cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
A Design Framework for Mobile Social Commerce
Creators: name: Kucukcay, Ilyas Eray
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2014
Subjects: mobile commerce
social commerce
e-commerce
business models
b2c
mobile development
hybrid development
design framework

description: The use of mobile devices and social media has been increasing dramatically and becoming critical for B2C businesses. Such businesses need to consider implementing e-commerce services in the mobile environment with social integration to satisfy their customers’ needs. Concepts like mobile commerce and social commerce are already being used extensively by many businesses. However, there are no clear guidelines in the literature on how to use mobile and social characteristics together for B2C e-commerce. Fusing these two concepts is what we call mobile social commerce (ms-commerce). In this thesis, we performed a thorough literature review to identify the characteristics of ms-commerce. The findings enabled us to first devise a proper definition for ms-commerce as the concept of performing online commercial activities in a mobile environment with the help of contributions from customers. Second, elements of the building blocks of ms-commerce, namely business models, m-commerce and s-commerce were identified based on commonly accepted fundamentals of the related concepts. Each building block has a critical role in increasing the value and efficiency of the product/service being delivered online by B2C businesses. We propose a mobile social commerce design framework along with a modular design model consisting of a generic class diagram that can be used for designing and developing ms-commerce applications that fit the specific needs of businesses. Businesses can choose the right elements to integrate in their ms-commerce application with the purpose of increasing the efficiency and integrating the social participation of customers. Three different scenarios were devised, and three mobile app prototypes were developed to support them, using the design model of our proposed framework. Finally, in light of our experience in developing ms-commerce applications, we discussed and contrasted the three different mobile development strategies, namely native, hybrid and web-based.
Kind Old World; Ideology, Illusion, Irony and Truth through Generative AI, Ishiguro and Wallace
Creators: name: Hutson, Joseph Reece
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024
Subjects: David Foster Wallace
Kazuo Ishiguro
Large Language Models
Contemporary Literature
Slavoj Žižek
Jacques Lacan
Ideology and Literature
Critique
Artificial Intelligence or Cybernetics
Literary Theory
Psychoanalysis

description: This thesis comprises a creative piece in the form of an experimental novel aiming to explore the implications of a near future in which literary meaning and bespoke written sentiment is generated cheaply, immediately and in concert with state-industrial networks of surveillance data. Besides this sits a critical component that aims to develop an account of literary meaning as such in light of this new technology. I argue that an interrogation of the method through which Generative AI functions by way of Jacques Lacan shows how the synthetic generation of textual meaning reveals what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘indeterminacy paradox’ in uniquely contemporary relief. This crucial paradox, I argue, mirrors a central preoccupation in recent canonical contemporary Anglo-American fiction and its mutually paranoid relationship with ‘critique’. Comparing the renderings of orphanhood, illusion and truth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and David Foster Wallace’s Good Old Neon I argue that both writers’ ‘début du siècle’ work point towards the necessity of the others’ positions across what might be an unbridgeable divide. This gap comprising, I argue, a historically novel suspicion of language as a necessarily fictive medium and of the mechanisms of illusion and indeterminacy at the heart of fictional meaning. I frame my creative piece as an attempt to enact the dramatically alienated and technologically accelerated end-point of a subjectivity and an art form which, unable to shake said suspicion, can no longer sufficiently commit to itself. 
Resoconto del XVI Convegno Nazionale della Società Italiana d’Estetica Verona, 4-5 maggio 2018
Creators: name: Porceddu Cilione, Pier Alberto
Publisher: name: Materiali di Estetica. Terza serie
Year: 2018

description: -
description: Materiali di Estetica. Terza serie, N. 5.1 (2018): Per Alfredo Civita. Tra filosofia e psicologia
A Comprehensive Survey on Machine Learning Driven Material Defect Detection
Creators: name: Bai, Jun
name: Wu, Di
name: Shelley, Tristan
name: Schubel, Peter
name: Twine, David
name: Russell, John
name: Zeng, Xuesen
name: Zhang, Ji
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: Material defects (MD) represent a primary challenge affecting product performance and giving rise to safety issues in related products. The rapid and accurate identification and localization of MD constitute crucial research endeavors in addressing contemporary challenges associated with MD. In recent years, propelled by the swift advancement of machine learning (ML) technologies, particularly exemplified by deep learning, ML has swiftly emerged as the core technology and a prominent research direction for material defect detection (MDD). Through a comprehensive review of the latest literature, we systematically survey the ML techniques applied in MDD into five categories: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and generative learning. We provide a detailed analysis of the main principles and techniques used, together with the advantages and potential challenges associated with these techniques. Furthermore, the survey focuses on the techniques for defect detection in composite materials, which are important types of materials enjoying increasingly wide application in various industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction, and renewable energy. Finally, the survey explores potential future directions in MDD utilizing ML technologies. This survey consolidates ML-based MDD literature and provides a foundation for future research and practice.
description: Accepted to ACM Computing Surveys. Full bibliographic information and external DOI added
Anacaona bellatrix Yong, 2019, new species
Creators: name: Yong, Sheyla
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2019
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Arthropoda
Insecta
Orthoptera
Tettigoniidae
Anacaona
Anacaona bellatrix

