Effective instruction for conceptual change should aim to reduce the interference of irrelevant knowledge structures, as well as to improve sense-making of counterintuitive scientific notions. Refutation texts are designed to support such processes, yet evidence for its effect on individual conceptual change of robust, complex misconceptions has not been equivocal. In the present work, we examine whether effects of refutation text reading on conceptual change in biological evolution can be augmented with subsequent peer argumentation activities. Hundred undergraduates read a refutation text followed by either peer argumentation on erroneous worked-out solutions or by standard, individual problem solving. Control group subjects read an expository text followed by individual problem solving. Results showed strong effects for the refutation text. Surprisingly, subsequent peer argumentation did not further improve learning gains after refutation text reading. Dialogue protocols analyses showed that gaining dyads were more likely to be symmetrical and to discuss core conceptual principles.
Intracellular protein inclusions are diverse cellular entities with distinct biological properties. They vary in their protein content, sequestration sites, physiological function, conditions for their generation, and turnover rates. Major distinctions have been recognized between stationary amyloids and dynamic, misfolded protein deposits. The former being a dead end for irreversibly misfolded proteins, hence, cleared predominantly by autophagy, while the latter consists of a protein-quality control mechanism, important for cell endurance, where proteins are sequestered during proteotoxic stress and resolved upon its relief. Accordingly, the disaggregation of transient inclusions is a regulated process consisting of protein solubilization, followed by a triage step to either refolding or to ubiquitin-mediated degradation. Recent studies have demonstrated an indispensable role in disaggregation for components of the chaperone and the ubiquitin-proteasome systems. These include heat-shock chaperones of the 40/70/100 kDa families, the proteasome, proteasome substrate shuttling factors, and deubiquitylating enzymes. Thus, a functional link has been established between the chaperone machinery that extracts proteins from transient deposits and 26S proteasome-dependent disaggregation, indicative of a coordinated process. In this review, we discuss data emanating from these important studies and subsequently consolidate the information in the form of a working model for the disaggregation mechanism.
Scholars have long sensed that Shakespeare distances himself from the ideology of perfect friendship, so dominant in his culture. This essay participates in this conversation by advancing two explanations for Shakespeare’s distrust of friendship. First, friends limit selves to what they were, preventing some transformations (examples discussed involve the love versus friendship tension played out in some of the comedies). Second, opening one’s heart to a friend requires abandoning self-love when recognizing the varied excellences which friends exhibit (a pattern of friendship resisted suggested by Timon of Athens).
Deep eutectic mixtures are a promising sustainable and diverse class of tunable solvents that hold great promise for various green chemical and technological processes. Many deep eutectic solvents (DES) are hygroscopic and find use in applications with varying extents of hydration, hence urging a profound understanding of changes in the nanostructure of DES with water content. Here, we report on molecular dynamics simulations of the quintessential choline chloride–urea mixture, using a newly parametrized force field with scaled charges to account for physical properties of hydrated DES mixtures. These simulations indicate that water changes the nanostructure of solution even at very low hydration. We present a novel approach that uses convex constrained analysis to dissect radial distribution functions into base components representing different modes of local association. Specifically, DES mixtures can be deconvoluted locally into two dominant competing nanostructures, whose relative prevalence (but not their salient structural features) change with added water over a wide concentration range, from dry up to ∼30 wt % hydration. Water is found to be associated strongly with several DES components but remarkably also forms linear bead-on-string clusters with chloride. At high water content (beyond ∼50 wt % of water), the solution changes into an aqueous electrolyte-like mixture. Finally, the structural evolution of the solution at the nanoscale with extent of hydration is echoed in the DES macroscopic material properties. These changes to structure, in turn, should prove important in the way DES acts as a solvent and to its interactions with additive components.
AbstractWhile CMIP5 models robustly project drying of the subtropics and more precipitation in the tropics and subpolar latitudes by the end of the century, the magnitude of these changes in precipitation varies widely across models: for example, some models simulate no drying in the eastern Mediterranean while others simulate more than a 50% reduction in precipitation relative to the model-simulated present-day value. Furthermore, the factors leading to changes in local subtropical precipitation remain unclear. The importance of zonal-mean changes in atmospheric structure for local precipitation changes is explored in 42 CMIP5 models. It is found that up to half of the local intermodel spread over the Mediterranean, northern Mexico, East Asia, southern Africa, southern Australia, and southern South America is related to the intermodel spread in large-scale processes such as the magnitude of globally averaged surface temperature increases, Hadley cell widening, polar amplification, stabilization of the tropical upper troposphere, or changes in the polar stratosphere. Globally averaged surface temperature increases account for intermodel spread in land subtropical drying in the Southern Hemisphere but are not important for land drying adjacent to the Mediterranean. The factors associated with drying over the eastern Mediterranean and western Mediterranean differ, with stabilization of the tropical upper troposphere being a crucial factor for the former only. Differences in precipitation between the western and eastern Mediterranean are also evident on interannual time scales. In contrast, the global factors examined here are unimportant over most of the United States, and more generally over the interior of continents. Much of the rest of the spread can be explained by variations in local relative humidity, a proxy also for zonally asymmetric circulation and thermodynamic changes.
