Reliability and clinical usefulness of the personality inventory for DSM-5 in clinically referred adolescents. A preliminary report in a sample of Italian inpatients

Background The DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) provides the opportunity to integrate the needed developmental perspective in the assessment of personality pathology. Based on this model, Krueger and colleagues (2012) developed the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), which operationalizes the proposed DSM-5 traits. Methods Eighty-five consecutively admitted Italian adolescent inpatients were administered the Italian translation of the PID-5, in order to obtain preliminary data on PID-5 reliability and clinical usefulness in clinically referred adolescents. Results With the possible exception of the PID-5 Suspiciousness scale, all other PID-5 scales evidenced adequate internal consistency reliability (i.e., Cronbach's α values of at least .70, most being greater than .80). Our data seemed to yield at least partial support for the construct validity of the PID-5 scales also in clinical adolescents, at least in terms of patterns of associations with dimensionally assessed DSM-5 Section II PDs that were also included in the DSM-5 AMPD (excluding Antisocial PD because of the participants' minor age). Finally, our data suggested that the clinical usefulness of the PID-5 in adolescent inpatients may extend beyond PDs to profiling adolescents at risk for life-threatening suicide attempts. In particular, PID-5 Depressivity, Anhedonia, and Submissiveness trait scales were significantly associated with adolescents' history of life-threatening suicide attempts, even after controlling for a number of other variables, including mood disorder diagnosis. Discussion As a whole, our study may provide interesting, albeit preliminary data as to the clinical usefulness of PID-5 in the assessment of adolescent inpatients

Chinese MNE Acquisition of Unrelated Foreign Businesses: The Role of Diversified Business Group Affiliation, Private Ownership and Strategic Asset Seeking

While the acquisition by Chinese firms of unrelated foreign businesses has become quite common, it is a highly risky undertaking not fully explained by international business scholars. Using resource-based and institutional theory, we hypothesize that affiliation with a domestically diversified business group confers pre- and post-acquisition advantages and legitimacy, fostering unrelated foreign acquisitions. In addition, we argue that private ownership as well as a motive to seek strategic assets amplify this tendency among Chinese firms affiliated to diversified groups. Ordered logit modelling for 662 Chinese cross-border M&As over a 10-year period provides support for our hypotheses. Our findings shed new light on: the distinctive characteristics of Chinese MNEs; broader conceptual arguments regarding the strategy of emerging market MNEs; the apparent paradox of why Chinese MNEs have used international acquisitions to diversify at a time when many Western diversified conglomerates are divesting non-core businesses

Engineering sulfate donor accumulation in Escherichia coli for synthesis of sulfated glycosaminoglycans

The model bacterium Escherichia coli has been extensively engineered for a variety of applications. However, sulfated biomolecules remain a relatively under-explored domain of biologics that can be synthesized using E. coli. An important class in this domain are sulfated glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) which are of great pharmaceutical/nutraceutical interest. On-going studies aim at developing efficient and scalable chemical and chemoenzymatic methods to produce these compounds. However, we propose that engineered E. coli capable of entirely in vivo synthesis of sulfated GAGs will serve as a great alternative to the current state-of-art. The biosynthesis of sulfated biomolecules relies on the universal sulfate donor, 3’-phosphoadenosine-5’-phosphosulfate (PAPS). PAPS plays the role of a co-enzyme in enzymatic sulfotransferase reactions and donates the sulfate to the substrate. In the first part of this study, we engineered the metabolism of E. coli to improve PAPS accumulation around 10000-fold. In the second part, we applied this engineered strain to in vitro biosynthesis of chondroitin sulfate (a sulfated GAG). Certain strains of E. coli possess the ability to biosynthesize unsulfated GAG backbones. These have been well-studied and optimized for GAG production. In vitro sulfation requires the addition of purified sulfotransferase and an excess of commercially obtained PAPS to the unsulfated GAG. By utilizing PAPS from our engineered strain in the existing setup, we improve the biotransformation method to one in which all components are synthesized from E. coli. We also use this system and its comparison to other in vitro systems to identify the bottlenecks for total in vivo synthesis of sulfated GAGs in E. coli. We show for the first time that with this system, we have achieved the synthesis of chondroitin sulfate A without the dependence on the commercially procured PAPS cofactor

A New Method of Blind Deconvolution for Colour Fundus Retinal Images

Fundus retinal imaging is widely used in the diagnosis and management of eye disease. Blur commonly occurs in the acquisition and when it is severe the resulting loss of resolution hampers accurate clinical assessment. In this paper, we present a new technique to address this challenging problem. We make use of implicitly constrained image deblurring, which is known to provide improved results over unconstrained and explicitly constrained methods, and build this into a multi-channel variational framework for parametric deblurring. We propose a new method for automatically selecting the regularisation parameter in the absence of the true (sharp) image using vessel segmentation. We then modify the model to include a regularisation coefficient function which is dependent on an available image mask in order to avoid potential inaccuracies caused by the addition of artificial masks. We present experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our new method

Genomic variations define divergence of water/wildlife-associated Campylobacter jejuni niche specialists from common clonal complexes

Although the major food-borne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni has been isolated from diverse animal, human and environmental sources, our knowledge of genomic diversity in C. jejuni is based exclusively on human or human food-chain-associated isolates. Studies employing multilocus sequence typing have indicated that some clonal complexes are more commonly associated with particular sources. Using comparative genomic hybridization on a collection of 80 isolates representing diverse sources and clonal complexes, we identified a separate clade comprising a group of water/wildlife isolates of C. jejuni with multilocus sequence types uncharacteristic of human food-chain-associated isolates. By genome sequencing one representative of this diverse group (C. jejuni 1336), and a representative of the bank-vole niche specialist ST-3704 (C. jejuni 414), we identified deletions of genomic regions normally carried by human food-chain-associated C. jejuni. Several of the deleted regions included genes implicated in chicken colonization or in virulence. Novel genomic insertions contributing to the accessory genomes of strains 1336 and 414 were identified. Comparative analysis using PCR assays indicated that novel regions were common but not ubiquitous among the water/wildlife group of isolates, indicating further genomic diversity among this group, whereas all ST-3704 isolates carried the same novel accessory regions. While strain 1336 was able to colonize chicks, strain 414 was not, suggesting that regions specifically absent from the genome of strain 414 may play an important role in this common route of Campylobacter infection of humans. We suggest that the genomic divergence observed constitutes evidence of adaptation leading to niche specialization

Discovering latent structure in task-oriented dialogues.

Abstract A key challenge for computational conversation models is to discover latent structure in task-oriented dialogue, since it provides a basis for analysing, evaluating, and building conversational systems. We propose three new unsupervised models to discover latent structures in task-oriented dialogues. Our methods synthesize hidden Markov models (for underlying state) and topic models (to connect words to states). We apply them to two real, non-trivial datasets: human-computer spoken dialogues in bus query service, and humanhuman text-based chats from a live technical support service. We show that our models extract meaningful state representations and dialogue structures consistent with human annotations. Quantitatively, we show our models achieve superior performance on held-out log likelihood evaluation and an ordering task