Evaluating batch correction methods for image-based cell profiling

High-throughput image-based profiling platforms are powerful technologies capable of collecting data from billions of cells exposed to thousands of perturbations in a time- and cost-effective manner. Therefore, image-based profiling data has been increasingly used for diverse biological applications, such as predicting drug mechanism of action or gene function. However, batch effects pose severe limitations to community-wide efforts to integrate and interpret image-based profiling data collected across different laboratories and equipment. To address this problem, we benchmarked seven high-performing scRNA-seq batch correction techniques, representing diverse approaches, using a newly released Cell Painting dataset, the largest publicly accessible image-based dataset. We focused on five different scenarios with varying complexity, and we found that Harmony, a mixture-model based method, consistently outperformed the other tested methods. Our proposed framework, benchmark, and metrics can additionally be used to assess new batch correction methods in the future. Overall, this work paves the way for improvements that allow the community to make best use of public Cell Painting data for scientific discovery.

Meta-Analysis Exploring the Effects of Music Training in Cochlear Implant Users by Age

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The present study aimed to explore meaningful change in the musical performance of cochlear implant (CI) users according to age after receiving music training compared to the other CI users who did not receive any music training and normal hearing (NH) listeners. Materials and.

METHODS

Article search was conducted from five journal databases. In accordance with PICOS criteria, 29 articles and 15 articles were included for the CI and NH groups, respectively. A total of 44 articles consisting of 407 CI users and 486 NH participants were then analyzed. Using the data gathered from pre- and post-training, meta-analysis was applied by the random-effects model, and then piecewise meta-regression was employed.

RESULTS

CI users with music training showed better performance than those without the training across all ages. The curve change in musical performance when training showed that the CI users was similar to the general pattern of NH performance, indicating that the CI users gained benefits from music training and developed perceptual ability, even though it was not as high as the level of NH counterparts.

CONCLUSIONS

This finding supports the benefits of active engagement with music for both CI users and NH listeners, while noting the important role of music as one of the primary aural rehabilitation approaches.

Prediction errors arising from switches between major and minor modes in music: An fMRI study

The major and minor modes in Western music have positive and negative connotations, respectively. The present fMRI study examined listeners' neural responses to switches between major and minor modes. We manipulated the final chords of J. S. Bach's keyboard pieces so that each major-mode passage ended with either the major (Major-Major) or minor (Major-Minor) tonic chord, and each minor-mode passage ended with either the minor (Minor-Minor) or major (Minor-Major) tonic chord. If the final major and minor chords have positive and negative reward values respectively, the Major-Minor and Minor-Major stimuli would cause negative and positive reward prediction errors (RPEs) respectively in a listener's brain. We found that activity in a frontoparietal network was significantly higher for Major-Minor than for Major-Major. Based on previous research, these results support the idea that a major-to-minor switch causes negative RPE. The contrast of Minor-Major minus Minor-Minor yielded activation in the ventral insula and visual cortex, speaking against the idea that a minor-to-major switch causes positive RPE. We discuss our results in relation to executive functions and the emotional connotations of major versus minor modes.

Consonance and dissonance perception. A critical review of the historical sources, multidisciplinary findings, and main hypotheses

Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D) are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the biological, acoustical, and cultural factors that affect C/D perception has resulted in descriptive accounts inspired by arithmetic, musicological, psychoacoustical or neurobiological frameworks without reaching a consensus. Here, we review the key historical sources and modern multidisciplinary findings on C/D and integrate them into three main hypotheses: the vocal similarity hypothesis (VSH), the psychocultural hypothesis (PH), and the sensorimotor hypothesis (SH). By illustrating the hypotheses-related findings, we highlight their major conceptual, methodological, and terminological shortcomings. Trying to provide a unitary framework for C/D understanding, we put together multidisciplinary research on human and animal vocalizations, which converges to suggest that auditory roughness is associated with distress/danger and, therefore, elicits defensive behavioral reactions and neural responses that indicate aversion. We therefore stress the primacy of vocality and roughness as key factors in the explanation of C/D phenomenon, and we explore the (neuro)biological underpinnings of the attraction-aversion mechanisms that are triggered by C/D stimuli. Based on the reviewed evidence, while the aversive nature of dissonance appears as solidly rooted in the multidisciplinary findings, the attractive nature of consonance remains a somewhat speculative claim that needs further investigation. Finally, we outline future directions for empirical research in C/D, especially regarding cross-modal and cross-cultural approaches.

