Communicating science in the COVID-19 news in the UK during Omicron waves: exploring representations of nature of science with epistemic network analysis

News media plays a vital role in communicating scientific evidence to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such communication is important for convincing the public to follow social distancing guidelines and to respond to health campaigns such as vaccination programmes. However, newspapers were criticised that they focus on the socio-political perspective of science, without explaining the nature of scientific works behind the government’s decisions. This paper examines the connections of the nature of science categories in the COVID-19 era by four local newspapers in the United Kingdom between November 2021 to February 2022. Nature of science refers to different aspects of how science works such as aims, values, methods and social institutions of science. Considering the news media may mediate public information and perception of scientific stories, it is relevant to ask how the various British newspapers covered aspects of science during the pandemic. In the period explored, Omicron variant was initially a variant of concern, and an increasing number of scientific evidence showed that the less severity of this variant might move the country from pandemic to endemic. We explored how news articles communicate public health information by addressing how science works during the period when Omicron variants surge. A novel discourse analysis approach, epistemic network analysis is used to characterise the frequency of connections of categories of the nature of science. The connection between political factors and the professional activities of scientists, as well as that with scientific practices are more apparent in left-populated and centralist outlets than in right-populated news outlets. Among four news outlets across the political spectrum, a left-populated newspaper, the Guardian, is not consistent in representing relations of different aspects of the nature of scientific works across different stages of the public health crisis. Inconsistency of addressing aspects of scientific works and a downplay of the cognitive-epistemic nature of scientific works likely lead to failure in trust and consumption of scientific knowledge by the public in the healthcare crisis

Visualizing the impact of Covid-19 vaccine passports on pedestrian access to metro stations in Hong Kong

Pedestrian infrastructures in Hong Kong enable multilevel city life in a vertical metropolis plagued by land scarcity. Public spaces integrated into pedestrian networks play an indispensable role in neighbourhood accessibility. We visualize the impact of the Covid-19 vaccine passport (VP) restrictions on the use of public space on pedestrian accessibility to all 97 metro stations in Hong Kong. Pedestrians without a vaccine passport (PwoVP) need to walk significantly longer alternative routes. Specifically, VP-related access restrictions to indoor walkways have doubled the shortest travel time for PwoVP and a 50% reduction in accessibility of two-thirds of stations

Proactive Resilience Building through Route Diversity: A Close Look at the Metro System from the Travelers’ Perspective

Travel demand plays a moderate role in the resilience impact assessment of public transport network disruptions. We analyze how travelers can proactively build transport resilience by responding to adverse events using alternative routes. We consider route diversity (i.e., the numbers of alternative routes for all origin–destination (OD) pairs) as a measure of the network’s capability to accommodate route choice behavioral change and look for potential proactive travelers from the spatial distribution of OD pairs with alternative routes in the Beijing subway network. We further investigate how proactive resilience can be built by choosing alternative routes with the least extra time cost

16-µJ pulse energy, picosecond, narrow-linewidth master oscillator power amplifier using direct amplification

We present a gain-switched-diode-seeded 1034.5nm master oscillator power amplifier, employing direct amplification through standard commercial Yb3+-doped fibres to generate 15.6µJ-pulse-energy, 126kW-peak-power, picosecond pulses with 3dB spectral bandwidth of 0.87nm

Anisotropy of the Coulomb Interaction between Folded Proteins: Consequences for Mesoscopic Aggregation of Lysozyme

AbstractToward quantitative description of protein aggregation, we develop a computationally efficient method to evaluate the potential of mean force between two folded protein molecules that allows for complete sampling of their mutual orientation. Our model is valid at moderate ionic strengths and accounts for the actual charge distribution on the surface of the molecules, the dielectric discontinuity at the protein-solvent interface, and the possibility of protonation or deprotonation of surface residues induced by the electric field due to the other protein molecule. We apply the model to the protein lysozyme, whose solutions exhibit both mesoscopic clusters of protein-rich liquid and liquid-liquid separation; the former requires that protein form complexes with typical lifetimes of approximately milliseconds. We find the electrostatic repulsion is typically lower than the prediction of the Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek theory. The Coulomb interaction in the lowest-energy docking configuration is nonrepulsive, despite the high positive charge on the molecules. Typical docking configurations barely involve protonation or deprotonation of surface residues. The obtained potential of mean force between folded lysozyme molecules is consistent with the location of the liquid-liquid coexistence, but produces dimers that are too short-lived for clusters to exist, suggesting lysozyme undergoes conformational changes during cluster formation

Source-Aware Embedding Training on Heterogeneous Information Networks

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) have been extensively applied to real-world tasks, such as recommendation systems, social networks, and citation networks. While existing HIN representation learning methods can effectively learn the semantic and structural features in the network, little awareness was given to the distribution discrepancy of subgraphs within a single HIN. However, we find that ignoring such distribution discrepancy among subgraphs from multiple sources would hinder the effectiveness of graph embedding learning algorithms. This motivates us to propose SUMSHINE (Scalable Unsupervised Multi-Source Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding) -- a scalable unsupervised framework to align the embedding distributions among multiple sources of an HIN. Experimental results on real-world datasets in a variety of downstream tasks validate the performance of our method over the state-of-the-art heterogeneous information network embedding algorithms.Comment: Published in Data Intelligence 202

A targeted gene panel that covers coding, non-coding and short tandem repeat regions improves the diagnosis of patients with neurodegenerative diseases

Genetic testing for neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) is highly challenging because of genetic heterogeneity and overlapping manifestations. Targeted-gene panels (TGPs), coupled with next-generation sequencing (NGS), can facilitate the profiling of a large repertoire of ND-related genes. Due to the technical limitations inherent in NGS and TGPs, short tandem repeat (STR) variations are often ignored. However, STR expansions are known to cause such NDs as Huntington\u27s disease and spinocerebellar ataxias type 3 (SCA3). Here, we studied the clinical utility of a custom-made TGP that targets 199 NDs and 311 ND-associated genes on 118 undiagnosed patients. At least one known or likely pathogenic variation was found in 54 patients; 27 patients demonstrated clinical profiles that matched the variants; and 16 patients whose original diagnosis were refined. A high concordance of variant calling were observed when comparing the results from TGP and whole-exome sequencing of four patients. Our in-house STR detection algorithm has reached a specificity of 0.88 and a sensitivity of 0.82 in our SCA3 cohort. This study also uncovered a trove of novel and recurrent variants that may enrich the repertoire of ND-related genetic markers. We propose that a combined comprehensive TGPs-bioinformatics pipeline can improve the clinical diagnosis of NDs

Drawing metro maps in concentric circles: A designer‐in‐the‐loop approach with visual examples

This article presents a proof-of-concept designer-in-the-loop schematic map drawing tool, based on the marriage of two approaches—manual and automated, which provides the technical interactivity of drawing tools between the user and the computer. We focus on concentric circle maps as opposed to the commonly used orthogonal mode representation, which is suggested by previous studies that it could promote better network learning. In comparison with existing methods, the proposed method is more compatible with the framework of effective map design from psychological and aesthetic perspectives, and a range of options can be provided in conjunction with users' preferences. We evaluated our approach on a set of iterations with case studies of Hong Kong metro with a group of three co-authors from the fields of geography, transport engineering, and education