description: Anacaona bellatrix new species
Figures 11–14, 18, 20 a, b, 25. Table IV
 Types. DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Barahona Province: Cabral Municipality: Sierra de Bahoruco: km 7–9 of road from Cabral to Polo (18°10'55"N - 71°15'10"W, 221 m a.s.l.); on the vegetation; 23/August/1987; L. F. de Armas, E. J. Marcano, A. Abud, D. Lantigua; 1♂ holotype (SY, in ethanol 80%). Pedernales Province: Oviedo Municipality: Los Tres Charcos (17°49'10.3"N - 71°26'15.1"W, 71 m a.s.l.); on the vegetation; 14/September/2016; R. Teruel; one adult female paratype (SY, in ethanol 80%).
 Diagnosis. See genus diagnosis above.
 Etymology. The selected epithet is a Latin word that literally means "she-warrior". It alludes to the remarkable aggressiveness displayed by individuals of this species when handled alive.
description: Published as part of Yong, Sheyla, 2019, Three new genera and four new species of katydids (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae) from Cuba and Hispaniola, Greater Antilles, pp. 222-256 in Ecologica Montenegrina 20 (2019) on page 247, DOI: 10.37828/em.2019.20.19, http://zenodo.org/record/13359746
Ancient Egypt : Early Dynastic Period
Creators: name: Arbuckle, Caroline
Publisher: name: Database of Religious History (DRH)
Year: 2021

description: The Early Dynastic Period in ancient Egypt includes the first and second dynasties. This covers the cultural period of Naqada IIIc-d, and approximately 2950BCE-2670BCE (though these exact dates are debated). During this period, Egypt was politically united, and we therefore have a true Egyptian state. Throughout the history of ancient Egypt, the concept of religion does not seem to have been debated. The gods were an assumed part of life, and individuals were expected to make offerings to the gods and participate in religious festivals. In this way, the entire population can be considered part of the religious group. Much of the iconography and burial practices from the previous Predynastic Period continued into the Early Dynastic, though there were a number of additional advances. While there are more numerous examples of writing than previously, largely in the form of objects inscribed with royal names, most of what we know about Egyptian society and beliefs at this time is based on interpretations of the material evidence.
Emergence of Fluctuation Relations in UNO
Creators: name: Sidajaya, Peter
name: Low, Jovan Hsuen Khai
name: Aw, Clive Cenxin
name: Scarani, Valerio
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
subject: Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: Fluctuation theorems are generalisations of the second law that describe the relations between work, temperature, and free energy in thermodynamic processes and are used extensively in studies of irreversibility and entropy. Many experiments have verified these relations for different physical systems in the setting of thermodynamics. In this study, we observe the same behavior away from physical thermodynamics, namely for the card game UNO, by performing numerical simulations of the game. As the analog of work, we choose the number of steps one player needs to effect a transition in her deck; the other players and the remaining cards play the role of a finite, non-Markovian bath. We also compare our observation with is expected for a Markovian random walk.
description: 10 pages, 8 figures
Background and Convergence Behaviour from STEP: Extraction of underlying Physics with robust Machine Learning
Creators: name: Alaa El-Din, Karim Kacper
name: Forte, Alessandro
name: Kasim, Muhammad Firmansyah
name: Miniati, Francesco
name: Vinko, Sam
Publisher: name: The Royal Society
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 340101
subject: Analytical spectrometry

description: This file contains background information on the RIXS scattering process and a short analysis of the convergence behaviour of the different machine learning tools used.
Development, validation, and evaluation of a novel tool to make treatment decisions and assess dog welfare: the Animal Welfare Assessment Grid (AWAG)
Creators: name: Malkani, Rachel
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024
Subjects: Dog welfare
Animal Welfare Assessment Grid
Behavioural medicine
Chronic Pain
Quality of Life

