Placental Heterogeneity in Stillbirth and Its Relations to Maternal Exogenous Characteristics

Introduction: Heterogeneous patterns of placental lesions in stillbirth signal important variations in placental histopathology that may be diagnostic in stillbirth. We explore placental heterogeneity and its associations with maternal characteristics (including HIV) using latent class analysis. Methods: Placental and maternal data and slides were assessed retrospectively for 122 confirmed stillbirths (gestational age ≥ 28 weeks) delivered at a major South African academic hospital between January 2016–July 2018. The slides were reviewed by 2 pathologists and classified using the Amsterdam Consensus Classification System. Latent class analyses were conducted on raw data. Results: We identify 5 latent placental classes in stillbirth based on similarity in patterns of observed diagnostic criteria and their associations with maternal characteristics. Three classes bear similarity to generalized patterns of placental injury identified previously. Our study shows that intrauterine infection was the commonest histopathological condition associated with stillbirth in our setting. Novel findings include 2 classes, distinguished by high placental RPH and maternal HIV, respectively, and the non-emergence of a class distinguished by VUE. Conclusion: The size and content of the latent classes and their similarity/dissimilarity to the more generalized patterns identified previously suggest potential new avenues for investigation and theory development concerning the role of the placenta in stillbirth and the impact of HIV.

World class from within: Aspiration, connection and brokering in the Colombo real estate market

This paper explores how the aspirational urban form of the ‘world-class city’ is produced from within the city itself. Rather than focusing on global competition between cities, the analysis considers how local actors in key industries discursively and materially produce the world-class city through their labor. The analytic of connection is introduced as central to understanding how world-class city-making projects are achieved. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo’s high-end real estate sector, the article examines how a successful broker creates and manages connections across different scales and registers. It focuses on three key areas: (1) the rhetorical connections drawn between luxury real estate and national development; (2) the connections created between wealthy foreign clients and local property owners and (3) the work of connecting disparate narratives about supply and demand for luxury housing. I highlight that against the backdrop of considerable economic and political uncertainty, connections are valuable even if they do not result in immediate profit. Offering a glimpse into the world of white-collar professionals in the luxury real estate industry, this paper underscores that world-class city-making projects are embedded in local realities even as they reflect generalized patterns of urban development.

Comprehensive analysis of lectin-glycan interactions reveals determinants of lectin specificity

Lectin-glycan interactions facilitate inter- and intracellular communication in many processes including protein trafficking, host-pathogen recognition, and tumorigenesis promotion. Specific recognition of glycans by lectins is also the basis for a wide range of applications in areas including glycobiology research, cancer screening, and antiviral therapeutics. To provide a better understanding of the determinants of lectin-glycan interaction specificity and support such applications, this study comprehensively investigates specificity-conferring features of all available lectin-glycan complex structures. Systematic characterization, comparison, and predictive modeling of a set of 221 complementary physicochemical and geometric features representing these interactions highlighted specificity-conferring features with potential mechanistic insight. Univariable comparative analyses with weighted Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests revealed strong statistical associations between binding site features and specificity that are conserved across unrelated lectin binding sites. Multivariable modeling with random forests demonstrated the utility of these features for predicting the identity of bound glycans based on generalized patterns learned from non-homologous lectins. These analyses revealed global determinants of lectin specificity, such as sialic acid glycan recognition in deep, concave binding sites enriched for positively charged residues, in contrast to high mannose glycan recognition in fairly shallow but well-defined pockets enriched for non-polar residues. Focused fine specificity analysis of hemagglutinin interactions with human-like and avian-like glycans uncovered features representing both known and novel mutations related to shifts in influenza tropism from avian to human tissues. As the approach presented here relies on co-crystallized lectin-glycan pairs for studying specificity, it is limited in its inferences by the quantity, quality, and diversity of the structural data available. Regardless, the systematic characterization of lectin binding sites presented here provides a novel approach to studying lectin specificity and is a step towards confidently predicting new lectin-glycan interactions.

Reasons for Cautious Optimism

The explosion of data collection and availability, the expansion of academia and the spread of ideas, and innovations in theory and method all suggest bright days ahead for social science. Addressing human collective challenges such as climate change, poverty, and public health depends on the advance of social science. I revisit the benefits of accounting for human bias in advancing these efforts and for the further understanding of ourselves. I embrace reforms, but as pieces of a pluralist landscape rather than strictures. Descriptive inferences of generalized patterns, causal inference, and qualitative explorations will all remain important to the advance of social knowledge.

PREDICTING BOTTOM CURRENT DEPOSITION AND EROSION ON THE OCEAN FLOOR

Three types of oceanographic data are integrated in this study to predict thermohaline geostrophic bottom current deposition and erosion on the ocean floor. These data types are, 1) high-resolution bathymetry, 2) numerical model data of bottom current shear stress and 3) model data of the distribution and amount of sediment on the ocean floor. Intervals of thermohaline geostrophic bottom current deposition and erosion can be quantified from this information, which are then be extrapolated across the ocean floor in 4.5 x 9.3 km grid-size resolution. The results of this analysis are displayed on a map that shows the distribution of zones of bottom current erosion and deposition. This map is then cross-referenced for accuracy using documented examples of mapped erosional and depositional bottom current systems, which demonstrates this study’s approach has strong predictive capabilities. The model developed herein is used to derive boundaries for depositional bottom current regimes and formulate generalized patterns that contribute to bottom current erosion and deposition, and then discuss the importance of these interpretations for resource extraction and ocean floor mapping.

