julilili42/papers huggingface dataset:
Peripheral nerve injury elicits microstructural and neurochemical changes in the striatum and substantia nigra of a DYT-TOR1A mouse model with dystonia-like movements
2023-02-28

The relationship between genotype and phenotype in DYT-TOR1A dystonia as well as the associated motor circuit alterations are still insufficiently understood. DYT-TOR1A dystonia has a remarkably reduced penetrance of 20-30%, which has led to the second-hit hypothesis emphasizing an important role of extragenetic factors in the symptomatogenesis of TOR1A mutation carriers. To analyze whether recovery from a peripheral nerve injury can trigger a dystonic phenotype in asymptomatic hΔGAG3 mice, which overexpress human mutated torsinA, a sciatic nerve crush was applied. An observer-based scoring system as well as an unbiased deep-learning based characterization of the phenotype showed that recovery from a sciatic nerve crush leads to significantly more dystonia-like movements in hΔGAG3 animals compared to wildtype control animals, which persisted over the entire monitored period of 12 weeks. In the basal ganglia, the analysis of medium spiny neurons revealed a significantly reduced number of dendrites, dendrite length and number of spines in the naïve and nerve-crushed hΔGAG3 mice compared to both wildtype control groups indicative of an endophenotypical trait. The volume of striatal calretinin<sup>+</sup> interneurons showed alterations in hΔGAG3 mice compared to the wt groups. Nerve-injury related changes were found for striatal ChAT<sup>+</sup>, parvalbumin<sup>+</sup> and nNOS<sup>+</sup> interneurons in both genotypes. The dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra remained unchanged in number across all groups, however, the cell volume was significantly increased in nerve-crushed hΔGAG3 mice compared to naïve hΔGAG3 mice and wildtype littermates. Moreover, in vivo microdialysis showed an increase of dopamine and its metabolites in the striatum comparing nerve-crushed hΔGAG3 mice to all other groups. The induction of a dystonia-like phenotype in genetically predisposed DYT-TOR1A mice highlights the importance of extragenetic factors in the symptomatogenesis of DYT-TOR1A dystonia. Our experimental approach allowed us to dissect microstructural and neurochemical abnormalities in the basal ganglia, which either reflected a genetic predisposition or endophenotype in DYT-TOR1A mice or a correlate of the induced dystonic phenotype. In particular, neurochemical and morphological changes of the nigrostriatal dopaminergic system were correlated with symptomatogenesis.
Masticatory Efficiency in Orthodontic Patients with Craniofacial Disorder
2023-02-28

This study evaluates the masticatory efficiency in patients with craniofacial disorders (CD) compared to controls (C). A total of 119 participants (7–21 years), divided into CD group (n = 42, mean age 13.45 ± 5.2 years) and C group (n = 77, mean age 14.3 ± 3.27 years) under an orthodontic treatment were included. Masticatory efficiency was assessed using a standard food model test. The masticated food was examined according to its number of particles (n) and area (mm2), wherein a higher number of particles alongside a smaller area was an indication of better masticatory efficiency. Additionally, the influence of cleft formation, chewing side, dentition stage, age and sex were evaluated. Patients with CD chewed the standardized food in fewer particles (nCD = 61.76 vs. nC = 84.58), with a significantly higher amount of area than the controls (ACD = 192.91 mm2 vs. AC = 146.84 mm2; p = 0.04). In conclusion, patients with CD showed a significantly decreased mastication efficiency compared to healthy patients. Factors such as stage of cleft formation, chewing side, dentition stage and age showed an influence on masticatory efficiency, whereas no gender effect on the masticatory efficiency of CD patients was found.
Mixed Methyl/Chlorido Yttrium(III) Complexes Supported by a Neutral Tridentate N-Donor Ligand
2023-02-28

