Ina Charlotta Werninghaus, Daniëla Maria Hinke, Kirankumar Katta
et al.
Abstract The immunogenicity of DNA vaccines can be improved by designing plasmids that encode secreted vaccine fusion proteins that (i) target antigen-presenting cells and (ii) display bivalent antigen. We extended this principle to a combinatorial and simultaneous delivery of 2 influenza virus antigens, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Using distinct dimerization motifs prevented mixing of the two antigens in the endoplasmic reticulum of transfected cells, maintaining antigen-presenting cell targeting and bivalency of each. Such a combinatorial DNA vaccine induced B and T cell responses against hemagglutinin and neuraminidase in mice at levels comparable to single-antigen vaccines, and increased protection against homologous influenza virus. In addition, vaccinated mice showed enhanced resistance to challenge with heterologous H1N1 and H5N1 viruses compared with both single-antigen and, importantly, conventional inactivated virus vaccines. This combinatorial DNA vaccine technology can be expanded to more influenza antigens as well as other pathogens, and therefore aid in the development of more potent and broadly reactive DNA vaccines.
Benedikte Emilie Vindstad, Tora Skeidsvoll Solheim, Josefine Ståhl-Kornerup
et al.
Abstract Purpose The aim of the study was to compare [18F]-FACBC positron emission tomography (PET)-based radiotherapy (RT) volumes to magnetic resonance (MR)-based volumes and investigate the potential impact of including [18F]-FACBC PET in RT treatment planning for gliomas. Methods MR- and PET-defined gross tumor volumes (GTVs) were independently contoured on pre-operative [18F]-FACBC PET/MR images in 24 patients with primary or recurrent low- or high-grade glioma. MR GTVs were defined from regions of contrast-enhancement on T1-weighted (ce-T1) sequences. For non-enhancing tumors or non-enhancing tumor components, regions of FLAIR hyperintensity were also included. PET-based GTVs were delineated using a tumor-to-background ratio (TBR) threshold of 2. GTVs were expanded by an isotropic margin to form clinical target volumes (CTVs). Volumetric analysis was performed using size comparisons, Dice coefficients (DC), overlap coefficients (OC) and Hausdorff distances (HD). Results PET GTVs were overall significantly smaller than MR GTVs, with median values of 14.8 ccm (6.5–26.7 ccm) and 28.5 ccm (17.2–62.7 ccm), respectively (p = 0.011). No significant volume difference was found between PET and MR volumes when MR volumes were based on ce-T1 only, but PET-based GTVs and CTVs were significantly smaller than MR-based GTVs and CTVs when the latter included FLAIR hyperintensity (p < 0.01). Similarity metrics showed a high degree of concordance between PET and MR volumes in cases where MR volumes were based on ce-T1 only, particularly for CTVs (DC: 0.88 (0.82–0.94), OC: 0.98 (0.96–0.99), HD: 0.86 cm (0.7–1.4 cm)). In comparison, for cases including FLAIR hyperintensity, MR CTVs had a high overlap with PET CTVs (OC: 0.99 (0.96–0.99)), but otherwise significantly lower degree of concordance (DC: 0.66 (0.46–0.81), p < 0.01, HD: 2.65 cm (2.22–3.85 cm), p < 0.001). Conclusion [18F]-FACBC PET underestimates tumor extension compared to FLAIR in contrast negative tumors and tumors containing non-enhancing components, indicating reduced sensitivity to low-grade tumor tissue and microscopic tumor infiltration. Inclusion of [18F]-FACBC PET as supplement to MR in RT planning for glioma could however help identify regions of highly malignant tumor, to facilitate target volume reduction and dose escalation strategies.
Medical physics. Medical radiology. Nuclear medicine, Neoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
Welfare and social work aim for social justice and self-determination, and the work is sensitive to both its institutional context and to the worker-client relationship. In this article, we re-analyse and compare two sets of collected data (Oltedal, 2000; Olsen, 2022). The data consists of institutional talks between frontline workers and clients in a Norwegian welfare-to-work-service context; the social services (Sosialkontoret) in 1992, and an integrated labour- and welfare service (NAV) in 2015.The institutional framework of the two services shares many similarities, including the overall policy goal of securing people’s financial livelihood, as well as labour market inclusion. We investigate the following question: How is moral and control dealt with in institutional welfare conversations in Norway in both 1992 and 2015, related to clients’ financial and unemployment problems? The aim of the study is to explore changes in institutional talk by identifying and discussing contextual and relational-dependent similarities and differences.
