Does self-love lead to love for others?: A story of narcissistic game playing.

Five studies investigated the links among narcissism, self-esteem, and love. Across all studies, narcissism was associated primarily with a game-playing love style. This link was found in reports of general love styles (Study 1a) and of love in ongoing romantic relationships (Studies 1b–3, 5). Narcissists ’ game-playing love style was the result of a need for power and autonomy (Study 2) and was linked with greater relationship alternatives and lesser commitment (Study 3). Finally, narcissists ’ self-reports of game playing were confirmed by their partners in past and current relationships (Studies 4, 5). In contrast, self-esteem was negatively linked to manic love and positively linked to passionate love across studies. Implications for the understanding of narcissism in relationships are discussed. If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love others. (Popular belief quoted by Branden, 1994) There are a whole lot of hearts breakin ’ tonight from the disease of conceit.—Bob Dylan, “Disease of Conceit” It is popularly believed that self-love is a necessary prerequisite for loving others. As exemplified by the first quote above, this belief permeates the realm of self-help literature (Branden, 1994)

Early Contrast Enhancement: a novel Magnetic Resonance Imaging biomarker of pleural malignancy

Introduction: Pleural Malignancy (PM) is often occult on subjective radiological assessment. We sought to define a novel, semi-objective Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) biomarker of PM, targeted to increased tumour microvessel density (MVD) and applicable to minimal pleural thickening. Materials and methods: 60 consecutive patients with suspected PM underwent contrast-enhanced 3-T MRI then pleural biopsy. In 58/60, parietal pleura signal intensity (SI) was measured in multiple regions of interest (ROI) at multiple time-points, generating ROI SI/time curves and Mean SI gradient (MSIG: SI increment/time). The diagnostic performance of Early Contrast Enhancement (ECE; which was defined as a SI peak in at least one ROI at or before 4.5 min) was compared with subjective MRI and Computed Tomography (CT) morphology results. MSIG was correlated against tumour MVD (based on Factor VIII immunostain) in 31 patients with Mesothelioma. Results: 71% (41/58) patients had PM. Pleural thickening was <10 mm in 49/58 (84%). ECE sensitivity was 83% (95% CI 61–94%), specificity 83% (95% CI 68–91%), positive predictive value 68% (95% CI 47–84%), negative predictive value 92% (78–97%). ECE performance was similar or superior to subjective CT and MRI. MSIG correlated with MVD (r = 0.4258, p = .02). Discussion: ECE is a semi-objective, perfusion-based biomarker of PM, measurable in minimal pleural thickening. Further studies are warranted

Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors for Counterfactual Inference, Data Integration and Fairness

Learning meaningful representations of data that can address challenges such as batch effect correction, data integration and counterfactual inference is a central problem in many domains including computational biology. Adopting a Conditional VAE framework, we identify the mathematical principle that unites these challenges: learning a representation that is marginally independent of a condition variable. We therefore propose the Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors (CoMP) method that uses a novel misalignment penalty to enforce this independence. This penalty is defined in terms of mixtures of the variational posteriors themselves, unlike prior work which uses external discrepancy measures such as MMD to ensure independence in latent space. We show that CoMP has attractive theoretical properties compared to previous approaches, especially when there is complex global structure in latent space. We further demonstrate state of the art performance on a number of real-world problems, including the challenging tasks of aligning human tumour samples with cancer cell-lines and performing counterfactual inference on single-cell RNA sequencing data. Incidentally, we find parallels with the fair representation learning literature, and demonstrate CoMP has competitive performance in learning fair yet expressive latent representations

Getting NuSTAR on target: predicting mast motion

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is the first focusing high energy (3-79 keV) X-ray observatory operating for four years from low Earth orbit. The X-ray detector arrays are located on the spacecraft bus with the optics modules mounted on a flexible mast of 10.14m length. The motion of the telescope optical axis on the detectors during each observation is measured by a laser metrology system and matches the pre-launch predictions of the thermal flexing of the mast as the spacecraft enters and exits the Earths shadow each orbit. However, an additional motion of the telescope field of view was discovered during observatory commissioning that is associated with the spacecraft attitude control system and an additional flexing of the mast correlated with the Solar aspect angle for the observation. We present the methodology developed to predict where any particular target coordinate will fall on the NuSTAR detectors based on the Solar aspect angle at the scheduled time of an observation. This may be applicable to future observatories that employ optics deployed on extendable masts. The automation of the prediction system has greatly improved observatory operations efficiency and the reliability of observation planning

Intraorbital foreign body projectile as a consideration for unilateral pupillary defect