The complete chloroplast genome of Korean cultivar 'Harmony' (Prunus salicina × Prunus armeniaca)

Prunus Linnaeus 1753 species include many economically important fruit crops, of which plumcot is generated by inter-species crossing between Prunus salicina Lindley 1830 × Prunus armeniaca Linnaeus 1753. In this study, the complete chloroplast genome of Korean plumcot cultivar 'Harmony' was characterized through the de novo assembly of Nanopore and Illumina sequencing data. The chloroplast genome is a circular molecule of 157,916 bp length with 36.75% GC content and has a total of 113 genes including 79 protein-coding genes, 30 transfer RNA genes, and four ribosomal RNA genes. Phylogenetic analysis with protein-coding sequences of chloroplast genome revealed that 'Harmony' showed closer to P. salicina than P. armeniaca.

Crucial Music Components Needed for Speech Perception Enhancement of Pediatric Cochlear Implant Users: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

BACKGROUND

Although many clinicians have attempted music training for the hearing-impaired children, no specific effects have yet been reported for individual music components. This paper seeks to discover specific music components that help in improving speech perception of children with cochlear implants (CI) and to identify the effective training periods and methods needed for each component.

METHOD

While assessing 5 electronic databases, that is, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science, 1,638 articles were found initially. After the screening and eligibility assessment stage based on the Participants, Intervention, Comparisons, Outcome, and Study Design (PICOS) inclusion criteria, 18 of 1,449 articles were chosen.

RESULTS

A total of 18 studies and 14 studies (209 participants) were analyzed using a systematic review and meta-analysis, respectively. No publication bias was detected based on an Egger's regression result even though the funnel plot was asymmetrical. The results of the meta-analysis revealed that the largest improvement was seen for rhythm perception, followed by the perception of pitch and harmony and smallest for timbre perception after the music training. The duration of training affected the rhythm, pitch, and harmony perception but not the timbre. Interestingly, musical activities, such as singing, produced the biggest effect size, implying that children with CI obtained the greatest benefits of music training by singing, followed by playing an instrument and achieved the smallest effect by only listening to musical stimuli. Significant improvement in pitch perception helped with the enhancement of prosody perception.

CONCLUSION

Music training can improve the music perception of children with CI and enhance their speech prosody. Long training duration was shown to provide the largest training effect of the children's perception improvement. The children with CI learned rhythm and pitch better than they did with harmony and timbre. These results support the finding of past studies that with music training, both rhythm and pitch perception can be improved, and it also helps in the development of prosody perception.

A learning bias for word order harmony: Evidence from speakers of non-harmonic languages

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al., 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg, 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology.

Efficient Communication in Written and Performed Music

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is.

Coopetition in healthcare: Heresy or reality? An exploration of felt outcomes at an intra-organizational level

This paper deals with coopetition in the healthcare sector, where in developed countries providers are experiencing a growing paradox between cooperation, as encouraged by authorities, and competition, in terms of resources or market share. Via comprehensive research methodology, we carry out a case study on a French Cancer Control Unit that simultaneously competes and cooperates with other local cancer treatment providers. We focus on different professional groups and their perceptions of coopetitive outcomes. Firstly, we show that different generic coopetitive situations exist and can be distinguished according to their degree of spontaneity, complementarity and value creation. Depending on these situations, felt outcomes differ from one professional group to another, highlighting that coopetition is a very complex reality and experienced differently by different individuals. Secondly, harmony created by coopetition is generally under-estimated, whereas it could be used as a catalyst to help managers implement coopetition.

