Non-selective TRP Channels

We thank Dr

We thank Dr. leads to embryonic lethality, hinting that PP4 could be needed for cell differentiation and development.16 T cell-specific ablation of PP4 from the proximal Lck promoter-driven Cre recombinase transgene (Lck-cre) causes severe thymocyte development blocks and induces peripheral lymphopenia.16 On the other hand, knockout of PP4 from the CD4 promoter-driven Cre recombinase transgene (CD4-cre) will not significantly impact thymocyte differentiation, but partially impairs regulatory T cell features to induce the onset of spontaneous colitis.17 Recently, PP4 in addition has been implicated in DNA harm response via its capability to either permit cell routine reentry,18 dephosphorylate H2AX,19,20 regulate the experience of KAP1,21 or control cell cycles in Drosophila 22 or candida 23; however, its role in regulating mammalian cell proliferation is not investigated thoroughly. Finally, it really is well worth noting that okadaic acidity (OA), which is regarded as a particular inhibitor of PP2A generally, in fact suppresses PP4 activity with equal 24 or better 25 efficacy also; these outcomes improve the probability that lots of natural procedures after that, such as for example IL-2 signaling modulation,26,27 AMPK activation 28 as well as the rules of T cell proliferation,29 which have been associated with PP2A via OA treatments may be related to the functions of PP4. Our prior characterizations MC-Val-Cit-PAB-rifabutin of mice with Compact disc4-cre mediated deletion from the gene (Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f) revealed a decrease in the amount of peripheral Compact disc4 and Compact disc8 T cells.17 Within this survey, we further showed which the T lymphopenia in Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice could possibly be related to the reduced homeostatic capability and hypo-proliferation of PP4-deficient T cells. This T cell hypo-proliferation had not been due to defective IL-2 signalings or production. Instead, PP4 insufficiency led to a incomplete G1-S cell routine stop that was connected with AMPK hyper-activation. Outcomes Faulty T cell immunity and T-dependent humoral replies in Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice PP4 was reported to become needed for pre-TCR signaling 16 and T cell success.30 Furthermore, our previous report showed that CD4cre:PP4f/f mice suffered from T cell lymphopenia and exhibited reduced KLH T cell responses.17 To help expand investigate the features of PP4 in peripheral T cells, we immunized 6C8 wk old WT or CD4cre:PP4f/f mice with OVA/CFA and harvested the draining LN T cells for OVA re-stimulation = 0.002C0.04, Fig.?1B). When principal and storage humoral responses had been likened between PP4f/f and Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f littermates pursuing NP-KLH/CFA, NPCficoll or NP-KLH/alum immunization, serum ELISA outcomes from the NP-KLH/CFA or NP-KLH/alum immunizations demonstrated that T-dependent antibody replies had been significantly impaired by PP4 insufficiency (< 0.001C0.05 for any Ig isotypes, Fig.?1C, best row); similar outcomes had been also seen in the storage replies (< 0.001C0.05 for any Ig isotypes, Fig.?1C, bottom level row). On the other hand, T-independent antibody replies induced by NP-ficoll had been either unaltered, or just marginally affected (IgM and IgG1 storage response, > 0.05, Fig.?1C, bottom level row) by PP4 ablation. The significantly hampered T-dependent immune system replies in the Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice hence claim that PP4 is vital for the perfect induction of T cell immunity. Open up in another window Amount 1. Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice display defective T-dependent immune system replies by CFSE dye dilution for OVA-induced T cell proliferation (n = 8). (B) Time 3 lifestyle supernatants from cells re-stimulated with 3?g/ml OVA in (A) were put through multiplex assay to measure Th1/Th2 cytokines secretion (n = 6). (C) Mice at 6C8?wk age group were immunized we.p. using the indicated epitope/antigen/adjuvant, and their sera had been gathered on d 21 for principal Ig replies (top sections). Mice had been instantly boosted by immunization and their sera gathered once again on d 35 for storage Ig response (bottom level sections). (n = 3C4). AU, arbitrary device. *, < 0.05; **, < 0.01; ***, < 0.005. Find Supplemental Amount?S1A for stream cytometry gating strategies. PP4 ablation impedes T cell homeostatic extension gene deletion in peripheral T cells. Through the use of qPCR to quantitate the floxed MC-Val-Cit-PAB-rifabutin area and flanking control area from the gene MC-Val-Cit-PAB-rifabutin (Fig.?2A and 17), we discovered that the floxed exon was deleted in 90% of splenic Compact disc4 T cells and 75% of splenic Compact Rabbit polyclonal to ABCB5 disc8 T cells from 6 wk and 12?wk previous Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice (Fig.?2B). Nevertheless, in 24?wk previous Compact disc4cre:PP4f/f mice just 80%.

Opioid Receptors

Recombinant human IL-13 caused mucous metaplasia and increased expression of FOXA3, SPDEF, and MUC5AC in well-differentiated primary HBECs cultured at airCliquid interface (Figure 2A)

Recombinant human IL-13 caused mucous metaplasia and increased expression of FOXA3, SPDEF, and MUC5AC in well-differentiated primary HBECs cultured at airCliquid interface (Figure 2A). Open in a separate window Figure 1. FOXA3 and SPDEF in airway goblet cells from individuals with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). rhinovirus. Foxa3 induced goblet cell metaplasia and enhanced expression of a network of genes mediating mucus production. Paradoxically, FOXA3 inhibited rhinovirus-induced IFN production, IRF-3 phosphorylation, and IKK expression and inhibited viral clearance and expression of genes required for antiviral defenses, including MDA5, RIG-I, TLR3, IRF7/9, and nuclear factor-B. Conclusions: FOXA3 induces goblet cell metaplasia in response to contamination or Th2 stimulation. Suppression of IFN signaling by FOXA3 provides a plausible mechanism that may serve to limit ongoing Th1 inflammation during the resolution of acute viral contamination; however, inhibition of innate immunity by FOXA3 may contribute to susceptibility to viral infections associated with chronic lung disorders accompanied by chronic goblet cell metaplasia. and and inhibited IFN responses. Although inhibitory effects of FOXA3 on IFN signaling may serve to dampen inflammatory responses during resolution of acute infections, chronic expression of FOXA3 associated with mucous metaplasia may contribute to susceptibility to contamination associated with chronic pulmonary disorders. Methods Human Specimens Human samples were deidentified and studies were performed in accordance with institutional review board (IRB) approval at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital (CCHMC ID: 2012-2853). Samples from patients with COPD were obtained from pathological tissues provided by Dr. Andreas Gunther, University of Giessen Lung Center, Giessen, Germany in accordance with IRB approval. HBECs and tissue from patients with asthma were obtained under approved protocols at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. HBECs were produced under Biomedical PC786 IRB Protocol #103-1396. Mouse Models, Ovalbumin, House Dust Mite, and RV1B Sensitization Mouse strains included in this study were C57/B6 (line 2) bred to mice. Ovalbumin, house dust mite (HDM), and RV1B sensitization protocols are provided in the online supplement. Immunohistochemistry, Alcian Blue Staining, and Confocal Microscopy Adult mouse lungs sections were stained with Alcian blue and/or immunohistochemical staining as previously described (12, 13, 19). For confocal microscopy, BEAS2B cells that were stably transfected with lentiviral constructs were dual stained with antibodies for FOXA3 and MUC5AC (13) (online supplement). RV Culture, Contamination, IFN-, and IL-13 Administration Amplification of RV1B followed the standard protocols as previously described (18). Contamination with RV and treatment of primary HBECs with IFN- or IL-13 were previously described (20C23) (online supplement). Chromatin Immunoprecipitation Sequence Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays were conducted as described previously (24). BEAS2B-GFP and BEAS2B-Foxa3 transfected cells were fixed with 1% formaldehyde for 10 minutes at room heat. Chromatin was sonicated and immunoprecipitated using a FOXA3 antibody (Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Dallas, TX) overnight. ChIPCpolymerase chain reaction analysis was conducted using real-time polymerase chain reaction. ChIP-sequence (ChIP-Seq) libraries were generated and sequenced using standard Illumina protocols. Reads (approximately 50 bp per fragment) were mapped to the human genome (UCSC hg19) using the Bowtie2 algorithm (3 trimmed 40 bp reads and three mismatches). Only sequences that PC786 mapped to a single genomic location were selected (online supplement). Statistics Student test (two-tailed, unpaired) and nonparametric Mann-Whitney test (two-tailed, unpaired) (Prism 6; Graphpad, La Jolla, PC786 CA) were used for comparison of statistical differences between two groups. Nonpairing one-way analysis of variance (Prism 6) was used for comparison of statistical differences between three or more groups; values of less than 0.05 were considered significant Rabbit Polyclonal to Chk2 (phospho-Thr383) difference. Results FOXA3 Is usually Highly Expressed in Airway Goblet Cells from Patients with Asthma and COPD Intense nuclear staining of FOXA3 was detected in airway goblet cells in tissue from patients with COPD and asthma. FOXA3 staining was restricted to epithelial cells and closely associated with Alcian blue and SPDEF, both characteristic of airway goblet cells. FOXA3 was much less abundant in airway epithelial cells in tissues from healthy individuals (Physique 1). Th2 cytokines, including IL-13, cause goblet cell metaplasia in airway epithelial cells (25). We therefore assessed the effects of IL-13 on expression of FOXA3 and goblet cellCrelated genes in primary HBECs. Recombinant human IL-13 caused mucous metaplasia and increased expression of FOXA3, SPDEF, and MUC5AC in well-differentiated primary HBECs cultured at airCliquid interface (Physique 2A). Open in a separate window Physique 1. FOXA3 and SPDEF in airway goblet cells from individuals with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). FOXA3 and SPDEF were detected by immunohistochemistry in lung tissue from the human patients with COPD and asthma. FOXA3 was present in nuclei and SPDEF in both.

