Behavioural study on advertising and marketing practices in online social media : Annex 1.5 legal assessment of problematic practices

One of the main objectives of the Online Social Media study is to identify which are the most common practices to which the consumer is exposed on Online Social Media (OSM) platforms and, amongst those, the ones that raise issues of compatibility with consumer legislation. The present legal analysis examines the identified online social media practices in light of the applicable consumer legislation. The contracts concluded between consumers and OSM platforms, and OSM platforms and third party traders are not an object of this study. The scope of the legal research was set to cover predominantly the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and to some extent the Consumer Rights Directive, the Unfair Contract Terms Directive, and the E-commerce Directive. The focus of the study is on the assessment of the compatibility of the identified practices with these Directives. A number of other legal instruments of potential relevance for practices on online social media are not covered by this study, notably the new General Data Protection Regulation and the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, and specific legislation such as the Services Directive and the Audiovisual Media Directive

Postural Sway in Parkinson's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis Patients During Tasks With Different Complexity

Neurological diseases are associated with static postural instability. Differences in postural sway between neurological diseases could include “conceptual” information about how certain symptoms affect static postural stability. This information might have the potential to become a helpful aid during the process of finding the most appropriate treatment and training program. Therefore, this study investigated static postural sway performance of Parkinson's disease (PD) and multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, as well as of a cohort of healthy adults. Three increasingly difficult static postural tasks were performed, in order to determine whether the postural strategies of the two disease groups differ in response to the increased complexity of the balance task. Participants had to perform three stance tasks (side-by-side, semi-tandem and tandem stance) and maintain these positions for 10 s. Seven static sway parameters were extracted from an inertial measurement unit that participants wore on the lower back. Data of 47 healthy adults, 14 PD patients and 8 MS patients were analyzed. Both healthy adults and MS patients showed a substantial increase in several static sway parameters with increasingly complex stance tasks, whereas PD patients did not. In the MS patients, the observed substantial change was driven by large increases from semi-tandem and tandem stance. This study revealed differences in static sway adaptations between PD and MS patients to increasingly complex stance tasks. Therefore, PD and MS patients might require different training programs to improve their static postural stability. Moreover, this study indicates, at least indirectly, that rigidity/bradykinesia and spasticity lead to different adaptive processes in static sway

Terror from the Sky: Unconventional Linguistic Clues to the Negrito Past

Within recorded history. most Southeast Asian peoples have been of southern Mongoloid physical type, whether they speak Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai, or Hmong-Mien languages. However, population distributions suggest that this is a post-Pleistocene phenomenon and that for tens of millennia before the last glaciation ended Greater Mainland Southeast Asia, which included the currently insular world that rests on the Sunda Shelf, was peopled by short, dark-skinned, frizzy-haired foragers whose descendants in the Philippines came to be labeled by the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers as negritos, a term that has since been extended to similar groups throughout the region. There are three areas in which these populations survived into the present so as to become part of written history: the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, and the Andaman Islands. All Philippine negritos speak Austronesian languages, and all Malayan negritos speak languages in the nuclear Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic, but the linguistic situation in the Andamans is a world apart. Given prehistoric language shifts among both Philippine and Malayan negritos, the prospects of determining whether disparate negrito populations were once a linguistically or culturally unified community would appear hopeless. Surprisingly, however, some clues to a common negrito past do survive in a most unexpected way

Making Friends in the Rainforest: Negrito Adaptation to Risk and Uncertainty

The so-called negritos adapt not just to a tropical forest environment but also to an environment characterized by perturbations and fluctuations. As with other hunter-gatherers in the region and, indeed, throughout the world, they use both social and ecological methods to enhance their chances of survival in this changing environment: socially, they have developed networks of trading and marriage partners; ecologically, they maintain patches of key resources that are available for future harvesting. As evidenced in the case of the Batek (Orang Asli), patterns of forest structure and composition are sometimes direct outcomes of intentional resource concentration and enrichment strategies. While little of the above is controversial anthropologically, what has drawn some debate is the nature of the relationship with partner societies. Conventional wisdom posits relations of inequality between foragers and others : foragers and farmers are often construed as hierarchical dyads where foragers supply products or labor to farmers in exchange for agricultural harvests and other trade goods. This kind of adaptation appears to be one of divergent specialization. However, there are cases, such as in the relationship between Batek and Semaq Beri, where both societies follow a roughly similar mode of adaptation, and specialization has not materialized. In sum, while not denying that hierarchy and inequality exist, I suggest that they have to be contextualized within a larger strand of relationships that includes both hierarchy and egality. Further, such relationships are part of the general portfolio of risk reduction strategies, following which access to widely scattered environmental resources, and passage from one location to another, is enhanced not by competing with and displacing neighbors but by maintaining a flexible regime of friendly exchange partners

Craniodental Affinities of Southeast Asia\u27s Negritos and the Concordance with Their Genetic Affinities