Intraorbital foreign bodies are frequently the result of high-velocity injuries with varying clinical presentations. The resultant diagnosis, management, and outcome depend on the type of foreign body present, anatomical location, tissue disruption, and symptomatology. A patient who presented to the Emergency Department with a large intraorbital foreign body projectile that was not evident clinically, but found incidentally on computed tomography and subsequent plain films is reported. The emergency room physician needs to be aware of the differential diagnosis of a unilateral irregular pupil with or without visual acuity changes. The differential diagnosis for any trauma patient with an irregular pupil with significant visual loss must include intraorbital foreign body and associated injury to the optic nerve directly or via orbital compartment syndrome secondary to hemorrhage and/or edema. Patients with significantly decreased visual acuity may benefit from emergent surgical intervention. In patients with intact visual acuity, the patient must be monitored closely for any visual changes as this may require emergent surgical intervention

What is campus bridging and what is XSEDE doing about it?

The term “campus bridging” was first used in the charge given to an NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure task force. That task force developed this description of campus bridging: “Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.” Campus bridging is more a viewpoint and a set of approaches to usability, software, and information concerns than a particular set of tools or software. We outline here several specific use cases that have been identified as priorities for XSEDE in the next four years. These priorities include documentation, deployment of software used entirely outside of XSEDE, and software that helps bridge from individual researcher to campus to XSEDE cyberinfrastructure. We also describe early pilot tests and means by which the user community may stay informed of campus bridging activities and participate in the implementation of Campus Bridging tools created by XSEDE. Metrics are still being developed, and will include (1) the number of campuses that adopt and use Campus Bridging tools developed by XSEDE and (2) the number of and extent to which XSEDE-developed Campus Bridging tools are adopted among other CI projects.The work described here was supported by National Science Foundation Award Nos. 0932251, 0503697, 1002526, 1059812, 1040777, 0723054, 0521433, and 0504075

Mass-Producible 2D-MoS2‑Impregnated Screen-Printed Electrodes

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.7b05104Two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide (2D-MoS2) screen-printed electrodes (2D-MoS2-SPEs) have been designed, fabricated, and evaluated toward the electrochemical oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) within acidic aqueous media. A screen-printable ink has been developed that allows for the tailoring of the 2D-MoS2 content/mass used in the fabrication of the 2D-MoS2-SPEs, which critically affects the observed ORR performance. In comparison to the graphite SPEs (G-SPEs), the 2D-MoS2-SPEs are shown to exhibit an electrocatalytic behavior toward the ORR which is found, critically, to be reliant upon the percentage mass incorporation of 2D-MoS2 in the 2D-MoS2-SPEs; a greater percentage mass of 2D-MoS2 incorporated into the 2D-MoS2-SPEs results in a significantly less electronegative ORR onset potential and a greater signal output (current density). Using optimally fabricated 2D-MoS2-SPEs, an ORR onset and a peak current of approximately +0.16 V [vs saturated calomel electrode (SCE)] and −1.62 mA cm–2, respectively, are observed, which exceeds the −0.53 V (vs SCE) and −635 μA cm–2 performance of unmodified G-SPEs, indicating an electrocatalytic response toward the ORR utilizing the 2D-MoS2-SPEs. An investigation of the underlying electrochemical reaction mechanism of the ORR within acidic aqueous solutions reveals that the reaction proceeds via a direct four-electron process for all of the 2D-MoS2-SPE variants studied herein, where oxygen is electrochemically favorably reduced to water. The fabricated 2D-MoS2-SPEs are found to exhibit no degradation in the observed achievable current over the course of 1000 repeat scans. The production of such inks and the resultant mass-producible 2D-MoS2-SPEs mitigates the need to modify post hoc an electrode via the drop-casting technique that has been previously shown to result in a loss of achievable current over the course of 1000 repeat scans. The 2D-MoS2-SPEs designed, fabricated, and tested herein could have commercial viability as electrocatalytic fuel cell electrodes because of being economical as a result of their scales of economy and inherent tailorability. The technique utilized herein to produce the 2D-MoS2-SPEs could be adapted for the incorporation of different 2D nanomaterials, resulting in SPEs with the inherent advantages identified above

XSEDE Campus Bridging Use Cases

This document is both a user-­facing document (publicly accessible) and an internal working document intended to define user needs and use cases that fall under the general umbrella of Campus Bridging within the overall activities of XSEDE.XSEDE is supported by National Science Foundation Grant 1053575 (XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment)

Campus Bridging Use Case Quality Attribute Scenarios

This document is both a user-­facing document (publicly accessible) and an internal working document intended to define quality attributes associated with user needs and use cases that fall under the general umbrella of Campus Bridging within the overall activities of XSEDE.XSEDE is supported by National Science Foundation Grant 1053575 (XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment)