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The present study aimed to investigate the association between the serum SIRT1 protein and the severity of spinal cord injury (SCI) as well as the neurological recovery in mice. In this study, the wild-type (WT), Mx1-Cre+ SIRT1loxP/loxP (Mx1), and LCK-Cre+SIRT1loxP/loxP (LCK) mice were subjected to sham surgery, mild, moderate, or severe SCI, respectively. The serum was collected at intervals of 12 h, 1 day (d), 3 d, 5 d, 7 d, 10 d, 14 d, and 21 d after the injury. The locomotor function of all the animals was assessed using the Basso mouse scale (BMS) and the serum SIRT1 proteins were analyzed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results demonstrated that about 7–10 d after SCI, the levels of SIRT1 protein in the serum correlated significantly with the severity of the injury and at 28 d post-injury, there was a distant neurological recovery (BMS score). The serum SIRT1 concentration in both the Mx1 and LCK mice in the sham group was significantly reduced compared to that in the WT mice, and there was a delayed increase in the serum SIRT1 levels after injury. These findings indicate that the SIRT1 concentrations in the serum of the SCI mice closely correlated with the acute severity and neurological outcome.

In this paper, we present a scalable three dimensional hybrid MPI+Threads parallel Delaunay image-to-mesh conversion algorithm. A nested master-worker communication model for parallel mesh generation is implemented which simultaneously explores process-level parallelization and thread-level parallelization: inter-node communication using MPI and inter-core communication inside one node using threads. In order to overlap the communication (task request and data movement) and computation (parallel mesh refinement), the inter-node MPI communication and intra-node local mesh refinement is separated. The master thread that initializes the MPI environment is in charge of the inter-node MPI communication while the worker threads of each process are only responsible for the local mesh refinement within the node. We conducted a set of experiments to test the performance of the algorithm on Turing, a distributed memory cluster at Old Dominion University High Performance Computing Center and observed that the granularity of coarse level data decomposition, which affects the coarse level concurrency, has a significant influence on the performance of the algorithm. With the proper value of granularity, the algorithm expresses impressive performance potential and is scalable to 30 distributed memory compute nodes with 20 cores each (the maximum number of nodes available for us in the experiments).

The School Development Planning [XUE-XIAO-FA-ZHAN-GUI-HUA] as a term has not been included in the China’s lexicon of school leadership and management until the late 1980s and early 1990s (Cao & Hui, 2009; Chu, 2008; Zhu, 2010). “School development planning” is valued because of the role of school leaders was intensified following the China’s educational reform launched in 1985. The government policies regarding educational reform during the late 1980s and early 1990s yielded two big changes for school leadership. In the Decision of the CCCPC on the Reform of the Educational System, the CCCPC decided that “reform the management system, while strengthening macro-management, resolutely implement simplified administration and decentralization, and increase the level of school autonomy.” (CCCPC, 1985). This position of the CCCPC resulted in the first change that a part of power was delegated from local education authority to school. As we know, the autonomy was always accompanied by accountability.

China and the Western countries have different historical traditions in terms of the relations between school and community. The Chinese educational historians have a summary of Chinese school education in ancient times, which is called XUE-ZAI-GUAN-FU [education never takes place out of official compound]. This saying is based on three fundamental characteristics of school education during initial stage of school education in ancient China (the period of time so-called the Chinese society with slave system). The first characteristic is that school education is exclusively the experience of the children from royal and noble families, and never allowed to extend to common man. Secondly, the school house is set in the royal palace or an official residence, in which a certain official or a couple of officials take the role of teachers. To be more exactly, these officials are only part-time teachers, since they also take other governing responsibilities in central or local governments.

As one of school leadership key practices, the “optimizing internal management” was initially set out by The Professional Standards for Principals of Compulsory Education Schools (MOE, 2013a) and The Professional Standards for Principals of Senior High Schools (MOE, 2015), and was more specifically described in the Management Standards for Compulsory Education Schools (MOE, 2017). According to above-mentioned RHDs, this leadership key practice consists of two prongs of requirements for school internal management

Among the professional standards for principals formulated by the Ministry of Education in 2013 and 2015, the “creating a culture fostering student development” was set as one of the six core practices of school leadership (MOE, 2013, 2015).

The differences between school leadership in China and in other countries, especially in Western countries, can be largely attributed to their different sources of school leadership knowledge and different external and internal institutional environment for school leadership. To understand how China’s school leadership unfolds in day-to-day practice and what knowledge underpins its leadership practice, it is essential to figure out the sources of China’s school leadership knowledge and to examine the educational administration system and the school leadership system of China.

