Social Justice Conversations: Using Critical Dialogue to Unpack Oppression

Dialogues can bring people together across social divides to develop mutual understanding, generate empathy, and challenge oppression. Yet, all too often, these conversations derail and merely reinforce rather than challenge the social divides they are designed to bridge. We piloted a brief small group program aimed at fostering dialogue about racism and other forms of oppression with 100 undergraduates. A thematic analysis of the resulting 37 group transcripts found that the critical dialogue process helped participants unpack the nature and complexity of oppression, deepen their understanding of privilege, and begin to share and challenge the experience of oppression itself. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and personal experiences, participants used the critical dialogue process to work together to disrupt oppression in their lives

Data Assimilation Enhancements to Air Force Weathers Land Information System

The United States Air Force (USAF) has a proud and storied tradition of enabling significant advancements in the area of characterizing and modeling land state information. 557th Weather Wing (557 WW; DoDs Executive Agent for Land Information) provides routine geospatial intelligence information to warfighters, planners, and decision makers at all echelons and services of the U.S. military, government and intelligence community. 557 WW and its predecessors have been home to the DoDs only operational regional and global land data analysis systems since January 1958. As a trusted partner since 2005, Air Force Weather (AFW) has relied on the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA/GSFC to lead the interagency scientific collaboration known as the Land Information System (LIS). LIS is an advanced software framework for high performance land surface modeling and data assimilation of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) information

L Band Brightness Temperature Observations over a Corn Canopy during the Entire Growth Cycle

During a field campaign covering the 2002 corn growing season, a dual polarized tower mounted L-band (1.4 GHz) radiometer (LRAD) provided brightness temperature (TB) measurements at preset intervals, incidence and azimuth angles. These radiometer measurements were supported by an extensive characterization of land surface variables including soil moisture, soil temperature, vegetation biomass, and surface roughness. In the period May 22 to August 30, ten days of radiometer and ground measurements are available for a corn canopy with a vegetation water content (W) range of 0.0 to 4.3 kg m−2. Using this data set, the effects of corn vegetation on surface emissions are investigated by means of a semi-empirical radiative transfer model. Additionally, the impact of roughness on the surface emission is quantified using TB measurements over bare soil conditions. Subsequently, the estimated roughness parameters, ground measurements and horizontally (H)-polarized TB are employed to invert the H-polarized transmissivity (γh) for the monitored corn growing season

Machine Learning Identifies Stemness Features Associated with Oncogenic Dedifferentiation.

Cancer progression involves the gradual loss of a differentiated phenotype and acquisition of progenitor and stem-cell-like features. Here, we provide novel stemness indices for assessing the degree of oncogenic dedifferentiation. We used an innovative one-class logistic regression (OCLR) machine-learning algorithm to extract transcriptomic and epigenetic feature sets derived from non-transformed pluripotent stem cells and their differentiated progeny. Using OCLR, we were able to identify previously undiscovered biological mechanisms associated with the dedifferentiated oncogenic state. Analyses of the tumor microenvironment revealed unanticipated correlation of cancer stemness with immune checkpoint expression and infiltrating immune cells. We found that the dedifferentiated oncogenic phenotype was generally most prominent in metastatic tumors. Application of our stemness indices to single-cell data revealed patterns of intra-tumor molecular heterogeneity. Finally, the indices allowed for the identification of novel targets and possible targeted therapies aimed at tumor differentiation

Molecular characterization and clinical relevance of metabolic expression subtypes in human cancers.

Metabolic reprogramming provides critical information for clinical oncology. Using molecular data of 9,125 patient samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas, we identified tumor subtypes in 33 cancer types based on mRNA expression patterns of seven major metabolic processes and assessed their clinical relevance. Our metabolic expression subtypes correlated extensively with clinical outcome: subtypes with upregulated carbohydrate, nucleotide, and vitamin/cofactor metabolism most consistently correlated with worse prognosis, whereas subtypes with upregulated lipid metabolism showed the opposite. Metabolic subtypes correlated with diverse somatic drivers but exhibited effects convergent on cancer hallmark pathways and were modulated by highly recurrent master regulators across cancer types. As a proof-of-concept example, we demonstrated that knockdown of SNAI1 or RUNX1—master regulators of carbohydrate metabolic subtypes-modulates metabolic activity and drug sensitivity. Our study provides a system-level view of metabolic heterogeneity within and across cancer types and identifies pathway cross-talk, suggesting related prognostic, therapeutic, and predictive utility