Trimethylyttrium, supported by the neutral tridentate ligand Me3TACN (1,4,7-trimethyl-1,4,7-triazacyclononane), is readily synthesized from (Me3TACN)YCl3 (via salt metathesis with MeLi in THF) or [YMe3]n (via Me3TACN-donor addition in toluene). Such discrete complex (Me3TACN)YMe3 reacts with trimethylchlorosilane according to a silane elimination protocol, affording well-defined mixed methyl/chlorido complexes of the composition [(Me3TACN)YMe3–xClx] (x = 1, 2, 3). All complexes were characterized by X-ray diffraction, homo- and heteronuclear NMR (especially 89Y) and FTIR spectroscopies, and elemental analysis. The reaction of heteroleptic complex [(Me3TACN)YMe2Cl] with dibenzyl ketone was investigated.
On the Requirements of Non-linear Dynamic Latent Class SEM: A Simulation Study with Varying Numbers of Subjects and Time Points
2023-02-28

Although small sample sizes represent an important issue, few studies investigated the requirements in dynamic latent variable model frameworks (e.g., dynamic structural equation modeling, DSEM; dynamic latent class analysis, DLCA). We conduct a small sample performance study of Bayesian estimation for the non-linear dynamic latent class structural equation model which generalizes DSEM and DLCA to include time-dependent latent class transitions. We simulate data using a two-level (non-linear) dynamic latent class model with a varying number of subjects (N=10,25,50,75) and time points (T = 10, 25, 50) which are in our main focus among other simulation conditions. The results show that at least a sample size of N≥50 with T≥25 is required to ensure good estimates. Using diffuse priors on the between level, especially for the (co-)variance parameters and the factor loadings should be avoided.
A Friend in Need May Not Be a Friend Indeed: Anti-Coronavirus Aid and China’s Soft Power in Europe
2023-02-28

Is foreign aid an effective soft power tool to bolster the international image of donor states? This article explores this question in the context of China's humanitarian assistance to Europe amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Anti-coronavirus aid generated affinity for Beijing in some receiver countries while backfired in others. Borrowing insights from social psychology, this study presents an explanation for this heterogeneous effect. It argues that beneficiaries' initial views of China predispose Beijing's image to a confirmation bias, leading the perceptions of pandemic aid intent to be aligned with pre-existing assessments. Specifically, receiver states with predominantly favorable views of China tend to appreciate the transfer of resources as an act of goodwill. However, recipient countries which lean towards a negative belief of the PRC are inclined to interpret the assistance as a faulty mask diplomacy to manipulate narratives and to expand geopolitical influence. The theory suggests that foreign aid cannot alter donors' global standing, but rather, it merely reinforces their established images.
Relationship of urban heat with building density and green spaces - a remote sensing-based study across Vietnam’s metropolitan areas
2023-02-28

Urban heat island effects are an increasing challenge for metropolitan areas, especially in regions where climate change increases the frequency of extreme temperatures. The consequences for human health are understood and must be addressed by urban planning. Although many studies currently exist regarding relationships of adaptation measures and urban heat amongst individual single cities, there is little general understanding on how urban development impacts temperature at large scales. In this study we analyze the correlation between urban heat and two indicators of urban morphology: the green spaces and the density of buildings. We hypothesize that the relation between building density, urban green space and urban surface temperature can be quantified openly available techniques of Earth observation. To grant an objective and consistent analysis over the entire country of Vietnam, we use information from different high-resolution imaging satellites. The computation of Pearson correlations across 58 Vietnamese districts confirms the hypothesis, indicating a negative impact of urban green space (-0.217), a positive impact of building density (+0.392) and an even stronger relationship with both indicators combined (+0.435). The findings are discussed with data of three research projects involving the cities of Hồ Chí Minh, Đà Nẵng, and Huế, and interpreted regarding regional differences and implications for urban planning.
L1-CAM in Mucinous Ovarian Carcinomas and Borderline Tumors
2023-02-28