Historically, the Chinese nation had a tradition of respecting teachers and valuing education. For example, Confucius as the typical and outstanding representative of ancient Chinese educator has been respected for thousands of years in China.

As we examined in Chapter 1, the principal plays so important role in school leadership under the Principal Responsibility System that they are inevitably viewed by China’s educational policymakers as key to success in school development and improvement.

In China, instructional leadership is not a theme that has only recently emerged. In fact, instructional leadership has long been placed in the center stage of China’s school leadership and management, and it has been regarded as a key factor to promote school improvement.

The Locality-Aware Parallel Delaunay (LAPD) method exploits concurrency at two different levels of granularities (data region and cavity) and employs data partitioning to improve data locality; as a result LAPD scales well on Distributed Shared Memory computers with about 200 cores. In this paper, we propose a three dimensional two-level Locality-Aware Parallel Delaunay image-to-mesh conversion algorithm (LAPD). The algorithm exploits two levels of parallelism at different granularities: coarse-grain parallelism at the region level (which is mapped to a node with multiple cores) and medium-grain parallelism at the cavity level (which is mapped to a single core). We employ a data locality-aware mesh refinement process to reduce the latency caused by the remote memory access. We evaluated LAPD on Blacklight, a cache-coherent NUMA distributed shared memory (DSM) machine in the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and observed a weak scaling efficiency of almost 70% for roughly 200 cores, compared to only 30% for the previous algorithm, Parallel Optimistic Mesh Generation algorithm (PODM). To the best of our knowledge, LAPD exhibits the best scalability for parallel Delaunay mesh generation algorithms running on NUMA DSM supercomputers.

With the tide of globalization, the external environment that schools face turns uncertain and complex. In response to the new challenges, teacher teams need to manage boundaries to maintain the sustainable development. The two studies reported in this paper, aimed to examine the boundary activities of teacher teams of middle schools in China. In order to achieve the research objective, the first study employed an inductive approach to identify a set of boundary activities that teacher teams engage in to manage the relationships with the outside. In the second study, the exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to build a valid and reliable scale for the boundary activities of teacher teams. Data from 332 teachers of 72 subject-based “teaching study” teams in 12 middle schools indicate a four-factor model of teacher team boundary activities includes the following subscales: scouting activities; task-coordinating activities; information filtering activities; and emotion cultivating activities. Similarities and differences between the current findings and existing literature have been discussed.

In this paper, we present a scalable three-dimensional hybrid parallel Delaunay image-to-mesh conversion algorithm (PDR.PODM) for distributed shared memory architectures. PDR.PODM is able to explore parallelism early in the mesh generation process thanks to the aggressive speculative approach employed by the Parallel Optimistic Delaunay Mesh generation algorithm (PODM). In addition, it decreases the communication overhead and improves data locality by making use of a data partitioning scheme offered by the Parallel Delaunay Refinement algorithm (PDR). PDR.PODM supports fully functional volume grading by creating elements with varying size. Small elements are created near boundary or inside the critical regions in order to capture the fine features while big elements are created in the rest of the mesh. We tested PDR.PODM on Blacklight, a distributed shared memory (DSM) machine in Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. For the uniform mesh generation, we observed a weak scaling speedup of 163.8 and above for up to 256 cores as opposed to PODM whose weak scaling speedup is only 44.7 on 256 cores. PDR.PODM scales well on uniform refinement cases running on DSM supercomputers. The end result is that PDR.PODM can generate 18 million elements per second as opposed to 14 million per second in our earlier work. The varying size version sharply reduces the number of elements compared to the uniform version and thus reduces the time to generate the mesh while keeping the same fidelity. Represents the surface with topological and geometrical guarantees.Recovers the surface and meshes the volume simultaneously in parallel.Supports parallel graded mesh generation for multi-material objects.

We consider the co-clustering of time-varying data using evolutionary co-clustering methods. Existing approaches are based on the spectral learning framework, thus lacking a probabilistic interpretation. We overcome this limitation by developing a probabilistic model in this paper. The proposed model assumes that the observed data are generated via a two-step process that depends on the historic co-clusters. This allows us to capture the temporal smoothness in a probabilistically principled manner. To perform maximum likelihood parameter estimation, we present an EM-based algorithm. We also establish the convergence of the proposed EM algorithm. An appealing feature of the proposed model is that it leads to soft co-clustering assignments naturally. We evaluate the proposed method on both synthetic and real-world data sets. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches based on spectral method. To fully exploit the real-world impact of our methods, we further perform a systematic application study on the analysis of Drosophila gene expression pattern images. We encode the spatial gene expression information at a particular developmental time point into a data matrix using a mesh-generation pipeline. We then co-cluster the embryonic domains and the genes simultaneously for multiple time points using our evolutionary co-clustering method. Results show that the co-clusters of gene and embryonic domains reflect the underlying biology.

