Early signaling responses to divergent exercise stimuli in skeletal muscle from well-trained humans

Skeletal muscle from strength- and endurance-trained individuals represents diverse adaptive states. In this regard, AMPK-PGC-1α signaling mediates several adaptations to endurance training, while up-regulation of the Akt-TSC2-mTOR pathway may underlie increased protein synthesis after resistance exercise. We determined the effect of prior training history on signaling responses in seven strength-trained and six endurance-trained males who undertook 1 h cycling at 70% VO2peak or eight sets of five maximal repetitions of isokinetic leg extensions. Muscle biopsies were taken at rest, immediately and 3 h postexercise. AMPK phosphorylation increased after cycling in strength-trained (54%; P<0.05) but not endurance-trained subjects. Conversely, AMPK was elevated after resistance exercise in endurance- (114%; P<0.05), but not strengthtrained subjects. Akt phosphorylation increased in endurance- (50%; P<0.05), but not strengthtrained subjects after cycling but was unchanged in either group after resistance exercise. TSC2 phosphorylation was decreased (47%; P<0.05) in endurance-trained subjects following resistance exercise, but cycling had little effect on the phosphorylation state of this protein in either group. p70S6K phosphorylation increased in endurance- (118%; P<0.05), but not strength-trained subjects after resistance exercise, but was similar to rest in both groups after cycling. Similarly, phosphorylation of S6 protein, a substrate for p70 S6K, was increased immediately following resistance exercise in endurance- (129%; P<0.05), but not strength-trained subjects. In conclusion, a degree of “response plasticity” is conserved at opposite ends of the endurancehypertrophic adaptation continuum. Moreover, prior training attenuates the exercise specific signaling responses involved in single mode adaptations to training.

What it means to become a public relations professional: student perceptions of professional identity through real-world learning

Public relations educators need new solutions to prepare students to become tomorrow's practitioner today. Managers and employers in the new creative workforce (McWilliam, 2008) expect graduates to be problem solvers, critical and creative thinkers, reflective, and self reliant (Barrie, 2008; David, 2004). Enabling students to develop these attributes requires a collaborative and creative approach to pedagogy (Jeffrey & Craft, 2001, 2004). A model for the next generation of public relations education was developed to integrate industry partnerships as a way to bridge pedagogy and professional practice. The model suggests (a) that industry partnerships be embedded in learning activities, (b) that assessment items be considered on a continuum and delivered incrementally across a course of study, and (c) that connections between classroom and workplace activities are clearly signposted for students.

The borders that law sets on entertainment

It is natural for those involved in entertainment to focus on the art. However, like any activity in even a free society, those involved in entertainment industries must operate within borders set by the law. This article examines the main areas of law that impact entertainment in an Australian context. It contrasts the position in relation to freedom of expression in Australia with that in the United States, which also promotes freedom of expression in a free society. It then briefly canvases the main limits on entertainment productions under Australian law.

Scripting versus emergence : issues for game developers and players in game environment design

This paper defines and discusses two contrasting approaches to designing game environments. The first, referred to as scripting, requires developers to anticipate, hand-craft and script specific game objects, events and player interactions. The second, known as emergence, involves defining general, global rules that interact to give rise to emergent gameplay. Each of these approaches is defined, discussed and analyzed with respect to the considerations and affects for game developers and game players. Subsequently, various techniques for implementing these design approaches are identified and discussed. It is concluded that scripting and emergence are two extremes of the same continuum, neither of which are ideal for game development. Rather, there needs to be a compromise in which the boundaries of action (such as story and game objectives) can be hardcoded and non-scripted behavior (such as interactions and strategies) are able to emerge within these boundaries.

Weight management and its role in breast cancer rehabilitation

Overweight and obesity are risk factors for post-menopausal breast cancer, and many women diagnosed with breast cancer, irrespective of menopausal status, gain weight after diagnosis. Weight management plays an important role in rehabilitation and recovery since obesity and/or weight gain may lead to poorer breast cancer prognosis, as well as prevalent co-morbid conditions (e.g. cardiovascular disease and diabetes), poorer surgical outcomes (e.g., increased operating and recovery times, higher infection rates, and poorer healing), lymphedema, fatigue, functional decline, and poorer health and overall quality of life. Health care professionals should encourage weight management at all phases of the cancer care continuum as a means to potentially avoid adverse sequelae and late effects, as well as to improve overall health and possibly survival. Comprehensive approaches that involve dietary and behavior modification, and increased aerobic and strength training exercise have shown promise in either preventing weight gain or promoting weight loss, reducing biomarkers associated with inflammation and co-morbidity, and improving lifestyle behaviors, functional status, and quality of life in this high-risk patient population.

