Abstract. Background: Identifying precursors that will aid in the discovery of individuals who may harm themselves or others has long been a focus of scholarly research. Aim: This work set out to determine if it is possible to use the legacy tokens of active shooters and notes left from individuals who completed suicide to uncover signals that foreshadow their behavior. Method: A total of 25 suicide notes and 21 legacy tokens were compared with a sample of over 20,000 student writings for a preliminary computer-assisted text analysis to determine what differences can be coded with existing computer software to better identify students who may commit self-harm or harm to others. Results: The results support that text analysis techniques with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool are effective for identifying suicidal or homicidal writings as distinct from each other and from a variety of student writings in an automated fashion. Conclusion: Findings indicate support for automated identification of writings that were associated with harm to self, harm to others, and various other student writing products. This work begins to uncover the viability or larger scale, low cost methods of automatic detection for individuals suffering from harmful ideation.
Background:
In view of many current mosquito-borne diseases there is a need for
the design of novel repellents.
Objective:
The objective of this article is to review the results of the researches carried out by
the authors in the computer-assisted design of novel mosquito repellents.
Methods:
Two methods in the computational design of repellents have been discussed: a)
Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) studies from a set of repellents structurally
related to DEET using computed mathematical descriptors, and b) Pharmacophore based
modeling for design and discovery of novel repellent compounds including virtual screening
of compound databases and synthesis of novel analogues.
Results:
Effective QSARs could be developed using mathematical structural descriptors. The
pharmacophore based method is an effective tool for the discovery of new repellent molecules.
Conclusion:
Results reviewed in this article show that both QSAR and pharmacophore based
methods can be used to design novel repellent molecules.