The employment control aspect is more visible in 2015 data through social workers’ emphasis on a step-by-step approach wherein measures are reframed, while social workers in 1992 are more inclined to leave it up to clients themselves to make work-life connections. While the financial control aspect is more visible in 1992 through social workers’ emphasis on the client’s moral responsibility, this is less dominant in 2015, in which social workers are acting more neutral and descriptive. The institutional discourse has changed. In 1992, the framing of the talk between frontline workers and client has a stronger moral focus than in 2015. This is due to the animator footing (Goffman, 1981), where workers bring the context and the societal perspectives regarding norms for social welfare recipients into the discussion. In 2015, the principal footing (Goffman, 1981), where the possibility for the frontline worker to voice their own judgement is more visible and the framing of the talk is more relational-dependent. Changes can also be traced back to differences in welfare policy, where the financial issue is more in focus in 1992, while welfare-to-work is more on the frontline workers agenda in 2015.
Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly adopted for programming work. Prior work shows that while LLMs accelerate task completion for professional programmers, beginning programmers struggle to prompt models effectively. However, prompting is just half of the code generation process -- when code is generated, it must be read, evaluated, and integrated (or rejected). How accessible are these tasks for beginning programmers? This paper measures how well beginners comprehend LLM-generated code and explores the challenges students face in judging code correctness. We compare how well students understand natural language descriptions of functions and LLM-generated implementations, studying 32 CS1 students on 160 task instances. Our results show a low per-task success rate of 32.5\%, with indiscriminate struggles across demographic populations. Key challenges include barriers for non-native English speakers, unfamiliarity with Python syntax, and automation bias. Our findings highlight the barrier that code comprehension presents to beginning programmers seeking to write code with LLMs.
Denne studien undersøkjer barnehagelærarars forteljingar om språkarbeid med fleirspråklege barn i barnehagen. Målet med studien var å få innsikt i barnehagelærars oppfatningar som dei byggjer praksisen med fleirspråklege barn i barnehagen på. Fire fokusgruppeintervju med totalt 20 barnehagelærarar blei gjennomførte. Den narrative analysen identifiserte fire sentrale tolkingsrepertoar for barnehagelæraranes oppfatningar av fleirspråkleg praksis: det ressursprega, det kompensatoriske, det monospråklege og det profesjonelle avmaktsrepertoaret. Tolkingsrepertoara kom til syne i alle fire intervjua, og dette tyder på eit mønster i oppfatningane. Tolkingsrepertoara var ikkje gjensidig utelukkande, til dømes kunne barnehagelærar både gi uttrykk for å oppfatte fleirspråklegheit som ressurs og samtidig kjenne avmakt i si eiga rolle. Likeins blei norskspråkleg utvikling trekt fram som målsetting for barnehagens språkarbeid samtidig som deltakarane fortalde om spontane transspråkingsaktivitetar. Dette tyder på ein variert og kompleks språkpraksis bygd på både formell og erfaringsbasert kompetanse og personlege oppfatningar. Funna gir innblikk i korleis barnehagelærarar forstår sin eigen og barnas posisjon i ein fleirspråkleg barnehagekontekst og har implikasjonar for utvikling av ein ressursbasert fleirspråkleg pedagogisk praksis.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT
Resource and Deficiency: Teachers’ Views on Complex Multilingual Practices in Early Childhood Education and Care
This study explores teachers’ experiences of multilingual practices in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The purpose was to gain insight into the underlying assumptions that shape ECEC teachers’ multilingual practices. Data were collected through four focus group interviews with 20 teachers. The analysis of the ECEC teachers’ narratives identified four emerging interpretative repertoires: resource-based, compensatory, monolingual, and feelings of professional powerlessness. All four interpretative repertoires appeared in all the interviews, which suggests a pattern of views. The interpretative repertoires were not mutually exclusive. One participant could, for instance, explicitly view multilingualism as a resource while simultaneously expressing feelings of powerlessness regarding how to practice multilingual didactics. Similarly, monolingual Norwegian development was identified as the objective of planned activities while teachers described spontaneous translingual activities. These findings indicate varied and complex linguistic practices built on formal and experience-based competencies and personal beliefs and provide insight into ECEC teachers’ understandings of their own and the children’s positions within a complex multilingual ECEC context. The results have implications for further research- based development of multilingual practices.
