Diverse Kinds Research Articles

Hsa_circ_0000231 Promotes colorectal cancer cell growth through upregulation of CCND2 by IGF2BP3/miR-375 dual pathway

BackgroundCircular RNAs (circRNAs) have emerged as vital regulators of the initiation and progression of diverse kinds of human cancers. In this study, we explored the role of hsa_circ_0000231 and its downstream pathway in CRC.MethodsThe expression profile of circRNAs in 5 pairs of CRC tissues and adjacent normal tissues were analyzed by Microarray. Quantitative real-time PCR and in situ hybridization and Base Scope Assay were used to determine the level and prognostic values of hsa_circ_0000231. Then, functional experiments in vitro and in vivo were performed to investigate the effects of hsa_circ_0000231 on cell proliferation. Mechanistically, fluorescent in situ hybridization, dual luciferase reporter assay, RNA pull-down and RNA immunoprecipitation experiments were performed to confirm the interaction between hsa_circ_0000231 and IGF2BP3 or has_miR-375.ResultsWe acquired data through circRNA microarray profiles, showing that the expression of hsa_circ_0000231 was upregulated in CRC primary tissues compared to adjacent normal tissues, which was indicated poor prognosis of patients with CRC. Functional analysis indicated that inhibition of hsa_circ_0000231 in CRC cell lines could suppress CRC cell proliferation as well as tumorigenesis in vitro and in vivo. The mechanistic analysis showed that hsa_circ_0000231 might, on the one hand, act as a competing endogenous RNA of miR-375 to promote cyclin D2 (CCND2) and, on the other hand, bind to the IGF2BP3 protein to prevent CCND2 degradation.ConclusionsThe findings suggested that hsa_circ_0000231 facilitated CRC progression by sponging miR-375 or binding to IGF2BP3 to modulate CCND2, implying that hsa_circ_0000231 might be a potential new diagnostic and therapeutic biomarker of CRC.

An industrial intelligent grasping system based on convolutional neural network

PurposeThis paper aims to save time spent on manufacturing the data set and make the intelligent grasping system easy to deploy into a practical industrial environment. Due to the accuracy and robustness of the convolutional neural network, the success rate of the gripping operation reached a high level.Design/Methodology/ApproachThe proposed system comprises two diverse kinds of convolutional neuron network (CNN) algorithms used in different stages and a binocular eye-in-hand system on the end effector, which detects the position and orientation of workpiece. Both algorithms are trained by the data sets containing images and annotations, which are generated automatically by the proposed method.FindingsThe approach can be successfully applied to standard position-controlled robots common in the industry. The algorithm performs excellently in terms of elapsed time. Procession of a 256 × 256 image spends less than 0.1 s without relying on high-performance GPUs. The approach is validated in a series of grasping experiments. This method frees workers from monotonous work and improves factory productivity.Originality/ValueThe authors propose a novel neural network whose performance is tested to be excellent. Moreover, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed second level is extraordinary robust subject to environmental variations. The data sets are generated automatically which saves time spent on manufacturing the data set and makes the intelligent grasping system easy to deploy into a practical industrial environment. Due to the accuracy and robustness of the convolutional neural network, the success rate of the gripping operation reached a high level.

Two Mn(II) and Zn(II) Coordination Polymers: Aqueous-Phase Detection of Nitroaromatic Explosives and Protective Effect on Atherosclerosis.

Via the solvothermal reaction between Zn(II) or Mn(II) salts and 5-(3,4-dicarboxylphenoxy)nicotinic acid (H3L) ligand, a trifunctional N,O-building block having three diverse kinds of functional groups (O-ether, N-pyridyl and COOH), two new coordination polymers (CPs) could be generated, and their chemical formulae respectively are {[Mn3(L)2(H2O)2]·4H2O} (1) and {[Zn(HL)]·NMP} (2). The complex 2 based on Zn(II) possesses high efficiency of fluorescence quenching for the nitrophenol (2,4,6-trinitrophenol, TNP; 4-nitrophenol, 4-NP; 3-nitrophenol, 3-NP; 2-nitrophenol, 2-NP) in the aqueous solution. Furthermore, the treatment activity of compounds on the atherosclerosis was assessed, and relevant mechanism was investigated. First of all, the ELISA assay was used to measure the content of the inflammatory cytokines released into the plasma. Besides, the levels of the NF-κb signaling pathway in the vascular endothelial cells were measured with real time RT-PCR. The hemolysis test was conducted in this research to measure the biocompatibility of the new compound.