description: Assessment and monitoring of canine welfare is vital across a range of settings including veterinary medicine, shelter and assistance dog environments. Employing objective, comprehensive, and valid assessment tools is essential for animal welfare professionals to quantify welfare, monitor longitudinally, and examine the individual domains that are influencing welfare. This can allow for action to be taken to improve welfare.This research employed a range of methodologies to adapt the Animal Welfare Assessment Grid (AWAG) for dogs into an online, user-friendly tool, which shows promising results in both validity and reliability. The AWAG was used to examine the scores of dogs with behavioural disorders and chronic pain. Both dogs with behaviour disorders and chronic pain show a wide variation in cumulative welfare assessment scores and are significantly different from those of healthy dogs. Logistic regression showed that fears and anxieties frequency, the dog’s reaction to stressors, engagement with enrichment, and social interactions were significant predictors of chronic pain in dogs and aggression towards the caregiver, fears and anxieties frequency, and choice, control, and predictability were all significant predictors of behaviour disorders.The AWAG also shows promise in its utility as a decision-making tool. Over 96% of respondents acknowledge the tool’s ability in aiding overall treatment and management decisions, and it is reported to facilitate discussions amongst colleagues and dog caregivers about welfare. Qualitative analysis revealed the tool is commonly described by users as helpful, objective, and useful.This research contributes to the field of quality of life assessment and canine welfare as it provides a novel approach for animal welfare professionals to assess welfare, filling a gap in the existing literature. It provides valuable insight into how welfare is impacted across the domains of welfare in dogs with chronic pain and behaviour disorders as this has not been extensively studied previously.
The Variable Pronunciations of Word-final Consonant Clusters in a Force Aligned Corpus of Spoken French
Creators: name: Milne, Peter
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2014
Subjects: French phonology
French schwa
Automatic speech recognition
Word-final consonant clusters

description: This thesis project examined both schwa insertion and simplification following word-final consonant clusters in a large corpus of spoken French. Two main research questions were addressed. Can a system of forced alignment reliably reproduce pronunciation judgements that closely match those of a human researcher? How do variables, such as speech style, following context, motivation for simplification and speech rate, affect the variable pronunciations of word-final consonant clusters? This project describes the creation and testing of a novel system of forced alignment capable of segmenting recorded French speech. The results of comparing the pronunciation judgements between automatic and manual methods of recognition suggest that a system of forced alignment using speaker adapted acoustic models performed better than other acoustic models; produced results that are likely to be similar to the results produced by manual identification; and that the results of forced alignment are not likely to be affected by changes in speech style or speech rate. This project also described the application of forced alignment on a corpus of natural language spoken French. The results presented in this large sample corpus analysis suggest that the dialectal differences between Québec and France are not as simple as ``simplification in Québec, schwa insertion in France". While the results presented here suggest that the process of simplification following a word-final consonant cluster is similar in both dialects, the process of schwa insertion is likely to be different in each dialect. In both dialects, word-final consonant cluster simplification is more frequent in a preconsonantal context; is most likely in a spontaneous or less formal speech style and in that speech style is positively associated with higher speaking rates. Schwa insertion following a word-final consonant cluster displays much stronger dialectal differences. Schwa insertion in the dialect from France is strongly affected by following context and possibly speech style. Schwa insertion in the dialect from Québec is not affected by following context and is strongly predicted by a lack of consonant cluster simplification.
Simul-Whisper: Attention-Guided Streaming Whisper with Truncation Detection
Creators: name: Wang, Haoyu
name: Hu, Guoqiang
name: Lin, Guodong
name: Zhang, Wei-Qiang
name: Li, Jian
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Sound (cs.SD)
subject: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
subject: Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: As a robust and large-scale multilingual speech recognition model, Whisper has demonstrated impressive results in many low-resource and out-of-distribution scenarios. However, its encoder-decoder structure hinders its application to streaming speech recognition. In this paper, we introduce Simul-Whisper, which uses the time alignment embedded in Whisper's cross-attention to guide auto-regressive decoding and achieve chunk-based streaming ASR without any fine-tuning of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, we observe the negative effect of the truncated words at the chunk boundaries on the decoding results and propose an integrate-and-fire-based truncation detection model to address this issue. Experiments on multiple languages and Whisper architectures show that Simul-Whisper achieves an average absolute word error rate degradation of only 1.46% at a chunk size of 1 second, which significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baseline.
description: Accepted by INTERSPEECH 2024
An examination of the factors that impact thriving at work
Creators: name: O'Kane, Marie-Claire
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024
Subjects: Executive Function
Self Efficacy
Supervisor Listening
Job Crafting
self determination theory
occupational psychology
thriving at work

