Development and Initial Validation of an Admission Test for Bachelor Psychology Studies

Extensive evidence clearly endorses the use of standardized reasoning ability tests and subject-specific knowledge tests as valid and useful tools for admission-restricted study programs. Yet, tests are still rarely applied for university admission in Germany. Instead, current admission practices are predominantly based on grade point average (GPA) achieved in high school. In the present study, we report the development and validation of a test battery for admission into bachelor’s degree programs in psychology for German universities. Its compilation is driven by evidence from international validity generalization, consensual models of cognitive abilities, and a taxonomy of the B.Sc. psychology degree in Germany. It consists of three subtests for reasoning ability, two tests that tap relevant declarative knowledge, and two psychology-specific text comprehension tests. N = 371 freshmen from five German universities completed the tests and university GPA was retrieved 2.5 years later. We use confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modeling to investigate the construct and criterion validity of the test battery. The results indicate that individual tests, as well as the test battery, meet psychometric requirements. As expected, the test battery predicts university GPA substantially and incrementally beyond high school GPA. The results illustrate the substantial added value that standardized achievement tests provide in university admissions

Microglia maintain structural integrity during fetal brain morphogenesis

Microglia (MG), the brain-resident macrophages, play major roles in health and disease via a diversity of cellular states. While embryonic MG display a large heterogeneity of cellular distribution and transcriptomic states, their functions remain poorly characterized. Here, we uncovered a role for MG in the maintenance of structural integrity at two fetal cortical boundaries. At these boundaries between structures that grow in distinct directions, embryonic MG accumulate, display a state resembling post-natal axon-tract-associated microglia (ATM) and prevent the progression of microcavities into large cavitary lesions, in part via a mechanism involving the ATM-factor Spp1. MG and Spp1 furthermore contribute to the rapid repair of lesions, collectively highlighting protective functions that preserve the fetal brain from physiological morphogenetic stress and injury. Our study thus highlights key major roles for embryonic MG and Spp1 in maintaining structural integrity during morphogenesis, with major implications for our understanding of MG functions and brain development.</p

Dynamique spatiale et temporelle de la végétation caractéristique du << Sahara vert >> pendant la période humide de l'Holocène

L intensification de la mousson en Afrique du Nord au cours de l Holocène a entraîné un changement de végétation - le Sahara vert - caractérisé par l apparition de plantes tropicales dans des zones aujourd hui désertiques. Les conditions humides ont permis l extension de la végétation soudanienne, la limite Sahel-Sahara ayant probablement migré d environ 450 km vers le Nord par rapport à sa position actuelle. Les données polliniques sont un des marqueurs paléoenvironnementaux les plus utilisés pour reconstituer les paysages du passé, du fait de leur abondance et de leur conservation. L objectif de cette thèse est de mieux comprendre la dynamique de la végétation en Afrique de l Ouest au cours des 14000 dernières années, en se basant sur l étude des données palynologiques. Trois axes sont développés: 1) l analyse de la relation actuelle pollen-plante-climat, 2) l analyse de la végétation de la région ouest africaine, à partir des échantillons de surface de cette région, 3) l étude de la migration des plantes au cours de l Holocène et la caractérisation des écosystèmes du Sahara vert . Ces analyses montrent qu il n est pas nécessaire dans les régions tropicales de prendre en compte les pourcentages des grains de pollen pour représenter les plantes, du fait de biais importants existant entre les fréquences polliniques et l abondance des plantes. Concernant les paysages du Sahara vert , le travail réalisé permet d estimer les vitesses de migration des plantes tropicales ainsi que leur ordre d apparition dans les latitudes nord africaines. Il confirme le caractère particulier de la végétation du Sahara vert : une interpénétration d éléments tropicaux humides dans un paysage steppique. Finalement, l ensemble de ces travaux permet de proposer des reconstitutions climatiques pour la période du Sahara vert .PARIS-BIUSJ-Sci.Terre recherche (751052114) / SudocSudocFranceF

Climate and vegetation: Simulating the African humid period

International audienceThe outputs of the climate simulated by two General Circulation Models (GCMs), (IPSL and UGAMP) have been used to force a vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS) to analyze the Holocene African humid period (AHP) and related vegetation changes over the 18°W-35°E, 5°S-25°N region. At the continental scale, simulations with the two models confirm the intensified African monsoon during the Holocene as compared to now, and the early but gradual termination of the AHP in eastern regions as compared to western regions. At the regional scale, the two GCMs results present important differences in the timing of the AHP, its spatial extent and the summer rainfall amplitude. Consequently, the vegetation model simulates changes that are globally in agreement with pollen data, but with large differences according to the region and the model considered. During the AHP, the IPSL climate induced proper vegetation changes in the eastern Sahara and in the Sahel, whereas the UGAMP climate induced correct changes in the western Sahara and in the equatorial zone

Are modern pollen data representative of west African vegetation?

