Relationship between serum interleukin-1beta levels and acute phase response proteins in patients with familial Mediterranean fever

Introduction:

The aim of this study was to investigate whether serum levels of interleukin-1β (IL–1β) has any possible correlation on inflammatory parameters such as C-reactive protein (CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and fibrinogen concentration in patients with familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) patients during attack-free period.

Materials and methods:

The serum levels of IL-1β, as an indicator of cytokines status, and the acute phase response proteins, CRP, ESR and fibrinogen levels were evaluated in 35 attack-free patients with FMF and 25 healthy volunteers.

Results:

Serum IL-1β levels were significantly higher in patients with FMF than control subjects (P = 0.018). There was no statistically significant difference in the serum levels of ESR, CRP and fibrinogen between two groups (P = 0.181, P = 0.816, P = 0.686, respectively). There was a significant correlation between IL-1β and CRP (r = 0.513, P = 0.002) values of FMF group.

Conclusions:

In conclusion, our results confirm the presence of increased IL-1β levels in FMF patients during attack-free period. Serum IL-1β values seems to correlate with CRP levels. The elevation of IL-1β levels may be important in monitoring subclinical inflammation of attack free period in FMF patients.     

Modern standard Arabic speech corpus for implementing and evaluating automatic continuous speech recognition systems

This paper presents our work towards developing a new speech corpus for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which can be used for implementing and evaluating Arabic speaker-independent, large vocabulary, automatic, and continuous speech recognition systems. The speech corpus was recorded by 40 (20 male and 20 female) Arabic native speakers from 11 countries representing three major regions (Levant, Gulf, and Africa). Three development phases were conducted based on the size of training data, Gaussian mixture distributions, and tied states (senones). Based on our third development phase using 11 hours of training speech data, the acoustic model is composed of 16 Gaussian mixture distributions and the state distributions tied to 300 senones. Using three different data sets, the third development phase obtained 94.32% and 8.10% average word recognition correctness rate and average Word Error Rate (WER), respectively, for same speakers with different sentences (testing sentences). For different speakers with same sentences (training sentences), this work obtained 98.10% and 2.67% average word recognition correctness rate and average WER, respectively, whereas for different speakers with different sentences (testing sentences) this work obtained 93.73% and 8.75% average word recognition correctness rate and average WER, respectively.     

Improved equalization and joint iterative detection

Intersymbol interference (ISI) degrades the bit error rate (BER) performance of sequential detectors such as maximum likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) and the maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm due to minimum distance reduction. This paper describes a novel rotation method that can increase the minimum distance and results in significant improvement in the BER performance for binary PSK and 4QAM systems when operating over severe ISI channels. Simulation results show that this method can improve the BER performance of systems employing MLSD and MAP turbo equalization by up to 4.6 dB compared to existing approaches including known precoding schemes.     

The impact of global and local context information on the processing of deceptive actions in game sports

In basketball, the defender’s reaction to a pass is slower and more error prone if the attacking player gazes into the opposite direction. This so-called head-fake effect might be modulated by context information, that is, the frequency and the sequence of head fakes occurring. Accordingly, the present study investigates the head-fake effect for different frequency proportions (20% vs. 50% vs. 80%). The results show that the head-fake effect decreases when the head fake occurs more often. Furthermore, a potential influence of previous fake experience (i.e., congruency-sequence effect) on the size of the head-fake effect was investigated. Importantly, previous fake experience did not cause the frequency-based modulation of the general size of the head-fake effect. These findings bare important implications for sports practice, especially when it comes to instructing players about the tactical use of deceptive actions.     

The numerical solution of physical problems modeled as a systems of differential-algebraic equations (DAEs)

In this paper, the numerical solution of differential-algebraic equations is considered by Padé approximation method. We applied this method to an example which is a physical model problem. Firstly the physical model problem has been converted to power series, then the numerical solution of physical model problem was put into Padé series form. Thus we obtained numerical solution of physical model problem.     

A comparison of students' conceptual understanding of electric circuits in simulation only and simulation‐laboratory contexts

The aim of this experimental study was to compare learning outcomes of students using a simulation alone (simulation environment) with outcomes of those using a simulation in parallel with real circuits (combination environment) in the domain of electricity, and to explore how learning outcomes in these environments are mediated by implicit (only procedural guidance) and explicit (more structure and guidance for the discovery process) instruction. Matched‐quartets were created based on the pre‐test results of 50 elementary school students and divided randomly into a simulation implicit (SI), simulation explicit (SE), combination implicit (CI) and combination explicit (CE) conditions. The results demonstrated that the instructional support had an expected effect on students' understanding of electric circuits when they used the simulation alone; pure procedural guidance (SI) was insufficient to promote conceptual understanding, but when the students were given more guidance for the discovery process (SE) they were able to gain significant amount of subject knowledge. A surprising finding was that when the students used the simulation and the real circuits in parallel, the explicit instruction (CE) did not seem to elicit much additional gain for their understanding of electric circuits compared to the implicit instruction (CI). Instead, the explicit instruction slowed down the inquiry process substantially in the combination environment (CE). Although the explicit instruction was able to improve students' conceptual understanding of electrical circuits considerably in the simulation environment, their understanding did not reach the level of the students in the combination environment. These results suggest that when teaching students about electricity, the students can gain better understanding when they have an opportunity to use the simulation and the real circuits in parallel than if they have only a computer simulation available, even when the use of the simulation is supported with the explicit instruction. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 71–93, 2011     

The Connection Between Forms of Guidance for Inquiry-Based Learning and the Communicative Approaches Applied—a Case Study in the Context of Pre-service Teachers

Research in Science Education - Recent research has argued that inquiry-based science learning should be guided by providing the learners with support. The research on guidance for inquiry-based...     

Introducing Dialogic Teaching to Science Student Teachers

It is commonly believed that science teachers rely on language that allows only minor flexibility when it comes to taking into account contrasting views and pupil thoughts. Too frequently science teachers either pose questions that target predefined answers or simply lecture through lessons, a major concern from a sociocultural perspective. This study reports the experiences of science student teachers when introduced to the Communicative Approach to science education drawing on dialogic teacher-talk in addition to authoritative teacher-talk. This approach was introduced to the students in an interventional teaching program running parallel to the student teachers’ field practice. The practical implications of this approach during initial teacher education are the central focus of this study. The data consisting of videos of lessons and interviews indicate that the student teacher awareness of teacher-talk and alternative communicative options did increase. Student teachers reported greater awareness of the different functions of teacher-talk as well as the challenges when trying to implement dialogic teaching.     

Epistemological Predictors of “Self Efficacy on Learning Biology” and “Test Anxiety Related to Evaluation of Learning on Biology” for Pre-service Elementary Teachers

The degree to which pre-service teachers learn biology is related to both motivational factors of self-regulation and factors regarding epistemological beliefs. At the same time, self-regulation and epistemological beliefs are also associated with one another. Based on this relationship, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between components of epistemological beliefs and self-refulation (self-efficacy and test-anxiety) on learning biology. The study was conducted with 411 pre-service elementary and pre-service elementary science teachers by using a predictive research approach. Collected data was analyzed by the multiple linear regression technique. The results showed that only the belief about “existence of one truth” was a significant predictor of test anxiety while there was no epistemological predictor of self-efficacy. Conclusions and implications of the study will be discussed.