description: This thesis investigates the influence of personal and contextual factors in predicting thriving at work. Thriving is a subjective psychological state which encapsulates striving towards the best one can be, rather than remaining stagnant in one’s job role. The main construct examined is Spreitzer et al.’s (2005) Socially Embedded Model of Thriving (SEMT) which, in the main, is a positive mechanism for achieving adaptivity at work, personal growth and positive wellbeing. Personal and contextual factors studied are those that have been given little attention in the literature, and that could potentially address current challenges in contemporary work. In today’s dynamic and unpredictable work environment, organisations need to retain an adaptive, skilled workforce and employees need to maintain up-to-date knowledge and skills to maintain employment. Research was driven by findings from interviews with women in banking during a global pandemic who emphasised the importance of having autonomy at work and of the role of organisations in enabling control over working locations and schedules. Research then examined the role of job crafting, Executive Function and self-efficacy (personal resources) on thriving, and supervisor listening (contextual factor) on thriving. The SEMT proposes that the combination of personal and contextual factors are more likely to lead to thriving. Therefore, this potential dual influence is explored by investigating the moderating effect of supervisor listening on the association between job crafting and thriving and on occupational self-efficacy and thriving. In the thriving literature, there is also a lack of intervention studies, but these are important for organisations to understand how they can influence positive work outcomes. To address this gap, a longitudinal experimental study examines whether a self-efficacy focussed training intervention has an influence on thriving and self-efficacy. Self-report, qualitative, longitudinal and mixed methods are used in the above studies, using participant samples from real work settings. Results draw attention to the influence of personal resources in increasing positive work outcomes; they introduce supervisor listening as a specific leadership behaviour that influences thriving; they show the negative impact of deficits in Executive Function on thriving and, finally, demonstrate the importance of designing appropriate interventions to positively influence employee behaviour and wellbeing at work.
The Collaboration between the Parochus and the Parish Finance Council in the Protection of Parish Property: Practical Reflections on the Relation between Canons 532 and 537 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law
Creators: name: Rasaian, Lawrence
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2014
Subjects: Pastor-Parish Finance Council Collaboration in the Protection of Parish Property

description: Canon 532 declares that the parochus is the administrator of parish property. Canon 537 stipulates that he must involve the parish finance council in the administration and protection of parochial goods. The parish as a public juridic person has the right to protect its property both by canon law and civil law. The parochus, who is not the owner but the steward of parish goods, has the primary responsibility to protect them. The Code presumes transparency and accountability in the administrator who is legally capable of carrying out acts of administration on behalf of the parish. However, the legislator also recognizes that there can be possible mismanagement or misappropriation of these goods. Therefore, the law provides checks and balances to prevent such misconduct and to ensure their protection. How the present legal provisions can be applied effectively and implemented appropriately by promoting a sound rapport between the parochus and the parish finance council in order to foster the efficacious protection of parish property is the subject matter of this dissertation. This study seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the legal provisions which can be used for the protection of parish property. Specifically, the principal objective of this dissertation is to offer a canonical analysis and practical reflections on the relation between canons 532 and 537. To achieve this objective, the thesis is developed in four chapters. The first examines the dual nature of the parish as a community of the faithful and as a juridic person. The second studies the respective roles of the parochus and the parish finance council in the protection of parish property in light of canons 532 and 537. The third deals with contemporary challenges to the protection of parish property. The final chapter reviews various possible particular canonical provisions (particular laws, special instructions, and parish statutes) to promote collaboration between the parochus and the parish finance council for the protection of the ecclesiastical goods of the parish.
Preschoolers' Saving: A Behavioural Manifestation of Episodic Foresight
Creators: name: Metcalf, Jennifer
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2015
Subjects: Saving
Children
Episodic foresight
Verbal cue

description: The aim of this dissertation was to develop a novel behavioural method to assess young children’s capacity for episodic foresight. Specifically, I developed a marble game paradigm to assess whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children would save marbles for future enjoyment. Study 1 demonstrated that preschoolers will save more spontaneously when they can draw on a recent past experience compared to when the context is completely novel. Results from study 1 also suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. Study 2 revealed that providing children with a verbal prompt alerting them to their possible courses of action (i.e., saving or spending) facilitated saving, that 5-year-olds saved more than 3-year-olds, and that children’s performance on this behavioural (i.e., nonverbal) measure of saving was independent of their language proficiency. Children’s saving was not associated with other capacities hypothesized to relate to episodic foresight (theory of mind, inhibitory control, and working memory). Implications for children's saving, the development of episodic foresight, and future research are discussed.
K-contact manifolds with minimal closed Reeb orbits
Creators: name: Li, Hui
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Symplectic Geometry (math.SG)
subject: Differential Geometry (math.DG)
subject: FOS: Mathematics
subject: Primary: 53D10, 53D05, 53D20, Secondary: 55N10, 57R20

