Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stronger Together: How Neighborhood Groups Build up a Virtual Network during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, people spontaneously initiate support groups, while established organizations like soccer clubs set non-regular goals, both offering help. Interested in the coordination of such help and potential challenges of collaboration, we conducted a virtual ethnography of a multi-level network located in Germany. We focused on aims, activities, and technological mediation, with Activity Theory as theoretical framework. Our findings show that the organizational aim of coordinating help was successfully achieved by connecting heterogeneous actors through digitization and institutionalization. Enabled by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the network acted virtually, but was also able to integrate analog spaces of help. We identified six crucial implications regarding the use of technology and collaboration for building a successful volunteering network.
The Long Road Ahead: Ongoing Challenges in Contributing to Large OSS Organizations and What to Do

Open source communities hosted in large foundations operate in a complex socio-technical ecosystem, which includes a heterogeneous mix of projects and stakeholders. Previous work has thus far investigated the challenges faced in OSS communities from the point of view of specific stakeholders, primarily at the level of individual projects. None have yet studied the challenges faced within a large, federated open source organization. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap to identify ongoing challenges contributors face in a mature OSS organization. To do so, we surveyed 624 contributors at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and ran 11 semi-structured follow up interviews. We validated our findings through member checking with the interviewees as well as the ASF Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) committee. The contributions of this paper include: (1) an empirically-evidenced conceptual model of the 88 challenges that contributors face in a mature OSS foundation and (2) a set of 48 community-recommended strategies for alleviating these challenges. Our results show that even well-established and mature organizations still face a variety of individual and project-specific challenges and that it is difficult to design a comprehensive set of processes and guidelines to match the needs and expectations of a diverse and large federated community. Our conceptual challenges model and associated strategies to mitigate them can provide guidance to other OSS foundations and projects helping them in building better support processes and tools to create a successful, thriving community of contributors.
Exploring Email-Prompted Information Needs

Over three billion people use personal email accounts for a wide variety of communications, largely from businesses. These messages often require additional information that users need to look for outside of the email itself, such as store hours, bill details, or related news articles. We studied these "email-prompted information needs" in a pilot interview-based study, a two-week diary study, and a large-scale survey with 790 total participants, finding that Notification, Deal, and Newsletter messages were the most likely to spark a need for external information. We conclude with several designs evaluated in a concept evaluation study with 276 participants and implications for the design of personal email services to better meet users' external information needs.
Understanding Driver-Passenger Interactions in Vehicular Crowdsensing

Smart city projects collect data on urban environments to identify problems, inform policymaking, and boost citizen engagement. Typically, this data is collected by static sensors placed around the city, which is not ideal for spatiotemporal needs of certain sensing applications such as air quality monitoring. Vehicular crowdsensing is an upcoming approach that addresses this problem by utilizing vehicles' mobility to collect fine-grained city-scale data. Prior work has mainly focused on designing vehicular crowdsensing systems and related components, including incentive schemes, vehicle selection, and application-specific sensing, without understanding the motivations and challenges faced by drivers and passengers, one of the two key stakeholders of any vehicular crowdsensing solution. Our work aims to fill this gap. To understand drivers' and passengers' perspectives, we developed Turn2Earn, a generic vehicular crowdsensing system that incentivizes drivers to take specific routes for data collection. Turn2Earn system was deployed with 13 auto-rickshaw drivers for two weeks in Bangalore, India. Our drivers took 709 trips using Turn2Earn covering 79.2% of the city's grid cells. Interviews with 13 drivers and 15 passengers revealed innovative information-based strategies adopted by the drivers to convince passengers in taking alternative routes, and passengers' altruism in supporting the drivers. We uncovered novel insights, including viability of offered routes due to road closure, issues with electric vehicles, and selection bias among the drivers. We conclude with design recommendations to inform the future of vehicular crowdsensing, including engaging and incentivizing passengers, and criticality-based reward structure.
Beyond Entertainment: Unpacking Danmaku and Comments' Role of Information Sharing and Sentiment Expression in Online Crisis Videos

Online videos are playing an increasingly important role in timely information dissemination especially during public crises. Video commentary, synchronous or asynchronous, is indispensable in viewers' engagement and participation, and may in turn contribute to video with additional information and emotions. Yet, the roles of video commentary in crisis communications are largely unexplored, which we believe that an investigation not only provides timely feedback but also offers concrete guidelines for better information dissemination. In this work, we study two distinct commentary features of online videos: traditional asynchronous comments and emerging synchronous danmaku. We investigate how users utilize these two features to express their emotions and share information during a public health crisis. Through qualitative analysis and applying machine learning techniques on a large-scale danmaku and comment dataset of Chinese COVID-19-related videos, we uncover the distinctive roles of danmaku and comments in crisis communication, and propose comprehensive taxonomies for information themes and emotion categories of commentary. We also discover the unique patterns of crisis communications presented by danmaku, such as collective emotional resonance and style-based highlighting for emphasizing critical information. Our study captures the unique values and salient features of the emerging commentary interfaces, in particular danmaku, in the context of crisis videos, and further provides several design implications to enable more effective communications through online videos to engage and empower users during crises.
Collective Privacy Management Practices: A Study of Privacy Strategies and Risks in a Private Facebook Group

