Newest Papers
Can There be a Feminist Pedagogy within the e-Learning Industrial Complex?
Michael J. Illuzzi, Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem
The Radical Teacher·2025
This article investigates the challenges of pursuing feminist pedagogy within what we call the “e-Learning industrial complex.” It contributes to the existing scholarship on feminist pedagogy, feminist-indigenous-decolonial community engagement, and e-Learning during COVID-19 in several ways. First, it conceptualizes the e-Learning industrial complex and examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has normalized its expansion. It explains how the e-Learning industrial complex appropriates the social justice language of “accessibility” and “affordability” while capitalizing on the urgent demand for e-Learning. In doing so, the e-Learning industrial complex prioritizes e-Learning as a profit-driven venture for neoliberal universities and e-Learning industries, sidestepping both the need for transformative student learning and the imperative to ensure sustainable working conditions for faculty, staff, and other workers. Second, drawing on our experience of pursuing feminist community engagement at Lesley University, this article proposes that the efforts to devise meaningful ways of pursuing feminist pedagogies in digital learning spaces remain incomplete without examining the larger institutional structures, as well as their complicity with the e-Learning industrial complex, against which feminist pedagogies and everyone involved are situated. Third, it argues that the pandemic can turn into a “portal” – as described by Arundhati Roy (2020) – to come out of the chaos. Through collective resistance against the e-Learning industrial complex, students, faculty, staff, and community members can extend the spirit, ethics, and politics of feminist pedagogy outside of the classroom, engage in solidarity with the broader community, and nurture communities of care.
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View paper →The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness
Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos, Anindya Ghose
2025
No abstract available
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View paper →Measuring Realistic Emotional Perception With <scp>EEG</scp>: A Comparison of Multimodal Videos and Naturalistic Scenes
Andrew H. Farkas, Matthew C. Gehr, Han Jia, Dean Sabatinelli
Psychophysiology·2025
<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p>Emotional experiences involve dynamic multisensory perception, yet most EEG research uses unimodal stimuli such as naturalistic scene photographs. Recent research suggests that realistic emotional videos reliably reduce the amplitude of a steady‐state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) elicited by a flickering border. Here, we examine the extent to which this video‐ssVEP measure compares with the well‐established Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is reliably larger for emotional relative to neutral scenes. To address this question, 45 participants viewed 90 matched pairs of realistic videos and scenes. Consistent with prior work, reduced 7–8 Hz ssVEP amplitude was evident during emotional relative to neutral videos. However, this reduction in power was not specific to the driving frequency of 7.5 Hz, and in fact, Fourier transformation analyses limited to 7.5 Hz were not modulated by video content. Still, at the group level, the video‐driven reductions in 7–8 Hz power and LPP modulation by scenes produced similarly large valence effects, and both measures strongly correlated with arousal ratings. Consistent with previous research, the scene‐LPP was sensitive to specific emotional contents (erotica and gore) somewhat inconsistent arousal ratings. In contrast, the video‐driven oscillation modulation did not show this content sensitivity and was better explained by individual arousal ratings per video clip. In sum, these results show that the 7.5 Hz flickering‐border paradigm does not index emotional engagement with video stimuli, yet emotional videos do evoke robust decreases in 3–10 Hz oscillatory power that is somewhat distinct from emotional modulation of the scene‐evoked LPP.</jats:p><jats:p>Matched emotional video and scenes evoke large EEG responses compared with neutral content within‐participant. Our findings align with previous research indicating that video modulation of power around the evoked 7.5 Hz ssVEP frequency (7–8 Hz) serves as a reliable emotional measure. However, further analyses reveal that this effect is attributable to a general decrease in power across the 3–10 Hz frequency range.</jats:p>
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View paper →Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries
Giorgos Kallis, Jason Hickel, Daniel W O’Neill, Tim Jackson, Peter A Victor, Kate Raworth, Juliet B Schor, Julia K Steinberger, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz
The Lancet Planetary Health·2025·76 citations
No abstract available
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View paper →Reshaping CAR-T cells through overexpression of T cell factor 1.
Hao Yao, Yuntian Ding, Qian Chen, Huixiu Han, David Sedloev, Carsten Müller-Tidow, Tim Sauer, Anita Schmitt, Michael Schmitt, Lei Wang
Frontiers in immunology·2025
Although chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has revolutionized treatment for hematologic malignancies, insufficient CAR-T cell persistence remains a major limitation. T cell factor 1 (TCF-1) is a transcription factor crucial for T cell development, self-renewal, and memory formation. However, CAR-T cells typically exhibit low TCF-1 expression. This study investigated whether restoring TCF-1 expression could enhance CAR-T cell persistence and functionality. Human peripheral blood T cells were transduced with third-generation CD19 or CD33 CAR retroviral vectors, with or without a TCF-1 (Tcf7.NGFR) construct. Phenotypic, functional, and transcriptional analyses were performed using flow cytometry, cytokine profiling, long-term killing assays, and RNA sequencing. Data mining and machine learning were applied for high-dimensional immunophenotyping. TCF-1 overexpression generated CAR-T cells with reduced apoptosis, lower activation marker expression, and an increased proportion of naïve and stem cell-like subsets. These modified cells displayed a higher CD4⁺/CD8⁺ ratio, preserved proliferative capacity, and maintained cytotoxicity with attenuated cytokine release. Long-term co-culture assays demonstrated superior persistence and sustained tumor-killing activity in TCF-1-overexpressing CAR-T cells. Transcriptomic profiling revealed downregulation of apoptotic and cytokine release pathways, and enrichment of cell cycle and metabolic pathways supporting T cell longevity. Overexpression of TCF-1 confers resistance to apoptosis, limits excessive activation, and promotes a less differentiated phenotype, collectively enhancing CAR-T cell persistence and long-term efficacy. These findings suggest that TCF-1 modulation represents a promising strategy to improve durability and safety of CAR-T cell therapy in relapsed or refractory hematologic malignancies.