Velocity-jump models with crowding effects

Velocity jump processes are discrete random walk models that have many applications including the study of biological and ecological collective motion. In particular, velocity jump models are often used to represent a type of persistent motion, known as a “run and tumble”, which is exhibited by some isolated bacteria cells. All previous velocity jump processes are non-interacting, which means that crowding effects and agent-to-agent interactions are neglected. By neglecting these agent-to-agent interactions, traditional velocity jump models are only applicable to very dilute systems. Our work is motivated by the fact that many applications in cell biology, such as wound healing, cancer invasion and development, often involve tissues that are densely packed with cells where cell-to-cell contact and crowding effects can be important. To describe these kinds of high cell density problems using a velocity jump process we introduce three different classes of crowding interactions into a one-dimensional model. Simulation data and averaging arguments lead to a suite of continuum descriptions of the interacting velocity jump processes. We show that the resulting systems of hyperbolic partial differential equations predict the mean behavior of the stochastic simulations very well.

Good Practice Report : Blended Learning

In early 2011, the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd (ALTC) commissioned a series of Good Practice Reports on completed ALTC projects and fellowships. This report will: • Provide a summative evaluation of the good practices and key outcomes for teaching and learning from completed ALTC projects and fellowships relating to blended learning • Include a literature review of the good practices and key outcomes for teaching and learning from national and international research • Identify areas in which further work or development are appropriate. The literature abounds with definitions; it can be argued that the various definitions incorporate different perspectives, but there is no single, collectively accepted definition. Blended learning courses in higher education can be placed somewhere on a continuum, between fully online and fully face-to-face courses. Consideration must therefore be given to the different definitions for blended learning presented in the literature and by users and stakeholders. The application of this term in these various projects and fellowships is dependent on the particular focus of the team and the conditions and situations under investigation. One of the key challenges for projects wishing to develop good practice in blended learning is the lack of a universally accepted definition. The findings from these projects and fellowships reveal the potential of blended learning programs to improve both student outcomes and levels of satisfaction. It is clear that this environment can help teaching and learning engage students more effectively and allow greater participation than traditional models. Just as there are many definitions, there are many models and frameworks that can be successfully applied to the design and implementation of such courses. Each academic discipline has different learning objectives and in consequence there can’t be only one correct approach. This is illustrated by the diversity of definitions and applications in the ALTC funded projects and fellowships. A review of the literature found no universally accepted guidelines for good practice in higher education. To inform this evaluation and literature review, the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, as outlined by Chickering and Gamson (1987), were adopted: 1. encourages contacts between students and faculty 2. develops reciprocity and cooperation among students 3. uses active learning techniques 4. gives prompt feedback 5. emphasises time on task 6. communicates high expectations 7. respects diverse talents and ways of learning. These blended learning projects have produced a wide range of resources that can be used in many and varied settings. These resources include: books, DVDs, online repositories, pedagogical frameworks, teaching modules. In addition there is valuable information contained in the published research data and literature reviews that inform good practice and can assist in the development of courses that can enrich and improve teaching and learning.

Models of collective cell motion for cell populations with different aspect ratio : diffusion, proliferation and travelling waves

Continuum, partial differential equation models are often used to describe the collective motion of cell populations, with various types of motility represented by the choice of diffusion coefficient, and cell proliferation captured by the source terms. Previously, the choice of diffusion coefficient has been largely arbitrary, with the decision to choose a particular linear or nonlinear form generally based on calibration arguments rather than making any physical connection with the underlying individual-level properties of the cell motility mechanism. In this work we provide a new link between individual-level models, which account for important cell properties such as varying cell shape and volume exclusion, and population-level partial differential equation models. We work in an exclusion process framework, considering aligned, elongated cells that may occupy more than one lattice site, in order to represent populations of agents with different sizes. Three different idealizations of the individual-level mechanism are proposed, and these are connected to three different partial differential equations, each with a different diffusion coefficient; one linear, one nonlinear and degenerate and one nonlinear and nondegenerate. We test the ability of these three models to predict the population level response of a cell spreading problem for both proliferative and nonproliferative cases. We also explore the potential of our models to predict long time travelling wave invasion rates and extend our results to two dimensional spreading and invasion. Our results show that each model can accurately predict density data for nonproliferative systems, but that only one does so for proliferative systems. Hence great care must be taken to predict density data for with varying cell shape.

