bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Addition of Different Adsorbents In SA-PVA Matrix For Bacillus Subtilis Immobilization on Methylene Blue Decolorization
Authors: Rohmah A. A. , Purnomo A.S. , Asranudin
Published: April 2022

Wastewater which is not handled by a proper treatment before released in the water body, can cause damage for aquatic biota and its environment. MB is a synthetic textile dye which is toxic and difficult to degrade. Bioremediation by decolorization using microbes such as bacteria is one of the best methods for dye removal. By immobilizing Bacillus subtilis bacterium in an appropriate matrix, it could have more advantage on dye decolorization than by free cell only. The sodium alginate (SA) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) are well known as good matrix for decolorization. Besides the addition of B. subtilis in the SA-PVA matrix, the addition of adsorbents could enhance the decolorization. In this study, different adsorbents: bentonite, activated charcoal, kaolin, and corncob powder were investigated for influencing MB decolorization by immobilized B. subtilis in SA-PVA matrix. The result showed that the highest MB decolorization was reached by SA-PVA-B. subtilis with the presence of activated charcoal by approximately 88% of 100 mg/L, followed by the addition of bentonite (82%), kaolin (80%), and corncob powder (79%). The MB decolorization by SA-PVA-Activated charcoal-B. subtilis reached optimum condition at temperature 35 °C, 24 h incubation time in static condition.
The Potency of Coffea liberica to Remediate Peat Soil After Fires In The Musi-Belida Peat Hydrological Unity, Indonesia
Authors: Maryani S , Novriadhy D
Published: April 2022

If not conserved, burned peatlands will significantly affect the succession or development of populations and vegetation composition on peat. It will also be disturbed to reduce biodiversity, causing damage to the hydrological cycle on the land. The rehabilitation of land by replanting repairs on peatlands after burning. Coffea liberica is one type of plantation crop that can be grown in efforts to restore burned peatlands, which can grow and produce well on peatlands so that it has the potential to be the region’s flagship commodity. The research method used is a survey in the peat of the Musi-Belida peat hydrological unity, Indonesia. Sampling point sampling is determined with a purposive random sampling approach where the location is divided based on former fire land and bushland (natural). The incidence of fires on peatlands has an increasing influence on chemical characteristics (Ash Levels, C-Organic, CEC, PH, and exch_Al), which then supports the increase in the chemical elements of peat soil. The distance of canals/channels do not affect the chemical properties of peat soils affected by fire events.
Determinants of Sustainability: A Case of Piloting ISARD Models in Oriental Mindoro and Leyte, Philippines
Authors: Orencio P M , Vallez A G C , Bandong R J M
Published: April 2022

SEARCA, in its 10th five-year plan (10th FYP), implemented the program, Inclusive and Sustainable Agricultural and Rural Development (ISARD). A pilot project was undertaken in a specific rural community following a well-defined scheme for an agroecosystem and through the integration of four inter-related components, technical assistance, capacity building, knowledge management, and linkage and networking. After the completion in 2020, evidences of well-developed agricultural system capable of contributing to the goals of food security and poverty alleviation emerged. In its 11th FYP, SEARCA endeavors to scale out the ARD model project in the Southeast Asian region. But, how will this benefit from adopting FAO’s Sustainable Food and Agriculture (SFA)? This central question was addressed by authors in this study. Using an indicator-based assessment approach, the results revealed that the pilot ISARD project, in general, has adopted the SFA principles. It is rated as Good Sustainability, with an overall SFA index of 0.62. To further meet the aspired sustainability through agricultural interventions, the design, delivery, and implementation of ISARD components should include aspects related to facilitating access to productive resources, finance, services for basic infrastructure, protecting water resources, promoting tenure systems to access land, and enhancing nutrition-based programs for the community.
Drug-delivery nanoparticles for bone-tissue and dental applications
Authors: Higino Taisa , França Rodrigo
Published: April 2022

