Couldn't or Wouldn't? the Influence of Privacy Concerns and Self-Efficacy in Privacy Management on Privacy Protection

Sampling 515 college students, this study investigates how privacy protection, including profile visibility, self-disclosure, and friending, are influenced by privacy concerns and efficacy regarding one's own ability to manage privacy settings, a factor that researchers have yet to give a great deal of attention to in the context of social networking sites (SNSs). The results of this study indicate an inconsistency in adopting strategies to protect privacy, a disconnect from limiting profile visibility and friending to self-disclosure. More specifically, privacy concerns lead SNS users to limit their profile visibility and discourage them from expanding their network. However, they do not constrain self-disclosure. Similarly, while self-efficacy in privacy management encourages SNS users to limit their profile visibility, it facilitates self-disclosure. This suggests that if users are limiting their profile visibility and constraining their friending behaviors, it does not necessarily mean they will reduce self-disclosure on SNSs because these behaviors are predicted by different factors. In addition, the study finds an interaction effect between privacy concerns and self-efficacy in privacy management on friending. It points to the potential problem of increased risk-taking behaviors resulting from high self-efficacy in privacy management and low privacy concerns.Radio-Television-Fil

The landscape, properties, and determinants of transcriptional activation of endogenous transposable elements in grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Lincoln University

Transposable elements (TEs) are an intrinsic mutagen of eukaryotic genomes and have been proposed to be important in increasing genetic diversity in plants. It has been known that biotic and abiotic stress treatments induce TE transcription, the first stage in TE mobilisation. This research began with an investigation of TE transcription activity in grapevine embryogenic callus subjected to biotic stressors (Botrytis cinerea extracts and live Hanseniaspora uvarum cultures) to determine the location and regulation of autonomous TEs. Short-read RNA sequencing (RNAseq) has been commonly used to determine TE transcription patterns at a family level. This research sought to further these approaches by establishing an analysis pipeline to identify the expression of individual TE loci from Illumina RNAseq data. We efficiently identified that only 1.7%-2.5% of total annotated TE loci were transcribed in our system. This work identified a strong tendency for TE expression candidates to be found within introns of expressed genes. It was also discovered that these pairs of TEs and genes shared the same differential expression patterns in response to applied stressors. Our analysis pipeline was successfully validated using publically available RNAseq datasets from Arabidopsis, wild-type and epigenetic mutant (ibm2 and ddm1) lines, and Drosophila datasets of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) models exhibiting a TE transcriptional storm. We successfully identified an Arabidopsis COPIA-93 locus previously proven to mobilise in ddm1 mutant and a subset of Drosophila TE loci that potentially contributed to full-length autonomous TE transcripts in the ALS models that have not been previously reported. Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) cDNA sequencing was deployed to determine whether autonomous TEs were being expressed as a precursor of mobilisation. Only low levels of full-length transcription of one Gypsy-V1 locus and three hAT-7 loci was detected in this data, suggesting rare intact transcription from autonomous TE loci despite stress treatments. This finding suggested that TE mobilisation might require inhibition of the epigenetic silencing system. We, therefore, treated embryogenic callus with the histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi), trichostatin A (TSA) or 4-phenylbutyric acid (4PBA), to alter the heterochromatic architecture of callus cells. Only the 4PBA treatment showed a noticeable shift in the transcriptional landscape of TE transcription, significantly increasing the proportion of intergenic TE loci in the expression candidate pool and resulting in significant up-regulation of 2,059 TE loci. ONT cDNA sequencing of these samples detected very low levels of intact sequencing reads from different yet a single Gypsy-V1 locus and six hAT-7 loci. Five genes participating in the RNA-dependent DNA methylation (RdDM) pathway (AGO2, AGO4, RDR1, RDR6, and NERD) were upregulated, suggesting that callus exposed to 4PBA responded by an enhancement of RdDM, maintaining effective control of TE transcription and therefore TE mobility. Overall, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the landscape, properties, and determinants of transcriptional activation of endogenous transposable elements, revealing the closely connected transcriptional relationship between TEs and co-localised genes. These findings shed light on the genetic and epigenetic impact of endogenous TE activation on genes in nature

