ethicalabs/Research-Intent-Collab huggingface dataset:
Students Under Surveillance: Big Data Policing and Privacy Rights

The surveillance and securitization of schools has transformed over the last decade to include predictive analytics and algorithms. In Florida, for example, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office used school record data sets to identify and monitor youth they believed were “destined for a life of crime.” Yet the extent of big data policing as a model of surveillance and control in American public schools has not been addressed in meaningful ways by schools and the courts. This essay argues the burden and risk on student Fourth Amendment and privacy rights place an obligation on the government to actively protect student data and make big data policing efforts transparent. Future research is critical to address the systemic inequities that policing and surveillance have exacerbated on America’s youth.
Hepatitis C in the workplace: a survey of occupational health and safety knowledge and practice in the beauty therapy industry

To examine current knowledge and practice of occupational health and safety (OH&S) regarding hepatitis C in beauty therapy practice.A questionnaire was sent to all beauty therapy practices identified through the Telstra Yellow Pages and distributed via beauty therapy product agencies.119 questionnaires were completed by employers and employees in 99 beauty therapy practices in metropolitan Adelaide. Beauty therapists reported carrying out many practices that had exposed them to blood in the past. More than 80% of the procedures carried out by beauty therapists in the previous week were reported to have led to exposure to blood. 39.5% of respondents had not received information about OH&S practices related to blood spills and 77.5% of respondents had received no OH&S information about hepatitis C. Knowledge of hepatitis C and its transmission was poor, with 62% of respondents incorrectly identifying the prevalence of hepatitis C and respondents incorrectly identifying sneezing (28%), kissing (46%) and sharing coffee cups (42%) as a modes of transmission. 80% of beauty therapy practices had no OH&S representative.Beauty therapy practice can expose both operator and client to blood and is therefore a potential site for the transmission of blood-borne diseases including hepatitis C. OH&S information is inadequate in this industry and knowledge of hepatitis C is poor.Health promotion information about hepatitis C and OH&S practice to prevent transmission of blood-borne diseases is required.
Access to care and health insurance coverage for workers with disabilities: Outcomes by state-level responses to the ACA

States had flexibility in their implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions, which may have led to variation in coverage and changes in access to care for workers with disabilities.To examine differential trends in health insurance coverage and access to care among workers with disabilities by states' decisions about expanding Medicaid under the ACA.We aggregated data from the National Health Interview Survey into groups by time period relative to ACA implementation: pre-ACA (2006-2009), early ACA (2010-2013), and later ACA (2014-2017). We produced health insurance and access statistics for each time period, by state-level Medicaid expansion status.Uninsurance rates decreased after 2014 in all states, regardless of the state's decision whether to expand Medicaid. There was a substantial increase after 2014 in the share of workers with disabilities covered by Medicaid in states that expanded in that year; in other states, workers with disabilities experienced larger increases in privately purchased coverage. At the same time, the share of workers with disabilities reporting cost-related barriers to care declined markedly in 2014 Medicaid expansion states, but it increased slightly in the non-expansion states. Structural barriers to accessing care increased in all states, with the smallest increase in 2014 expansion states.Medicaid coverage and cost-related access to care improved significantly among workers with disabilities in 2014 Medicaid expansion states, both overall and relative to workers with disabilities in non-expansion states.
THE IMPACT OF THE INSTRUMENT FOR PRE-ACCESSION ASSISTANCE ON DEMOCRATIC VALUES AND THE RULE OF LAW IN WESTERN BALKANS COUNTRIES A CASE STUDY OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN SERBIA

La tesi prende in esame la letteratura riguardante il processo di allargamento dell'Unione Europea dagli anni '50. La metodologia utilizzata sarà quella sviluppata da Schimmelfennig e Sedelmeier su l'External Incentives Model studiando quattro indicatori: Reward, Determinacy, Credibility e Costs
Discrimination grounds and personalised pricing: Consumer perceptions of fairness, norm alignment, legality, and trust in markets

