University of North Carolina at Charlotte

About: University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a education organization based out in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 8772 authors who have published 22239 publications receiving 562529 citations. The organization is also known as: UNC Charlotte & UNCC.

Invisible men and women: A status report on race as a variable in organization behavior research†

Abstract: Twenty-five years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the full integration of racial minorities in the Unites States workforce has still not been achieved. Recent demographic trends indicating that the workforce will be increasingly composed of racial minorities make this a critical issue for academics and practitioners alike. This paper reports on a review of journal research addressing issues of race in organizations. Articles published in twenty major outlets for organization behavior research between 1964 and 1989 were reviewed. Data on the quantity, types and topics of published work are presented. Results indicate that the amount of total published research is small relative to the importance of the topic, that the recent trend is for less rather than more research, that the designs and research questions have been very narrow, and that the topics covered are not representative of the domain of organization behavior. Based upon the findings, some suggestions for future research are offered.

A modified genetic algorithm for optimal control problems

Abstract: This paper studies the application of a genetic algorithm to discrete-time optimal control problems. Numerical results obtained here are compared with ones yielded by GAMS, a system for construction and solution of large and complex mathematical programming models. While GAMS appears to work well only for linear quadratic optimal control problems or problems with short horizon, the genetic algorithm applies to more general problems equally well.

Sexual dimorphism in innate immune responses to infectious organisms.

Abstract: Gender has long been known to be a contributory factor in the incidence and progression of disorders associated with immune system dysregulation. More recently, evidence has accumulated that gender may also play an important role in infectious disease susceptibility. In general, females generate more robust and potentially protective humoral and cell-mediated immune responses following antigenic challenge than their male counterparts. In contrast, males have frequently been observed to mount more aggressive and damaging inflammatory immune responses to microbial stimuli. In this article we review the evidence for sexual dimorphism in innate immune responses to infectious organisms and describe our recent studies that may provide a mechanism underlying gender-based differences in conditions such as bacterial sepsis.

Pose-Free Facial Landmark Fitting via Optimized Part Mixtures and Cascaded Deformable Shape Model

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of facial landmark localization and tracking from a single camera. We present a two-stage cascaded deformable shape model to effectively and efficiently localize facial landmarks with large head pose variations. For face detection, we propose a group sparse learning method to automatically select the most salient facial landmarks. By introducing 3D face shape model, we use procrustes analysis to achieve pose-free facial landmark initialization. For deformation, the first step uses mean-shift local search with constrained local model to rapidly approach the global optimum. The second step uses component-wise active contours to discriminatively refine the subtle shape variation. Our framework can simultaneously handle face detection, pose-free landmark localization and tracking in real time. Extensive experiments are conducted on both laboratory environmental face databases and face-in-the-wild databases. All results demonstrate that our approach has certain advantages over state-of-the-art methods in handling pose variations.

The fate of duplicated genes in a polyploid plant genome.

Abstract: SUMMARYPolyploidy is generally not tolerated in animals, but is widespread in plant genomes and may result inextensive genetic redundancy. The fate of duplicated genes is poorly understood, both functionally andevolutionarily. Soybean (Glycine max L.) has undergone two separate polyploidy events (13 and 59 millionyears ago) that have resulted in 75% of its genes being present in multiple copies. It therefore constitutesa good model to study the impact of whole-genome duplication on gene expression. Using RNA-seq, wetested the functional fate of a set of approximately 18 000 duplicated genes. Across seven tissues tested,approximately 50% of paralogs were differentially expressed and thus had undergone expression sub-functionalization. Based on gene ontology and expression data, our analysis also revealed that only asmall proportion of the duplicated genes have been neo-functionalized or non-functionalized. In addition,duplicated genes were often found in collinear blocks, and several blocks of duplicated genes wereco-regulated, suggesting some type of epigenetic or positional regulation. We also found thattranscription factors and ribosomal protein genes were differentially expressed in many tissues, suggest-ing that the main consequence of polyploidy in soybean may be at the regulatory level.Keywords: polyploidy, duplicated gene expression, sub-functionalization, Glycine max, RNA-seq, genomeevolution.INTRODUCTIONAngiosperms represent the largest group of plants, with350 000 known taxa (Van de Peer et al., 2009). They under-went diversification in the mid-Cretaceous period (i.e. 100million years ago, MYA), and, in contrast to pteridophytesand gymnosperms, maintained a high radiation rate over along period of time (Lidgard and Crane, 1988; Crane andLidgard, 1989; Crepet and Niklas, 2009). Defined by Darwinas an ‘abominable mystery’, this prominence of floweringplants on earth has been extensively studied. Recent theo-ries suggest that carpel evolution, double fertilization andflower development, as well as additional innovations suchas reduced cost of seed production and short generationtime, contributed to the explosive success of angiosperms(Stuessy, 2004; Lord and Westoby, 2011). Because manygenes involved in reproduction and flower developmentwere duplicated before the monocot/dicot radiation (Jiaoet al., 2011), whole-genome duplications (WGDs) arebelieved to be at the origin of angiosperm radiation(De Bodt et al., 2005). Polyploidy, or WGD, is a process thatrecurrently shaped eukaryotic genomes. Although, in ani-mals, this process is mainly restricted to amphibians andfish (Otto and Whitton, 2000), polyploidy has played amajor evolutionary role in plants. Complete genomeanalyses strongly support the conclusion that, in additionto lineage-specific WGDs, a triplication (c) and two WGD(q and r), respectively, occurred in eudicots and monocots(Vision, 2000; Jaillon et al., 2007; Lyons et al., 2008; Tanget al., 2010). Recent work also demonstrated that two