ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Black holes: accretion processes in X-ray binaries

Accretion onto black holes is one of the most efficient energy source in the Universe. Black hole accretion powers some of the most luminous objects in the universe, including quasars, active galactic nuclei, tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, and black hole X-ray transients. In the present review, we give an astrophysical overview of black hole accretion processes, with a particular focus on black hole X-ray binary systems. In Section 1, we briefly introduce the basic paradigms of black hole accretion. Physics related to accretion onto black holes are introduced in Section 2. Models proposed for black hole accretion are discussed in this section, from the Shakura-Sunyaev thin disk accretion to the advective-dominated accretion flow. Observational signatures that make contact to stellar-mass black hole accretion are introduced in Section 3, including the spectral and fast variability properties. A short conclusion is given in Section 4.
Knowledge, attitudes and practices of community pharmacy professionals on poultry antimicrobial dispensing, use and resistance in Zambia : implications on antibiotic stewardship and WHO AWaRe classification of antibiotics

Globally, the inappropriate dispensing and use of antibiotics in animals has contributed to the development of bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In Zambia, there is insufficient infor-mation among community pharmacy professionals on antibiotic use (AMU) and AMR in food-producing animals. This study assessed community pharmacy professionals' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding poultry antibiotic dispensing, use, and bacterial AMR the Lusaka district of Zambia. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 178 community pharmacy pro-fessionals between February and April 2022 using a semi-structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Stata version 17. Of the total participants (n=178), 51.1% (n=91) were pharmacists. The most dispensed antibiotic was oxytetracycline, a Watch antibiotic, mainly without prescrip-tions. Good knowledge of AMU and AMR was associated with work experience for more than one year (p=0.016), while good practices were associated with male gender (p=0.039) and work expe-rience of more than one year (p=0.011). The study found moderate knowledge, positive attitudes and moderate practices of pharmacy professionals on poultry AMU and AMR. There was high dispensing of poultry antibiotics without prescriptions, which calls for strict implementation of antimicrobial stewardship and surveillance programs in poultry production in Zambia to reduce AMR.
Disability Decolonized: Indigenous Peoples Enacting Self-determination

Populations researched often have little if any input in the means of data collection, analysis, or authorship of the findings published. They are excluded from participating in the scientific methods even though they are the subject of the content that is being produced. This is true for Indigenous populations and the disability community around the globe. Researchers usually use colonial methodology that does not encompass the values of these communities or have their well-being in mind. This paper examines the history of colonization and how it has infiltrated science and inhibits self-determination of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities need to have the means and power for self-determination. For individuals with disabilities, this includes rights to services and programs that give the respect and person-centered care they deserve to make informed decisions about their lives. Moreover, there is a recognized need for culturally appropriate services that empower American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people with disabilities to lead independent lives in their own communities—urban or rural. AI/AN cultures may view disabilities differently than those in the mainstream U.S. Barriers and challenges for AI/AN individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and AI/AN families of individuals with IDD in access to services include inadequate funding, personnel shortages, housing shortages, lack of coordination among agencies, lack of consultation with tribes, and problems identifying persons eligible for services. AI/AN-specific programs that have begun to bridge the gap in access to and development of culturally competent services such as Oyáte Circle and development of collegiate courses focused on AI/AN disabilities issues. There remains a need for partnership with AI/AN tribes for disability services and incorporation of AI/AN people with disabilities as equitable partners in program development and implementation. To reach a full decolonization of IDD health care and fully embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles, individuals in these communities need to be viewed as experts in their journey of resilience.
Côte d’Ivoire Needs a New Conflict Resolution and Peace-building Strategy

The military and political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire is an illustration of the assertion that resistance is a concept embodying a multitude of meanings. The Ivorian parties have framed their civil war as the result of a conflict between several meanings of resistance. The presidential party claims to lead a nationalist resistance against neocolonial forces associated with the French government, as well as a Christian resistance against Islamic terrorism. The armed rebellion and the traditional political opposition contend that their actions are justified by a duty of resistance against ethnic and religious sectarianism, as well as Mr. Gbagbo’s despotic and unprincipled style of government.  This article provides a critical analysis of current international efforts to resolve the Ivorian conflict, and particularly of the roadmap to peace adopted at Linas- Marcoussis, France, and later endorsed by the United Nations and other international actors as the appropriate framework for a peaceful and durable solution to the crisis. By presenting a set of principles and operational measures for an alternative conflict resolution strategy this article is focused on the creation of sustainable democratic institutions and their legitimization through a truly democratic process for writing and adopting a new Ivorian constitution. Whether or not in a post-9/11 world, conflicts such as those in the Cote d’Ivoire continue to be ignominiously ignored and marginalized by the United States is yet to be seen, but what this article proves is a need to establish a viable solution of lasting-peace for the region.
Simulation of particle precipitation and emission processes in electron auroras

