Self-Devotion as a Cultural Value in the Consciousness of Young Russians

The article reflects the dynamics of key values of the Russian linguocultural community. The research presents a comprehensive analysis of the data of a psycholinguistic experiment aimed at explicating the real content of the value of self-devotion marked by precedent names. Actual content modeling of the value of self-devotion was carried out with the help of semantic gestalt method and then compared with the semantic gestalt constructed in compliance with dictionary data.The research suggested that the minds of young people possess that meaning of self-devotion stands that contrasts the traditional one. According to the majority of respondents, self-devotion is not considered a moral law, moreover, a significant part of participants (25%) defines such an action as stupidity.The change in the list of precedent names that personify this value in the linguistic consciousness of a modern person was experimentally proven. It was revealed that one of the main factors determined by changes in the cultural code are history textbooks used today in the educational process. In the course of psycholinguistic text analysis of these textbooks, it was proved that they do not meet the main criteria that enable a directed transmission of cultural meanings. As a result, there is a gradual disappearance of precedent names traditional for culture, and there is also a tendency of including the values of Western culture into the content of the cognitive base of the Russian linguocultural community.

Design, Development and Applicability Evaluation of a Digital Cartographic Model for 3D Cadastre Mapping in China

Structurally describing the portrayal-related information by using a standalone Digital Cartographic Model on top of a Digital Landscape Model has been proved applicable and beneficial for 2D mapping but has not yet been applied to 3D cadastre. This study, therefore, evaluates the applicability of digital cartographic model and the corresponding visualization pipeline for 3D cadastre in the context of Chinese urban cadastre. This research starts by identifying the requirements and design features of 3D cadastre mapping through a literature review and interviews with users and cartographers. Addressing the limitations of the existing general-purpose models, this paper proposes an ad hoc 3D cadastre digital cartographic model. The main developments of the proposed model are the inclusion of 3D content modeling, the support of the compound 3D symbols, and the introduction of the semantic transformation. The proposed model is then embedded into three parts of the cadastre visualization pipeline: the symbolic rule design, graphic content creation, and scene dissemination. The empirical result of qualitative proof-of-concept user tests supports that the proposed visualization pipeline is applicable and yields promising visualization results. The digital cartographic model-based visualization pipeline is a novel 3D cadastre mapping paradigm that facilitates designing, producing, sharing, and administrating.

Online social image ranking in diversified preferences

Due to the prevalence of social media service, effective and efficient online image retrieval is in urgent need to satisfy diversified requirements of Web users. Previous studies are mainly focusing on bridging the semantic gap by well-established content modeling with semantic information and social tagging information, but they are not flexible in aggregating the diversified expectations of the online users. In this paper, we present OSIR, a solution framework to facilitate the diversified preference styles in online social media image searching by textual query inputs. First, we propose an efficient Online Multiple Kernel Ranking (OMKR) model which is constructed on multiple query dimensions and complimentary feature channels, and trained by minimizing the triplet loss on hard negative samples. By optimizing the ranking performance with multi-dimensional queries, the semantic consistency between the image ranking and textual query input is directly maximized without relying on the intermediate semantic annotation procedure. Second, we construct random walk-based preference modeling by domain-specific similarity calculation on heterogeneous social attributes. By re-ranking the rank output of OMKR based on each preference ranking model, we obtain a set of ranking lists encoding different potential aspects of user preference. Last, we propose an effective and efficient position-sensitive rank aggregation approach to aggregate multiple ranking results based on the user preference specification. Extensive experiment on two social media datasets demonstrates the advantages of our approach in both retrieval performance and user experience.

Scnn1b-Transgenic BALB/c Mice as a Model of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infections of the Cystic Fibrosis Lung

ABSTRACT The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa is responsible for much of the morbidity and mortality associated with cystic fibrosis (CF), a condition that predisposes patients to chronic lung infections. P. aeruginosa lung infections are difficult to treat because P. aeruginosa adapts to the CF lung, can develop multidrug resistance, and can form biofilms. Despite the clinical significance of P. aeruginosa, modeling P. aeruginosa infections in CF has been challenging. Here, we characterize Scnn1b-transgenic (Tg) BALB/c mice as P. aeruginosa lung infection models. Scnn1b-Tg mice overexpress the epithelial Na+ channel (ENaC) in their lungs, driving increased sodium absorption that causes lung pathology similar to CF. We intranasally infected Scnn1b-Tg mice and wild-type littermates with the laboratory P. aeruginosa strain PAO1 and CF clinical isolates and then assessed differences in bacterial clearance, cytokine responses, and histological features up to 12 days postinfection. Scnn1b-Tg mice carried higher bacterial burdens when infected with biofilm-grown rather than planktonic PAO1; Scnn1b-Tg mice also cleared infections more slowly than their wild-type littermates. Infection with PAO1 elicited significant increases in proinflammatory and Th17-linked cytokines on day 3. Scnn1b-Tg mice infected with nonmucoid early CF isolates maintained bacterial burdens and mounted immune responses similar to those of PAO1-infected Scnn1b-Tg mice. In contrast, Scnn1b-Tg mice infected with a mucoid CF isolate carried high bacterial burdens, produced significantly more interleukin 1β (IL-1β), IL-13, IL-17, IL-22, and KC, and showed severe immune cell infiltration into the bronchioles. Taken together, these results show the promise of Scnn1b-Tg mice as models of early P. aeruginosa colonization in the CF lung.