ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
The role of civil society in protecting judicial independence in times of rule of law backsliding in Poland

The article discusses approaches to defending the independence of the judiciary – one of the main institutional requirements of the rule of law – adopted by civil society organisations (CSOs) in Poland since 2015. Beginning by describing the rule of law backsliding in context, this article shows how civil society organisations reacted to the orchestrated threats to judicial independence in Poland. The article highlights the negative consequences of rule of law backsliding for the civic space, proving that the role of CSOs was not only to protect the rule of law (judicial independence, in particular), but also to fight the shrinking civic space. This article surveys the concept of the ‘rule of law from below’ by critically analysing the actions of CSOs in response to attempts to undermine judicial independence, providing a part of a broader ‘rule of law backsliding’ picture. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of two case studies – reactions from CSOs to Poland’s so-called ‘reform of the judiciary’.
Implementing a transparency and accountability policy to reduce corruption: The GAVI Alliance in Cameroon

The GAVI Alliance – an alliance of the world’s major players in global immunisation – uncovered massive misuse of its grants in Cameroon in 2011. GAVI’s Transparency and Accountability Policy triggered an investigation into the financial management of Cameroon’s Health Systems Strengthening grant. The investigation revealed that, of US$5.1 million programme expenditures, US$3.7 million had been misspent, partly due to fraud. Different types of corruption affected this programme. Analysing how misuse was detected and how GAVI and the government responded, provides lessons on how similar abuses can be prevented in the future. In order to avoid grant mismanagement, programmes should have integrated transparency and accountability systems. This is also applicable to programmes in other sectors.
Antimicrobial Resistance Through the Lens of One Health in Ethiopia: A Review of the Literature Among Humans, Animals, and the Environment

We aimed to review and describe antimicrobial resistance (AMR) prevalence in humans, animals, and the environment in Ethiopia.We conducted a structured review of literature on AMR in humans, animals, and the environment in Ethiopia from 2016-2020. We reported the pooled prevalence of AMR of bacterial pathogens in all 3 sectors.We included 43 articles in our review. Only 5 studies evaluated AMR across multiple sectors. The most common bacteria in humans were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Staphylococcus aureus. High prevalence of resistance to third-generation cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones, and sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim were seen in gram-negative organisms, often with >50% prevalence of resistance. Highest resistance rates were seen in humans, followed by environmental isolates. Salmonella spp. exhibited higher rates of resistance than previously reported in the literature. We found methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) in approximately half of S. aureus from the environment and a third from human isolates. Few studies evaluated AMR across all 3 sectors.Our review demonstrated high prevalence of AMR among bacteria in humans, animals, and the environment in Ethiopia. Integrating a One Health approach into AMR surveillance as part of Ethiopia's national surveillance program will inform future implementation of One Health interventions.
The risk of corruption in public pharmaceutical procurement: how anti-corruption, transparency and accountability measures may reduce this risk

Background: The goal of the public procurement of pharmaceuticals is to purchase sufficient quantities of high-quality pharmaceuticals at cost-effective prices for a given population. This goal can be undercut if corruption infiltrates the procurement process. Good procurement practices can help mitigate the risks of corruption and support equitable access to affordable and high-quality medicines.Objectives: This paper aims to 1) examine manifestations of corruption in the pharmaceutical procurement process and key factors behind them, and 2) identify how to design and implement effective anti-corruption, transparency and accountability mechanisms within this process.Methods: This paper was informed by a narrative literature review from 1996 to the present. The search focused on publications that addressed the issue of pharmaceutical procurement and governance and corruption issues. Our search included peer-reviewed literature, books, grey literature such as working papers, reports published by international organizations and donor agencies, and some media articles. Some documents used in this paper were already known to the authors.Results: Procurement is highly vulnerable to corruption particularly in the health sector. What is more, corruption in the procurement process does not appear to be limited to any one level of government or type of health system. The better integration of accountability, transparency and anti-corruption mechanisms in the procurement process is needed to reduce the risk of corruption.Conclusions: Lessons learned suggest that anti-corruption, transparency and accountability mechanisms in the pharmaceutical procurement process, such as open contracting and integrity pacts are helpful towards reducing the risk of corruption.
Modulation of Cosmic‐Ray Electrons in the Outer Heliosphere