Food and beverage flavour pairing: A critical review of the literature

The recent explosion of interest in the topic of flavour pairing has been driven, at least in part, by the now-discredited food-pairing hypothesis, along with the emergence of the new field of computational gastronomy. Many chefs, sommeliers, mixologists, and drinks brands, not to mention a few food brands, have become increasingly interested in moving the discussions that they have with their consumers beyond the traditional focus solely on food and wine pairings. Here, two key approaches to pairing that might help to explain/justify those food and beverage combinations that the consumer is likely to appreciate are outlined. Historically-speaking, many conventional pairings emerged naturally from cultural/geographical matches, presumably internalized as semantic knowledge amongst consumers. In this review, such conventional pairings are framed as but one example of a cognitive/intellectual food-beverage strategy. The alternative approach to pairing that has become increasingly popular in recent years involves experts/commentators making recommendations based on the perceptual relationship, or interaction, between the component stimuli, be it one of perceived similarity, contrast, harmony, emergence, or modulation (either suppression or enhancement). Physicochemical accounts of pairing, based on the presence of shared flavour molecules (e.g., aromatic volatiles) in the to-be-combined flavours or ingredients, have also gained in popularity. Here, though, the latter approach is framed as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to predict matches based on perceived similarity. This review summarizes the available evidence concerning food-beverage pairing and proposes a new dichotomy between intellectual/cognitive and perceptual pairing principles in the case of food-beverage matching.

Harmony in Life Scale - Turkish version: Studies of validity and reliability

This article presents the adaptation and psychometric evaluation of the Turkish version of Harmony in Life Scale (Turkish-HiL). The present paper investigates (study 1; N₁ = 253) confirmatory factor analysis, measurement invariance; (study 2; N₂ = 231) concurrent validity; (study 3; N₃ = 260) convergent and known-group validities; (study 4; N_t − t = 50) test-retest, Cronbach alpha, and composite reliabilities of the Turkish-HiL. In study 1, based on a confirmatory factor analysis, results confirmed that unidimensional-factor structure. The results suggested that the model demonstrated a configural and metric invariance across the gender groups. In study 2, Turkish-HiL significantly correlated with measures of satisfaction with life, subjective happiness, positive affect, and negative affect. In study 3, Turkish-HiL was predicted positively by flourishing, conversely, negatively predicted by depression, anxiety, and stress. Finally, in study 4, alpha, composite and test-retest reliabilities are acceptable. Overall, the scale presented here may prove useful for satisfactorily assessing, in Turkish, the harmony in life of the university students.

Finishing procedures in orthodontic-surgical cases

To ensure optimal results, we must do our utmost to achieve targets based on order, symmetry and precision, our ultimate aim being to strive towards the desired harmony, planned contrast and exact proportions. Orthodontic-surgical treatments require specific finishing procedures, which most often call for multidisciplinary, or even transdisciplinary, collaboration. Finishing will involve the dental arches just as much as the orofacial environment. Above all, treatment of this kind demands a highly targeted approach in combination with well-defined and perfectly executed techniques. To finish a case satisfactorily, reasonable targets should be aimed for to ensure they are achieved. One must be ambitious and yet wise. A tight alliance of surgeon and orthodontist will nurture convincing and achievable projects and good, lifelong outcomes. Following the consolidation phase, roughly 4 to 6 weeks post-surgery, we can initiate the final orthodontic treatment, which, in effect, constitutes a mini-treatment in its own right. "Details make perfection, but perfection is not a detail" (Leonardo Da Vinci). "A lucid mind is the ante-chamber of intelligence" (Léo Ferré). In the order of life, every form of unity is always unique, and if each of us is unique, it is because everyone else is too. Ambition, wisdom, lucidity and efficiency will guarantee a successful result, the successful result. We must not be mere observers of our treatments, but the architect, project manager and site foreman at one and the same time. One could talk ad infinitum about finishing orthodontic-surgical cases because everything else leads up to the case-finishing and even the fullest description could never be exhaustive.

Harmony in health sector: a requirement for effective healthcare delivery in Nigeria

Harmony is defined as the pleasing combination of elements of a system to form an all-inclusive, all involving and more productive team. The aim of this present review was to investigate the factors militating against harmony among healthcare professional in the Nigerian healthcare delivery system. This review was carried out by searching through literature on the topic that bother on harmony among health professions in the health sector. Literature search and reports from previous studies indicates that harmony among health workers is pivotal to improving the health indices. However, available evidence suggests that unlike in the developed world, health care professionals do not collaborate well together in Nigeria because of the claim of superiority of a particular health professional over others. This has often resulted in inter-professional conflict which is threatening to tear the health sector apart to the detriment of the patients. The Nigeria health system should be based on team work. Health professionals from a variety of disciplines should work together to deliver the best possible healthcare services to all Nigerians. All members of the team are equally valuable and essential to the smooth running of hospitals. Hospitals should ideally be headed by health administrators or by a qualified member of any of the professions in the health sector.

