Welcome Home Ramsey: Creating Housing Opportunities for All

Report completed by students enrolled in PA 5211: Land Use Planning, taught by Fernando Burga in fall 2017.This project was completed as part of the 2017-2018 Resilient Communities Project (rcp.umn.edu) partnership with the City of Ramsey. Ramsey's housing plan was last updated in 2008. The plan identified numerous strategies for achieving the City’s housing goals, including increased housing density, redeveloping underutilized land, and engaging underserved populations. Since then, the City has made good progress in terms of achieving its workforce and senior housing goals, but public support for some of the City’s other housing goals is not as strong. The City sought assistance developing a communication/outreach strategy to make the case for various housing types and the value they add to the community. Students in Dr. Fernando Burga’s Land Use Planning class analyzed housing needs in the community, identified three locations accessible to transit or jobs as potential locations for additional workforce and affordable housing, presented case studies of policy strategies to increase affordable housing, and made policy recommendations for the City going forward. The students’ final report is available.This project was supported by the Resilient Communities Project (RCP), a program at the University of Minnesota whose mission is to connect communities in Minnesota with U of MN faculty and students to advance community resilience through collaborative, course-based projects. RCP is a program of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA). More information at http://www.rcp.umn.edu

Linear Ranking Analysis

We extend the classical linear discriminant analysis (L-DA) technique to linear ranking analysis (LRA), by con-sidering the ranking order of classes centroids on the pro-jected subspace. Under the constrain on the ranking order of the classes, two criteria are proposed: 1) minimization of the classification error with the assumption that each class is homogenous Guassian distributed; 2) maximiza-tion of the sum (average) of the k minimum distances of all neighboring-class (centroid) pairs. Both criteria can be efficiently solved by the convex optimization for one-dimensional subspace. Greedy algorithm is applied to ex-tend the results to the multi-dimensional subspace. Experi-mental results show that 1) LRA with both criteria achieve state-of-the-art performance on the tasks of ranking learn-ing and zero-shot learning; and 2) the maximummargin cri-terion provides a discriminative subspace selection method, which can significantly remedy the class separation prob-lem in comparing with several representative extensions of LDA. 1

Prevalence and Correlates of Discomfort and Acceptability of Acupuncture among Outpatients in Chinese Acupuncture and Moxibustion Departments: A Cross-Sectional Study

Objective. This study aims to give a profile of discomfort and acceptability of acupuncture, including the prevalence and association with demographic and acupuncture-related factors. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Beijing, China. Outpatients of acupuncture and moxibustion departments were recruited using purposive sampling. 925 subjects were interviewed with an anonymous questionnaire. Multinomial and binary logistic regression were used to analyze factors affecting discomfort and acceptability of acupuncture. Results. The average VAS value of 925 subjects’ acupuncture discomfort was 2.66 ± 2.02, within the range of mild discomfort. Acupuncture was easily accepted by 81.1% of the subjects. Results of logistic regression were as follows: (1) subjects with a better knowledge of acupuncture, or a greater fear of pain or needles, experienced more “moderate to severe discomfort” and showed a decreased acupuncture acceptance (P<0.001 or P<0.01); (2) Acupuncture with less discomfort or implemented by a more qualified doctor was easy to be accepted (P<0.001); (3) subjects aged 20–29 preferred to report “moderate to severe discomfort” while those aged 40–59 preferred to report “slight discomfort” (P<0.001). Conclusion. Acupuncture is an acceptable therapy with less discomfort, which can be greatly affected by fear of pain or needles, age, knowledge of acupuncture, and professional title of acupuncturist

Nearly 100% selective and visible-light-driven methane conversion to formaldehyde via. single-atom Cu and Wδ+

Direct solar-driven methane (CH4) reforming is highly desirable but challenging, particularly to achieve a value-added product with high selectivity. Here, we identify a synergistic ensemble effect of atomically dispersed copper (Cu) species and partially reduced tungsten (Wδ+), stabilised over an oxygen-vacancy-rich WO3, which enables exceptional photocatalytic CH4 conversion to formaldehyde (HCHO) under visible light, leading to nearly 100% selectivity, a very high yield of 4979.0 μmol·g-1 within 2 h, and the normalised mass activity of 8.5 × 106 μmol·g-1Cu·h-1 of HCHO at ambient temperature. In-situ EPR and XPS analyses indicate that the Cu species serve as the electron acceptor, promoting the photo-induced electron transfer from the conduction band to O2, generating reactive •OOH radicals. In parallel, the adjacent Wδ+ species act as the hole acceptor and the preferred adsorption and activation site of H2O to produce hydroxyl radicals (•OH), and thus activate CH4 to methyl radicals (•CH3). The synergy of the adjacent dual active sites boosts the overall efficiency and selectivity of the conversion process

Did your child get disturbed by an inappropriate advertisement on YouTube?

