The Role of Inflammatory Monocytes in Post-Influenza Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Pneumonia

Secondary bacterial infections following influenza can lead to poor clinical outcomes and mortality. It is widely accepted that susceptibility to secondary bacterial infections is attributable to a suppressed innate antibacterial immunity. In contrast, a dysregulated host inflammatory response may also contribute to disease severity. Inflammation induced by viral infection alone significantly affects lung pathology, potentially exacerbating the destruction of the respiratory tract. Interestingly, the role of inflammatory mediators such as inflammatory monocytes have been extensively studied during influenza infection alone; however, their role during secondary bacterial infection are still not fully established. The objective of this study was to analyze the contribution of inflammatory monocytes during secondary S. aureus infection and their effect on lung pathology. Based on the negative impact of inflammatory monocytes during influenza infection alone, and their little recruitment during S. aureus infection alone, we hypothesized that inflammatory monocytes contribute to increased mortality and lung pathology during secondary MRSA pneumonia. In order to study the possible effects of inflammatory monocytes, we developed post-influenza MRSA pneumonia murine models, with and without antibiotic treatment, using mice deficient in the chemokine receptor, C-C chemokine receptor type 2 (CCR2). Interestingly, we found that CCR2-deficient (CCR2-/-) mice, which are unable to sufficiently recruit inflammatory monocytes to the airways, survive significantly better compared to WT mice after post-influenza MRSA infection. Furthermore, we show, mechanistically, that inflammatory monocytes may impair the phagocytic bacterial killing function of alveolar macrophages, leading to decreased bacterial clearance and increased mortality. Future studies will evaluate the effect of inflammatory monocytes on lung damage during post-influenza MRSA pneumonia

Autonomous Systems Validation (SysVal) Environment for Advancing Mission Operations

In order to maintain the health and productivity of satellites, it is crucial to develop a system that can swiftly, accurately, and effectively reproduce the on-orbit workflow and behavior a spacecraft experiences. To achieve this, Planet created the Systems Validation (SysVal) ecosystem; originally developed to validate individual spacecraft subsystem design requirements, and has evolved to encompass satellite concept of operation workflows, innovating test processes while mitigating risks through the ability to rapidly mimic on-orbit activities in a lab environment. SysVal is a fully integrated hardware and software system composed of a ground station network and a mission operations center with multiple integrated satellites, developed in-house by Planet, to assist with operating its Dove constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. Planet’s implementation of agile aerospace has exposed the value of SysVal, which facilitates seamless transitions of operational improvements from development and experimentation to rapid productionalization by incorporating “Test-Like-You-Fly” principles. SysVal utilizes cloned instances of Planet’s operational mission control interfaces and data storage platforms along with fully integrated flight capable satellite hardware, the same build that is flown in space, to test software upgrades before they are deployed on-orbit, reproduce on-orbit issues on the ground, replicate continuous “Day in the Life\u27\u27 satellite operations, examine changes with potential operational impacts, while being easily managed remotely by a distributed team. System autonomy is a principal component of SysVal to alleviate human-in-the-loop decision making, maintenance and resources, and is utilized for quick snapshots of the testbed states, software deploys to match the lab environment to the production environment, automated flashing of lab satellite onboard software images to match on-orbit satellites, as well as autonomous analysis of system-level metrics and daily testbed testing with operator notification. This paper describes the SysVal system utilized by Planet and the latest automations integrated into the ecosystem that assist with the testing and development of operating the world’s largest Earth Observation satellite constellation