Genetic research into Southeast Asia\u27s negritos has revealed their deep-rooted ancestry, with time depth comparable to that of Southwest Pacific populations. This finding is often interpreted as evidence that negritos, in contrast to other Southeast Asians, can trace much of their ancestry directly back to the early dispersal of Homo sapiens in the order of 70 kya from Africa to Pleistocene New Guinea and Australia. One view on negritos is to lump them and Southwest Pacific peoples into an Australoid race whose geographic distribution had included Southeast Asia prior to the Neolithic incursion of Mongoloid farmers. Studies into Semang osteology have revealed some hints of Southwest Pacific affinities in cranial shape, dental morphology, and dental metrical shape. On the other hand, the Andamanese have been shown to resemble Africans in their craniometrics and South Asians in their dental morphology, while Philippine negritos resemble Mongoloid Southeast Asians in these respects and also in their dental metrics. This study expands the scope of negrito cranial comparisons by including Melayu Malays and additional coverage of South Asians. It highlights the distinction between the Mongoloid-like Philippine negritos and the Andamanese and Semang (and Senoi of Malaya) with their non-Mongoloid associations. It proposes that the early/mid-Holocene dispersal of the B4a1a mitochondrial DNA clade across Borneo, the Philippines, and Taiwan may be important for understanding the distinction between Philippine and other negritos

HDAC7 Is a Repressor of Myeloid Genes Whose Downregulation Is Required for Transdifferentiation of Pre-B Cells into Macrophages

B lymphopoiesis is the result of several cell-commitment, lineage-choice, and differentiation processes. Every differentiation step is characterized by the activation of a new, lineage-specific, genetic program and the extinction of the previous one. To date, the central role of specific transcription factors in positively regulating these distinct differentiation processes to acquire a B cell-specific genetic program is well established. However, the existence of specific transcriptional repressors responsible for the silencing of lineage inappropriate genes remains elusive. Here we addressed the molecular mechanism behind repression of non-lymphoid genes in B cells. We report that the histone deacetylase HDAC7 was highly expressed in pre-B cells but dramatically down-regulated during cellular lineage conversion to macrophages. Microarray analysis demonstrated that HDAC7 re-expression interfered with the acquisition of the gene transcriptional program characteristic of macrophages during cell transdifferentiation; the presence of HDAC7 blocked the induction of key genes for macrophage function, such as immune, inflammatory, and defense response, cellular response to infections, positive regulation of cytokines production, and phagocytosis. Moreover, re-introduction of HDAC7 suppressed crucial functions of macrophages, such as the ability to phagocytose bacteria and to respond to endotoxin by expressing major pro-inflammatory cytokines. To gain insight into the molecular mechanisms mediating HDAC7 repression in pre-B cells, we undertook co-immunoprecipitation and chromatin immunoprecipitation experimental approaches. We found that HDAC7 specifically interacted with the transcription factor MEF2C in pre-B cells and was recruited to MEF2 binding sites located at the promoters of genes critical for macrophage function. Thus, in B cells HDAC7 is a transcriptional repressor of undesirable genes. Our findings uncover a novel role for HDAC7 in maintaining the identity of a particular cell type by silencing lineage-inappropriate genes

BCL6 is critical for the development of a diverse primary B cell repertoire

BCL6 protects germinal center (GC) B cells against DNA damage–induced apoptosis during somatic hypermutation and class-switch recombination. Although expression of BCL6 was not found in early IL-7–dependent B cell precursors, we report that IL-7Rα–Stat5 signaling negatively regulates BCL6. Upon productive VH-DJH gene rearrangement and expression of a μ heavy chain, however, activation of pre–B cell receptor signaling strongly induces BCL6 expression, whereas IL-7Rα–Stat5 signaling is attenuated. At the transition from IL-7–dependent to –independent stages of B cell development, BCL6 is activated, reaches expression levels resembling those in GC B cells, and protects pre–B cells from DNA damage–induced apoptosis during immunoglobulin (Ig) light chain gene recombination. In the absence of BCL6, DNA breaks during Ig light chain gene rearrangement lead to excessive up-regulation of Arf and p53. As a consequence, the pool of new bone marrow immature B cells is markedly reduced in size and clonal diversity. We conclude that negative regulation of Arf by BCL6 is required for pre–B cell self-renewal and the formation of a diverse polyclonal B cell repertoire

Motor, cognitive and mobility deficits in 1000 geriatric patients : protocol of a quantitative observational study before and after routine clinical geriatric treatment – the ComOn-study

© The Author(s). 2020 Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Motor and cognitive deficits and consequently mobility problems are common in geriatric patients. The currently available methods for diagnosis and for the evaluation of treatment in this vulnerable cohort are limited. The aims of the ComOn (COgnitive and Motor interactions in the Older populatioN) study are (i) to define quantitative markers with clinical relevance for motor and cognitive deficits, (ii) to investigate the interaction between both motor and cognitive deficits and (iii) to assess health status as well as treatment outcome of 1000 geriatric inpatients in hospitals of Kiel (Germany), Brescia (Italy), Porto (Portugal), Curitiba (Brazil) and Bochum (Germany). Methods: This is a prospective, explorative observational multi-center study. In addition to the comprehensive geriatric assessment, quantitative measures of reduced mobility and motor and cognitive deficits are performed before and after a two week's inpatient stay. Components of the assessment are mobile technology-based assessments of gait, balance and transfer performance, neuropsychological tests, frailty, sarcopenia, autonomic dysfunction and sensation, and questionnaires to assess behavioral deficits, activities of daily living, quality of life, fear of falling and dysphagia. Structural MRI and an unsupervised 24/7 home assessment of mobility are performed in a subgroup of participants. The study will also investigate the minimal clinically relevant change of the investigated parameters. Discussion: This study will help form a better understanding of symptoms and their complex interactions and treatment effects in a large geriatric cohort.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe