Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness Twenge, Jean M.; Haidt, Jonathan; Blake, Andrew B. ...
Journal of adolescence (London, England.),
December 2021, 2021-12-00, 20211201, Letnik:
93, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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Several studies have documented increases in adolescent loneliness and depression in the U.S., UK, and Canada after 2012, but it is unknown whether these trends appear worldwide or whether they are ...linked to factors such as economic conditions, technology use, or changes in family size.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey of 15- and 16-year-old students around the world included a 6-item measure of school loneliness in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015, and 2018 (n = 1,049,784, 51% female) across 37 countries.
School loneliness increased 2012–2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents in 2018 (vs. 2012) had elevated levels of school loneliness. Increases in loneliness were larger among girls than among boys and in countries with full measurement invariance. In multi-level modeling analyses, school loneliness was high when smartphone access and internet use were high. In contrast, higher unemployment rates predicted lower school loneliness. Income inequality, GDP, and total fertility rate (family size) were not significantly related to school loneliness when matched by year. School loneliness was positively correlated with negative affect and negatively correlated with positive affect and life satisfaction, suggesting the measure has broad implications for adolescent well-being.
The psychological well-being of adolescents around the world began to decline after 2012, in conjunction with the rise of smartphone access and increased internet use, though causation cannot be proven and more years of data will provide a more complete picture.
Efficient Human Pose Estimation from Single Depth Images Shotton, Jamie; Girshick, Ross; Fitzgibbon, Andrew ...
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence,
12/2013, Letnik:
35, Številka:
12
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We describe two new approaches to human pose estimation. Both can quickly and accurately predict the 3D positions of body joints from a single depth image without using any temporal information. The ...key to both approaches is the use of a large, realistic, and highly varied synthetic set of training images. This allows us to learn models that are largely invariant to factors such as pose, body shape, field-of-view cropping, and clothing. Our first approach employs an intermediate body parts representation, designed so that an accurate per-pixel classification of the parts will localize the joints of the body. The second approach instead directly regresses the positions of body joints. By using simple depth pixel comparison features and parallelizable decision forests, both approaches can run super-real time on consumer hardware. Our evaluation investigates many aspects of our methods, and compares the approaches to each other and to the state of the art. Results on silhouettes suggest broader applicability to other imaging modalities.
Previous research established a substantial increase in support for same-sex marriage in the US, but it is unclear if this increase is due to cohort (a change that affects only the younger ...generation) or time period (a change that affects those of all ages). In a nationally representative sample of American adults (n = 13,483) in 1988 and 2004-2018, increased support for same-sex marriage was primarily due to time period (from 11.1% in 1988 to 66.7% in 2018). There was a smaller cohort effect, with a fairly linear increase between cohorts born in the 1960s and those born in the 1990s. Time period increases in support for same-sex marriage appeared among across gender, race, education levels, regions, and levels of religious service attendance, though differences in support still remain. The results suggest Americans of all ages modified their beliefs about same-sex marriage over time.
Poisson image editing Pérez, Patrick; Gangnet, Michel; Blake, Andrew
ACM transactions on graphics,
07/2003, Letnik:
22, Številka:
3
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Using generic interpolation machinery based on solving Poisson equations, a variety of novel tools are introduced for seamless editing of image regions. The first set of tools permits the seamless ...importation of both opaque and transparent source image regions into a destination region. The second set is based on similar mathematical ideas and allows the user to modify the appearance of the image seamlessly, within a selected region. These changes can be arranged to affect the texture, the illumination, and the color of objects lying in the region, or to make tileable a rectangular selection.
We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict 3D positions of body joints from a single depth image, using no temporal information. We take an object recognition approach, designing an ...intermediate body parts representation that maps the difficult pose estimation problem into a simpler per-pixel classification problem. Our large and highly varied training dataset allows the classifier to estimate body parts invariant to pose, body shape, clothing, etc. Finally we generate confidence-scored 3D proposals of several body joints by reprojecting the classification result and finding local modes. The system runs at 200 frames per second on consumer hardware. Our evaluation shows high accuracy on both synthetic and real test sets, and investigates the effect of several training parameters. We achieve state of the art accuracy in our comparison with related work and demonstrate improved generalization over exact whole-skeleton nearest neighbor matching.
