Origin and destination attachment: study of cultural integration on Twitter

The cultural integration of immigrants conditions their overall socio-economic integration as well as natives’ attitudes towards globalisation in general and immigration in particular. At the same time, excessive integration—or assimilation—can be detrimental in that it implies forfeiting one’s ties to the origin country and eventually translates into a loss of diversity (from the viewpoint of host countries) and of global connections (from the viewpoint of both host and home countries). Cultural integration can be described using two dimensions: the preservation of links to the origin country and culture, which we call origin attachment, and the creation of new links together with the adoption of cultural traits from the new residence country, which we call destination attachment. In this paper we introduce a means to quantify these two aspects based on Twitter data. We build origin and destination attachment indices and analyse their possible determinants (e.g., language proximity, distance between countries), also in relation to Hofstede’s cultural dimension scores. The results stress the importance of language: a common language between origin and destination countries favours origin attachment, as does low proficiency in the host language. Common geographical borders seem to favour both origin and destination attachment. Regarding cultural dimensions, larger differences among origin and destination countries in terms of Individualism, Masculinity and Uncertainty appear to favour destination attachment and lower origin attachment

An Evidence-based Framework for Reporting Student Nurse Medication Incidents: Errors, Near Misses and Discovered Errors

Purpose: To share an evidence-based framework for reporting and analysing three types of medication incidents in an undergraduate nursing program. Incident types include errors, near misses and discovered errors. Background: Medication errors are underreported. Published studies on errors by nursing students indicate that although errors occur during clinical placements, there is a lack of consensus on how the factors that contributed to the errors are reported and analyzed. This limits our understanding of the factors that impact safe medication administration and reduces our ability to apply this knowledge to education and practice. Method: Quality improvement project. Results: Our reporting framework quantifies system factors that are supported by the literature as contributing to errors but not usually captured in incident reporting. Contributing factors for errors and near misses varied. This finding has not been documented in the literature. Conclusion: Nursing schools should prepare nursing students with a strong commitment to report all incidents and provide them with the competencies and a reporting system that allows them to report efficiently and effectively. As these graduates enter the workforce, they can influence the reporting practices of seasoned nurses. The ten factor framework provides nursing schools with the ability to quantify the individual and system factors that influence the safety of the student nurse medication administration process and the opportunity to implement strategies to reduce and/or prevent these incidents from occurring. Objectif : Présenter un cadre fondé sur des résultats probants pour signaler et analyser trois types d’incidents liés aux médicaments dans un programme de premier cycle en sciences infirmières, soit les erreurs, les quasi-incidents et les erreurs découvertes. Contexte : Les erreurs de médication ne sont pas toutes signalées. Les études publiées portant sur les erreurs causées par des étudiantes infirmières indiquent que, même si les erreurs se produisent durant les stages cliniques, la manière de signaler et d’analyser les facteurs contributifs ne fait pas consensus. Cela limite notre compréhension des facteurs influant sur l’administration sécuritaire des médicaments et réduit notre capacité à mettre en application ces connaissances en formation et en pratique. Méthode : Projet d’amélioration de la qualité. Résultats : Notre cadre de signalements quantifie les facteurs systémiques qui, selon la littérature sur le sujet, contribuent à des erreurs, mais ne figurent pas normalement dans les déclarations d’incident. Les facteurs ayant contribué à des erreurs et quasi-incidents étaient variables. Ce résultat n’a pas été rapporté dans la littérature. Conclusion : Les écoles de sciences infirmières devraient enseigner aux étudiantes infirmières l’importance de signaler l’ensemble des incidents tout en leur fournissant les habiletés et un système de déclaration qui leur permet de les déclarer de façon efficace et efficiente. Lorsque les diplômées intègreront le marché du travail, elles pourront influencer les pratiques des infirmières chevronnées en matière de signalement. Le cadre composé de dix facteurs permet aux écoles de sciences infirmières de quantifier les facteurs individuels et systémiques ayant un impact sur la sécurité du processus d’administration des médicaments par des étudiantes infirmières; il leur permet aussi de mettre en œuvre des stratégies de réduction ou de prévention de tels incidents

Establishment of two cell lines from embryonic cells of Pectinophora gossypiella (Lepidoptera : Gelichiidae)

Two cell lines from the most important insect pest of cotton, #Pectinophora gossypiella S., were obtained from an embryonic tissue culture. The cells were cultured in GRACE's modified medium. The first cell line, designated ORS-PgS (PgS), was obtained by selecting the non-adherent cells during subculturing and consisted of a homogeneous population of rounded cells. The second cell line, designated ORS-PgA (PgA), obtained without any artificial selection, was a heterogeneous population of spherical and spindle-shaped cells with a great capacity to adhere. The two cell lines had a doubling time of 40 and 48 h respectively and were sub-cultured for more than 50 passages. Their polypeptidic profiles appeared identical but were different from those of other lepidopteran cell lines tested. The two cell lines support the multiplication of #Autographa california nucleopolyhedrovirus, producing 100000 plaque forming units/ml. In 1 to 2% PgS cells, polyhedra were synthetized, whereas PgA cells multiplied only virions. (Résumé d'auteur