The use of nanoparticles as biomaterials with applications in the biomedical field is growing every day. These nanomaterials can be used as contrast imaging agents, combination therapy agents, and targeted delivery systems in medicine and dentistry. Usually, nanoparticles are found as synthetic or natural organic materials, such as hydroxyapatite, polymers, and lipids. Besides that, they are could also be inorganic, for instance, metallic or metal-oxide-based particles. These inorganic nanoparticles could additionally present magnetic properties, such as superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles. The use of nanoparticles as drug delivery agents has many advantages, for they help diminish toxicity effects in the body since the drug dose reduces significantly, increases drugs biocompatibility, and helps target drugs to specific organs. As targeted-delivery agents, one of the applications uses nanoparticles as drug delivery particles for bone-tissue to treat cancer, osteoporosis, bone diseases, and dental treatments such as periodontitis. Their application as drug delivery agents requires a good comprehension of the nanoparticle properties and composition, alongside their synthesis and drug attachment characteristics. Properties such as size, shape, core-shell designs, and magnetic characteristics can influence their behavior inside the human body and modify magnetic properties in the case of magnetic nanoparticles. Based on that, many different studies have modified the synthesis methods for these nanoparticles and developed composite systems for therapeutics delivery, adapting, and improving magnetic properties, shell-core designs, and particle size and nanosystems characteristics. This review presents the most recent studies that have been presented with different nanoparticle types and structures for bone and dental drug delivery.
Single-component gradient rules for variational quantum algorithms
Authors: Hubregtsen Thomas , Wilde Frederik , Qasim Shozab , Eisert Jens
Published: April 2022

Many near-term quantum computing algorithms are conceived as variational quantum algorithms, in which parameterized quantum circuits are optimized in a hybrid quantum–classical setup. Examples are variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum approximate optimization algorithms as well as various algorithms in the context of quantum-assisted machine learning. A common bottleneck of any such algorithm is constituted by the optimization of the variational parameters. A popular set of optimization methods work on the estimate of the gradient, obtained by means of circuit evaluations. We will refer to the way in which one can combine these circuit evaluations as gradient rules. This work provides a comprehensive picture of the family of gradient rules that vary parameters of quantum gates individually. The most prominent known members of this family are the parameter shift rule (PSR) and the finite differences method. To unite this family, we propose a generalized PSR that expresses all members of the aforementioned family as special cases, and discuss how all of these can be seen as providing access to a linear combination of exact first- and second-order derivatives. We further prove that a PSR with one non-shifted evaluation and only one shifted circuit evaluation does not exist, and introduce a novel perspective for approaching new gradient rules.
Vernacular Arabic Literature in Tunisia in the 19th through 21st Centuries
Authors: Koerber Benjamin
Published: April 2022

Although vernacular varieties of Arabic—the so-called dialects—have been used in oral performance genres for centuries, they have held a much more restricted presence in written literature, which has traditionally been regarded as the exclusive domain of classical or standard Arabic (al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥá). In contrast with the vernacular Arabic literatures of Egypt, Morocco, and the Levant, those of Tunisia have been scantly regarded by scholars. The first significant corpus of written texts in the vernacular Arabic of Tunisia emerged in the late-19th century, in Hebrew characters. This “Judeo-Arabic” literature was born of the intersecting currents of the Haskalah or Jewish “Enlightenment,” the Arab Nahḍah or “Renaissance,” and French literary culture, as well as trans-Mediterranean networks of trade and print technology. Although a significant portion of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic literature consisted of translations and adaptations from Hebrew, classical Arabic, and French, it also included many original works, especially in journalism and poetry. This vernacular literature, however, would decline under the impact of French colonialism and Zionism, before ceasing entirely by the 1960s. Meanwhile, a separate, but not entirely disconnected, series of vernacular literary experiments began to take shape in Arabic script at the beginning of the 20th century. From 1908, the satirical press emerged as the most significant medium for the publication of vernacular texts, which proliferated in response to the cultural, linguistic, and political changes brought by French colonialism. Printed folklore collections would constitute a second major venture in the writing down of vernacular Arabic, and became a means by which both French colonial administrators and Tunisian intellectuals “imagined” the Tunisian “nation.” The vernacular written in Arabic script would eventually find its way into short stories, novels, comics, cultural and political journalism, and internet writing. The expansion of vernacular writings in the 21st century corresponds to increasing economic and political liberalization, the foundation of organizations for the promotion of the vernacular, and new opportunities for publishing both in print and online.
Own-Body Perception
Authors: Cowie Dorothy
Published: April 2022

It has long been known that there are topographic maps of the body in primary sensory and motor cortices. While these maps have greater representation of sensitive body parts, the fact that we do not feel these distortions in everyday sensory experience indicates that there are also higher-level corrective processes involved in tactile perception. Beyond perceptions on the body, one’s own body is perceived as distinct from external objects, and this perception gives rise to a feeling of ownership over the body—that my body is mine or belongs to me. This arises from both bottom-up and top-down sensory signals. In the rubber-hand illusion, stroking on a fake hand induces the participant to feel that it is their own. Therefore, the sight of a body, and the synchrony of visual and tactile signals on it, are important cues to body ownership. Other forms of multisensory synchrony, including movement and interoceptive signals, also contribute. Prior expectations of the body’s posture and form constrain the extent to which these sensory signals produce feelings of ownership. Since body ownership arises from a multiplicity of signals, it is subject to significant individual differences. There is also plasticity in body representation. This is demonstrated by neural reorganization in individuals with congenital limb loss and by developmental effects. While very young infants are sensitive to the multisensory signals that drive body ownership (e.g., visuotactile synchrony), it takes substantial experience for the tactile sensations of the body to be flexibly coded in appropriate reference frames; likewise, children up to 10 years old tend to embody an appropriately oriented hand more than adults. Understanding own-body representation has important applications, including for tool use, prosthetic design, and virtual reality.
Health and Medicine in Modern China
Authors: Fu Jia-Chen
Published: April 2022