These data suggest that although Nec-1 appears to offer some short-term protection against the cytotoxicity of the drugs delivered by electroporation

These data suggest that although Nec-1 appears to offer some short-term protection against the cytotoxicity of the drugs delivered by electroporation. like PANC-1 cells, Bleomycin ECT significantly impaired the recovery of Pan02 cells at all doses (= 0.05). Open in a separate window Physique 1 ECT negatively affects the ability of pancreatic cancer cells to recover relative to treatment with chemotherapy alone. (1 million cells were resuspended in EP buffer in the presence or absence of (A,B, 0.1C10 g/mL Bleomycin), (C,D, 0.1C10 g/mL Cisplatin), or (E,F, 0.2C4 g/mL Oxaliplatin). Cells were electroporated and 24 h later, 1000 cells (PANC-1) or 400 cells (Pan02) were seeded in triplicate in complete media in six well plates. The recovery of cells post treatment was quantified by fluorescent intensities of colonies formed after 10C14 days. Each well is usually a representative of at least nine comparable wells (three impartial experiments). The data (minimum to maximum) is also presented as floating bar graphswith the median integrated intensity relative to EP buffer alone denoted with a line. * statistically significant differences in the number of colonies formed when cells were allowed to recover, * = 0.05. Teglicar Low dose Cisplatin (0.1C0.4 g/mL) did not impact the recovery of PANC-1 cells (Physique 1C). However, electroporation of PANC-1 cells in the presence of all doses of Cisplatin significantly impaired their survival and recovery (Physique 1C) (= 0.05). Pan02 cells were treated with higher doses of Cisplatin yet their recovery remained unaffected (Physique 1D). When combined with electroporation, however, the recovery of Cisplatin-treated cells at all doses was significantly decreased (= 0.05). Oxaliplatin alone elicited a dose-dependent decrease in PANC-1 recovery (Physique 1E). Oxaliplatin ECT however, significantly affected recovery at all doses (= 0.05). Pan02 cells exhibited no decline in recovery upon Oxaliplatin treatment. However, combination with electroporation led to a significant decline in recovery at 0.5 and 1 g/mL (Determine 1F) (= 0.05). These data suggest that PANC-1 and Pan02 cells exhibit different sensitivities to the chemotherapies in terms of their ability to recover following treatment, with Pan02 exhibiting resistance to passive treatment with Bleomycin and Cisplatin. ECT potentiates the chemotoxic effects of these clinically relevant brokers, thereby reducing the ability of pancreatic cancer cells to recover from treatment. Concentrations of chemotherapies were chosen for further study based on viability 24 h post-treatment (Supplementary Physique S1) and recovery following ECT. 2.2. ECT of Pancreatic Cells Leads to Altered Necrotic-Like Morphology Relative to Drug Alone A cell succumbing to apoptosis typically exhibits several characteristic morphological features beginning with a profound rearrangement of the nucleus. This entails the initial marginalisation of chromatin followed by its compaction towards nuclear periphery [16,17]. DNA is usually then degraded by caspase-activated DNase leading to fragmentation of the nuclear material. The membrane may bleb and the cell may release apoptotic bodies. Teglicar Thus, the plasma membrane and organelles contained within remain unchanged in a cell undergoing apoptosis until the very late stages of the process. By contrast, cells undergoing necrosis are characterized by an early increase in cellular volume accompanied by an increasingly translucent cytoplasm, finally culminating in a loss of plasma membrane integrity [17]. In some cells undergoing necrosis, the chromatin may become more condensed whilst in others it remains diffuse. The mechanism of cell death following ECT is currently unclear. Electroporation itself has been shown to cause cell swelling and membrane blebbing in the minutes immediately following treatment [18], in addition, a patchwork effect of cell fragments and live fused cells, some multinucleated, has also been observed 24 h post electroporation in fibroblastic cells [19]. Endothelial cells undergoing Bleomycin ECT display a decrease in turgidity, shrink and become spindle-like in the hours subsequent to treatment [20]. These reports suggest that the effect of electroporation itself is likely to be cell-specific. Gemcitabine is the standard treatment choice for locally advanced and metastatic pancreatic cancer and it is thought to ultimately cause death by an apoptotic mechanism [21]. We evaluated the morphology of pancreatic cancer cells following ECT treatment, using 100 M Gemcitabine as a positive control for apoptosis and 0.2% Hydrogen Peroxide (H2O2), as a control for necroptosis. Consistent with other reports, PANC-1 cells appear to be largely resistant to Gemcitabine JAM2 [21], with the majority of cells exhibiting normal rounded morphology albeit with a swollen translucent cytoplasm (Physique 2A GEM-treated). Few PANC-1 cells exhibit shrunken morphology, with highly condensed nuclear material (indicated ). PANC-1 cells treated with 0.2% H2O2, known Teglicar to induce necrosis at high concentrations in epithelial cells [22] contain nuclei with decondensed chromatin () and in some.

Non-selective Endothelin

262011) to CV; NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (URSA) studentship awards to JBP; Ministre de lducation, du loisir et du sport (MELS) du Qube, Fonds de recherche du Qubec-Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT) and studentship from Fondation Armand Frappier to LSF

262011) to CV; NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (URSA) studentship awards to JBP; Ministre de lducation, du loisir et du sport (MELS) du Qube, Fonds de recherche du Qubec-Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT) and studentship from Fondation Armand Frappier to LSF. Data Availability All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files.. isolated from normal term placenta, were maintained in normoxia (8% O2) for 24 h or exposed to hypoxia (0.5% of O2 for 4 h) followed by 20 h of normoxia, creating a situation of H/R, in the presence or absence of 1 mM melatonin. Melatonin induced a 7-fold increase in the activation of 5′ adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an upstream modulator of autophagy, rising to a 16-fold increase in BeWo cells co-exposed to H/R and melatonin, compared to controls. H/R induced autophagosome formation via the increased expression of Beclin-1 (by 94%) and ATG7 (by 97%) in BeWo cells. Moreover, H/R also induced autophagic activity, indicated by the by the 630% increase in P62, and increased Nrf2 by 314% in BeWo cells. In H/R conditions, melatonin reduced autophagic activity by 74% and Nrf2 expression activation by 300%, leading to BeWo cell apoptosis. In contrast, In human primary villous cytotrophoblasts, H/R induced autophagy and Nrf2, which melatonin further potentiated, thereby affording protection against H/R. This study demonstrates that melatonin differentially modulates autophagy and the Nrf2 pathway in normal vs. tumor trophoblast cells, being cytoprotective in normal cells whilst increasing apoptosis in tumoral trophoblast cells. Introduction Macroautophagy, herein referred to as autophagy, is a highly conserved detoxifying mechanism involving the catabolism of damaged proteins and organelles [1]. Autophagy shows low levels of activity under basal conditions, being inhibited by the cellular sensor, the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). However, autophagy is activated in suboptimal conditions, such as hypoxia/reoxygenation (H//R) or amino acid starvation (reviewed in [2]). Beclin-1 is an important initiator of autophagy via its activation of the ATG (autophagy-related) proteins. ATG proteins build a double-membrane vesicle, autophagosome, which engulfs cargo to be degraded in lysosomes. The Acetaminophen consequent release of simpler structures can restore cellular energy levels and inhibit the deleterious effects of reactive species of oxygen (ROS) [3, 4]. Autophagy upregulates the transcription factor nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2 (Nrf2, also called NFE2L2), by the autophagy carrier sequestosome-1/P62 (SQSTM1/P62) [5]. Nrf2 induces defenses against oxidative and other stressors, including by binding to the consensus antioxidant response element (ARE) in their promoters. As with autophagy, Nrf2 is activated in during hypoxia in both normal and cancer cells, including placental cells [6C8]. Alterations in oxygenation are common, reducing cell viability including by increasing ROS and oxidative stress, thereby leading to oxidation and damage of proteins, DNA and lipids [9, 10]. Under such challenge, autophagy is activated leading to increased catabolism of damaged cellular components. BeWo cells, a placental choriocarcinoma model, are frequently utilized to investigate placental physiology, given their ability to synthesize human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) Rabbit Polyclonal to ITIH1 (Cleaved-Asp672) and their ability to mimic the differentiation of villous cytotrophoblasts (vCTB) into syncytiotrophoblast (STB) [11, 12]. During altered oxygenation, both BeWo and primary trophoblast cells show increased ROS and cell Acetaminophen death, thereby inducing autophagic activity, which is modulated by the 5′ adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and the protein phosphatase 2c (PP2Ac), cellular sensors that are activated to enhance cell survival [13C16]. Melatonin is produced by most cell types, across different tissues and organs. Melatonin is a strong antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and optimizer of mitochondria functioning in non-tumor cells [17, 18]. In contrast, melatonin is cytotoxic in tumor cells, where it has pro-apoptotic and antiproliferative effects [19]. In human placental trophoblastic cells, we have previously shown melatonin to reverse H/R-induced elevations Acetaminophen in oxidative stress and cell death, mediated via melatonin effects on inflammation and autophagy [20]. In human choriocarcinoma cells, melatonin disrupts the permeability of the mitochondrial membrane, leading to intrinsic apoptosis [21]. The mechanisms underlying these distinctive effects of melatonin.