The Effect of Vegetation Restoration in Soil Organic Carbon Storage

This review paper has been made to assess the past studies reviewed regarding vegetation restoration and its impact on soil organic carbon content. A Vegetation Restoration is an influential technique that can be used to respond to these effects. As a response to the global biodiversity crisis, more restoration actions have been taken. The European Union Council’s results on kinds of diversity after 2010 highlight words like stopping biodiversity loss and the breakdown of ecological systems in the European Union. The United Nations Conference on Biological Diversity’s growth strategy for 2022, which includes restoring at least 15% of degraded ecosystems, has made this possible. Soil types are among the most vulnerable resources on the planet due to factors such as climate change, land degradation, and the reduction of biodiversity. Organic Carbon, the top meter of soil, could potentially store three times as much carbon as is found in the air and almost twice as much as in plants. For the systematic literature review, past papers on vegetation restoration have been extracted from the latest papers of 2013 and onwards to 2022. The summary of results included key findings of the papers, the interpretation of papers reviewed, and the relevant references. Thirty papers were reviewed and selected from authentic databases and assessed that vegetation restoration significantly affects soil organic carbon (SOC). The findings also exhibit that the primary sources of prediction for SOC dynamics include changes in soil properties, quality, the number of carbon inputs, and the composition of the C pool. Vegetation restoration also plays an important role in improving the services of ecosystems such as controlling the erosion of soil and increasing the carbon sequestration. Moreover, some papers concluded that vegetation restoration positively influences on the SOC. Moreover, to increase the generalizability of the study, implications and future research indications have also been included in the end.

Foucault, Oedipus, and Virality

Foucault, Oedipus, and Virality Mario Telò (bio) In the first chapter of Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity, Paul Allen Miller focuses on Oedipus as a figure of the interconnections of knowledge, power, and the subject in the lectures that Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1979 and 1983—On the Government of the Living and The Government of Self and Others (Foucault 2011b and 2012b). In an extended reading of Oedipus the King in the former, Foucault uses Oedipus to theorize the "relation [that] obtains between the subject, its manifesting or producing truth, and that subject's adherence to a larger institutional structure, which both makes the truth possible and is made possible by the truth—i.e., the polis, the church, a government" (Miller 2021, 18). For Foucault, Oedipal alêthourgia ("truth labor") shows that, to see the truth, we need a care of the self—"we must … undertake practices that make us into a speaking and knowing subject that can recognize the truth" (Miller 2021, 25). This apparent centrality of the "knowing subject" is complicated, as Foucault emphasizes, by the major role afforded in Sophocles' Oedipal alêthourgia to slaves, the subjects to whom the state denies the privileged status of subjectivity. Since, for Foucault, truths in Oedipus the King "can only be accepted … when confirmed by the eyewitness testimony of slaves" (Miller 2021, 37), the Athenian slaves' status as non-citizens and thus, to an extent, non-subjects invites us to problematize the notion of the "knowing subject." Oedipal epistêmê ("knowledge") amounts to a process of expansion—of the individual's cognitive horizons and, apparently, also the social boundaries of who counts as a subject. However, this expansion operates through the pressure of biopolitical subjection—angry threats in Oedipus the King, or, in Athenian historical practice, the torture that extracts truth out of the slave's body.1 Yet a case can also be made that the expansive force of alȇthourgia exceeds and contests the very idea of subjecthood. Oedipal alêthourgia is an "anarchaeology" (Foucault 2012b, 79) because of the fact that an indispensable unknown is entrusted to a slave, whose "negative agency" is located,2 figuratively, in "the shepherd's hut," where Oedipus's destiny "came true or … manifested itself" (Foucault 2012b, 4). For Foucault, this hut is, with an obvious reference to Deleuze and Guattari, the "anti-Oedipus," a space homologous to the secret room of [End Page 383] the emperor Septimius Severus, which nobody had the right to see, a space where "the emperor hid the sky of his death."3 The Oedipal excess that concerns me, however, does not relate to the disastrous consequences of Oedipus's self-discovery,4 but rather to the process of the discovery, the "labor" (ergon) of truth reflected in the form of Sophocles' and Foucault's writing. I see this labor, in Foucauldian terms, as an expenditure driven by the overlapping imperatives of biopower and care of the self—or, we could also say, a continuing spasmodic exertion demanded of the subject by the diachronic metamorphoses of "pastoral power."5 The thesis I want to test is that alêthourgia is Oedipal in that it operates through a virality that turns the epistemic care of the self, in its wearying practice, into a way to get out of oneself. In these pandemic times, Foucault and Oedipus are frequently evoked together as we seek out solutions or just comparanda for our predicament. In 2020, the plague that sets Oedipus the King in motion figured prominently among the antecedents cataloged, for example in blog posts and op-ed pieces, as a kind of genealogical diversion during the unfillable time of the lockdown, an archaeological response, we can say, to the sudden arrival of achrony. In The Virus in the Age of Madness (2020), Bernard-Henri Lévy provocatively cried out, "Come Back, Michel Foucault—We Need You!," referring to the discussion in Discipline and Punish (1977) of the eighteenth-century shift in state policy toward leprosy and plague:6 "Exile to an island or a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, as was the practice with lepers and the insane, gave way...