1,2,4-Triazole stabilized allene anions are intermediates for the synthesis of 4-alkyl-2(5H)-thiophenones and 8-phenylimino-1,2,4-triazolo[5,1-c]-1,4-thiazines. Structures are confirmed by X-ray crystallography.Key words: allene anion, 4-alkyl-2(5H)-thiophenones, 8-phenylimino-1,2,4-triazolo[5,1-c]-1,4-thiazines, X-ray crystallography.

1-(α-Alkoxyalkyl)benzotriazoles 1a−d add to phenyl vinyl ether to form key intermediates 4a−d, which readily undergo lithiation and subsequent trapping by a variety of electrophiles to give the expected substituted derivatives 7a−d, 9a−c, 11, 13, 15, and 18 in high yields. Subsequent hydrolysis of these compounds provides a novel high-yield acyl anion synthon approach for the synthesis of β-alkoxy ketones 8 or α‘-functionalized β-alkoxy ketones 10, 12, 14, 16, and 19 by short procedures from readily available starting materials.

Tosylmethylamines (1) are advantageous synthon equivalents for “nonstabilized” α-aminocarbanions of aromatic amines. Clean reactions and high yields are observed provided one-step procedures are ut...

Novel and facile routes to alkenyl, alkynyl, and aryl 1,2-diketones utilize treatment of benzotriazole derivatives 1, 7a,b, and 15a−d with butyllithium and subsequent reaction with esters or acid chlorides to yield the substituted intermediates 2a−d, 8a,b, and 16a−g. Reactions of the deprotonated 1 and 7 with α,β-unsaturated aldehydes followed by oxidation also produces similar intermediates 5 and 11a,b. Subsequent hydrolyses of the intermediates of type 2, 5, 8, 11, and 16 afford diverse 1,2-diketones in good yields.

1-(Benzotriazol-1-yl)-3-(diphenylphosphoryl)-1-ethoxy-1-propene (3), prepared from N-(α-ethoxyallyl)benzotriazole (1), underwent selective Horner reactions with aldehydes to give substituted dienes. Subsequent hydrolysis of these intermediates readily produced β,γ-unsaturated esters 2a−c in good yields. Similar reactions with ketones followed by hydrolysis of 10 produced, depending on the conditions, either the corresponding γ,γ-disubstituted β,γ-unsaturated esters 11a−d or γ-lactones 9a−c and 13. A double lithiation process provided β,γ,γ-trisubstituted β,γ-unsaturated esters 15, 18, and β,γ,γ-trisubstituted γ-lactone 14.

C−Benzotriazole bonds were selectively transformed to give the corresponding α-aminocarbanions when N-(α-aminoalkyl)benzotriazoles were reacted with either Li/LiBr or SmI2 in the presence of representative electrophiles. The ranges of applicability of the two reagents complement each other, and together the two protocols provide a general route from readily available crystalline starting materials to a variety of “nonstabilized” α-aminocarbanions that can be trapped in moderate to good yields.

The dianion 12 (right harpoon over left harpoon 13) of 1-(1,2,4-triazol-1-yl)phenylpropargyl ethyl ether 11(readily prepared from phenylpropargylaldehyde diethyl acetal 8 and 1,2,4-triazole) reacts with alkyl halides, aldehydes, ketones, and alpha,beta-unsaturated ketones to give exclusively gamma-substituted allenic products of type 10. These adducts underwent mild in situ hydrolysis enabling convenient syntheses of alpha,beta-unsaturated esters 9a-c and alpha,beta-unsaturated gamma-lactones 16, 18, 20, and 22. Reactions of dianion 13 with imines generated the 1,3,4-trisubstituted 2-alkoxypyrroles 27, 30, and 31 in high yields. The alkyl-substituted analog 34 underwent similar reactions to give predominantly the gamma-products 39,40, and 42 along with a small proportion of alpha-analogs.

