Health and Well-Being

The goal of this chapter is to show how a sense of meaning in life acts in concert with the dimensions of religion that have been discussed so far to affect health. The discussion that follows is divided into two sections. The extensive body of research that links meaning with health and well-being is examined first. Following this, three submodels are introduced that provide further insight into how meaning in life might affect health. The first submodel brings gratitude and prayer to the foreground. The second submodel focuses on the relationships among meaning in life, proactive coping responses, and health behavior. The third submodel brings issues involving the interface between meaning in life, negative aspects of religious life (e.g., religious doubt), and health-related outcomes.

Interactions between Jews and Christians in Later Medieval Provence

This study uses an extensive body of archival evidence from Latin-Christian sources to explore economic and social interactions between Provençal Jews and Christians. Evidence discussed in section one indicates that the city’s Jewish and Christian communities interacted to a significant degree, and not just in the domain of moneylending. Data derived from a network analysis suggests that Jews were prominent in providing brokerage services. In the second section, analysis of a small sample of Jewish estate inventories indicates that the material profiles of Jewish and Christian families were very similar. In the third section, an analysis of a register of debt collection shows that Jews were involved in credit relations at a rate that was proportional to their population. Jewish moneylenders filled an economic niche by providing Christians with the liquidity to pay off structural debts generated by the political economy of rents and taxes.

The new National Atlas of Hungary – volume Society

The current volume, National Atlas of Hungary – Society, is Part 3 of the series. It presents the special world of Hungarian society and, according to the availability of data, also that of the Carpatho–Pannonian Area. By combining the tools of statistics, geography and cartography, the maps present the spatial structure accompanied by numerous graphs, photos, texts and infographics.The present volume of the National Atlas, Society, contributes to a much deeper understanding of processes and a better understanding of the relationships between phenomena through the presentation of the spatial diversity of demographic and social processes in historical perspective. This is a significant record of the period also showing the challenges that Hungarian society faces at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. This addition to the National Atlas of Hungary – with its extensive body of knowledge presented in this work – is an important document of great benefit not only togeographers but also to historians, economists, politicians, and all other interested parties.

Decolonizing Human Rights

In his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale of scholarship for social change, An-Naim proposes advancing the universality of human rights through internal discourse within Islamic and African societies and cross-cultural dialogue among human cultures. This book proposes a transformation from human rights organized around a state determined practice to one that is focused on a people-centric approach that empowers individuals to decide how human rights will be understood and integrated into their communities. Decolonizing Human Rights aims to illustrate the decisive role of human agency on the subject of change, without implying that Islamic or any other society are exceptionally disposed to politically motivated violence and consequent profound political instability.

A new unsupervised pseudo-siamese network with two filling strategies for image denoising and quality enhancement

Digital image noise may be introduced during acquisition, transmission, or processing and affects readability and image processing effectiveness. The accuracy of established image processing techniques, such as segmentation, recognition, and edge detection, is adversely impacted by noise. There exists an extensive body of work which focuses on circumventing such issues through digital image enhancement and noise reduction, but this work is limited by a number of constraints including the application of non-adaptive parameters, potential loss of edge detail information, and (with supervised approaches) a requirement for clean, labeled, training data. This paper, developed on the principle of Noise2Void, presents a new unsupervised learning approach incorporating a pseudo-siamese network. Our method enables image denoising without the need for clean images or paired noise images, instead requiring only noise images. Two independent branches of the network utilize different filling strategies, namely zero filling and adjacent pixel filling. Then, the network employs a loss function to improve the similarity of the results in the two branches. We also modify the Efficient Channel Attention module to extract more diverse features and improve performance on the basis of global average pooling. Experimental results show that compared with traditional methods, the pseudo-siamese network has a greater improvement on the ADNI dataset in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our method therefore has practical utility in cases where clean images are difficult to obtain.

CSNK2 in cancer: pathophysiology and translational applications

Protein kinase CSNK2 (CK2) is a pleiotropic serine/threonine kinase frequently dysregulated in solid and hematologic malignancies. To consolidate a wide range of biological and clinically oriented data from this unique kinase in cancer, this systematic review summarises existing knowledge from in vitro, in vivo and pre-clinical studies on CSNK2 across 24 different human cancer types. CSNK2 mRNA transcripts, protein levels and activity were found to be routinely upregulated in cancer, and commonly identified phosphotargets included AKT, STAT3, RELA, PTEN and TP53. Phenotypically, it frequently influenced evasion of apoptosis, enhancement of proliferation, cell invasion/metastasis and cell cycle control. Clinically, it held prognostic significance across 14 different cancers, and its inhibition in xenograft experiments resulted in a positive treatment response in 12. In conjunction with commentary on preliminary studies of CSNK2 inhibitors in humans, this review harmonises an extensive body of CSNK2 data in cancer and reinforces its emergence as an attractive target for cancer therapy. Continuing to investigate CSNK2 will be crucial to advancing our understanding of CSNK2 biology, and offers the promise of important new discoveries scientifically and clinically.