Mucinous ovarian carcinoma (MOC) is a rare histotype of primary ovarian carcinoma. Frequent pathogenic molecular alterations include mutations in KRAS , TP53 , and overexpression of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, but without having prognostic relevance. As L1-CAM (cell adhesion molecule) has previously shown prognostic relevance in other epithelial tumors of the female genital tract, we analyzed whether L1-CAM expression affected MOC prognosis. In addition, we investigated L1-CAM expression in mucinous borderline tumors (MBOTs) with and without adjacent MOC to identify its potential role in the pathogenesis of MOC. We examined a well-characterized collective of 39 MOCs by immunohistochemistry and compared their expression with clinicopathologic data. L1-CAM positivity was defined as any (even single-cell) positivity. Furthermore, we compared the L1-CAM expression in 20 MBOT regions adjacent to a MOC with that of 15 pure MBOTs. L1-CAM expression in MOC was significantly associated with recurrence, independent of tumor stage. Overall, 7/20 positive cases recurred versus 0/19 L1-CAM-negative cases ( P =0.032), showing a significant difference in time to progression. Furthermore, the presence of at least 1 defined molecular alteration (L1-CAM, aberrant p53, or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2) was found more frequently in the MBOT regions adjacent to a MOC (14/20) than in pure MBOTs (3/15) ( P =0.024). Expression of the tumor marker L1-CAM is frequent (51%) in MOC and is associated with tumor recurrence. The lack of L1-CAM may serve to characterize cases with a low risk of recurrence. Furthermore, the presence of specific molecular alterations in MBOTs is associated with adjacent carcinomas and may define potential pathways in tumor progression.
Structural influences on synaptic plasticity: the role of presynaptic connectivity in the emergence of E/I co-tuning
2023-02-28

Cortical neurons are versatile and efficient coding units that develop strong preferences for specific stimulus characteristics. The sharpness of tuning and coding efficiency is hypothesized to be controlled by delicately balanced excitation and inhibition. These observations suggest a need for detailed co-tuning of excitatory and inhibitory populations. Theoretical studies have demonstrated that a combination of plasticity rules can lead to the emergence of excitation/inhibition (E/I) cotuning in neurons driven by independent, low-noise signals. However, cortical signals are typically noisy and originate from highly recurrent networks, generating correlations in the inputs. This raises questions about the ability of plasticity mechanisms to self-organize co-tuned connectivity in neurons receiving noisy, correlated inputs. Here, we study the emergence of input selectivity and weight co-tuning in a neuron receiving input from a recurrent network via plastic feedforward connections. We demonstrate that while strong noise levels destroy the emergence of co-tuning in the readout neuron, introducing specific structures in the non-plastic pre-synaptic connectivity can re-establish it by generating a favourable correlation structure in the population activity. We further show that structured recurrent connectivity can impact the statistics in fully plastic recurrent networks, driving the formation of co-tuning in neurons that do not receive direct input from other areas. Our findings indicate that the network dynamics created by simple, biologically plausible structural connectivity patterns can enhance the ability of synaptic plasticity to learn input-output relationships in higher brain areas.
Preface
2023-02-28

It was both through interest and by chance that I found myself researching Amazon. I am fascinated by the world of workers, who, despite the unequal structures of capitalism, retain their humility, strength and agency. Agency, essentially the ability to act, allows us to imagine possibilities for change and to pursue these, historically and contemporarily. But as we are always bound to a specific moment in time and place, I have been eager to combine my interest with an essential development in our world today: technology, and more specifically the platform economy. These transnational corporations, such as Amazon, Google, Airbnb and Uber, which instrumentalize the Internet to mediate what they may not directly own, intrigue me. While these may not (yet) employ, relatively speaking, the largest amount of global workforces, they continue to grow in power and capital, equivalent to national economies, and contribute to the unequal distribution of wealth globally. I found myself increasingly absorbed into the orbits of Amazon, its exponential growth and what it has come to symbolize. It was Amazon's former CEO, after all, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans in our planet's history, who joined the summer 2021 ten-minute Blue Origin flight to the edges of outer space to experience zero gravity. In the press conference he later stated, "I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this" (Goodkind, 2021; Lopatto, 2021).
Cog in the Machine: Working the Amazon Circulation Line
2023-02-28