Neurotensin Receptors

Supplementary Materials Appendix MSB-15-e8604-s001

Supplementary Materials Appendix MSB-15-e8604-s001. and DNA harm. Despite large adjustments in durations in cell populations, stage durations continued to be uncoupled in specific cells. These outcomes suggested the fact that independence of stage durations may occur from a lot of molecular elements that all exerts a influence in the price of cell routine progression. We examined this model by experimentally forcing stage coupling through inhibition of cyclin\reliant kinase 2 (CDK2) or overexpression of cyclin D. Our function provides an description for the traditional observation that stage durations are both inherited and indie and suggests how cell routine progression could be changed in disease expresses. (2016) showed the fact that length of time of M stage isn’t correlated with total cell routine length and it is rather temporally protected from upstream occasions. Unifying these disparate observations and interpretations will demand a physical model that may describe the quantitative interactions between stage durations in proliferating cells. The chance that specific phases are combined is certainly supported with the observation that lots of biochemical procedures are recognized to exert control over several phase. For instance, expression from the E2F category of transcription elements, which focus on Esomeprazole Magnesium trihydrate genes mixed up in G2/M and G1/S transitions and replication, affects the durations Esomeprazole Magnesium trihydrate of G1, S, and G2 (Helin, 1998; Ishida Poisson procedures with price (Fig?2B). The Erlang distribution was originally created to spell it out the waiting period before some telephone calls is certainly taken care of by an operator (Erlang, 1909). In its program towards the cell routine, each phase could be regarded as some guidelines that proceeds at some fundamental price (Chao guidelines. Rather, a concise is certainly supplied by the Erlang model, phenomenological explanation of cell routine progression which has a basic and relevant natural interpretation: Each cell routine phase is certainly a multistep biochemical procedure that must definitely be completed to be able to advance to another stage (Murray & Kirschner, 1989). Equivalent mathematical models have already been proposed to spell it out the microstates of stem cell differentiation, a sequential natural procedure that undergoes a discrete variety of observable condition transitions (Stumpf (Fig?2C and E). This craze suggests that, from the cell routine stage irrespective, each cell type acquired a different group Esomeprazole Magnesium trihydrate of kinetic variables Rabbit Polyclonal to IGF1R for cell routine development. RPE cell routine kinetics had been better installed with higher prices through more many steps, accompanied by U2OS, by H9 with slower prices and fewer guidelines then. The main one exception to the design was G1 in Esomeprazole Magnesium trihydrate H9 (Fig?2D and F), which is in keeping with the unusually brief G1 duration in embryonic stem cells (Light & Dalton, 2005; Becker signifies indicates indicates signifies network marketing leads to accelerated improvement through the next gap stage via E2F1 legislation (Reis & Edgar, 2004), although additional work must determine whether E2F1\changed phases are in fact coupled in one cells. Recent function in yeast shows that specific cell routine stage durations can present coupling (Garmendia\Torres shows that this obvious stochasticity is certainly driven by root deterministic elements that are powered by a different timescale compared to the cell routine. They propose a kicked model where an out\of\stage, external deterministic aspect leads to too little relationship between consecutive cell cycles. In keeping with these observations, our outcomes claim that, in cells with intact cell routine regulation, storage of cell routine phase durations isn’t only lost over years but also within Esomeprazole Magnesium trihydrate an individual cell’s life time between consecutive cell routine phases. Commensurate with this craze, Barr (2017) discovered solid correlations between p21 level and G2 length of time in mom cells;.

NT Receptors

Supplementary Materials Appendix EMBR-20-e47880-s001

Supplementary Materials Appendix EMBR-20-e47880-s001. tissue is definitely a powerful technique to study and manipulate neural stem cells. However, such microinjection requires expertise and is a low\throughput process. We Radioprotectin-1 developed the Autoinjector, a robot that utilizes images from a microscope to guide a microinjection needle into cells to deliver femtoliter quantities of liquids into solitary cells. The Autoinjector enables microinjection of hundreds of cells within a single organotypic slice, resulting in an overall yield that Sox18 is an order of magnitude greater than manual microinjection. The Autoinjector successfully focuses on both apical progenitors (APs) and newborn neurons in the embryonic mouse and human being fetal telencephalon. We used the Autoinjector to systematically study space\junctional communication between neural progenitors in the embryonic mouse telencephalon and found that apical contact is a characteristic feature of the cells that are portion of a space junction\coupled cluster. The throughput and versatility of the Autoinjector will render microinjection an accessible high\performance solitary\cell manipulation technique and will provide a powerful new platform for performing solitary\cell analyses in cells for bioengineering and biophysics applications. ((inside a manually microinjected slice (in an automated microinjected slice using the dye alone (inside a manually microinjected slice (in an automated microinjected slice using the dye alone (Caenorhabditis eleganspatch clamping of solitary 53, 54, 55 as well as multiple neurons knowledge of the location of cells. Based on the high effectiveness we accomplished in injecting APs and newborn neurons both in the mouse and in the human being telencephalon, we forecast that this process will become further implemented in applications where microinjection was previously not regarded as possible. Materials and Methods Microinjection hardware We designed the Radioprotectin-1 Autoinjector (Fig?1) by modifying a standard microinjection system described previously 5. The Autoinjector hardware is composed of a pipette mounted inside a pipette holder (64\2354 MP\s12u, Warner Devices, LLC) attached to a three\axis manipulator (three\axis uMP, Sensapex Inc) for exact position control of the injection micropipette. A microscope video camera (ORCA, Hamamatsu Photonics) was utilized for visualizing and guiding the microinjection, and a custom pressure regulation system adapted from earlier work 53 was built for programmatic control of?injection pressure. The pressure rules system consisted of manual pressure regulator (0C60 PSI 41795K3, McMaster\Carr) that downregulated pressure from standard house pressure (~?2,400?mbar) to 340?mbar. The output from your manual pressure regulator was routed to an electronic pressure regulator (990\005101\002, Parker Hannifin) that allowed good tuning of the final pressure going to the?injection micropipette (0C250?mbar) using the control software. A solenoid valve (LHDA0533215H\A, Lee Organization) was then used to digitally switch the pressure output to the injection micropipette. A microcontroller (Arduino Due, Arduino) was used to control electronic pressure regulation via a 0C5?V analog voltage transmission and the solenoid via a digital transistor transistor logic (TTL) transmission (Fig?1A and C). The computer controlled the three\axis manipulator via an Ethernet connection and controlled the video camera and microcontroller via common serial bus (USB) contacts. All hardware was controlled by Radioprotectin-1 custom software as explained in the next section (observe User Manual for additional information about hardware). Microinjection software and operation All software was written in python (Python Software Basis) and Arduino (Arduino) and is available for download with instructions at We developed a graphical user interface (GUI) in python to operate the microinjection platform (Appendix?Fig S1). The GUI allowed the user to Radioprotectin-1 image Radioprotectin-1 the cells and micropipette and to customize the trajectory of microinjection (observe User Manual for.

Neuronal Metabolism

Cells in M-phase were localized using a main rabbit polyclonal anti-pH3 antibody (Ser10; 1:800) and a secondary anti-rabbit antibody (Cy3; goat; 1:500)

Cells in M-phase were localized using a main rabbit polyclonal anti-pH3 antibody (Ser10; 1:800) and a secondary anti-rabbit antibody (Cy3; goat; 1:500). cycling ISCs. Our data provide new evidence that IGF1 activates 2 ISC populations unique regulatory pathways to promote growth of normal intestinal epithelium and crypt regeneration after irradiation.Vehicle Landeghem, L., Santoro, M. A., Mah, A. T., Krebs, A. E., Dehmer, J. J., McNaughton, K. K., Helmrath, M. A., Magness, S. T., Lund, P. K. IGF1 stimulates crypt development differential activation of 2 intestinal stem cell populations. (9), (10), and (11). CBC-ISCs were demonstrated by lineage tracing to be multipotent for those crypt and villus cell Nicarbazin lineages (7, 11). A second ISC population, also defined as multipotent by lineage tracing, appears to be a heterogeneous human population of cells that cycle more slowly than CBCs and are designated by high levels of manifestation of (12), (13), (14), or (15)-reporter genes. These cells are typically located above Paneth cells, laying 4C6 cells up from your crypt foundation and correspond in location to putative reserve/facultative ISCs that were originally described as label-retaining cells Rabbit Polyclonal to EPHA2/3/4 (16). Available evidence suggests that a bidirectional lineage relationship exists between the 2 ISC populations, and both ISC populations have been shown to contribute to crypt regeneration after radiation (1C3, 13, 17C19). In multiple mouse strains, radiation doses of 12C14 Gy result in ablation of small intestinal crypts followed by regeneration of crypts and ultimately villi as a result of clonal development of surviving ISCs (1, 2, 20). This radiation model has been used like a platinum standard to study effect of trophic therapies on ISC-mediated crypt regeneration, which is definitely highly relevant to safety against fatal radiation-associated enteropathy. Several growth factors including keratinocyte growth factor, transforming growth element-3, and insulin-like growth element 1 (IGF1) have been shown to enhance crypt survival in early phases after high-dose radiation (21C25). However, until the development of ISC reporter mice, it was not possible to directly and specifically study the effect of trophic factors on ISCs in normal or regenerating intestinal epithelium. IGF1 potently promotes intestinal epithelial growth or healing under a wide range of experimental conditions such as radiation-induced apoptosis (25), enteritis (23), experimentally induced colitis (26), small bowel resection (27), or total parenteral nourishment (28). IGF1 Nicarbazin is definitely a key mediator of the enterotrophic actions of growth hormone and glucagon-like peptide 2, which are U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized or under medical trial as trophic therapies to promote intestinal epithelial growth and/or healing (29C32). However, whether IGF1-induced growth of intestinal epithelium displays selective or preferential activation and development of ISCs is not defined, and it is not known which genes are controlled by IGF1 specifically in ISCs. We hypothesized that IGF1 therapy for 5 days in nonirradiated mice or after crypt ablation by high-dose radiation would selectively or preferentially increase normal or regenerating ISCs. Importantly, we tested this hypothesis in Sox9-EGFP transgenic mice, which permits us to compare the effect of IGF1 on the 2 2 small intestinal ISC populations that are designated by different Sox9-EGFP manifestation levels (2, 33). Our prior work shown that cells expressing low levels of Sox9-EGFP (Sox9-EGFPLow) are enriched for mRNA and many additional mRNAs enriched in Lgr5-expressing ISCs and are multipotent for those intestinal epithelial Nicarbazin cell lineages (2, 33). Cells expressing high levels of Sox9-EGFP (Sox9-EGFPHigh) include cells enriched for.