A new cosmic-ray transport model, which investigates the modulation of cosmic-ray electrons in the outer heliospheric regions, including all major modulation mechanisms and the asymmetry of the heliospheric shock structures, is developed. The transport of Galactic cosmic rays into the heliosphere is directly calculated from the local interstellar medium, while for the mutual interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, the three-fluid two-dimensional hydrodynamic Bonn model is used to calculate the geometry of the heliosphere and solar wind flow profiles as input to the transport model. There are considerable differences in the modulation that cosmic rays experience between the heliospheric nose and tail regions, but because of large transport parameters, no modulation of Galactic cosmic rays occurs beyond the heliopause. It is shown that for energetic particles in the range of 1 GeV the termination shock has a significant influence on the modeled Galactic cosmic-ray flux intensities in the equatorial regions in direction to the heliospheric nose, while it is decreasing toward the poles and in the tail. Depending on energy, most of the modulation that the particles experience occurs at radial distances less than the shock radius. It is also shown that the cosmic-ray distribution in the inner heliosphere is not sensitive to the nose-tail asymmetry of the termination shock and heliopause. Finally, the effect of perpendicular transport parameter in the polar region is calculated. It is shown that depending on energy, this parameter influence computed latitudinal gradients, especially at, and to a lesser extend beyond, the termination shock, and in the heliospheric tail.
First Energy Independence Conference: Fusion Energy and Plasma Physics (Report on the Conference, Rio de Janeiro, 17–21 August 1987)

The Energy Independence Conference on Fusion Energy and Plasma Physics was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). This conference was sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). One of the prime purposes of the meeting was to assess and promote the role of developing countries in fusion research. Some one hundred people attended the meeting, with a good representation from the Latin American countries, and participants from Austria, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Poland and Portugal, and with a good selection of specialists from the developed countries.
A Collaborative Filtering Based Approach for Recommending Elective Courses

In management education programmes today, students face a difficult time in choosing electives as the number of electives available are many. As the range and diversity of different elective courses available for selection have increased, course recommendation systems that help students in making choices about courses have become more relevant. In this paper we extend the concept of collaborative filtering approach to develop a course recommendation system. The proposed approach provides student an accurate prediction of the grade they may get if they choose a particular course, which will be helpful when they decide on selecting elective courses, as grade is an important parameter for a student while deciding on an elective course. We experimentally evaluate the collaborative filtering approach on a real life data set and show that the proposed system is effective in terms of accuracy.
ANALISIS FAKTOR PENYEBAB LANGSUNG POTENSI KECELAKAAN KERJA DENGAN METODE EVENT AND CASUAL FACTOR ANALYSIS (ECFA) DAN FAULT TREE ANALYSIS (FTA) DI PT. SYGMA EXA GRAFIKA KOTA BANDUNG

Permasalah mengenai Kesehatan dan Keselamatan Kerja sering terjadi di lingkungan industri khususnya di industri percetakan.Pelaksanaan Kesehatan dan Keselamatan Kerja (K3) merupakan upaya untuk menciptakan suasana bekerja yang aman, nyaman dan mencapai tujuan yaitu produktivitas setinggi-tingginya. Kesehatan dan Keselamatan Kerja (K3) sangat penting untuk dilaksanakan karena penerapan Kesehatan dan Keselamatan Kerja (K3) dapat mencegah dan mengurangi resiko terjadinya kecelakaan maupun penyakit akibat melakukan kerja. Semakin besar pengetahuan pekerja akan bahaya kecelakaan kerja maka semakin kecil terjadinya resiko kecelakaan kerja. Salah satu metode yang diterapkan dalam menganalisis potensi kecelakaan kerja yaitu motode Event Casual and Fault Analysis (ECFA) dan Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). Hasil analisis ECFA berupa direct cause (penyebab langsung), root cause (penyebab utama), contribution cause (penyebab yang berkontribusi) terhadap masing-masing kejadian atau potensi kecelakaan kerja, serta hasil analisis FTA berupa unsafe action (tindakan tidak aman) dan unsafe condition (kondisi tidak aman) dengan hasil 12 unsafe action dan 7 unsafe condition pada temuan kejadian atau potensi kecelakaan kerja di PT. Sygma Exa Grafika Kota Bandung dengan jumlah persentase 63,16% dan unsafe condition dengan jumlah persentase 36,84% pada temuan potensi kecelakaan kerja
The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights: mapping resistance against a young court

AbstractAt first glance, it appears that the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights – the first pan-continental court of the African Union (AU) for human rights protection – epitomises the advances made by international courts in Africa in the past decade. Since its first judgment in 2009, the Court has taken a robust approach to its mandate and its docket is growing apace. However, a closer look at the overall context in which the Court operates reveals that it is susceptible to many of the patterns of resistance that have hampered other international courts in the region, which cut across the development of its authority and impact. This paper analyses the forms and patterns of resistance against the African Court and the actors involved, emphasising the additional difficulties entailed in mapping resistance to a young court compared to long-established courts, such as the European and Inter-American human rights courts.
Embryonic stem cell transplantation: potential applicability in cell replacement therapy and regenerative medicine