Warehouse workers of Amazon's e-commerce platform occupy a complex role: they are manual workers reminiscent of those inside factory walls in the industrial era, now transported into the technological conditions of the 21st century. Whereas factories produce, Amazon circulates. The organization of these warehouses reflects Taylorist techniques of scientific management. These monitor and control every step of the labor process to ensure a docile and (algorithmically) disciplined workforce to keep up with massive expansions and ever-increasing demand. In the process, this location-based traditional time-wage platform systematically alienates workers across the dimensions of their laboring and being. As one worker puts it, they do not just become "part of the machine, [they] are the machine". To dive into the walls of the warehouse, where the division of labor and organization of work(ers) is similar across the globe, I abstract the larger material context. I return to this in the next chapter to shed light on some relative differences in the working conditions that play a role in the agency of labor.
“Artificial Artificial Intelligence”: Gigging on Amazon Mechanical Turk
2023-02-28

As a second-generation platform, MTurk exemplifies how capitalism continues to evolve. While all platforms assume, regardless of their nature, the digital dimension of the Internet to mediate, web-based platforms additionally instrumentalize this infrastructure to organize and mediate all the capital–labor relations. In stark contrast to warehouse workers, MTurk workers are organized on a web-based platform to complete piecework, which is increasingly normalized and reproduced beyond the platform economy. They share in that regard the nature of the work with the larger gig economy, which I return to in Chapter 10. As "technology has the potential to be leveraged by capital to capture and alienate labour power in quite novel ways" (Bergvall-Kareborn and Howcroft, 2014: 221), I now investigate how MTurk systematically alienates workers. These labor atomistically without ever encountering either capital that employs them or other workers on MTurk's Application Programming Interface (API).
Contextualizing Amazon’s Growing Empire
2023-02-28

Amazon spreads its roots across the platform economy, becoming foundational to it and making it increasingly difficult not to encounter Amazon in one way or another while using the Internet. Essentially, it constitutes an example "of a corporation thriving under the current organization of capitalism which, in absence of regulatory frameworks, favours market concentration and dominance" (Brevini, 2021: 65). I trace in this chapter Amazon's development within the larger platform economy from its establishment in the 1990s to the monopoly it has grown into today, as it has organically created platforms across all three generations. I focus especially on its e-commerce and digital labor platform, as these constitute the focus of my investigation of the world of workers. Amazon is increasingly regarded as a trendsetter for other platforms and industries in the global political economy looking to Amazonify the way they organize themselves and their workforces (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020; Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020). The repercussions and implications of this may very well extend beyond the platform economy.
Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy
2023-02-28

Drawing on interviews with Amazon workers and original empirical data, this book explores how different working conditions estrange and alienate workers, and how, despite these, workers find ways to organize and express their agency. This is an important analysis of work on the digital shop floor for the scholars of platform economy.
How to Grasp Agency: The Power Resources Approach
2023-02-28

If we were solely to study the relations of alienation of workers, we would risk reproducing a dehumanized understanding of capitalism and its trajectory – at most accounting for only its internal interacting contradictory relations. It comes as no surprise that Adam Smith and Frederick Taylor dismiss the agency of workers, the former describing those laboring simple tasks as "stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" (Smith, 1776: n.p.), the latter arguing that it "would be possible to train an intelligent-gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any [hu]man can be" (Taylor, 1911: n.p.). Such disempowered depictions of workers deny them all consciousness and agency, immobilize them and strip them of their emancipatory potential. In contrast, Gramsci underlines that
Alienation across Amazon and the Platform Economy
2023-02-28

