Lipocalin 2 prevents oral cancer metastasis through carbonic anhydrase IX inhibition and is associated with favourable prognosis.

Lipocalin 2 (LCN2), a secreted glycoprotein, is up- or downregulated in different human cancers. At present, the functional role of LCN2 in the progression of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), which accounts for most head and neck cancers, remains poorly understood, particularly with respect to its involvement in invasion and metastasis. In this study, we observed that LCN2 expression decreased in patients with OSCC and lymph node metastasis compared with that in patients without metastasis. A higher LCN2 expression correlated with the survival of patients with OSCC. Furthermore, LCN2 overexpression in OSCC cells reduced in vitro migration and invasion and in vivo metastasis, whereas its silencing induced an increase in cell motility. Mechanistically, LCN2 inhibited the cell motility of OSCC cells through hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-1α-dependent transcriptional inhibition of the carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX). CAIX overexpression relieved the migration inhibition imposed by LCN2 overexpression in OSCC cells. Moreover, a microRNA (miR) analysis revealed that LCN2 can suppress CAIX expression and cell migration through miR-4505 induction. Examination of tumour tissues from patients with OSCC and OSCC-transplanted mice revealed an inverse correlation between LCN2 and CAIX expression. Furthermore, patients with LCN2(strong)/CAIX(weak) revealed the lowest frequency of lymph node metastasis and the longest survival. Our findings suggest that LCN2 suppresses tumour metastasis by targeting the transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of CAIX in OSCC cells. LCN2 overexpression may be a novel OSCC treatment strategy and a useful biomarker for predicting OSCC progression.

Density and anomalous thermal expansion of deeply cooled water confined in mesoporous silica investigated by synchrotron X-ray diffraction.

A synchrotron X-ray diffraction method was used to measure the average density of water (H2O) confined in mesoporous silica materials MCM-41-S-15 and MCM-41-S-24. The average density versus temperature at atmospheric pressure of deeply cooled water is obtained by monitoring the intensity change of the MCM-41-S Bragg peaks, which is directly related to the scattering length density contrast between the silica matrix and the confined water. Within MCM-41-S-15, the pore size is small enough to prevent the crystallization at least down to 130 K. Besides the well-known density maximum at 277 K, a density minimum is observed at 200 K for the confined water, below which a regular thermal expansion behavior is restored. Within MCM-41-S-24 of larger pore size, water freezes at 220.5 K. The average water/ice density measurement in MCM-41-S-24 validated the diffraction method. The anomalous thermal expansion coefficient (αp) is calculated. The temperature at which the αp reaches maximum is found to be pore size independent, but the peak height of the αp maximum is linearly dependent on the pore size. The obtained data are critical to verify available theoretical and computational models of water.

Plan and Then Act: The Moderated Moderation Effects of Profession Identity and Action Control for Students at Arts Universities during the Career Development Process.

Preservice teachers at universities of arts have more than 10 years of professional training before admission, but in their senior year, they face the pressure of the graduation exhibition and performances and the teacher certification examination at the same time. This process is dissimilar to that for preservice teachers at general universities. Such a difference, however, has not been taken seriously in the past. In order to avoid burnout, preservice teachers at universities of arts, when they are under the pressure of limited time, may choose to identify with the departments they are more familiar with for their future careers, rather than identifying with their educational program, in order to increase hope for their career and reduce the chance of burnout. In addition, we believe that the use of action control/state control would also show different adaptation situations in the face of pressure. Therefore, this study focuses on the role of profession identity and action control as moderating variables in the process of becoming preservice teachers at arts universities. We recruited 304 art-major preservice teachers to establish a path model to explore their future time perspective and grit, detecting how the mediation of career decision self-efficacy affects learning burnout and career hope. Secondly, we inspected the moderating effect of profession identity and action control on learning burnout and career hope. We found that profession identity moderates the relationships between future time perspective and career decision self-efficacy as well as between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout, all of which exhibited ordinal interactions. Furthermore, preservice teachers with high decision-making efficacy had lower burnout than those with low efficacy, but the high-efficacy advantage in preservice teachers under state control in reducing burnout would disappear. Lastly, although professional identification was important, action control regulated the relationship between career decision self-efficacy and learning burnout with ordinal interaction; that is, action control could effectively reduce their learning burnout.

GWAPower: a statistical power calculation software for genome-wide association studies with quantitative traits.

BACKGROUND: In designing genome-wide association (GWA) studies it is important to calculate statistical power. General statistical power calculation procedures for quantitative measures often require information concerning summary statistics of distributions such as mean and variance. However, with genetic studies, the effect size of quantitative traits is traditionally expressed as heritability, a quantity defined as the amount of phenotypic variation in the population that can be ascribed to the genetic variants among individuals. Heritability is hard to transform into summary statistics. Therefore, general power calculation procedures cannot be used directly in GWA studies. The development of appropriate statistical methods and a user-friendly software package to address this problem would be welcomed. RESULTS: This paper presents GWAPower, a statistical software package of power calculation designed for GWA studies with quantitative traits, where genetic effect is defined as heritability. Based on several popular one-degree-of-freedom genetic models, this method avoids the need to specify the non-centrality parameter of the F-distribution under the alternative hypothesis. Therefore, it can use heritability information directly without approximation. In GWAPower, the power calculation can be easily adjusted for adding covariates and linkage disequilibrium information. An example is provided to illustrate GWAPower, followed by discussions. CONCLUSIONS: GWAPower is a user-friendly free software package for calculating statistical power based on heritability in GWA studies with quantitative traits. The software is freely available at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10502931/GWAPower.zip.

