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摘要： For decades, capital punishment has been a highly divisive topic. Today, most democratic governments have done away with capital punishment, with few exceptions which include the United States. Drawing from the Canadian Election Study (2015) and the American National Election Study (2016), this article explores the underlying value systems that shape contemporary pro-death penalty opinions in Canada and in the United States. Findings suggest that, in both countries, pro-death penalty attitudes should be better understood as part of a "law and order syndrome." In the United States, the distribution of attitudes toward death penalty is also the reflection of a partisan divide. Our results also support the hypothesis that government distrust increases death penalty support in Canada.

关键词： coal   ecological degradation   emotion   environmental activism   moral shocks   sacrifice zone  

摘要： Emotions can play an important role in the perception of grievances, yet we know little about how environmentalists strategically utilize emotions to bolster activism and garner support. Drawing on social movement and environmental sociological research, we analyze how moral shocks can be used to mobilize activists against environmentally destructive activities. We study the case of Libkovice, Czech Republic, where environmentalists battled against the coal industry to save a city from being razed to access coal reserves. The data come from in-depth interviews, organizational and documentary video, and archival documents. Findings indicate that environmentalists drew upon symbols of destruction, such as threats to the local church, to fuel anger and mobilize the campaign. Results show how symbolic environmental campaigns can serve as beacons for future protest.

关键词： digestive diseases   cost and burden   quality of life   health care   spending   primary care specialist collaboration   integrative medicine   chronic digestive disease  

摘要： Acute and chronic digestive diseases are causing increased burden to patients and are increasing the United States health care spending. The purpose of this case report was to present how nonconfirmatory and conflicting diagnoses led to increased burden and suffering for a patient thus affecting quality of life. There were many physician visits and multiple tests performed on the patient. However, the primary care physician and specialists could not reach a confirmatory diagnosis. The treatment plans did not offer relief of symptoms, and the patient continues to experience digestive symptoms, enduring this burden for over 2 years. The central theme of this paper is to inform health care providers the importance of utilizing evidence-based primary care specialist collaboration models for better digestive disease outcomes. Consistent with patient's experience, the authors propose to pilot/adopt the integrative health care approaches that are proven effective for treating digestive diseases.

关键词： GIS education   GIS programming   GIS in higher education   geography education   CyberGIS  

摘要： Understanding of fundamentals of computer science and abilities in programming are becoming more important components of the GIS practitioner's skillset. As the frontiers of GIS expand into areas of inquiry and modes of operation which require such domain capabilities, teaching and instruction in GIS must begin that shift as well. And while the knowledge, skills, and practices of the GIS practitioner have always been in flux, the range of potential topics from computer science and programming to integrate into GIS instruction is a major pedagogical challenge. This paper examines a range of syllabi from variant GIS programming courses to explore the landscape of programming coursework. Through content analysis, these syllabi reveal three general themes: courses built on learning scripting with Python, courses built on learning fundamentals of WebGIS, and courses built on learning fundamentals in geodatabase design and management. While each of these focus areas are impactful skills for GIS learners to explore, there is by no means any consistency or cohesion in how GIS programming courses operate, nor does there seem to be any general resources or approaches to unify course design. More work is necessary among GIS instructors to begin building evidence-based practices in GIS programming instruction.

关键词： Computer science   Information visualization   Visual analytics   Learning analytics   MOOC   Case study  

摘要： Malaysia and many other developing countries progressively adopting massively open online course (MOOC) in their national higher education approach. We have observed an increasing need for facilitating MOOC monitoring that is associated with the rising adoption of MOOCs. Our observation suggests that recent adoption cases led analyst and instructors to focus on monitoring enrolment and learning activities. Visual analytics in MOOC support education analysts in analyzing MOOC data via interactive visualization. Existing literature on MOOC visualization focuses on enabling visual analysis on MOOC data from forum and course material. We found limited studies that investigate and characterize domain problems or design requirements of visual analytics for MOOC. This paper aims to present the empirical problem characterization and abstraction for visual analytics in MOOC learner's support monitoring. Detailed characterization and abstraction of the domain problem help visualization designer to derive design requirements in generating appropriate visualization solution. We examined the literature and conducted a case study to elicit a problem abstraction based on data, users, and tasks. We interviewed five Malaysian MOOC experts from three higher education institutes using semistructured questions. Our case study reveals the priority of enabling MOOC analysis on learner's progression and course completion. There is an association between design and analysis priority with the pedagogical type of implemented MOOC and users. The characterized domain problems and requirements offer a design foundation for visual analytics in MOOC monitoring analysis.

关键词： Coronavirus 19   Molecular docking   Molecular dynamics   Peptide-based drugs   Spike protein   Cluster of differentiation   Computer science   Engineering   Physics   Chemistry   Biological sciences  

摘要： The coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) is a highly contagious and rapidly spreading infection caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In some cases, the disease can be fatal which resulted in more than one million deaths worldwide according the WHO. Currently, there is no effective vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, however many small-molecule inhibitors have shown potent antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2 and some of them are now under clinical trials. Despite their promising activities, the development of these small molecules for the clinical use can be limited by many factors like the off-target effect, the poor stability, and the low bioavailability. The clusters of differentiation CD147, CD209, CD299 have been identified as essential entry co-receptors for SARS-CoV-2 species specificity to humans, although the underlying mechanisms are yet to be fully elucidated. In this paper, protein-protein docking was utilized for identifying the critical epitopes in CD147, CD209 and CD299 which are involved in the binding with SARS-CoV-2 Spike receptor binding domain (RBD). The results of binding free energies showed a high affinity of SARS-CoV-2 RBD to CD299 receptor which was used as a reference to derive hypothetical peptide sequences with specific binding activities to SARSCoV-2 RBD. Molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations of the newly designed peptides showed favorable binding features and stability with SARS-CoV-2 RBD and therefore can be further considered as potential candidates in future anti-SARS CoV-2 drug discovery studies.

