ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
MARINE PROTECTED AREAS AS A TOOL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT IN THE BLACK SEA AND MEDITERRANEAN REGIONS: BALANCING BIODIVERSITY, FISHERIES AND ECOSYSTEM CONSERVATION

Європейські моря та океан є домівкою для багатого й різноманітного спектра видів та екосистем, забезпечуючи середовища існування для насиченого та часто ще невідомого морського біорізноманіття. Оскільки Чорне море є спільним ресурсом для кількох країн, ефективне управління його природними багатствами, включаючи створення та функціонування Морських охоронюваних територій, вимагає тісної координації на міжнародному рівні. У статті підкреслено важливість співпраці між державами, яка є ключовою для розробки та впровадження єдиної, комплексної стратегії охорони моря. Це може стати міцною основою для вдосконалення існуючих міжнародних угод, таких як Бухарестська конвенція, та сприяння активнішій співпраці в рамках регіональних та міжнародних організацій для створення дієвої системи MPA та розглядається важливість Морських охоронюваних територій для збереження унікального біорізноманіття Чорного моря та їхня роль у контексті економічної та геополітичної значущості регіону. Досліджено, що Чорне море стикається з численними екологічними проблемами, для подолання яких створення ефективної мережі MPA є одним з ключових інструментів. Наголошено на необхідності міжнародної співпраці між причорноморськими державами для розробки та впровадження узгодженої стратегії охорони моря через MPA. Також розглянуто потенційний позитивний вплив функціонуючих MPA на місцеві громади через сталий розвиток. Окрему увагу приділено важливості наукових досліджень для аналізу існуючих MPA та розробки нових підходів до збереження біорізноманіття в Чорному морі. У цьому дослідженні проаналізований сучасний стан та перспективи розвитку морських охоронюваних територій, зокрема в Чорноморському регіоні, в контексті європейської інтеграції та необхідності забезпечення сталого використання морських ресурсів. Особливу увагу приділено виявленню ключових проблем, аналізу існуючих наукових досліджень та визначенню шляхів підвищення ефективності MPA для досягнення природоохоронних цілей та сприяння сталому розвитку регіону.
Exploring the integration of local and scientific knowledge in early warning systems for disaster risk reduction: a review

AbstractThe occurrence and intensity of some natural hazards (e.g. hydro-meteorological) increase due to climate change, with growing exposure and socio-economic vulnerability, leading to mounting risks. In response, Disaster Risk Reduction policy and practice emphasize people-centred Early Warning Systems (EWS). Global policies stress the need for including local knowledge and increasing the literature on integrating local and scientific knowledge for EWS. In this paper, we present a review to understand and outline how local and scientific knowledge integration is framed in EWS, namely: (1) existing integration approaches, (2) where in the EWS integration happens, (3) outcomes, (4) challenges, and (5) enablers. The objective is to critically evaluate integration and highlight critical questions about assumptions, goals, outcomes, and processes. In particular, we unpack the impact of power and knowledges as plural. We find a spectrum of integration between knowledges in EWS, mainly with dichotomy at the start: focus on people or technology. The most popular integration approaches are participatory methods such as ‘GIS mapping’ (technology) and methods that focus on ‘triangulation’ (people). We find that critical analysis of power relations and social interaction is either missed or framed as a challenge within integration processes. Knowledge is often seen as binary, embedded in the concept of ‘integration’. It is important to know what different knowledges can and cannot do in different contexts and acknowledge the hybrid reality of knowledge used for EWS. We argue that how we approach different knowledges in EWS has fundamental implications for the approaches to integration and its meaning. To this end, attention to the social processes, power dynamics, and context is crucial.
Additional file 1 of Public attitudes towards personal health data sharing in long-term epidemiological research: a Citizen Science approach in the KORA study

Supplementary Material 1
Methodological and Ethical Quality of Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials in Gastrointestinal Surgery

