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Plasma p217+tau versus NAV4694 amyloid and MK6240 tau PET across the Alzheimer's continuum
Get PDFIntroduction
We evaluated a new Simoa plasma assay for phosphorylated tau (P-tau) at aa217 enhanced by additional p-tau sites (p217+tau).
Methods
Plasma p217+tau levels were compared to 18F-NAV4694 amyloid beta (Aβ) positron emission tomography (PET) and 18F-MK6240 tau PET in 174 cognitively impaired (CI) and 223 cognitively unimpaired (CU) participants.
Results
Compared to Aβ− CU, the plasma levels of p217+tau increased 2-fold in Aβ+ CU and 3.5-fold in Aβ+ CI. In Aβ− the p217+tau levels did not differ significantly between CU and CI. P217+tau correlated with Aβ centiloids P = .67 (CI, P = .64; CU, P = .45) and tau SUVRMT P = .63 (CI, P = .69; CU, P = .34). Area under curve (AUC) for Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia versus Aβ− CU was 0.94, for AD dementia versus other dementia was 0.93, for Aβ+ versus Aβ− PET was 0.89, and for tau+ versus tau− PET was 0.89.
Discussion
Plasma p217+tau levels elevate early in the AD continuum and correlate well with Aβ and tau PET
The other side of a maritime frontier pearl-shelling in Aru, 1870-1942
Get PDFThis thesis studies pearl-shelling activity in the Aru Islands, Southeast Moluccas (Netherlands Indies) from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War II. The Aruese have traditionally searched for pearl-shell and traded with foreigners since the 1600s. Their marine procurement activities remained largely undisturbed until the second half of the 19th century. From the 1870s, Australian pearl-shellers entered Aru waters to assess the potential of its pearl-banks, intent upon expanding their pearling activities in the archipelago.
This thesis focuses on Aru which was situated at the far side of this expanding maritime frontier. Responding to Australian incursions, in the 1880s the Dutch installed their administration there, establishing their authority without consulting the Aruese. The Aruese organised resistance movements but the Dutch crushed them. The Dutch used their expanding administrative reach to regulate traditional Aruese marine rights through the pearl fishing ordinances. In creating the Ordinances, the Dutch wanted to preserve traditional pearl-shelling activities, and foster the growth of modern NI pearlshellers. The ordinance facilitated Sech Said Baadilla's activity in Aru, and later allowed the Australian pearl-sheller James Clark and his multiethnic workforce to operate from Dobo in 1905. His company, the Celebes Trading Company, operated in Aru for four decades. However, by the 1930s it was in trouble, due to repeated crises in the global pearl-shelling industry. The company's failure to modernise led to a situation from which it never recovered due to the outbreak of war.
This thesis uses Dutch colonial records and oral history materials to describe and analyse the transitions and transformations of pearl-shelling in the Aru archipelago between 1870 and 1940 and it highlights the role of foreigners, especially Australians, within the context of an expanding colonial state and a maritime resource frontier
Quantifying risk factors and potential geographic extent of African swine fever across the world
Get PDFAfrican swine fever (ASF) has spread to many countries in Africa, Europe and Asia in the past decades. However, the potential geographic extent of ASF infection is unknown. Here we combined a modeling framework with the assembled contemporary records of ASF cases and multiple covariates to predict the risk distribution of ASF at a global scale. Local spatial variations in ASF risk derived from domestic pigs is influenced strongly by livestock factors, while the risk of having ASF in wild boars is mainly associated with natural habitat covariates. The risk maps show that ASF is to be ubiquitous in many areas, with a higher risk in areas in the northern hemisphere. Nearly half of the world’s domestic pigs (1.388 billion) are in the high-risk zones. Our results provide a better understanding of the potential distribution beyond the current geographical scope of the disease
Cultural studies and critical allyship in the settler colonial academe
