Yi Deng

© 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.The fornix is the primary subcortical output fiber system of the hippocampal formation. In children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, hippocampal volume reduction has been commonly reported, but few studies as yet have evaluated the integrity of the fornix. Therefore, we investigated the fornix of 45 school-aged children with 22q11.2DS and 38 matched typically developing children. Probabilistic diffusion tensor imaging tractography was used to reconstruct the body of the fornix in each child[U+05F3]s brain native space. Compared with children, significantly lower fractional anisotropy and higher radial diffusivity was observed bilaterally in the body of the fornix in children with 22q11.2DS. Irregularities were especially prominent in the posterior aspect of the fornix where it emerges from the hippocampus. Smaller volumes of the hippocampal formations were also found in the 22q11.2DS group. The reduced hippocampal volumes were correlated with lower fornix FA and higher fornix RD in the right hemisphere. Our findings provide neuroanatomical evidence of disrupted hippocampal connectivity in children with 22q11.2DS, which may help to further understand the biological basis of spatial impairments, affective regulation, and other factors related to the ultra-high risk for schizophrenia in this population.

In late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread over the world, causing millions of deaths. In the first few months of the pandemic, several countries prevented the spread of the pandemic successfully. By contrast, the pandemic in many other countries was not controlled well. For example, India encountered a second serious outbreak of COVID-19 from April 2021 due to the poor resistance measures implemented by the government. To figure out the effective countermeasures to the pandemic, this research proposes a COVID-19 pandemic and its response system, which consists of the infection subsystem, the quarantine subsystem, and the medical subsystem. On this basis, an improved SEIR-SD model is established which is utilized to analyze the response measures to the pandemic quantitatively. This model successfully simulates the actual epidemic scenarios in Wuhan, which verifies its effectiveness. Afterward, the impact of hospital administration rate, quarantine rate, average contact number, and contact infection rate on the cumulative number of infections and deaths are analyzed by simulation. The results show that both the medical and administrative efforts, especially in the early stage of the epidemic, are significant in reducing the number of infections and shortening the epidemic period. In the medical aspect, the more stringent quarantine brings the earlier inflection point of the epidemic; more importantly, improving the treatment rate significantly reduces the scale of the epidemic. In the administrative aspect, enforcing individual protection and strict community closure can effectively cut off the transmission of the virus and curb the spread of the epidemic. Finally, this research proposes several practical suggestions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main contribution of this research is that the effects of different response measures on the number of new infections daily and the cumulative number of deaths of a country or region in the COVID-19 pandemic are estimated quantitatively based on modeling and simulation.

In order to preserve and ensure the vitality of freedom and democracy in democratic societies, it is important that citizens reflect deeply on the meaning of freedom and the conditions necessary to sustain it. The idea for this volume arose from discussions at the February 2019 annual meeting of the Georgia Philosophical Society held at Mercer University on the theme of "Freedom and Society," and drafts of many of the chapters were first presented there. Including contributions from both early-career and well-known scholars, the chapters are tied together by questions about the nature of political freedom and autonomy in democratic societies and about the ways in which the enactment of democratic freedom depends on awareness of and engagement with freedom's underlying conditions. These conditions include social responsibility, creative innovation, and strong democratic institutions. Other recurring themes in the volume include the pitfalls of atomistic models of autonomy and the importance of giving due consideration to intersubjectivity, embodiment, and plurality as integral elements of a free society. Countering models centered exclusively on negative freedom, (i.e. freedom from constraints imposed by others), several chapters highlight the crucial roles of social responsibility and creativity in confronting obstructions to freedom, such as systemic racism and other challenges currently facing democracies. Finally, several chapters emphasize the fundamental importance of strong and just democratic institutions as the primary means of reliably expressing the will of the people.

In response to epistemic challenges posted to the public by hyper-realistic characters in AI-generated synthetic media, this chapter aims to answer the question: to what extent is generative AI responsible for its generated texts, images, audio, or videos, especially in situations involving deepfakes? I argue that generative AI models such as an artificially intelligent speech generator or a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) should be accountable for the transparency and truthfulness of its generated output due to its practical impacts on the public, particularly considering the injustice and potential epistemic threats posed by political deepfakes. The latest trend in AI regulations, as presented by the 2024-implemented EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) and the 2024-signed California AI Transparency Act, shows the move toward a more comprehensive regulatory framework for AI, which aligns with my argument on AI accountability.

Regarding domestic justice, Kant establishes republicanism as the requirement of governments. Defined as the division of legislative, administrative, and juridical branches, Kant’s republicanism aims to guarantee citizens’ independence, freedom, and equality and prevent despotism. Friedrich Schlegel criticizes Kant’s view by arguing that the mere legal division of the three powers is not sufficient to guarantee citizens’ independence, freedom, and equality or prevent despotism, and therefore he challenges Kant’s republicanism as an appropriate means for preventing injustice. Schlegel’s criticism, in my view, rightly points out the gap between the legal division of the three branches and ideal republicanism. To respond to Schlegel’s doubts, I present two arguments that elaborate on Kant’s republicanism, which could include active citizenship in addition to the legal division of the three branches. The first one argues that Kant’s republicanism, as merely the legal division of the three branches, would bring internal contradiction to the conception of republicanism. The second positively argues that the gap between the legal division of the three branches and ideal republicanism does not originate from the “gulf” between a particular will and the general will as described by Schlegel but from the vague overlap between a particular will and the general will. This argument also calls for the expansion of Kant’s republicanism with active citizenship.

© 2015 Hemme, Tu, Shi, Qin, Gao, Deng, Van Nostrand, Wu, He, Chain, Tringe, Fields, Rubin, Tiedje, Hazen, Arkin and Zhou.To understand patterns of geochemical cycling in pristine versus contaminated groundwater ecosystems, pristine shallow groundwater and contaminated groundwater samples from the Oak Ridge Integrated Field Research Center were sequenced and compared to each other to determine phylogenetic and metabolic difference between the communities. Proteobacteria are the most abundant lineages in the pristine community, though a significant proportion of the community is composed of poorly characterized low abundance lineages. The phylogenetic diversity of the pristine community contributed to a broader diversity of metabolic networks than the contaminated community. In addition, the pristine community encodes redundant and mostly complete geochemical cycles distributed over multiple lineages and appears capable of a wide range of metabolic activities. In contrast, many geochemical cycles in the contaminated community appear truncated or minimized due to decreased biodiversity and dominance by Rhodanobacter populations capable of surviving the combination of stresses at the site. These results indicate that the pristine site contains more robust and encodes more functional redundancy than the stressed community, which contributes to more efficient nutrient cycling and adaptability than the stressed community.