This article explores consumer perceptions of different grounds by which online prices can be personalised. We conducted a survey among Dutch consumers (n = 727) presenting them with 25 segmentation bases, drawing from legally permissible and legally prohibited grounds. We then ranked these bases and accompanying consumer perceptions across five dimensions: fairness, alignment with personal norms, alignment with social norms, perceived legality, and trust in markets. We find that while consumer perceptions generally align with what is currently prohibited in law, there are some “new” grounds, in particular intelligence and physical appearance, that elicit similar negative perceptions as legally prohibited grounds. This raises questions regarding the further regulation of personalised pricing. We discuss pros and cons of updating legislation to better reflect (new) ethical and social norms.
Feed-Forward Neural Networks Need Inductive Bias to Learn Equality Relations

Basic binary relations such as equality and inequality are fundamental to relational data structures. Neural networks should learn such relations and generalise to new unseen data. We show in this study, however, that this generalisation fails with standard feed-forward networks on binary vectors. Even when trained with maximal training data, standard networks do not reliably detect equality.We introduce differential rectifier (DR) units that we add to the network in different configurations. The DR units create an inductive bias in the networks, so that they do learn to generalise, even from small numbers of examples and we have not found any negative effect of their inclusion in the network. Given the fundamental nature of these relations, we hypothesize that feed-forward neural network learning benefits from inductive bias in other relations as well. Consequently, the further development of suitable inductive biases will be beneficial to many tasks in relational learning with neural networks.
Effects of the Affordable Care Act Insurance Expansions on Health Care Coverage, Access, and Health Status of 50–64-Year-Old Adults: Evidence From the First Six Years

Individuals aged 50–64 face a higher burden of chronic conditions and an increased probability of insurance coverage loss, making them particularly vulnerable to limited access than younger adults. This study examines the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insurance expansions, including both Medicaid eligibility and other expansions, on health care coverage, access, and health status of adults aged 50–64 years over 6 years since the initial expansions in 2014. Using a triple difference-in-difference-in-differences model and nationally representative data, we find that the ACA increased private insurance and Medicaid coverage. There is evidence of improved access based on having a personal provider, completing a routine checkup, and reducing forgoing medical care due to cost. There is little evidence for the effects on self-reported health outcomes. Findings suggest that coverage expansions have improved access to care but have thus far not had discernible and consistent effects on self-reported health for 50–64-year-olds.
Variations in the quality and costs of end-of-life care, preferences and palliative outcomes for cancer patients by place of death: the QUALYCARE study

Emerging trends and new policies suggest that more cancer patients might die at home in the future. However, not all have equal chances of achieving this. Furthermore, there is lack of evidence to support that those who die at home experience better care and a better death than those who die as inpatients. The QUALYCARE study aims to examine variations in the quality and costs of end-of-life care, preferences and palliative outcomes associated with dying at home or in an institution for cancer patients.Mortality followback survey (with a nested case-control study of home vs. hospital deaths) conducted with bereaved relatives of cancer patients in four Primary Care Trusts in London. Potential participants are identified from death registrations and approached by the Office for National Statistics in complete confidence. Data are collected via a postal questionnaire to identify the informal and formal care received in the three months before death and the associated costs, relatives' satisfaction with care, and palliative outcomes for the patients and their relatives. A well-established questionnaire to measure relatives' views on the care integrates four brief and robust tools - the Client Service Receipt Inventory, the Palliative Outcome Scale, the EQ-5 D and the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief. Further questions assess patients and relatives' preferences for place of death. The survey aims to include 500 bereaved relatives (140 who experienced a home death, 205 a hospital death, 115 a hospice death and 40 a nursing home death). Bivariate and multivariate analyses will explore differences in place of death and place of end-of-life care, in preferences for place of death, patients' palliative outcomes and relatives' bereavement outcomes, in relation to place of death. Factors influencing death at home and the costs of end-of-life care by place of death will be identified.Collecting data on end-of-life care retrospectively from bereaved relatives has ethical, practical and scientific challenges. QUALYCARE has been carefully designed to address these challenges in a robust and ethically sound population-based survey. By discovering variations in the underlying individual reality of place of death for people dying from cancer and their families, this study will advance our understanding of end-of-life care and, we hope, improve care for cancer patients and their families in the future.National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network Portfolio. UKCRN7041.
OpportunityFinder: A Framework for Automated Causal Inference

