Zebrafish eaf1 and eaf2/u19 Mediate Effective Convergence and Extension Movements through the Maintenance of wnt11 and wnt5 Expression

Studies have attributed several functions to the Eaf family, including tumor suppression and eye development. Given the potential association between cancer and development, we set forth to explore Eaf1 and Eaf2/U19 activity in vertebrate embryogenesis, using zebrafish. In situ hybridization revealed similar eaf1 and eaf2/u19 expression patterns. Morpholino-mediated knockdown of either eaf1 or eaf2/u19 expression produced similar morphological changes that could be reversed by ectopic expression of target or reciprocal-target mRNA. However, combination of Eaf1 and Eaf2/U19 (Eafs)-morpholinos increased the severity of defects, suggesting that Eaf1 and Eaf2/U19 only share some functional redundancy. The Eafs knockdown phenotype resembled that of embryos with defects in convergence and extension movements. Indeed, knockdown caused expression pattern changes for convergence and extension movement markers, whereas cell tracing experiments using kaeda mRNA showed a correlation between Eafs knockdown and cell migration defects. Cardiac and pancreatic differentiation markers revealed that Eafs knockdown also disrupted midline convergence of heart and pancreatic organ precursors. Noncanonical Wnt signaling plays a key role in both convergence and extension movements and midline convergence of organ precursors. We found that Eaf1 and Eaf2/U19 maintained expression levels of wnt11 and wnt5. Moreover, wnt11 or wnt5 mRNA partially rescued the convergence and extension movement defects occurring in eafs morphants. Wnt11 and Wnt5 converge on rhoA, so not surprisingly, rhoA mRNA more effectively rescued defects than either wnt11 or wnt5 mRNA alone. However, the ectopic expression of wnt11 and wnt5 did not affect eaf1 and eaf2/u19 expression. These data indicate that eaf1 and eaf2/u19 act upstream of noncanonical Wnt signaling to mediate convergence and extension movements.

中国大陆地区远震体波接收函数与岩石圈厚度的研究

Movements of separation and convergence between the continental plates, as well as the interaction beween the lithosphere and asthenosphere is the dominant factor in plate evolution. Moreover, those phenomena, the formation, enrichment and storage of energy and mineral strorage, as well as intraplate earthquakes are all relate to plate movement and evolution. Therefore, the study of continental lithosphere, is not only helpful to analysing the dynamic model between lithosphere and asthenoshere as well as different plates, but also important to the nation's economy and the people's livelihood. And the lithospheric thickness or Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary (LAB) is one of the most important parameters in study of continental lithospheric formation and evolution. Chinese continent composed by many small plates, possesses diverse type of lithospheric structure. But our knowledge ahout Chinese continental lithosphere, especially the regional research, is almost based on the low-resolution results of surface wave dispersion analysis and seismic wave tomography. Howere, recently a technique employing S-to-P converted body waves (the S receiver function technique) has been developed that can be used to identify the LAB with a higher resolution. This thesis has collected waveform data of 232 broadband seismic stations that are located in China and neighboring regions. Using teleseismic S-wave and P-wave receiver functions have studied the Chinese continental lithospheric structure. The results of this study indicate that, the thickness of Chinese continental lithosphere become thinner from west to east, and obvious difference exists between different blocks. Four types of lithosphere have been detected: (1) Convergence thicking lithosphere in Tibetan Plateau; (2) Stable lithosphere in Tarim basin and upper Yangtze craton; (4) Active lithosphere in Orogenic belts; (4) Break-up thinning lithosphere in east China craton

青藏高原壳幔形变与层圈耦合数值模拟

Based on multi-principle (such as structures, tectonics and kinematics) exploratory data and related results of continental dynamics in the Tibetan plateau, the author reconstructed the geological-geophysical model of lithospherical structure and tectonic deformation, and the kinetics boundary conditions for the model. Then, the author used the numerical scheme of Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua (FLAC), to stimulate the possible process of the stress field and deformational field in the Tibetan plateau and its adjacent area, since the convergence-collision between the Indian continent and Eurasia continent about 50Ma ago. With the above-mentioned results, the author discussed the relationship between crustal movement in shallow layer and the deformational process in interior layers, and its possible dynamic constraints in deep. At the end of the paper, an integrative model has been put forward to explain the outline images of crust-mantle deformation and coupling in the Tibetan Plateau. (1) The characteristics of crust-mantle structure of the Tibetan plateau have been shown to be very complex, and vertical and horizontal difference is significant. The general characteristics of crust-mantle of the Tibetan plateau may be that it's layering in depth direction, and shows blocking from south to north and belting from east to west, mainly according to the results of about 20 seismic sections, such as wide-angle seismic profiles, CMP, seismic tomography and so on. (2) The crust had shortened about 2200km, while the shortening is different for different block from south to north in the Tibetan plateau. It is about 11.5mm/a in Himalayan block, about 9.0mm/a in Lhas-Gangdese block, about 7.0mm/a in Qiangtang block and Songpan-Ganzi-Kekexili block, about 8.0mm/a in Kunlun-Qaidam, and about ll.Omm/a in Qilian block, since the convergence-collision between the Indian continent and Eurasia continent about 50Ma ago. Which - in demonstrates the shortening rate decreases from south to north, but this rate increases near the north edge of the Tibetan plateau. The crust thickening rate is about 0.4mm/a in the whole Tibetan plateau; and this rate is about 0.5mm/a in Himalayan block, about 0.4mm/a in Lhas-Gangdese block, about 0.3mm/a in Qiangtang block, about 0.2mm/a in Songpan-Ganzi-Kekexili block and about O.lmm/a in Kunlun-Qaidam-Qilian block, since the convergence-collision between the Indian continent and Eurasia continent about 50Ma ago. This implies that the thickening rate decreases in the blocks of the Tibetan plateau. From south to north, the displacement of eastern boundary in the Tibetan plateau is about 37mm/a in Himalayan block, about 45mm/a in Lhas-Gangdese block, about 47mm/a in Qiangtang block, about 43mm/a in Songpan-Ganzi-Kekexili block, and about 35mm/a in Kunlun-Qaidam-Qilian block, since the collision-matching between the Indian continent and Eurasia continent had happened about 50Ma ago. This implies that the rate of eastward displacement is biggest in the middle of plateau, and decreases to both sides. The transition of S-N compression stress field in Tibetan Plateau, since about 28Ma+ ago, may be caused by two reasons: On one hand, the movement direction of Eurasia continent changed from northward to southward about 28Ma± ago in the northern plateau. On the other hand, the front belt that is located between India continent's and Eurasia continent's convergence-collision, had moved southward to high Himalayan from Indus-Brahmaputra suture almost at the same time in southern plateau. Affected by the stress field, the earlier tectonics rotated clockwise, NE and NW conjugate strike-slip faults developed, and the SN rift formed. This indicated that the EW movement started. The ratio between upper crust and lower crust of different blocks from south to north in the Tibetan plateau during the process of deformation are as following: about 3.5~5:1 in Himalayan block, about 1~5: 3-4 (which is about 1:3o--4 in south and about 4~5:3 in north) in Lhas-Gangdese block, about 1:3~447mm/a in these blocks: Which is located to the north of Banggong-nujiang suture.

Convergence Results for the EM Approach to Mixtures of Experts Architectures

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative approach to maximum likelihood parameter estimation. Jordan and Jacobs (1993) recently proposed an EM algorithm for the mixture of experts architecture of Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan and Hinton (1991) and the hierarchical mixture of experts architecture of Jordan and Jacobs (1992). They showed empirically that the EM algorithm for these architectures yields significantly faster convergence than gradient ascent. In the current paper we provide a theoretical analysis of this algorithm. We show that the algorithm can be regarded as a variable metric algorithm with its searching direction having a positive projection on the gradient of the log likelihood. We also analyze the convergence of the algorithm and provide an explicit expression for the convergence rate. In addition, we describe an acceleration technique that yields a significant speedup in simulation experiments.

Most Haunted and the Convergence of Traditional Belief and Popular Television

Koven, M. (2007). Most Haunted and the Convergence of Traditional Belief and Popular Television. Folklore. 118(2), pp.183-202. RAE2008

‘It was almost like the opposite of what I needed’: a qualitative exploration of client experiences of unhelpful therapy

Background: The issue of unhelpful and harmful therapy outcome has received an increasing amount of attention within the research literature in recent years. However, little research exists on the client's perspective of what constitutes unhelpful therapy. Aim: The aim of this study was to explore clients’ experiences of unhelpful therapy. Method: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten therapists who, as clients, experienced unhelpful therapy. Interview transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings: Participants recounted therapy episodes characterised by an absence of negotiation, collaboration and care; pivotal moments when they knew that they would not return; and ongoing negative effects. Conclusions: The findings of this study have implications for training and strategies for supporting clients who have been harmed by therapy.