Perception of oral and maxillofacial surgeons, orthodontists and laypersons in relation to the harmony of the smile

OBJECTIVE

Harmony is one of the main objectives in surgical and orthodontic treatment and this harmony must be present in the smile, as well as in the face. The aim of the present study was to assess the perceptions of professionals and laypersons in relation to the harmony of the smile of patients with or without vertical maxillary alterations.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Sixty observers (oral and maxillofacial surgeons, orthodontists and laypersons) reported the degree of harmony of six smiles using an objective questionnaire and the participants indicated if there was a need for corrective surgery or not. The classification of observers was recorded on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. Mixed regression was used to determine differences between the three groups.

RESULTS

Statistically significant differences were found only for the harmony of the smile between the oral and maxillofacial surgeons and laypersons, with laypersons being more critical when assessing the smile. There was no statistical difference between the other groups for the harmony of the smile or the indication of corrective surgery. The patterns of greater or lesser harmony determined by observers during the smile were similar to those found in the literature as the ideal standard in relation to vertical maxillary positioning.

CONCLUSIONS

Laypersons had a tendency to be more critical in relation to facial harmony than surgeons, although no statistical differences were found in the other groups in relation to the harmony of the smile or indication for the corrective surgery. In addition, the patterns of greater or lesser harmony of the smile determined by the participants were similar to those found in the literature as the ideal standard in relation to vertical maxillary positioning. Overall, the present study demonstrates that adequate interaction between surgeons, orthodontists and laypersons is essential in order to achieve facial harmony with orthodontic and/or surgical treatment.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE

Opinion of specialists and laypersons about the smile in relation to the vertical positioning of the maxilla.

Teamwork in pediatric heart care

Pediatric cardiac specialties, pediatric cardiology (pediatric cardiac surgery and pediatric cardiac anesthesiology and intensive care) are only now being recognized as distinct specialties in most parts of the world. There has been a tremendous growth in knowledge in these specialties in the last 30-40 years with dramatic improvements in outcome.

Pediatric cardiac care thrives on team work. The cohesiveness of the team of caregivers has a direct impact on the patient outcomes and efficiency of the system. The development of hybrid heart procedures in pediatric heart care represents an important benchmark in a team-based approach to patient care where a group of specialists with specific skills work closely together for ensuring the best possible patient outcome. Establishment of a cohesive team requires organization of group of team members with diverse skills to come together through good mutual understanding, under a leadership that actively promotes team harmony. Excellent communication among team members is a core requirement. The barriers for development and sustenance of a successful team must be recognized and overcome. They include egos of key team members as a source of conflict, time for interactions, disproportionate rewards and recognition for members of the team and traditional hierarchical arrangements. Special attention must be paid to motivating non-physician staff.

Reactions of Grape Rootstocks to Pratylenchus vulnus and Meloidogyne spp

Five grape rootstocks were inoculated with 0, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 Pratylenchus vulnus. Dogridge and Saltcreek supported low average total numbers of P. vulnus, 136-705/pot, at 12 months after inoculation. Growth of both rootstocks was not affected. Harmony, Couderc 1613, and Ganzin 1 supported high average total numbers, 6-856 times the inoculum levels. Numbers in Harmony continued to increase at all levels but reduced root weight only at the 10,000 level after 12 months. Numbers in Couderc 1613 decreased by 15-30% after 12 months, and root weight was reduced at the 10,000 level. In Ganzin 1, total nematode numbers diminished after 12 months but were still at high levels; growth reduction was proportional to numbers of nematodes added. Meloidogyne incognita, M. javanica, and M. arenaria produced galls and egg masses in Harmony and Couderc 1613 only at 36 C. Galling in Ganzin 1 increased with increasing temperature. Galls in Ganzin 1 at 18 C supported mature females after 90 days. Harmony was resistant to M. incognita in single and concomitant inoculations of P. vulnus and M. incognita. At 250 days after inoculation, total numbers of P. vulnus increased above the inoculum level and the 150-day values; increase was greatest in P. vulnus added singly. Neither nematode species affected growth of Harmony.