We introduce OpportunityFinder, a code-less framework for performing a variety of causal inference studies with panel data for non-expert users. In its current state, OpportunityFinder only requires users to provide raw observational data and a configuration file. A pipeline is then triggered that inspects/processes data, chooses the suitable algorithm(s) to execute the causal study. It returns the causal impact of the treatment on the configured outcome, together with sensitivity and robustness results. Causal inference is widely studied and used to estimate the downstream impact of individual's interactions with products and features. It is common that these causal studies are performed by scientists and/or economists periodically. Business stakeholders are often bottle-necked on scientist or economist bandwidth to conduct causal studies. We offer OpportunityFinder as a solution for commonly performed causal studies with four key features: (1) easy to use for both Business Analysts and Scientists, (2) abstraction of multiple algorithms under a single I/O interface, (3) support for causal impact analysis under binary treatment with panel data and (4) dynamic selection of algorithm based on scale of data.
A Syncretic Approach to Knowledge Discovery for the Natural Sciences

Classification, which means discrimination between examples belonging to different classes, is a fundamental aspect of most scientific applications. Machine Learning (ML) tools have proved to be very performing in this task, in the sense that they can achieve very high success rates. On the other hand, the "realism" and interpretability of their models are very low, resulting often in modest increases of knowledge and limited applicability. In this paper, a methodology is described, which, by applying ML tools directly to the data, allows formulating new scientific models that describe the actual "physics" determining the boundary between the classes. The proposed technique consists of a stacked approach of different ML tools, each one applied to a specific subtask of the scientific analysis; all together they combine all the major strands of machine learning, from rule based classifiers and Bayesian statistics to genetic programming and symbolic manipulation. To take into account the error bars of the measurements, an essential aspect of any scientific form of inference, the novel concept of the Geodesic Distance on Gaussian manifolds is adopted. The characteristics of the methodology have been investigated with a series of systematic numerical tests, for different types of classification problems. The potential of the approach to handle real data has been tested with various experimental databases. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method permits to find a good trade-off between accuracy of the classification and complexity of the derived mathematical equations. Moreover, the derived models can be tuned to reflect the actual phenomena, providing a very useful tool to bridge the gap between data, machine learning tools and scientific theories.
TensorFlow with user friendly Graphical Framework for object detection API

TensorFlow is an open-source framework for deep learning dataflow and contains application programming interfaces (APIs) of voice analysis, natural language process, and computer vision. Especially, TensorFlow object detection API in computer vision field has been widely applied to technologies of agriculture, engineering, and medicine but barriers to entry of the framework usage is still high through command-line interface (CLI) and code for amateurs and beginners of information technology (IT) field. Therefore, this is aim to develop an user friendly Graphical Framework for object detection API on TensorFlow which is called TensorFlow Graphical Framework (TF-GraF). The TF-GraF provides independent virtual environments according to user accounts in server-side, additionally, execution of data preprocessing, training, and evaluation without CLI in client-side. Furthermore, hyperparameter setting, real-time observation of training process, object visualization of test images, and metrics evaluations of test data can also be operated via TF-GraF. Especially, TF-GraF supports flexible model selection of SSD, Faster-RCNN, RFCN, and Mask-RCNN including convolutional neural networks (inceptions and ResNets) through GUI environment. Consequently, TF-GraF allows anyone, even without any previous knowledge of deep learning frameworks, to design, train and deploy machine intelligence models without coding. Since TF-GraF takes care of setting and configuration, it allows anyone to use deep learning technology for their project without spending time to install complex software and environment.
Training on Therapeutic Communication and Patient Safety to Improve the Quality Indicator of Nursing Care at the Government Hospital in Bukittinggi, West Sumatera

Hospitals as one of the agencies that have a role in providing health services to the community are required to improve the quality of performance or quality of service in meeting needs and expectations so as to provide satisfaction to the community. One indicator of the quality service needed is an increase in the quality of services provided. As an effort to improve service quality, there are two quality indicators (communication and patient safety) that have not been optimally implemented in the hospitals. This Community Service (PKM) aims to provide training and increase knowledge through socialization and outreach to the nurses in one of the government hospitals in Bukittinggi, West Sumatera. The method that has been used in this PKM includes counseling related to the therapeutic communication between nurse-patient and socialization of hand washing with six steps and five moments. The results of this PKM obtained an increase in the knowledge and competence of nurses as well as the procedural for implementing hand washing and five moments in the treatment room. From the results of monitoring and evaluating PKM activities, it is known that nurses understand and practice therapeutic communication and five moments. It is hoped that this activity will be useful for increasing the knowledge and experience of therapeutic communication between nurses and patients as well as five moments of hand washing by nurses in the room as an effort to improve indicators of the quality of nursing care as a collaborative services in the hospital
Considerations When Visualizing Information for a Non-interactive Dashboard : A study about what aspects to keep in mind when designing a non-interactive dashboard

I detta projekt skapades en dashboard på uppdrag av företaget Combitech som ville visualisera en del av en av deras arbetsgruppers informationsflöde i hopp om att förbättra deras kommunikation. Den enda begränsningen var att den inte kunde vara interaktiv. Fokuset och målet med denna studie var att utforska vilka faktorer man bör tänka på när man designar en icke-interaktiv dashboard. De två huvudsakliga teorierna som användes för att styra detta arbete var: informationsvisualisering och tillgänglighet (fokus på defekt färgseende). Att designa digitala produkter med tillgänglighetsbehov i åtanke är inte standardpraxis, men behöver bli det då samhället blir mer fyllt av dem.  Processen att skapa dashboarden började med en litteraturgenomgång för att läsa relevanta verk för att få insikt. Intervjuer och användarutvärderingar genomfördes för att samla åsikter från användarna. En tillgänglighetsutvärdering gjordes för att kontrollera eventuella tillgänglighetsproblem med designen.   Resultatet av studien tyder på att informationsvisualisering och tillgänglighet kan användas tillsammans för att skapa en icke-interaktiv dashboard som ses som både användbar och tilltalande. Aspekterna som användes för att uppnå detta var: förstå och involvera användarna för att kunna prioritera information, vara medveten om hur mänsklig perception fungerar och hur man kan applicera färg på ett tillgängligt sätt.
Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts: Draft Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions – Brief Summary

As announced previously, the ICRC has drafted two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. These drafts are to be the basic working documents of the Diplomatic Conference to be held in Geneva from 20 February to 29 March 1974, and to which all signatories of the Conventions have been invited.
Baseline Patient and Caregiver Characteristics From a Prospective, Noninterventional, Real-World Study (REALITY) on the Effect of Alemtuzumab on Fatigue and Other Patient- and Caregiver-Reported Quality-of-Life Outcomes in Patients With RRMS

