Nineteenth-Century Depictions of Disabilities and Modern Metadata: A Consideration of Material in the P. T. Barnum Digital Collection

The Library of Congress subject headings have been examined in the past for their classification of subjects relating to race, gender, and sexuality. Overlooked is subject headings that relate to disabilities. In the course of creating records for the archival and object material that form the P.T. Barnum Digital Collection, the project discovered the imperfections of the Library of Congress subject headings, and the need to develop standards and protocols for the material. This resulted in a balance of language that respects the preferences of living communities and their best practices, and the existing language in the Library of Congress, while also engaging with the complex nuances of disability theory. The issues encountered raise questions regarding classification, contemporary language, and the best way forward for archival institutions

Review of: Archival Virtue: Relationships, Obligation, and the Just Archives by Scott Cline

A thoughtful meditation on the profession, Scott Cline’s Archival Virtue is timely and much needed. The text reframes discussions regarding justice, equity, diversity, access, and a better archives for all as a part of a greater quest for morality and virtue among ourselves and as a core of archives as a profession in the 21st century

Review of The Future of Literary Archives

In the opening of The Future of Literary Archives: Diasporic and Diverse Collections at Risk, editor David C. Sutton is careful to note that the various chapters in the volume are related to the work of the Diasporic Literary Archives Network. As such, the book itself serves as a demonstrated result of the Network’s years of work and collaboration across international boundaries, touching on subjects including public/private archives, material at risk, cultural imperialism, and literary history

Stochastic method for in-situ damage analysis

Based on the physics of stochastic processes we present a new approach for structural health monitoring. We show that the new method allows for an in-situ analysis of the elastic features of a mechanical structure even for realistic excitations with correlated noise as it appears in real-world situations. In particular an experimental set-up of undamaged and damaged beam structures was exposed to a noisy excitation under turbulent wind conditions. The method of reconstructing stochastic equations from measured data has been extended to realistic noisy excitations like those given here. In our analysis the deterministic part is separated from the stochastic dynamics of the system and we show that the slope of the deterministic part, which is linked to mechanical features of the material, changes sensitively with increasing damage. The results are more significant than corresponding changes in eigenfrequencies, as commonly used for structural health monitoring.Comment: This paper is accepted by European Physical Journal B on November 2. 2012. 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Patients' Post-/Long-COVID Symptoms, Vaccination and Functional Status-Findings from a State-Wide Online Screening Study.

(1) Background: Better understanding of post-/long-COVID and limitations in daily life due to the symptoms as well as the preventive potential of vaccinations is required. It is unclear whether the number of doses and timepoint interrelate with the trajectory of post-/long-COVID. Accordingly, we examined how many patients positively screened with post-/long-COVID were vaccinated and whether the vaccination status and the timepoint of vaccination in relation to the acute infection were related to post-/long-COVID symptom severity and patients' functional status (i.e., perceived symptom severity, social participation, workability, and life satisfaction) over time. (2) Methods: 235 patients suffering from post-/long-COVID were recruited into an online survey in Bavaria, Germany, and assessed at baseline (T1), after approximately three weeks (T2), and approximately four weeks (T3). (3) Results: 3.5% were not vaccinated, 2.3% were vaccinated once, 20% twice, and 53.3% three times. Overall, 20.9% did not indicate their vaccination status. The timepoint of vaccination was related to symptom severity at T1, and symptoms decreased significantly over time. Being vaccinated more often was associated with lower life satisfaction and workability at T2. (4) Conclusions: This study provides evidence to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, as it has shown that symptom severity was lower in those patients who were vaccinated prior to the infection compared to those getting infected prior to or at the same time of the vaccination. However, the finding that being vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 more often correlated with lower life satisfaction and workability requires more attention. There is still an urgent necessity for appropriate treatment for overcoming long-/post-COVID symptoms efficiently. Vaccination can be part of prevention measures, and there is still a need for a communication strategy providing objective information about the usefulness and risks of vaccinations

Catalysts of Women’s Success in Academic STEM: A Feminist Poststructural Discourse Analysis

This qualitative study seeks understand the phenomena that activate women’s success in STEM disciplines where women’s representation has not yet attained critical mass. A poststructuralist emphasis on complexity and changing nature of power relations offers a framework that illuminates the ways in which elite academic women navigate social inequalities, hierarchies of power, and non-democratic practices. Feminist poststructural discourse analysis (FPDA) draws from the women’s experiences to better understand their complex, shifting positions. Eight female tenured full professors of STEM at research-focused universities in the United States participated in the study. Data sources were in-depth semi-structured interviews, a demographic survey, and curricula vitae. Findings will help shape programs and policies aimed at increasing female representation and promoting achievement at senior levels in academic STEM fields

Transposable elements modulate human RNA abundance and splicing via specific RNA-protein interactions