Assessing agreement with repeated measures for random observers.

Agreement studies are often concerned with assessing whether different observers for measuring responses on the same subject or sample can produce similar results. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) is a popular index for assessing the closeness among observers for quantitative measurements. Usually, the CCC is used for data without and with replications based on subject and observer effects only. However, we cannot use this methodology if repeated measurements rather than replications are collected. Although there exist some CCC-type indices for assessing agreement with repeated measurements, there is no CCC for random observers and random time points. In this paper, we propose a new CCC for repeated measures where both observers and time points are treated as random effects. A simulation study demonstrates our proposed methodology, and we use vertebral body data and image data for illustrations.

Density measurement of 1-d confined water by small angle neutron scattering method: pore size and hydration level dependences.

Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) is used to measure the absolute density of water contained in 1-D cylindrical pores of a silica material MCM-41-S with pore diameters of 19 and 15 A. By being able to suppress the homogeneous nucleation process inside the narrow pore, one can keep water in the liquid state down to at least 160 K. From a combined analysis of SANS data from both H(2)O and D(2)O hydrated samples, we determined the absolute value of the density of 1-D confined water. We found that the average density of water inside the fully hydrated 19 A pore is 8% higher than that of the bulk water at room temperature. The temperature derivative of the density shows a pronounced peak at T(L) = 235 K signaling the crossing of the Widom line at ambient pressure and confirming the existence of a liquid-liquid phase transition at an elevated pressure. Pore size and hydration level dependences of the density are also studied.

Uncovering synthetic lethal interactions for therapeutic targets and predictive markers in lung adenocarcinoma.

Two genes are called synthetic lethal (SL) if their simultaneous mutation leads to cell death, but mutation of either individual does not. Targeting SL partners of mutated cancer genes can selectively kill cancer cells, but leave normal cells intact. We present an integrated approach to uncover SL gene pairs as novel therapeutic targets of lung adenocarcinoma (LADC). Of 24 predicted SL pairs, PARP1-TP53 was validated by RNAi knockdown to have synergistic toxicity in H1975 and invasive CL1-5 LADC cells; additionally FEN1-RAD54B, BRCA1-TP53, BRCA2-TP53 and RB1-TP53 were consistent with the literature. While metastasis remains a bottleneck in cancer treatment and inhibitors of PARP1 have been developed, this result may have therapeutic potential for LADC, in which TP53 is commonly mutated. We also demonstrated that silencing PARP1 enhanced the cell death induced by the platinum-based chemotherapy drug carboplatin in lung cancer cells (CL1-5 and H1975). IHC of RAD54B↑, BRCA1↓-RAD54B↑, FEN1(N)↑-RAD54B↑ and PARP1↑-RAD54B↑ were shown to be prognostic markers for 131 Asian LADC patients, and all markers except BRCA1↓-RAD54B↑ were further confirmed by three independent gene expression data sets (a total of 426 patients) including The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort of LADC. Importantly, we identified POLB-TP53 and POLB as predictive markers for the TCGA cohort (230 subjects), independent of age and stage. Thus, POLB and POLB-TP53 may be used to stratify future non-Asian LADC patients for therapeutic strategies.

Thrombocytopenia as a surrogate for cirrhosis and a marker for the identification of patients at high-risk for hepatocellular carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to examine the usefulness of platelet counts in the diagnosis of cirrhosis and for identifying high-risk individuals in a community-based hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) screening program. METHODS: Pilot Study 1 determined the correlation between platelet counts and pathologic hepatic fibrosis scores among individuals with chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection (n = 122 patients) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection (n = 244 patients). Pilot Study 2 investigated proportions of individuals with thrombocytopenia (<150 x 10(3)/mm(3)) among patients with HCC (n = 4042 patients). Pilot Study 3 demonstrated the correlation between platelet counts and ultrasonographic (US) parenchyma scores among anti-HCV-positive individuals (n = 75 patients). The core study was a 2-stage, community-based screening for HCC among residents age 40 years or older in townships with a high prevalence of anti-HCV (n = 4616 individuals) and in townships with a low prevalence of anti-HCV (n = 1694 individuals). Patients with thrombocytopenia were identified for US and alpha-fetoprotein screening. RESULTS: Among the individuals who were positive for anti-HCV, platelet counts decreased according to increased pathologic fibrosis scores or US scores for liver parenchyma disease: The best cutoff platelet count was 150 x 10(3)/mm(3) for a diagnosis of cirrhosis. The sensitivity and specificity were 68.2% and 76.4%, respectively, for pathologic cirrhosis and 76.2% and 87.8%, respectively, for US cirrhosis. Forty-eight percent of patients with HCC were thrombocytopenic. The proportion of thrombocytopenia was significantly greater in patients with HCV-related HCC (63%) than in patients with HBV-related HCC (42%). In the townships with high and low anti-HCV prevalence, the prevalence of thrombocytopenia was 17.9% and 6.1%, respectively, (P < .001), respectively. Twenty-five patients were diagnosed with HCC, and all of those patients resided in the high-prevalence township. CONCLUSIONS: Thrombocytopenia was a valid surrogate of cirrhosis and a valid marker for the identification of individuals at high-risk for HCC, especially in areas that had a high prevalence of HCV.