With increasing energy prices, low income households are known to forego or minimize the use of electricity to save on energy costs. If a household is on a prepaid electricity program, it can be automatically and immediately disconnected from service if there is no balance in its prepaid account. Such households need to actively ration the amount of energy they use by deciding which appliances to use and for how long. We present a tool that helps households extend the availability of their critical appliances by limiting the use of discretionary ones, and prevent disconnections. The proposed method is based on a linear optimization problem that only uses average power demand as an input and can be solved to optimality using a simple greedy approach. We compare the model with two mixed-integer linear programming models that require more detailed demand forecasts and optimization solvers for implementation. In a numerical case study based on real household data, we assess the performance of the different models under different accuracy and granularity of demand forecasts. Our results show that our proposed linear model is much simpler to implement, while providing similar performance under realistic circumstances.
The Covid-19 pandemic and energy, climate, and demographic crises have shown how cities are vulnerable to these impacts and how the access to green and blue spaces has become highly relevant to people. One strategy that we can observe is the strong focus on the resilience discourse, meaning implementing more green and blue spaces in urban areas, such as at previous brownfield quarters. However, social justice implications of urban greening have been overlooked for a long time. The implementation of strategies to improve the quality and availability of the green and blue infrastructures may indeed have negative outcomes as far as housing accessibility is concerned by trigging gentrification processes. Issues related to environmental justice and socio-spatial justice are increasing in contemporary cities and call for a better understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities. This thematic issue includes eleven articles with different methodologies, with examples from Europe and North America as well as different lenses of green gentrification. Some articles focus more on the question of costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of various infrastructural options for urban greening. Others, instead, discuss how the strategic urban planning tools and policy processes take into account distributional consequences, with specific attention on participatory processes.
Yngvild Arnesen, Kjersti R. Lillevoll, Børge Mathiassen
Abstract Background and Objective To improve quality, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) are expected to quantify families' views on healthcare with user satisfaction measures. As little is known about what influences satisfaction in CAMHS, this study aimed to examine predictors of adolescents' and parents' user satisfaction. Methods Data from 231 adolescents and 495 parents in treatment at an outpatient clinic who returned a user satisfaction measure, the Experience of Service Questionnaire (ESQ), was analyzed. Registry data on background, clinical and service characteristics were predictors for the ESQ factors general satisfaction, satisfaction with care and satisfaction with environment. Results In regression models, satisfaction with care for adolescents (r2 = .12) was significant and was predicted by low parent‐self‐reported mental health burden and low clinician‐rated overall symptom burden at intake. For parents, regression models for general satisfaction (r2 = .07), satisfaction with care (r2 = .06) and satisfaction with environment (r2 = .08) were significant. Parents general satisfaction was predicted by higher levels of hyperactivity, less family stress and longer travelling distances to the service. Satisfaction with care for parents was predicted by higher levels of hyperactivity at intake and longer travelling distances. Satisfaction with environment for parents was more likely if the adolescents was a boy, with low levels of family stress and longer travelling distances. Conclusion Predictors for adolescent and parent user satisfaction in CAMHS differ. Hence, to improve quality CAMHS should enhance focus on collaborative practice with parents, and person‐centred care for adolescents with moderate to severe mental health illness. Patient or Public Contribution Representatives from the hospitals' youth panel and the non‐governmental organization called The Change Factory have been consulted regarding study design and results.
This study compares the National Cybersecurity Strategies (NCSSs) of publicly available documents of ten nations across Europe (United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Estonia, Spain, and Norway), Asia-Pacific (Singapore and Australia), and the American region (the United States of America and Canada). The study observed that there is not a unified understanding of the term "Cybersecurity"; however, a common trajectory of the NCSSs shows that the fight against cybercrime is a joint effort among various stakeholders, hence the need for strong international cooperation. Using a comparative structure and an NCSS framework, the research finds similarities in protecting critical assets, commitment to research and development, and improved national and international collaboration. The study finds that the lack of a unified underlying cybersecurity framework leads to a disparity in the structure and contents of the strategies. The strengths and weaknesses of the NCSSs from the research can benefit countries planning to develop or update their cybersecurity strategies. The study gives recommendations that strategy developers can consider when developing an NCSS.
