Women in the Assembly: representations of female Assembly Members in the Welsh press

This study highlights the significance of equal participation of men and women as central to the future health of politics and the democratic process in Wales. Following affirmative action taken by two major Welsh political parties, the National Assembly for Wales has been notable for the high level of female representation among its membership since the legislature was created in 1999. The large number of women in the Assembly is a unique phenomenon both politically and geographically. However, the question that remains unanswered is this: in spite of equal political representation in the Assembly, are men and women now treated equally and fairly by the Welsh press? This research is the first comparative study of press representations of men and women in a political institution that has an almost equal number of male and female representatives. It specifically attempts to examine how 12 Welsh newspapers portrayed female Assembly Members [AMs] during a three-month Welsh national election period as well as during a later three-month routine press coverage period. It draws on content and discourse analyses of the press coverage of over 3000 articles from about 1000 newspaper editions during the two periods studied. It is also based on data generated by in-depth interviews with 28 AMs from the current Assembly. This study shows that when there has been a relative equal participation of women in a political institution over a period, the gender issue initially remains noticeable and “business as usual”. However, over time, more complex media representations of male and female politicians have been observed and gender bias has gradually become less salient and controversial than before, both in colleagues’ perceptions of women politicians and in media representations, because gender parity has become a norm

Model-Assisted Learning for Adaptive Cooperative Perception of Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Cooperative perception (CP) is a key technology to facilitate consistent and accurate situational awareness for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To tackle the network resource inefficiency issue in traditional broadcast-based CP, unicast-based CP has been proposed to associate CAV pairs for cooperative perception via vehicle-to-vehicle transmission. In this paper, we investigate unicast-based CP among CAV pairs. With the consideration of dynamic perception workloads and channel conditions due to vehicle mobility and dynamic radio resource availability, we propose an adaptive cooperative perception scheme for CAV pairs in a mixed-traffic autonomous driving scenario with both CAVs and human-driven vehicles. We aim to determine when to switch between cooperative perception and stand-alone perception for each CAV pair, and allocate communication and computing resources to cooperative CAV pairs for maximizing the computing efficiency gain under perception task delay requirements. A model-assisted multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) solution is developed, which integrates MARL for an adaptive CAV cooperation decision and an optimization model for communication and computing resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in achieving high computing efficiency gain, as compared with benchmark schemes.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Gender and politics

The relationship between gender and politics has unfolded in the context of male domination. Questions of representation and its consequences for political gender equality have always been central to understanding this relationship, as women politicians have consistently been under-represented and subjected to essentialist constructions of feminity. But a shift towards more complex representations is making gender less salient than before, as female politicians are entering legislatures around the world in larger numbers

Millimeter Wave Full-Duplex Networks: MAC Design and Throughput Optimization

Full-duplex (FD) technique can remarkably boost the network capacity in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands by enabling simultaneous transmission and reception. However, due to directional transmission and large bandwidth, the throughput and fairness performance of a mmWave FD network are affected by deafness and directional hidden-node (HN) problems and severe residual self-interference (RSI). To address these challenges, this paper proposes a directional FD medium access control protocol, named DFDMAC to support typical directional FD transmission modes by exploiting FD to transmit control frames to reduce signaling overhead. Furthermore, a novel busy-tone mechanism is designed to avoid deafness and directional HN problems and improve the fairness of channel access. To reduce the impact of RSI on link throughput, we formulate a throughput maximization problem for different FD transmission modes and propose a power control algorithm to obtain the optimal transmit power. Simulation results show that the proposed DFDMAC can improve the network throughput and fairness by over 60% and 32%, respectively, compared with the existing MAC protocol in IEEE 802.11ay. Moreover, the proposed power control algorithm can effectively enhance the network throughput

A Novel Aptamer LL4A Specifically Targets Vemurafenib-Resistant Melanoma through Binding to the CD63 Protein.

Melanoma is a highly aggressive tumor with a poor prognosis, and half of all melanoma patients harbor BRAF mutations. A BRAF inhibitor, vemurafenib (PLX4032), has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) to treat advanced melanoma patients with BRAFV600E mutation. However, the efficacy of vemurafenib is impeded by adaptive resistance in almost all patients. In this study, using a cell-based SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) strategy, we obtained a DNA aptamer (named LL4) with high affinity and specificity against vemurafenib-resistant melanoma cells. Optimized truncated form (LL4A) specifically binds to vemurafenib-resistant melanoma cells with dissociation constants in the nanomolar range and with excellent stability and low toxicity. Meanwhile, fluorescence imaging confirmed that LL4A significantly accumulated in tumors formed by vemurafenib-resistant melanoma cells, but not in control tumors formed by their corresponding parental cells in vivo. Further, a transmembrane protein CD63 was identified as the binding target of aptamer LL4A using a pull-down assay combined with the liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method. CD63 formed a supramolecular complex with TIMP1 and β1-integrin, activated the nuclear factor кB (NF-кB) and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathways, and contributed to vemurafenib resistance. Potentially, the aptamer LL4A may be used diagnostically and therapeutically in humans to treat targeted vemurafenib-resistant melanoma