Background Multicellular organisms consist of cells of many different types that are established during development. Each type of cell is characterized by the unique combination of expressed gene products as a result of spatiotemporal gene regulation. Currently, a fundamental challenge in regulatory biology is to elucidate the gene expression controls that generate the complex body plans during development. Recent advances in high-throughput biotechnologies have generated spatiotemporal expression patterns for thousands of genes in the model organism fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Existing qualitative methods enhanced by a quantitative analysis based on computational tools we present in this paper would provide promising ways for addressing key scientific questions. Results We develop a set of computational methods and open source tools for identifying co-expressed embryonic domains and the associated genes simultaneously. To map the expression patterns of many genes into the same coordinate space and account for the embryonic shape variations, we develop a mesh generation method to deform a meshed generic ellipse to each individual embryo. We then develop a co-clustering formulation to cluster the genes and the mesh elements, thereby identifying co-expressed embryonic domains and the associated genes simultaneously. Experimental results indicate that the gene and mesh co-clusters can be correlated to key developmental events during the stages of embryogenesis we study. The open source software tool has been made available at http://compbio.cs.odu.edu/fly/. Conclusions Our mesh generation and machine learning methods and tools improve upon the flexibility, ease-of-use and accuracy of existing methods.

The thermodynamic second dissociation constant K2 for sulfuric acid has been determined by conductivity measurements of aqueous sulfuric acid solutions at various temperatures. The data are treated by using two different methods developed with two independent assumptions due to Noyes et al. and Shedlovsky. Both methods require the knowledge of relevant ionic conductivities, which may be calculated from the Onsager limiting law. The values for K2 obtained with these two methods show excellent agreement. The value of 0.0103 mol-L−1 at 25°C agrees with the ‘best’ literature value of 0.0102 mol-L−1 within the experimental uncertainty, as also does the enthalpy of dissociation which is derived from the derivative of the temperature coefficient of K2.

Ionic interaction in the three systems Hcl-HEPES (N-2-hydroxyethylpiperazine-N′-2-ethanesulfonic acid), HCl-MOPSO (3-(N-Morpholino)-2-hydroxypropanesulfonic acid), and HCl-glycine have been studied in terms of their mutual influence on the respective activity coefficients of each component. Activity coefficients for each component of the three systems are calculated from emf measurements of solutions containing HCl and the amino acid in a H2/solution/AgCl,Ag cell at 25°C. The first dissociation constant of HEPES at 25°C has also been determined using emf and pH titration measurements.

The dianion 12 (right harpoon over left harpoon 13) of 1-(1,2,4-triazol-1-yl)phenylpropargyl ethyl ether 11(readily prepared from phenylpropargylaldehyde diethyl acetal 8 and 1,2,4-triazole) reacts with alkyl halides, aldehydes, ketones, and alpha,beta-unsaturated ketones to give exclusively gamma-substituted allenic products of type 10. These adducts underwent mild in situ hydrolysis enabling convenient syntheses of alpha,beta-unsaturated esters 9a-c and alpha,beta-unsaturated gamma-lactones 16, 18, 20, and 22. Reactions of dianion 13 with imines generated the 1,3,4-trisubstituted 2-alkoxypyrroles 27, 30, and 31 in high yields. The alkyl-substituted analog 34 underwent similar reactions to give predominantly the gamma-products 39,40, and 42 along with a small proportion of alpha-analogs.

Deprotonated 1-(benzotriazol-1-yl)-1-ethoxy-2-hexene (7) reacted with alkyl halides, aldehydes, ketones, imines, and alpha,beta-unsaturated esters to give exclusively the alpha-alkylated products 8a-c, 10a,b, 12, 14, 16, and 18a,b, respectively. Without isolation, these products were hydrolyzed under mild conditions to generate the corresponding simple or functionalized alpha,beta-unsaturated ketones 9a-c, 11a,b, 13, 15, 17, and 19a,b. Similar reactions with the phenyl-substituted analog 3-(benzotriazol-1-yl)-3-ethoxy-1-phenyl-1-propene (21) also gave the analogous alpha-products, but they were accompanied by small amount of the gamma-products in most cases. By contrast, deprotonation of the corresponding triazole derivative 29 with butyllithium followed by reactions with alkyl halides, aldehydes, ketones, or imines yielded exclusively gamma-alkylated adducts 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, and 42. Intermediates 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, and 42 were readily converted into beta-substituted esters 33a-c, gamma-lactones 35a,b, 39, 41, and 43, and gamma-lactams 37a-c on hydrolysis.

A new experimental approach is proposed for the evaluation of liquid junction potentials and single ion activities. Neither of these quantities can be experimentally measured without assumption. Furthermore, they are concentration dependent but without clearly defined functional relationships. Thus, a given assumption may be satisfactory to obtain these quantities at a given concentration, but will fail at another concentration. It is the intent of this paper to establish a functional relationship between the ratio of activity coefficients and the ionic strength, through which the liquid junction potentials may be computed, as well as the pH values at moderate ionic strengths (