Cultural Stressors, Identity Development, and Substance Use Attitudes Among Hispanic Immigrant Adolescents

The goal of this investigation was to determine whether various cultural stressors (bicultural stress, perceived discrimination, and perceived negative context of reception [PNCR]) predict positive and negative substance use attitudes, directly and indirectly through personal identity, in a sample of immigrant Hispanic adolescents. Data on cultural stressors, substance use attitudes, and covariates were collected from 302 Hispanic immigrant adolescents (152 from Miami [61% Cuban] and 150 from Los Angeles [70% Mexican]) at 3 time points. PNCR was associated with identity confusion (=.175, p=.033). Identity confusion significantly predicted higher positive attitudes toward alcohol and other drug (AOD; =.216, p\u3c.001) and cigarette use (=.191, p=.015) and mediated the relationship between PNCR with unfavorable AOD attitudes ( =-.019, 95% confidence interval [CI] [-0.052,-0.001]) and favorable AOD attitudes (=0.038, 95% CI [0.003, 0.086]). Perceptions of a negative context of reception may hinder successful personal identity formation and impact health outcomes for immigrant youth

Lime binders for the repair of historic buildings: Considerations for CO2 abatement

Lime binders are utilised worldwide and are associated with a considerable scale of production and corresponding CO2 emissions. The relevance of this review is therefore international in scope, with production transcending geographical boundaries and construction practices. An holistic view of lime binders, considering their provenance, production and utilisation offers the potential for significant CO2 savings urgently required globally. Importantly, the technical aspects of lime materials production is critical, but the alteration of behaviour of both specifier and those undertaking the construction processes is also essential in achieving meaningful CO2 emission reduction. This review paper investigates the life cycle stages of lime binders in line with the features highlighted in the Scottish Building Alliance (SBA) ‘building life cycle stages model’. It attempts to determine what can be learnt from our understanding of the manufacture and use of binders from historic, current and future perspectives in the context of reconciling the production of historically authentic materials in a decarbonising environment. The production and use of such authentic historic lime binders initially appears highly carbon intensive through its utilisation of relatively inefficient kiln technologies and loss of economies of scale associated with larger operations. However, this review shows numerous benefits in the production of such binders; including their CO2 sequestration capability, lower potential processing energy, and a reduction in excessive ‘carbon miles’ associated with transportation. Importantly, we show how historic production and on-site manufacture approaches with lime-based materials also offers exciting potential for carbon savings. Importantly, hot mixed lime mortars offer the promise of higher durability materials compared to their modern cold manufactured counterparts, thereby reducing the frequency of repeat maintenance interventions, again yielding CO2 savings. We suggest hot mixing, whether in an innovative contemporary materials realm or within traditional contexts should be explored. In addition, hot mixed materials can concomitantly satisfy conservation requirements for repairs through better reflecting the aspired to building conservation requirement of like for like materials replacement reflected with historically produced binders. We suggest future paths for the industry that would simultaneously reconcile demands for authentic materials and production methods for the conservation sector with the necessity of achieving cleaner production in a decarbonizing world

Interface Fluctuations under Shear

Coarsening systems under uniform shear display a long time regime characterized by the presence of highly stretched and thin domains. The question then arises whether thermal fluctuations may actually destroy this layered structure. To address this problem in the case of non-conserved dynamics we study an anisotropic version of the Burgers equation, constructed to describe thermal fluctuations of an interface in the presence of a uniform shear flow. As a result, we find that stretched domains are only marginally stable against thermal fluctuations in $d=2$, whereas they are stable in $d=3$.Comment: 3 pages, shorter version, additional reference

To Transformers and Beyond: Large Language Models for the Genome

In the rapidly evolving landscape of genomics, deep learning has emerged as a useful tool for tackling complex computational challenges. This review focuses on the transformative role of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are mostly based on the transformer architecture, in genomics. Building on the foundation of traditional convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks, we explore both the strengths and limitations of transformers and other LLMs for genomics. Additionally, we contemplate the future of genomic modeling beyond the transformer architecture based on current trends in research. The paper aims to serve as a guide for computational biologists and computer scientists interested in LLMs for genomic data. We hope the paper can also serve as an educational introduction and discussion for biologists to a fundamental shift in how we will be analyzing genomic data in the future