The influence of family background on educational attainment in the Czech Republic is strong compared to other countries internationally and there is great variation in the composition and academic performance of students between schools. Research to date has focused primarily on this issue in reference to multi-year gymnasia. This article concentrates on variation at the primary-school level, on which there are only limited empirical data available on the distribution of students. It looks at how important the choice of primary school by parents of preschool-age children is, how that choice is realized over time, and what parental characteristics influence their choice of school. The answers to these questions are obtained from an analysis of data from a questionnaire survey conducted in 2014 amongst a representative sample of 2008 parents of preschool-age children. The authors employ a logistic regression analysis and compare data for 2014 with data obtained in 2009 in a survey of parents with children who were of compulsory school age. These analyses reveal that there is currently universal support amongst parents for the right to choose between schools. The possibility to choose puts at an advantage those children whose parents have at least upper secondary education and live in large towns, who are able to effectively obtain information on the quality of schools, the potential effect of which is to reinforce existing educational inequalities.
The cellular functions and regulation of phosphatidylinositol (PtdIns) 5-phosphate (5-P), the newest addition to the family of phosphoinositides (PIs), are still elusive. Here we have examined a plausible role of PtdIns 5-P as a signaling intermediate in acute insulin action. A wortmannin-insensitive transient increase of PtdIns 5-P mass levels that peaked at 10 min, and declined 20–30 min after insulin stimulation, was observed in both Chinese hamster ovary (CHO)-T cells stably expressing the insulin receptor and 3T3-L1 adipocytes. Similarly to insulin, found to induce a rapid disassembly of Texas-Red phalloidin-labeled actin stress fibers in CHO-T cells, microinjected PtdIns 5-P, but not other PIs, decreased the number and length of F-actin stress fibers in this cell type to a magnitude seen in response to insulin. Likewise, increases of PtdIns 5-P by ectopic expression of the PtdIns 5-P-producing enzyme PIKfyve yielded a similar effect. As with insulin, the PtdIns 5-P-induced loss of actin stress fibers was independent of PI 3-kinase activation. Furthermore, sequestration of functional PtdIns 5-P, either by ectopic expression of 3xPHD domains that bind selectively PtdIns 5-P or by microinjecting the GST-3xPHD fusion peptide, abrogated insulin-induced F-actin stress fiber disassembly in CHO-T cells. In 3T3-L1 adipocytes, microinjected PtdIns 5-P, but not other PIs, partially mimicked insulin's effect of translocating enhanced green fluorescent protein-GLUT4 to the cell surface. Conversely, insulin-induced myc-GLUT4 vesicle dynamics was arrested in the presence of coexpressed enhanced green fluorescent protein-3xPHD. Involvement of PIKfyve membrane recruitment, but not activation, and/or a decrease in PtdIns 4,5-bisphosphate levels are likely to be among the mechanisms underlying the insulin-induced PtdIns 5-P increase. Together, these results identify PtdIns 5-P as a novel key intermediate for insulin signaling in F-actin remodeling and GLUT4 translocation.
Prevenci vzniku chronických ran lze popsat jako nastroje, ktere
si kladou za cil snižit výskyt chronických ran v definovane
populaci. Prevence v oblasti chronických ran prochazi, stejně
tak jako ostatni oblasti mediciny rychlým vývojem.
Background: In its communications, the European Commission stresses the importance of vocational education and endorses apprenticeship training. Educational systems that have dual tracks of academic alongside vocational learning routes have been shown to generate better labour market outcomes for school leavers and smooth the school-to-work transition. On the other hand, dual tracked educational systems can reinforce the effect of social origin on educational performance: the differences between the achievement of students from a background characterised by low socio-economic status and students from high socio-economic status backgrounds are greater in a tracked system than in a comprehensive one. In addition to these general tendencies, the content and organisation of vocational education differ in individual countries, as do its strengths and weaknesses and impacts on the labour market prospects of young people.Purpose: This paper studies vocational education in the Czech Republic: specifically, its apprenticeship track leading directly to the labour market. It seeks to answer questions about whether the Czech apprenticeship education system provides its students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in the modern labour market, and whether it facilitates their transition from school to work. The paper also studies the impact of the high vocational specificity of the Czech education system on educational inequalities and the development of these inequalities over time.Sample: The research questions are answered using statistical data and analyses of Czech data from international surveys of adult skills: the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which studied probability samples of adults aged 16–65 years. The IALS data were collected in 1998 and included 3132 cases, and the PIAAC data were collected in 2012 and included 6102 cases.Design and methods: The IALS and PIAAC data were analysed using binary logistic regression. Descriptive statistics from PIAAC, statistical yearbooks of education and national surveys on the transition from school to work were also used to provide evidence.Results: The analyses show that in spite of its high vocational specificity, the efficiency of the Czech education system in facilitating transition to the labour market is relatively low, as are the achievement outcomes of its apprentices. This high differentiation, moreover, contributes significantly and increasingly to educational inequalities. In the light of those findings, the paper discusses features of the Czech apprenticeship education system and intended policy measures that are aiming to retain the current structure of the system and foster apprenticeship education.