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard tool used to evaluate therapeutic interventions. Methodological and ethical aspects should be adequately reported to enable readers to make informed and justified judgments regarding the validity of a trial and the treatment effectiveness.The aim of this study was to evaluate the methodological and ethical qualities of randomized clinical trials in gastrointestinal surgery and to assess the relationship between these two qualities.All of the articles chosen for review reported on phase III randomized controlled gastrointestinal surgical trials were published in 12 international journals during 2006 and 2007. The eligible studies were identified, selected, and then evaluated based on a broad set of predetermined criteria. The methodological quality was evaluated using the Jadad scale, and the ethical quality was evaluated using the Berdeu score.The mean Jadad score was 9.7 ± 1.78. The methodological quality was insufficient in 64 RCTs (37.4 %; Jadad score <9). The mean Berdeu score was 0.36 ± 0.08. The journal impact factor, number of randomized patients, and number of centers correlated with the outcome of the Jadad score, and the journal impact factor, industry funding, and year in which the trial began correlated with the outcome of the Berdeu score. Informed consent from patients was not obtained in 7 % (n = 12) of the RCTs, and research ethics committee approval was not mentioned in 14.6 % (n = 25) of the RCTs.The reporting of gastrointestinal surgery RCTs is less than optimal. In our study, the trials of higher methodological quality were more likely to provide information about their ethical aspects. These results suggest the need for more attention to be paid to the conduct of clinical research and the reporting of ethical aspects. The appropriation of the ethical rules by surgeons involved in human clinical trials could improve the methodology and reporting of RCTs in gastrointestinal surgery.
Projected climate change impacts on water resources in northern Morocco with an ensemble of regional climate models

The Mediterranean region is considered as a hot spot of climate change, where precipitation islikely to decrease with the rise of temperature. These changes could have a strong effect in north Africa andnotably in Morocco where the agricultural sector is of high importance and very dependent on surface waterresources. Therefore, there is a need to quantify the possible climate change impacts on water resources ofthis region. The most common approach to conduct hydrological impact studies of climate change is to runhydrological models with climate scenarios, usually provided by climate model outputs downscaled to thecatchment of interest. In the present study an ensemble of six regional climate model (RCM) simulationsfrom the European project ENSEMBLES at a 25 km resolution is considered to evaluate the climate changeimpacts on the inflows of the sixth largest dam located in northern Morocco. A quantile perturbation methodis used to generate future temperature and precipitation series under the emission scenario A1B. The GR4Jhydrological model is first calibrated on different climatic conditions to assess the temporal transferability ofits parameters and then run with the perturbed temperature and precipitation series. The ensemble approachallows the projection uncertainties to be evaluated from the spread in the individual RCM simulations. AllRCM simulations project a decrease in surface water resources during the extended winter season(November to May), from –9% to –54% depending on the model.
Review of National Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Plan of Pakistan in context with Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

Abstract   Pakistan has undergone multiple geological and climate-related disasters in recent years. This includes the devastating 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and yearly countrywide flooding since 2010 till present. The recurrence of such disasters has led to the establishment of national and provincial disaster management institutions, which worked towards the formulation of national disaster management plan. As a result, Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP) was approved in 2012. This paper provides a review of Pakistan’s National Multi-Hazard Early Warning System Plan (NMH-EWS-P) that is part of the overall NDMP, approved prior to the introduction of the 2015-2030 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). The research identifies various aspects of the national plan, which require amendments in the light of the Sendai Framework. The implementation of the NMH-EWS-P is reviewed by the case study of the province of Punjab, where the Punjab Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) is responsible for the implementation of the national plan at provincial level. With the analysis of Early Warning Systems against natural disasters, as implemented by the PDMA, the gaps and shortcomings of the prevailing practice are identified. Furthermore, this research also aims to propose practical solutions and recommendations for improvement, and better alignment of the prevailing Early Warning System with that of the Sendai Framework.
Publisher Correction: A Fast and Refined Cancer Regions Segmentation Framework in Whole-slide Breast Pathological Images

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Design Choices for Offline Transactions in a Norwegian Central Bank Digital Currency

Denne oppgaven undersøker mulighetene og utfordringene forbundet med offline funksjonalitet for Digitale Sentralbankpenger (DSP). Et best effort forslag av en protokoll for offline transaksjoner i en norsk DSP kontekst presenteres. Protokollen er basert på eksisterende tilnærminger til offline problemet og formulerte krav fra relevante aktører, inkludert Norges Bank. Den foreslåtte protokollen, sikkerhetsmekanismene og arkitektur aspekter er testet i et transaksjonssimuleringsrammeverk for DSP utviklet i Python. Utfordringene knyttet til offline transaksjoner er ikke løst i denne oppgaven, men mekanismer som kan minimere tilknyttede risikoer er foreslått. Resultatene viser at disse mekanismene og beløpsgrenser er effektive mot de simulerte angrepene, hovedsakelig double spending fra en sofistikert fiendtlig aktør. Simuleringsresultatene bekrefter at økt tilgjengelighet gjennom systemarkitektur kan redusere risikoen forbundet med offline funksjonalitet.
Criminal Liability Under The Rome Statute Of The International Criminal Court For Israel's Military Offensive On The Gaza Strip