Throughout much of the modern period (late imperial through the 20th century), healing activities have been pluralistic and diverse in nature. There were fluid boundaries between curative and health-promoting activities, and those providing health services came from a variety of backgrounds and trades. The Qing state (1644–1912) adopted a paternalistic though largely hands-off approach to matters of health and medicine until social and political crises of the late 19th century. With the arrival of Protestant medical missionaries and the increasingly strong conflation of Western medicine with modernization, health and medicine in modern China became inextricably tied to the question, “what purpose should health serve?” Chinese medicine too found itself swept up in these currents of defining modernity and modernization. Health and sovereignty in modern China were intertwined in such a fashion that equated a strong, autonomous nation with healthy, disciplined bodies. Individual health behaviors were linked to the status of the nation. Within this formulation, health, especially in the form of public health and modernized medicine, was both predicated on a powerful, centralized state and served as a means for state-building. State responsibility thus included preventing disease as well as minimizing ill health. To achieve these aims, the state needed tools and mechanisms to keep track of its citizens and how they acted. It needed to build a health infrastructure that could manage the health of public spaces and citizens’ bodies. And it needed to do so in ways that were meaningfully resonant to outside observers. These goals served as a kind of through line for much of the 20th century, even as it accommodated different interpretations and degrees of success by the subsequent political regimes, the Republican government (1912–1949), and the People’s Republic of China (1949 to present).
Language Reform in 19th-Century Kerala
Authors: Ambrosone Ellen
Published: April 2022

Refashioning of the regional languages of South India occurred from the end of the 18th century throughout the 19th century and culminated, though was not subsumed, in movements of linguistic nationalism in the middle of the 20th century. The premodern literary landscape of the Malabar coast was linguistically diverse, demonstrating influence from neighboring languages, languages associated with different religious traditions, and the languages of visitors who came for trade. India’s encounter with Europe and with colonialism reshaped ideas about caste, religion, tradition, and particularly language. As European missionaries began to arrive in Kerala, they deployed print technology to produce religious tracts, grammars, and pedagogical materials that facilitated their proselytizing and civilizing interests. The British also conducted in-depth philological studies of Indian languages as a way of learning about the population and justifying colonial rule.

As agents of change, Malayalis participated in the interconnected processes of language reform, which was devoted to restyling the language to suit modern tastes. Such reform included creating new print genres in an accessible Malayalam prose, establishing printing presses, revising curricula, and creating textbooks. The discourse on the modernization of Malayalam developed around questions about the history of the language, its literary landscape, and the role of the language as a medium of instruction in schools. Having looked to Tamil and Sanskrit in the past as models for grammatical and literary production, Malayalis who were engaged in language reform in the 19th century also began to look to English as a model for literary and pedagogical innovation. Though knowledge of English became important at this time, Malayalis also argued for the importance of learning Malayalam before any other language. Such arguments tempered the zeal for other languages, fostered the spread of education, and encouraged affective attachment to the language, thereby establishing the roots of protonationalism by the turn of the century.
Plantation Economy and Slavery in the Mascarene Islands (Indian Ocean)
Authors: Allen Richard B.
Published: April 2022

The social and economic history of the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Réunion, and Rodrigues must be viewed in the context of regional and global developments including the African diaspora of slave origin and European colonialism in both the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds. Mauritius and Réunion’s transformation into plantation colonies during the 18th and early 19th centuries was a complex process shaped by the cultivation of coffee, cloves, cotton, indigo, and sugar; Anglo-French rivalry for domination in the Indian Ocean; a reliance upon domestically generated and controlled capital; the importation of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian slaves from a global catchment area that stretched from West Africa eastward to Southeast Asia; and the increasing socioeconomic importance of the local free population of color during the early 19th century.
Ideological and Technological Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic
Authors: Rucker Walter C.
Published: April 2022

