The correlations between Th1 and Th2 cytokines in human alveolar echinococcosis

Background: Alveolar echinococcosis (AE) is a cosmopolitan zoonotic parasitic disease caused by Echinococcus multilocularis larval tapeworm infections in humans that severely impairs the health of affected patients. Methods: The expression levels of 20 cytokines associated with AE infection were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and the correlations between these cytokines were analysed in the R programming language. Results: Serum cytokine levels differed among individuals in both the AE patient and healthy control groups. Related studies have shown that different cytokines are associated with AE. Therefore, we investigated the correlations among the cytokines; these correlations were simple in the healthy control group butcomplex in the AE patient group. Th2 cytokines, such as interferon (IFN)-γ, interleukin (IL)-1β and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1, had high betweenness centrality in AE patients, whereas Th1 cytokines, such as growth-regulated oncogene (GRO)-α, eotaxin and IL-5, had high betweenness centrality in the healthy control group. Conclusions: The altered correlations between Th1 and Th2 cytokines may be closely associated with AE progression.

International collaboration of Polish research entities in a territorial context

The aim of the article was to characterize the structure of scientific collaboration launched by Polish institutions in partnership with foreign entities in 2019 with a special focus on the territorial context. An analysis of the network generated on the basis of data from the POL-on system was made: weak components, the degree centrality and the betweenness centrality for each entity were identified, as well as significant connections in the network reduced to the level of countries and to voivodeships. A key entity in the network was indicated (the Central Mining Institute). Some foreign entities show high betweenness centrality in the considered network. At the level of relations between countries, the high network density and significant activity of institutions from Germany were observed, which in the future may hinder gaining advantages. Scientific collaboration of Polish institutions is carried out mainly with centres located in Europe, but it is generally not cross-border.

Spatial Pattern of Urban System Based on Gravity Model and Whole Network Analysis in Eight Urban Agglomerations of China

An urban agglomeration (shorted as UA) is a highly developed spatial form of integrated city and an important driving force for regional economic development. The network of UA mainly reflects the spatial connections and organizational structure of all cities, which is of great significance for understanding the development status of UAs and revealing their development laws. However, there are few horizontal studies comparing the network structure of China’s UAs. This study constructs the economic network of China’s eight UAs with the gravity model and explores the overall network structure and city centrality using indicators in network analysis. Then, two groups of UAs with similar network structures are compared. Finally, the association between the gravity model and empirical data is discussed. The results show that the spatial pattern of cities in UAs can be expressed by the gravity model approximately. Besides, UAs with different development levels present different spatial network structures, but the network structures cannot reflect the development levels of UAs directly. We also find that the cities with high betweenness centrality have greater development potential to be the next growth pole.

Family Networks and Distributive Politics

We study the distribution of public services by local politicians when political support spreads through social networks. We sketch a model showing that incumbents target goods and services to individuals who would lead to the largest aggregate loss of support if they stopped supporting the incumbent. Those individuals have high betweenness centrality. Using data on 3.6 million households from the Philippines, we show that households with high betweenness centrality receive a greater number of public services from their local government. This result is robust to the inclusion of controls for program eligibility, detailed measure of family wealth and elite status, family ties with politicians, and other measures of centrality.

Modeling Team Cognition in Emergency Response via Naturalistic Observation of Team Interactions

Emergency responders work collectively as an ad hoc team to save lives and infrastructures at risk, despite their varying experience, knowledge, cultural backgrounds, and difficult working conditions with high-levels of uncertainty and timepressure. Cognition, in particular, has gained attention as a key construct to consider in collective response efforts in emergency management. Team cognition, however, has not been fully appreciated or adequately addressed in the field of emergency response (Bigley & Roberts, 2001). The interactionist perspective (or interactive team cognition) effectively captures team cognition in heterogeneous and dynamic teams prevalent in the real-world (Cooke & Gorman, 2009; Cooke, Gorman, Myers, & Duran, 2013). Although researchers in the emergency response discipline appreciate the value of viewing team cognition as interaction (Comfort, 2007; Bergeron & Cooren, 2012; Wolbers & Boersma, 2013), an associated empirical or interventional attempt using this perspective remains scarce. Tracing the scarcity of literature back to lack of context-specific theorizing efforts (Moon, Peres, & Sasangohar, 2017), an observation-based, theory-building approach is utilized here to address this gap. The naturalistic observational study presented here is an initial effort to explore team cognition for an incident management team (IMT) as an interactive system. An IMT is an ad hoc team of command-level responders. Interestingly, an IMT is a team of functional sub-teams or sections (i.e., Command, Planning, Operations, Logistics, and Finance/ Administration). Within each sub-team there is also a team of functional units. This naturalistic observational study was conducted at a high-fidelity simulator replicating a generic IMT facility, i.e., the emergency operations training center (EOTC), College Station, TX. Interactions were observed and coded in terms of who initiated the interaction and with whom, which technology was being used, and what was communicated and for what purpose. The purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical interactionist model of team cognition in emergency response, to inform future interventional attempts to improve team decision-making. To do so, this study views a Plans team as a cognitive system capable of managing information through interdependent, nonlinear, and dynamic interactive behaviors for perceiving (P), diagnosing (D), and adapting (A) to the changes in the status of critical elements (Adapted from Moon et al., 2017). The proposed P·D·A model posits the following three premises: (1) a Plans team is a cognitive system where its team cognition is interactions of team members to complete a cognitive task; (2) team cognition for each of the three sub-teams of a Plans team is tied to the context-specific cognitive tasks of perceiving (P), diagnosing (D), and adapting (A) to the changes in the status of critical elements; and (3) team cognition for a Plans team is manifested as nonlinear, interdependent, and dynamic interactions within and among P, D, and A of the three sub-teams of the Plans team. Preliminary results from a content analysis of transcribed and coded interactions suggest that an Info/Intel unit, a Situation unit, and a Section Chief unit can be hypothesized to be critical contributors of team cognition for a Plans team in terms of P, D, and A, respectively. These hypotheses can be represented with network centrality measures as follows: Hypothesis 1. An Info/Intel unit has high in-degree and out-degree centrality with non-Plans teams. Hypothesis 2. A Situation unit has high betweenness centrality within a Plans team. Hypothesis 3. A Section Chief unit has high in-degree and out-degree centrality within a Plans team, and high betweenness centrality between the Plans team and non-Plans teams. The proposed P·D·A model illustrates the benefits of viewing team cognition as interaction within and among a team of teams, for context-specific tasks of P, D, and A. Most importantly, the model effectively captures the nonlinear, interdependent, and dynamic nature of team cognition as interaction in a multiteam system, or MTS (Marks, DeChurch, Mathieu, Panzer, & Alonso, 2005; Bienefeld & Grote, 2014), embedded in complex socio-technical systems, STS (Vicente, 2002). As the information processing model views an individual as a cognitive system or a human information processing system (Wickens, 1992), the P·D·A model views a team as a cognitive system capable of managing information. The interactionist perspective on team cognition helps the P·D·A model to realize its potential to extend an individual cognition model to a team level. The interactionist perspective is “compatible with the view of human-machine system as a unitary system” (Cooke & Gorman, 2009, p. 28). In addition to the theoretical and practical implications, this study has methodological implications. Measuring interactive team cognition with network-based metrics (currently in progress) will open a new chapter. The need of incorporating a network perspective into team cognition in emergency response is in line with the literature (Wolbers & Boersma, 2013; Steigenberger, 2016). As a future work, the P·D·A model will be further developed with network and content analysis and validated through interviews with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) involved in Hurricane Harvey.

Effective hybrid link-adding strategy to enhance network transport efficiency for scale-free networks

In this paper, we propose a new strategy (HLS) to enhance the transport capacity of scale-free networks by adding links to the existing networks, based on the betweenness of nodes, the shortest path length and the betweenness of links. Since only slight amounts of nodes in scale-free networks have high betweenness centrality, local link-adding strategy is adopted as a part of HLS for target nodes, which can significantly reduce the load of target nodes. Moreover, in order to improve the robustness of our strategy under some extreme cases, second sorting procedure is introduced in HLS. Simulation results show that HLS outperforms the IE strategy in terms of transport capacity and delivering ability of scale-free networks. After the adding links process of HLS, the congestion can be alleviated efficiently, which is meaningful to the realistic networks.

Jaringan Komunikasi Pelaku Inovasi Agribisnis Kolam Ikan Air Deras di Kecamatan Caringin Kabupaten Bogor

Running water fish culture is one of the techniques in freshwater fish cultivation. This activity forms an agribusiness system and interactions from the individuals involved. These interactions form a communication network. This study aimed to provide a description of running water fish culture innovation, analyze the interpersonal communication networks in running water fish culture agribusiness, factors that influence the interpersonal communication networks, and analyze the factors that influence business sustainability. This research which used the census method was conducted in Caringin Subdistrict Bogor Regency. Survey results show that the communication network formed was of scattered personal networks. The outdegree centrality and indegree centrality values obtained were categorized as medium respectively. The closeness centrality value is also in the medium category. Whereas the betweenness centrality value for running water fish agribusiness participants is known to be the highest. Those individuals with high betweenness centrality values possess the ability to organize communication in their networks.