Responsible research and innovation in the digital age

At a time when increasingly potent technologies are being developed with the potential to transform society, researchers in all technological fields, including information and communications technology (ICT), are under growing pressure to consider and reflect on the motivations, purposes, and possible consequences associated with their research. This pressure comes from the general public, civil society, and government institutions. In parallel is a growing recognition that current ethics review procedures within ICT may not address broader concerns (such as the potential societal consequences of innovation)

Monitoring EDTA and endogenous metabolite biomarkers from serum with mass spectrometry

Copyright © 2005 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We describe a quantitative method for the determination of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) in human serum by gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS/MS), and desorption ionisation on silicon mass spectrometry (DIOS-MS). In the initial stages of the analysis, endogenous metabolites (1-palmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine and 1-stearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine) were readily observed in LC-ESI-MS and DIOS-MS however, direct analysis of the EDTA free acid had limited sensitivity. In order to improve EDTA detection we employed a straightforward esterification derivatization. The most successful derivatization procedure converted EDTA to its methyl ester and, since 13C isotopes of these reagents are readily available, internal standards could be easily generated for quantitative analysis. This approach provided a limit of detection of 0.5 and 0.1 μM for GC-MS and LC-ESI-MS, and offers a viable method for the EDTA detection

Online Sellers' Lived Experiences and Challenges: A Qualitative Study Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic.

With the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, online sellers faced challenges in managing their online business daily. Aside from it, their work-life balance has been negatively affected as well, considering that they work from home and are responsible for household responsibilities. Thus, this study is conducted during the pandemic and gathered data using a semi-structured interview through Messenger call. It is conducted to explore the lived experiences of online sellers and how they managed their online business and personal life. It also determines the specific challenges they’ve encountered and how they coped with them. Lastly, this study aims to map out how these experiences will benefit online sellers and consumers and explain that online selling can be both sustainable and convenient in terms of earning a good living and meeting their daily needs. Moreover, three major conclusions emerged from this study’s findings: (1) online sellers faced psychological and physical difficulties in managing their online business during the pandemic, (2) online sellers discovered ways on how to cope with the struggles they are facing, and (3) online sellers reflected on their experience to be more effective in the online selling industry

In Pursuit of Inclusive and Diverse Digital Futures : Exploring the Potential of Design Fiction in Education of Children

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants - children in schools and Child Computer Interaction researchers. We conducted one long-term project with two schools in Finland and two one-day workshops with an international set of participants. Through an analysis of participants’ experiences and outcomes in the project and workshops, we build a case for diversity and inclusion through design fiction in the context of children’s education. In addition, through an analysis of the process we as researchers took for developing the project and workshops, we showcase the support of diversity and inclusion in design fiction.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

A Search for Technosignatures Around 31 Sun-like Stars with the Green Bank Telescope at 1.15-1.73 GHz

We conducted a search for technosignatures in April of 2018 and 2019 with the L-band receiver (1.15-1.73 GHz) of the 100 m diameter Green Bank Telescope. These observations focused on regions surrounding 31 Sun-like stars near the plane of the Galaxy. We present the results of our search for narrowband signals in this data set as well as improvements to our data processing pipeline. Specifically, we applied an improved candidate signal detection procedure that relies on the topographic prominence of the signal power, which nearly doubles the signal detection count of some previously analyzed data sets. We also improved the direction-of-origin filters that remove most radio frequency interference (RFI) to ensure that they uniquely link signals observed in separate scans. We performed a preliminary signal injection and recovery analysis to test the performance of our pipeline. We found that our pipeline recovers 93% of the injected signals over the usable frequency range of the receiver and 98% if we exclude regions with dense RFI. In this analysis, 99.73% of the recovered signals were correctly classified as technosignature candidates. Our improved data processing pipeline classified over 99.84% of the ~26 million signals detected in our data as RFI. Of the remaining candidates, 4539 were detected outside of known RFI frequency regions. The remaining candidates were visually inspected and verified to be of anthropogenic nature. Our search compares favorably to other recent searches in terms of end-to-end sensitivity, frequency drift rate coverage, and signal detection count per unit bandwidth per unit integration time.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, in press at the Astronomical Journal (submitted on Sept. 9, 2020; reviews received Nov. 6; re-submitted Nov. 6; accepted Nov. 17

