Follow the money

Martin Schmalzried, a Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer at the Confederation of Family Organisations in the European Union (COFACE), explores the power and control of private companies over internet access and usage. His piece follows a special workshop¹ convened by the Media Policy Project and Parenting for a Digital Future on ‘Families and “screen-time”: challenges of media self-regulation’ and the publication of a policy brief about families and “screen time”, authored by Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingston

Digital parenting or ‘just’ parenting?

Has ‘digital parenting’ simply become another dimension of parenting, as ‘traditional’ parenting spills over into the ‘online’ world, with social skills, sexuality education, a healthy balance in children’s activities, social and emotional learning, and values such as respect all be transposed to online settings? Martin Schmalzried, a Senior Policy and Advocacy Officer at the Confederation of Family Organisations in the European Union (COFACE), explores the dilemmas of modern parenting. His piece follows a special workshop¹ convened by the Media Policy Project and Parenting for a Digital Future on ‘Families and “screen-time”: challenges of media self-regulation’ and the publication of a new policy brief about families and “screen time”, authored by Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone

Electron Thermal Runaway in Atmospheric Electrified Gases: a microscopic approach

Thesis elaborated from 2018 to 2023 at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía under the supervision of Alejandro Luque (Granada, Spain) and Nikolai Lehtinen (Bergen, Norway). This thesis presents a new database of atmospheric electron-molecule collision cross sections which was published separately under the DOI : With this new database and a new super-electron management algorithm which significantly enhances high-energy electron statistics at previously unresolved ratios, the thesis explores general facets of the electron thermal runaway process relevant to atmospheric discharges under various conditions of the temperature and gas composition as can be encountered in the wake and formation of discharge channels

Patterns of Rumination by Young and Older Adults

A lot of attention has been given to the negative effects of both inhibitory deficits and rumination but little work has compared both: research on inhibitory deficits has focused on older adults whereas research on rumination has focused on young adults. This study examined the pattern of rumination by both young and older adults and compared rumination to working memory, inhibition, and mood. Based on findings from a small pilot study, it was hypothesized that older adults would ruminate less often than young adults and that the structure of rumination by young and older adults would differ, including the relationship between rumination, working memory, inhibition, and mood. These hypotheses were supported. Older adults reported less rumination than young adults and older adults' rumination could be modeled as a unitary construct whereas young adults' rumination was composed of two forms of rumination, a tendency toward brooding and reflection versus a more general form of rumination on sadness. The relationships between rumination and working memory, inhibition, and mood also change with age. Older adults' rumination was not associated with inhibitory deficits whereas both forms of rumination by young adults were. The implications of these findings for theories of inhibitory deficits and emotional regulation are discussed

Crystalline Oxide Solid Solutions in Oxygen Potential Gradients

The steady state demixing of an initially homogeneous oxide solid solution (A, B)O in an oxygen potential field is studied theoretically and experimentally. In case that DA > Db ≫ D0, the crystal is shifted with respect to the oxide lattice system toward the higher oxygen potential and is enriched in A at the side of the higher oxygen potential, while the transport of oxygen in the crystal is negligible. A numerical solution of the transport problem is presented, and the predicted effect is verified experimentally. © 1979, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved

Excellent diagnostic characteristics for ultrafast gene profiling of DEFA1-IL1B-LTF in detection of prosthetic joint infections

The timely and exact diagnosis of prosthetic joint infection (PJI) is crucial for surgical decision-making. Intraoperatively, delivery of the result within an hour is required. Alpha-defensin lateral immunoassay of joint fluid (JF) is precise for the intraoperative exclusion of PJI; however, for patients with a limited amount of JF and/or in cases where the JF is bloody, this test is unhelpful. Important information is hidden in periprosthetic tissues that may much better reflect the current status of implant pathology. We therefore investigated the utility of the gene expression patterns of 12 candidate genes (TLR1, -2, -4, -6, and 10, DEFA1, LTF, IL1B, BPI, CRP, IFNG, and DEFB4A) previously associated with infection for detection of PJI in periprosthetic tissues of patients with total joint arthroplasty (TJA) (n = 76) reoperated for PJI (n = 38) or aseptic failure (n = 38), using the ultrafast quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) Xxpress system (BJS Biotechnologies Ltd.). Advanced data-mining algorithms were applied for data analysis. For PJI, we detected elevated mRNA expression levels of DEFA1 (P < 0.0001), IL1B (P < 0.0001), LTF (P < 0.0001), TLR1 (P = 0.02), and BPI (P = 0.01) in comparison to those in tissues from aseptic cases. A feature selection algorithm revealed that the DEFA1-IL1B-LTF pattern was the most appropriate for detection/exclusion of PJI, achieving 94.5% sensitivity and 95.7% specificity, with likelihood ratios (LRs) for positive and negative results of 16.3 and 0.06, respectively. Taken together, the results show that DEFA1-IL1B-LTF gene expression detection by use of ultrafast qRT-PCR linked to an electronic calculator allows detection of patients with a high probability of PJI within 45 min after sampling. Further testing on a larger cohort of patients is needed.Web of Science5592697268

Global Cities – Cities Changed Social-Cultural Space

In this article, we analyze different approaches to the term global city and reveal the process of formationof this phenomenon in social sciences. We consider the specifics of such concepts as a global city, aworld city, town information, a creative city. The global city is seen as a factor of influence on the socioeconomicprocesses of the modern world, which determines the impact depending not only on the size ofthe city. The modern urban development goal - to become visible on the world map of politics, economy,allowing the city to develop, involving active and creative actors in their own space. This article discussesthe methods and mechanisms that contribute to changes in the urban space by different examples. Theinstability, volatility of urban space, the dependence on a huge number of factors and side effects ofdecisions are the main problems of the modern management of urban space. For the world city, as asystem that defines and forms these processes, the author introduces the concept of a control point, whichis a landmark, setting the direction of development and changing the dynamics of socio-cultural space

Enhancing higher-energy spectral resolution for electron particle simulations in air

In the presence of an electric field, electrons would theoretically accelerate asymptotically to relativistic energies. However, regular collisions with air molecules limit the increase in electron energy. The stochastic nature of collisions leaves a theoretical probability that an electron elude inelastic collisions thereby accumulating an atypically high energy. Such an electron, under specific criteria, could be called a “thermal” or “cold runaway”. Depending on the electric field, the runaway probability might be too low to be computationally observed without resorting to Monte Carlo importance sampling. This article provides a method for fixing the spectral energy resolution of electrons through the combined methodology of Russian roulette and probabilistic splitting in order to render the study of runaway mechanism amenable to electron swarm simulations in various plasma physics applications.publishedVersio