On the Convergence of Statistical Techniques for Inferring Network Traffic Demands

Accurate knowledge of traffic demands in a communication network enables or enhances a variety of traffic engineering and network management tasks of paramount importance for operational networks. Directly measuring a complete set of these demands is prohibitively expensive because of the huge amounts of data that must be collected and the performance impact that such measurements would impose on the regular behavior of the network. As a consequence, we must rely on statistical techniques to produce estimates of actual traffic demands from partial information. The performance of such techniques is however limited due to their reliance on limited information and the high amount of computations they incur, which limits their convergence behavior. In this paper we study strategies to improve the convergence of a powerful statistical technique based on an Expectation-Maximization iterative algorithm. First we analyze modeling approaches to generating starting points. We call these starting points informed priors since they are obtained using actual network information such as packet traces and SNMP link counts. Second we provide a very fast variant of the EM algorithm which extends its computation range, increasing its accuracy and decreasing its dependence on the quality of the starting point. Finally, we study the convergence characteristics of our EM algorithm and compare it against a recently proposed Weighted Least Squares approach.

TCP-friendly SIMD Congestion Control and Its Convergence Behavior

The increased diversity of Internet application requirements has spurred recent interests in flexible congestion control mechanisms. Window-based congestion control schemes use increase rules to probe available bandwidth, and decrease rules to back off when congestion is detected. The parameterization of these control rules is done so as to ensure that the resulting protocol is TCP-friendly in terms of the relationship between throughput and packet loss rate. In this paper, we propose a novel window-based congestion control algorithm called SIMD (Square-Increase/Multiplicative-Decrease). Contrary to previous memory-less controls, SIMD utilizes history information in its control rules. It uses multiplicative decrease but the increase in window size is in proportion to the square of the time elapsed since the detection of the last loss event. Thus, SIMD can efficiently probe available bandwidth. Nevertheless, SIMD is TCP-friendly as well as TCP-compatible under RED, and it has much better convergence behavior than TCP-friendly AIMD and binomial algorithms proposed recently.

Securing Bulk Content Almost for Free

Content providers often consider the costs of security to be greater than the losses they might incur without it; many view "casual piracy" as their main concern. Our goal is to provide a low cost defense against such attacks while maintaining rigorous security guarantees. Our defense is integrated with and leverages fast forward error correcting codes, such as Tornado codes, which are widely used to facilitate reliable delivery of rich content. We tune one such family of codes - while preserving their original desirable properties - to guarantee that none of the original content can b e recovered whenever a key subset of encoded packets is missing. Ultimately we encrypt only these key codewords (only 4% of all transmissions), making the security overhead negligible.

An Adaptive Policy Management Approach to BGP Convergence

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the current inter-domain routing protocol used to exchange reachability information between Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the Internet. BGP supports policy-based routing which allows each AS to independently adopt a set of local policies that specify which routes it accepts and advertises from/to other networks, as well as which route it prefers when more than one route becomes available. However, independently chosen local policies may cause global conflicts, which result in protocol divergence. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called Adaptive Policy Management Scheme (APMS), to resolve policy conflicts in a distributed manner. Akin to distributed feedback control systems, each AS independently classifies the state of the network as either conflict-free or potentially-conflicting by observing its local history only (namely, route flaps). Based on the degree of measured conflicts (policy conflict-avoidance vs. -control mode), each AS dynamically adjusts its own path preferences—increasing its preference for observably stable paths over flapping paths. APMS also includes a mechanism to distinguish route flaps due to topology changes, so as not to confuse them with those due to policy conflicts. A correctness and convergence analysis of APMS based on the substability property of chosen paths is presented. Implementation in the SSF network simulator is performed, and simulation results for different performance metrics are presented. The metrics capture the dynamic performance (in terms of instantaneous throughput, delay, routing load, etc.) of APMS and other competing solutions, thus exposing the often neglected aspects of performance.

Accelerating self-consistent field convergence with the augmented Roothaan-Hall energy function.

