Adolescent beliefs about antisocial behavior : mediators and moderators of links with parental monitoring and attachment

The current study examined whether parental monitoring and attachment were related to adolescent beliefs about antisocial acts, with temperament, gender, and age considered as potential moderators. A total of 7135 adolescents, aged 14-18 years, completed selfreport measures of antisocial beliefs, parental monitoring, attachment security, and temperament. Results indicate that both attachment security and parental monitoring are associated with adolescent beliefs about antisocial behaviour. It also appears that the two aspects of parenting are complementary, in that a secure attachment relationship is associated with greater parental monitoring knowledge, which in turn is linked with a lower tolerance for antisocial behaviour. However, the relations between these aspects of parenting and beliefs about antisocial acts depended on the young people’s characteristics, with some results varying by age, gender and temperament. Implications for future research and parent-focused interventions to prevent antisocial beliefs and behaviour are discussed.peer-reviewe

Using Manhattan distance and standard deviation for expressed sequence tag clustering

An explosion of genomic data in recent years has necessitated the novel application of old algorithms and the development of new algorithms in order to process and understand this information. One specific type of data comes in the form of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) which have significant biological importance. They do, however, require a lot of work in the dry lab once they have been created in a wet lab before anything meaningful can be made of the data. ESTs are short fragments of genomic data that represent the active genes in a sequenced sample. The sequencing process is complex and involves the copying, magnification and then splitting up of long complete sequences. The splitting of each copy is random and by looking for overlaps on the shorter sequences we can then begin to re-assemble the original long sequence. The process of finding the overlaps is called clustering and in theory it groups all the ESTs from a single gene together (where data sets in general contain ESTs from many different genes). Two new heuristics have been developed in this research that aim to speed up the time taken to do the clustering, which is traditionally an all-against-all comparison (and thus quadratic time complexity). The first heuristic uses a sorted word list of all the words in all the sequences to rapidly identify matching pairs of sequences. Further, the standard deviation between the relative position where words occur in the matching sequences is used to determine the quality of the matches – if a pair of sequences has sufficiently many words in common, and the variation in relative positions of those words is sufficiently low it is then tested by the second heuristic. The second heuristic uses a distance measure called d1 which identifies pairs of matching sequences in a very similar way to the d2 distance measure. d2 is an accepted distance calculation for calculating the relatedness of ESTs, but d1 is used as a comparison as it runs in linear time and rules out many of the potential matches from the first heuristic that would also be ruled out by the final d2 comparison. The results show that with careful selection of clustering parameters a significant speed-up can be made over various competing clustering techniques with little significant impact on clustering quality

Adolescent beliefs about antisocial behavior : mediators and moderators of links with parental monitoring and attachment

The current study examined whether parental monitoring and attachment were related to adolescent beliefs about antisocial acts, with temperament, gender, and age considered as potential moderators. A total of 7135 adolescents, ages 14-18 years, completed self- report measures of antisocial beliefs, parental monitoring, attachment security, and temperament. Results indicate that both attachment security and parental monitoring are associated with adolescent beliefs about antisocial behaviour. It also appears that the two aspects of parenting are complementary, in that a secure attachment relationship is associated with greater parental monitoring knowledge, which in turn is linked with a lower tolerance for antisocial behaviour. However, the relations between these aspects of parenting and beliefs about antisocial acts depended on the young people's characteristics, with some results varying by age, gender and temperament. Implications for future research and parent-focused interventions to prevent antisocial beliefs and behaviour are discussed.peer-reviewe

Both intratumoral regulatory T cell depletion and CTLA-4 antagonism are required for maximum efficacy of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies

Anti-CTLA-4 antibodies have successfully elicited durable tumor regression in the clinic; however, long-term benefit is limited to a subset of patients for select cancer indications. The incomplete understanding of their mechanism of action has hindered efforts at improvement, with conflicting hypotheses proposing either antagonism of the CTLA-4:B7 axis or Fc effector-mediated regulatory T cell (Treg) depletion governing efficacy. Here, we report the engineering of a nonantagonistic CTLA-4 binding domain (b1s1e2) that depletes intratumoral Tregs as an Fc fusion. Comparison of b1s1e2-Fc to 9d9, an antagonistic anti-CTLA-4 antibody, allowed for interrogation of the separate contributions of CTLA-4 antagonism and Treg depletion to efficacy. Despite equivalent levels of intratumoral Treg depletion, 9d9 achieved more long-term cures than b1s1e2-Fc in MC38 tumors, demonstrating that CTLA-4 antagonism provided additional survival benefit. Consistent with prior reports that CTLA-4 antagonism enhances priming, treatment with 9d9, but not b1s1e2-Fc, increased the percentage of activated T cells in the tumor-draining lymph node (tdLN). Treg depletion with either construct was restricted to the tumor due to insufficient surface CTLA-4 expression on Tregs in other compartments. Through intratumoral administration of diphtheria toxin in Foxp3-DTR mice, we show that depletion of both intratumoral and nodal Tregs provided even greater survival benefit than 9d9, consistent with Treg-driven restraint of priming in the tdLN. Our data demonstrate that anti-CTLA-4 therapies require both CTLA-4 antagonism and intratumoral Treg depletion for maximum efficacy-but that potential future therapies also capable of depleting nodal Tregs could show efficacy in the absence of CTLA-4 antagonism