Dynamic Assessment of Baroreflex Control of Heart Rate During Induction of Propofol Anesthesia Using a Point Process Method

In this article, we present a point process method to assess dynamic baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) by estimating the baroreflex gain as focal component of a simplified closed-loop model of the cardiovascular system. Specifically, an inverse Gaussian probability distribution is used to model the heartbeat interval, whereas the instantaneous mean is identified by linear and bilinear bivariate regressions on both the previous R−R intervals (RR) and blood pressure (BP) beat-to-beat measures. The instantaneous baroreflex gain is estimated as the feedback branch of the loop with a point-process filter, while the RRBP feedforward transfer function representing heart contractility and vasculature effects is simultaneously estimated by a recursive least-squares filter. These two closed-loop gains provide a direct assessment of baroreflex control of heart rate (HR). In addition, the dynamic coherence, cross bispectrum, and their power ratio can also be estimated. All statistical indices provide a valuable quantitative assessment of the interaction between heartbeat dynamics and hemodynamics. To illustrate the application, we have applied the proposed point process model to experimental recordings from 11 healthy subjects in order to monitor cardiovascular regulation under propofol anesthesia. We present quantitative results during transient periods, as well as statistical analyses on steady-state epochs before and after propofol administration. Our findings validate the ability of the algorithm to provide a reliable and fast-tracking assessment of BRS, and show a clear overall reduction in baroreflex gain from the baseline period to the start of propofol anesthesia, confirming that instantaneous evaluation of arterial baroreflex control of HR may yield important implications in clinical practice, particularly during anesthesia and in postoperative care.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-HL084502)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant K25-NS05758)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant DP2- OD006454)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant T32NS048005)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-DA015644)Massachusetts General Hospital (Clinical Research Center, UL1 Grant RR025758

Neurodevelopmental Disruption of Cortico-Striatal Function Caused by Degeneration of Habenula Neurons

The habenula plays an important role on cognitive and affective functions by regulating monoamines transmission such as the dopamine and serotonin, such that its dysfunction is thought to underlie a number of psychiatric conditions. Given that the monoamine systems are highly vulnerable to neurodevelopmental insults, damages in the habenula during early neurodevelopment may cause devastating effects on the wide-spread brain areas targeted by monoamine innervations.Using a battery of behavioral, anatomical, and biochemical assays, we examined the impacts of neonatal damage in the habenula on neurodevelopmental sequelae of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and associated behavioral deficits in rodents. Neonatal lesion of the medial and lateral habenula by ibotenic acid produced an assortment of behavioral manifestations consisting of hyper-locomotion, impulsivity, and attention deficit, with hyper-locomotion and impulsivity being observed only in the juvenile period, whereas attention deficit was sustained up until adulthood. Moreover, these behavioral alterations were also improved by amphetamine. Our study further revealed that impulsivity and attention deficit were associated with disruption of PFC volume and dopamine (DA) receptor expression, respectively. In contrast, hyper-locomotion was associated with decreased DA transporter expression in the NAcc. We also found that neonatal administration of nicotine into the habenula of neonatal brains produced selective lesion of the medial habenula. Behavioral deficits with neonatal nicotine administration were similar to those caused by ibotenic acid lesion of both medial and lateral habenula during the juvenile period, whereas they were different in adulthood.Because of similarity between behavioral and brain alterations caused by neonatal insults in the habenula and the symptoms and suggested neuropathology in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), these results suggest that neurodevelopmental deficits in the habenula and the consequent cortico-striatal dysfunctions may be involved in the pathogenesis and pathophysiology of ADHD