P(論文) Electron auroras are theoretically investigated by using the Monte Carlo method. The MSIS-86 model is employed to represent the atmospheric number density and temperature corresponding to the aurora observed at around latitude 58° and longitude 142° on October 21,1989. Only N_2,O and O_2 are taken into account as components of the atmosphere. Electrons are injected downward into the upper atmosphere at the altitude of 400km. The initial electron energy E_0 is considered to be 100 and 500eV. It is assumed that the initial pitch angle is uniformly distributed. Emission rates for the red and green lines of atomic oxygen, and the first negative band system of nitrogen molecular ions, are specifically calculated as a function of altitude and the initial electron energy. The photo-emission of the red line dominates over that of the green line or those from the first negative band system, if the emission occurs at altitude above 280km and the initial energy of the precipitating electrons is below a few hundred eV. These results serve as a qualitative model to understand the characteristic features seen in the low latitude electron auroras.
Corruption risks in health procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-corruption, transparency and accountability (ACTA) mechanisms to reduce these risks: a rapid review

Abstract                 Background                 Health systems are often susceptible to corruption risks. Corruption within health systems has been found to negatively affect the efficacy, safety, and, significantly, equitable distribution of health products. Enforcing effective anti-corruption mechanisms is important to reduce the risks of corruption but requires first an understanding of the ways in which corruption manifests. When there are public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, corruption risks can increase due to the need for accelerated rates of resource deployment that may result in the bypassing of standard operating procedures.                                Main body                 A rapid review was conducted to examine factors that increased corruption risks during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as potential anti-corruption, transparency and accountability (ACTA) mechanisms to reduce these risks. A search was conducted including terms related to corruption, COVID-19, and health systems from January 2020 until January 2022. In addition, relevant grey literature websites were hand searched for items. A single reviewer screened the search results removing those that did not meet the inclusion criteria. This reviewer then extracted data relevant to the research objectives from the included articles. 20 academic articles and 17 grey literature pieces were included in this review. Majority of the included articles described cases of substandard and falsified products. Several papers attributed shortages of these products as a major factor for the emergence of falsified versions. Majority of described corruption instances occurred in low- and middle-income countries. The main affected products identified were chloroquine tablets, personal protective equipment, COVID-19 vaccine, and diagnostic tests. Half of the articles were able to offer potential anti-corruption strategies.                                Conclusion                 Shortages of health products during the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be associated with increased corruption risks. We found that low- and middle-income countries are particularly vulnerable to corruption during global emergencies. Lastly, there is a need for additional research on effective anti-corruption mechanisms.
Relating Electrochemistry of New Organic Materials for Batteries and Fundamental Understanding through DFT Calculations

We present DFT investigations on the redox properties of quinone based precursors exhibiting growing interest from the electrochemists community due to their potential application as electrodes for new battery devices, with lower ecological footprint. A screening of various substituents is undertaken with the aim of providing guidelines to the experimentalists towards most promising candidates. A comparison of the effect of aromaticity extension is provided through the comparison of 1,4-benzo-/naphtho-/anthra-quinone and 9,10-anthraquinone backbones. Additionally, this work allowed the establishment of a ranking and quantitative assessment of substituents with respect to both increase and decrease of the redox voltage (useful for positive and negative electrodes, respectively) by considering such functionalizing groups for the monosubstitution of the 1,4-benzoquinone. Our computational work elucidates important fundamental relationships between redox voltage and local chemical bonding features, which may serve to the comprehension and design of new organic electrodes.
Graph neural network for colliding particles with an application to sea ice floe modeling

This paper introduces a novel approach to sea ice modeling using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), utilizing the natural graph structure of sea ice, where nodes represent individual ice pieces, and edges model the physical interactions, including collisions. This concept is developed within a one-dimensional framework as a foundational step. Traditional numerical methods, while effective, are computationally intensive and less scalable. By utilizing GNNs, the proposed model, termed the Collision-captured Network (CN), integrates data assimilation (DA) techniques to effectively learn and predict sea ice dynamics under various conditions. The approach was validated using synthetic data, both with and without observed data points, and it was found that the model accelerates the simulation of trajectories without compromising accuracy. This advancement offers a more efficient tool for forecasting in marginal ice zones (MIZ) and highlights the potential of combining machine learning with data assimilation for more effective and efficient modeling.
AI Contextual Information Shapes Moral and Aesthetic Judgements of AI-Generated Visual Art

Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence reshapes visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, critical questions arise about the moral and aesthetic implications of AI-generated art. Despite the growing use of AI tools in art, their moral impact remains underexplored. Understanding moral judgments of AI-generated art is essential for assessing AI's impact on art and its alignment with ethical norms. Across three pre-registered experiments combining explicit and implicit paradigms with Bayesian modelling, we examined how information about AI systems influences moral and aesthetic judgments and whether human art is implicitly associated with positive attributes compared to AI-generated art. Experiment 1 revealed that factual information about AI backend processes reduced moral acceptability and aesthetic appeal in contexts such as gaining financial incentives and art status. Experiment 2 showed that additional information about AI art's success had no clear impact on moral judgments. Experiment 3 demonstrated that an implicit association task did not reliably link human art with positive attributes and AI art with negative ones. These findings show that factual information about AI systems shapes judgments, while varying information doses about AI art's success have limited moral impact. Additionally, implicit associations between human-made and AI-generated art are similar. This work enhances understanding of moral and aesthetic perceptions of AI-generated art, emphasizing the importance of examining human—AI interactions in an art context, and their current societal implications.
Pose-disentangled Contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Facial Representation

Self-supervised facial representation has recently attracted increasing attention due to its ability to perform face understanding without relying on large-scale annotated datasets heavily. However, analytically, current contrastive-based self-supervised learning (SSL) still performs unsatisfactorily for learning facial representation. More specifically, existing contrastive learning (CL) tends to learn pose-invariant features that cannot depict the pose details of faces, compromising the learning performance. To conquer the above limitation of CL, we propose a novel Pose-disentangled Contrastive Learning (PCL) method for general self-supervised facial representation. Our PCL first devises a pose-disentangled decoder (PDD) with a delicately designed orthogonalizing regulation, which disentangles the pose-related features from the face-aware features; therefore, pose-related and other pose-unrelated facial information could be performed in individual subnetworks and do not affect each other's training. Furthermore, we introduce a pose-related contrastive learning scheme that learns pose-related information based on data augmentation of the same image, which would deliver more effective face-aware representation for various downstream tasks. We conducted linear evaluation on four challenging downstream facial understanding tasks, ie, facial expression recognition, face recognition, AU detection and head pose estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamMr/PCL}{https://github.com/DreamMr/PCL
Quantum Optimal Transport

We analyze a quantum version of the Monge--Kantorovich optimal transport problem. The quantum transport cost related to a Hermitian cost matrix $C$ is minimized over the set of all bipartite coupling states $ρ^{AB}$ with fixed reduced density matrices $ρ^A$ and $ρ^B$ of size $m$ and $n$. The minimum quantum optimal transport cost $\rT^Q_{C}(ρ^A,ρ^B)$ can be efficiently computed using semidefinite programming. In the case $m=n$ the cost $\rT^Q_{C}$ gives a semidistance if and only if $C$ is positive semidefinite and vanishes exactly on the subspace of symmetric matrices. Furthermore, if $C$ satisfies the above conditions, then $\sqrt{\rT^Q_{C}}$ induces a quantum analogue of the Wasserstein-2 distance. Taking the quantum cost matrix $C^Q$ to be the projector on the antisymmetric subspace, we provide a semi-analytic expression for $\rT^Q_{C^Q}$ for any pair of single-qubit states and show that its square root yields a transport distance on the Bloch ball. Numerical simulations suggest that this property holds also in higher dimensions. Assuming that the cost matrix suffers decoherence and that the density matrices become diagonal, we study the quantum-to-classical transition of the Earth mover's distance, propose a continuous family of interpolating distances, and demonstrate that the quantum transport is cheaper than the classical one. Furthermore, we introduce a related quantity -- the SWAP-fidelity -- and compare its properties with the standard Uhlmann--Jozsa fidelity. We also discuss the quantum optimal transport for general $d$-partite systems.
Sugarcane Yield Prediction Through Data Mining and Crop Simulation Models