International audienc

The developing female genital tract: from genetics to epigenetics.

International audienceThe mammalian female reproductive tract develops from the Mullerian ducts which differentiate, in a cranial to caudal direction, into oviducts, uterine horns, cervix and the anterior vagina. The developmental processes taking place during this organogenesis are notably under the control of steroid hormones, such as members of the Wnt and Hox families, which regulate key developmental genes. At later stages, steroid hormones also participate in the development of the female genital tract. Chemical compounds homologous to steroids can thus act as agonists or antagonists in fetuses exposed to them. These so-called endocrine disruptors are nowadays found in increasing amounts in the environment and may therefore have a particular impact on such developing organs. Epidemiological studies have revealed that endocrine disruptors have had drastic effects on female health and fertility during the last decades. Furthermore, these adverse effects might be transmitted to subsequent generations through epigenetic modifications. Given the potential hazard of inherited epigenetic marks altering reproduction and/or human health, such molecular mechanisms must be urgently investigated. This review aims to summarize the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in female genital tract development, to highlight key genes involved in this process and to present epigenetic mechanisms triggered by endocrine disruptors and their consequences in regard to female reproductive tract development

Analyzing theme penetration from specialized to non-specialized discourses with NLP: the case of the IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5 ºC

Discourses as scientifically sharp and socially influential as the IPCC reports raise the question of their relationship with non-specialists discourses on climate change. IPCC reports are officially aimed at governments (IPCC, 2019), and their reception by the general public is certainly filtered by legacy media (O’Neill et al. 2015; Painter, 2014; Kunelius, 2017) and shaped through social media (Pearce et al., 2014; O’Neill et al., 2015). Social media discourses are known to be sometimes polarized and over-simplified, and one can expect such discourses to focus only on some of the IPCC reports topics. In this research, we use natural language processing (NLP) techniques as well as a qualitative analysis to identify the main concepts and topics in the Special Report Global Warming of 1.5ºC by the IPCC (2018) and track their presence and recycling in a sample of the general public discourses on social media. Our aim is to understand how topics covered in the last published IPCC report are represented in social media discourses, as a step towards a deeper understanding of the appropriation of specialized discourses on climate change (like IPCC documents) by the general public . The contribution of this communication is twofold. First, whereas other NLP-based investigation of climate discourse have mainly relied on Twitter data (O’Neill et al., 2015; Newman, 2017; Yagodin et al., 2018), our approach will make use of a different type of digital media data, namely Reddit. Reddit is a social platform where news and opinions are shared and debated. As such, it can be a valuable source of data on climate change discourses, and also provides new new perspectives to Twitter-based analyses. Second, previous studies have carried out rather limited topic analyses of Tweets, either manually classifying a small sample of Tweets into a few categories (Newman, 2017) or using the most frequent hashtags as topics (O’Neill et al., 2015). In this study, we have developed a system able to detect all concepts listed in the official glossary of the Special Report Global Warming of 1.5ºC (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/glossary/), which offer a much more representative outline of the topics occurring in IPCC reports than hashtags (which already reflects biases). The distribution of these concepts will first be compared across the whole IPCC 1.5 °C report, the 1.5 °C report’s “Summary for Policymakers”, and the subreddits threads related to climate issues. In a second step, we will automatically cluster these concepts into larger themes, based on the Doc2Vec similarity methods (Le et Mikolov, 2014) and compare their distribution on the three above corpora. Finally, a sample of threads will be manually analyzed in order to shed light on the results obtained by the automatic approach

BESOCIAL: Interview / Survey results WP1

This document is part of the PROMISE project (2017-2019) financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) as part of the BRAIN.be programme and is coordinated by KBR. The State Archives, the universities of Ghent (Research Group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies; Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities) and Namur (Research Centre in Information, Law and Society) and the university college Bruxelles-Brabant (Unité de Recherche et de Formation en Sciences de l’Information et de la Documentation) are partners in the project. In the scope of this project, a state-of-the-art report was written based on interviews via mail and Skype with several organizations from different countries. The information in this spreadsheet is a summary of the data collected during this task. A list of all the organisations involved can be found in tab "Annex - List of countries and organizations". In 2020, a new project called BESOCIAL (towards a sustainable social media archiving strategy for Belgium) started in which an updated state-of-the-art report will be written with a focus on archiving social media. Again, the different organizations are surveyed and the data in this spreadsheet is being updated and enhanced