Appraisal of SMAP Operational Soil Moisture Product from a Global Perspective

Space-borne soil moisture (SM) satellite products such as those available from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) offer unique opportunities for global and frequent monitoring of SM and also to understand its spatiotemporal variability. The present study investigates the performance of the SMAP L4 SM product at selected experimental sites across four continents, namely North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. This product provides global scale SM estimates at 9 km × 9 km spatial resolution at daily intervals. For the product evaluation, co-orbital in situ SM measurements were used, acquired at 14 test sites in North America, Europe, and Australia belonging to the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) and local networks in India. The satellite SM estimates of up to 0–5 cm soil layer were compared against collocated ground measurements using a series of statistical scores. Overall, the best performance of the SMAP product was found in North America (RMSE = 0.05 m3/m3) followed by Australia (RMSE = 0.08 m3/m3), Asia (RMSE = 0.09 m3/m3) and Europe (RMSE = 0.14 m3/m3). Our findings provide important insights into the spatiotemporal variability of the specific operational SM product in different ecosystems and environments. This study also furnishes an independent verification of this global product, which is of international interest given its suitability for a wide range of practical and research applications

Administering prophylactic alpha-blockade to reduce urinary retention post inguinal hernia repair: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised control trials

Introduction: The incidence of post-operative urinary retention (POUR) following inguinal hernia repair (IHR) is approximately 0.4% - 22.0%. POUR may lead to patient discomfort and catheter-related complications including urinary tract infection, urethral trauma, bladder overdistension and subsequent permanent bladder dysfunction. We aimed to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised control trials (RCT) evaluating the impact of administration of perioperative alpha-blockade to reduce the incidence of acute POUR following IHR. Methods: A systematic review was performed as per PRISMA guidelines. The incidence of POUR in the alpha-blocker and control groups were expressed as dichotomous outcomes, reported as odds ratios (ORs) expressed with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) following estimation using the Mantel-Haenszel method. Results: Eight RCTs with a combined total of 918 patients were included. Of these, 53.7% (493/918) received alpha-blockers while 46.3% (425/918) did not. Five studies used tamsulosin, two used prazosin and one used phenoxybenzamine. Overall, the prescription of prophylactic alpha-blockers in the preoperative setting significantly reduced POUR compared to the control group (7.9% (39/493) vs 21.2% (90/425), OR: 0.31, 95% CI: 0.12–0.80, P = 0.020). Conclusion: Preoperative prescription of alpha-blockers reduced the incidence of POUR following inguinal hernia repair. The next generation of prospective randomised trials may identify which patients should be prescribed this medication prior to surgery.</p

Considering combined or separated roughness and vegetation effects in soil moisture retrievals

International audienceFor more than six years, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission has provided multi angular and full-polarization brightness temperature (TB) measurements at L-band. Geophysical products such as soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth at nadir (τnad) are retrieved by an operational algorithm using TB observations at different angles of incidence and polarizations. However, the quality of the retrievals depends on several surface effects, such as vegetation, soil roughness and texture, etc. In the microwave forward emission model used in the retrievals (L-band Microwave Emission Model, L-MEB), soil roughness is modelled with a semi-empirical equation using four main parameters (Qr, Hr, Nrp, with p = H or V polarizations). At present, these parameters are calibrated with data provided by airborne studies and in situ measurements made at a local scale that is not necessarily representative of the large SMOS footprints (43 km on average) at global scale. In this study, we evaluate the impact of the calibrated values of Nrp and Hr on the SM and τnad retrievals based on SMOS TB measurements (SMOS Level 3 product) over the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) network located in North America over five years (2011–2015). In this study, Qr was set equal to zero and we assumed that NrH = NrV. The retrievals were performed by varying Nrp from −1 to 2 by steps of 1 and Hr from 0 to 0.6 by steps of 0.1. At satellite scale, the results show that combining vegetation and roughness effects in a single parameter provides the best results in terms of soil moisture retrievals, as evaluated against the in situ SM data. Even though our retrieval approach was very simplified, as we did not account for pixel heterogeneity, the accuracy we obtained in the SM retrievals was almost systematically better than those of the Level 3 product. Improved results were also obtained in terms of optical depth retrievals. These new results may have key consequences in terms of calibration of roughness effects within the algorithms of the SMOS (ESA) and the SMAP (NASA) space missions