Drawing on communities of practice, this article considers social support for international students in Japanese as a foreign language classroom at an Australian university. Social support, which is ...a means of promoting well-being, is often set outside international students' day-to-day routines, especially outside classrooms in that academic support is a primary concern. Language education studies concerning student emotional experiences acknowledge that classrooms are venues for emotional turmoil and thus call for more attention on classrooms to better understand and support student learning. Yet, in-class social support has been under-discussed to date. This qualitative case study focused on four international students in an introductory Japanese course within a Japanese program community of practice and analyzed the data collected over a 13-week semester using a reflexive thematic analysis to write four vignettes. The vignettes highlight that the students felt stressed in their daily and academic lives, and built, gave, received, and benefited from social support in the classroom. The social support impacted not only their Japanese learning, but also their study for other subjects; that is, it enhanced their overall well-being as students. Exploring in-class social support using a community of practice perspective helped elucidate how educators can promote social support in foreign language classrooms. Further, it prompted us to reconsider what classrooms are for, and underlined the importance of paying attention to such support to enhance the well-being of international students who are likely to face challenges frequently.
Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are expected to be used for embedded systems, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and edge computing thanks to their high-energy efficiency and ...programmability. In essence, a CGRA is an array of numerous processing elements. To exploit this abundant computation resource, a compiler for CGRAs has to fulfill more tasks compared that for general-purpose processors. Therefore, many studies have proposed optimization methods, especially for application mapping, because the performance and energy efficiency strongly depend on optimization at compile time. However, many works focus only on performance improvement or resource minimization, although such optimization objectives are not always appropriate when considering various use cases. In this work, we propose GenMap, an application mapping framework using multiobjective optimization based on a genetic algorithm so that users can set optimization criteria as needed. Besides, it provides aggressive power optimization using our dynamic power model and leakage minimization technique. The proposed method is applied to three fabricated CGRA chips for evaluation. Experimental results show that GenMap achieves 15.7% reduction of wire length while keeping processing element utilization when compared with conventional methods. In addition, according to real chip experiments, 12.1%-46.8% of energy consumption is reduced, and up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">2\times </tex-math></inline-formula> speedup is archived for several architectures when compared with other two approaches.
Exercise combined with dietary factors may have significant effects on the suppression of body fat accumulation. Several trials suggest that amino acid mixtures containing alanine, arginine, and ...phenylalanine (ARF) combined with exercise can significantly reduce body fat accumulation in overweight adults and high-fat diet-induced obesity in mice. We therefore hypothesized that combining ARF and exercise would significantly induce beige adipocyte formation and that this would contribute to reducing body weight, whereas administration of ARF or exercise alone would not. Administration of ARF (1 g/kg body weight, daily) combined with exercise (5 sessions per week) for 4 wk significantly induced formation of beige adipocytes in inguinal white adipose tissue (iWAT) in mice, although ARF or exercise alone did not. Metabolomic analysis showed that plasma lactate concentration was significantly elevated in the exercise+ARF group relative to the exercise group. Furthermore, lactate dehydrogenase B, which increases redox stress by converting lactate to pyruvate in iWAT and triggers induction of uncoupling protein 1 expression was significantly upregulated in iWAT of the exercise+ARF group. These findings demonstrate the unique effect of ARF combined with exercise for inducing beige adipocyte formation, which may be associated with the suggested lactate-mediated pathway. Appropriate mixtures of amino acids could be used as a dietary supplement before exercise and contributed to increasing energy expenditures.
Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) provide high energy efficiency with word-level programmability rather than bit-level ones such as FPGAs. The coarser reconfigurability brings about ...higher energy efficiency and reduces the complexity of compiler tasks compared to the FPGAs. However, application mapping process for CGRAs is still time-consuming. When the compiler tries to map a large and complicated application data-flow-graph(DFG) onto the reconfigurable fabric, it tends to result in inefficient resource use or to fail in mapping. In case of failure, the compiler must divide it into several sub-DFGs and goes back to the same flow. In this work, we propose a novel partitioning method based on a genetic algorithm to eliminate the unmappable DFGs and improve the mapping quality. In order not to generate unmappable sub-DFGs, we also propose an estimation model which predicts the mappability and resource requirements using a DGCNN (Deep Graph Convolutional Neural Network). The genetic algorithm with this model can seek the most resource-efficient mapping without the back-end mapping process. Our model can predict the mappability with more than 98% accuracy and resource usage with a negligible error for two studied CGRAs. Besides, the proposed partitioning method demonstrates 53-75% of memory saving, 1.28-1.39x higher throughput, and better mapping quality over three comparative approaches.