Cognitive function in patients undergoing cystectomy for bladder cancer - results from a prospective observational study.

Background:Impaired cognitive function of bladder cancer patients plays a role in coping with the kind of urinary diversion and may impact perioperative morbidity. In this study we therefore aimed to assess the prevalence of mild cognitive impairment in patients undergoing radical cystectomy. Secondary objectives included correlation of common cognition tests, assessment of the admitting physician, and perioperative complication rates.Methods:Patients undergoing radical cystectomy for bladder cancer were prospectively screened by neuropsychological tests including cognition tests [DemTect (Dementia Detection test), MMSE (Mini-Mental State Examination), clock drawing test] prior to surgery. Besides, clinical characteristics and perioperative outcomes were documented. Frequency of mild cognitive impairment as assessed by DemTect was correlated with the results of MMSE and clock drawing test, the occurrence of anxiety and depression, the assessment of the admitting physician, and perioperative complication rates as calculated by Spearman rank correlation coefficient. Comparative analysis (parametric and nonparametric) of patient characteristics (nonpathological versus pathological DemTect suggestive of mild cognitive impairment) was performed.Results:A total of 51 patients (80% male, median age 69 years) were analyzed. DemTect was suspicious of mild cognitive impairment in 27% (14/51) of patients, whereas MMSE and clock drawing test showed pathological results only in 10/51 and 6/51 patients, respectively. We found no correlation between mild cognitive impairment and anxiety/depression status. In all, 5/20 patients (25%) with suspicious DemTect results were considered suitable for a continent diversion neobladder by the admitting physician. Suspicious DemTect results were predictive for higher perioperative complication rates (29% versus 5%). Study limitations include small sample size and missing long-term follow-up.Conclusions:Mild cognitive impairment was observed in more than a quarter of radical cystectomy patients prior to surgery. Preoperative assessment should be supplemented by neuropsychological testing such as the DemTect as mild cognitive impairment is often underestimated and associated with significantly higher perioperative complication rates.

Retracted] Adversarial Attacks Defense Method Based on Multiple Filtering and Image Rotation

Adversarial examples in an image classification task cause neural networks to predict incorrect class labels with high confidence. Many applications related to image classification, such as self‐driving and facial recognition, have been seriously threatened by adversarial attacks. One class of the existing defense methods is the preprocessing‐based defense which transforms the inputs before feeding them to the system. These methods are independent of the classification models and have excellent defensive effects under oblivious attacks. An image filtering method is often used to evaluate the robustness of adversarial examples. However, filtering induces the loss of valuable features that reduce the classification accuracy and weakens the adversarial perturbation. Furthermore, the fixed filtering parameters cannot effectively defend against the adversarial attack. This paper proposes a novel defense method based on different filter parameters and randomly rotated filtered images. The output classification probabilities are statistically averaged, which keeps the classification accuracy while removing the perturbation. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the defense capability of various models against diverse kinds of oblivious adversarial attacks. Under the adaptive attack, the transferability of the adversarial examples among different models is significantly reduced.

