Intergroup Conflict Self-Perpetuates via Meaning: Exposure to Intergroup Conflict Increases Meaning and Fuels a Desire for Further Conflict

We investigated whether violent conflict provides individuals with a sense of meaning that they are hesitant to let go of, thus contributing to the perpetuation of intergroup conflict. Across a wide variety of contexts, we found that making intergroup conflict salient increased the meaning people found in conflict and, in turn, increased support for conflict-perpetuating beliefs, ideologies, policies, and behaviors. These effects were detected among participants exposed to reminders of intergroup conflict (the American Revolutionary War and the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS; Studies 1A and 1B), participants living through actual intergroup conflict (the 2014 Israel-Gaza war; Study 2), and participants who perceived actual intergroup conflicts to be larger versus smaller in scope (the November 2015 Paris attacks; Studies 3 and 4). We also found that directly manipulating the perceived meaning in conflict (in the context of the 2014 NYC "hatchet attack"; Study 5) led to greater perceived meaning in life in general and thereby greater support for conflict escalation. Together, these findings suggest that intergroup conflict can serve as a source of meaning that people are motivated to hold on to. We discuss our findings in the context of the meaning making and threat compensation literatures, and consider their implications for perspectives on conflict escalation and resolution

Prioritization of HCV treatment in the direct-acting antiviral era: an economic evaluation

BACKGROUND & AIMS: We determined the optimal HCV treatment prioritization strategy for interferon-free (IFN-free) HCV direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) by disease stage and risk status incorporating treatment of people who inject drugs (PWID). METHODS: A dynamic HCV transmission and progression model compared the cost-effectiveness of treating patients early vs. delaying until cirrhosis for patients with mild or moderate fibrosis, where PWID chronic HCV prevalence was 20, 40 or 60%. Treatment duration was 12weeks at £3300/wk, to achieve a 95% sustained viral response and was varied by genotype/stage in alternative scenarios. We estimated long-term health costs (in £UK=€1.3=$1.5) and outcomes as quality adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained using a £20,000 willingness to pay per QALY threshold. We ranked strategies with net monetary benefit (NMB); negative NMB implies delay treatment. RESULTS: The most cost-effective group to treat were PWID with moderate fibrosis (mean NMB per early treatment £60,640/£23,968 at 20/40% chronic prevalence, respectively), followed by PWID with mild fibrosis (NMB £59,258 and £19,421, respectively) then ex-PWID/non-PWID with moderate fibrosis (NMB £9,404). Treatment of ex-PWID/non-PWID with mild fibrosis could be delayed (NMB -£3,650). In populations with 60% chronic HCV among PWID it was only cost-effective to prioritize DAAs to ex-PWID/non-PWID with moderate fibrosis. For every one PWID in the 20% chronic HCV setting, 2 new HCV infections were averted. One extra HCV-related death was averted per 13 people with moderate disease treated. Rankings were unchanged with reduced drug costs or varied sustained virological response/duration by genotype/fibrosis stage. CONCLUSIONS: Treating PWID with moderate or mild HCV with IFN-free DAAs is cost-effective compared to delay until cirrhosis, except when chronic HCV prevalence and reinfection risk is very high

Co-expression of CD39 and CD103 identifies tumor-reactive CD8 T cells in human solid tumors.

Identifying tumor antigen-specific T cells from cancer patients has important implications for immunotherapy diagnostics and therapeutics. Here, we show that CD103+CD39+ tumor-infiltrating CD8 T cells (CD8 TIL) are enriched for tumor-reactive cells both in primary and metastatic tumors. This CD8 TIL subset is found across six different malignancies and displays an exhausted tissue-resident memory phenotype. CD103+CD39+ CD8 TILs have a distinct T-cell receptor (TCR) repertoire, with T-cell clones expanded in the tumor but present at low frequencies in the periphery. CD103+CD39+ CD8 TILs also efficiently kill autologous tumor cells in a MHC-class I-dependent manner. Finally, higher frequencies of CD103+CD39+ CD8 TILs in patients with head and neck cancer are associated with better overall survival. Our data thus describe an approach for detecting tumor-reactive CD8 TILs that will help define mechanisms of existing immunotherapy treatments, and may lead to future adoptive T-cell cancer therapies

Worker well-being and the importance of work: bridging the gap

The importance of worker well-being is widely-embraced both in theory and policy, but there are numerous perspectives on what it is, how to measure it, whether it needs improving and if so, how to improve it. We argue that a more complete approach to worker well-being needs to consider workers as full citizens who derive and experience both public and private benefits and costs from working. A broad framework on the meanings of work is used to expand the boundaries of worker well-being to reflect the broad importance of work in human life

EnvMine: A text-mining system for the automatic extraction of contextual information