Curcumin (Cur) has various biological effects, including anti-obesity and anti-diabetic properties. However, the molecular mechanisms by which Cur exerts these effects remain unclear. In addition, ...high doses of Cur have been administered in most animal and human trials to date, due mainly to the poor water solubility of native Cur and its low oral bioavailability. In our previous study, we demonstrated that a highly bioavailable Cur formulation (4.5 mg/kg) induces the formation of beige adipocytes in inguinal white adipose tissue (iWAT) in mice. In the present study, to enhance Cur-mediated beige adipocyte formation and reduce the required functional Cur dose, we investigated whether a low dose of Cur combined with exercise synergistically induced beige adipocyte formation. Cur (1.5 mg Cur/kg, daily) combined with exercise for 4 wk significantly induced beige adipocyte formation in iWAT in mice. This effect was associated with the elevation of interleukin-6 level following subsequent Cur administration combined with exercise. These results indicate that exercise combined with Cur synergistically enhances biological activity and reduces the required Cur dose. These findings suggest that Cur could be used as a dietary supplement during exercise to enhance exercise-mediated health benefits.
Phosphatase of regenerating liver (PRL) is overexpressed in metastatic cancers and actively drives their malignant progression. Many studies on cultured cancer cells have implied PRL overexpression ...as a stimulant for cellular signaling involved in cell proliferation. However, its role in the tightly adhered and polarized epithelial cells remains largely uncharacterized. In this study, we show that inducible expression of PRL in MDCK normal epithelial cells sensitized MET, the receptor for hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), to functional activation by HGF. We found that PRL expression amplified tyrosine phosphorylation levels of various proteins, among which MET was identified to be the most abundant. This phosphorylation occurred selectively at Y1234/1235 in the activation loop of MET, whereas phosphorylation of Y1349 in the effector-binding site, which is directly involved in downstream signaling, was almost undetectable. Consistently, PRL overexpression by itself did not cause observable alterations at the cellular level. However, when cells were stimulated with HGF, phosphorylation of Y1349 was much more strongly induced in PRL-expressing cells than in control cells. This resulted in robust cell scattering and tubulogenesis, even with low levels of HGF. Collectively, these results demonstrate a unique role of PRL in regulating MET function, which is known to be crucial for remodeling of epithelial tissues and malignant progression of cancers.
Abstract
Dust and gas in protoplanetary disks dissipate as central stars evolve. In order to estimate the dust dissipation timescales in the protoplanetary disks, we stacked the WISE 12 and 22, and ...the AKARI 90 μm survey images of known T Tauri stars and derived the average fluxes, well below the survey flux limit in the 90 μm band. We classified 4783 T Tauri stars into three age groups, which are young (<2 Myr), mid-age (2–6 Myr), and old (>6 Myr) groups, and stacked the WISE 12 and 22 and the AKARI 90 μm images in each group. The photometry of the stacked image shows the flux decay timescales of 1.4 ± 0.2, 1.38 ± 0.05, and $1.4^{+0.6}_{-0.5}\:$Myr in the 12, 22, and 90 μm bands, respectively. In optically thin disks with one-solar luminosity central stars, the 12 and 22 μm fluxes are attributed to the emission from the intermediate (∼1 au) region and the 90 μm flux corresponds to that from the outer (∼10 au) region in the disk. We hence conclude that the dust dissipation timescale is τmed,dust ∼ 1.4 Myr in the intermediate disks and is $\tau _{\rm outer,dust}= 1.4^{+0.6}_{-0.5}\:$Myr in the outer disks. The dust-dissipation time difference between the outer and intermediate disks is $\Delta \tau _{\rm dust} = \tau _{\rm outer,dust} -\tau _{\rm med,dust}=0.0^{+0.6}_{-0.5}\:$Myr, indicating that the dust in the intermediate and outer disks dissipates on almost the same timescale.