Comprehensive analysis of lectin-glycan interactions reveals determinants of lectin specificity

Lectin-glycan interactions facilitate inter- and intracellular communication in many processes including protein trafficking, host-pathogen recognition, and tumorigenesis promotion. Specific recognition of glycans by lectins is also the basis for a wide range of applications in areas including glycobiology research, cancer screening, and antiviral therapeutics. To provide a better understanding of the determinants of lectin-glycan interaction specificity and support such applications, this study comprehensively investigates specificity-conferring features of all available lectin-glycan complex structures. Systematic characterization, comparison, and predictive modeling of a set of 221 complementary physicochemical and geometric features representing these interactions highlighted specificity-conferring features with potential mechanistic insight. Univariable comparative analyses with weighted Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests revealed strong statistical associations between binding site features and specificity that are conserved across unrelated lectin binding sites. Multivariable modeling with random forests demonstrated the utility of these features for predicting the identity of bound glycans based on generalized patterns learned from non-homologous lectins. These analyses revealed global determinants of lectin specificity, such as sialic acid glycan recognition in deep, concave binding sites enriched for positively charged residues, in contrast to high mannose glycan recognition in fairly shallow but well-defined pockets enriched for non-polar residues. Focused analysis of hemagglutinin interactions with human-like and avian-like glycans uncovered features representing both known and novel mutations related to shifts in influenza tropism from avian to human tissues. The presented systematic characterization of lectin binding sites provides a novel approach to studying lectin specificity and is a step towards confidently predicting new lectin-glycan interactions.

Qujing (取经) as policy mobility with Chinese characteristics: A case study of ultralow-energy building policy in China

This article introduces the concept and practice of qujing as a Chinese state-organized form of policy mobility. The term qujing originates in the journey of a Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang who brought Buddhism’s sutras from India to China in the 7th century; qujing has been appropriated by modern Chinese leaders to promote learning from the experiences of other regions. In post-reform China, qujing has become routinized within the Chinese bureaucracy as an integral step in its distinctive experimentalist governance. By bringing insights from the literature of China’s policy experimentation to situate trans-local learning, I challenge the disproportionate attention the policy mobility literature has paid to local and transnational actors in mobilizing policies under neoliberalism. Instead, I locate the origins, agency, and knowledge mutation of Chinese qujing within the multi-scalar policy experimentation protocols of China’s authoritarian regime. This article contrasts qujing with generalized patterns of policy mobility in the existing literature, thereby decentering political mobility research from more familiar western political contexts and actors. Using multi-year interviews and official documents, I trace China’s introduction of ultralow-energy passive building from Germany as a case-study to show the relationships between foreign learning ( qujing), local experimentation, and policy making in greening China’s built environment.

Detection of Computer Graphics Using Attention-Based Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network from Fused Color Components

With the development of 3D rendering techniques, people can create photorealistic computer graphics (CG) easily with the advanced software, which is of great benefit to the video game and film industries. On the other hand, the abuse of CGs has threatened the integrity and authenticity of digital images. In the last decade, several detection methods of CGs have been proposed successfully. However, existing methods cannot provide reliable detection results for CGs with the small patch size and post-processing operations. To overcome the above-mentioned limitation, we proposed an attention-based dual-branch convolutional neural network (AD-CNN) to extract robust representations from fused color components. In pre-processing, raw RGB components and their blurred version with Gaussian low-pass filter are stacked together in channel-wise as the input for the AD-CNN, which aims to help the network learn more generalized patterns. The proposed AD-CNN starts with a dual-branch structure where two branches work in parallel and have the identical shallow CNN architecture, except that the first convolutional layer in each branch has various kernel sizes to exploit low-level forensics traces in multi-scale. The output features from each branch are jointly optimized by the attention-based fusion module which can assign the asymmetric weights to different branches automatically. Finally, the fused feature is fed into the following fully-connected layers to obtain final detection results. Comparative and self-analysis experiments have demonstrated the better detection capability and robustness of the proposed detection compared with other state-of-the-art methods under various experimental settings, especially for image patch with the small size and post-processing operations.

Professional Self-Development of a Teacher of a Higher Education Institution: Interdisciplinary Aspect

This article deals with the urgent problem of teacher’s professional self-development at a higher educational institution, based on normative and acmeological aspects. In the process of achieving this goal – which is the study of the peculiarities of professional self-development in the terms of Ukrainian higher education in its cultural and historical context – the analysis of such problems, as the transformation of forms of consciousness into educational interactions; professional archetype of a teacher; the transformation of the content of professional self-development, was conducted. The given problem has practical meaning. It means that there are a number of objective factors, which influence the essence of a teacher's professional self-development, as a process, connected with the concept of lifelong education, and turn it into a component of the creation of professional identity. We came to the following conclusions: firstly, concerning the dual nature of professional and personal identity (real and imaginary, virtual), which is objectified in the cultural and educational space of the university; secondly, studying the peculiarities of the teacher's self-development,special attention should be paid to appropriate archetypes as culturally conditioned generalized patterns; thirdly, a change in the type of teacher’s professional self-development is caused by both the transformation of the character of the person’s identity and the change of archetype