Canberra – Cultural Controversies and Urban Change in a Capital City Region

Making international headline news, the uncontrollable forest fires that have devastated much of Australia in the summer of 2019/2020 have added a dramatic sense of urgency to the focus of this paper on cultural controversies in Canberra – controversies that relate to key themes of the REALCORP 2020 conference: the links between climate change and immanent natural disasters; the problematic co-ordination of urban development among urban and regional authorities; the conflict-ridden connections between public planning and real estate interests; and the role of civil society in the urban transformation process. The Australian Federal Capital has come a long way from its conception as a physical expression of parliamentary democracy designed in 1911 for a new, progressive nation, hailed at the time in Germany as ‘The Social Continent.’ Cultural controversies on ideals and issues such as urban vs. suburban ideal concepts, leasehold vs. freehold land, and welfare state politics vs. market-led development were reflected in the growth and change of the capital during the 20th century. By 1988, urban development under conditions of high planning control on leasehold land had led to the production of a city that could be summarized as ‘a perfectionist garden city metropolis.’ This paper focuses on transformations that have eroded this ideal in recent years through a combination of dysfunctional inter-governmental relations, neoliberal policies, power plays among public and private actors, and superficial populism. In 1988, withdrawal of the Federal Government from most of its responsibilities for Canberra plunged the city into a fundamental crisis in term of its role and identity, its administration and its finance throwing up questions such as: Do we need a national capital at all? If so, which functions should the capital cater for? Should certain government departments be relocated to regional districts (preferably at the seat of the Federal politicians lobbying for such a strategy)? Does it make sense to maintain the ambitions the founders of Canberra had for creating a model city, ‘The Pride of Time’ or should Canberra pursue a path of ‘normalization’ by following the ‘business as usual’ pattern that characterizes urbandevelopment in most other Australian cities? Isn’t public planning an expression of ‘nanny state’ ideologies anyway? And above all, how should the burden of national and local expenses for the capital be divided? At the administrative level, Canberra was subjected to years of turbulent change, with negative consequences at many levels including poorly devolved responsibility for forest management. This contributed to theconditions for a devastating bush fire in 2003, a harbinger of the fires of 2019/2020, played out in a political climate of climate change denial. Establishment of new suburbs on the burnt-out western flank of the city, exposed to the same threat of wildfire as in 2003 are an ominous sign of a development ethos that has put real estate interests above sound planning principles. In another instance, independent review by the Auditor General of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) exposed a serious “lack of transparency and accountability” in the way in which the ACT government mingled public and private real estate interests – an issue of continuing concern, particularly given the ACT’s recent agreement to cross-border development on rural lands long-held by land owners in the state of New South Wales. A core issue is that Federal Government divestment of all responsibilities beyond core national capital functions has meant that a substantial part of Canberra’s local government revenue has been financed through the sale of greenfield land. Since this approach is unsustainable given the limited extent of developable land in the ACT, strategies have been adopted which have culminated in densification through high-rise luxury apartment blocks. The upshot has been an intense cultural controversy driven by a remarkably crude and aggressive campaign by local politicians in unison with one of the biggest local developers ridiculing the planning approaches of the past and literally smashing the long-established image of Canberra as ‘The Bush Capital, ’ a city oriented on the Australian landscape. Even the way in which the introduction of light rail is linked into this process does not come as the desired triumph of sustainability. One of the many issues there is that it is partly financed through the relocation of public housing to bushfire prone areas at the edge of the city. In the context of these cultural controversies, Canberra’s civil society is beginning to raise its voice, but is still struggling to do so in a way that ensures more than sporadic victories

More Than Yes and No: Predicting the Magnitude of Non-Invariance Between Countries from Systematic Features

Measurement Invariance has long been the cornerstone of cross-cultural comparisons. Nevertheless, over time a research tradition has developed in which invariance tests are applied with the stated end goal of finding invariance between measures and an implicit view that non-invariance is a barrier to cross-cultural research. In the current paper we aim to challenge this view and urge researchers to consider non-invariance critically not as barrier, but as opportunity for cross-cultural research. Specifically, we show how invariance effect sizes of items can be used to understand psychometric distances between countries and formulate novel hypotheses on cultural differences. Using a previously published dataset on the cross-cultural comparability of subjective happiness from 59 countries, we show how invariance effect sizes can be used to detect problematic items and variables which shape the psychometric similarity of countries. Focusing on item differences, we showed that negatively worded items are performing markedly worse in cross-cultural comparisons and that this effect is exacerbated if countries are linguistically distant. Additionally, we showed that country level variables such as GDP or environmental factors such as temperature can be used to cluster similarities in psychometric functioning, creating novel possibilities to systematize sources of non-invariance on a granular level

Negative-Weight Single-Source Shortest Paths in Near-Linear Time: Now Faster!

In this work we revisit the fundamental Single-Source Shortest Paths (SSSP) problem with possibly negative edge weights. A recent breakthrough result by Bernstein, Nanongkai and Wulff-Nilsen established a near-linear $O(m \log^8(n) \log(W))$-time algorithm for negative-weight SSSP, where $W$ is an upper bound on the magnitude of the smallest negative-weight edge. In this work we improve the running time to $O(m \log^2(n) \log(nW) \log\log n)$, which is an improvement by nearly six log-factors. Some of these log-factors are easy to shave (e.g. replacing the priority queue used in Dijkstra's algorithm), while others are significantly more involved (e.g. to find negative cycles we design an algorithm reminiscent of noisy binary search and analyze it with drift analysis). As side results, we obtain an algorithm to compute the minimum cycle mean in the same running time as well as a new construction for computing Low-Diameter Decompositions in directed graphs