Watch out for children : Charles Schulz’s Peanuts in the 1950s

When Peanuts debuted in American newspapers at the end of 1950, it entered a world of optimistic postwar consumerism that was moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. A comic about the baby boom that depicted the children of that boom without any parental supervision, it appeared to be set in an idyll, a small world of little folks, concerned only with small things. Even at this moment before melancholy and disappointment became its primary characteristics, however, the strip was fundamentally concerned with how its characters found their way in the world, which, at least in part, involved acting as if they were adults. For parents, such autonomy might have resonated with the emerging, and concerning, category of the teenager, had that vision not been covered over with a façade of cuteness. That mask, moreover, was one of the many factors that caused adults to imagine themselves as characters in the strip. By investigating the way that the children in the strip imagined themselves as adults, we can see that the little world of Charlie Brown animated the feeling, as the midcentury political philosopher Hannah Arendt might have said, of being between past and future, of being an actor in a world that does not understand individual agents and over which those agents have no control.American Studie

Effectiveness of College Counseling Interventions in International Student Adjustment to United States Higher Education Systems: A Meta-Analysis

International students in U.S. higher education institutions face many emotional, social, and institutional challenges as they navigate their academic and acculturative journeys. College counseling centers serve as valuable support resources, but low utilization rates and high early termination rates among the international student population presents a major concern for the college counseling field. To begin the development of an empirically supported, responsive approach to structuring counseling work with international students, this study utilized a metaanalysis to review the literature on counseling intervention effectiveness. The following questions guided this research: What adjustment outcomes are produced by college counseling interventions across modes in international student-client populations? and Which college counseling intervention modes have the greatest impact on adjustment outcomes in international student-client populations? The meta-analysis indicated that across modes, college counseling centers are, on a small magnitude, positively promoting adjustment and well-being for international students who complete an intervention course. Additionally, the interventions that produced a significant impact on adjustment outcomes in international student-client populations are translated and modified acceptance and commitment bibliotherapy and art therapy. These analyses expand the field of college counseling’s understanding of effective approaches in responding to international students’ unique experiences and needs. They provide recommendations for the future direction of college counselling center programing as well as counselor education course enhancement

Dynamics of HIV-1 Infection and Therapy In Vivo

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is the causative agent of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease responsible for extensive morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite more than thirty years of research since the discovery of HIV-1, no cure or vaccine yet exists. HIV-1 infection, while treatable with suppressive antiretroviral therapy drugs (ART), establishes lifelong persistence in the infected host as a natural consequence of the viral life cycle and the dynamic properties of the human immune cells in which HIV-1 propagates. This persistence is driven by populations of rare, long-lived HIV-1-infected cells, termed latently infected cells (LICs), that are refractory to immune clearance and viral cytopathic effects. Interruption of suppressive therapy – even after years of continuous and effective treatment – rapidly leads to virological rebound, requiring infected persons to remain on ART indefinitely. As the need to maintain lifelong daily ART imposes a substantial compliance burden on those infected, two major goals of HIV-1 research, broadly, concern (1) developing new therapeutic modalities that may alleviate some drawbacks to ART, and (2) identifying means with which to target and eradicate LICs as an approach to curing HIV-1 infection. To these ends, in the first three chapters of my thesis, I discuss my work demonstrating the utility of highly potent anti-HIV-1 antibodies in a number of therapeutic contexts. As antibody therapy expectedly did not result in cure, I was later motivated to study the nature of LIC formation and persistence. The fourth chapter of this thesis outlines my work to develop new molecular tools to interrogate LICs in a humanized mouse model of HIV-1 infection

Soil organic matter characterization in rubber based systems in central Kerala - A spectroscopic approach

Land use and agro-management practices influence the quantity and quality of soil organic matter. Soil properties to a large extent are influenced by the content and nature of soil organic matter. A field study was conducted in two locations, one at Amayannoor and the other at Mundakayam in Kottayam district, Kerala to undertake the spectroscopic characterization of soil organic matter. The four rubber systems investigated at Amayannoor were mature rubber, immature rubber with cover crop Pueraria phaseoloides, immature rubber with inter-crop banana and immature rubber with inter crop pineapple. At Mundakayam, mature rubber, immature rubber with cover crop Mucuna bracteata, immature rubber with inter crop banana, and immature rubber with inter crop pineapple were investigated. Both, UV-Vis and FTIR spectroscopic studies were carried out. Soil organic matter under mature rubber was observed to be more aromatic than soil under immature systems at both locations. Among the different immature systems, the soil organic matter in rubber-Pueraria system showed the presence of more carbohydrates and polysaccharides than rubber-pineapple and rubber-banana systems. However, rubber-Mucuna system showed relatively higher aromaticity than rubber-pineapple and rubber-banana systems. This study confirms the earlier reports about the faster decomposition of soil organic matter in rubber-Pueraria system and slower decomposition of soil organic matter in mature rubber plantation. This spectral investigation also revealed the specific nature viz., higher aromaticity of the soil organic matter in rubber-Mucuna system which contributed towards the buildup of soil carbon in the system