The paper reviews key fictions which appeared in 1999: the first Matrix film, the third Harry Potter novel and the fourth television series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The paper contends that one of ...the immediate effects of these texts, each a paradigm of the postmodern aesthetic, was to promote the growth of crossover academic-popular cultural studies. It is argued that important though this secondary literature is, the immediate political and cultural context of these texts’ times needs to remain in sharper focus if we are to assess them properly.
Pathological Wnt pathway activation is a conserved hallmark of colorectal cancer. Wnt-activating mutations can be divided into: i) ligand-independent (LI) alterations in intracellular signal ...transduction proteins (
, β-catenin), causing constitutive pathway activation and ii) ligand-dependent (LD) mutations affecting the synergistic R-Spondin axis (
,
-fusions) acting through amplification of endogenous Wnt signal transmembrane transduction. Our aim was to exploit differential Wnt target gene expression to generate a mutation-agnostic biomarker for LD tumours.
We undertook harmonised multi-omic analysis of discovery (n=684) and validation cohorts (n=578) of colorectal tumours collated from publicly available data and the Stratification in Colorectal Cancer Consortium. We used mutation data to establish molecular ground truth and subdivide lesions into LI/LD tumour subsets. We contrasted transcriptional, methylation, morphological and clinical characteristics between groups.
Wnt disrupting mutations were mutually exclusive. Desmoplastic stromal upregulation of
may compensate for absence of epithelial mutation in a subset of stromal-rich tumours. Key Wnt negative regulator genes were differentially expressed between LD/LI tumours, with targeted hypermethylation of some genes (
,
) occurring even in CIMP-negative LD cancers.
mRNA expression was used as a discriminatory molecular biomarker to distinguish LD/LI tumours (area under the curve >0.93).
Epigenetic suppression of appropriate Wnt negative feedback loops is selectively advantageous in LD tumours and differential
expression in LD/LI lesions can be exploited as a molecular biomarker. Distinguishing between LD/LI tumour types is important; patients with LD tumours retain sensitivity to Wnt ligand inhibition and may be stratified at diagnosis to clinical trials of Porcupine inhibitors.
Summary
Lignocellulose degradation by microbes plays a central role in global carbon cycling, human gut metabolism and renewable energy technologies. While considerable effort has been put into ...understanding the biochemical aspects of lignocellulose degradation, much less work has been done to understand how these enzymes work in an in vivo context. Here, we report a systems level study of xylan degradation in the saprophytic bacterium Cellvibrio japonicus. Transcriptome analysis indicated seven genes that encode carbohydrate active enzymes were up‐regulated during growth with xylan containing media. In‐frame deletion analysis of these genes found that only gly43F is critical for utilization of xylo‐oligosaccharides, xylan, and arabinoxylan. Heterologous expression of gly43F was sufficient for the utilization of xylo‐oligosaccharides in Escherichia coli. Additional analysis found that the xyn11A, xyn11B, abf43L, abf43K, and abf51A gene products were critical for utilization of arabinoxylan. Furthermore, a predicted transporter (CJA_1315) was required for effective utilization of xylan substrates, and we propose this unannotated gene be called xntA (xylan transporter A). Our major findings are (i) C. japonicus employs both secreted and surface associated enzymes for xylan degradation, which differs from the strategy used for cellulose degradation, and (ii) a single cytoplasmic β‐xylosidase is essential for the utilization of xylo‐oligosaccharides.
The saprophytic bacterium Cellvibrio japonicus is proficient at degrading the polysaccharides found in plant biomass. Using a combination of transcriptomic and mutational analyses this report updates the model of how the bacterium depolymerizes and transports the hemicellulose xylan into the cell. An essential Carbohydrate Active Enzyme (CAZyme) and a critical oligosaccharide transporter for xylan metabolism in C. japonicus are also characterized in this study.
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