Based on Pulay's direct inversion iterative subspace (DIIS) approach, we present a method to accelerate self-consistent field (SCF) convergence. In this method, the quadratic augmented Roothaan-Hall (ARH) energy function, proposed recently by Høst and co-workers [J. Chem. Phys. 129, 124106 (2008)], is used as the object of minimization for obtaining the linear coefficients of Fock matrices within DIIS. This differs from the traditional DIIS of Pulay, which uses an object function derived from the commutator of the density and Fock matrices. Our results show that the present algorithm, abbreviated ADIIS, is more robust and efficient than the energy-DIIS (EDIIS) approach. In particular, several examples demonstrate that the combination of ADIIS and DIIS ("ADIIS+DIIS") is highly reliable and efficient in accelerating SCF convergence.

Convergence of numerical time-averaging and stationary measures via Poisson equations

Numerical approximation of the long time behavior of a stochastic di.erential equation (SDE) is considered. Error estimates for time-averaging estimators are obtained and then used to show that the stationary behavior of the numerical method converges to that of the SDE. The error analysis is based on using an associated Poisson equation for the underlying SDE. The main advantages of this approach are its simplicity and universality. It works equally well for a range of explicit and implicit schemes, including those with simple simulation of random variables, and for hypoelliptic SDEs. To simplify the exposition, we consider only the case where the state space of the SDE is a torus, and we study only smooth test functions. However, we anticipate that the approach can be applied more widely. An analogy between our approach and Stein's method is indicated. Some practical implications of the results are discussed. Copyright © by SIAM. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

Stochastic switching in infinite dimensions with applications to random parabolic PDE

© 2015 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.We consider parabolic PDEs with randomly switching boundary conditions. In order to analyze these random PDEs, we consider more general stochastic hybrid systems and prove convergence to, and properties of, a stationary distribution. Applying these general results to the heat equation with randomly switching boundary conditions, we find explicit formulae for various statistics of the solution and obtain almost sure results about its regularity and structure. These results are of particular interest for biological applications as well as for their significant departure from behavior seen in PDEs forced by disparate Gaussian noise. Our general results also have applications to other types of stochastic hybrid systems, such as ODEs with randomly switching right-hand sides.

Cyclic Pursuit: Symmetry, Reduction and Nonlinear Dynamics

In this dissertation, we explore the use of pursuit interactions as a building block for collective behavior, primarily in the context of constant bearing (CB) cyclic pursuit. Pursuit phenomena are observed throughout the natural environment and also play an important role in technological contexts, such as missile-aircraft encounters and interactions between unmanned vehicles. While pursuit is typically regarded as adversarial, we demonstrate that pursuit interactions within a cyclic pursuit framework give rise to seemingly coordinated group maneuvers. We model a system of agents (e.g. birds, vehicles) as particles tracing out curves in the plane, and illustrate reduction to the shape space of relative positions and velocities. Introducing the CB pursuit strategy and associated pursuit law, we consider the case for which agent i pursues agent i+1 (modulo n) with the CB pursuit law. After deriving closed-loop cyclic pursuit dynamics, we demonstrate asymptotic convergence to an invariant submanifold (corresponding to each agent attaining the CB pursuit strategy), and proceed by analysis of the reduced dynamics restricted to the submanifold. For the general setting, we derive existence conditions for relative equilibria (circling and rectilinear) as well as for system trajectories which preserve the shape of the collective (up to similarity), which we refer to as pure shape equilibria. For two illustrative low-dimensional cases, we provide a more comprehensive analysis, deriving explicit trajectory solutions for the two-particle "mutual pursuit" case, and detailing the stability properties of three-particle relative equilibria and pure shape equilibria. For the three-particle case, we show that a particular choice of CB pursuit parameters gives rise to remarkable almost-periodic trajectories in the physical space. We also extend our study to consider CB pursuit in three dimensions, deriving a feedback law for executing the CB pursuit strategy, and providing a detailed analysis of the two-particle mutual pursuit case. We complete the work by considering evasive strategies to counter the motion camouflage (MC) pursuit law. After demonstrating that a stochastically steering evader is unable to thwart the MC pursuit strategy, we propose a (deterministic) feedback law for the evader and demonstrate the existence of circling equilibria for the closed-loop pursuer-evader dynamics.