Life after armed group involvement in Nepal: a clinical ethnography of psychological well-being of former 'child soldiers' over time

Little is known about the longitudinal effects of early age involvement of young people in armed groups and their well-being as they return to strongly affected, politicised communities. Current research and policy are often driven by the assumption of a causal relationship between participation in this war experience and psychological damage. This article explores the role of young people’s armed group experience during the Nepal People’s War, compared with post-conflict stressors, in shaping intra-psychic impact and distress, and which processes enable well-being and resilient functioning. Findings are reported from an 18-month clinical ethnography of a cohort of 17 Nepalese young subjects, where participant-observation methods were used to explore their daily lives after exiting the armed group and follow-up research conducted six years later. The findings highlighted limited evidence for on-going intra-psychic impact and distress related directly to their armed group experience; when such distress occurred, it appeared to be generated more by the structural violence of their environments. The key constituents determining their well-being included: a sense of closeness through emotional connectedness with their family, ideological proximity with the values of the armed group, closeness in their bond with the community, and the social-emotional-economic capital available to them to navigate the harsh structural constraints of post-conflict life. These data further challenge the prevailing assumption that this war experience inevitably leads to psychological damage, and the article argues that structural violence often plays a predominant role in cases where psychological distress does arise

Adaptive strong-field control of chemical dynamics guided by three-dimensional momentum imaging.

Shaping ultrafast laser pulses using adaptive feedback can manipulate dynamics in molecular systems, but extracting information from the optimized pulse remains difficult. Experimental time constraints often limit feedback to a single observable, complicating efforts to decipher the underlying mechanisms and parameterize the search process. Here we show, using two strong-field examples, that by rapidly inverting velocity map images of ions to recover the three-dimensional photofragment momentum distribution and incorporating that feedback into the control loop, the specificity of the control objective is markedly increased. First, the complex angular distribution of fragment ions from the nω+C2D4→C2D3++D interaction is manipulated. Second, isomerization of acetylene (nω+C2H2→C2H22+→CH2++C+) is controlled via a barrier-suppression mechanism, a result that is validated by model calculations. Collectively, these experiments comprise a significant advance towards the fundamental goal of actively guiding population to a specified quantum state of a molecule

Incorporating real time velocity map image reconstruction into closed-loop coherent control

We report techniques developed to utilize three-dimensional momentum information as feedback in adaptive femtosecond control of molecular dynamics. Velocity map imaging is used to obtain the three-dimensional momentum map of the dissociating ions following interaction with a shaped intense ultrafast laser pulse. In order to recover robust feedback information, however, the two-dimensional momentum projection from the detector must be inverted to reconstruct the full three-dimensional momentum of the photofragments. These methods are typically slow or require manual inputs and are therefore accomplished offline after the images have been obtained. Using an algorithm based upon an “onion-peeling” (also known as “back projection”) method, we are able to invert 1040 × 1054 pixel images in under 1 s. This rapid inversion allows the full photofragment momentum to be used as feedback in a closed-loop adaptive control scheme, in which a genetic algorithm tailors an ultrafast laser pulse to optimize a specific outcome. Examples of three-dimensional velocity map image based control applied to strong-field dissociation of CO and O2 are presented

Unambiguous observation of F-atom core-hole localization in CF4 through body-frame photoelectron angular distributions

Citation: McCurdy, C. W., Rescigno, T. N., Trevisan, C. S., Lucchese, R. R., Gaire, B., Menssen, A., . . . Weber, T. (2017). Unambiguous observation of F-atom core-hole localization in CF4 through body-frame photoelectron angular distributions. Physical Review A, 95(1). doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.95.011401A dramatic symmetry breaking in K-shell photoionization of the CF4 molecule in which a core-hole vacancy is created in one of four equivalent fluorine atoms is displayed in the molecular frame angular distribution of the photoelectrons. Observing the photoejected electron in coincidence with an F+ atomic ion after Auger decay is shown to select the dissociation path where the core hole was localized almost exclusively on that atom. A combination of measurements and ab initio calculations of the photoelectron angular distribution in the frame of the recoiling CF3+ and F+ atoms elucidates the underlying physics that derives from the Ne-like valence structure of the F(1s-1) core-excited atom. © 2017 American Physical Society

Development of automated brightfield double In Situ hybridization (BDISH) application for HER2 gene and chromosome 17 centromere (CEN 17) for breast carcinomas and an assay performance comparison to manual dual color HER2 fluorescence In Situ hybridization (FISH)