Opioid, ??-

Supplementary MaterialsS1 Fig: Consultant images teaching the cell clusters of LECs

Supplementary MaterialsS1 Fig: Consultant images teaching the cell clusters of LECs. major human being adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) had been analyzed as feeder cells to aid the development of LSCs extended LSCs towards the LSCD attention continues to be reported as an effective therapy to take care of LSCD [5, 11, 12]. A thorough review demonstrated that the entire success rate can be 76% from 583 individuals [13]. The typical method to tradition LSCs on 3T3 feeder cells which have been used in medical research is cultivating solitary LSC on the surface of the growth-arrested 3T3 feeder cells [14]. Once adequate quantity of LSCs can be achieved, the cultivated LSCs are transplanted onto the patients cornea after removing the abnormal pannus and epithelium. Although 3T3 fibroblast cells are growth-arrested and so are not really populated in individuals theoretically, there are worries about the mouse source from the 3T3 feeder cells in medical applications including contaminants from xenogenic substances, immuno-rejection, and potential interspecies viral transmitting. It’s been reported that human being embryonic stem cells co-cultured with animal-derived serum and feeder cells communicate immunogenic non-human sialic acidity [15]. Retinal pigment epithelial cells and iris pigment epithelial cells co-cultured on mitomycin C-treated 3T3 fibroblasts had been found expressing mouse collagen type I [16]. 3T3 cells come with an endogenous retrovirus including a 3600-bp area of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related disease (XMRV) that AZD-9291 (Osimertinib) are associated with human being prostate tumor and chronic exhaustion syndrome CCNA2 [17]. To displace the mouse fibroblast feeder cells, human being amniotic membrane and human-derived feeder cells have already been examined for his or her potential to aid the development of LSCs development of LSCs with a lesser clonogenic capability than 3T3 as well as the extended LSCs communicate some putative limbal stem/progenitor cell markers [33]. Nevertheless, the comparison between your ASC and 3T3 is bound towards the colony-forming effectiveness (CFE) and there is bound comparison for the stem cell phenotypes of cultured LSCs, which is vital for pre-clinical advancement. In addition, just direct co-culture technique was utilized and ASCs usually do not display superior capability in assisting the development of LSCs than 3T3 [33]. We previously reported a 3 dimensional (3D) tradition system, where the LSCs as well as the 3T3 feeder cells had been AZD-9291 (Osimertinib) cultured on the contrary sides of the porous membrane, backed the development of LSCs AZD-9291 (Osimertinib) and considerably improved the cell proliferation of LSC cultured by means of cell clusters [34]. Whether the 3D tradition system can facilitate the ASC-supported tradition was examined with this study. Fibrin gel, which has been used like a carrier for epithelial cell propagation and human being transplantation [14, 35], was coated within the porous membrane. The cultured LSCs on fibrin could be directly transplanted into individuals’ eyes without extra retrieving methods from tradition surface. In this study, the potency that ASCs support the growth of LSCs was compared to the standard tradition on 3T3 cells, including cell doubling, expressions of putative stem cell markers including ATP-binding cassette sub-family G member 2 (ABCG2) [36], N-terminally truncated transcripts of p63 (?Np63) [14, 37], N-cadherin [10] and cytokeratin (K) 14 [38], maturation marker K12 [39], and proliferation marker Ki67 [40]. Different forms of seeded LSCs and different tradition methods were examined using ASC feeder cells to investigate which approach was the most ideal. The tradition method using 3T3s that has been successfully used in medical study, which is definitely solitary LSCs cultured directly on 3T3 feeder cells, served as the control in all experiments. Materials and methods Human being sclerocorneal tissue Human being sclerocorneal cells was from your Lions Vision Institute for Transplant and Study (Tampa, FL) and the Illinois Vision Standard bank (Watson Gailey, Bloomington, IL). Cells donors were aged from 20 to 65 years old. Experimentation on human being tissue adhered to the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki. The experimental protocol was evaluated and.


Feature: Cuba Boosts Digital Economy amid COVID-19 Pandemic
2021-04-28 Xinhua

by Yosley Carrero

HAVANA, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- Aile Rodriguez, a 31-year-old engineer living in Havana's Bahia district, has turned to online grocery shopping to reduce exposure to the virus amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the island nation strives to contain its sharpest rise in infections since March last year, thousands of people nationwide are benefitting from measures adopted by the Cuban government to boost the country's digital economy through e-commerce.

Rodriguez, the mother of a four-year-old boy, uses locally-developed applications to buy basic necessities at the city's supermarkets and convenience stores.

She says she enjoys filling her online shopping cart with food bundles and hygiene kit items either from the comfort of her couch or while resting in bed, which she describes as a "pleasant and time-saving experience."

The development of e-commerce platforms is part of the Cuban government's strategies to improve the performance of the country's economy amid the pandemic and the U.S. sanctions against the island.

As more and more households in Cuba have access to computers, the number of Cuba's Internet users has grown tremendously. In 2020, some 4.4 million Cubans accessed the mobile Internet, according to officials from the state-owned Telecommunications Company of Cuba.

Meanwhile, Cuba's leading e-commerce application Transfermovil is expected to reach 1.7 million users by the end of February, according to local authorities.

Miguel Gutierrez, director general of Informatics at the Cuban Ministry of Communications, told local media that during 2020, some progress was made to promote people's access to virtual payments.

"For e-commerce to be effective, a multifactorial work is required, including indispensable elements such as bancarization and efficient logistics chains in virtual shops," he said.

Throughout the pandemic, an increasing number of people on the island have continued to pay their bills via mobile applications and digital platforms while sheltering in place.

The development of e-commerce in Cuba is offering many opportunities for private entrepreneurs who seek to explore new business opportunities as the country implements its major monetary overhaul over the past six decades.

Running a bakery in Havana's Arroyo Naranjo district, Jorge Luis Ramirez uses mobile applications to charge clients 50 percent of the overall price in advance, in order to reduce social interactions during the pandemic.

"People no longer need to order a birthday or wedding cake in person," he said. "E-commerce is making things easier and helping people stay safe as the virus sticks around."


“Bella figura”

bella2 (2 von 1)

Why is it so important for Italians to look good?

“Bella figura” is more than just looking good it’s a way of life that emphasizes aesthetics and good behavior.

The thing about living in Italy is, people are generally more concerned with how they look than how you do. “Fare una bella figura” is a cultural and societal cornerstone for Italians. After choosing the perfect outfit and assessoirs,  Italians step out into the world with the aim of making a good impression on anyone and everyone they may meet.

Dressing well and behaving well

In Italy, dressing well and behaving well is thus a sign to others that one respects oneself and those around them. But how does this attitude fit with Italian rudeness when it comes to traffic, standing in line or blocking a path by not giving way? What looks like a contradiction at first glance, is simple to explain: it´s important to make a good impression on people you know, like relatives, colleagues, neighbors  and friends – everyone else is a stranger and doesn´t count.


[+] Wayc0de's Blog[+]

Software Pirate Cracks Cybercriminal Wares

In a chat conversation with KrebsOnSecurity.com, Xylitol said he’s lost track of the number of ransomware cracks he’s released, noting that at one point the WinAd gang switched to shipping a half-dozen updates daily in a bid to stay one step ahead.

“I lost count of how many of these I’ve cracked,” Xylitol said. “For a period that was daily and five or six per day, due to automatic ransomware update.”
Sometime around Sept. 14, 2011, the WinAd gang apparently decided it was losing the war, and called it quits. In closing a year-long discussion thread on the WinAd gang, Kernelmode.info moderator EP_XOFF wrote:

“Since September 11, their activity has decreased significantly. September 14 had died last known domain and redirector. However this may mean nothing. We continue to search.”

Another Kernelmode member, Nickvth2009, replied, “Let’s hope it will never come back.”

1 komentar:

  1. The accounting software differs from product to product. Larger firms may choose to implement a customized solution which integrates a vast amount of data from many different departments.Accounts SoftwareThanks a lot.


EMAIL: NAME: Steve Gowers TOPIC: Time COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 beta for Windows TOOLS USED: Fractal Design Dabbler 2 RENDER TIME: 4hours 44min HARDWARE USED: Pentium P-90 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 'Precision' This is a view of the gears of a pocket watch loosely based on a picture I found of a Gruen watch made in 1924. I've had to take some liberties translating what I could see into a 3D image, so if you're a watchmaker I apologise for whatever mistakes there are. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Everything was created manually as it was more satisfying than using a modeller. The shapes of the plates and case of the watch are all curved in several dimensions by using cut-outs from spheres and torii to produce smoother highlights. Repeating objects such as the teeth on the gears and the knurled knob are done with looping 'while' directives. Wooden textures are from the Povray Include files with some modifications. The inlay on the box is original as is the texture used for the coloured pencils which is done simply with a single stretched onion colour-map. The drawing is done using Dabbler's tools. What took the most time was getting the viewpoint and textures and lights to look right.