Enhanced Marathi Speech Recognition Facilitated by Grasshopper Optimisation-Based Recurrent Neural Network

Communication is a significant part of being human and living in the world. Diverse kinds of languages and their variations are there; thus, one person can speak any language and cannot effectively communicate with one who speaks that language in a different accent. Numerous application fields such as education, mobility, smart systems, security, and health care systems utilize the speech or voice recognition models abundantly. Though, various studies are focused on the Arabic or Asian and English languages by ignoring other significant languages like Marathi that leads to the broader research motivations in regional languages. It is necessary to understand the speech recognition field, in which the major concentrated stages are feature extraction and classification. This paper emphasis developing a Speech Recognition model for the Marathi language by optimizing Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Here, the preprocessing of the input signal is performed by smoothing and median filtering. After preprocessing the feature extraction is carried out using MFCC and Spectral features to get precise features from the input Marathi Speech corpus. The optimized RNN classifier is used for speech recognition after completing the feature extraction task, where the optimization of hidden neurons in RNN is performed by the Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA). Finally, the comparison with the conventional techniques has shown that the proposed model outperforms most competing models on a benchmark dataset.

New Modified Controlled Bat Algorithm for Numerical Optimization Problem

Bat algorithm (BA) is an eminent meta-heuristic algorithm that has been widely used to solve diverse kinds of optimization problems. BA leverages the echolocation feature of bats produced by imitating the bats’ searching behavior. BA faces premature convergence due to its local search capability. Instead of using the standard uniform walk, the Torus walk is viewed as a promising alternative to improve the local search capability. In this work, we proposed an improved variation of BA by applying torus walk to improve diversity and convergence. The proposed. Modern Computerized Bat Algorithm (MCBA) approach has been examined for fifteen well-known benchmark test problems. The finding of our technique shows promising performance as compared to the standard PSO and standard BA. The proposed MCBA, BPA, Standard PSO, and Standard BA have been examined for well-known benchmark test problems and training of the a.pngicial neural network (ANN). We have performed experiments using eight benchmark datasets applied from the worldwide famous machine-learning (ML) repository of UCI. Simulation results have shown that the training of an ANN with MCBA-NN algorithm tops the list considering exactness, with more superiority compared to the traditional methodologies. The MCBA-NN algorithm may be used effectively for data classification and statistical problems in the future.

Natural frequency analysis of imperfect FG sandwich plates resting on Winkler-Pasternak foundation

The present research analyzes the natural frequencies of the imperfect functionally graded sandwich plate (FGSP) comprised of porous face sheets made of functionally graded materials (FGMs) and an isotropic homogeneous core resting on the elastic foundation. To accomplish this, the material characteristics of the FGSP are taken to be changed incessantly along the thickness direction based on the volume fraction of constituents expressed by the modified rule of the mixture, which includes porosity volume fraction with three diverse kinds of porosity distribution models. Furthermore, to describe the two-parameter elastic foundation's response on the imperfect FGSP, the medium is supposed to be linear, homogenous, and isotropic, and it has been modelled using the Winkler-Pasternak model. Moreover, in the kinematic relationship of the imperfect FGSP resting on the Winkler-Pasternak foundation, third-order shear deformation theory (TSDT) is used, and the motion equations are set up employing Hamilton's principle. For natural frequency analysis of imperfect FGSPs resting on the Winkler-Pasternak foundation with simply supported edges, an analytical solution is obtained. To verify the current formulation, comprehensive comparisons are performed with the available data. The impacts of the two-parameter elastic foundation, porosity volume fraction, porosity distribution types, lay-up scheme, and side to thickness ratio, on the values of the non-dimensional fundamental natural frequency (NDFNF) of the imperfect FGSPs, are investigated, thoroughly.