BACKGROUND: Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) is a quantitative assay for selecting breast cancer patients for trastuzumab therapy. However, current HER2 FISH procedures are labor intensive, manual methods that require skilled technologists and specialized fluorescence microscopy. Furthermore, FISH slides cannot be archived for long term storage and review. Our objective was to develop an automated brightfield double in situ hybridization (BDISH) application for HER2 gene and chromosome 17 centromere (CEN 17) and test the assay performance with dual color HER2 FISH evaluated breast carcinomas. METHODS: The BDISH assay was developed with the nick translated dinitrophenyl (DNP)-labeled HER2 DNA probe and DNP-labeled CEN 17 oligoprobe on the Ventana BenchMark(® )XT slide processing system. Detection of HER2 and CEN 17 signals was accomplished with the silver acetate, hydroquinone, and H(2)O(2 )reaction with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and the fast red and naphthol phosphate reaction with alkaline phosphatise (AP), respectively. The BDISH specificity was optimized with formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded xenograft tumors, MCF7 (non-amplified HER2 gene) and BT-474 (amplified HER2 gene). Then, the BDISH performance was evaluated with 94 routinely processed breast cancer tissues. Interpretation of HER2 and CEN 17 BDISH slides was conducted by 4 observers using a conventional brightfield microscope without oil immersion objectives. RESULTS: Sequential hybridization and signal detection for HER2 and CEN 17 ISH demonstrated both DNA targets in the same cells. HER2 signals were visualized as discrete black metallic silver dots while CEN 17 signals were detected as slightly larger red dots. Our study demonstrated a high consensus concordance between HER2 FISH and BDISH results of clinical breast carcinoma cases based on the historical scoring method (98.9%, Simple Kappa = 0.9736, 95% CI = 0.9222 – 1.0000) and the ASCO/CAP scoring method with the FISH equivocal cases (95.7%, Simple Kappa = 0.8993%, 95% CI = 0.8068 – 0.9919) and without the FISH equivocal cases (100%, Simple Kappa = 1.0000%, 95% CI = 1.0000 – 1.0000). CONCLUSION: Automated BDISH applications for HER2 and CEN 17 targets were successfully developed and it might be able to replace manual two-color HER2 FISH methods. The application also has the potential to be used for other gene targets. The use of BDISH technology allows the simultaneous analyses of two DNA targets within the context of tissue morphological observation

Hydrogen and fluorine migration in photo-double-ionization of 1,1-difluoroethylene (1,1-C2H2F2) near and above threshold

We have studied the nondissociative and dissociative photo-double-ionization of 1,1-difluoroethylene using single photons of energies ranging from 40 to 70 eV. Applying a coincident electron-ion three-dimensional momentum imaging technique, kinematically complete measurements have been achieved. We present the branching ratios of the six reaction channels identified in the experiment. Electron-ion energy maps and relative electron emission angles are used to distinguish between direct and indirect photo-double-ionization mechanisms at a few different photon energies. The influence of selection and propensity rules is discussed. Threshold energies of double ionization are extracted from the sum of the kinetic energies of the electrons, which hint to the involvement of different manifolds of states. The dissociative ionization channels with two ionic fragments are explored in detail by measuring the kinetic energy release of the fragment ions, sum of the kinetic energies, as well as the energy sharing of the two emitted electrons. We investigate the migration of hydrogen and fluorine atoms and compare the experimental results to the photo-double-ionization of centrosymmetric linear and planar hydrocarbons (C[subscript 2]H[subscript 2] and C[subscript 2]H[subscript 4]) whenever possible

Potential of tree-ring chronologies for multi-centennial streamflow reconstructions: an insight from Nepal

Rivers in the Himalayan and adjacent mountain regions are the lifelines of over 1 billion people and are the backbone of civilizations therein. The short gauge records of Nepal do not provide a sufficient time window to understand the natural variations in river discharge from a long-term climate perspective. By developing a network of over 100 tree-ring chronologies across Nepal, we checked their hydrological sensitivity for long-term streamflow reconstruction. This shows huge potential for long-term annual or seasonal streamflow reconstructions in different river basins of Nepal. A robust reconstruction model was developed between tree growth and streamflow, capturing 56 % of the variance in the actual data, and was used to reconstruct the March–July monthly average streamflow of Sinja Khola (river) at Diware from AD 1700 to 2013. The reconstruction revealed several dry and pluvial periods with the recent decline in the streamflow in the Sinja River. We found short- (2 to 8.7 years) to medium-term (35.2 years) periodicities in the reconstruction that are likely to be associated with climatic oscillations, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), along with the influence of local circulation patterns. Since Sinja Valley is related to the origin of the Nepali language and civilization, the information on long-term streamflow will be beneficial for water resource management in the context of rapid climate change and for preparedness for water-induced disasters in the region.</p

PrivGenDB: Efficient and privacy-preserving query executions over encrypted SNP-Phenotype database

Privacy and security issues limit the query executions over genomics datasets, notably single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), raised by the sensitivity of this type of data. Therefore, it is important to ensure that executing queries on these datasets do not reveal sensitive information, such as the identity of the individuals and their genetic traits, to a data server. In this paper, we propose and present a novel model, we call PrivGenDB, to ensure the confidentiality of SNP-phenotype data while executing queries. The confidentiality in PrivGenDB is enabled by its system architecture and the search functionality provided by searchable symmetric encryption (SSE). To the best of our knowledge, PrivGenDB construction is the first SSE-based approach ensuring the confidentiality of SNP-phenotype data as the current SSE-based approaches for genomic data are limited only to substring search and range queries on a sequence of genomic data. Besides, a new data encoding mechanism is proposed and incorporated in the PrivGenDB model. This enables PrivGenDB to handle the dataset containing both genotype and phenotype and also support storing and managing other metadata, like gender and ethnicity, privately. Furthermore, different queries, namely Count, Boolean, Negation and k′-out-of-k match queries used for genomic data analysis, are supported and executed by PrivGenDB. The execution of these queries on genomic data in PrivGenDB is efficient and scalable for biomedical research and services. These are demonstrated by our analytical and empirical analysis presented in this paper. Specifically, our empirical studies on a dataset with 5000 entries (records) containing 1000 SNPs demonstrate that a count/Boolean query and a k′-out-of-k match query over 40 SNPs take approximately 4.3s and 86.4μs, respectively, outperforming the existing schemes