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What-does.net is your comprehensive online definition dictionary. If you are not sure how to define Trumpet, our website can provide you with the appropriate definition. On this page, you can find what is Trumpet.

Trumpet meaning

trumpet - 2 dictionary results

trumpet - examples of usage

  1. After which, they passed to the chamber wherein the prisoner was kept; and, having brought him forth, sounded a trumpet, which was a signal to them without that the enterprize was performed. - "Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3)", Walter Scott.
  2. The human voice is a combination of reed organ, pipe organ, trumpet, and violin; and can produce in its tiny music box- only about two inches long by one inch wide- all the tones and qualities of tones that can be produced on all these instruments, except that it cannot go quite so high or so low. - "A Handbook of Health", Woods Hutchinson.
  3. Nothing was now heard but confusion; the pilot having just left the ship, the hoarse voice of the captain resounded through a speaking trumpet, while the seamen were busy in making sail. - "Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales", W. B. Cramp.
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meaning of flaky

Flaky means easily broken or crumbled.

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Corrupt government in its essence fault of disengaged citizenry

To the editor:

When filmmaker Ken Burns gave the 2015 commencement lecture at Washington University, his eloquent oration quickly turned to the state of our society.

He cited the ongoing turmoil between government, police and the economic and socially suppressed citizens who comprise the base of American society. His concern: survival of an America that seems in the throes of self-destruction. Burns quoted Abraham Lincoln: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

Burns’ focus was on government integrity. Integrity and honesty are the qualities that bind American society. They are in government, in particular, tantamount to the structural survival of America, for it is forthright government that provides societal cohesiveness. Local government is the base of our society and ultimately supports and reflects the honesty and integrity of the entire system.

In St. Louis, municipal governments are our societal base. But many are failing the integrity test, preying on, not protecting, their citizens.

Predatory practices abound. Abuses encompass errant police practices, kangaroo courts, malfeasance in general and government kowtowing to the “well-connected.”

Corrupt government is in its essence the fault of a disengaged citizenry.

But for venality to rule, government officials — be they elected or employed — must abandon their oath of office and willingly relinquish their personal morals, honesty and integrity.

So, paraphrasing Lincoln, if America is put asunder, it will be we, the people, who tear it apart.

Michael K. Broughton

Green Park

Editor’s note: Michael K. Broughton serves as a Ward 1 Green Park alderman.


» » Guns N' Roses - Performance
Guns N' Roses - Performance Album

Guns N' Roses - Performance Album

MP3 1303 mb. | FLAC 2261 mb. | WMA 2688 mb.

Performer: Guns N' Roses
Title: Performance
Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Category: Rock
Rating: 4.7
Catalog #: P 910027
Label: Not On Label (Guns N' Roses)

1Double Talkin' Jive Motherfucker
2You Could Be Mine
3It's So Easy
4Paradise City
5November Rain
6Don't Cry
7Welcome To The Jungle
8Knocking On Heaven's Door
9Sweet Child O'Mine

CategoryArtistTitle (Format)LabelCategoryCountryYear
MECD 2091/92Guns N' Roses Paris (2xCD, Unofficial)Metal CrashMECD 2091/92Italy1992
P 910027Guns N' Roses Performance (CD, Unofficial)Unknown (P)P 910027Germany1992
WF 002/3Guns N' Roses Thompson 1880 (3xCD + 3xCass + Box, Unofficial)White Fly RecordsWF 002/3Italy1992
noneGuns N' Roses Paris 92 (DVD, Unofficial)Not On Label (Guns N' Roses)noneGermany2003
CD/ON 2241Guns N' Roses One In A Million (3xCD, Comp, Unofficial)On Stage RecordsCD/ON 2241Italy1994

Recorded live in USA, 1992.

  • Barcode: 4 011778 959526
  • Rights Society: GEMA

Guns N' Roses, often abbreviated as GNR, is an American hard rock band from Los Angeles, California, formed in 1985. When they signed to Geffen Records in 1986, the band comprised vocalist Axl Rose, lead guitarist Slash, rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan, and drummer Steven Adler. The current lineup consists of Rose, Slash, McKagan, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, guitarist Richard Fortus, drummer Frank Ferrer and keyboardist Melissa Reese. Guns N' Roses: все альбомы, включая Sweet Child O' Mine , Welcome to the Jungle , My Michelle и другие. Guns N' Roses. 2020 сингл Live at the Ritz, New York 1989 FM Broadcast. Welcome to the Jungle. 2020 сингл Live Fm Broadcast Remastered. My Michelle. 2019 Live. Guns N' Roses is an American hard rock band founded in Los Angeles, California in 1985. The band has released six studio albums: Appetite For Destruction in 1987, G N' R Lies in 1988, Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II in 1991, The Spaghetti Incident in 1993 and, after 15 years and with frontman Axl Rose and keyboardist Dizzy Reed being the only members left from the previous lineup, Chinese Democracy in 2008. They also released three EP's in 1986, 1988, and 1993 and two live albums, in 1999 and 2014. The group was formed in early 1985 by Holly read more. Rumors are swirling that Guns N Roses may reform in some iteration of their classic lineup - the five-man powder keg existing between 1985 and 1990 that produced a single studio album and a trail of destruction in its wake. However, the story of this combustible band spans 30 years of sex, drugs, fights, riots, near-death experiences, mountain lions, bitch-slap rapping, cocaine tongues and one mysterious dude with a KFC bucket on his head. This Guns N' Roses discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Guns N' Roses albums can be found at the top of the list. To make it easy for you, we haven't included Guns N' Roses singles, EPs, or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums. If you want to know, What is the Best Guns N' Roses album of all time or What are the top Guns N' Roses albums then this list will answer your questions. Examples include Appetite for Destruction and G N' R Lies. Guns N' Roses from United States. The top ranked albums by Guns N' Roses are Appetite For Destruction, Use Your Illusion II and Use Your Illusion I. Guns N Roses official web site and fan club, featuring news, photos, concert tickets, merchandise, and more. Several dates rescheduled. Copyright 2020 Guns N' Roses. Terms of Use. Do Not Sell My Information. Guns N Roses, American band that invigorated late 1980s heavy metal music with its raw energy. The principal members were Axl Rose original name William Bailey b. February 6, 1962, Lafayette, Indiana, U. Slash original name Saul Hudson b. July 23, 1965, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. The 1993 album The Spaghetti Incident generated further controversy by including a song written by mass murderer Charles Manson. Axl Rose performing with Guns N' Roses, 2006. PRNewsFotoSanctuary Entertainment Major League Baseball-George ChinAP Images. Latest Videos. Chart History. Current Album Sales. Heritage Rock. Active Rock. Sweet Child O' Mine. June 13. You're revisiting Guns N' Roses ' album output, baby That's right We're here to reflect on the band's musical career, ranking the band's albums from weakest to strongest. Despite being active since the release of their 1987 debut, the group only has six studio albums and five of those six discs were issued over a six-year period before their notoriously famous delay prior to 2008's Chinese Democracy. So head below and scroll through Guns N' Roses' albums, ranked from weakest to strongest. See Other Artists' Albums Ranked


Calculating total sum value within a repeat group

Hi Kal_Lam
I am trying to calculate the sum of the number of households mapped with a specific number of people for each family size
That is the number of respondents who come from a family of 5, 10 to obtain the total number of persons mapped
I had tried this but I keep getting an error when I try and deploy the form
How can I go about this

Welcome back to the community, @baunjeri! We have some workarounds (on how to calculate a sum from within a repeat group) which should be helpful for you:

Another one:

And this one:

Here too:

And this one too:

Last but not the least:

Please help, I can see the difference between your example and my example
My repeat groups calculate ItemCost for Number of Unit X Unit Costs for repeat items I add.RepeatGroupQuery.xlsx (10.4 KB)

Then outside my RepeateGroup I want total the ItemCost using sum(ItemCost)


ARC-Net: Activity Recognition Through Capsules

07/06/2020 ∙ by Hamed Damirchi, et al. ∙ Synacor, Inc. 0

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a challenging problem that needs advanced solutions than using handcrafted features to achieve a desirable performance. Deep learning has been proposed as a solution to obtain more accurate HAR systems being robust against noise. In this paper, we introduce ARC-Net and propose the utilization of capsules to fuse the information from multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) to predict the activity performed by the subject. We hypothesize that this network will be able to tune out the unnecessary information and will be able to make more accurate decisions through the iterative mechanism embedded in capsule networks. We provide heatmaps of the priors, learned by the network, to visualize the utilization of each of the data sources by the trained network. By using the proposed network, we were able to increase the accuracy of the state-of-the-art approaches by 2 Furthermore, we investigate the directionality of the confusion matrices of our results and discuss the specificity of the activities based on the provided data.

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page 6

This week in AI

I Introduction

In the human activity recognition field, the goal is to predict the activity of a human subject based on a window of measurements provided by the available sensors. These activities may range from lying to rope jumping. A wide variety of sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, force sensor, and light sensor may be used to classify the activity performed in that window of collected data. Even everyday devices such as smartphones and smartwatches may be used in order to obtain the required data for activity recognition. Due to availability and the low cost of the mentioned sensors, HAR is utilized in many areas such as design of exoskeletons

[1] and more commonly, elderly care [2]. Furthermore, the collected data from HAR sensors may be collected and utilized to provide more personalized services through the monitored activities. For example, the data collected from body-worn sensors and the behavior extracted form this data can help increase security [3], provide more modern and reactive healthcare [2] and allow the creation of better user interfaces [4].