Trust, Workload, Outdoor Adventure Leadership, and Organizational Safety Climate

The outdoor adventure leadership (OAL) field has an extensive body of work centered on individual safety performance, but much less at the organization level of analysis and assessment of organizational safety. Safety climate is a well-established construct and when measured can be indicative of employees’ perceptions of organizational safety and predictive of safety performance. This study employed a safety climate scale and surveyed 506 employees across ten United States OAL not-for-profit organizations. Dimensions of safety as a recognized value, and leadership and management for safety typically scored the highest across organizations. The Dimensions of safety as learning oriented, and safety as integrated into operations, typically scored the lowest. Trust in the organization and OAL delivery pressure, workload, and stress emerged as important indicators of safety climate at the organizational level. Directions for future research based upon this safety climate tool are identified.

Tau Stabilizes Chromatin Compaction

An extensive body of literature suggested a possible role of the microtubule-associated protein Tau in chromatin functions and/or organization in neuronal, non-neuronal, and cancer cells. How Tau functions in these processes remains elusive. Here we report that Tau expression in breast cancer cell lines causes resistance to the anti-cancer effects of histone deacetylase inhibitors, by preventing histone deacetylase inhibitor-inducible gene expression and remodeling of chromatin structure. We identify Tau as a protein recognizing and binding to core histone when H3 and H4 are devoid of any post-translational modifications or acetylated H4 that increases the Tau’s affinity. Consistent with chromatin structure alterations in neurons found in frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Tau mutations did not prevent histone deacetylase-inhibitor-induced higher chromatin structure remodeling by suppressing Tau binding to histones. In addition, we demonstrate that the interaction between Tau and histones prevents further histone H3 post-translational modifications induced by histone deacetylase-inhibitor treatment by maintaining a more compact chromatin structure. Altogether, these results highlight a new cellular role for Tau as a chromatin reader, which opens new therapeutic avenues to exploit Tau biology in neuronal and cancer cells.

Managing African Swine Fever: Assessing the Potential of Camera Traps in Monitoring Wild Boar Occupancy Trends in Infected and Non-infected Zones, Using Spatio-Temporal Statistical Models

The recent spreading of African swine fever (ASF) over the Eurasian continent has been acknowledged as a serious economic threat for the pork industry. Consequently, an extensive body of research focuses on the epidemiology and control of ASF. Nevertheless, little information is available on the combined effect of ASF and ASF-related control measures on wild boar (Sus scrofa) population abundances. This is crucial information given the role of the remaining wild boar that act as an important reservoir of the disease. Given the high potential of camera traps as a non-invasive method for ungulate trend estimation, we assess the effectiveness of ASF control measures using a camera trap network. In this study, we focus on a major ASF outbreak in 2018–2020 in the South of Belgium. This outbreak elicited a strong management response, both in terms of fencing off a large infected zone as well as an intensive culling regime. We apply a Bayesian multi-season site-occupancy model to wild boar detection/non-detection data. Our results show that (1) occupancy rates at the onset of our monitoring period reflect the ASF infection status; (2) ASF-induced mortality and culling efforts jointly lead to decreased occupancy over time; and (3) the estimated mean total extinction rate ranges between 22.44 and 91.35%, depending on the ASF infection status. Together, these results confirm the effectiveness of ASF control measures implemented in Wallonia (Belgium), which has regained its disease-free status in December 2020, as well as the usefulness of a camera trap network to monitor these effects.

Construction of Mediated National Identity Through Sports Journalists Twitter Feed

This study analyzed how Pakistani and Indian national identity was portrayed in selected Pakistani and Indian journalists’ tweets about the 2017 International Cricket Council (ICC) champions trophy final. There is an extensive body of literature that has documented the triad between sports, media, and national identity. However, most of the sports communication literature related to mediated construction of national identity has focused on western countries. Through the lens of Elias’s habitus thesis and employing textual analysis, Pakistani and Indian journalists’ 641 tweets during the game were analyzed. Results suggest that there are potential national variations in sports journalism and the type of media platform used when it comes to mediated construction of national identity and that journalistic styles and practices across old and new media influence each other.