The effects of hemodynamic lag on functional connectivity and behavior after stroke

Stroke disrupts the brain's vascular supply, not only within but also outside areas of infarction. We investigated temporal delays (lag) in resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging signals in 130 stroke patients scanned two weeks, three months and 12 months post stroke onset. Thirty controls were scanned twice at an interval of three months. Hemodynamic lag was determined using cross-correlation with the global gray matter signal. Behavioral performance in multiple domains was assessed in all patients. Regional cerebral blood flow and carotid patency were assessed in subsets of the cohort using arterial spin labeling and carotid Doppler ultrasonography. Significant hemodynamic lag was observed in 30% of stroke patients sub-acutely. Approximately 10% of patients showed lag at one-year post-stroke. Hemodynamic lag corresponded to gross aberrancy in functional connectivity measures, performance deficits in multiple domains and local and global perfusion deficits. Correcting for lag partially normalized abnormalities in measured functional connectivity. Yet post-stroke FC-behavior relationships in the motor and attention systems persisted even after hemodynamic delays were corrected. Resting state fMRI can reliably identify areas of hemodynamic delay following stroke. Our data reveal that hemodynamic delay is common sub-acutely, alters functional connectivity, and may be of clinical importance

Fingerprint Matching using A Hybrid Shape and Orientation Descriptor

From the privacy perspective most concerns arise from the storage and misuse of biometric data (Cimato et al., 2009). ... is provided with a in-depth discussion of the state-of-the-art in iris biometric cryptosystems, which completes this work

Despite "super-human" performance, current LLMs are unsuited for decisions about ethics and safety

Large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity in the past few years and have achieved undeniably impressive results on benchmarks as varied as question answering and text summarization. We provide a simple new prompting strategy that leads to yet another supposedly "super-human" result, this time outperforming humans at common sense ethical reasoning (as measured by accuracy on a subset of the ETHICS dataset). Unfortunately, we find that relying on average performance to judge capabilities can be highly misleading. LLM errors differ systematically from human errors in ways that make it easy to craft adversarial examples, or even perturb existing examples to flip the output label. We also observe signs of inverse scaling with model size on some examples, and show that prompting models to "explain their reasoning" often leads to alarming justifications of unethical actions. Our results highlight how human-like performance does not necessarily imply human-like understanding or reasoning.Comment: ML Safety Workshop, NeurIPS 202

Statistical models for the support of forensic fingerprint identifications

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Science.For the majority of the 20th century, the forensic practice of fingerprint identification has had unanimous acceptance as reliable, robust, and admissible evidence. However, a number of forensic commentators have questioned the scientific validity of the current practice of fingerprint identification. Moreover, recent well publicised misidentifications have added concerns with the accuracy and quality assurance processes in practice, while fingerprint practitioners have experienced growing pressure to perform identifications from increasing workload and difficult casework. The application of statistical modelling for fingerprint identification is a scientific methodology that provides a quantification of fingerprint evidence that can alleviate such concerns regarding the scientific foundations of fingerprint identification. Moreover, such statistical models can be used as a supportive tool for fingerprint practitioners who are under operational pressure to accurately assess crime marks against other fingermarks in a timely manner. In this dissertation, two statistical modelling frameworks for different fingerprint identification scenarios are proposed. The first variant is called AFIS-centric models that calculate likelihood ratios and are designed to work with AFIS candidate lists, helping the practitioner to decide between match and close non-match correspondences. Two likelihood ratio measures are proposed, one with the aim of evaluating candidate list members as match or a close non-match, the other providing a weight-of-evidence evaluation. The second model variant called a Person-of-Interest (POI) model is designed for the scenario where a rich collection of fingermarks from the same source finger are available to provide a more thorough evidential assessment. Tailored models of skin distortion are built using samples of the POI's finger, using feature vectors that make use of all of the available spatial information, from which a weight-of-evidence likelihood ratio measure is derived. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the AFIS-centric and POI models as supportive tools for casework. The significance of these research results is threefold. Firstly, the proposed AFIS-centric models illustrate how feature vector based models can focus on match and close non-match populations to provide a statistical measure agnostic of an AFIS scores that can be used for workload reduction purposes through candidate list filtering/reordering and quality assurance within the Analysis-Comparison-Evaluation-Verification (ACE-V) framework. Secondly, the proposed feature vectors add robustness and spatial completeness to the model, resulting in highly accurate models that assess real-world case samples accurately. Lastly, both proposed model variants provide a highly robust and accurate quantitative output in the form of a weight-of-evidence measure that can be used to support expert testimony

Bridging Bays, Bridging Borders: Global Justice and Community Organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area

We offer this document as our own effort to build the inclusion and understandings that will help both communities and leaders recognize the grassroots wisdom and issues that could help us realize the positive impacts from globalization and minimize the negative aspects that have concerned us all. Another world is possible, but it is up to us to build it