A novel configuration data compression technique for coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) is proposed. Reducing the size of configuration data of CGRAs shortens the reconfiguration ...time especially when the communication bandwidth between a CGRA and a host CPU is limited. In addition, it saves energy consumption of configuration cache and controller. The proposed technique is based on a multicast configuration technique called RoMultiC, which reduces the configuration time by multicasting the same data to multiple PEs (Processing Elements) with two bit-maps. Scheduling algorithms for an optimizing the order of multicasting have been proposed. However, the multicasting is possible only if each PE has completely the same configuration. In general, configuration data for CGRAs can be divided into some fields like machine code formats of general perpose CPUs. The proposed scheme confines a part of fields for multicasting so that the possibility of multicasting more PEs can be increased. This paper analyzes algorithms to find a configuration pattern which maximizes the number of multicasted PEs. We implemented the proposed scheme to CMA (Cool Mega Array), a straight forward CGRA as a case study. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 40.0% smaller configuration than a previous method for an image processing application at maximum. The exploration of the multicasted grain size reveals the effective grain size for each algorithm. Furthermore, since both a dynamic power consumption of the configuration controller and a configuration time are improved, it achieves 50.1% reduction of the energy consumption for the configuration with a negligible area overhead.
Recent IoT devices require extremely low standby power consumption, while a certain performance is needed during the active time, and Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) have received ...attention because of their high energy efficiency. For further reduction of the standby energy consumption of CGRAs, the leakage power for their configuration memory must be reduced. Although the power gating is a common technique, the lost data in flip-flops and memory must be retrieved after the wake-up. Recovering everything requires numerous state transitions and considerable overhead both on its execution time and energy. To address the problem, Non-volatile Cool Mega Array (NVCMA), a CGRA providing non-volatile flip-flops (NVFFs) with spin transfer torque type non-volatile memory (NVM) technology has been developed. However, in general, non-volatile memory technologies have problems with reliability. Some NVFFs are stacked-at-0/1, and cannot store the data in a certain possibility. To improve the chip yield, we propose a mapping algorithm to avoid faulty processing elements of the CGRA caused by the erroneous configuration data. Next, we also propose a method to add an error-correcting code (ECC) mechanism to NVFFs for the configuration and constant memory. The proposed method was applied to NVCMA to evaluate the availability rate and reduction of write time. By using both methods, the average availability ratio of 94.2% was achieved, while the average availability ratio of the nine applications was 0.056% when the probability of failure of the FF was 0.01. The energy for storing data becomes about 2.3 times because of the hardware overhead of ECC but the proposed method can save 8.6% of the writing power on average.
Intracellular signaling pathways that promote axon regeneration are closely linked to the mechanism of neurite outgrowth. TC10, a signaling molecule that acts on neurite outgrowth through membrane ...transport, is a member of the Rho family G proteins. Axon injury increases the TC10 levels in motor neurons, suggesting that TC10 may be involved in axon regeneration. In this study, we tried to understand the roles of TC10 in the nervous system using TC10 knock‐out mice. In cultured hippocampal neurons, TC10 ablation significantly reduced axon elongation without affecting ordinary polarization. We determined a role of TC10 in microtubule stabilization at the growth cone neck; therefore, we assume that TC10 limits axon retraction and promotes in vitro axon outgrowth. In addition, there were no notable differences in the size and structure of brains during prenatal and postnatal development between wild‐type and TC10 knock‐out mice. In motor neurons, axon regeneration after injury was strongly suppressed in mice lacking TC10 (both in conventional and injured nerve specific deletion). In retinal ganglion cells, TC10 ablation suppressed the axon regeneration stimulated by intraocular inflammation and cAMP after optic nerve crush. These results show that TC10 plays an important role in axon regeneration in both the peripheral and central nervous systems, and the role of TC10 in peripheral axon regeneration is neuron‐intrinsic.
Intracellular signaling pathways that promote axon regeneration are closely linked to the mechanism of axon outgrowth. TC10 is a signaling molecule that acts on in vitro neurite outgrowth through membrane transport, and here we addressed the physiological roles of TC10 in the nervous system using TC10 KO mice. We found that TC10 plays an essential role in axon regeneration in both the peripheral and central nervous systems, and the role of TC10 in peripheral axon regeneration is neuron‐intrinsic.
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