Embryonic stem cells are derived from the inner cell mass of the trophoblast, and have the ability to differentiate into all the tissues of the fetus. As such, their potential in cell replacement therapy and regenerative medicine has been widely acknowledged. Useful cell types such as neurons, cardiomyocytes, hepatocytes, pancreatic beta cells, and blood cells have all been successfully derived in the laboratory. Furthermore, embryonic stem cells may be utilized in novel immunomodulatory applications, such as hematopoietic chimerism strategies aimed at inducing tolerance to donor organ allografts. Unfortunately, progress in embryonic stem cell therapeutics continues to be hindered by haphazard differentiation and tumorigenesis; and the immune response to an embryonic stem cell-derived tissue graft is still an open question. This review summarizes the current state of embryonic stem cell research in regards to transplantation, highlighting the successes to date and the future obstacles yet to be overcome. Although embryonic stem cells are still far from their debut in the clinic, continued scientific advances engender optimism that they will eventually play an important role in cell replacement therapy and regenerative medicine.
Supplementary document for Toward In-sensor Imaging Classification Enabled by On-chip All-optical Modulation and Photonic Neural Networks - 7554576.pdf

Supplemental document
Parallelisation of PyHEADTAIL, a Collective Beam Dynamics Code for Particle Accelerator Physics

The longitudinal tracking engine of the particle accelerator simulation application PyHEADTAIL shows a heavy potential for parallelisation. For basic beam circulation, the tracking functionality with the leap-frog algorithm is extracted and compared between a sequential C and a concurrent CUDA C API implementation for 1 million revolutions. Including the sequential data I/O in both versions, a pure speedup of up to S = 100 is observed which is in the order of magnitude of what is expected from Amdahl's law. From O(100) macro-particles on the overhead of initialising the GPU CUDA device appears outweighed by the concurrent computations on the 448 available CUDA cores.
ADAPTIVE KNOWLEDGE-AUGMENTED DATABASE SYSTEMS FOR REAL-TIME QUERY OPTIMIZATION AND SEMANTIC DATA INTEGRATION IN HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENTS: A HYBRID NEURO-SYMBOLIC FRAMEWORK COMBINING GRAPH-BASED REASONING, NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES, AND AUTO ML-DRIVEN INDEXING STRATEGIES

In the era of data deluge and heterogeneous information systems, traditional database architectures face critical challenges in handling complex semantic queries and real-time optimization. This paper proposes an adaptive knowledge-augmented database framework that integrates neuro-symbolic AI, graph-based reasoning, and AutoML-driven indexing to enable semantic data integration and efficient query processing. By leveraging natural language interfaces and domain knowledge graphs, the system supports dynamic adaptation to query intents across disparate datasets. Experimental evaluation demonstrates improved response time, query accuracy, and semantic richness compared to conventional systems.
Nurses' sleep, work hours, and patient care quality, and safety

To describe sleep duration and work characteristics among registered nurses ("nurses") across health care settings and unit types and determine the association between sleep duration and quality of care and patient safety.We used an observational, retrospective design. Survey data were collected from two cohorts of nurses in 2015 and 2016.Health care and community settings across the United States, primarily acute care hospitals.Nurses working in a staff or general duty position (N=1,568).The independent variable was nurses' sleep duration before work and nonwork days. The two dependent variables were nurse reported quality of care (single item rating) and overall patient safety, measured by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture.Nurses reported an average of 414 minutes, or just less than 7 hours, of sleep before a work day and 497 minutes, or just over 8 hours, before a nonwork day. Short sleep duration was statistically significantly associated with lower ratings of quality of care (p=.002) and patient safety (p=.000).Nurses are sleeping, on average, less than recommended amounts before work, which may be impacting their health and performance on the job. Health care managers may consider interventions to support nurses' sleep to improve patient care. Further research is warranted.
Civil Society Organizations <i>for</i> and <i>with</i> the Courts and Judges—Struggle for the Rule of Law and Judicial Independence: The Case of Poland 1976–2020

AbstractDuring the rule of law backsliding crisis in Poland since late 2015, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have been active in the struggles to defend judicial independence. CSOs cooperate closely with judges and support their ‘judicial resistance’. This Article has three main objectives: describe and analyze the relationship between judges and CSOs; show the evolution — both continuity and discontinuity in their relations over time; assess whether CSOs’ activities are of any practical significance and therefore worth attention. The CSO-judicial relationship is analyzed for three periods: 1976–1989, the years before the transformation of Poland from a ‘people’s republic’ to a democracy; 1989–2015, the time of building liberal democracy and the rule of law; 2015–2020, the time of defending the rule of law from a populist attack.Drawing on sources including years of participant observation providing unique and insider knowledge, the author analyzes the activities and outputs of CSOs and judges focusing on their interactions and cooperation. The author argues that CSOs play a significant role in the struggle for the rule of law and judicial independence. This Article demonstrates that CSOs’ current engagement and input is not an extraordinary, ad hoc phenomenon, but rather one that arose from the previous interactions between the judiciary and civil society. The author argues that what we witness in Poland is an unprecedented phenomenon, both in the character of the relationship between judges and CSOs, and the scale and diversity of their cooperation. At the same time, the author claims that CSOs are underappreciated, including by academia, their work is taken for granted, and their role in the legal complex can be seen as a partly lost opportunity. If noticed, appreciated, and supported CSOs activities and their role could be more meaningful.
The feasibility of vibration analysis as a mechanism of failure analysis in failure investigations and root cause analysis