YouTube is a popular video platform for sharing creative content and ideas, targeting different demographics. Adults, older children, and young children are all avid viewers of YouTube videos. Meanwhile, countless young-kid-oriented channels have produced numerous instructional and age appropriate videos for young children. However, inappropriate content for young children, such as violent or sexually suggestive content, still exists. And children lack the ability to decide whether a video is appropriate for them or not, which then causes a huge risk to children's mental health. Prior works have focused on identifying YouTube videos that are inappropriate for children. However, these works ignore that not only the actual video content influences children, but also the advertisements that are shown with those videos. In this paper, we quantify the influence of inappropriate advertisements on YouTube videos that are appropriate for young children to watch. We analyze the advertising patterns of 24.6 K diverse YouTube videos appropriate for young children. We find that 9.9% of the 4.6 K unique advertisements shown on these 24.6 K videos contain inappropriate content for young children. Moreover, we observe that 26.9% of all the 24.6 K appropriate videos include at least one ad that is inappropriate for young children. Additionally, we publicly release our datasets and provide recommendations about how to address this issue.Comment: In Proceedings of KDD Undergraduate Consortium (KDD-UC 2022

High-throughput sequencing-based analysis of the composition and diversity of endophytic bacteria community in tubers of Gastrodia elata f.glauca

Gastrodia elata f.glauca (G. elata) is a commonly used Chinese Medicinal Materials with great medicinal value. The medicinal plant and its endophytic bacteria are a symbiotic whole, and the endophytic bacteria are rich in species, and their metabolites are a treasure trove of natural compounds. However, there is a relative lack of analysis on the diversity, flora composition and network interactions of the endophytic bacteria of G. elata. In this study, high-throughput sequencing technology based on the Illumina Miseq platform was used to reveal the core microbiota by examining the diversity and community structures of tuber endophytic bacteria in G. elata grown under different regions and exploring the effect of region on its endophytic bacteria. Here, 1,265 endophytic ASVs were found to coexist with G. elata tuber in Guizhou and Hubei. At the phylum level, the dominant phyla were Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Acdobacteriota. At the family level, the dominant family were Comamonadaceae, Nocardicaece, Xanthobacteraceae, and Burkholderiaceae. At the genus level, Delftia and Rhodococcus were represented the core microbiota in G. elata tuber, which served as the dominant genera that coexisted in all samples tested. Moreover, we found that the beta diversity of endophytic bacteria in G. elata tuber was higher level in the Guizhou region than Hubei region. Overall, this study results to provide a reference for screening active strains and interaction between plants and endophytic bacteria

Histone Lysine Methyltransferase SDG8 Is Involved in Brassinosteroid-Regulated Gene Expression in Arabidopsis thaliana

Citation: Wang, X., Chen, J., Xie, Z., Liu, S., Nolan, T., Ye, H., et al. (2014). Histone lysine methyltransferase SDG8 is involved in brassinosteroid- regulated gene expression in arabidopsis thaliana.The plant steroid hormones, brassinosteroids (BRs), play important roles in plant growth, development and responses to environmental stresses. BRs signal through receptors localized to the plasma membrane and other signaling components to regulate the BES1/BZR1 family of transcription factors, which modulates the expression of 4,000-5,000 genes. How BES1/BZR1 and their interacting proteins function to regulate the large number of genes are not completely understood. Here we report that histone lysine methyltransferase SDG8, implicated in Histone 3 lysine 36 di- and tri-methylation (H3K36me2 and me3), is involved in BR-regulated gene expression. BES1 interacts with SDG8, directly or indirectly through IWS1, a transcription elongation factor involved in BR-regulated gene expression. The knockout mutant sdg8 displays a reduced growth phenotype with compromised BR responses. Global gene expression studies demonstrated that SDG8 plays a major role in BR-regulated gene expression as more than half of BR-regulated genes are differentially affected in sdg8 mutant. A Chromatin Immunoprecipitation (ChIP) experiment showed that H3K36me3 is reduced in BR-regulated genes in the sdg8 mutant. Based on these results, we propose that SDG8 plays an essential role in mediating BR-regulated gene expression. Our results thus reveal a major mechanism by which histone modifications dictate hormonal regulation of gene expression

Privacy-Preserving Aggregation in Federated Learning: A Survey

Over the recent years, with the increasing adoption of Federated Learning (FL) algorithms and growing concerns over personal data privacy, Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (PPFL) has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. Practical PPFL typically allows multiple participants to individually train their machine learning models, which are then aggregated to construct a global model in a privacy-preserving manner. As such, Privacy-Preserving Aggregation (PPAgg) as the key protocol in PPFL has received substantial research interest. This survey aims to fill the gap between a large number of studies on PPFL, where PPAgg is adopted to provide a privacy guarantee, and the lack of a comprehensive survey on the PPAgg protocols applied in FL systems. In this survey, we review the PPAgg protocols proposed to address privacy and security issues in FL systems. The focus is placed on the construction of PPAgg protocols with an extensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of these selected PPAgg protocols and solutions. Additionally, we discuss the open-source FL frameworks that support PPAgg. Finally, we highlight important challenges and future research directions for applying PPAgg to FL systems and the combination of PPAgg with other technologies for further security improvement.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figure