Factors influencing the risk attitude of vegetable farmers in Kerala

Vegetables play a major role by providing nutritional, economic security and producing higher returns per unit area. But vegetable farmers have to face diverse kinds of climate, biological, price and financial risks. An important factor in understanding the behavioural and managerial decisions of farmers is to understand their attitude towards risk. This study investigated the risk attitude of vegetable farmers in special agricultural zones, socio-economic characteristics of farmers and identified the factors which influences the risk attitude. A survey was conducted by involving 270 respondents from 6 agro ecological units. Purposive as well as simple random sampling techniques were adopted for the study. The data were collected with the help of structured interview schedule and processed into frequency, percentage, correlation analysis to draw the conclusion. Results showed that majority of the farmers were in medium risk attitude category and the factors such as area under vegetable cultivation, education, annual income, irrigation potential, extension participation, social participation and innovative proneness were positively and significantly related with the risk attitude of vegetable farmers.

Analysing a meta-model for production scheduling in different kind of flow shop configurations

Meta-models enable to introduce dynamism and flexibility while trying to develop tools for solving a widened set of problems in a given application domain, which is considered nowadays to be of upmost importance, in the current Industry 4.0 era, and its underlying Cyber Physical Production Systems. In this paper a meta-model about flow shop scheduling problems is proposed, which enables to solve scheduling problems occurring in different kind of flow shop configurations through simulation. A comparative performance analysis of the scheduling results obtained considering the different types of flow shop configurations is carried out in this paper, based on the use of diverse kind of dispatching rules and flow shop performance evaluation parameters in order to realize about the utility of the proposed meta-model, for instance for proposing the best suited flow shop configuration in a given industrial scenario.

The evolution of patients’ concept of the alliance and its relation to outcome: A dynamic latent-class structural equation modeling approach.

The working alliance (WA) has been widely identified as the key concept for psychotherapy and allied health care services. The WA, measured at different phases of diverse kinds of therapies, has been shown to robustly predict posttreatment outcomes. But the way the clients' conceptualization of the alliance evolves overtime, and the relation between this kind of conceptual change and subsequent symptom improvements, has not been investigated. Dynamic Latent Class Structural Equation Models (DLC-SEM) were applied to data drawn from two randomized clinical trials of cognitive-behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder (N = 57 and 80) to evaluate several potential models of the relation between the conceptual/structural changes in patients' self-reports of the quality of the alliance and subsequent treatment outcomes. Inspection of the DLC-SEM models suggests that, overtime, between 63% and 66% of the better session-level outcome clients switched from three factors (task, goal, bond) to an integrated single factor conceptualization of the therapeutic alliance. The study indicates that the majority of patients evolve their concept of the alliance overtime: The previously distinct alliance elements become integrated into a single factor construct. These findings suggest that if such overtime development is generalizable across diverse patient/treatment populations, future research ought to take these developments into account both methodologically (i.e., how alliance is measured) and in analyzing time-series data (e.g., using DLC-SEM). By modeling the patient's dynamic concept evolution, this initial study shows a potential to empirically explore prior theoretical propositions of the evolutions (or stability) of the alliance overtime. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

NILAI-NILAI PENDIDIKAN KARAKTER DALAM TRADISI TAJINAN (SORA DAN SAPPAR) MASYARAKAT KECAMATAN KRAKSAAN, KABUPATEN PROBOLINGGO

Indonesia, with its characteristic diversity, has many races, cultures, languages, traditions that are spread all over the islands in Indonesia. has various kinds of diversity with noble values that are still maintained to this day. However, it is undeniable that in the era of modernization and globalization itself, the younger generation who should be the inheritors of the culture, tradition, language, that is in their area are slowly being left behind. Therefore, it is very important to instill local values or traditions, traditional culture, regional languages in students, so that they do not lose their identity as Indonesian people which are rich in diversity. In the Probolinggo area itself, there are many local traditions that are not widely known by students, but there are also traditions that are already known but they do not know the origin, meaning or philosophy of the existing traditions. One of the traditions that almost all students know, especially in the Kraksaan sub-district is the tajinan "Tajin sora and Sappar", but unfortunately they do not know the origin or meaning of the tajinan itself and there are also character values contained in this tajinan tradition.
 Kata kunci: Character Matter, Tajinan, Sora dan Sappar