This paper qualitatively examines how members of a large private Facebook group view the risks of information disclosure to their privacy and the strategies they employ to navigate and manage those risks. The paper adds to an emerging interest in how privacy is managed collectively and within dynamic large groups, thus moving beyond established knowledge of privacy management on individual and small-scale levels. The work builds on semi-structured interviews with 20 members of a private Facebook group and draws on Communication Privacy Management theory. The study shows how privacy management practices are enacted at individual, intragroup, and group levels. Findings show that participants associate very high risks with sharing private information in the group, partly because it consists of a mix of known others and strangers, who are potentially geographically co-located. They adopt several strategies for managing and protecting their privacy at all three levels. The risks associated with context, time, and spatial collapse of the imagined audience are identified as important to how participants experience information disclosure in the group. The paper concludes by identifying some practical implications that serve as a call for developers to design privacy tools that support dynamic groups' privacy challenges and needs.
Guiding caregivers through disclosure: a qualitative investigation into caregivers responses to a disclosure intervention for HIV-infected children in Soweto, South Africa

Awareness of HIV status improves health outcomes in HIV infected children, yet disclosure is often delayed by hesitant caregivers. This qualitative investigation explored how 30 caregivers responded to a HIV Disclosure study conducted between 2017 and 2020 at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, Soweto, South Africa. Caregivers were assisted in disclosing to their children, aged 7-13 years. Following that, a sub-sample of caregivers were interviewed to elaborate on findings.1) Barriers to disclosure included caregivers being ill-equipped, fear of negative consequences and children considered lacking emotional or cognitive readiness. 2) Deflecting diagnosis and the need for medication motivated caregivers to disclosure. 3) Apprehension was evident during disclosure, however, overall disclosure was a positive experience with the assurance and support of the healthcare providers. These results highlight the significant role healthcare providers play in supporting caregivers through the disclosure process and how, in turn, this has a positive impact on the community as a whole.
Similarities and Differences Between Italian Early Neolithic Groups: The Role of Personal Ornaments

Abstract The Early Neolithic is an interesting period for observing the changes that took place in material culture and also in the ideology that influenced the production of personal ornaments. Objects of adornment are useful for understanding how past peoples differentiated themselves on the basis of gender, age, or group affiliation. The Early Neolithic in Italy developed throughout the entire sixth millennium cal. BC, during which the first farming communities settled in the Italian peninsula and islands, with diverse Neolithic groups related to wider-ranging cultural spheres. Early Neolithic ornaments were mainly ring bracelets, manufactured beads and perforated shells or teeth. Through their choice and the raw materials used for their production, individuals and groups emphasized their diverse identities based on shared traditions. Focusing on some of the more significant sites, this article considers similarities and differences in forms and raw materials employed for ornaments by different Early Neolithic groups and how these could have been useful attributes to emphasise identities and in particular the membership of particular social or cultural groups.
Gender wage gap across the distribution: What is the role of within- and between-firm effects?

Abstract This paper studies the role of within- and between-firm effects on the gender wage gap (GWG). Using linked employer–employee data for Turkey for 2006 and 2014, we show that the wage gap among comparable men and women is much wider within establishments than between establishments. Our distributional analysis shows a more pronounced gap among highly paid workers, consistent with the presence of a glass-ceiling effect. This effect, however, is more apparent within establishments than between establishments, and it is the former that drives the economy-wide glass ceiling that women face. We also find that between 2006 and 2014, the GWG in Turkey widened at all points in the wage distribution, and that this widening was more pronounced within establishments than between establishments.
Human 5’-tailed Mirtrons are Processed by RNaseP