Deep learning has proven to be an adequate tool for recognizing patterns and extracting rich features that may be utilized to classify data [5]. Human activities may be classified based on the patterns that are seen in the input data. Therefore, rather than looking only at the measurements from individual data sources, we require our algorithm to view the input data on different levels and fuse the extracted features in such a way that the perceived patterns would be able to tell us about the activity being performed, e.g., to differentiate between walking and running, it would be misleading to only look at the data provided by a motion sensor located on the ankle of the subject and we would reach better performances by also using the data from subject’s forearm. This calls for a technique that is able to adequately fuse the information from every data source and use the said information to make a prediction about the activity.

In this paper, we propose using a single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as an encoder to extract the features from each of the IMUs and pass the said features to CapsNet

[6] in order to fuse the extracted information and make a prediction about the activity of the subject. We will use two datasets to evaluate the performance and generalization of our approach. Moreover, a modified version of the network proposed in [7] will be used as our encoder which uses stage-based fusion to extract the necessary information. Our contributions are as follows:

  • CapsNet is used to fuse the information obtained from each IMU

  • Provide intuitive interpretations regarding the utilization of each of the IMUs based on the true label

  • Provide comparisons to empirically examine the capability of capsules in rejecting corrupted modalities

  • Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning based approaches

This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we go through various available classical and deep learning-based approaches to HAR alongside the current state-of-the-art(SOTA) approaches. In Section 3, we explain the proposed architecture and provide an introduction to capsules. In the last section, we present quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed method against SOTA approaches and provide visualizations alongside corresponding discussions.

Ii Related work

From an algorithmic point of view, approaches to HAR may be divided into three groups, namely, classical approaches that utilize preprocessing methods such as pose estimation, machine learning-based approaches that rely on hand-crafted features devised by an expert and deep learning-based methods that rely on gradient backpropagation in order to both extract features and perform classification. Deep learning based methods can be separated into multiple groups of architectures themselves. Each group utilizes a specific characteristic of an architecture to improve the accuracy of their predictions. This category of approaches may be divided further based on the memory of past inputs

[12, 13, 14], unsupervised methods [10, 11], non-recurrent methods [15, 7].

In [8]

, video sequences captured by a monocular camera are used to classify the activity of subjects. Optical flow alongside background extraction methods is used as features which are then passed to a support vector machine (SVM) to generate predictions.

uses decision trees to classify the activity of the subject based on features extracted from an accelerometer of a smartphone. Ten features such as phone position on the human body, user location, age and sensor readings are passed through a decision tree to make predictions.

uses activity sets rather than single label ground truth values to predict the potential activities in the corresponding window of measurements from IMUs. This work also uses unsupervised learning methods prior to supervised learning in their training process to achieve a more effective feature representation. In

[11], unsupervised learning methods are deployed where the number of activities is unknown. This is done by using clustering methods that operate on the frequency components of the measured acceleration and angular velocity values.

[12] proposes DeepConvLSTM which is an LSTM based network that utilizes a CNN to extract the features from inputs. Due to the usage of recurrent layers, this model falls into the category of memory-based networks. DeepConvLSTM aims to increase the performance of HAR systems by modeling temporal dependencies while using raw sensor data. In [13] various architecture choices are compared to reach a conclusion about the necessity of recurrence in HAR models. [14]

uses variants of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to observe the cognitive decline by monitoring the daily activities of the subject, while

[12, 13, 14] all use IMU measurements as network input.

[15] stacks IMU measurements from a smartphone and creates a window of measurements. These measurements are then passed through a CNN to predict the activity of the subject. This work aims to model the temporal connections between raw sensor measurements using the convolution operations that reside in CNNs. [7] also stacks the raw measurements from the available IMUs and uses convolutional layers to extract the features from said inputs. This work uses specific kernel sizes that allow the network to perform data fusion in multiple levels. Reference [7] also proposes that late sensor fusion is more effective due to the separate processing of each axis of sensor module in the initial layers. We base our encoder on this architecture with modifications to prevent loss of information during pooling layers. Moreover, we view HAR as a multimodal fusion problem. We use a single encoder to extract features from IMUs with no constraints on the position of the data source on subject’s body. Thereafter, we use mechanisms that fuse the collected information and predict the performed activity.

Fig. 1: A general overview of the proposed architecture

Iii The Proposed Approach

We propose using CapsNets to fuse the high dimensional features passed from an encoder. The general overview of our architecture is shown in Fig. 1

. We stack a pre-specified number of measurements from each IMU and create a two-dimensional array where columns represent each measurement. These arrays are passed to a single CNN separately and the features corresponding to each of the IMUs are extracted. Then, primary capsules are formed by reshaping the output of the CNN and concatenating the extracted features from each of the encoders. The concatenated features are then passed through CapsNet to obtain a probability vector of the activities. These steps are elaborated in detail in Section 3.A and 3.B.

Fig. 2:

The architecture of the encoder. k, s and c correspond to kernel size, stride size and number of output channels, respectively

Iii-a Encoder

In order to extract features from each of the IMUs, we use a CNN with varying kernel sizes at each layer similar to the architecture proposed in [7]. A modified version of this architecture is presented in Fig. 2. As it is seen in this figure, at the first layer of the encoder, we perform a 1-dimensional convolution operation that does not perform any fusion on the given inputs and mainly acts as a filter. In the next layer, a 2-dimensional convolution is applied to the features of the former layer. Due to the size of the kernel and the strides of this layer, each module of the IMU is processed separately and the features of the accelerometer and gyroscope are not fused in this layer. In the final layer, a kernel size of () convolves over the features of the second layer and fuses the information extracted from each of the modules. To be able to pass the extracted features to CapsNet, we will need to reshape these features as shown in Fig. 2.

Iii-B CapsNet and Dynamic Routing

CapsNet [6]

uses vectors of neurons (capsules) to represent the entities that may be present in the given input. Each capsule looks at a small window of the input and gives the probability of the existence of a specific pattern in the data. The magnitude of a capsule gives the probability of the existence of an entity and the orientation of the capsule in its high dimensional space defines the characteristics of that entity. The capsules in the first layer of the network, which are called primary capsules, are extracted through the encoder as shown in Fig.

2. CapsNet uses an iterative mechanism to dynamically route each of the lower layer capsules to the higher layer ones. Through this mechanism, the network is able to use the information about the existence of low level entities to decide about the presence of higher level ones. In our approach we only use one layer on top of the primary capsules in order to obtain predictions about the activity performed by the subject. Therefore, the higher level capsules will represent the activity that is potentially present in the given window of measurements. In other words, the routing mechanism will allow us to link the existence of specific patterns in each of the IMU measurements to the potential activity that is being performed by the subject.

By concatenating the primary capsules from each of the IMUs, we will have a feature map of size where is the number of IMUs. As seen in Fig. 2, each primary capsule has 96 dimensions and 12 capsules are extracted from each of the IMUs. Assuming represents the lower layer capsule and is the higher layer capsule, Algorithm 1 describes the routing mechanism used in our approach for r number of iterations. The squash non-linearity is formulated as follows

While, the softmax function is formulated as follolws:

Following  [16], we added a soft updating rule with the coefficient in Algorithm 1

to prevent overrouting. Furthermore, we used the original loss function from

[6] which is a margin loss that calculates a separate loss value for each of the predicted classes.

initialize the log prior matrix b and set
for r iterations do
end for
Algorithm 1 Dynamic routing algorithm

Iv Experiments

The experiments were conducted using an NVIDIA Tesla P100 with 16 gigabytes of RAM and 3584 CUDA cores. We used the PyTorch

[17] framework to implement the proposed architecture and PyTorch lightning [18] as an interface for reproducibility purposes.

Iv-a Datasets

The proposed method was tested on the PAMAP2 [19] and RealWorld [20]

HAR datasets. The validation set of the PAMAP2 dataset was used to tune the model hyperparameters. The quantitative results from each of the datasets were compared against the state of the art methods with the same preprocessing characteristics. We report our results against PerceptionNet

[7], DeepConvLSTM [12] and CNN-EF [15] on the PAMAP2 dataset and to test the generalizability of our method, we also provide quantitative results for PerceptionNet [7] and DeepConvLSTM [12] alongside our method on the RealWorld dataset. To train the network and to infer the activity of each of the subjects from either dataset, we only use the IMU measurements, namely accelerometer and gyroscope.

Iv-A1 RealWorld

This dataset contains measurements from 15 subjects (8 males and 7 females) with recorded data from the chest, forearm, head, shin, thigh, upper arm, and waist of each of the subjects. For each subject, this dataset provides measurements from GPS, IMU, gyroscope, light, sound level data and magnetic field sensors. The annotated activities from this dataset are climbing up and down the stairs, jumping, lying, standing, sitting and running. The data is not synchronized and is recorded at a frequency of 50Hz. After synchronizing the IMUs, we segment the data into windows of 128 measurements (2.56 seconds) with 60% overlap. We use the leave-one-subject-out approach to evaluate our method. Specifically, we use subjects 10 and 11 as validation and test subjects and the rest are used to train the network.

Iv-A2 Pamap2

The physical activity monitoring dataset consists of 18 different physical activities from 9 subjects (8 males and 1 female). Three Colibri wireless inertial measurement units were used to provide measurements alongside a heart rate monitor. This dataset contains IMU measurements from the chest, dominant wrist and dominant ankle at a frequency of 100Hz. We downsampled this dataset to 50Hz in order to match the frequency of the RealWorld dataset and stacked 128 measurements with the same overlapping that was used for the preprocessing stage of the RealWorld dataset. Similar to PerceptionNet, we chose a leave-one-subject-out approach to validate and test our model. Subjects 1 and 5 were chosen as test and validation sets, respectively.