Response of partially grouted wider reinforced masonry walls to inplane cyclic shear

Partially grouted wider reinforced masonry wall, built predominantly using face shell bedded hollow concrete blocks, is an economical structural system and is popularly used in the cyclonic areas; its out-of-plane response to lateral loading is well understood, unfortunately its inplane shear behaviour is less well understood as to the effect of partial gouting in intervening the load paths within the wall. For rational analysis of the wall clarification is sought as to whether the wall acts as a composite of unreinforced panels and reinforced cores or as a continuum of masonry embedded with reinforced at wider spacing. This paper reports the results of four full scale walls tested under inplane cyclic shear loading to provide some insight into the effect of the grout cores in altering the load paths within the wall. The global lateral load - lateral deflection hysteric curves as well as local responses of some critical zones of the shear walls are presented.

A descriptive approach for power system stability and security assessment

Power system dynamic analysis and security assessment are becoming more significant today due to increases in size and complexity from restructuring, emerging new uncertainties, integration of renewable energy sources, distributed generation, and micro grids. Precise modelling of all contributed elements/devices, understanding interactions in detail, and observing hidden dynamics using existing analysis tools/theorems are difficult, and even impossible. In this chapter, the power system is considered as a continuum and the propagated electomechanical waves initiated by faults and other random events are studied to provide a new scheme for stability investigation of a large dimensional system. For this purpose, the measured electrical indices (such as rotor angle and bus voltage) following a fault in different points among the network are used, and the behaviour of the propagated waves through the lines, nodes, and buses is analyzed. The impact of weak transmission links on a progressive electromechanical wave using energy function concept is addressed. It is also emphasized that determining severity of a disturbance/contingency accurately, without considering the related electromechanical waves, hidden dynamics, and their properties is not secure enough. Considering these phenomena takes heavy and time consuming calculation, which is not suitable for online stability assessment problems. However, using a continuum model for a power system reduces the burden of complex calculations

Fuzzy methods for analysis of microarrays and networks

Bioinformatics involves analyses of biological data such as DNA sequences, microarrays and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Its two main objectives are the identification of genes or proteins and the prediction of their functions. Biological data often contain uncertain and imprecise information. Fuzzy theory provides useful tools to deal with this type of information, hence has played an important role in analyses of biological data. In this thesis, we aim to develop some new fuzzy techniques and apply them on DNA microarrays and PPI networks. We will focus on three problems: (1) clustering of microarrays; (2) identification of disease-associated genes in microarrays; and (3) identification of protein complexes in PPI networks. The first part of the thesis aims to detect, by the fuzzy C-means (FCM) method, clustering structures in DNA microarrays corrupted by noise. Because of the presence of noise, some clustering structures found in random data may not have any biological significance. In this part, we propose to combine the FCM with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for clustering microarray data. The purpose of EMD is to reduce, preferably to remove, the effect of noise, resulting in what is known as denoised data. We call this method the fuzzy C-means method with empirical mode decomposition (FCM-EMD). We applied this method on yeast and serum microarrays, and the silhouette values are used for assessment of the quality of clustering. The results indicate that the clustering structures of denoised data are more reasonable, implying that genes have tighter association with their clusters. Furthermore we found that the estimation of the fuzzy parameter m, which is a difficult step, can be avoided to some extent by analysing denoised microarray data. The second part aims to identify disease-associated genes from DNA microarray data which are generated under different conditions, e.g., patients and normal people. We developed a type-2 fuzzy membership (FM) function for identification of diseaseassociated genes. This approach is applied to diabetes and lung cancer data, and a comparison with the original FM test was carried out. Among the ten best-ranked genes of diabetes identified by the type-2 FM test, seven genes have been confirmed as diabetes-associated genes according to gene description information in Gene Bank and the published literature. An additional gene is further identified. Among the ten best-ranked genes identified in lung cancer data, seven are confirmed that they are associated with lung cancer or its treatment. The type-2 FM-d values are significantly different, which makes the identifications more convincing than the original FM test. The third part of the thesis aims to identify protein complexes in large interaction networks. Identification of protein complexes is crucial to understand the principles of cellular organisation and to predict protein functions. In this part, we proposed a novel method which combines the fuzzy clustering method and interaction probability to identify the overlapping and non-overlapping community structures in PPI networks, then to detect protein complexes in these sub-networks. Our method is based on both the fuzzy relation model and the graph model. We applied the method on several PPI networks and compared with a popular protein complex identification method, the clique percolation method. For the same data, we detected more protein complexes. We also applied our method on two social networks. The results showed our method works well for detecting sub-networks and give a reasonable understanding of these communities.