M.Phil. “Failure is one of the unfortunate facts of life”. This is the very first statement in the book by Coetzee (1998). This statement is unfortunately true, leading to the fact that failure is a reality, to be dealt with. Dealing with it in a proactive way will provide warnings of an approaching failure. Dealing with it in a reactive way will go through the “surprising pain” of an unexpected breakdown or downtime. In both cases the source of failure must be known to prevent it from happening again. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured method of determining the reason (root cause) of a failure. On the other hand, Vibration Analysis is one of the best known methods of condition monitoring and has the capability to indicate a reason for failure, although not necessarily the root cause or causes. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the possibility to combine the RCA method with Vibration Analysis as forensic science to improve the success of finding root causes and their solutions.
Tax policy reform and universal basic income effectiveness in a currency union: Implications for long-term growth, inequality, and welfare

This paper aims to assess tax policy reforms that can sustain universal basic income programs and foster long-term growth and welfare in a currency union that faces fiscal rule constraints and inequality. To address this ongoing government and economics’ debate, we developed a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model of universal basic income enriched with three fiscal policy strategies. Results demonstrate that the effectiveness of universal basic income on long-term growth, inequality, and welfare depends on the type of fiscal policy adopted by government to fund it, notably the trade-off between increasing the tax base or reducing public spending. First, under normal circumstances, universal basic income funded by completely eliminating oil subsidies appears to be the best policy for reducing inequality while increasing growth and welfare. Second, when the currency union faces a crisis, a universal basic income funded by increases in different taxes is more effective in combating stagflation and inequality than a universal basic income funded by total oil subsidy elimination. The welfare analysis confirms that, universal basic income funded by the increase in tax on capital gains and the increase in tax on corporate income is successful in reducing income inequality and consumption inequality and improving households’ living standards, its effects lead to higher welfare gains when the economy faces a crisis rather than the economy in normal times.
The emergence of self-organization in complex systems–Preface

[No abstract available]
Encounters in the forest: Social and ecological dimensions of lemur hunting, habitat change and biodiversity conservation in south-east Madagascar

To conserve endangered species in anthropogenic landscapes it is crucial to understand how humans and wild animals perceive each other and the nature of their interactions. In this study I use a cross-disciplinary approach to investigate human-wildlife relationships in Tsitongambarika Nouvelle Aire Protégée in south-east Madagascar, with an emphasis on lemur hunting. My fieldwork took place over 12 months during 2017-2020 (July-August, 2017, May-September, 2018, September-October, 2019, and March 2020), split across two study sites. Through my social research in two neighbouring communes I show how their differing biodiversity conservation regimes influence the ways that people living at the forest frontier use forest resources, and characterise their relationships with lemurs and other wild animals. Most wild mammals and birds are considered to be acceptable food, with certain exceptions proscribed by ancestral practices. Contrary to Euro-western narratives, lemurs are not given special importance. Red-collared brown lemurs (Eulemur collaris) are targeted for their fatty meat and southern bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur meridionalis) are treated locally as a ‘pest’ species. In my ecological research, I elucidate the impacts of habitat modifications and hunting on endemic mammals, using cathemeral lemurs and Euplerid carnivores as models. My camera trap survey confirms the presence of four endemic carnivores: broad-striped vontsira (Galidictis fasciata), fosa (Cryptoprocta ferox), ring-tailed vontsira (Galidia elegans) and spotted fanaloka (Fossa fossana), and four non-native mammals. All Euplerid species (except ring-tailed vontsira) are negatively affected by historic habitat degradation. Using distance sampling, I demonstrate lower abundance and group sizes of red-collared brown lemur and southern bamboo lemur under acute hunting conditions. Both species direct anti-predator behaviours towards humans and, in accordance with the ‘landscape of fear’ model, show spatial variations in their anti-predator responses according to the risk of human hunting. My data highlight the cascading effects of conservation measures on humans, lemurs and carnivores and the importance of understanding the capability of each party to cope with living in a shared landscape.
Use beyond usability: integrating user experience design and human factors to improve the usability of a cochlear implant charging system

Use error is a leading cause of medical device failure, with regulatory guidance now provided for usability and human factors. In the wider design field, usability and user experience are now well ...