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>For ecological studies, it is crucial to count on adequate descriptions of the environments and samples being studied. Such a description must be done in terms of their physicochemical characteristics, allowing a direct comparison between different environments that would be difficult to do otherwise. Also the characterization must include the precise geographical location, to make possible the study of geographical distributions and biogeographical patterns. Currently, there is no schema for annotating these environmental features, and these data have to be extracted from textual sources (published articles). So far, this had to be performed by manual inspection of the corresponding documents. To facilitate this task, we have developed EnvMine, a set of text-mining tools devoted to retrieve contextual information (physicochemical variables and geographical locations) from textual sources of any kind.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>EnvMine is capable of retrieving the physicochemical variables cited in the text, by means of the accurate identification of their associated units of measurement. In this task, the system achieves a recall (percentage of items retrieved) of 92% with less than 1% error. Also a Bayesian classifier was tested for distinguishing parts of the text describing environmental characteristics from others dealing with, for instance, experimental settings.</p> <p>Regarding the identification of geographical locations, the system takes advantage of existing databases such as GeoNames to achieve 86% recall with 92% precision. The identification of a location includes also the determination of its exact coordinates (latitude and longitude), thus allowing the calculation of distance between the individual locations.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>EnvMine is a very efficient method for extracting contextual information from different text sources, like published articles or web pages. This tool can help in determining the precise location and physicochemical variables of sampling sites, thus facilitating the performance of ecological analyses. EnvMine can also help in the development of standards for the annotation of environmental features.</p

Critical analysis of information security culture definitions

This article aims to advance the understanding of information security culture through a critical reflection on the wide-ranging definitions of information security culture in the literature. It uses the hermeneutic approach for conducting literature reviews. The review identifies 16 definitions of information security culture in the literature. Based on the analysis of these definitions, four different views of culture are distinguished. The shared values view highlights the set of cultural value patterns that are shared across the organization. An action-based view highlights the behaviors of individuals in the organization. A mental model view relates to the abstract view of the individual’s thinking on how information security culture must work. Finally, a problem-solving view emphasizes a combination of understanding from shared value-based and action-based views. The paper analyzes and presents the limitations of these four views of information security culture definitions

Cancer immunotherapy by immunosuppression

We have previously suggested that the stimulatory effect of a weak immune reaction on tumor growth may be necessary for the growth of incipient tumors. In the present paper, we enlarge upon and extend that idea by collecting evidence in the literature bearing upon this new hypothesis that a growing cancer, whether in man or mouse, is throughout its lifespan, probably growing and progressing because of continued immune stimulation by a weak immune reaction. We also suggest that prolonged immunosuppression might interfere with progression and thus be an aid to therapy. While most of the considerable evidence that supports the hypothesis comes from observations of experimental mouse tumors, there is suggestive evidence that human tumors may behave in much the same way, and as far as we can ascertain, there is no present evidence that necessarily refutes the hypothesis

MANAGING THE IMPACT OF DIFFERENCES IN NATIONAL CULTURE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL IN MULTINATIONAL IT PROJECT TEAMS – A GERMAN PERSPECTIVE

How can management handle relationship problems arising from cultural differences in multinational IT project teams? This paper uses a social capital lens to better understand the negative impact of cultural differences in IT project teams. In contrast to many previous works we do not consider cultural differences as a whole but explore the role of the different national culture dimensions. This allows for a more detailed view on cultural differences in a team context and thus contributes to a better understanding about which dimensions of national culture drive relationship problems and which management measures can help to dampen the negative effects. Based on several exploratory cases (6 multinational IT projects in 4 companies, headquartered in Germany), the authors identify three patterns showing typical problems in team social relationships which arise from differences in particular dimensions of national culture. Pattern-specific as well as general management measures, employed to address the culture-driven negative effects, are identified as well

Model projections on the impact of HCV treatment in the prevention of HCV transmission among people who inject drugs in Europe"

Prevention of hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission among people who inject drugs (PWID) is critical for eliminating HCV in Europe. We estimated the impact of current and scaled-up HCV treatment with and without scaling up opioid substitution therapy (OST) and needle and syringe programmes (NSPs) across Europe over the next 10 years. We collected data on PWID HCV treatment rates, PWID prevalence, HCV prevalence, OST, and NSP coverage from 11 European settings. We parameterised an HCV transmission model to setting-specific data that project chronic HCV prevalence and incidence among PWID. At baseline, chronic HCV prevalence varied from <25% (Slovenia/Czech Republic) to >55% (Finland/Sweden), and <2% (Amsterdam/Hamburg/Norway/Denmark/Sweden) to 5% (Slovenia/Czech Republic) of chronically infected PWID were treated annually. The current treatment rates using new direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) may achieve observable reductions in chronic prevalence (38-63%) in 10 years in Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Amsterdam. Doubling the HCV treatment rates will reduce prevalence in other sites (12-24%; Belgium/Denmark/Hamburg/Norway/Scotland), but is unlikely to reduce prevalence in Sweden and Finland. Scaling-up OST and NSP to 80% coverage with current treatment rates using DAAs could achieve observable reductions in HCV prevalence (18-79%) in all sites. Using DAAs, Slovenia and Amsterdam are projected to reduce incidence to 2 per 100 person years or less in 10 years. Moderate to substantial increases in the current treatment rates are required to achieve the same impact elsewhere, from 1.4 to 3 times (Czech Republic and France), 5-17 times (France, Scotland, Hamburg, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Sweden), to 200 times (Finland). Scaling-up OST and NSP coverage to 80% in all sites reduces treatment scale-up needed by 20-80%. The scale-up of HCV treatment and other interventions is needed in most settings to minimise HCV transmission among PWID in Europe. Measuring the amount of HCV in the population of PWID is uncertain. To reduce HCV infection to minimal levels in Europe will require scale-up of both HCV treatment and other interventions that reduce injecting risk (especially OST and provision of sterile injecting equipment