Wider reinforced masonry shear walls subjected to cyclic lateral loading

Partially grouted wider reinforced masonry wall, built predominantly with the use of face shell bedded hollow concrete blocks, is adopted extensively in the cyclonic areas due to its economy. Its out-of-plane response to lateral pressure loading is well definied; however its in-plane shear behaviour is less well understood, in particular it is unclear how the grouted reinforced cores affect the load paths within the wall. For the rational design of the walls, clarification is sought as to whether the wall acts as a composite of unreinforced panels surrounded by the reinforced cores or simply as a continuum embedded with reinforcement at wider spacing. This paper reports four full scale walls tested under in-place cyclic shear loading to provide some insight into the effect of the grout cores in altering the load paths within the wall. The global lateral load - lateral deflection hysteretic curves as well as the local responses of some critical zones of the shear walls are presented. It is shown that the aspect ratio of the unreinforced masonry panels surrounded by the reinforced grouted cores within the shear walls have profound effect in ascertaining the behaviour of the shear walls.

Mathematical modelling of tumour-induced angiogenesis

The growth of solid tumours beyond a critical size is dependent upon angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels from an existing vasculature. Tumours may remain dormant at microscopic sizes for some years before switching to a mode in which growth of a supportive vasculature is initiated. The new blood vessels supply nutrients, oxygen, and access to routes by which tumour cells may travel to other sites within the host (metastasize). In recent decades an abundance of biological research has focused on tumour-induced angiogenesis in the hope that treatments targeted at the vasculature may result in a stabilisation or regression of the disease: a tantalizing prospect. The complex and fascinating process of angiogenesis has also attracted the interest of researchers in the field of mathematical biology, a discipline that is, for mathematics, relatively new. The challenge in mathematical biology is to produce a model that captures the essential elements and critical dependencies of a biological system. Such a model may ultimately be used as a predictive tool. In this thesis we examine a number of aspects of tumour-induced angiogenesis, focusing on growth of the neovasculature external to the tumour. Firstly we present a one-dimensional continuum model of tumour-induced angiogenesis in which elements of the immune system or other tumour-cytotoxins are delivered via the newly formed vessels. This model, based on observations from experiments by Judah Folkman et al., is able to show regression of the tumour for some parameter regimes. The modelling highlights a number of interesting aspects of the process that may be characterised further in the laboratory. The next model we present examines the initiation positions of blood vessel sprouts on an existing vessel, in a two-dimensional domain. This model hypothesises that a simple feedback inhibition mechanism may be used to describe the spacing of these sprouts with the inhibitor being produced by breakdown of the existing vessel's basement membrane. Finally, we have developed a stochastic model of blood vessel growth and anastomosis in three dimensions. The model has been implemented in C++, includes an openGL interface, and uses a novel algorithm for calculating proximity of the line segments representing a growing vessel. This choice of programming language and graphics interface allows for near-simultaneous calculation and visualisation of blood vessel networks using a contemporary personal computer. In addition the visualised results may be transformed interactively, and drop-down menus facilitate changes in the parameter values. Visualisation of results is of vital importance in the communication of mathematical information to a wide audience, and we aim to incorporate this philosophy in the thesis. As biological research further uncovers the intriguing processes involved in tumourinduced angiogenesis, we conclude with a comment from mathematical biologist Jim Murray, Mathematical biology is : : : the most exciting modern application of mathematics.

Application of Geographic Modeling Techniques to Quantify Spatial Access to Health Services Before and After an Acute Cardiac Event: The Cardiac ARIA Project

Background: Access to cardiac services is essential for appropriate implementation of evidence-based therapies to improve outcomes. The Cardiac Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia (Cardiac ARIA) aimed to derive an objective, geographic measure reflecting access to cardiac services. Methods: An expert panel defined an evidence-based clinical pathway. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a numeric/alpha index was developed at two points along the continuum of care. The acute category (numeric) measured the time from the emergency call to arrival at an appropriate medical facility via road ambulance. The aftercare category (alpha) measured access to four basic services (family doctor, pharmacy, cardiac rehabilitation, and pathology services) when a patient returned to their community. Results: The numeric index ranged from 1 (access to principle referral center with cardiac catheterization service ≤ 1 hour) to 8 (no ambulance service, > 3 hours to medical facility, air transport required). The alphabetic index ranged from A (all 4 services available within 1 hour drive-time) to E (no services available within 1 hour). 13.9 million (71%) Australians resided within Cardiac ARIA 1A locations (hospital with cardiac catheterization laboratory and all aftercare within 1 hour). Those outside Cardiac 1A were over-represented by people aged over 65 years (32%) and Indigenous people (60%). Conclusion: The Cardiac ARIA index demonstrated substantial inequity in access to cardiac services in Australia. This methodology can be used to inform cardiology health service planning and the methodology could be applied to other common disease states within other regions of the world.