description: We use the Boothby-Wang fibration to construct certain simply connected K-contact manifolds and we give sufficient and necessary conditions on when such K-contact manifolds are homeomorphic to the odd dimensional spheres. If the symplectic base manifold of the fibration admits a Hamiltonian torus action, we show that on the total space of the fibration, other than the regular K-contact structures which have infinitely many closed Reeb orbits, there are K-contact structures whose closed Reeb orbits correspond exactly to the fixed points of the Hamiltonian torus action on the base manifold. Then we give a collection of examples of compact simply connected K-contact manifolds with minimal number of closed Reeb orbits which are not homeomorphic to the odd dimensional spheres, while having the real cohomology ring of the spheres. Finally, we give a family of examples of simply connected K-contact manifolds which have one more than the minimal number of closed Reeb orbits and which do not have the real cohomology ring of the spheres.
Autonomous Fire Detection Robot Using Modified Voting Logic
Creators: name: Rehman, Adeel Ur
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2015
Subjects: Autonomous robot
Sensor fusion
Fire detection
Modified Voting Logic
Voting Logic
LabVIEW

description: Recent developments at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan have created urgency in the scientist community to come up with solutions for hostile industrial environment in case of a breakdown or natural disaster. There are many hazardous scenarios in an indoor industrial environment such as risk of fire, failure of high speed rotary machines, chemical leaks, etc. Fire is one of the leading causes for workplace injuries and fatalities. The current fire protection systems available in the market mainly consist of a sprinkler systems and personnel on duty. In the case of a sprinkler system there could be several things that could go wrong, such as spraying water on a fire created by an oil leak may even spread it, the water from the sprinkler system may harm the machinery in use that is not under the fire threat and the water could potentially destroy expensive raw material, finished goods and valuable electronic and printed data. There is a dire need of an inexpensive autonomous system that can detect and approach the source of these hazardous scenarios. This thesis focuses mainly on industrial fires but, using same or similar techniques on different sensors, may allow it to detect and approach other hostile situations in industrial workplace. Autonomous robots can be equipped to detect potential threats of fire and find out the source while avoiding the obstacles during navigation. The proposed system uses Modified Voting Logic Fusion to approach and declare a potential fire source autonomously. The robot follows the increasing gradient of light and heat intensity to identify the threat and approach the source.
Elucidating the Biological Role of Neuronal Dystonin Isoforms in the Hereditary Sensory Neuropathy Dystonia Musculorum
Creators: name: Ferrier, Andrew R.
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2013

description: Dystonin is a cytoskeletal linker protein whose loss-of-function in dystonia musculorum (dt) mice results in a hereditary sensory neuropathy with profound sensory ataxia. The dystonin gene (Dst) is exceptionally large (~400 kb) producing three giant neuronal dystonin isoforms (>600 kDa) through alternative splicing, namely dystonin-a1, -a2, and -a3. Although loss of expression of dystonin-a1 and -a2 is sufficient to cause dt pathogenesis, the causal dystonin-a variant and the pathological mechanisms activated upon their individual loss remains unclear. Moreover, while the primary pathology lies in the sensory neurons of dt mice, the overt movement disorder coupled with dystonin’s expression in motor neurons, suggests the motor system may also be affected. Here we report that dt mice exhibit motor neuron defects, including, but not limited to, aberrant phosphorylation of neurofilaments, axonal swellings, reduced axon branching and immature neuromuscular junctions. Furthermore, we find that various pathologies (e.g., Ca2+ dyshomeostasis, unfolded protein response (UPR) induction, caspase activation, and apoptosis) within dt sensory neurons are attributable to the specific loss of dystonin-a2. Coupled with this, transgenic mice exogenously expressing dystonin-a2 within the nervous system of dt mice attenuated the degeneration of sensory neuron subtypes, and was sufficient to ameliorate the phenotype and increase life span. Despite these improvements, however, both dystonin-a2 and dystonin-a1 appear necessary for complete amelioration of dt pathogenesis. Finally, pertubations in autophagic activity underlie the degeneration of dt sensory neurons. Restoring dystonin-a2 expression in dt sensory neurons rescues this autophagic defect. Taken together, our work reveals that dystonin-a loss-of-function imparts defects on the neuromuscular system that likely contribute to the dt phenotype. Moreover, although loss of dystonin-a2 expression impedes key biological processes, such as autophagy, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) dynamics and intracellular trafficking, and elicits numerous pathological mechanisms, this work suggests the dt disorder to be a multi-isoform disease.
A ROOT based detector geometry and event visualization system for JUNO-TAO
Creators: name: Liao, Minghua
name: Huang, Kaixuan
name: Zhang, Yumei
name: Xu, Jiayang
name: Cao, Guofu
name: You, Zhengyun
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: The Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO or JUNO-TAO) is a satellite experiment of Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) and located near the Taishan nuclear power plant (NPP). TAO will measure the energy spectrum of reactor antineutrinos with unprecedented precision, which will benefit both reactor neutrino physics and the nuclear database. A detector geometry and event visualization system has been developed for TAO. The software is based on ROOT packages and embedded in the TAO offline software framework. It provides an intuitive tool to visualize the detector geometry, tune the reconstruction algorithm, understand the neutrino physics, and monitor the operation of reactors at NPP. The further applications of the visualization system in the experimental operation of TAO and its future development are also discussed.
description: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in Nuclear Science and Techniques
Unnatural State: Anthropocene Consciousness in Contemporary Californian Fiction
Creators: name: Gilson, Edwin
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024
Subjects: Contemporary Literature
Anthropocene
California
Ecocriticism
Climate Change

