Social Relationships in Young Offenders: Relevance to Peers, Poverty, and Psychological Adjustment

The increasing influence of peers in adolescence is related to a developing array of skills, aspirations, attitudes, and behaviours. The nature and magnitude of this influence and the potential association of certain youth with deviant peers is among the most prominent risk factors in predicting youth crime. This becomes of greater concern for economically disadvantaged youth, whose neighbourhoods harbour greater susceptibility to negative peer influence. With social affiliations at the forefront of youth development and criminality, research efforts need to further characterize the nature, constitution, and influence of peers on adolescent offending. Two hundred and eighty-one Canadian youth were sampled from an urban-based court clinic who had been referred during the years 2010 to 2015. Information was drawn from case file content. Exploratory analyses were conducted to characterize relevant demographics, trends, and dispositions of youth according to their social networks, offending patterns, and socio-economic status. Experiences of poverty and negative peers were prevalent in this sample of young offenders. A negative peer environment was correlated with poverty, criminality, number of mental health diagnoses and symptoms. An interaction was found between offending pattern and level of antisocial behaviour. Post-hoc analysis revealed an additional interaction between gender and peer influence. Lastly, unique psychological correlates were identified according to friendship influence and friendship status. Findings point to the unique role of adolescent social patterns in both guiding and investigating the motives and struggles of young offenders. The relevance of the findings is discussed as they pertain to assessment, intervention, and future research

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Implementation of a UDC-based multilingual thesaurus in a library catalogue: the case of BiblioPhil

The paper describes an approach to improving classification-based subject access in a library catalogue. In order to enhance the use of UDC numbers in information retrieval, the authors have represented classification with thesaurus descriptors and implemented this solution in an automated way. In addition, descriptors in more than one language were used to interface classification. The authors present a solution implemented in a BiblioPhil library system. The standard formats used are UNIMARC for bibliographic and subject authority records (i.e. the UDC-based multilingual thesaurus) with MARCXML support for data transfer. The multilingual thesaurus was built according to the existing standards, the constituent parts of the classification notations being used as the basis for search terms in the multilingual information retrieval. The verbal equivalents, descriptors and non-descriptors, are used to expand the number of concepts and are given in Romanian, English and French. The authors illustrate how this approach saves the time of the indexer and provides more user-friendly and easier access to the bibliographic information. The multilingual aspect of the thesaurus enhances information access for a greater number of online users

Heparanase Localization and Expression by Head and Neck Cancer: Correlation with Tumor Progression and Patient Survival

Heparanase is an endoglycosidase that specifically cleaves heparan sulfate (HS) side chains of HS proteoglycans, the major proteoglycans in the extracellular matrix and cell surfaces. Traditionally, heparanase activity was implicated in cellular invasion associated with angiogenesis, inflammation, and cancer metastasis. More recently, heparanase upregulation was documented in an increasing number of primary human tumors, correlating with reduced postoperative survival rate and enhanced tumor angiogenesis. In the present study, we examined the expression of heparanase in squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck by means of immunostaining, and we correlated expression levels with patient outcome. The intensity and extent of heparanase staining correlated with tumor stage (P = .049 and P = .027, respectively), and the extent of staining further correlated with tumor grade (P = .047). Moreover, heparanase expression inversely correlated with patient status at the end of the study (P = .012). Notably, heparanase localization was found to be an important parameter for patient status. Thus, 63% of patients with nuclear staining, compared to 19% of patients with cytoplasmic staining (P = .0043), were alive, indicating that nuclear localization of the enzyme predicts a favorable outcome

Effects of cell packing on chemoattractant distribution within a tissue

Diffusible signals provide critical information to cells in biological systems, often in a concentration-dependent manner. In animal development, such signals can determine different cell fates or guide motile cells to their proper locations. It is well-known that migrating cells respond to graded chemoattractant cues by moving toward areas of higher concentrations. However, it is not clear how cell-dense animal tissues impact the distribution of chemoattractants in three dimensions. We leverage the simple architecture of the Drosophila egg chamber to explore this idea. In this context, sixteen large germline cells are packed together, enveloped by a somatic epithelium. A small set of epithelial cells, the border cells, form a motile cell cluster and respond to guidance signals by moving across the egg chamber during oogenesis. We created a geometrically-realistic model of the egg chamber and determined the distribution of the chemoattractants through that domain using a reaction-diffusion system. We used this information to determine reasonable biophysical parameters of chemoattractant that would facilitate gradient formation in the appropriate developmental time, and to explore the effects of different secretion locations in the egg chamber. Our model revealed several interesting features: The chemoattractant is more concentrated and the gradient sets up more quickly in a cell-packed space, and cell packing creates dips in the concentration and changes in gradient along the migratory path. We simulated migration with our calculated chemoattractant gradient and compared it to that with a constant gradient. We found that with our calculated gradient, migration was slower initially than in the constant gradient, which could be due to the exponential nature of the gradient or other variation in signal due to the heterogeneous domain. Given the many situations in which cell migration occurs in complex spatio-temporal environments, including development, immune response, and cancer metastasis, we believe modeling chemoattractant distribution in heterogeneous domains is widely relevant