The East Asian Journal of British History, vol. 3

The East Asian Journal of British History is produced by the East Asian Society of British History, and supported by the Institute for Historical Research. The Institute of Historical Research is pleased and proud to be supporting this recent addition to British history scholarship. Developing out of the IHR’s long-standing collaborative partnership with Japanese universities, and now in its fourth year, the East Asian Journal of British History features some of the best emergent scholarship from Anglophone historians working in China, Japan, and South Korea. Divided between an articles section and one devoted to reviews, the journal’s remit wide-ranging covering all fields and periods of British history. It complements the triennial Anglo-Japanese Conference organised by the IHR and Japanese historians based at the universities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, and the conference of the East Asian Society of British history, in which we are joined by our colleagues from South Korea. In future, we hope that more contributions will be featured in the journal from the Chinese mainland and from Taiwan

When “perverts” were religious: the Protestant sexualisation of asceticism in nineteenth-century Britain, India and Ireland

Anti-Catholic polemics from the mid-nineteenth century made frequent comparison between religious practices in Britain, Ireland and India. The supposed atrocities taking place at locations such as Lough Dearg in Country Donegal and at ‘Juggernaut’ (Jagganath) at Puri were denounced in terms which hinted strongly at a striking combination of extreme asceticism and perverse sexual enjoyment. In the same period the word ‘perversion’, which had hitherto referred to apostasy, started to develop connotations of sexual deviance. Protestant sexualised readings of Catholic and Hindu asceticism appear to have been an important site for the development of conceptions of deviant sexuality in general and masochism in particular

Using remote sensing to assess the relationship between crime and the urban layout

[EN] The link between place and crime is at the base of social ecology theories of crime that focus in the relationship of the characteristics of geographical areas and crime rates. The broken windows theory states that visible cues of physical and social disorder in a neighborhood can lead to an increase in more serious crime. The crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) planning approach seeks to deter criminal behavior by creating defensible spaces. Based on the premise that a settlement's appearance is a reflection of the society, we ask whether a neighborhood's design has a quantifiable imprint when seen from space using urban fabric descriptors computed from very high spatial-resolution imagery. We tested which land cover, structure and texture descriptors were significantly related to intra-urban homicide rates in Medellin, Colombia, while controlling for socioeconomic confounders. The percentage of impervious surfaces other than clay roofs, the fraction of clay roofs to impervious surfaces, two structure descriptors related to the homogeneity of the urban layout, and the uniformity texture descriptor were all statistically significant. Areas with higher homicide rates tended to have higher local variation and less general homogeneity; that is, the urban layouts were more crowded and cluttered, with small dwellings with different roofing materials located in close proximity to one another, and these regions often lacked other homogeneous surfaces such as open green spaces, wide roads, or large facilities. These results seem to be in agreement with the broken windows theory and CPTED in the sense that more heterogeneous and disordered urban layouts are associated with higher homicide rates.This research was made possible by funding from EAFIT University (EAFIT-435-000060) and the Medellin City Hall EnlazaMundos program. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers and Hermilson Velazquez, Andr es Ramírez Hassan and Gustavo Canavire for their insightful observations and suggestions during the different stages of this projectPatiño Quinchía, JE.; Duque, JC.; Pardo Pascual, JE.; Ruiz Fernández, LÁ. (2014). Using remote sensing to assess the relationship between crime and the urban layout. Applied Geography. 55:48-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2014.08.016S48605

Using a multiple-delivery-mode training approach to develop local capacity and infrastructure for advanced bioinformatics in Africa

With more microbiome studies being conducted by African-based research groups, there is an increasing demand for knowledge and skills in the design and analysis of microbiome studies and data. However, high-quality bioinformatics courses are often impeded by differences in computational environments, complicated software stacks, numerous dependencies, and versions of bioinformatics tools along with a lack of local computational infrastructure and expertise. To address this, H3ABioNet developed a 16S rRNA Microbiome Intermediate Bioinformatics Training course, extending its remote classroom model. The course was developed alongside experienced microbiome researchers, bioinformaticians, and systems administrators, who identified key topics to address. Development of containerised workflows has previously been undertaken by H3ABioNet, and Singularity containers were used here to enable the deployment of a standard replicable software stack across different hosting sites. The pilot ran successfully in 2019 across 23 sites registered in 11 African countries, with more than 200 participants formally enrolled and 106 volunteer staff for onsite support