Iv-B Performance evaluation metrics

Due to an imbalance in the number of labels for both of the datasets, we chose the weighted score to report the quantitative results of our network. This score is formulated as below

Where c represents each class, while is the total number of data and is the number of data with label c. Moreover, we report the precision, recall and accuracy values separately and compare our results against the state of the art methods.

We also provide the confusion matrix as a qualitative measure for both of the datasets. This matrix allows us to interpret how the model wrongly classifies each of the categories. In the provided matrices, the rows correspond to the actual labels while columns represent the predicted classes. We will also take a look at the directionality of this matrix and discuss how easy it is for a model to confuse one class with the other but not the other way around. This approach will allow us to get a look at the specificity of the classes.

V Results and Discussion

We used the Optuna [21] library to optimize the hyperparameters of the network. Due to a limited amount of computational power, we only used this library to search for iteration number(r), soft-updating value(

) and the initial learning rate. Twenty trials were conducted while each trial lasted 200 epochs. The best set of hyperparameters were chosen based on the average validation loss. Moreover, an exponential learning rate scheduler with a multiplicative factor equal to 0.98 was used to train the network on both datasets.

V-a Results on PAMAP2

Loss margins were set to 0.95 and 0.05 for this dataset. Moreover, the iteration number and the soft updating coefficient were set to 3 and 0.1, respectively, while the training proceeded with a batch size of 64. The test accuracy of our model ranges from 89.18% to 90.51% across multiple training sessions of the same model and the best single epoch based on the validation loss achieves an accuracy score of 90.51% on the test set. Due to the observed variance in the performance of each model during training, we also formed a horizontal voting ensemble

[22], based on epochs of a single model using the top validation scores but the metrics did not improve when using this ensemble. Table I provides a comparison between the obtained results of our model and the reported metrics from the state of the art models.

Precision Recall wF1 Score Accuracy
CNN-EF 85.51% 84.53% 84.57% 84.53%
DeepConvLSTM 87.75% 86.78% 86.83% 86.78%
PerceptionNet 89.76% 88.57% 88.74% 88.56%
ARC-Net 91.77% 90.52% 90.76% 90.51%
TABLE I: Results on PAMAP2

As it can be seen in Table I, the results from our model surpass the state of the art results on all metrics. The largest gap between ARC-Net and PerceptionNet can be seen in the precision achieved on the test results which is about 2.01%. Furthermore, A consistent improvement is seen on other metrics.

Fig. 3: Confusion map of the test set on the PAMAP2 dataset

The confusion matrix of the test results of the network on the PAMAP2 dataset is provided in Fig. 3. The directionality of the confusion of the network in classifying sitting and standing activities suggests that the two activities are similar to each other based on the provided data. This is expected since this dataset does not provide any data from an IMU that is positioned in such a way that would allow an easier differentiation between the two classes. If an IMU that is placed inside a pocket has been used, it would allow the network to be able to differentiate between the two more easily. Furthermore, lying, cycling, rope jumping and running have a precision of 100%. The precision of the ironing activity is low while having a high recall, specifically ironing has a recall of 100% while its precision is only 68.04%.

V-B Results on RealWorld

The accuracy of our method on the test set ranges from 95.47% to 95.64% across multiple training sessions. We report our best epoch in Table II alongside a full comparison of our network against the state of the art methods. Due to the observed variance in the performance of the network during training, we also formed a horizontal voting ensemble based on the validation loss of each of the epochs of a single model. This way, we were able to increase the accuracy of our model to 95.92%. Same as the results achieved on PAMAP2, a consistent improvement of all the metrics is seen in Table II.

Precision Recall wF1 Score Accuracy
DeepConvLSTM 92.83% 92.65% 92.63% 92.65%
PerceptionNet 94.78% 94.20% 94.27% 94.20%
ARC-Net 96.08% 95.64% 95.67% 95.64%
TABLE II: Results on RealWorld

Because of the relatively large number of sensors in this dataset, the number of iterations was increased to 7 while the soft updating coefficient was dropped to 0.01. By this means, the larger amount of iterations would allow the network to focus more on the routing of each primary capsule from each IMU to the high level capsules. Moreover, the smaller soft updating coefficient would prevent overrouting of the network.

Fig. 4: Confusion map of the test set on the RealWorld dataset

The confusion matrix corresponding to the test results of this dataset is provided in Fig. 4. This visualization shows that some samples from each activity are consistently being misclassified as the standing activity. This is due to the data collection protocol where the subjects are asked to stand up before performing any of the activities available in the dataset. Moreover, climbing up and down is also being largely misclassified as walking. Based on the footage of the activities provided by [20], the misclassifications have to do with the sections of the path where no climbing up or down is performed and the subject is in transition between two staircases. Therefore, a large number of these samples are because of the wrong annotations in the dataset rather than being wrong predictions of the network.

PAMAP2 RealWorld
wF1 Acc wF1 Acc
PerceptionNet 20.47% 18.63% 8.21% 8.1%
ARC-Net 10.60% 10.93% 3.67% 3.66%
TABLE III: Changes in Accuracy and F1-score with Modality Corruption
Fig. 5: Normalized prior matrix heatmap of the network trained on PAMAP2

V-C Prior Matrix Visualization

The prior matrix denoted by in the routing mechanism of CapsNet is a learnable parameter and is also responsible for setting the values that describe the model’s prior belief regarding the routing between two layers of capsules. Therefore, it is possible to extract the values of this matrix after training and visualize the routing between each IMU and the performed activities. Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 visualize the prior matrix of our trained network on PAMAP2 and RealWorld, respectively.

Based on Fig. 5, the routing that the network has come up with seems intuitive in activities such as the ones related to walking or climbing up and down the stairs where the network relies on the movement of the ankle or hand more than other modalities to make predictions. Moreover, correlations can be seen between the heatmaps of PAMAP2 and RealWorld for the same activities, e.g. the activity of lying relies on the measurements from the waist/chest when trained on either datasets. Based on Fig. 6, the addition of a thigh modality has allowed the standing and sitting activities to be more distinguishable with respect to PAMAP2. This has resulted in a substantial improvement in the directionality between the two classes in Fig. 4 with respect to Fig. 3.

V-D Modality Corruption Test

One of the modalities was randomly corrupted by replacing its measurements with a zero matrix to simulate the potential case of modality failure during inference. The drops in the accuracy and weighted F1 scores of our method and PerceptionNet on the test sets of each dataset are reported in Table

III. It can be seen that on both datasets, our approach is significantly more robust against modality corruptions compared to a CNN only approach.

Vi Conclusions

In this paper, we developed a method for human activity recognition that relies on CapsNet to fuse the information from multiple IMUs. We tested our approach on two datasets with varying sensor positions and compared our results against the SOTA. Our results surpassed that of SOTA by about 2% in accuracy and weighted F1 score. Moreover, the confusion matrices of the test set of each dataset were presented and specificity of the classes was investigated. Our approach allowed for the visualization of routing between modalities and activities. Through these visualizations, we were able to interpret the importance of each modality for correct classification of each activity. Finally, modality corruption was simulated by passing an array of zeros instead of one random modality during inference. Through this test, the capability of our method in noise rejection was shown. In our approach, it is possible to add extra modalities without a need for significant changes in the structure of the network which allows for easier transfer learning. Moreover, our encoder can be trained on data from various positions of the body to achieve a general feature extractor.

Fig. 6: Normalized prior matrix heatmap of the network trained on RealWorld


How to get a refund from your local library if your library card is lost or stolen

Aboriginal language students, who often have a difficult time speaking in their native languages, can now use their school libraries to pay for a copy of the books they’ve borrowed.

The move was announced Tuesday as students across the country are trying to avoid missing out on school books and learning what they need to succeed.

“If I need a textbook or a textbook for a course or I need to look up a word in a dictionary, I’ll go to my library and borrow it,” said Marlene Deane, a Grade 11 English student at the University of Alberta.

“So if I have a book and it’s missing, I can just go into my library, I don’t have to go into the classroom.”

Students at the Université de Sherbrooke have also been able to use their libraries to get books and other resources to help them learn the language.

Deane said the move is important because some Aboriginal languages, like English, are taught as an “intermediate” level and students can sometimes struggle learning it.

“I don’t think people really understand that they’re learning an intermediate level language, so that’s really important to us because we know that learning that level of language is going to be a lifelong process for us,” she said.

Deanes said she would love to see a similar program in other First Nations communities.

“We’ve had some good conversations about it, and I think that the whole conversation really needs to be driven by the students, because there’s a lot of students who really are struggling and we really need to support them,” she added.

The library card holders are required to have a card that shows they are a Canadian resident.

They can also be issued a library card with a specific language or a specific school and a certain number of days per year.

The library cards are valid for three years, and are charged at the point of purchase, with a minimum $2 fee for a new one.

Deans school also offers free bilingual learning sessions for students who don’t speak English, French, Spanish or another language.

Students can also sign up for a free program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to learn their own Aboriginal languages.

Students who want to sign up can find more information at the library’s website.

The program also includes the option of having a library cards used for school and personal use.

“It’s kind of like a gateway to learning a language that you wouldn’t otherwise learn,” Deane said.


Which of the following is the most important global humanitarian aid?

A new study finds that more than $5 trillion worth of humanitarian aid is delivered globally every year, but that’s only a fraction of what’s actually delivered, especially given that we’re only at the start of a sustained humanitarian crisis.

We’re also missing out on vital humanitarian efforts, according to a new study that was published in the journal Nature Communications.

In the study, researchers at the University of Ottawa, the Norwegian Centre for Development Research (NCDC), and the International Crisis Group examined how the delivery of humanitarian assistance has evolved since World War II.