Despite assumptions regarding the unidirectional flow of ideas and technologies from Europe to Atlantic Africa beginning in the 1440s, African-European interactions were far more complex and dynamic. The multilateral flow of concepts in the early Atlantic world had a precedent in the Mediterranean world. New and reintroduced concepts entering Iberia from North Africa and Arabia propelled sustained contacts between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Beginning with the Umayyad Caliphate’s conquest of Iberia until the defeat of the last Islamic stronghold in 1492, Iberian architecture, language, and science received waves of innovation from foreign sources. This constant cross-fertilization reintroduced Iberians and other Europeans—emerging from the early Middle Ages—to physics, astronomy, and geometry; navigational instruments like compasses, quadrants, and astrolabes; and seafaring technologies like lateen sails. This process of multilateral exchange and interaction set the stage for the complex engagements between Europeans and Atlantic Africans by the mid-15th century.

Beginning with the Portuguese in the 1440s, Europeans engaged with Atlantic Africans and, together, developed commercial networks, political alliances, and social connections from Senegambia to Angola. Within these regions, a matrix of exchanges occurred that shaped the course of Atlantic history. Above and beyond the Columbian Exchange of agricultural products, Atlantic Africans introduced Europeans to an array of aquatic proficiencies; techniques associated with mineral extraction, mining and metallurgy, and crop cultivation; and herblore. Instead of understanding Atlantic Africa as a recipient of foreign ideas and innovations and in a state of dependency, communities in the region were partners within the many exchange networks through the 18th century. As they absorbed, internalized, and—in some cases—Africanized European ideas and technologies, Atlantic Africans also introduced Europeans to African innovations. As vectors of Atlantic African and Atlantic creole ideas, enslaved women and men fueled a broader range of exchanges in Western Hemisphere colonies.
Energy Finance
Authors: Megginson William , Farnsworth Herber , Xu Bing (Violet)
Published: April 2022

Defined as a single industrial sector, the global production, distribution, and consumption of energy is the world’s largest in terms of annual capital investment (US$1.83 trillion in 2019, the last prepandemic year for which full data are available) and the second largest nonfinancial industry in terms of sales revenue (US$4.51 trillion). Production and consumption of more than 100 million barrels of oil occurs each day—with 70% being traded across borders. Each of the world’s 7.5 billion citizens consumes an average of 3,181 kilowatt-hours per year, although per capita energy consumption varies enormously and is much higher in rich than in poor countries.

Properly analyzing the financial economics of the global energy industry requires focusing on both the physical aspects of production and distribution—how, where, and with what type of fuel energy is produced and consumed—and the capital investment required to support each energy segment. The global energy “industry” can be broadly categorized into two main segments: (a) provision of fuels for transportation and production and (b) distribution of electricity for residential and industrial consumption. The fuels sector encompasses the production; processing; and distribution of crude oil and its refined products, mostly gasoline, kerosene (which becomes jet fuel), diesel, gas oil, and residual fuel oil. The electric power sector includes four related businesses: generation, transmission, distribution, and supply.

Two imperatives drive the ongoing transformation of the global energy industry. These are (a) meeting rising demand due to population growth and rising wealth and (b) addressing climate change through greener energy policies and massive capital investments by corporations and governments. The pathway to decarbonizing electricity production and distribution by 2050 is fairly straightforward technologically; however, doing so will require both scientific innovations (particularly regarding scalable battery storage) and sustained multitrillion dollar annual investments for the next three decades. Decarbonizing transportation is a far more difficult and expensive proposition, which will require fundamental breakthroughs in multiple technologies, coupled with unusually farsighted policy action. Extant academic research already provides useful guidance for policymakers in many areas, but far more is required to help shape the future policy agenda.
How Primary Maternal-Child Healthcare Reduces Mortality among Mothers and Children throughout the World: A Historical and Personal Reflection on Progress and Missed Opportunities
Authors: Cunningham Nicholas
Published: April 2022

In the first decades of the 21st century, despite major medical advances, women in the least developed parts of the world are dying in childbirth far more often than women in wealthier nations, and their children are far more likely to die before reaching age 5. The major reason for this is that healthcare in these areas lacks its foundation: basic primary maternal and child healthcare (MCH).

Two early examples of primary MCH care showed that the high death rates for mothers and children could be reduced substantially at low cost: David Morley’s Under-Fives Clinic in Western Nigeria, which began in the 1960s, and the Aroles’ Jamkhed Project in Maharashtra State in India, which began in the early 1970s. The lessons learned from these two early projects were also highlighted as principles at the Alma Ata International Primary Care Conference in 1978. They included:

1. Integration of basic curative care with the various aspects of promotive/preventive care, the former building the trust required for full acceptance of the less-understood aspects of the latter, such as immunizations, family planning, and exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of life.

