AIDing Contraception: HIV and Recent Trends in Abortion Rates

Since the onset of HIV/AIDS awareness in the early 1980s, much attention has centered around the substantial negative effects of the disease throughout the world. This paper provides evidence of a secondary effect the disease has had on sexual behavior in the United States. Using a difference-in-differences estimation framework and state level data, we show that the perceived threat of HIV resulted in a drop in unwanted pregnancies, as demonstrated by a lower incidence of abortions. Our results suggest that each additional reported case of HIV per 1,000 individuals resulted in 85.5 fewer abortions per 1,000 live births.

Visual Persuasion: Inferring Communicative Intents of Images

In this paper we introduce the novel problem of under-standing visual persuasion. Modern mass media make ex-tensive use of images to persuade people to make commer-cial and political decisions. These effects and techniques are widely studied in the social sciences, but behavioral studies do not scale to massive datasets. Computer vision has made great strides in building syntactical representa-tions of images, such as detection and identification of ob-jects. However, the pervasive use of images for commu-nicative purposes has been largely ignored. We extend the significant advances in syntactic analysis in computer vi-sion to the higher-level challenge of understanding the un-derlying communicative intent implied in images. We be-gin by identifying nine dimensions of persuasive intent la-tent in images of politicians, such as “socially dominant,” “energetic, ” and “trustworthy, ” and propose a hierarchical model that builds on the layer of syntactical attributes, such as “smile ” and “waving hand, ” to predict the intents pre-sented in the images. To facilitate progress, we introduce a new dataset of 1,124 images of politicians labeled with ground-truth intents in the form of rankings. This study demonstrates that a systematic focus on visual persuasion opens up the field of computer vision to a new class of inves-tigations around mediated images, intersecting with media analysis, psychology, and political communication. 1

The relationship between fear of missing out and mobile phone addiction among college students: the mediating role of depression and the moderating role of loneliness

BackgroundMobile phone addiction has adverse influences on the physical and mental health of college students. However, few studies shed light on the effect of fear of missing out on mobile phone addiction and the underlying mechanisms among college students.MethodsTo explore their associations, the present study used the Fear of Missing Out Scales (FoMOS), Loneliness Scale (USL-8), Mobile Phone Addiction Index Scale (MPAI), and Depression-Anxiety-Stress Questionnaire (DASS-21) to investigate 750 college students.ResultsThe results suggested that fear of missing out significantly positively predicted mobile phone addiction. This direct effect could be mediated by depression, and the indirect effect of fear of missing out on mobile phone addiction could be moderated by loneliness. Specifically, the indirect effect was stronger for students with high levels of loneliness.ConclusionThis study provides a theoretical basis for developing future interventions for mobile phone addiction in higher education students

TEA-PSE 3.0: Tencent-Ethereal-Audio-Lab Personalized Speech Enhancement System For ICASSP 2023 DNS Challenge

This paper introduces the Unbeatable Team's submission to the ICASSP 2023 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge. We expand our previous work, TEA-PSE, to its upgraded version -- TEA-PSE 3.0. Specifically, TEA-PSE 3.0 incorporates a residual LSTM after squeezed temporal convolution network (S-TCN) to enhance sequence modeling capabilities. Additionally, the local-global representation (LGR) structure is introduced to boost speaker information extraction, and multi-STFT resolution loss is used to effectively capture the time-frequency characteristics of the speech signals. Moreover, retraining methods are employed based on the freeze training strategy to fine-tune the system. According to the official results, TEA-PSE 3.0 ranks 1st in both ICASSP 2023 DNS-Challenge track 1 and track 2.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 202

Molecular cloning, characterization and expression analysis of CpCBF2 gene in harvested papaya fruit under temperature stresses

Background: C-repeat binding factors (CBFs) are transcription factors that regulate the expression of a number of genes related to abiotic stresses. Few CBF genes have been cloned from other plants but no report in papaya. In present study, a full-length cDNA, designated as CpCBF2, was cloned from papaya using in silico cloning and 5\u2019- rapid amplification cDNA ends (RACE). Sequence analysis was performed to understand the gene function. The expression pattern of CpCBF2 in papaya under low (7\ubaC) and high temperature (35\ubaC) stresses was examined using real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Results: The full-length cDNA of CpCBF2 was 986-bp, with a 762-bp open reading frame (ORF) encoding a 254 amino acid polypeptide. CpCBF2 contained several major highly conserved regions including the CBF-family signature PKRRAGRKKFQETRHP and FADSAW in its amino acid sequence. Phylogenetic tree and three-dimensional structure analysis showed that CpCBF2 had a relatively close relationship with other plant CBFs. Gene expression analysis showed that high temperature stress had little effect on the expression of CpCBF2 but low temperature repressed CpCBF2 expression. Conclusion: The results showed that CpCBF2 may involve in different roles in temperature stress tolerance. This study provided a candidate gene potentially useful for fruit temperature stress tolerance, although its function still needs further confirmation