Managing the Global knowledge-creation Network: A Sense Making Perspective

We have entered the era of the knowledge economy, a period when knowledge has replaced natural resources and capital as the most important economic resource. Increasingly, corporations are reaching out globally to secure the best talent available at the most reasonable cost to serve world-wide markets

Climate of Coercion: Environmental and Other Drivers of Cross-Border Displacement in Central America and Mexico

This report published by the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and Human Security Initiative (HUMSI) analyzes the intersection of climate change and climate-related disasters with other root causes of movement across borders for people who have traveled to the United States-Mexico border from Central America and other parts of Mexico to seek U.S. humanitarian protection. It is based on 38 interviews in Tijuana shelters with Guatemalan, Honduran, Mexican, and Salvadoran individuals who intend to seek U.S. asylum, conducted in Spanish in January 2023 by HUMSI and a team of Stanford Law School students

Selective hypermethylation is evident in small intestine samples from infants with necrotizing enterocolitis

OBJECTIVE: Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common and lethal gastrointestinal disease affecting preterm infants. NEC develops suddenly and is characterized by gut barrier destruction, an inflammatory response, intestinal necrosis and multi-system organ failure. There is currently no method for early NEC detection, and the pathogenesis of NEC remains unclear. DESIGN: To further understand the molecular mechanisms that support NEC, we used solution phase hybridization and next-generation DNA sequencing of bisulfite converted DNA to perform targeted genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation at high read depth. RESULTS: We found that ileal samples from surgical NEC infants (n = 5) exist in a broadly hypermethylated state relative to their non-NEC counterparts (n = 9). These trends were not uniform, with hypermethylation being most consistently observed outside CpG islands and promoters. We further identified several biologically interesting gene promoters that displayed differential methylation in NEC and a number of biological pathways that appear dysregulated in NEC. We also found that DNA methylation patterns identified in ileal NEC tissue were correlated with those found and published previously in stool samples from NEC-affected infants. CONCLUSION: We confirmed that surgical NEC is associated with broad DNA hypermethylation in the ileum, and this may be detectable in stool samples of affected individuals. Thus, an epigenomic liquid biopsy of stool may have significant potential as a biomarker with respect to the diagnostic/predictive detection of NEC. Our findings, along with recent similar observations in colon, suggest that epigenomic dysregulation is a significant feature of surgical NEC. These findings motivate future studies which will involve the longitudinal screening of samples obtained prior to the onset of NEC. Our long-term goal is the development of novel screening, diagnostic and phenotyping methods for NEC

Lessons on Ethical Decision Making from the Bioscience Industry

Mackie and colleagues performed over 100 interviews with managers and executives at 13 bioscience companies to learn about bioindustry ethics from their perspective

Predicting response in mobile advertising with Hierarchical Importance-Aware Factorization Machine

Mobile advertising has recently seen dramatic growth, fu-eled by the global proliferation of mobile phones and devices. The task of predicting ad response is thus crucial for maxi-mizing business revenue. However, ad response data change dynamically over time, and are subject to cold-start situ-ations in which limited history hinders reliable prediction

Reviving dormant ties in an online social network experiment

Social network users connect and interact with one another to fulfil different kinds of social and information needs. When interaction ceases between two users, we say that their tie becomes dormant. While there are different underlying rea-sons of dormant ties, it is important to find means to revive such ties so as to maintain vibrancy in the relationships. In this work, we thus focus on designing an online experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of personalized social messages to revive dormant ties. The experiment carefully selects users with dormant ties so that each user does not get mixed treat-ments and be affected by the responses of other users un-dergoing treatment. Our results show that personalized mes-sage content plays an important part in reviving dormant ties. Specifically, we find the message containing friend’s recent activity information is more effective than that containing inter-friend activity information. We observe that the quality of engagement of at least 50 % of the revived ties can effec-tively be restored to the level before the ties become dormant. We also observe that it is easier to revive dormant ties that involve users from the same country but not users with the same and different gender

Identification of PKD1L1 Gene Variants in Children with the Biliary Atresia Splenic Malformation Syndrome

Biliary atresia (BA) is the most common cause of end‐stage liver disease in children and the primary indication for pediatric liver transplantation, yet underlying etiologies remain unknown. Approximately 10% of infants affected by BA exhibit various laterality defects (heterotaxy) including splenic abnormalities and complex cardiac malformations — a distinctive subgroup commonly referred to as the biliary atresia splenic malformation (BASM) syndrome. We hypothesized that genetic factors linking laterality features with the etiopathogenesis of BA in BASM patients could be identified through whole exome sequencing (WES) of an affected cohort. DNA specimens from 67 BASM subjects, including 58 patient‐parent trios, from the NIDDK‐supported Childhood Liver Disease Research Network (ChiLDReN) underwent WES. Candidate gene variants derived from a pre‐specified set of 2,016 genes associated with ciliary dysgenesis and/or dysfunction or cholestasis were prioritized according to pathogenicity, population frequency, and mode of inheritance. Five BASM subjects harbored rare and potentially deleterious bi‐allelic variants in polycystin 1‐like 1, PKD1L1, a gene associated with ciliary calcium signaling and embryonic laterality determination in fish, mice and humans. Heterozygous PKD1L1 variants were found in 3 additional subjects. Immunohistochemical analysis of liver from the one BASM subject available revealed decreased PKD1L1 expression in bile duct epithelium when compared to normal livers and livers affected by other non‐cholestatic diseases. Conclusion WES identified bi‐allelic and heterozygous PKD1L1 variants of interest in 8 BASM subjects from the ChiLDReN dataset. The dual roles for PKD1L1 in laterality determination and ciliary function suggest that PKD1L1 is a new, biologically plausible, cholangiocyte‐expressed candidate gene for the BASM syndrome