They found that the most common way that people receive relief in recent years has been via the International Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has about $1 trillion in global resources.

However, that number includes food aid delivered by various agencies around the world, including those tasked with protecting and stabilizing vulnerable populations, including refugees, migrants, and internally displaced people.

“The vast majority of food aid in recent decades has been delivered by FAO,” the study states.

“A large share of the food aid today is delivered through FAO-funded agencies.”

The researchers also looked at the distribution of food and other supplies that are distributed around the globe, including the number of people receiving food assistance, which is the largest single measure of assistance given to people in need.

The researchers found that over half of all the food and aid that has been distributed since the mid-20th century was delivered by the FAO.

In addition, the authors found that between 1996 and 2015, the number and distribution of people experiencing severe hunger rose significantly, and that the number, and distribution, of those receiving food aid grew faster.

This means that over the past decade, the FAOs humanitarian aid has more than doubled, and the total number of humanitarian relief efforts has grown from about $2 trillion in 2016 to more than three trillion today.

“In a world of rapidly increasing hunger, this is a real issue,” lead author Roberta Zimerman, a professor of sociology at the university, told Live Science.

“As hunger levels rise, it means more food and more people are at risk of starvation.

We know that this means more people need food, and more resources are needed to help them feed themselves.”

Zimman and her co-author, Professor Daniel Sperling, a social scientist at the Centre for Global Development, analyzed data from the FAOS website between 1999 and 2015 to determine how food aid has grown in different countries over the period.

“We were surprised to see that food aid increased substantially in countries with high levels of extreme hunger,” Sperlings research director, Dr. Michael Gifford, told the Huffington Post.

“But what we also noticed was that in other countries that had very low levels of severe hunger, there were more and more food aid going to those who were in extreme hunger, rather than those who are not.

We see this in countries like Ethiopia, where famine has been increasing dramatically.”

As a result, people in the world’s poorest countries have more food to eat and more places to go, as well as less and less money for other humanitarian efforts.

This increased food and food aid distribution in developing countries has led to a growing humanitarian crisis, with over 200 million people needing aid and more than 2.7 billion people in poverty.

While the study only examined the distribution and distribution data for a small number of countries, it did find that in 2015, food aid dropped by a whopping 71 percent in the poorest countries, from $4.5 trillion to $3.2 trillion.

And this decline was particularly notable in sub-Saharan Africa, where food aid is at its lowest since the end of the Cold War.

In these countries, the decline was even greater, with aid dropping by 69 percent in sub, semi- and fully-arid countries, including $2.7 trillion in sub regions, as compared to $1.5 billion in the richer countries.

This suggests that the FAOC is responsible for a significant amount of the humanitarian aid that is delivered, and it’s time that we started to take the same approach when it comes to delivering aid in countries that are at the very bottom of the global food distribution scale.

“What we found was that food distribution is really dependent on a variety of different things,” Zimberg told Live Sci.

“On the one hand, we see that FAO is providing a lot of food, but it also has a large amount of money and resources available to it.

And that means that there’s less and fewer resources that FAOs are able to use to deliver aid in these countries.” So what”

And on the other hand, when people are experiencing extreme hunger in countries, there are also a lot fewer resources available.


What are Predictive Models and What are they Used for?
Friday, July 16, 2021
Predictive models are statistical tools that use machine learning supported by Big Data mining to predict and forecast likely future outcomes with the help of historical and existing data by inputting multiple parameters.
They can be used to predict virtually anything containing existing data, in every sector imaginable, from ratings of any program, a customer's next purchase, credit risks, decision making among others.

Most predictive models work quickly and often complete their calculations in real time. So banks and retailers can, for example, calculate the risk of an online mortgage or credit card application and accept or reject the request almost instantly based on a prediction, also a software company could model historical sales data versus marketing spend in various regions to create a model of future revenue based on economic impact.

You may be interested in: "Big Data Models Most Commonly Used in Business".

A predictive model is not fixed; it is regularly validated or revised to incorporate changes in the underlying data. In other words, it is not a one-time prediction.

Predictive models make assumptions based on what has happened in the past and what is happening now.

Also see: "Data Science for Analyzing Business-to-Business Relationships".

What are the two models most commonly used by businesses?

Forecasting Models
Handles the prediction of metrics by estimating new data values based on learnings from historical data. It is often used to generate numerical values on historical data when none exists.
Forecasting models are popular because they are incredibly versatile.

Classification Models
These models work by categorizing information based on historical data. Classification models are used in different industries because they can be easily retrained with new data and can provide extensive analysis to answer business questions.

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“Most of us change not because we see the light but because we feel the heat,” says Don Neal, Founder and CEO of 360 Live Media. Organizations world wide are feeling the heat from the Covid-19 pandemic.

This raises many questions. Is it hot enough to cause your organization to change? Are your changes limited to spots where you “feel” the burn? How permanent are changes you’ve made. For example, are you just using virtual meetings through Zoom or Microsoft Teams until everyone can be back onsite everyday? Use caution when discounting changes as temporary or “until this blows over.”

Change is uncomfortable, scary, and difficult. We’ve seen the demise from companies that failed to do it. Toys R Us failed to respond to the heat from big box retailers and online competition. They went from 800 stores to two. Kodak was one of the most powerful companies in the world during their heyday. Ask a Millenial or Gen Z-er about their most recent “Kodak moment.” I can only imagine the confused look you will see on their face.

If prestigious, powerful companies failed to change, then how can I? One can imagine the huge salary Toys R Us and Kodak could’ve paid an executive to lead change. Jonah Berger reveals the keys to driving change in his recent book, “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.” He makes it clear that pushing change with brute force is simply ineffective. Instead the keys are to reduce barriers.

Barriers to change comes in many forms as well as shapes and sizes.

  • It could feel too far from the status quo for your team to believe it is possible. Imagine how teachers felt when some of the largest school districts in the United States announced the fall semester would be online only.
  • It could impact the way people are accustomed to doing something. A local gym offered fitness classes in 8-week sessions and required members to register at the beginning of the session. Their new app required members to register for classes day by day. There were many “Silver Sneakers” members that did not want or like the change.
  • There could be uncertainty about the outcome of the change. I used Microsoft products exclusively for two decades. Imagine the uncertainty when I needed to switch to the Google platform as I launched my own business.

In the last blog, I challenged you to identify the change(s) your organization needs to embrace and the barriers to it. What are those changes and barriers?

It becomes challenging to identify these when you’ve developed expertise in your sector or “you’ve always done it this way.” We often become myopic as the day to day challenges such as social distancing, wearing masks, etc. consume our cognitive energy. Click here to schedule a FREE session where I can help you identify change(s) needed and the barrier(s) to making it.

Becoming a catalyst or change agent means becoming more of a matchmaker according to Berger. Here are three questions to help you begin finding the best suited tools to remove roadblocks:

  1. What step moves the organization closer to the desired outcome?
  2. What is a compelling cost you can share with your team for failing to change “the way we have always done it?”
  3. What change can you pilot on a small scale to test the uncertainty with the ability to easily revert back if the outcome is undesirable?

Click here to register for a FREE roadblock removal planning session.


GMAT Math: Memory vs. Memorizing

A Case Study of the Area of an Equilateral Triangle

Fact: on the GMAT Math section, you are likely to find questions about the area of an equilateral triangle, and it would be efficient if you knew the formula.  (BTW, the formula appears a little further below.)

Don’t Merely Memorize

I am going to recommend that you work to remember this formula, rather than memorize it.  What distinction am I drawing?  By memorizing, I mean you write this isolated factoid, area of an equilateral triangle, on an index card, and drill yourself until you can successful regurgitate it.  That’s one way to get something into your memory, but it’s hard to retain it, particularly over the long term.  One big problem is: on the day of the test, because of increased stress, if you forget the factoid you previously could regurgitate, you are stuck: you have no recourse.

Memory with Contextual Understanding

By contrast, true learning involves remembering something because you understand it.  When you understand every step of an argument and how it fits together, that makes it very easy to remember.  This is particularly true in mathematics: if you can remember the series of steps that lead to a conclusion, first of all, such learning makes the conclusion much easier to remember; furthermore, even if you can’t remember the conclusion or want to check it, you will probably remember enough of the argument that you can reconstruct it if need be.  This is a much deeper kind of understanding.

Example: The Area of an Equilateral Triangle

Suppose you have an equilateral triangle with sides of length s.
We know all the sides have the same length.  It’s not relevant for finding the area, but we also know that all three angles equal 60 degrees.

Step #1: We know that the formula for the area of a triangle is A={1/2}*bh.  The base is clearly s, but we need a height.

Step #2: We draw an altitude, that is, a line from B that is perpendicular to AC.  The length of this line is the height needed in A = {1/2}*bh.

Step #3: Point D is the midpoint of AC, so AD = s/2.  Also, angle ADB is 90 degrees.

Step #4: Call the length of BD h, and apply the Pythagorean Theorem in triangle ADB:

Step #5: Now that we have the height in terms of s, we can find the area.

That last formula is, indeed, the area of an equilateral triangle, and remembering it will be a definite time-saver on GMAT Math.  Again, I don’t want you to memorize it.  Rather, I strongly encourage you to remember this five step argument: practice recreating it step-by-step until you can flawlessly recapitulate the entire thing by yourself.  Then, you won’t merely remember this formula — you will own it!

I encourage you to do that with each important GMAT math formula.  If you don’t know the steps that lead to a particular formula, and can find it online, leave me a comment  :).

Try a free Magoosh GMAT Practice Question to practice “remembering” what we just learned!

Ready to get an awesome GMAT score? Start here.

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