Undokai in the city of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923

The aim of this study is to clarify the cultural characteristics of “Undokai” (Sports day) in the city of Tokyo based on a case study examining an Undokai held in Ueno Park on November 25 after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. The study was conducted based on document analysis and showed the following results. 1) The Great Kanto Earthquake caused catastrophic damage to the city of Tokyo, destroying about half of the city area by fire. Afterwards, at least 119 barracks were set up in the city, and in particular, the barracks in Ueno Park (Ikenohata, Miharudai, and Takenodai), which were directly operated by the city of Tokyo, housed over 9,000 victims in total. The people lived as evacuees, sharing limited lifelines in a desperate situ-ation. 2) According to a report by sociologist Gonda Yasunosuke, the evacuated victims sought entertainment in order to regain their "human life," and this was one of the reasons why the Tokyo City Social Education Department developed a series of comfort programs. These programs included the events of Undokai for the purpose of "promoting vitality and fostering physical strength". Regarding the case of Ueno Park, the pho-tographic archive shows a track divided by wooden poles and ropes, a venue decorated with flags and red and white curtains, and many spectators. The number of participants was recorded as 3,000 in the Tokyo city report. 3) According to the newspaper, the Undokai included events such as a parent-child race, an obstacle race, a tug-of-war between barracks, and a 400-meter run for men over 45 years old, etc. Articles reported that the day was "the most lively since the earthquake, with spectators laughing wildlｙ" and "applauding and cheering, the villagers were in a relaxed mood for the first time in a long time". These articles indicate that the Undo-kai was of great significance as a kind of diversion for the participants and as a place to promote communi-cation among the people. With the findings above, this study concludes that in those days, the Undokai as a comforting program was an es-sential element of comfort for the victims after the disaster. Through the event, the victims as participants fostered the "harmony" between barracks created an extraordinary space within the barrack life. Therefore, creating har-mony and an extraordinary space can be considered the main cultural function of Undokai at the disaster affected area.

Writing the Self: A Study on Buchi Emecheta’s Autobiographical Novel Second Class Citizen

Life-writing, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, is a general term for the writing of diverse kinds that takes life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or an explicit self-reference to the writer. As autobiographies, as well as autobiographical novels, can be considered as self-referential modes of writing, a notion of the terms in which the subject preconceives himself/herself becomes pervasive for understanding autobiographies as well as autobiographical novels. Susan Stanford Friedman, in her essay “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice” (1988) opens a critique of a seminal essay by Georges Gusdorf where he states that the cultural precondition for autobiography is a pervasive concept of individualism, a “conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life” (Qtd in Friedman 72). Friedman argues that the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self that pervades Gusdorf’s work raises serious problems for critics who recognise that the “self, self-creation, and self-consciousness are profoundly different for women, minorities, and many non-western peoples” (Friedman 73). While taking into account the differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender identity, Friedman refers to Regina Blackburn in her “In Search of the Black Female Self” and says that the “black women autobiographers use the genre to redefine ‘the black female self in black terms from a black perspective’” (Qtd in Freidman 78). Moreover, in the postcolonial context, C.L. Innes in The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2007) considers the use of the self-referential mode as a tool by postcolonial writers to represent his/her culture and also to capture and address contemporary concerns. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to explore the use of the self-referential mode by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in her autobiographical novel Second-Class Citizen (1974)

Nutrient Composition, Antioxidant and Antibacterial Activities of Ulva prolifera O. F. Müller

Seaweeds are marine organisms capable of producing diverse kinds of chemical compounds with promising pharmacological use. The study evaluated the proximate and elemental composition and the potential antioxidant (using CUPRAC, ABTS+, and DPPH assays) and antibacterial activities (using microtiter plate dilution assay) of Ulva prolifera O. F. Müller. The seaweed has a total phenolic content of 829 ± 2.00 mg GAE/g. Antioxidant efficiency of U. prolifera exerted high ability of reducing copper ions, potent ABTS+ and DPPH scavenging activities in a concentration-dependent manner with IC50 value of 24.7 mg GAE/mL, 43.52 mg GAE/mL, and 54.1 mg GAE/mL, respectively, more effective than ascorbic acid. In vitro antibacterial activity assay showed that U. prolifera exhibited inhibitory activity against bacterial pathogens such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MIC = 125 mg/mL), S. epidermidis (MIC = 125 mg/mL), and Pseudomonas fluorescens (MIC = 500 mg/mL). This investigation is the first documented report regarding antibacterial activity of U. prolifera against P. fluorescens. In addition, results showed elemental composition to be in decreasing order of Ca K Mg Na Mn Fe Zn Cu Pb Cd Cr. Proximate composition of U. prolifera showed high carbohydrate and protein content with a percentage composition of 36.20 ± 0.27% and 23.72 ± 0.31% (dry weight), respectively. This study is the first report in the Philippines that shows the potential of U. prolifera as an excellent candidate organism as source of chemical compounds with relevant application to the pharmacological industry.

