Agenda setting and active audiences in online coverage of human trafficking

Online news platforms and social media increasingly influence the public agenda on social issues such as human trafficking. Yet despite the popularity of online news and the availability of sophisticated tools for analyzing digital texts, little is known about the relations between news coverage of human trafficking and audiences’ reactions to and interpretations of such coverage. In this paper, we examine journalists’ and commenters’ topic choices in coverage and discussion of human trafficking in the British newspaper The Guardian from 2009 to 2014. We use latent semantic analysis to identify 11 topics discussed by both journalists and readers, and analyze each topic in terms of the degree to which journalists and readers agree or disagree in their topic preferences. We find that four topics were preferred equally by journalists and commenters, four were preferred by journalists, and three were preferred by commenters. Our findings suggest that theories of ‘agenda setting’ and of the ‘active audience’ are not mutually exclusive, and the scope of explanation of each depends partly on the specific topic or subtopic that is analyzed

Hematogenous Long Bone Osteomyelitis by Prevotella (Bacteroides) Melaninogenicus

Anaerobic infections are difficult to recognize and may lead to life threatening complications. We present the case of an acute Prevotella hematogenous infection of the humerus in a previously healthy adult patient, treated with a two-stage surgical treatment, emphasizing on the importance of the radical surgical debridement and the selection of the appropriate antimicrobial agents. To our knowledge, such an acute hematogenous infection has not been previously reported in the literature

Audio-assisted movie dialogue detection

An audio-assisted system is investigated that detects if a movie scene is a dialogue or not. The system is based on actor indicator functions. That is, functions which define if an actor speaks at a certain time instant. In particular, the cross-correlation and the magnitude of the corresponding the cross-power spectral density of a pair of indicator functions are input to various classifiers, such as voted perceptions, radial basis function networks, random trees, and support vector machines for dialogue/non-dialogue detection. To boost classifier efficiency AdaBoost is also exploited. The aforementioned classifiers are trained using ground truth indicator functions determined by human annotators for 41 dialogue and another 20 non-dialogue audio instances. For testing, actual indicator functions are derived by applying audio activity detection and actor clustering to audio recordings. 23 instances are randomly chosen among the aforementioned 41 dialogue instances, 17 of which correspond to dialogue scenes and 6 to non-dialogue ones. Accuracy ranging between 0.739 and 0.826 is reported. © 2008 IEEE

Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disease with Positive Autoimmune Indices: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

A 45-year-old female suffering from severe thoracic pain was admitted to the emergency department of our hospital. Thorough clinical examination revealed paresis of the left lower limb and sensory deficit at the level of the Th4 vertebra. MRI of the thoracic spine demonstrated a lesion at the level of Th1–Th7. Despite initial improvement following i.v. corticosteroid administration, the patient's clinical status deteriorated, with recurrence of myelitis and extension of the lesion to Th12. She developed paraparesis, hyperreflexia and spasticity of both legs, symmetrical sensory deficit below Th4, and sphincter dysfunction. Differential diagnosis included infectious, metabolic, neoplastic/paraneoplastic, and ischemic causes as well as multiple sclerosis. NMO IgG was found positive and led to the diagnosis of longitudinal extensive transverse myelitis (LETM) in the NMO spectrum disorders. Administration of immunosuppressive therapy resulted in gradual improvement of the patient's clinical status and stabilization for five years. In the setting of LETM, patients with antiaquaporin 4 IgGs can present features of coexisting systemic involvement. A thorough differential diagnosis is required to guide appropriate therapy