This research aims to analyze criminal liability under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court regarding Israel's military attack on the Gaza Strip. This research is normative juridical in nature, by looking at international law as rules or norms and general legal principles in the application of international criminal law. The approach used in this research is a case approach. The nature of this research is descriptive research that explains the problem on the facts of armed conflict between Israel and HAMAS and human rights violations committed by Israel against the Palestinian population in Gaza. The data sources in this research consist of secondary data. Data collection techniques were carried out through literature studies and online data searches as well as reviewing laws and regulations and books, journals, and other references relevant to the research. The result of this research is that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a criminal court that has become part of the international global justice system, has the authority to handle and try crimes in accordance with article 5 paragraph (1) of the Rome Statute. In 2012, as many as 193 countries that are members of the UN have recognized Palestine as a real “state”. With the status changing from “entity” to “non-member state” which means that Palestine has the right to join the ICC. Palestine's joining the ICC was marked by the signing of the Rome Statute on April 1 by the Palestinian president. By joining Palestine to the ICC, it has become the authority and jurisdiction of the ICC as the International Criminal Court to help deal with the conflict that occurred in Palestine. So based on article 13 letter (a) and article 14 of the Rome Statute, referring to the situation in Palestine, the court specifically requested the Prosecutor to help investigate the conflict that occurred, in accordance with the temporary jurisdiction of the country.
Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies: The Power Spectrum and Beyond

42 pages, 14 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the Valencia Summer School "Data Analysis in Cosmology" held in September 2004. The manuscript was almost finish before the second release of the WMAP data
On Topological Data Analysis for Structural Dynamics: An Introduction to Persistent Homology

Abstract                Topological methods can provide a way of proposing new metrics and methods of scrutinizing data, that otherwise may be overlooked. A method of quantifying the shape of data, via a topic called topological data analysis (TDA) will be introduced. The main tool of TDA is persistent homology. Persistent homology is a method of quantifying the shape of data over a range of length scales. The required background and a method of computing persistent homology are briefly discussed in this work. Ideas from topological data analysis are then used for nonlinear dynamics to analyze some common attractors, by calculating their embedding dimension, and then to assess their general topologies. A method will also be proposed, that uses topological data analysis to determine the optimal delay for a time-delay embedding. TDA will also be applied to a Z24 bridge case study in structural health monitoring, where it will be used to scrutinize different data partitions, classified by the conditions at which the data were collected. A metric, from topological data analysis, is used to compare data between the partitions. The results presented demonstrate that the presence of damage alters the manifold shape more significantly than the effects present from temperature.
Statistical mechanics of cell aggregates: explaining the phase transition and paradoxical piezoelectric behavior of soft biological tissues

Piezoelectricity in biological soft tissues is a controversial issue with differing opinions.
All that Glitters is not Bitcoin -- Unveiling the Centralized Nature of the BTC (IP) Network

Blockchains are typically managed by peer-to-peer (P2P) networks providing the support and substrate to the so-called distributed ledger (DLT), a replicated, shared, and synchronized data structure, geographically spread across multiple nodes. The Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain is by far the most well known DLT, used to record transactions among peers, based on the BTC digital currency. In this paper, we focus on the network side of the BTC P2P network, analyzing its nodes from a purely network measurements-based approach. We present a BTC crawler able to discover and track the BTC P2P network through active measurements, and use it to analyze its main properties. Through the combined analysis of multiple snapshots of the BTC network as well as by using other publicly available data sources on the BTC network and DLT, we unveil the BTC P2P network, locate its active nodes, study their performance, and track the evolution of the network over the past two years. Among other relevant findings, we show that (i) the size of the BTC network has remained almost constant during the last 12 months - since the major BTC price drop in early 2018, (ii) most of the BTC P2P network resides in US and EU countries, and (iii) despite this western network locality, most of the mining activity and corresponding revenue is controlled by major mining pools located in China. By additionally analyzing the distribution of BTC coins among independent BTC entities (i.e., single BTC addresses or groups of BTC addresses controlled by the same actor), we also conclude that (iv) BTC is very far from being the decentralized and uncontrolled system it is so much advertised to be, with only 4.5% of all the BTC entities holding about 85% of all circulating BTC coins.
Discovery and Instrumentation: How Surplus Knowledge Contributes to Progress in Science