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View paper →<span>The Effectiveness of Party-Hopping Laws in Kenya: An Analytical Study</span>
Gabriel Lojingu
SSRN Electronic Journal·2025
No abstract available
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View paper →Double-hybrid density functionals applied to a large set of INVEST systems: validating the (SOS1-)PBE-DH-INVEST expressions
P. Maiz-Pastor, A. J. Pérez-Jiménez, J. C. Sancho-García
Journal of Materials Chemistry C·2025·1 citations
<jats:p>We thoroughly assess here the recently developed (SOS1-)PBE-DH-INVEST double-hybrid density functionals using the NAH159 dataset, in the search of a robuts and accurate method for S<jats:sub>1</jats:sub>–T<jats:sub>1</jats:sub> gaps.</jats:p>
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View paper →The Awareness of Anti-Party Hopping Law among Youths in Sarawak
Nurul Aqmal Roslan, Dr. Nur Aida Kipli, Dr. Ummi Farhani Firdaus
ideas.repec.org·2025
Downloadable! Malaysian youth are more politically aware nowadays compared to the previous years. However, since the 14th general election in 2018, the national political landscape has been continually shifting, and the party-hopping issues have left many young people in Malaysia unsure over the coalition line-ups and the grand directions of the various political parties. Thus, this paper aims to discover awareness of Anti-Party Hopping Law among youths in Sarawak. The emphasis of the literature focuses on the dominant factor that contributes to the lack of awareness and awareness of Anti-Party Hopping law among young people in Sarawak. This study used a quantitative research methodology for collecting and analyzing the numerical data. The results of the study indicate that social media turns out to be the most dominant factor that leads to lack of awareness on Anti-Party Hopping Law among youths in Sarawak when there is rarely news on Anti-Party Hopping Law in Sarawak has been published on any platform of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and others, which eventually give negative impacts towards youths
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View paper →Unlocking inverted singlet–triplet gap in alternant hydrocarbons with heteroatoms
Atreyee Majumdar, Surajit Das, Raghunathan Ramakrishnan
Chemical Science·2025·1 citations
<jats:p>BN-substituted polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons exhibit negative singlet–triplet gaps.</jats:p>
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View paper →Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
Ali Behrouz, Peilin Zhong, Vahab Mirrokni
arXiv·2024
Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention allows attending to the entire context window, capturing the direct dependencies of all tokens. This more accurate modeling of dependencies, however, comes with a quadratic cost, limiting the model to a fixed-length context. We present a new neural long-term memory module that learns to memorize historical context and helps attention to attend to the current context while utilizing long past information. We show that this neural memory has the advantage of fast parallelizable training while maintaining a fast inference. From a memory perspective, we argue that attention due to its limited context but accurate dependency modeling performs as a short-term memory, while neural memory due to its ability to memorize the data, acts as a long-term, more persistent, memory. Based on these two modules, we introduce a new family of architectures, called Titans, and present three variants to address how one can effectively incorporate memory into this architecture. Our experimental results on language modeling, common-sense reasoning, genomics, and time series tasks show that Titans are more effective than Transformers and recent modern linear recurrent models. They further can effectively scale to larger than 2M context window size with higher accuracy in needle-in-haystack tasks compared to baselines.
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View paper →Female Rebellion Bound by Culture: A Comparative Study of Lin Daiyu and Anna Karenina’s Struggles Against Societal Expectations
Anqi Song
Arts, Culture and Language·2024
<jats:p>Lin Daiyu and Anna Karenina are female protagonists in Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, two masterpieces of world literature. Despite their geographical and cultural differences, both characters engage in acts of defiance against social norms that reflect their desires for autonomy, love, and self-expression. This paper explores the similarities and differences of their rebellions, including their driving force, detailed rebellious acts, the ending of their rebellions, and the cultural elements involved. By analyzing their gender roles under different cultural contexts, this paper seeks to uncover the universal social constraints carried upon women, and their different embodiment because of cultural and social structure demonstrated in the literature. The comparative study sheds light on the broader implications of female resistance in literature and how these narratives contribute to the discourse on gender and societal changes. This research applies gynocriticism in feminist criticism to provide a comprehensive understanding of women’s internal consciousness embodied in literature across cultures.</jats:p>
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