No full textSuccessive generations of First Nation scholars have critiqued the ongoing institutional and disciplinary complicity of Higher Education to support settler colonialism. These critiques extend to include Cultural Studies, despite the field’s inter (anti)disciplinary efforts to expose power and inequality in social relations, dominant institutions, popular culture, and everyday life. As part of the university-machine, Cultural Studies is disconnected from the inherently pedagogical experiences and knowledge of Culture and Country for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. With an emphasis on praxis, we critique three autoethnographic examples of interactions between Indigenous agents and the settler colonial academe as a call to mobilize Cultural Studies literacies as a pedagogy of critical allyship to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars. Cultural Studies as critical allyship pedagogy supports non-Indigenous agents to conduct rigorous critique of internalized and institutional settler colonial hegemony, identifying absences and erasures of Indigenous agency, autonomy, and self-determination. These gaps and silences are not for allies – or Cultural Studies – to fill; rather the project is to leverage Cultural Studies methodologies to cede epistemological space in the academe to Indigenous ways of knowing and being without intervention, assimilation, or academic critique
One-pot synthesis of Mn-doped goethite composite for enhanced supercapacitor performance and charge storage mechanism
No full textA simplistic synthesis of Mn & Fe (manganese & iron)-based composites with high surface area for energy storage application is presented here. We have successfully synthesized Mn-doped iron oxide composite through co-precipitation method. Nanorod-shaped particles with high surface area is formed with uniform distribution of Fe, Mn, & O. The nanocomposite is then used as electrodes in supercapacitor study. The obtained nanostructures have less than 100 nm particle size with surface area of 153 m2 g−1. The composite exhibits high specific capacitance of ~ 387.9 F g−1 at 2.5 A g−1 current density with corresponding specific power density of 1250 W kg−1 and energy density of ~ 146 Wh kg−1. Further the electrode materials were also demonstrated using Trasatti and Dunn’s method revealing the diffusion-controlled storage process as being dominant in the contribution towards the total capacitance for the supercapacitor. The results indicate that Mn-doped iron oxide nanorods have great potential as energy storage material
Energy-saving glasses based on sodium tungsten bronze-like (Na5W14O44) functional units: Facile synthesis, NIR-shielding performance, and formation mechanism
No full textNear-infrared (NIR)-shielding glasses for energy-saving window applications were prepared by forming sodium tungsten bronze-like (Na5W14O44) functional units in the 29SiO2–43B2O3–28NaF glass matrix. The glasses were synthesized by a facile melt-quenching process where 4–8 mol.% H2WO4 was added as the W source. The optimal glass was produced using 6 mol.% H2WO4, which had a low NIR transmission of 15.4% and a high visible light transmission of 59.8%. The possible mechanism for the formation of Na5W14O44 in glasses were discussed based on XRD, Raman, XPS, XANES and EXAFS characterization of the glass samples, the glass samples after further crystallization, and the samples produced by staged heating of the starting materials. Crystalline or amorphous Na5W14O44 formed during heating partially due to the protection by molten B2O3. Subsequently, amorphous Na5W14O44 clusters are present in the glass acting as NIR-shielding functional units. This study sheds a light on further development of non-film-based and highly efficiency energy-saving windows
Sober sitter or coconsumer? Psychedelics, online forums and preferences for interpersonal interactions
No full textContemporary clinical research into the psychotherapeutic administration of psychedelics has primarily emphasized the importance of therapeutic interpersonal interactions to assist clients prepare for and integrate the acute effects of psychedelics. Alternative therapeutic frameworks have encouraged active talk therapy between therapists and clients during the administration phase. We used data gathered from forums to investigate consumer preferences concerning interpersonal interactions during their psychedelic-occasioned experience. Google was used to locate relevant posts on the psychedelic forums The Shroomery and The DMT Nexus. We analyzed these posts using thematic analysis, in which two researchers independently categorized posts in accordance with emergent themes. These themes were then refined through iterative reflexivity. We then identified four themes pertaining to psychedelic consumer interpersonal interaction preferences: nonintrusive; boundary setting; help; and sober sitter or coconsumer. Further analysis revealed parallels between consumer preferences and clinical guidelines for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, including the emphasis of carer acceptance; minimal involvement; nondirection; hazard management and emotional stability. However, there was also disparity between consumer preferences and guidelines, specifically concerning desires for consumer agency; for psychedelic consumption alongside other consumers, and for carers who had consumed psychedelics themselves. These findings have clinical implications and thus may aid the development of future guidelines