Zahra Kolagar, Anna Katharina Leschanowsky, Birgit Popp
Privacy policies play a vital role in safeguarding user privacy as legal jurisdictions worldwide emphasize the need for transparent data processing. While the suitability of privacy policies to enhance transparency has been critically discussed, employing conversational AI systems presents unique challenges in informing users effectively. In this position paper, we propose a dynamic workflow for transforming privacy policies into privacy question-and-answer (Q&A) pairs to make privacy policies easily accessible through conversational AI. Thereby, we facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration among legal experts and conversation designers, while also considering the utilization of large language models' generative capabilities and addressing associated challenges. Our proposed workflow underscores continuous improvement and monitoring throughout the construction of privacy Q&As, advocating for comprehensive review and refinement through an experts-in-the-loop approach.
Susan E. Smith, Nina Sivertsen, Lauren Lines
et al.
Objectives: : Vaccine refusal is increasing in Australia and is a major concern in high- and middle-income countries. There is evidence to suggest that some parents, even those who elect to immunise, may be vaccine hesitant with some manipulating the schedule by excluding or delaying some vaccines. The aim of this review was to gain an understanding of factors that influence vaccine decision-making in pregnant women and parents of children. Design: : An integrative review approach was used to produce an analysis of existing literature on vaccine decision-making in pregnancy and parents. As the broadest of review methods, an integrative review can include a range of experimental and non-experimental research, thereby ensuring the inclusion of data from multiple perspectives. Data Sources: : Online databases were searched for research related to vaccine decision-making in pregnant women and parents. Original and review articles were sought that were published in English between 2015 and 2021. Reviewed articles included qualitative and quantitative studies and systematic reviews. No mixed methods papers were located or excluded from this review. Review methods: : The review method was an integrative review informed by Coughlan. Results: : Papers from thirteen predominantly high- and middle-income countries were selected for this review. A total of 31 articles fit the inclusion/exclusion criteria, including qualitative, quantitative and review articles. Three main themes were identified including the role of healthcare professionals, vaccine safety concerns and alternative influences. Alternative influences included: social media, friends and family, religion, conspiracy theories and salutogenic parenting. Findings suggest that high levels of anxiety are involved in vaccine decision-making with parents seeking information from multiple sources including healthcare professionals, friends and family and social media. Conclusions: : Pregnancy is an ideal time to provide education on both pregnancy and childhood vaccinations. However, some parents reported dissatisfaction in their therapeutic relationships with healthcare professionals. As a result, parents can resort to their own information seeking, in the main via social media which has been linked to vaccine refusal. Additionally, some healthcare professionals report feeling inadequately prepared for the role of immunisation promotion and provision. Parental information seeking from non-traditional sources has been shown to result in the acquisition of misinformation, exposure to conspiracy theories, the inevitable loss of vaccine confidence and subsequent vaccine refusal.
Anne-France de Bengy, Johanna Decorps, Lisa S. Martin
et al.
Many changes characterize skin aging, and the resulting dysfunctions still constitute a real challenge for our society. The aim of this study was to compare the skin aging of two rat strains, Wistar and Brown Norway (BN), considered as “poorly aging” and “healthy aging” models, respectively, and to assess the effect of alpha-lipoic acid (LPA), especially on skin microcirculation. To this purpose, various skin characteristics were studied at 6, 12, and 24 months and compared to the results of LPA treatment performed at 12 or 24 months. Skin aging occurred in both strains, but we showed an early occurrence of different age-related disorders in the Wistar strain compared to BN strain, especially regarding weight gain, glycemia dysregulation, basal skin perfusion, endothelial function, and skin resistance to low pressure. LPA treatment tended to improve skin resistance to low pressure in BN but not in Wistar despite the improvement of basal skin perfusion, endothelial function, and skin sensory sensitivity. Overall, this study confirmed the healthier aging of BN compared to Wistar strain and the positive effect of LPA on both general state and skin microcirculation.
Geistligheten i Norge deltok hovedsakelig som pådrivere i de historiske trolldomsprosessene på 1600-tallet. Historikere har tradisjonelt tolket denne deltagelsen som et uttrykk for den moralske ensrettingskampanjen og innføringen av den lærde demonologien i samfunnelitens tankegods. Basert på denne forståelsen har geistlighetens deltagelse i trolldomsprosessene blitt sett på som et uttrykk for statens styrkede posisjon og inngripen i lokalsamfunnene. De siste tiårene har internasjonal forskning vist at det finnes et nyanseringspotensial hva gjelder geistlighetens deltagelse i prosessene, hvor den lokale konteksten framheves i større grad. Denne artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i internasjonal forskning og viser hvordan prester, eksemplifisert ved sogneprest Hans Pedersen Bang i Vardø prestegjeld, kunne være både pådrivere og ha en praksis som var normativt avvikende og stoppet trolldomsprosesser fra å begynne. Artikkelen argumenterer for at geistlighetens funksjon i skjæringspunktet mellom stat og lokalsamfunn bør inkluderes i større grad i framtidige studier. En slik nyansering vil framheve ulike aspekter ved geistlighetens involvering i de historiske trolldomsprosessene.