Background: Transposable elements (TEs) have significantly influenced the evolution of transcriptional regulatory networks in the human genome. Post-transcriptional regulation of human genes by TE-derived sequences has been observed in specific contexts, but has yet to be systematically and comprehensively investigated. Here, we study a collection of 75 CLIP-Seq experiments mapping the RNA binding sites for a diverse set of 51 human proteins to explore the role of TEs in post-transcriptional regulation of human mRNAs and lncRNAs via RNA-protein interactions. Results: We detect widespread interactions between RNA binding proteins (RBPs) and many families of TE-derived sequence in the CLIP-Seq data. Further, alignment coverage peaks on specific positions of the TE consensus sequences, illuminating a diversity of TE-specific RBP binding motifs. Evidence of binding and conservation of these motifs in the nonrepetitive transcriptome suggests that TEs have generally appropriated existing sequence preferences of the RBPs. Depletion assays for numerous RBPs show that TE-derived binding sites affect transcript abundance and splicing similarly to nonrepetitive sites. However, in a few cases the effect of RBP binding depends on the specific TE family bound; for example, the ubiquitously expressed RBP HuR confers transcript stability unless bound to an Alu element. Conclusions: Our meta-analysis suggests a widespread role for TEs in shaping RNA-protein regulatory networks in the human genome. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0537-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Screening and assessment for post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS), guidance by personal pilots and support with individual digital trainings within intersectoral care: a study protocol of a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Because the clinical patterns and symptoms that persist after a COVID-19 infection are diverse, a diagnosis of post-acute COVID-19 syndrome (PACS) is difficult to implement. The current research project therefore aims to evaluate the feasibility and the practicability of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral treatment program consisting of a low-threshold online screening and holistic assessment for PACS. Furthermore, it aims to evaluate digital interventions and the use of so-called personal guides that may help to facilitate the recovery of PACS. METHODS: This German study consists of a low-threshold online screening for PACS where positively screened participants will be supported throughout by personal pilots. The personal pilots are aimed at empowering patients and helping them to navigate through the study and different treatment options. Patients will then be randomly assigned either to an intervention group (IG) or an active control group (ACG). The IG will receive a comprehensive assessment of physiological and psychological functioning to inform future treatment. The ACG does not receive the assessment but both groups will receive a treatment consisting of an individual digital treatment program (digital intervention platform and an intervention via a chatbot). This digital intervention is based on the needs identified during the assessment for participants in the IG. Compared to that, the ACG will receive a more common digital treatment program aiming to reduce PACS symptoms. Importantly, a third comparison group (CompG) will be recruited that does not receive any treatment. A propensity score matching will take place, ensuring comparability between the participants. Primary endpoints of the study are symptom reduction and return to work. Secondary outcomes comprise, for example, social participation and activities in daily life. Furthermore, the feasibility and applicability of the online screening tool, the holistic assessment, digital trainings, and personal pilots will be evaluated. DISCUSSION: This is one of the first large-scale studies to improve the diagnosis and the care of patients with PACS by means of empowerment. It is to be evaluated whether the methods utilized can be used for the German and international population. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT05238415; date of registration: February 14, 2022

Anomalous diffusion, Localization, Aging and Sub-aging effects in trap models at very low temperature

We study in details the dynamics of the one dimensional symmetric trap model, via a real-space renormalization procedure which becomes exact in the limit of zero temperature. In this limit, the diffusion front in each sample consists in two delta peaks, which are completely out of equilibrium with each other. The statistics of the positions and weights of these delta peaks over the samples allows to obtain explicit results for all observables in the limit $T \to 0$. We first compute disorder averages of one-time observables, such as the diffusion front, the thermal width, the localization parameters, the two-particle correlation function, and the generating function of thermal cumulants of the position. We then study aging and sub-aging effects : our approach reproduces very simply the two different aging exponents and yields explicit forms for scaling functions of the various two-time correlations. We also extend the RSRG method to include systematic corrections to the previous zero temperature procedure via a series expansion in $T$. We then consider the generalized trap model with parameter $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and obtain that the large scale effective model at low temperature does not depend on $\alpha$ in any dimension, so that the only observables sensitive to $\alpha$ are those that measure the `local persistence', such as the probability to remain exactly in the same trap during a time interval. Finally, we extend our approach at a scaling level for the trap model in $d=2$ and obtain the two relevant time scales for aging properties.Comment: 33 pages, 3 eps figure

Aging in the random energy model

In this letter we announce rigorous results on the phenomenon of aging in the Glauber dynamics of the random energy model and their relation to Bouchaud's 'REM-like' trap model. We show that, below the critical temperature, if we consider a time-scale that diverges with the system size in such a way that equilibrium is almost, but not quite reached on that scale, a suitably defined autocorrelation function has the same asymptotic behaviour than its analog in the trap model.Comment: 4pp, P