Exploring teacher immediacy-(non)dependency in the tutored augmented reality game-assisted flipped classrooms of English for medical purposes comprehension among the Asian students
No full textRecently, the new-generation-of-game-assisted practicums have been widely utilized in college language education to reduce the teacher-student psychological distance and promote teacher immediacy. In tandem with the attempt for elevating the ubiquity of teachers' tutelage, extensive instantiation of healthcare fields through the multiplayer scenes of augmented reality games has made arrangements for student engagement and helped ease the comprehension of English for Medical Purposes. Accordingly, in an English for Medical Purposes course, this interventional study, using a parallel design, endeavored to explore the dependency of applicability of the tutored augmented reality-game-assisted flipped classrooms on teacher immediacy among 240 Asian medical undergraduates. The participants' perception of the course was debriefed as well. In so doing, augmented reality games were practiced in the circles of two randomly assigned sets convened in the practicums of the flipped English for Medical Purposes comprehension classrooms under the teachers' tutelage. The formative assessments of students' comprehension in the online teaching sessions and in the fields in the quantitative phase were followed by a focus-group interview in the qualitative phase. The findings revealed that the English teachers' immediacy fostered the students' engagement and added to the applicability of the tutored augmented reality game-assisted flipped classrooms for English for Medical Purposes comprehension skills education. It was also found that students perceived their reduced psychological distance with the English teachers in favor of enlisting supports from their peers in doing English for Medical Purposes comprehension through the tutored augmented reality game-assisted flipped classrooms. The findings could provide a basis for teachers who are interested in fostering immediacy with students in the new-generation-of-game-assisted practicums for college language education
Identifying optimal solutions between competing economic and conservation land use objectives for species that require widely distributed resources
No full textAcross the world, wildlife must coexist with humans in modified and increasingly fragmented landscapes but balancing the competing land use objectives of economic production and conservation is challenging. Multi-objective optimisation and spatial conservation prioritisation can inform land use planning but have not yet explicitly accounted for the way species access multiple resources at different locations in a landscape. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach for conservation prioritisation that accounts for the spatial distribution of different resources as well as a species' movements. This suite of tools and models identifies Pareto-optimal solutions to competing objectives of economic production on the one hand, with conserving a species’ food, drink and shelter requirements and movement corridors on the other. We demonstrate the broader functionality of these tools using a case study with competing objectives of clearing land for mining versus conservation of a vulnerable endemic species
Bidirectional mapping coupled GAN for generalized Zero-Shot learning
No full textBidirectional mapping-based generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) methods rely on the quality of synthesized features to recognize seen and unseen data. Therefore, learning a joint distribution of seen-unseen classes and preserving the distinction between seen-unseen classes is crucial for GZSL methods. However, existing methods only learn the underlying distribution of seen data, although unseen class semantics are available in the GZSL problem setting. Most methods neglect retaining seen-unseen classes distinction and use the learned distribution to recognize seen and unseen data. Consequently, they do not perform well. In this work, we utilize the available unseen class semantics alongside seen class semantics and learn joint distribution through a strong visual-semantic coupling. We propose a bidirectional mapping coupled generative adversarial network (BMCoGAN) by extending the concept of the coupled generative adversarial network into a bidirectional mapping model. We further integrate a Wasserstein generative adversarial optimization to supervise the joint distribution learning. We design a loss optimization for retaining distinctive information of seen-unseen classes in the synthesized features and reducing bias towards seen classes, which pushes synthesized seen features towards real seen features and pulls synthesized unseen features away from real seen features. We evaluate BMCoGAN on benchmark datasets and demonstrate its superior performance against contemporary methods