Fracton physics of spatially extended excitations. II. Polynomial ground state degeneracy of exactly solvable models

Generally, ``fracton'' topological orders are referred to as gapped phases that support \textit{point-like topological excitations} whose mobility is, to some extent, restricted. In our previous work [Phys. Rev. B 101, 245134 (2020)], a large class of exactly solvable models on hypercubic lattices are constructed. In these models, \textit{spatially extended excitations} possess generalized fracton-like properties: not only mobility but also deformability is restricted. As a series work, in this paper, we proceed further to compute ground state degeneracy (GSD) in both isotropic and anisotropic lattices. We decompose and reconstruct ground states through a consistent collection of subsystem ground state sectors, in which mathematical game ``coloring method'' is applied. Finally, we are able to systematically obtain GSD formulas (expressed as $\log_2 GSD$) which exhibit diverse kinds of polynomial dependence on system sizes. For example, the GSD of the model labeled as $[0,1,2,4]$ in four dimensional isotropic hypercubic lattice shows $ 12L^2-12L+4$ dependence on the linear size $L$ of the lattice. Inspired by existing results [Phys. Rev. X 8, 031051 (2018)], we expect that the polynomial formulas encode geometrical and topological fingerprints of higher-dimensional manifolds beyond toric manifolds used in this work. This is left to future investigation.

Profanity and Play: Solidarity in the Discourse of Cyberbullying

Offering the world countless remarkable benefits, computer mediated communication has become an essential feature of modern life. However, it has also become a medium for personal aggression and abuse of diverse kinds. The discourse of online vilification has been the topic of much research, for instance on the behaviour of trolls. This study focuses on a little researched phenomenon, the discourse of cyberbullying, in particular a subtype, cybermobbing, in which a group of participants gather online to attack an individual over a period of time. The study takes up an example of such participants who joined a Facebook group dedicated to abusing a prominent sportsman. The purpose of the study is to identify the chief discourse characteristics of cybermobbing that bind the participants together. The analysis reveals a high degree of solidarity among the participants expressed through profanity, humour, and play. The results will also throw light on the mentality of those who engage in cybermobbing.

Woody plant biodiversity explains arthropod pest management interventions in residential landscapes

The woody plant communities found on residential properties constitute an integral component of cities’ green infrastructure and serve as a nexus between urban residents and the natural world. Despite this importance, residential landscapes are infrequently designed with principles of sustainability in mind, resulting in the extensive use of pesticides to suppress a diverse array of plant pests. In this study, we ask whether ecological theory can inform the sustainable design and management of woody plant communities on urban residential properties. The associational resistance and dilution effect hypotheses are analogous hypotheses, which posit that increasing biodiversity can inhibit the abundance of herbivores and pathogens, respectively. Importantly, theory suggests that it might not just be diversity that matters, but the right kind of diversity (i.e., community composition). Previous studies have demonstrated that herbivore abundance can be greater on native plants compared to exotic plants in residential landscapes. However, little is known regarding whether this translates into greater numbers of interventions to reduce damage associated with plant pests on native plants. To test these hypotheses, we utilized a multi-year, commercial plant health care program dataset. We examined, at the residential property scale, the relationships between woody plant diversity, the percentage of plants that were native, and pest management interventions. We found that the number of pest management interventions targeting phytophagous arthropods, but not plant pathogens, was negatively related to woody plant biodiversity. The percentage of native plants on a property had no relationship with the number of pest management interventions that occurred. Consequently, efforts to increase woody plant biodiversity in residential landscapes could result in increased phytophagous arthropod pest suppression, thereby reducing the need for pesticide applications and their associated adverse effects.