BHMT transfers a methyl group from betaine (Bet) to homocysteine to form Met and dimethylglycine. Bet is obtained from the diet or by the endogenous oxidation of choline by CHDH. BHMT is expressed in rat liver and is regulated by dietary Met and choline. BHMT is also found in rat kidney, albeit in substantially lower amounts, but it is not known whether it is regulated by dietary Met or choline. Whether diet has a role in the regulation of CHDH expression has not been investigated. Rats (~50g) were fed (9 days) in 3 x 2 factorial design (n = 8) a purified diet varying in Met (0.125, 0.3 or 0.8%) and choline (0 or 0.625%). Liver and kidney BHMT and CHCH expression were assessed using enzymatic, Western blot and real-time PCR analyses. Livers were also fixed in 10% buffered formalin for histological analysis. Animals fed low Met diets had significantly lower feed efficiencies. A degree of fatty liver was observed in all rats fed a choline-devoid diet, indicating that excess Met cannot compensate for low dietary choline. Compared to rats fed the 0.3% Met and 0.625% choline diet, liver BHMT activity was 113% higher in animals fed the 0.125% Met containing 0.625% choline and was also reflected in increases in mRNA content (2.7-fold) and immunodetectable protein. Excess dietary Met with or without choline increased liver BHMT activity 19.7% to 33.3%. Kidney BHMT was refractory to dietary treatment. Liver CHDH immunodetectable protein and mRNA content were not affected by dietary Met and choline availability. This work was supported by NIDDK (DK52501).
Description of the course, complications and permanent sequelae
of tick-borne encephalitis in patients hospitalized at the
Department of Infectious Diseases of the Faculty of Medicine,
Masaryk University and University Hospital Brno. Prospective
monitoring of epidemiological, clinical and laboratory data of
107 patients diagnosed with tick- borne encephalitis (TBE) and
hospitalized between 2009 and 2012.
Schools have been closed in many countries due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, but education continues online. Little is known about how parents cope with educating their children in this unprecedented situation. Here, we present the results of a rapid survey examining the experience of Czech parents of children in Grades 1-9 (Age ~ 6-15; N = 9,810) with respect to education at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. This survey was distributed widely, but only online and parents participated voluntarily. Mainly families with an internet connection and interested in their children’s education (i.e., the majority of families with school-aged children in the Czech Republic) took part in the survey. The results show that these families tend to cope well with the current educational situation and view the overall schoolwork transferred to homes as useful. Most children spend 2-4 hours a day studying, while parents help them at least half the time. Parents mostly explain task instructions, check the work their children have done, and teach new topics. To a lesser extent, they help their children solve tasks. Teachers appear to assign tasks more often than they provide feedback and/or interact with children. Some parents face difficulties, but those are generally not severe. These include, most notably, a lack of time, issues with technologies, and inadequate teaching skills and content knowledge. Altogether, this work maps the current educational situation in a large segment of Czech families and highlights possible pitfalls to be avoided: in the Czech Republic and beyond.
We present our contribution to the SIGMORPHON 2019 Shared Task: Crosslinguality and Context in Morphology, Task 2: contextual morphological analysis and lemmatization. We submitted a modification of the UDPipe 2.0, one of best-performing systems of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies and an overall winner of the The 2018 Shared Task on Extrinsic Parser Evaluation. As our first improvement, we use the pretrained contextualized embeddings (BERT) as additional inputs to the network; secondly, we use individual morphological features as regularization; and finally, we merge the selected corpora of the same language. In the lemmatization task, our system exceeds all the submitted systems by a wide margin with lemmatization accuracy 95.78 (second best was 95.00, third 94.46). In the morphological analysis, our system placed tightly second: our morphological analysis accuracy was 93.19, the winning system's 93.23.