When looking at the two Amazon platforms, it appears that the platform economy may contain some peculiarities, but ultimately (re)produces current capitalist trends towards algorithmic management of labor processes, hypertaylorization of work, fragmentation of the workforce and precarization of the labor market. The Amazon warehouses illustrate, on the one hand, the historical continuation of traditional time-wage laboring, in which the workforce is assembled in the same physical space within the platform economy, sharing similarities to other platforms such as Facebook and Google. The case of MTurk, on the other hand, sheds light on a different historical continuation, namely of piecework adopted by capital into the new dimension of the digital. While even time-wage laboring platforms such as Facebook and Google are known to contract labor and depend on ghost work of entities such as MTurk, the MTurk case is meant, first and foremost, to give insights into the significance of laboring remotely through the web and also of piecework. The gig economy is founded precisely on the latter, constituting an essential part of the platform economy. This chapter compares the two Amazon workforces first in terms of their alienation, before, in the next chapter, looking at their agency. Rather than presenting the platform economy dichotomously as consisting of either location-based time-wage labor or web-based piece-wage labor, this chapter contextualizes the cases in the larger platform economy. It, therefore, also includes location-based gig platforms like Uber.
“I Am Not a Robot”: (Trans)national Labor Organization at the Warehouses
2023-02-28

Analyzing how Amazon warehouse workers are alienated explains in part labor's (dis)organization but risks presenting a deterministic portrayal of a compliant and submissive manual workforce that Smith and Taylor portrayed. While some warehouse workers may identify with Amazon, others may be politicized, recognizing their class position and interests, to translate these ultimately, but not necessarily, into industrial action (Apicella, 2016, 2021). Both general capitalist conditions and relative conditions to the worker and labor process continuously form and reform their class consciousness, subjectivities and solidarity. Amazon warehouse workers are distributed across the globe and have their own labor histories and different relative conditions which may spark a formation or further development of class consciousness.
Introduction
2023-02-28

It is becoming more and more difficult to imagine our daily lives without digital platforms. To order something, we check Amazon and its reviews; to search online, we Google; to go somewhere, we Uber; and we Netflix and chill. We rely on Facebook or its WhatsApp and Instagram for our social relations, while we browse TikTok for content – entertaining at times, political at others. But our contact with these platforms may not always be so obvious. We could just be using a website that is a client of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or stumble across some data that Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers contributed to. We could even be one of these very workers. Indeed, it takes a substantial effort to avoid these platforms, as they have come to form an intrinsic part of our social fabric and vocabulary. Relatively speaking, our degree of contact with one or more of these platforms is of course not devoid of privileges, class, racialized and gendered relations, and questions of access that are not uniform across our world. Generally speaking, the presence of platforms in our lives has only been magnified and accelerated by COVID-19, as the Internet plays a growing role in the mediation of our social relations, labor relations and, more generally, our daily lives. In the process, the societal, political and economic powers of platforms have become increasingly apparent in recent years; meanwhile these platforms have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth that has not been shared equally.
Conclusion
2023-02-28

This book has in essence been about the ability to act and struggle in the hope of bringing about change in a system designed in the interests of the few and at the cost of the many. Workers in the platform economy constitute one of countless contemporary examples that shed light on the complexity of agency within our current capitalist moment, as they face hostile material conditions that aim to restrain and impede their labor organization. As platforms continue to grow in economic, political, social and technological power, which has become even clearer in light of COVID-19, it is crucial to delve into the exploitative social relations between capital and labor at the heart of the platform economy. I avoid fetishistic understandings that paint technology as devoid of all materiality and humanity, and deterministic understandings that paint workers as devoid of all subjectivity and agency, which normalize and eternalize capitalism. I see this as crucial in order to understand current developments and inequalities not as inevitable and preordained, thus opening up the possibility of conceptualizing change and transformation.