#mytweet via Instagram: Exploring User Behaviour across Multiple Social Networks

We study how users of multiple online social networks (OSNs) employ and share information by studying a common user pool that use six OSNs - Flickr, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. We analyze the temporal and topical signature of users' sharing behaviour, showing how they exhibit distinct behaviorial patterns on different networks. We also examine cross-sharing (i.e., the act of user broadcasting their activity to multiple OSNs near-simultaneously), a previously-unstudied behaviour and demonstrate how certain OSNs play the roles of originating source and destination sinks.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, 2015. This is the pre-peer reviewed version and the final version is available at http://wing.comp.nus.edu.sg/publications/2015/lim-et-al-15.pd

SCITAB: A Challenging Benchmark for Compositional Reasoning and Claim Verification on Scientific Tables

Current scientific fact-checking benchmarks exhibit several shortcomings, such as biases arising from crowd-sourced claims and an over-reliance on text-based evidence. We present SCITAB, a challenging evaluation dataset consisting of 1.2K expert-verified scientific claims that 1) originate from authentic scientific publications and 2) require compositional reasoning for verification. The claims are paired with evidence-containing scientific tables annotated with labels. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that SCITAB poses a significant challenge to state-of-the-art models, including table-based pretraining models and large language models. All models except GPT-4 achieved performance barely above random guessing. Popular prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought, do not achieve much performance gains on SCITAB. Our analysis uncovers several unique challenges posed by SCITAB, including table grounding, claim ambiguity, and compositional reasoning. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/XinyuanLu00/SciTab.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (main conference, long paper

Molecular Design of Sugar-Based Polyurethanes

Polyurethane (PUs) are present in many aspects of everyday lives such as the rigid foam insulation panel in construction, seat cushion in automotive and elastomeric materials in medical industries. Conventional PUs are made from petrochemical based starting materials which raised severe health and environmental concerns. The substitution of petro-based polyols with carbohydrate polyols have shown to improve biodegradability and mechanical properties of PUs. Reaction pathways were examined with density functional theory to design novel environmental friendly polyurethanes. Based on the calculated thermodynamic properties, the reactivity of sugars towards isocyanates was compared. Fructose was found to be the most reactive as the corresponding fructose-isocyanate reaction has the lowest energy barrier of 135.6 kJ/mol. Therefore, the results obtained have encouraged the synthesis of fructose-based polyurethane foam. The synthesis was successful, and the produced fully fructose-based foam was stable with minimal sign of shrinkage. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Detection of EBV Infection and Gene Expression in Oral Cancer from Patients in Taiwan by Microarray Analysis

Epstein-Barr virus is known to cause nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Although oral cavity is located close to the nasal pharynx, the pathogenetic role of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in oral cancers is unclear. This molecular epidemiology study uses EBV genomic microarray (EBV-chip) to simultaneously detect the prevalent rate and viral gene expression patterns in 57 oral squamous cell carcinoma biopsies (OSCC) collected from patients in Taiwan. The majority of the specimens (82.5%) were EBV-positive that probably expressed coincidently the genes for EBNAs, LMP2A and 2B, and certain structural proteins. Importantly, the genes fabricated at the spots 61 (BBRF1, BBRF2, and BBRF3) and 68 (BDLF4 and BDRF1) on EBV-chip were actively expressed in a significantly greater number of OSCC exhibiting exophytic morphology or ulceration than those tissues with deep invasive lesions (P = .0265 and .0141, resp.). The results may thus provide the lead information for understanding the role of EBV in oral cancer pathogenesis

Liposome-based polymer complex as a novel adjuvant: enhancement of specific antibody production and isotype switch

The aim of vaccination is to induce appropriate immunity against pathogens. Antibody-mediated immunity is critical for protection against many virus diseases, although it is becoming more evident that coordinated, multifunctional immune responses lead to the most effective defense. Specific antibody (Ab) isotypes are more efficient at protecting against pathogen invasion in different locations in the body. For example, compared to other Ab isotypes, immunoglobulin (Ig) A provides more protection at mucosal areas. In this study, we developed a cationic lipopolymer (liposome-polyethylene glycol-polyethyleneimine complex [LPPC]) adjuvant that strongly adsorbs antigens or immunomodulators onto its surface to enhance or switch immune responses. The results demonstrate that LPPC enhances uptake ability, surface marker expression, proinflammatory cytokine release, and antigen presentation in mouse phagocytes. In contrast to Freund’s adjuvant, LPPC preferentially activates Th1- immunity against antigens in vivo. With lipopolysaccharides or CpG oligodeoxynucleotides, LPPC dramatically enhances the IgA or IgG2A proportion of total Ig, even in hosts that have developed Th2 immunities and high IgG1 serum titers. Taken together, the results demonstrate that the LPPC adjuvant not only increases the immunogenicity of antigens but also modulates host immunity to produce an appropriate Ab isotype by combining with immunomodulators

Transmission of acute infectious illness among cases of Kawasaki disease and their household members

Background/purposeKawasaki disease (KD) is a disease of unknown cause and the causative agent is most likely to be infectious in nature. To investigate the household transmission pattern of infectious illness and etiology, we thus initiated a prospective case and household study.MethodsWe enrolled KD cases and their household members from February 2004 to September 2008. The KD cases and their household members accepted questionnaire-based interviews of the contact history, signs of infection, and symptoms to check whether clusters of infectious illness occurred.ResultsA total of 142 KD cases and 561 household members were enrolled. Among the 142 KD cases, 136 cases (96%) were typical KD, and six (4%) were atypical KD. Of the 561 household members, 17% were siblings, 46% were parents, 18% were grandparents, and the others were cousins or babysitters. Prior to the onset of their KD illness, 66% (94/142) KD cases had contact with ill household members. On the same day of the onset of KD cases' illness, 4% (6/142) KD cases had household members with illness. After KD cases' disease onset, 70% (100/142) KD cases had at least one other family member with illness. Overall, 61% (343/561) of all the household members had acute infectious illness during KD cases' acute stage, and 92% (130/142) of the families had clusters of infectious illness.ConclusionA total of 66% KD cases had positive contact with ill household members prior to their disease onset and 92% of families had clusters of infectious illness, so KD is strongly associated with infections

Uncovering distinct progression patterns of tau deposition in progressive supranuclear palsy using [18F]Florzolotau PET imaging and subtype/stage inference algorithm.

BACKGROUND Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a primary 4-repeat tauopathy with diverse clinical phenotypes. Previous post-mortem studies examined tau deposition sequences in PSP, but in vivo scrutiny is lacking. METHODS We conducted [18F]Florzolotau tau positron emission tomography (PET) scans on 148 patients who were clinically diagnosed with PSP and 20 healthy controls. We employed the Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) algorithm to identify PSP subtype/stage and related tau patterns, comparing clinical features across subtypes and assessing PSP stage-clinical severity association. We also evaluated functional connectivity differences among subtypes through resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. FINDINGS We identified two distinct subtypes of PSP: Subtype1 and Subtype2. Subtype1 typically exhibits a sequential progression of the disease, starting from subcortical and gradually moving to cortical regions. Conversely, Subtype2 is characterized by an early, simultaneous onset in both regions. Interestingly, once the disease is initiated, Subtype1 tends to spread more rapidly within each region compared to Subtype2. Individuals categorized as Subtype2 are generally older and exhibit less severe dysfunctions in areas such as cognition, bulbar, limb motor, and general motor functions compared to those with Subtype1. Moreover, they have a more favorable prognosis in terms of limb motor function. We found significant correlations between several clinical variables and the identified PSP SuStaIn stages. Furthermore, Subtype2 displayed a remarkable reduction in functional connectivity compared to Subtype1. INTERPRETATION We present the evidence of distinct in vivo spatiotemporal tau trajectories in PSP. Our findings can contribute to precision medicine advancements for PSP. FUNDING This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (number 82272039, 81971641, 82021002, and 92249302); Swiss National Science Foundation (number 188350); the STI2030-Major Project of China (number 2022ZD0211600); the Clinical Research Plan of Shanghai Hospital Development Center of China (number SHDC2020CR1038B); and the National Key R&D Program of China (number 2022YFC2009902, 2022YFC2009900), the China Scholarship Council (number 202006100181); the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under Germany's Excellence Strategy within the framework of the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (EXC 2145 SyNergy, ID 390857198)