description: This thesis argues that contemporary authors have used California as a device to define and propose a mode of human consciousness that has arisen from the Anthropocene, an unofficial epoch named after the transformative impact of humanity on Earth systems. The Anthropocene consciousness (as I call it) describes a form of awareness and perception, about ourselves and the world around us, that results from being a member of a species that has modified the planet and entered geologic history. I do not claim that the Anthropocene consciousness is a universal sensation, rather that California Anthropocene fiction – my categorising term for the novels discussed within – develops and advances this state of being in reaction to the emergence of the suggested epoch. California is positioned as a microcosm of the Anthropocene in this fiction, epitomising its drivers and effects. As characters navigate the environmental turbulence of the state, they become conscious of themselves in the context of the vast spatial and temporal scale of the Anthropocene. This sense of awareness is communicated to the novels’ readers through the psychological interiority of their characters, and, more broadly, the empathetic connection enabled by fiction. The authors therefore generate the Anthropocene consciousness in their readers as well as characters. My understanding of this key concept consists of two main facets, planetary consciousness and geologic consciousness, which relate respectively to the spatial and temporal effects of the Anthropocene. Ultimately I contend that California Anthropocene fiction constructs a model of human consciousness – an unnatural state – that accompanies an epoch defined by anthropogenic activity.
Towards Understanding the Immigrant Cultural Diversity in the Churches in Canada: A Values-Based Approach in the Participation of Visible Minorities in The United Church of Canada
Creators: name: Smith, Junior Anthony
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2016
Subjects: values
United Church
Schwartz
immigrant
diversity
culture
Canada
Church
model
spirituality
religious
Scripture

description: Today, both globalization and immigration have significantly altered the Canadian demographics. Our interactions across borders have become less and less obtrusive both for governments, corporations and individuals. As a result, our cultural interactions no longer require travel to far off places. Technological advances bring these experiences into our living spaces. Furthermore, Canada’s monolithic and predominantly White culture of the 1960s has changed with the arrival of individuals from places other than Europe and the United States. This shift in the cultural dynamics, the ageing cohort particularly among the Roman Catholic and Protestant populations, the decline in the number of young people identifying with these denominations, and the increase in individuals identifying themselves as “no-traditional” faith and “no religion,” have all contributed to a general decline in attendance in the mainline churches. Over this period, The United Church of Canada has recognized the impact of these demographic and social changes. The church has also recognized that in order to become a more welcoming community, it must understand the underlying values of this demographic segment along with its “traditional” membership so as to continue to celebrate the commonality of all cultures, values and traditions while recognizing and finding ways to mitigate the inhibiting consequences of their differences. The objective of this research is to identify and to move towards understanding the core values and traditions within the context of a multicultural, multi-generational, postmodern, and changing church. The study explores whether the similarities and differences between the individual values, and the similarities and differences in spirituality/religiousness between the study groups, provide indicators that will advance the need to become a more intercultural and inclusive church. Furthermore, this research examines the question: How can Scripture inform the church towards the treatment of visible minorities both inside and outside of the church?
Pre-treatment expectations of patients with spinal metastases: what do we know and what can we learn from other disciplines? A systematic review of qualitative studies
Creators: name: Gal, R.
name: Oostinga, D.
name: Wessels, H.
name: Verlaan, J. J
name: Charest-Morin, R.
name: Fisher, Charles G.
name: Verkooijen, H. M.
name: Versteeg, A. L.
Publisher: name: BioMed Central
Year: 2020