A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness

We present a research roadmap of a Planetary Nervous System (PNS), capable of sensing and mining the digital breadcrumbs of human activities and unveiling the knowledge hidden in the big data for addressing the big questions about social complexity. We envision the PNS as a globally distributed, self-organizing, techno-social system for answering analytical questions about the status of world-wide society, based on three pillars: social sensing, social mining and the idea of trust networks and privacy-aware social mining. We discuss the ingredients of a science and a technology necessary to build the PNS upon the three mentioned pillars, beyond the limitations of their respective state-of-art. Social sensing is aimed at developing better methods for harvesting the big data from the techno-social ecosystem and make them available for mining, learning and analysis at a properly high abstraction level. Social mining is the problem of discovering patterns and models of human behaviour from the sensed data across the various social dimensions by data mining, machine learning and social network analysis. Trusted networks and privacy-aware social mining is aimed at creating a new deal around the questions of privacy and data ownership empowering individual persons with full awareness and control on own personal data, so that users may allow access and use of their data for their own good and the common good. The PNS will provide a goal-oriented knowledge discovery framework, made of technology and people, able to configure itself to the aim of answering questions about the pulse of global society. Given an analytical request, the PNS activates a process composed by a variety of interconnected tasks exploiting the social sensing and mining methods within the transparent ecosystem provided by the trusted network. The PNS we foresee is the key tool for individual and collective awareness for the knowledge society. We need such a tool for everyone to become fully aware of how powerful is the knowledge of our society we can achieve by leveraging our wisdom as a crowd, and how important is that everybody participates both as a consumer and as a producer of the social knowledge, for it to become a trustable, accessible, safe and useful public good. Graphical abstrac

Production of Axions by Cosmic Magnetic Helicity

We investigate the effects of an external magnetic helicity production on the evolution of the cosmic axion field. It is shown that a helicity larger than (few \times 10^{-15} G)^2 Mpc, if produced at temperatures above a few GeV, is in contradiction with the existence of the axion, since it would produce too much of an axion relic abundance.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, major changes in the first part of the paper, reference added, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let

Mise en évidence d'un virus de granulose chez Sesamia cretica Led. (Lepidoptera Noctuidae), principal ravageur du maïs d'Afrique du Nord-Est : caractérisation de l'ADN génomique et diagnostic viral

Un virus de granulose a été isolé du foreur de tige de maïs #Sesamia cretica Led. (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae) en Egypte. L'ADN de ce Baculovirus, dénommé ScGV (#S. cretica Granulosis Virus), a été caractérisé. La taille du génome a été estimée à 112 kilobases et des profils caractéristiques de restriciton enzymatique ont été dressés pour 17 endonucléases. Des méthodes de diagnostic viral, test immunoenzymatique ELISA et sonde nucléique totale, ont été établies et testées en vue d'études épidémiologiques de la maladie. (Résumé d'auteur

Dilaton Interactions and the Anomalous Breaking of Scale Invariance of the Standard Model

We discuss the main features of dilaton interactions for fundamental and effective dilaton fields. In particular, we elaborate on the various ways in which dilatons can couple to the Standard Model and on the role played by the conformal anomaly as a way to characterize their interactions. In the case of a dilaton derived from a metric compactification (graviscalar), we present the structure of the radiative corrections to its decay into two photons, a photon and a $Z$, two $Z$ gauge bosons and two gluons, together with their renormalization properties. We prove that, in the electroweak sector, the renormalization of the theory is guaranteed only if the Higgs is conformally coupled. For such a dilaton, its coupling to the trace anomaly is quite general, and determines, for instance, an enhancement of its decay rates into two photons and two gluons. We then turn our attention to theories containing a non-gravitational (effective) dilaton, which, in our perturbative analysis, manifests as a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone mode of the dilatation current ($J_D$). The infrared coupling of such a state to the two-photons and to the two-gluons sector, and the corresponding anomaly enhancements of its decay rates in these channels, is critically analyzed.Comment: Revised version, 42 pages, 5 figure

Probing the axion-nucleon coupling with the next generation of axion helioscopes

A finite axion–nucleon coupling, nearly unavoidable for QCD axions, leads to the production of axions via the thermal excitation and subsequent de-excitation of 57Fe isotopes in the sun. We revise the solar bound on this flux adopting the up to date emission rate, and investigate the sensitivity of the proposed International Axion Observatory IAXO and its intermediate stage BabyIAXO to detect these axions. We compare different realistic experimental options and discuss the model dependence of the signal. Already BabyIAXO has sensitivity far beyond previous solar axion searches via the nucleon coupling and IAXO can improve on this by more than an order of magnitude