We investigated the relationship between teachers' emotional intelligence (EI) and self-efficacy, and tested whether this relationship was mediated by teaching performance. Participants were 467 Chinese middle school teachers (312 women; 66.8%). They completed 3 questionnaires relating to EI, self-efficacy, and teaching performance. The results showed that the total effect of EI on self-efficacy was .61, indicating that higher EI is positively correlated with a higher level of self-efficacy. This relationship was partially mediated by teaching performance. In the mediating model for teaching performance, the direct effect of EI on teachers' self-efficacy was .23 and the mediating effect of teaching performance on the relationship between EI and teachers' self-efficacy was .45. In addition, both the direct and mediating effects were invariant across gender and teaching experience. These results indicate that an increase in EI largely enhances teachers' self-efficacy only when emotional skills are successfully used to improve teachers' performance.

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), a cytokine produced by many cell types, modulates cellular and humoral immune responses. In schistosomiasis, ova in the portal circulation induce a delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH) that results in formation of hepatic granulomas (HG) which secrete MIF activity. Therefore, we hypothesized that endogenous MIF modulates immune responses in schistosomiasis. To test this hypothesis, Schistosoma japonicum-infected mice were injected with rabbit IgG or neutralizing rabbit IgG antibody to MIF 4.5-6.5 week post infection when HG form and female worms are laying eggs. Compared with controls, 6.5-7-week post-infection, antibody-treated mice had 1.7-3 times as many adult worms and half as many ova per worm pair in their livers. In contrast, antibody introduced before infection or 6-8 week post infection did not affect worm burden or fecundity. Thus, for the first time there is evidence that 4.5-6 week post-infection endogenous MIF somehow mediates reduction of adult worm burden and promotes fecundity. Splenocytes and HG cells from antibody-treated mice showed reduced intracellular expression of TNFalpha and/or IL-10. We hypothesize that endogenous MIF enhances adult worm attrition by up-regulating innate and adaptive immune responses by increasing expression of MHC-II, co-stimulatory, adhesion, receptor and cytokine molecules, and promotes fecundity by up-regulating TNFalpha expression.

No abstract

In the triangular meshes obtained in additive repair, it is a challenge to find one single hole-filling method to close all holes and make the filling patches assort with surrounding meshes well with low time complexity, which is mainly caused by the shape complexity and size difference of the various holes, especially in the fields of intelligent manufacturing, 3D measurement, and reverse engineering. Therefore, it is reasonable to adopt different algorithms to fill different types of holes. In this research, a fast hole-filling method for triangular mesh is proposed based on the hole size. First, a group of basic concepts is defined to make them uniform throughout the whole text, followed by the descriptions of hole detection and boundary cleaning. Second, three different algorithms are developed to fill the small-sized, middle-sized, and large-sized holes classified by hole size respectively, which can fill all the detected holes in a fast and proper manner. Finally, two experiments are carried out to verify the efficiency, robustness, and ability to recover the shape of our method. Compared to two state-of-the-art hole-filling methods in the first experiment, the quantitative evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed method is much faster than them with the ability to guarantee the regularity of most filling triangles. The second experiment proves that our method can produce satisfactory filling results by making the filling patches be compatible with surrounding meshes well.