description: Background: Little is known about treatment expectations of patients with spinal metastases undergoing radiotherapy and/or surgery. Assuming that patients with spinal metastases share characteristics with patients who had spinal surgery for non-cancer related conditions and with advanced cancer patients, we performed a systematic review to summarize the literature on patient expectations regarding treatment outcomes of spinal surgery and advanced cancer care. Methods: A comprehensive search was performed in MEDLINE, EMBASE and PsycINFO for studies between 2000 and sep-2019. Studies including adult patients (> 18 years), undergoing spinal surgery or receiving advanced cancer care, investigating patients’ pre-treatment expectations regarding treatment outcomes were included. Two independent reviewers screened titles, abstracts and full-texts, extracted data and assessed methodological quality. Results: The search identified 7343 articles, of which 92 were selected for full-text review. For this review, 31 articles were included. Patients undergoing spinal surgery had overly optimistic expectations regarding pain and symptom relief, they underestimated the probability of functional disability, and overestimated the probability of (complete) recovery and return to work. Studies highlighted that patients feel not adequately prepared for surgery in terms of post-treatment expectations. Similarly, advanced cancer patients receiving palliative treatment often had overly optimistic expectations regarding their survival probability and cure rates. Conclusions: Patients tend to have overly optimistic expectations regarding pain and symptom relief, recovery and prognosis following spinal surgery or advanced cancer care. Pretreatment consultation about the expected pain and symptom relief, recovery and prognosis may improve understanding of prognosis, and promote and manage expectations, which, in turn, may lead to better perceived outcomes. Trial registration: PROSPERO registration number: CRD42020145151 .
Les mariages Islamo-Chrétiens au Liban : une étude empirique et théorique
Creators: name: Tannous, Marie-Rose
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2014
Subjects: mariage
Liban
islamo-chrétien
confessionalisme
violence
disparité

description: Le Liban, la société mosaïque de dix-huit confessions, est le seul pays arabe au Moyen Orient qui ne possède pas un code unique unifiant ses citoyens à travers leurs différentes religions et confessions, en ce qui concerne leur statut personnel. Le droit familial tel que le mariage, la séparation ou le divorce ainsi que la garde des enfants est géré par les dix-huit tribunaux qui représentent les dix-huit confessions. De cette diversité de lois découle les principaux problèmes matrimoniaux au niveau canonique, pour les couples mixtes, et juridique pour les couples dispars. Quel avenir aux couples dispars dans une société plurielle si les détendeurs du pouvoir législatif et judiciaire de chaque communauté se contentent de prohiber une telle union ? Comment réussir la vie conjugale si les disparités religieuses, juridiques et culturelles constituent des obstacles à la cohésion dans le couple islamo-chrétien? Comment pouvoir recevoir et accueillir l’autre sous un régime politique basé sur le confessionnalisme appuyant l’isolement de chaque communauté et incitant au rejet de l’autre. Dans un couple dispar, comment bâtir un vivre ensemble pacifique, face aux multiples disparités ?
Modelling hepatitis C infection acquired from blood transfusions in the UK between 1970 and 1991 for the Infected Blood Inquiry - Supplementary Information
Creators: name: Hayes, Sarah
name: McCabe, Ruth
name: De Angelis, Daniela
name: Donnelly, Christl A.
name: Evans, Stephen
name: Medley, Graham
name: Spiegelhalter, David
name: Bird, Sheila
Publisher: name: The Royal Society
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 420299
subject: Epidemiology not elsewhere classified

description: Supplementary Material
LASSI: An LLM-based Automated Self-Correcting Pipeline for Translating Parallel Scientific Codes
Creators: name: Dearing, Matthew T.
name: Tao, Yiheng
name: Wu, Xingfu
name: Lan, Zhiling
name: Taylor, Valerie
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Software Engineering (cs.SE)
subject: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
subject: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
subject: Programming Languages (cs.PL)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: This paper addresses the problem of providing a novel approach to sourcing significant training data for LLMs focused on science and engineering. In particular, a crucial challenge is sourcing parallel scientific codes in the ranges of millions to billions of codes. To tackle this problem, we propose an automated pipeline framework called LASSI, designed to translate between parallel programming languages by bootstrapping existing closed- or open-source LLMs. LASSI incorporates autonomous enhancement through self-correcting loops where errors encountered during the compilation and execution of generated code are fed back to the LLM through guided prompting for debugging and refactoring. We highlight the bi-directional translation of existing GPU benchmarks between OpenMP target offload and CUDA to validate LASSI. The results of evaluating LASSI with different application codes across four LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of LASSI for generating executable parallel codes, with 80% of OpenMP to CUDA translations and 85% of CUDA to OpenMP translations producing the expected output. We also observe approximately 78% of OpenMP to CUDA translations and 62% of CUDA to OpenMP translations execute within 10% of or at a faster runtime than the original benchmark code in the same language.
description: 8 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables
Emerging nanomedicines for effective breast cancer immunotherapy
Creators: name: Bahreyni, Amirhossein
name: Mohamud, Yasir
name: Luo, Honglin
Publisher: name: BioMed Central
Year: 2020