2. Heavy reliance on well-supervised lower-level health workers (including community health workers) to reach entire target populations.

3. Reliable delivery of a limited formulary of common, low-cost medical supplies and medications.

4. Partnerships among government ministries of health, education, and finance with communities and with local, national and international non-governmental organizations, and,

5. Gradual buildup as the health system and the communities enhance their capacity to support the work, so that success builds on success.

It is past time for building primary MCH and eventually total population-based care systems everywhere. The first and biggest benefit will be in least developed societies, where the present rate of preventable mother and child deaths is unconscionable.
Technosignatures and Astrobiology
Authors: Haqq-Misra Jacob
Published: April 2022

Astrobiologists are engaged in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life in all forms, known as biosignatures, as well as specific signs of extraterrestrial technology, known as technosignatures. The search for technosignatures and biosignatures attempts to identify characteristic evidence of life on other planets that could be detected using astronomical methods. The first scientific searches for technosignatures began in the 1960s, which used radio telescopes to examine nearby star systems for evidence of narrowband transmissions used for communication. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has continued to search for anomalous radio and optical signals that would indicate intentional or unintentional extraterrestrial communication. Advances in ground- and space-based spectroscopy are also beginning to enable searches for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems such as atmospheric pollution, city lights, large-scale surface structures, and orbiting satellites. Some technosignature searches also attempt to search for nonterrestrial artifacts within the solar system on planetary bodies or in stable orbits. All of these technosignature concepts use known technology on Earth as a starting point for thinking about technology that could be plausible and detectable in extraterrestrial systems.

Technology is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of life on Earth, so the search for technosignatures also employs methods from futures studies to explore numerous trajectories for extensions of known technology. The range of possibilities considered by technosignature science can include any known or plausible technology that could be remotely detected and would not violate any known physical laws. Megastructures are examples of theoretical large-scale planetary engineering or astroengineering projects that could be detectable in exoplanetary systems through infrared excesses or gravitational effects. Many other technosignatures remain possible, even if they do not draw upon Earth projections, but most astrobiological study of technosignatures focuses on predictions that could be tested with current or near-future missions. The positive discovery of extraterrestrial technology could be of great significance to humanity, but technosignature searches that yield negative results still provide value by placing qualitative upper limits on the prevalence of certain types of extraterrestrial technology.
Emotions and International Relations
Authors: Koschut Simon
Published: April 2022

The growth of research on emotion in international relations (IR) has produced a significant body of literature. This body of literature has raised a number of interesting questions, debates, and theoretical positions regarding the agentic properties of international actors and how they are embedded in international structures. Emotions have long been viewed in IR as self-evident and irrational by-products of cognitive processes and have, until recently, remained largely implicit and undertheorized. The first wave of research lamented the discipline’s neglect and marginalization of emotions in mainstream IR theories and concepts. The second wave has turned to specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research within specific issue areas, from diplomacy, security, war, and ethnic conflict to transnational actors, institutions, governance, and conflict management. The literature on this topic is so extensive that many even speak of an “emotional turn.” Its intellectual roots stem from various disciplines, such as psychology, neuroscience, sociology, history, and cultural studies, and this diversity is reflected in ongoing challenges of how to study emotions and their political effects in IR. These challenges relate to a number of ontological and epistemological questions, including how to conceptualize emotions, how to capture emotions methodologically, and how to move from the individual to the collective level of analysis. Whatever divergent claims are made by these scholars, there is by now a firm consensus in the discipline that emotions matter for international and global politics.
Lexical Representations in Language Processing
Authors: Libben Gary
Published: April 2022

Words are the backbone of language activity. An average 20-year-old native speaker of English will have a vocabulary of about 42,000 words. These words are connected with one another within the larger network of lexical knowledge that is termed the mental lexicon. The metaphor of a mental lexicon has played a central role in the development of theories of language and mind and has provided an intellectual meeting ground for psychologists, neurolinguists, and psycholinguists. Research on the mental lexicon has shown that lexical knowledge is not static. New words are acquired throughout the life span, creating very large increases in the richness of connectivity within the lexical system and changing the system as a whole. Because most people in the world speak more than one language, the default mental lexicon may be a multilingual one. Such a mental lexicon differs substantially from a lexicon of an individual language and would lead to the creation of new integrated lexical systems due to the pressure on the system to organize and access lexical knowledge in a homogenous manner. The mental lexicon contains both word knowledge and morphological knowledge. There is also evidence that it contains multiword strings such as idioms and lexical bundles. This speaks in support of a nonrestrictive “big tent” view of units of representation within the mental lexicon. Changes in research on lexical representations in language processing have emphasized lexical action and the role of learning. Although the metaphor of words as distinct representations within a lexical store has served to advance knowledge, it is more likely that words are best seen as networks of activity that are formed and affected by experience and learning throughout the life span.
Peculiarities of Romanian Word-Formation
Authors: Grossmann Maria
Published: April 2022