Use electrochemistry to charge the next dynamic thermal metamaterials

Electrochemistry has enabled a wide range of important energy technologies such as fuel cells and batteries, emerging as a powerful tool to achieve active materials and devices with novel applications. In this Perspective, we highlight the great potential of electrochemistry in propelling the next generation of dynamic thermal metamaterials with a focus on thermal radiation applications. After a brief introduction of the mechanisms of electrochemistry to change material properties, we discuss the possibilities of achieving highly tunable thermal radiation features by electrochemically manipulating the carrier densities of plasmonic materials. Recent studies in the intersections between electrochemistry, metamaterials, and thermal radiation applications are reviewed, indicating an emerging research direction incorporating these three fields — electrochemically dynamic thermal metamaterials. Towards this direction, we anticipate a promising pathway of employing conducting polymers and point out its remarkable opportunities and potential challenges. We hope this perspective could encourage more researchers to contribute to the development of this interdisciplinary field targeting the next energy technologies and applications

3D-PL: Domain Adaptive Depth Estimation with 3D-aware Pseudo-Labeling

For monocular depth estimation, acquiring ground truths for real data is not easy, and thus domain adaptation methods are commonly adopted using the supervised synthetic data. However, this may still incur a large domain gap due to the lack of supervision from the real data. In this paper, we develop a domain adaptation framework via generating reliable pseudo ground truths of depth from real data to provide direct supervisions. Specifically, we propose two mechanisms for pseudo-labeling: 1) 2D-based pseudo-labels via measuring the consistency of depth predictions when images are with the same content but different styles; 2) 3D-aware pseudo-labels via a point cloud completion network that learns to complete the depth values in the 3D space, thus providing more structural information in a scene to refine and generate more reliable pseudo-labels. In experiments, we show that our pseudo-labeling methods improve depth estimation in various settings, including the usage of stereo pairs during training. Furthermore, the proposed method performs favorably against several state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches in real-world datasets.Comment: Accepted in ECCV 2022. Project page: https://ccc870206.github.io/3D-PL

Identification of potential angiogenic biomarkers in human follicular fluid for predicting oocyte maturity

BackgroundAngiogenesis in folliculogenesis contributes to oocyte developmental competence in natural and in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles. Therefore, the identification of key angiogenic factors in follicular fluid (FF) during folliculogenesis is clinically significant and important for in vitro fertilization. This study aims to identify the key angiogenic factors in FF for predicting oocyte maturity during in vitro fertilization.Materials and methodsForty participants who received ovarian stimulation using a GnRH antagonist protocol in their first in vitro fertilization treatment were recruited. From each patient, two follicular samples (one preovulatory follicle, > 18 mm; one mid-antral follicle, < 14 mm) were collected without flushing during oocyte retrieval. In total, 80 FF samples were collected from 40 patients. The expression profiles of angiogenesis-related proteins in FF were analyzed via Luminex high-performance assays. Recorded patient data included antral follicle count, anti-müllerian hormone, age, and BMI. Serum samples were collected on menstrual cycle day 2, the trigger day, and the day of oocyte retrieval. Hormone concentrations including day 2 FSH/LH/E2/P4, trigger day E2/LH/P4, and retrieval day E2/LH/P4 were measured by chemiluminescence assay.ResultsTen angiogenic factors were highly expressed in FF: eotaxin, Gro-α, IL-8, IP-10, MCP-1, MIG, PAI-1 (Serpin), VEGF-A, CXCL-6, and HGF. The concentrations of eotaxin, IL-8, MCP1, PAI-1, and VEGF-A were significantly higher in preovulatory follicles than those in mid-antral follicles, while the Gro-α and CXCL-6 expressional levels were lower in preovulatory than in mid-antral follicles (p < 0.05). Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed that VEGF-A, eotaxin, and CXCL-6 were the three strongest predictors of oocyte maturity. The combination of VEGF-A and CXCL-6 predicted oocyte maturity with a higher sensitivity (91.7%) and specificity (72.7%) than other combinations.ConclusionOur findings suggest that VEGF-A, eotaxin, and CXCL-6 concentrations in FF strongly correlate with oocyte maturity from the mid-antral to preovulatory stage. The combination of VEGF-A and CXCL-6 exhibits a relatively good prediction rate of oocyte maturity during in vitro fertilization