Objective: Assess the burden of MS on patient and caregiver quality of life (QoL) at baseline before starting alemtuzumab. Background: Alemtuzumab significantly improved clinical, MRI, and QoL outcomes versus subcutaneous interferon beta-1a in patients with RRMS in clinical trials. Little is known about real-world QoL in alemtuzumab-treated patients and their caregivers. Design/Methods: REALITY is a 3-year prospective, multicenter, noninterventional, observational, real-world study of alemtuzumab-treated RRMS patients conducted in Denmark, Italy, and Norway. Included patients had a baseline Fatigue Scale for Motor and Cognitive Functions (FSMC) total score ≥43. Patient QoL was assessed using FSMC and Multiple Sclerosis Impact Scale (MSIS)-29, and caregiver QoL using 36-Item Short-Form (SF-36) Health Survey physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS). Results: Baseline characteristics were available for 87 (100%) patients and 55 caregivers. Patients were 81% female, mean (SD) age 36.4 (8.4) years, MS duration 7.8 (6.1) years, EDSS score 3.1 (1.6), and number of previous MS therapies 2.9 (1.5). Caregivers were 62% male, mean age 44.8 (11.7) years; 85% had been a caregiver for &gt;1 year, 64% were employed full-time, and 75% had children living at home. Before alemtuzumab initiation, mean patient-reported FSMC total score (n=67) was 66.4 (15.6). Patients’ MSIS-29 physical and psychological impact scores at baseline (n=46) were 42.3 (24.6) and 51.7 (28.7), respectively, whereas matched caregivers’ estimates (blinded to patients’ responses) were 36.5 (22.2) and 49.8 (25.9). Caregivers reported mean baseline SF-36 PCS and MCS scores of 48.5 (10.6) and 44.3 (9.9), respectively (lower than general population norm-based score of 50 [10]). Conclusions: Before alemtuzumab initiation, caregivers’ perceptions of patient QoL trended better than patients’ own QoL evaluations and caregivers experienced lower QoL versus the general population on SF-36. The ongoing REALITY study will assess the effect of alemtuzumab treatment on these measures.
Fuzzy fault tree analysis of uncontained event of an areo-engine rotor

Fuzzy fault tree analysis of uncontained event for aero-engine rotor is performed. The theory of fuzzy fault tree analysis was introduced firstly. Then the fault tree of uncontained event for aero-engine rotor is established, in which the descending method is used to find minimal cut sets. Further more, the interval representation and calculation strategy is presented when the symmetrical L-R type fuzzy number was chosen to describe the failure probability, and the built fault tree is analyzed quantitatively.
THE IMPACT OF ADOPTING INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC SECTOR ACCOUNTING  STANDARDS ON CORRUPTION: TRANSPARENCY AND FINANCIAL  ACCOUNTABILITY

Transparent operations provide clear insight into all phases of business activities, thereby enabling  their clear understanding. Transparency simultaneously serves as a barrier to corruption, which  arises from the misuse of official or social position or influence for the purpose of gaining illicit benefit. Anti-corruption instruments are embedded within the standards themselves. IPSAS are designed to globally enhance the transparency and accountability of public sector entities. The effectiveness of IPSAS in combating corruption depends on the institutional context and the stage of implementation. This paper aims to examine how the implementation of IPSAS can contribute to reducing corruption. A conceptual and analytical approach is applied in the paper.
Synthesis and electrochemistry of LiNi0.6Fe0.3−xMg0.1+xO2 (x=0, 0.5 and 1.0) materials for lithium-ion batteries

Lithium nickel oxide cathodes doped with Fe and Mg was synthesized by the solid state reaction method at 800 °C. Structural investigation of these materials was performed using XRD and EDAX. The electrochemical behavior was studied using galvanostatic charge/discharge in order to investigate the performance of LiNi0.6Fe0.3Mg0.1O2, LiNi0.6Fe0.25Mg0.15O2 and LiNi0.6Fe0.2Mg0.2O2 materials. It is shown that LiNi0.6Fe0.3Mg0.1O2 produced about 96 m Ah/g of discharge capacity.
Biološko suzbijanje maslinine muhe Bactrocera oleae (Rossi) (Diptera: Tephritidae) u sustavu integrirane zaštite: kratak pregled

U radu su, na osnovi literaturnih podataka, prikazana aktualna znanja o maslinovoj muhi i moguće mjere suzbijanja u sustavu integrirane proizvodnje masline.