An important fact about human labor is that it can result not just in reproduction of what it started with, but in something new, a surplus product. When the latter is a means of production, it makes possible a mechanism of change consisting of reproduction by means of the expanded means of production. Each iteration of the labor process can differ from the preceding one insofar as it incorporates the surplus generated previously. Over the long-term, this cyclical process can lead to the self-transformation of labor and, through it, of human societies and cultures. In this paper, I argue that this mechanism of change is also at work in the history of science. I argue that the form this mechanism takes in science is that of a feedback loop between discovery and instrument construction. This process requires the integration, and transformation into material form, of different kinds of knowledge. Based on this mechanism, I defend a concept of scientific progress as transcendence of the limitations of native human epistemic abilities. I also criticize narrowly biologistic approaches to the history of science for ignoring the role of surplus generation in transforming the labor process, and discuss some problems associated with viewing science as labor.
Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and Evaluation

Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.
Long-Term Modulation of Galactic Cosmic Rays in the Heliosphere by Curvature of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field

Long-term changes of the GCR intensity in the heliosphere were analysed making use of records of cosmogenic isotopes abundances (10Be and 14C) in natural archives and neutron monitor data. These data contain information about short-term, 11-year, 22-year, centennial and two-centennial cycles of solar activity. A mechanism to explain the long-term modulation of GCR due to changes in the curvature of the interplanetary magnetic field, resulting from changes in solar activity, is suggested.
Marketing and institutional factors in the voluntary adoption of corporate social responsibility reporting: The case of global reporting initiative

Nas últimas décadas a Responsabilidade Social Empresarial (RSE) tem aumentado substancialmente. Vários estudos têm identificado que a crescente importância da RSE é paralela com o aumento da informação do público acerca das actividades de RSE e das exigências dos stakeholders. De facto, as empresas estão a comunicar cada vez mais as suas actividades de RSE. Este estudo aborda a motivação que leva as empresas a aderirem aos relatórios voluntários de RSE? Focamos a nossa investigação no tipo de relatórios mais disseminado a nível mundial - Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Tanto quanto sabemos, este é o primeiro estudo a abordar o que leva as empresas a adoptarem o GRI. Propomos que a pressão institucional, conjuntamente com factores de marketing nomeadamente o reconhecimento da marca, a exposição mediática e publicidade, podem ser factores determinantes na adopção do GRI. Reunimos informação de 600 empresas globais através de fontes de informação publica, por forma a construir as variáveis do nosso modelo. Testámos o nosso modelo aplicando a regressão logística com na variável dependente – a adopção do GRI. Os resultados sugerem que as pressões institucionais, em particular o comportamento imitativo e a transparência da cultura do país de origem das empresas persuade as mesmas a estarem conscientes da importância de reportarem as suas actividade de RSE e, consequentemente a adopção da prática do GRI. Para além disso, a comunicação das actividades de RSE e relações públicas também desempenham um papel importante na tomada de decisão da adopção voluntária do GRI.
Assessing the Optimal Stage-Cam Target for Continuous Water Level Monitoring in Ephemeral Streams: Experimental Evidence

Recently, increased attention has been devoted to intermittent and ephemeral streams (IRES) due to the recognition of their importance for ecology, hydrology, and biogeochemistry. However, IRES dynamics still demand further research, and traditional monitoring approaches present several limitations in continuously and accurately capturing river network expansion/contraction. Optical-based approaches have shown promise in noninvasively estimating the water level in intermittent streams: a simple setup made up of a wildlife camera and a reference white pole led to estimations within 2cm of accuracy in severe hydrometeorological conditions. In this work, we investigate whether the shortcomings imposed by adverse illumination can be partially mitigated by modifying this simple stage-cam setup. Namely, we estimate the image-based water level by using both the pole and a larger white bar. Further, we compare such results to those obtained with larger bars painted in the red, green, and blue primary colors. Our findings show that using larger white bars also increases reflections and, therefore, the accuracy in the estimation of the water level is not necessarily enhanced. Likewise, experimenting with colored bars does not significantly improve image-based estimations of the stage. Therefore, this work confirms that a simple stage-cam setup may be sufficient to monitor IRES dynamics, suggesting that future efforts may be rather focused on including filters and polarizers in the camera as well as on improving the performance of the image processing algorithm.