关键词： capital punishment   death penalty   Japan   public opinion   punitive attitudes  

摘要： Based on the Japanese General Social Survey conducted in 2010 on a representative sample of adults, the present analysis intends to identify the factors more likely to predict variations in death penalty attitudes in Japan. Compared to death penalty proponents, those who oppose capital punishment are less likely to express punitive attitudes in general and to be dissatisfied with government expenditures on crime control. Relative to retentionists, abolitionists tend to have a higher level of social trust, show a higher level of support for public participation in the criminal justice process, are more likely to practice a religion, and are younger. Instrumental factors, such as victimization and fear of crime, symbolic factors, such as institutional trust, trust in the judiciary, and the police, as well as gender do not differentiate death penalty opponents from supporters. The results of the multinomial logistic regression show that residents who did not express agreement or disagreement with the death penalty have more in common with those who oppose capital punishment than with those who favor it. Although the majority of the population (65.2%) expressed support for death penalty, one in four respondents (26.1%) remained ambivalent regarding the use of capital punishment. Additionally, most of those who expressed an opinion (50.5%) said they would hesitate to recommend death, if chosen to serve in the newly instituted citizen judge system. Findings suggest that public support for death penalty is not as strong in the country as the Japanese government claims and that it requires further exploration.

关键词： Computer science   Epileptic abnormalities identification   Deep neural networks   EEG signals  

摘要： An electroencephalogram (EEG) measures and records the electrical activity of the brain. It provides valuable information that can be used to identify epileptic abnormalities. However, the visual identification of such abnormalities from EEG signals by expert neurologists is time consuming. Therefore, several researchers have proposed using deep neural networks (DNNs) to automate the identification of these abnormalities. Their studies have examined the use of different numbers of layers, different numbers of parameters, and various operation types arranged in different architectures. This paper presents the shallowest 11-layer DNN architecture capable of classifying three classes of EEG signals: normal, preictal, and seizure. When the proposed architecture was applied to the standard University of Bonn EEG signal dataset, it achieved accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity values of 99.43%, 99.57%, and 99.10%, respectively. It not only had a better performance than the state of the art DNN architectures, but also had shallower layers with fewer parameters. This allowed it to more quickly identify epileptic abnormalities. Experiments were also conducted where the length of the EEG signals was reduced to 65% (2,662 samples with a period of 15.26 s), which in turn minimised the total parameters of the proposed architecture so that it was comparable to the smallest state-of-the-art architecture and decreased the lag time for identification. Even in these experiments, it was capable of producing equal performance measures, with the execution time reduced to only 69% of that when employing the full length of EEG signals.

关键词： capital punishment   Crime   death penalty   Nigeria   South Africa  

摘要： Crime prevention can be any scheme, idea, or course of action or effort that reduces or eliminates crime in any given society. This article examines the perception that the adoption of the death penalty as a form of crime punishment will automatically result in a decrease in crime. The article adopts the qualitative research approach of document analysis, using comparative studies of two African countries (Nigeria and South Africa), one being a retainer of the death penalty and the other being an abolitionist of the death penalty. Attention is given to the contemporary national, regional, and international statutory provisions relevant to the death penalty. The article concludes with the premise that the adoption of the death penalty as a means of crime punishment has no direct corollary to the crime rate in society, but that a decrease in the crime rate is possible only with efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system. © 2020 Oriental Institute of Cultural and Social Research and SAGE Publications.

关键词： Pins   Standards   Benchmark testing   Computer science   Electronic mail   Circuit synthesis   Law   Fence regions   legalization   mixed-cell-height circuits   routability   technology constraints  

摘要： Mixed-cell-height circuits have become popular in advanced technologies for better power, area, routability, and performance tradeoffs. With technology and region constraints imposed by modern circuit designs, the mixed-cell-height legalization problem has become even more challenging. Additionally, an ideal legalization method should minimize both the average and maximum cell movements to preserve the quality of a given placement as much as possible. In this article, we present an effective and efficient mixed-cell-height legalization algorithm to consider technology and region constraints while minimizing the average and maximum cell movements. We first present a fence region handling technique to unify the fence regions and the default region. To obtain a desired cell assignment, we then propose a movement-aware cell reassignment method by iteratively reassigning cells in locally dense areas to their desired rows. After cell reassignment, a technology-aware legalization is presented to remove cell overlaps while satisfying the technology constraints. Finally, we propose a technology-aware refinement to further reduce the average and maximum cell movements without increasing the technology constraints violations. Compared with the champion of the 2017 CAD Contest at ICCAD and the state-of-the-art work, experimental results based on the 2017 CAD Contest at ICCAD benchmarks show that our algorithm achieves the best average and maximum cell movements and significantly fewer technology constraint violations, in a comparable runtime. The experimental results based on the modified 2015 ISPD Contest benchmarks also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in minimizing the average and maximum cell movements, compared with state-of-the-art mixed-cell-height legalizers.