Romanian has features which distinguish it from other Romance languages. These can be attributed to its geographical location on the periphery of the Romance area, and to its having evolved independently and through contact with different languages. Until the early decades of the 19th century, loans and calques based on Slav(on)ic, Hungarian, Turkish, and Greek models influenced Romanian in several respects, including its word-formation patterns. Subsequent enrichment by means of numerous loans and calques from French, Italian, and (Neo-)Latin has been an important force in the re-Romanization and modernization of Romanian. In recent decades English word-formation models have also exercised a strong influence. The wide range of etymological sources and their historical stratification have meant that Romanian has a much richer inventory of affixes and allomorphs than other Romance languages. The possibility of combining bases and affixes entering Romanian from different sources at different periods and related to different registers has been exploited to create nonce formations with ironic connotations and greater expressivity. Of all Romance languages, Romanian is certainly the most interesting for the study of borrowing of affixes and of word-formation patterns.

The most important characteristics distinguishing Romanian from other Romance languages are: the limited productivity of the V-N compounding pattern; the formation of compound numerals; the high number of prefixes, suffixes, and their allomorphs; the presence of a complex system of morphophonological alternations in suffixation; the many gender-marking suffixes; and the systematic and prevalent recourse to -re suffixation and to conversion of the supine to form action nouns, and to adjective conversion to form adverbs.
Community Resilience
Authors: Sousa Cindy , Moss Tamarah
Published: April 2022

Community resilience describes the dynamic, ongoing process of coping and recovery in the face of collective stressors and trauma. Social and monetary capital, technological expertise, and strong physical and organizational infrastructure all undergird strong systematic responses to massive hardships. Other factors that underlie community resilience, such as shared philosophies; patterns and cultures of survival and meaning-making; emotional qualities such as optimism and trust; and norms around cooperation and interdependence, are more ethereal. Our world faces continual onslaughts to collective well-being. Thus, notions and practice models around community resilience are increasingly urgent to develop, with implications for macro practice across multiple methods - including community organization, policy practice, and management/administration.
Mental Health Policy Overview
Authors: Rine Christine M.
Published: April 2022

Mental health practice is inextricably linked to how this concept has been understood in a historical context from which policies and systems of care develop. How mental health is perceived has shaped policy, as much as policy has influenced how mental health has been defined and subsequently treated. Early frameworks evolved, furthering the multidisciplinary nature of policies and services highlighting social and environmental contributions. Holistic approaches that appreciate social determinants are a comparatively new way to understand and advance mental health policy that underlies access to insurance, programs, and services based on qualifications and eligibility. A chronological and historical overview highlights interconnectedness and provides context to the development of mental health policies, initiatives, and systems of care. Content specific to roles of the social work profession should be included.
Hagen, Gerd
Authors: Johannesdottir Helga , Seltzer Michael
Published: April 2022

Gerd Anna Dorothea Hagen (1928–2007) was an eminent social worker, educator, innovator, administrator, and campaigner for children’s rights in Norway. She worked tirelessly her entire professional life pioneering, developing, and promoting educational programs for child protection and social work professionals. Her creativity, enthusiasm, and leadership greatly contributed to establishing Norway’s reputation as a champion of children’s rights and well-being.
Kumarappa, Jagadisan Mohandas
Authors: Sinha Ruchi , Nair-Shaikh Roshni , Raghavan Vijay
Published: April 2022

Jagdisan Mohandas Kumarappa (1886–1957) was an erudite scholar and a passionate social reformer. He championed the cause of social work education and criminology as the director of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the first institution to impart social work education in Asia. He was also a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament. Kumarappa’s contribution to social work and criminology in India is immense.
Decoding multilevel relationships with the human tissue-cell-molecule network
Authors: Hou Siyu , Zhang Peng , Yang Kuo , Wang Lan , Ma Changzheng , Li Yanda , Li Shao
Published: April 2022