The starting point for this compilation is the wish to rethink the concept of antisemitism, race and gender in light of Sartre’s pioneering Réflexions sur la Question Juive seventy years after its publication. The book gathers texts by prestigious scholars from different disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, with the objective or revisiting this work locating it within the setting of two other pioneering – and we argue, related – publications, namely Simone De Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe of 1949 and Franz Fanon’s Peau noire et masques blancs of 1952. This particular and original standpoint sheds new light on the different meanings and political functions of the concept of antisemitism in a political and historical context marked by the post-modern concepts of multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism.
The detection of ionic variation patterns could be a significant marker for the diagnosis of neurological and other diseases. This paper introduces a novel idea for training chemical sensors to recognise patterns of ionic variations. By using an external voltage signal, a sensor can be trained to output distinct time-series signals depending on the state of the ionic solution. Those sequences can be analysed by a relatively simple readout layer for diagnostic purposes. The idea is demonstrated on a chemical sensor that is sensitive to zinc ions with a simple goal of classifying zinc ionic variations as either stable or varying. The study features both theoretical and experimental results. By extensive numerical simulations, it has been shown that the proposed method works successfully in silico. Distinct time-series signals are found which occur with a high probability under only one class of ionic variations. The related experimental results point in the right direction.
What are the implications of hard economic times for regional economic cooperation? Existing research is sharply divided on the answer to this question. Some studies suggest that economic crises encourage governments to strengthen their regional institutions, but others indicate that they lead to decreasing investment in such initiatives. Both sides overlook the possibility that the passage of time conditions these relationships, however. We aim to bridge these opposing perspectives by distinguishing between short-term and long-term effects of economic hard times on institutionalized regional cooperation. We argue that in the short-term economic crises impede regional institutionalization due to protectionist pressures, nationalistic public sentiments, and political instability. This effect is reversed in the longer-term, as interest groups and the public adopt more favorable attitudes towards regional economic organizations (REOs) and governments employ these institutions to demonstrate their competence and to improve economic conditions. We evaluate this argument in relations to regional institutionalization, which refers to the functional scope and structure of REOs. Using a data set that contains information on this dimension for thirty REOs over four decades, we find strong support for the theoretical framework: regional institutionalization remains stagnant in the immediate aftermath of economic crises, but increases in subsequent years.
In this paper we offer a new approach to modeling strategies of bounded complexity, the so-called factor-based strategies. In our model, the strategy of a player in the multi-stage game does not directly map the set of histories H to the set of her actions. Instead, the player’s perception of H is represented by a factor ϕ : H → X, where X reflects the “cognitive complexity” of the player. Formally, mapping ϕ sends each history to an element of a factor space X that represents its equivalence class. The play of the player can then be conditioned just on the elements of the set X. From the perspective of the original multi-stage game we say that a function ϕ from H to X is a factor of a strategy σ if there exists a function ω from X to the set of actions of the player such that σ = ω ◦ ϕ. In this case we say that the strategy σ is ϕ-factorbased. Stationary strategies and strategies played by finite automata and strategies with bounded recall are the most prominent examples of factor-based strategies. In the discounted infinitely repeated game with perfect monitoring, a best reply to a profile of ϕ-factor-based strategies need not be a ϕ-factor-based strategy. However, if the factor ϕ is recursive, namely, its value ϕ(a(1), . . . , a(t)) on a finite string of action profiles (a(1), . . . , a(t)) is a function of ϕ(a(1), . . . , a(t−1)) and at, then for every profile of factor-based strategies there is a best reply that is a pure factor-based strategy. We also study factor-based strategies in the more general case of stochastic games.
Informed regional policy needs good regional data. As regional data series for key economic variables are generally absent whereas national-level time series data for the same variables are ubiquitous, we suggest an approach that leverages this advantage. We hypothesize the existence of a pervasive “common factor” represented by the national time series that affects regions differentially. We provide an empirical illustration in which national FDI is used in place of panel data for FDI, which are absent. The proposed methodology is tested empirically with respect to the determinants of regional demand for housing. We use a quasi-experimental approach to compare the results of a “common correlated effects” (CCE) estimator with a benchmark case when absent regional data are omitted. Using three common factors relating to national population, income and housing stock, we find mixed support for the common correlated effects hypothesis. We conclude by discussing how our experimental design may serve as a methodological prototype for further tests of CCE as a solution to the absent spatial data problem.