Resveratrol and Cancer

Resveratrol is a stilbene substance, belonging to the superfamily of phytoalexins, which are compounds synthesized by plants when stress occurs, usually an infection. It is abundant in red wine, red grapes, blueberries, peanuts and pistachios. Resveratrol induces p53-dependent apoptosis. A novel resveratrol analogue, HS-1793, has recently been demonstrated to inhibit vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in human prostate cancer cells. Pterostilbene, an analog of resveratrol, has been demonstrated to exert both autophagy and apoptosis in human bladder and breast cancer cell lines. It has also been found to cause accumulation of autophagic vacuoles as well as promote cell death via a mechanism involving lysosomal membrane permeabilization in human melanoma, colon, lung and breast cancer cell lines. Identification of a receptor site for resveratrol in cancer cells, supports the potential of this compound as a therapeutic agent. The receptor could also serve as a vehicle for studies of future resveratrol analogues. Resveratrol has also been documented to overcome chemo-resistance by inhibiting NF-κB and STAT3 pathway. Resveratrol has shown much promise in preclinical trials and because of its good safety profile it may be an ideal chemo-preventive and chemotherapeutic agent

The temporal expression profile of a Nos3-related natural antisense RNA in the brain suggests a possible role in neurogenesis

Experimental work over the past several years has revealed an unexpected abundance of long natural antisense transcripts (NATs) in eukaryotic species. In light of the proposed role of such RNA molecules in the regulation of gene expression in the brain, attention is now focused on specific examples of neuronal NATs. Of particular interest are NATs that are complementary to mRNAs encoding nitric oxide synthase (NOS), the enzyme responsible for production of the important gaseous neurotransmitter nitric oxide (NO). Here we study the temporal expression profile of murine Nos3as NAT in the brain. Notably, Nos3as NAT is known to act as a negative regulator of Nos3 gene expression. The results of our quantitative analysis reveal differential expression of Nos3as NAT during embryonic and post-embryonic stages of development of the brain. Also, they show that the low levels of Nos3as NAT coincides with active neurogenesis. In addition we report on an inverse correlation between the relative expression level of Nos3as NAT and the level of Nos3 protein. Thus our data raise the hypothesis that the Nos3as NAT regulates neurogenesis through suppression of Nos3 gene activity. This idea is further supported by experiments conducted on the olfactory bulbs and cultured neuroblastoma cells

The Impact of Demographic Characteristics and Lifestyle in the Distribution of Cystatin C Values in a Healthy Greek Adult Population

Background. The aim of the present study was to examine sources of variation for serum cystatin C in a healthy Greek population. Methods. Cystatin C together with basic clinical chemistry tests was measured in a total of 490 adults (46 ± 16 yrs, 40% males) who underwent an annual health check. Demographic, anthropometric, and lifestyle characteristics were recorded. Results. Higher values of cystatin C were observed among males (P = .04), participants aged over 65 years (P < .001), current smokers (P = .001) and overweight/obese participants (P = .03). On the contrary, alcohol consumption and physical activity seemed to have no influence on cystatin C levels (P = .61; P = .95, resp.). Conclusions. In interpreting serum cystatin C values in a healthy adult population, age, gender, Body Mass Index, and cigarette smoking need to be considered, and determination of reference ranges among distinct subpopulations seem to be prudent

Video Summarization Using Deep Semantic Features

Computer Vision - ACCV 2016: 13th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Nov 20-24, 2016, Taipei, TaiwanThis paper presents a video summarization technique for an Internet video to provide a quick way to overview its content. This is a challenging problem because finding important or informative parts of the original video requires to understand its content. Furthermore the content of Internet videos is very diverse, ranging from home videos to documentaries, which makes video summarization much more tough as prior knowledge is almost not available. To tackle this problem, we propose to use deep video features that can encode various levels of content semantics, including objects, actions, and scenes, improving the efficiency of standard video summarization techniques. For this, we design a deep neural network that maps videos as well as descriptions to a common semantic space and jointly trained it with associated pairs of videos and descriptions. To generate a video summary, we extract the deep features from each segment of the original video and apply a clustering-based summarization technique to them. We evaluate our video summaries using the SumMe dataset as well as baseline approaches. The results demonstrated the advantages of incorporating our deep semantic features in a video summarization technique