Approximately a thousand microRNAs (miRNAs) are documented from human cells. A third appear to transit non-canonical pathways that typically bypass processing by Drosha, the dedicated nuclear miRNA producing enzyme. The largest class of non-canonical miRNAs are mirtrons which eschew Drosha to mature through spliceosome activity. While mirtrons are found in several configurations, the vast majority of human mirtron species are 5’-tailed. For these mirtrons, a 3’ splice site defines the 3’ end of their hairpin precursor while a “tail” of variable length separates the 5’ base of the hairpin from the nearest splice site. How this tail is removed is not understood. Here we examine sequence motifs in 5’-tailed mirtrons and interactions with RNA turnover processes to characterize biogenesis processes. Through studying the high confidence 5’-tailed mirtron, hsa-miR-5010, we identify RNaseP as necessary and sufficient for “severing” the 5’ tail of this mirtron. Further, depletion of RNaseP activity globally decreased 5’-tailed mirtron expression implicating this endoribonuclease in biogenesis of the entire class. Moreover, as 5’-tailed mirtron biogenesis appears to be connected to tRNA processing we found a strong correlation between accumulation of tRNA fragments (tRFs) and 5’-tailed mirtron abundance. This suggests that dysregulation of tRNA processing seen in cancers may also impact expression of the ∼400 5’-tailed mirtrons encoded in the human genome. SUMMARY Abundant non-canonical human miRNAs referred to as tailed mirtrons are processed by RNaseP, which “severs” tail nucleotides to yield a precursor hairpin suitable for Dicer processing. Biogenesis of these miRNAs is correlated with tRFs, which are also products of RNaseP processing.
Visual space curves before eye movements

Despite the incessant retinal disruptions that necessarily accompany eye movements, our percept of the visual world remains continuous and stable – a phenomenon referred to as spatial constancy. How the visual system seamlessly achieves spatial constancy is poorly understood despite almost four centuries worth of theorizing and experimentation (1–4). Here, I measured visual sensitivity at geometrically symmetric retinotopic locations, observing transient but marked sensitivity differences between them where none should be observed if cells that support spatial constancy indeed faithfully translate or converge across visual space (5–10). These differences, recapitulated by a novel neurobiologically inspired force-field model, reflect an overriding influence of putative visually transient error signals that curve visual space. Intermediate eccentric locations between the current and future location of gaze, likely to contain retinal disruptions are uniquely affected by curved visual space. This suggest that active visual processing at these locations is transiently turned off before an eye movement, and with the gating off of these error signals, fully turned back on after an eye-movement– a proposed novel mechanism underlying spatial constancy.
The PRO model accounts for the anterior cingulate cortex role in risky decision-making and monitoring

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been implicated in a number of functions, including performance monitoring and decision-making involving effort. The prediction of responses and outcomes (PRO) model has provided a unified account of much human and monkey ACC data involving anatomy, neurophysiology, EEG, fMRI, and behavior. We explored the computational nature of ACC with the PRO model, extending it to account specifically for both human and macaque monkey decision-making under risk, including both behavioral and neural data. We show that the PRO model can account for a number of additional effects related to outcome prediction, decision-making under risk, gambling behavior. In particular, we show that the ACC represents the variance of uncertain outcomes, suggesting a link between ACC function and mean-variance theories of decision making. The PRO model provides a unified account of a large set of data regarding the ACC.
Repetition-attenuation of auditory N1 is modulated by the phonological representations of spoken word-forms

Repeated auditory stimuli are usually found to elicit attenuated peak amplitude of the N1 component of the event related brain potential (ERP). While the repetition-attenuation of the auditory N1 has been found sensitive to some cognitive factors, less is known whether and how the representational properties of stimuli influence this physiological phenomenon. To further address this issue, we focus on the phonological representations of spoken word-forms, and hypothesise modulatory roles of two phonological features: the lexicality and its usage frequency of a word-form. To test this, we used a short-term habituation design with a factorial combination of the two features at two levels each (i.e., lexicality (real versus pseudo word-form) × frequency (high versus low frequency)). EEG was recorded from 30 native Mandarin-speaking participants while they were passively delivered with stimulations trains. Each train consisted of five presentation positions (S1 ∼ S5), on which one word-form is presented repeatedly, separated by a brief, constant interstimulus interval. At the fourth presentation position (S4), we found greater N1 attenuation in low-frequency pseudo word-forms than in low-frequency real and high-frequency pseudo word-forms, respectively. The results support our representational modulation hypothesis, and provides the first evidence that representations of different phonological features interactively modulate the N1 repetition-attenuation. The brain function that underlies the phonological effects of the representational modulation on N1 repetition-attenuation might be sensory filtering.
The cyanotoxin 2,4-DAB enhances mortality and causes behavioral and molecular dysfunctions associated with neurodegeneration in larval zebrafish