We report the current understanding of heavy quarkonium production at high transverse momentum ($p_T$) in hadronic collisions in terms of QCD factorization. In this presentation, we highlight the role of subleading power corrections to heavy quarkonium production, which are essential to describe the $p_T$ spectrum of quarkonium at a relatively lower $p_T$. We also introduce prescription to match QCD factorization to fixed-order NRQCD factorization calculations for quarkonium production at low $p_T$.
Oleksii Ivanytskyi, David Blaschke, Tobias Fischer
et al.
We present a relativistic density functional approach to color superconducting quark matter that mimics quark confinement by a fast growth of the quasiparticle selfenergy in the confining region. The approach is shown to be equivalent to a chiral model of quark matter with medium dependent couplings. While the (pseudo)scalar sector of the model is fitted to the vacuum phenomenology of quantum chromodynamics, the strength of interaction in the vector and diquark channels is varied in order to provide the best agreement with the observational constraints on the mass-radius relation and tidal deformability of neutron stars modelled with our approach. In order to recover the conformal behavior of quark matter at asymptotically high densities we introduce a medium dependence of the vector and diquark couplings motivated by the nonperturbative gluon exchange. Our analysis signals that the onset of deconfinement to color superconducting quark matter is likely to occur in neutron stars with masses below 1.0 $M_\odot$.
We review the current status of heavy quarkonium production phenomenology based on nonrelativistic effective field theories, focusing on spin-triplet $S$-wave states such as $J/ψ$, $ψ(2S)$, and $Υ$. We present some representative examples for heavy quarkonium production mechanisms proposed in the literature, which vary significantly depending on the choice of data employed in analyses. We then discuss the rôle of polarization in discriminating between the different possible scenarios for quarkonium production. Other observables that may be useful in pinpointing the production mechanism are also introduced, such as the $η_c$ production, associated production of $J/ψ$ plus a gauge boson, and $J/ψ$ production at the Electron-Ion Collider.
In quantum field theories at finite temperature spectral functions describe how particle systems behave in the presence of a thermal medium. Although data from lattice simulations can in principle be used to determine spectral function characteristics, existing methods rely on the extraction of these quantities from temporal correlators, which requires one to circumvent an ill-posed inverse problem. In these proceedings we report on a recent approach that instead utilises the non-perturbative constraints imposed by field locality to extract spectral function information directly from spatial correlators. In particular, we focus on the application of this approach to lattice QCD data of the spatial pseudo-scalar meson correlator in the temperature range $220-960 \, \text{MeV}$, and outline why this data supports the conclusion that there exists a distinct pion state above the chiral pseudo-critical temperature $T_{\!\text{pc}}$.
Volodymyr Biloshytskyi, Lucian Harland-Lang, Bogdan Malaescu
et al.
The LHC newly-discovered resonant structures around 7 GeV, such as the $X(6900)$, could be responsible for the observed excess in light-by-light scattering between 5 and 10 GeV. We show that the ATLAS data for light-by-light scattering may indeed be explained by such a state with the $γγ$ branching ratio of order of $10^{-4}$. This is much larger than the value inferred by the vector-meson dominance, but agrees quite well with the tetraquark expectation for the nature of this state. Further light-by-light scattering data in this region, obtained during the ongoing Run-3 and future Run-4 of the LHC, are required to pin down these states in $γγ$ channel.
Guillermo Benito-Calviño, Javier García-Olivares, Felipe J. Llanes-Estrada
The flow of information in high-energy collisions has been recently investigated by various groups: this includes the entanglement entropy of the proton becoming classical information entropy of pdfs, jet splitting affecting entropy, or the entropy distribution in hadron decays. Here we examine fragmentation functions in this context, including their entropy as probability distributions, and propose it as one convenient number to characterize progress in their extraction. We also use the Kullback-Leibler divergence to examine relations between FFs and pdfs such as that of Barone, Drago and Ma.