Understanding the biological functions of molecules in specific human tissues or cell types is crucial for gaining insights into human physiology and disease. To address this issue, it is essential to systematically uncover associations among multilevel elements consisting of disease phenotypes, tissues, cell types and molecules, which could pose a challenge because of their heterogeneity and incompleteness. To address this challenge, we describe a new methodological framework, called Graph Local InfoMax (GLIM), based on a human multilevel network (HMLN) that we established by introducing multiple tissues and cell types on top of molecular networks. GLIM can systematically mine the potential relationships between multilevel elements by embedding the features of the HMLN through contrastive learning. Our simulation results demonstrated that GLIM consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in disease gene prediction. Moreover, GLIM was also successfully used to infer cell markers and rewire intercellular and molecular interactions in the context of specific tissues or diseases. As a typical case, the tissue-cell-molecule network underlying gastritis and gastric cancer was first uncovered by GLIM, providing systematic insights into the mechanism underlying the occurrence and development of gastric cancer. Overall, our constructed methodological framework has the potential to systematically uncover complex disease mechanisms and mine high-quality relationships among phenotypical, tissue, cellular and molecular elements.
Deciphering clonal dynamics and metastatic routines in a rare patient of synchronous triple-primary tumors and multiple metastases with MPTevol
Authors: Chen Qingjian , Wu Qi-Nian , Rong Yu-Ming , Wang Shixiang , Zuo Zhixiang , Bai Long , Zhang Bei , Yuan Shuqiang , Zhao Qi
Published: April 2022

Multiple primary tumor (MPT) is a special and rare cancer type, defined as more than two primary tumors presenting at the diagnosis in a single patient. The molecular characteristics and tumorigenesis of MPT remain unclear due to insufficient approaches. Here, we present MPTevol, a practical computational framework for comprehensively exploring the MPT from multiregion sequencing (MRS) experiments. To verify the utility of MPTevol, we performed whole-exome MRS for 33 samples of a rare patient with triple-primary tumors and three metastatic sites and systematically investigated clonal dynamics and metastatic routines. MPTevol assists in comparing genomic profiles across samples, detecting clonal evolutionary history and metastatic routines and quantifying the metastatic history. All triple-primary tumors were independent origins and their genomic characteristics were consistent with corresponding sporadic tumors, strongly supporting their independent tumorigenesis. We further showed two independent early monoclonal seeding events for the metastases in the ovary and uterus. We revealed that two ovarian metastases were disseminated from the same subclone of the primary tumor through undergoing whole-genome doubling processes, suggesting metastases-to-metastases seeding occurred when tumors had similar microenvironments. Surprisingly, according to the metastasis timing model of MPTevol, we found that primary tumors of about 0.058–0.124 cm diameter have been disseminating to distant organs, which is much earlier than conventional clinical views. We developed MPT-specialized analysis framework MPTevol and demonstrated its utility in explicitly resolving clonal evolutionary history and metastatic seeding routines with a rare MPT case. MPTevol is implemented in R and is available at https://github.com/qingjian1991/MPTevol under the GPL v3 license.
VisuStatR: visualizing motility and morphology statistics on images in R
Authors: Harmel Christoph , Sid Ahmed Samy , Koch Robin , Tünnermann Jana , Distler Tania , Imle Andrea , Giorgetti Luca , Bahn Emanuel , Fackler Oliver T , Graw Frederik
Published: April 2022

Motivation

Live-cell microscopy has become an essential tool for analyzing dynamic processes in various biological applications. Thereby, high-throughput and automated tracking analyses allow the simultaneous evaluation of large numbers of objects. However, to critically assess the influence of individual objects on calculated summary statistics, and to detect heterogeneous dynamics or possible artifacts, such as misclassified or -tracked objects, a direct mapping of gained statistical information onto the actual image data would be necessary.

Results

We present VisuStatR as a platform independent software package that allows the direct visualization of time-resolved summary statistics of morphological characteristics or motility dynamics onto raw images. The software contains several display modes to compare user-defined summary statistics and the underlying image data in various levels of detail.

Availability and implementation

VisuStatR is a free and open-source R-package, containing a user-friendly graphical-user interface and is available via GitHub at https://github.com/grrchrr/VisuStatR/ under the MIT+ license.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Continuous chromatin state feature annotation of the human epigenome
Authors: Daneshpajouh Habib , Chen Bowen , Shokraneh Neda , Masoumi Shohre , Wiese Kay C , Libbrecht Maxwell W
Published: April 2022

Motivation

Segmentation and genome annotation (SAGA) algorithms are widely used to understand genome activity and gene regulation. These methods take as input a set of sequencing-based assays of epigenomic activity, such as ChIP-seq measurements of histone modification and transcription factor binding. They output an annotation of the genome that assigns a chromatin state label to each genomic position. Existing SAGA methods have several limitations caused by the discrete annotation framework: such annotations cannot easily represent varying strengths of genomic elements, and they cannot easily represent combinatorial elements that simultaneously exhibit multiple types of activity. To remedy these limitations, we propose an annotation strategy that instead outputs a vector of chromatin state features at each position rather than a single discrete label. Continuous modeling is common in other fields, such as in topic modeling of text documents. We propose a method, epigenome-ssm-nonneg, that uses a non-negative state space model to efficiently annotate the genome with chromatin state features. We also propose several measures of the quality of a chromatin state feature annotation and we compare the performance of several alternative methods according to these quality measures.