Exposure to cyanotoxins has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease. While the cyanotoxin β-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) has received much attention, cyanobacteria produce many cyanotoxic compounds, several of which have been detected in nature alongside BMAA including 2,4-diaminobutyric acid (2,4-DAB), and N-(2-aminoethyl)glycine (AEG). Thus, the question of whether DAB and AEG also cause neurotoxic effects in vivo is of great interest, as is the question of whether they interact to enhance toxicity. Here, we evaluate the toxic and neurotoxic effects of these cyanotoxins alone or in combination by measuring zebrafish larval viability and behavior after exposure. 2,4-DAB was the most potent cyanotoxin as it decreased larval viability by approximately 50% at 6 days post fertilization, while BMAA and AEG decreased viability by just 16% and 8%, respectively. Although we only observed minor neurotoxic effects on spontaneous locomotion, BMAA and AEG enhanced acoustic startle sensitivity, and they interacted in an additive manner to exert their effects. 2,4-DAB, however, only modulated the startle kinematics, an indication of motor dysfunction. To investigate the mechanisms of 2,4-DAB’s effects, we analyzed the protein profile of larval zebrafish exposed to 500μM 2,4-DAB at two time points and identified molecular signatures consistent with neurodegeneration, including disruption of metabolic pathways and downregulation of the ALS-associated genes SOD1 and UBQLN4. Together, our data demonstrate that BMAA and its isomers AEG and 2,4-DAB cause neurotoxic effects in vivo, with 2,4-DAB as the most potent of the three in the zebrafish model.
Rilmenidine mimics caloric restriction via the nischarin I1-imidazoline receptor to extend lifespan in C. elegans

Caloric restriction increases lifespan across species and has health benefits in humans. Because complying with a low-calorie diet is challenging, here we investigated pharmacological interventions mimicking the benefits of caloric restriction. Searching for compounds that elicit a similar gene expression signature to caloric restriction, we identified rilmenidine, an I1-imidazoline receptor agonist and prescription medication for the treatment of hypertension. We then show that treating C. elegans with rilmenidine at young and older ages increases lifespan. We also demonstrate that the stress-resilience, healthspan, and lifespan benefits upon rilmenidine treatment in worms are mediated by the I1-imidazoline receptor nish-1, implicating this receptor as a potential longevity target. Furthermore, we show that rilmenidine treatment increased ERK phosphorylation via NISH-1. Consistent with the shared caloric-restriction-mimicking gene signature, supplementing rilmenidine to caloric restricted C. elegans, genetic reduction of TORC1 function, or rapamycin treatment did not further increase lifespan. The rilmenidine-induced longevity required the transcription factors FOXO/DAF-16 and NRF1,2,3/SKN-1, both important for caloric restriction-mediated longevity. Furthermore, we find that autophagy, but not AMPK signaling, was needed for rilmenidine-induced longevity. Lastly, we find that treating mice with rilmenidine showed transcriptional changes in liver and kidney similar to caloric restriction. Overall, our findings reveal rilmenidine as a caloric restriction mimetic and as a novel geroprotective compound.
Whole genome sequences of Treponema pallidum subsp. endemicum isolated from Cuban patients: The non-clonal character of isolates suggests a persistent human infection rather than a single outbreak

Bejel (endemic syphilis) is a neglected non-venereal disease caused by Treponema pallidum subsp. endemicum (TEN). Although it is mostly present in hot, dry climates, a few cases have been found outside of these areas. The aim of this work was the sequencing and analysis of TEN isolates obtained from “syphilis patients” in Cuba, which is not considered an endemic area for bejel. Genomes were obtained by pool segment genome sequencing or direct sequencing methods, and the bioinformatics analysis was performed according to an established pipeline. We obtained four genomes with 100%, 81.7%, 52.6%, and 21.1% of broad coverage, respectively. The sequenced genomes revealed a non-clonal character, with nucleotide variability ranging between 0.2–10.3 nucleotide substitutions per 100 kbp among the TEN isolates. Nucleotide changes affected 27 genes, and the analysis of the completely sequenced genome also showed a recombination event between tprC and tprI, in TP0488 as well as in the intergenic region between TP0127–TP0129. Despite limitations in the quality of samples affecting broad sequencing coverage, the determined non-clonal character of the isolates suggests a persistent infection in the Cuban population rather than a single outbreak caused by imported case. Author summary The incidence of venereal syphilis has greatly increased in the last years, however endemic syphilis (bejel) which have been considered as a disease restricted to dry arid areas such as the Sahel and the Middle East, remain as a neglected disease. In Cuba, which is a tropical country, several bejel cases were unexpectedly detected few years ago in “syphilis” patients with no records of travel abroad or sex with foreign partners. In this study, we explored the whole genome sequences from four of the Cuban Treponema pallidum subsp. endemicum (TEN) isolates and the substantial genetic diversity detected among them suggests a persistent infection of TEN within the human population rather than a single outbreak of a TEN isolate introduced from an area where it is typically endemic. This finding has significant implications on this neglected and also possibly tropical disease in terms of geographical/temporal distribution, and highlights the importance of keeping in mind neglected diseases in apparently non-endemic areas.