The formation of placenta can be viewed as a controlled process of inflammation or cancer development in which cell proliferation, invasion, and immune surveillance or evasion are promoted in a time- and space-specific manner. This suggests that the functions of prostasin are mainly active in pathophysiological conditions, more so than those in basic or normal physiological conditions. The uniqueness of the prostasin serine protease is its membrane anchorage via a glycosylphosphatidylinositol moiety. This anchorage exposes the entire prostasin molecule to the outside while still being immobilized on the cell membrane and gives prostasin a better chance to be used as a biomarker or drug target. As presented in placenta development, the equilibrium between growth and differentiation dictates healthy and disease states.This book provides readers with an integrated knowledge on serine protease prostasin, starting with its discovery, protein isolation, cDNA, and gene cloning, to its functions in physiology and pathophysiology, and to its application in the development of therapeutics. This is the first-of-its-kind book that covers the history, present state of knowledge, and future perspectives of the prototypic glycosylphosphatidylinositol-anchored epithelial extracellular serine protease prostasin, which is a key player in the regulation and maintenance of the extracellular fluid homeostasis. The chapters encapsulate all that has been learned about prostasin in the technical sophistication, but more importantly, also highlight a critical analysis on the problems with the current state of research and outline the challenges for the future.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems, ICVS 2013, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 16-18, 2013. Proceedings. The 16 revised papers presented with 20 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on image and video capture; visual attention and object detection; self-localization and pose estimation; motion and tracking; 3D reconstruction; features, learning and validation.

Are you a computer scientist working on image analysis? Are you a biologist seeking tools to process the microscopy data from image-based experiments? Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis provides a comprehensive and in-depth discussion of modern computer vision techniques, in particular deep learning, for microscopy image analysis that will advance your efforts.Progress in imaging techniques has enabled the acquisition of large volumes of microscopy data and made it possible to conduct large-scale, image-based experiments for biomedical discovery. The main challenge and bottleneck in such experiments is the conversion of "big visual data" into interpretable information.Visual analysis of large-scale microscopy data is a daunting task. Computer vision has the potential to automate this task. One key advantage is that computers perform analysis more reproducibly and less subjectively than human annotators. Moreover, high-throughput microscopy calls for effective and efficient techniques as there are not enough human resources to advance science by manual annotation.This book articulates the strong need for biologists and computer vision experts to collaborate to overcome the limits of human visual perception, and devotes a chapter each to the major steps in analyzing microscopy images, such as detection and segmentation, classification, tracking, and event detection.

This book uses detailed qualitative method to explore the implementation of task-based learning and teaching in an Elementary School English learning classroom in Taiwan. This paper examined the process of task implementation by analyzing the data from intensive classroom observations, on-going interviews with the teacher, in-depth interviews with the students and their reflective journals. This study identified the issues that were not addressed in previous studies. Previous studies have tried to show the effectiveness of task-based learning and teaching. The overall results of the present study have shown the implementations of task-based learning have shown to be challenging for both the teacher and students involved; however students enjoyed working on the tasks at different levels and the difficulties that were raised were able to be adjusted over a period of time with the exception of one. The results suggested that Taiwanese Elementary Schools are unique contexts in which careful considerations should be taken when using the task-based learning approach. Suggestions were also made for the implementation of task-based learning in an Elementary School context.

Mei Mei Chen has a story to tell: A story of a Chinese woman's unique journey; a tale of love and tragedy, of betrayal and redemption, of a journey where hope still counts, despite all of life's drawbacks. April was a university professor in Shanghai, and her husband, David, the president of a law firm. Together they had an adorable, two-year old son. Their life seemed in order until she decided to go abroad to pursue her ambition. Circumstances brought her to America. On the campus of the University of New Hampshire, she met Jason, who was adventurous and filled with a deep longing for the ocean. Two lonely people turned to each other for comfort and fell in love. Torn between passion and obligation, sacrifice and desire, April had a choice to make. What steps would she take that would reel her heart with ache and change her life in ways she had never expected? In a New Hampshire setting, the story unfolds like a kaleidoscope and paints a vivid and compelling picture of April's life that stretched from her hometown, Shanghai, throughout Germany to several cities of United States, with backdrops of her extraordinary multicultural background.