Results

We show that chromatin state features from epigenome-ssm-nonneg are more useful for several downstream applications than both continuous and discrete alternatives, including their ability to identify expressed genes and enhancers. Therefore, we expect that these continuous chromatin state features will be valuable reference annotations to be used in visualization and downstream analysis.

Availability and implementation

Source code for epigenome-ssm is available at https://github.com/habibdanesh/epigenome-ssm and Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6507585).

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Reshoring by small firms: dual sourcing strategies and local subcontracting in value chains
Authors: Canello Jacopo , Buciuni Giulio , Gereffi Gary
Published: April 2022

This article assesses how the reshoring of manufacturing activities by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) affects the performances of co-located subcontracting networks and the reconfiguration of global value chains (GVCs). We utilize quantitative microdata of Italian MSEs operating in the clothing and footwear industries during the 2008–2015 period. Empirically MSE reshoring does not have a significant impact on domestic subcontractors’ birth rates and survival chances, whereas it is positively associated with their productivity growth. Most MSEs in our sample adopt a dual sourcing strategy, expanding their global production networks while preserving their local supply base. Local and global production networks are not two alternative paradigms of industrial organization; they can be complementary and mutually reinforce each other.
Can ketogenic dietary interventions slow disease progression in ADPKD: what we know and what we don't
Authors: Ong Albert C M , Torra Roser
Published: April 2022

Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is the most common inherited kidney disease leading to kidney failure. To date, there is no cure for the disease although there is one approved disease-modifying therapy: tolvaptan. In this context, a common question that ADPKD patients ask in clinical practice is whether there is anything they can do to slow their disease by modifying their diet or lifestyle. Recent evidence from experimental PKD models has shown the potential benefits of caloric restriction, high water intake and especially ketogenic diets in preserving kidney function. Whether these benefits are translatable to humans remains unknown. In this issue of CKJ, Strubl et al. report results of a self-enrolled survey of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) patients who have self-administered a ketogenic diet [1]. These results provide interesting insights into the tolerability, potential benefits and harms of such an intervention that could inform a future clinical trial.
Reperfusion therapy for ST-elevation myocardial infarction complicated by cardiogenic shock: the European Society of Cardiology EurObservational programme acute cardiovascular care-European association of PCI ST-elevation myocardial infarction registry
Authors: Zeymer Uwe , Ludman Peter , Danchin Nicolas , Kala Petr , Laroche Cécile , Gale Chris P , Maggioni Aldo P , Siabani Soraya , Sadeghi Masoumeh , Wafa Ahmed , Bartus Stanislaw , Weidinger Franz
Published: April 2022

Aims

To determine the current state of the use of reperfusion and adjunctive therapies and in-hospital outcomes in European Society of Cardiology (ESC) member and affiliated countries for patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) complicated by cardiogenic shock (CS).

Methods and results

ESC EurObservational Research Programme prospective international cohort study of admissions with STEMI within 24 h of symptom onset (196 centres; 26 ESC member and 3 affiliated countries). Of 11 462 patients enrolled, 448 (3.9%) had CS. Patients with compared to patients without CS, less frequently received primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) (65.5% vs. 72.2%) and fibrinolysis (15.9% vs. 19.0), and more often had no reperfusion therapy (19.0% vs. 8.5%). Mechanical support devices (intraaortic ballon pump 11.2%, extracoporeal membrane oxygenation 0.7%, other 1.1%) were used infrequently in CS. Bleeding definition academic research consortium 2–5 bleeding complications (10.1% vs. 3.0%, P < 0.01) and stroke (4.2% vs. 0.9%, P < 0.01) occurred more frequently in patients with CS. In-hospital mortality was 10-fold higher (35.5% vs. 3.1%) in patients with CS. Mortality in patients with CS in the groups with PCI, fibrinolysis, and no reperfusion therapy were 27.4%, 36.6%, and 62.4%, respectively.

Conclusion

In this multi-national registry, patients with STEMI complicated by CS less frequently receive reperfusion therapy than patients with STEMI without CS. Early mortality in patients with CS not treated with primary PCI is very high. Therefore, strategies to improve clinical outcome in STEMI with CS are needed.