description: Breast cancer continues to be the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women, putting their life in jeopardy. Cancer immunotherapy is a novel approach with the ability to boost the host immune system to recognize and eradicate cancer cells with high selectivity. As a promising treatment, immunotherapy can not only eliminate the primary tumors, but also be proven to be effective in impeding metastasis and recurrence. However, the clinical application of cancer immunotherapy has faced some limitations including generating weak immune responses due to inadequate delivery of immunostimulants to the immune cells as well as uncontrolled modulation of immune system, which can give rise to autoimmunity and nonspecific inflammation. Growing evidence has suggested that nanotechnology may meet the needs of current cancer immunotherapy. Advanced biomaterials such as nanoparticles afford a unique opportunity to maximize the efficiency of immunotherapy and significantly diminish their toxic side-effects. Here we discuss recent advancements that have been made in nanoparticle-involving breast cancer immunotherapy, varying from direct activation of immune systems through the delivery of tumor antigens and adjuvants to immune cells to altering immunosuppression of tumor environment and combination with other conventional therapies.
Supporting information to accompany: Cardenolides in the dorsolateral defensive fluid of adult large milkweed bugs have differential potency on vertebrate and invertebrate predator NA+/K+— ATPases
Creators: name: Rubiano-Buitrago, Paola
name: Pradhan, Shrikant
name: Aceves, Alfonso
name: Mohammadi, Shabnam
name: Paetz, Christian
name: Rowland, Hannah
Publisher: name: The Royal Society
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 310499
subject: Evolutionary biology not elsewhere classified

description: PARB Supplementary info 19 03 2024.docx
Fine-Grained Vision-Language Learning
Creators: name: Han, Xiao
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2024
Subjects: Deep Learning
Vision-Language

description: In the ever-evolving landscape of Vision-Language (V+L) learning, the synergy between visual and textual information has proven pivotal for a multitude of tasks, ranging from discriminative to generative objectives. Nevertheless, in specific fine-grained contexts within practical applications, such as e-commerce and human-related modeling, the intricate characteristics of individual instances are difficult to represent, distinguish, and generate. Generic V+L methods often struggle in these nuanced situations due to the lack of specialized designs to address the unique attributes inherent to fine-grained tasks. In light of these challenges, this thesis delves into the world of fine-grained vision-language learning, proposing innovative solutions for typical fine-grained V+L cases to propel the field forward.
Three contributions are made in this thesis. First, we investigate how to learn better fine-grained V+L representations. We present novel pre-training objectives specifically tailored to the unique attributes of the fashion domain, along with a flexible and versatile pretraining architecture. This approach is designed to offer more discriminative and generalizable features, enhancing the performance of a wide range of downstream tasks in the fashion domain. Second, we study how to parameter-efficiently unify fine-grained heterogeneous V+L tasks in a multi-task model. We propose two lightweight adapters and a stable optimization strategy to support simultaneously training a V+L model across multiple heterogeneous tasks, which outperforms independently trained single-task models in discriminative and generative downstream tasks (incl. cross-modal matching, multi-modal recognition, and image-to-text generation) with significant parameter saving. Finally, we explore how to use natural language to create fine-grained visual content – 3D head avatars. Building upon the foundation of 2D text-to-image diffusion models, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating 3D awareness of head priors and enable fine-grained editing through the proposed identity-aware score distillation method, resulting in superior fidelity and editing capabilities.
Retracing Micro-Epidemics of Chagas Disease Using Epicenter Regression
Creators: name: Cornejo del Carpio, J.G.
name: Small, D.S.
name: Gilman, R.H.
name: Kawai, V.
name: Plotkin, J.B.
name: Vilhena, D.A.
name: Levy, M.Z.
name: Bowman, N.M.
name: Bern, C.
name: Cordova-Benzaquen, E.
Publisher: name: Public Library of Science
Year: 2011

description: Vector-borne transmission of Chagas disease has become an urban problem in the city of Arequipa, Peru, yet the debilitating symptoms that can occur in the chronic stage of the disease are rarely seen in hospitals in the city. The lack of obvious clinical disease in Arequipa has led to speculation that the local strain of the etiologic agent, Trypanosoma cruzi, has low chronic pathogenicity. The long asymptomatic period of Chagas disease leads us to an alternative hypothesis for the absence of clinical cases in Arequipa: transmission in the city may be so recent that most infected individuals have yet to progress to late stage disease. Here we describe a new method, epicenter regression, that allows us to infer the spatial and temporal history of disease transmission from a snapshot of a population's infection status. We show that in a community of Arequipa, transmission of T. cruzi by the insect vector Triatoma infestans occurred as a series of focal micro-epidemics, the oldest of which began only around 20 years ago. These micro-epidemics infected nearly 5% of the community before transmission of the parasite was disrupted through insecticide application in 2004. Most extant human infections in our study community arose over a brief period of time immediately prior to vector control. According to our findings, the symptoms of chronic Chagas disease are expected to be absent, even if the strain is pathogenic in the chronic phase of disease, given the long asymptomatic period of the disease and short history of intense transmission. Traducción al español disponible en Alternative Language Text S1/A Spanish translation of this article is available in Alternative Language Text S1.