The understanding of the hierarchical importance of the factors which influence sugarcane yield can subsidize its modeling, thus contributing to the optimization of agricultural planning and crop yield estimates. The objectives of this study were to identify and ordinate the main variables that condition sugarcane yield, according to their relative importance, as well as to develop mathematical models for predicting sugarcane yield by using data mining (DM) techniques. For this, three DM techniques were applied in the analyses of databases of several sugar mills in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Meteorological and crop management variables were analyzed through the following DM techniques: random forest; boosting; and support vector machine, and the resulting models were tested through the comparison with an independent data set. Finally, the predictive performances of these models were compared with the performance of a simple agrometeorological model, applied in the same data set. The results allowed to conclude that, within all the variables assessed, the number of cuts was the most important factor considered by all DM techniques. The comparison between the observed yields and those estimated by the DM models resulted in a root mean square error (RMSE) ranging between 19.70 and 20.03 t ha−1, which was much better than the performance of the Agroecological Zone Model, which presented RMSE ≈ 34 t ha−1.
Integrated Pest Management for Stored Grain: Potential Natural Biological Control by a Parasitoid Wasp Community

Insect contamination of stored grain is a major concern for the grain industry. Phosphine is currently the standard fumigant used to control insect pests in stored grain. However, some species and populations of insects that infest stored grain exhibit resistance to this fumigant and consumers are concerned about pesticide residues. Therefore, alternative methods of effective pest control are needed to partially or completely replace the use of phosphine. There is growing interest in biological control via parasitoid wasps. However, there is evidence that biological control will succeed only if used alongside other pest-management measures. Integrating biological control with the use of chemical insecticide is challenging and may lead to severe reductions in parasitoid survival and success. The main aim of the current study is to shed light on a greatly overlooked issue: the parasitoid community found in stored grain before and after phosphine treatment. The current study results indicate that there is a high level of parasitoid biodiversity within grain stores. We found common parasitoids at both semi-arid and Mediterranean sites, suggesting that those parasitoids can be active across a wide range of abiotic conditions. This research indicates that the community may recover even though phosphine has an immediate negative effect on a parasitoid community. Nevertheless, the parasitoid wasps seem to reduce the host population insufficiently. In light of the findings presented here, those interested in implementing pest-management strategies that include both phosphine treatment and biological control should consider conservation and augmentation of the naturally occurring parasitoid population. These studies should take into account interactions between and within parasitoid populations and phosphine distribution within the grain storage. To limit the effect of phosphine on the parasitoids, pest-management strategies should also reflect careful consideration of the timing of phosphine treatment and the need for sufficient refuge for the parasitoids.
FROM THE HUNGER CAMPAIGN TOWARDS FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY: THE RIGHT TO ADEQUATE FOOD

Este ensaio busca 'fazer um revisão abrangente da evolução do conceito de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional nos planos mundial e nacional, iniciando–se por um breve histórico do enfrentamento da questão da Fome e dos distúrbios nutricionais em nosso pais. Busca fazer também uma avaliação crítica do quadro afual de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional no Brasil , incluindo uma análise do contexto institucional e político em que vem se dando o enfrentamento da questão no Brasil. Concluindo, apresenta a situação de articulação da sociedade civil nacional e internacional, procurando identifIcar as tarefas que se colocam para que consigamos construir uma sociedade com segurança alimentar e nutricional, mais eqüit ativa, justa e sustentàvel tanto para o Brasil quanto para o mundo, tendo como preocupação central o ser humano.
XMM-Newton observations of the supernova remnant IC443: I. soft X-ray emission from shocked interstellar medium

The shocked interstellar medium around IC443 produces strong X-ray emission in the soft energy band (E<1.5 keV). We present an analysis of such emission as observed with the EPIC MOS cameras on board the XMM-Newotn observatory, with the purpose to find clear signatures of the interactions with the interstellar medium (ISM) in the X-ray band, which may complement results obtained in other wavelenghts. We found that the giant molecular cloud mapped in CO emission is located in the foreground and gives an evident signature in the absorption of X-rays. This cloud may have a torus shape and the part of torus interacting with the IC443 shock gives rise to 2MASS-K emission in the southeast. The measured density of emitting X-ray shocked plasma increases toward the northeastern limb, where the remnant is interacting with an atomic cloud. We found an excellent correlation between emission in the 0.3-0.5 keV band and bright optical/radio filament on large spatial scales. The partial shell structure seen in this band therefore traces the encounter with the atomic cloud.