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We aim to uncover grading bias by gender, socio-economic status, ethnic/migration background as well as body weight in the German secondary school system. Following an intersectional approach, we test whether—controlling for ability—students receive different grades depending on (the specific combination of) ascriptive characteristics. Using data from the fourth starting cohort (SC4, 13.0.0, first survey in year 9 in 2010) of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) consisting of more than 14,000 ninth graders, we compute the predicted differences in grades for the different groups of students depending on whether they are a boy or a girl, whether they are obese/overweight or not, their socio-economic status (SES) and ethnic background. We rely on a grade equation approach, assuming that discrepancies between observed grades and achievement as measured in standardised tests are evidence of biased grading. We control for two different competence tests—the Domain General Cognitive Functions (DGCF) and a standardised domain-specific competence test—as objective measures of ability as well as secondary school track. Even after controlling for different personality and behavioural traits—the “big five”, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), the Sick, Control, One, Fat and Food (SCOFF), health satisfaction and class retention—substantial differentials in grading across almost all factors and subjects remain. To account for the fact that many students may face bias on multiple grounds, we then compare the differences in predicted grades for groups with overlapping (dis)advantaging characteristics (e.g. low SES overweight Turkish boy vs a high SES non-overweight majority girl), while controlling for the objective ability measures. Significant differentials in grades are found in almost all cases, with the largest effect sizes for the subject German. We also compute models including all 2-way or 4-way interactions between the four axes of inequality and find

Recent advances in generative language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated an uncanny ability to produce texts that appear to be comparable to those produced by humans. Several key empirical results related to human processing of language, such as analogical reasoning, have been replicated using these models. Nevertheless, there are some important differences between the language generated by these models and language produced by humans. In this paper, I examine how LLMs performs on two pronoun disambiguation tasks reported on by Rhode, Levy, and Kehler (2011) and Sagi and Rips (2014). While LLMs performed reasonably in these tasks, their responses demonstrate stronger language-based biases while the influence of world knowledge, such as causal relationships, was lessened. Because LLMs replicate language produced by humans, these results can help shed light on which aspects of language use are directly encoded in language and which require additional reasoning faculties beyond language processing.

Edge computing promises to decentralize cloud applications while providing more bandwidth and reducing latency. Based on the discussion of our first Dagstuhl Seminar and the continuation work that took place after the seminar, we continued our work on identified challenges that need to be further addressed within the community. These challenges included 1) large-scale deployment of the edge-cloud continuum, 2) energy optimization and sustainability of such large-scale AI/ML learning and modelling, and 3) trustworthiness, security, and ethical questions related to the whole continuum. In this seminar, we discussed the current state of Edge Intelligence and shaped a holistic view of its challenges and applications. The main concerns were 1) the assessment and applicability of Edge Intelligence solutions, 2) energy consumption and sustainability, and 3) the new trend of Large-Language Models.

Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Forensic Architecture has been collecting data related to attacks against civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military. Our analysis of this conduct reveals the near-total destruction of civilian life in Gaza. We have also collected and analysed evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military directing Palestinian civilians to areas of Gaza designated as ‘safe’. These orders have resulted in the repeated, large-scale displacement of the Palestinian population across Gaza, often to areas which subsequently came under Israeli attack. Our findings indicate that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is organised, systematic, and intended to destroy conditions of life and life-sustaining infrastructure. To this end, ‘A Cartography of Genocide’ platform and accompanying report develops a comprehensive mapping of military conduct in Gaza since 7 October 2023. It deploys a range of methods to observe the ways in which Israel’s military operations engendered widespread harm and suggests how these observations might inform broader assessments of Israel’s military conduct during this period. We use here the term ‘genocide’ within the meaning developed by Raphael Lemkin, whose thinking behind this term was instrumental for the definition formulated in Article II of the Genocide Convention. Genocide, according to Lemkin, signifies a coordinated plan of actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The results of more than a year of FA’s monitoring and research are now published as: An interactive cartographic platform: ‘A Cartography of Genocide’ An 827-page text report: ‘A spatial analysis of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023’, https://www.librarystack.org/a-spatial-analysis-of-the-israeli-militarys-conduct-in-gaza-since-october-2023/?ref=unknown

Introduction Soft contact lenses may be a good alternative for early-stage keratoconus (KC) patients who do not tolerate rigid gas permeable (RGP) lenses due to ocular discomfort or complications. This prospective study compared outcomes obtained after 2¿weeks of wearing two types of soft silicone hydrogel contact lenses for keratoconus that varied in their diameter and central thickness (cc). Methods Patients with Amsler–Krumeich grades I or II KC were fitted with small-diameter (14.2 or 14.8¿mm) SoftK (SD-SoftK, cc¿=¿0.48¿mm) and large-diameter (17¿mm) SoftK (LD-SoftK, cc¿=¿0.60¿mm) lenses, each worn for 2¿weeks in a crossover design. Low (10%;10VA) and high (100%;100VA) contrast visual acuity, contrast sensitivity (CS, Pelli-Robson), higher order aberrations (HOAs, Visionix Vx130), the number of trial lens modifications during fitting and the subjectively preferred lens were compared using Friedman tests with post-hoc analysis. Results Forty eyes (N¿=¿20, 10 males, mean age: 39.0¿±¿9.9¿years, range: 23–55¿years) were examined. Their habitual median (interquartile1, interquartile3) 10VA (LogMAR), 100VA (LogMAR) and CS (LogCS) were 0.52 (0.30, 0.50), 0.14 (0.10, 0.15) and 1.35 (1.35, 1.50), respectively. For the SD-SoftK condition, the values were 0.23 (0.17, 0.30), 0.02 (0.00, 0.05) and 1.50 (1.50, 1.65), respectively. For the LD-SoftK condition, the respective values were 0.36 (0.27, 0.44), 0.09 (0.05, 0.13) and 1.50 (1.50, 1.60). SD-SoftK lenses significantly improved 10VA compared with habitual and LD-SoftK. SD-SoftK also significantly improved CS compared with habitual, but not LD-SoftK. LD-SoftK significantly improved spherical aberration compared with uncorrected (0.03¿±¿0.10¿µ vs. 0.07¿±¿0.13¿µ) but not SD-SoftK (0.04¿±¿0.07¿µ). Both lenses required a mean of 1.5 modifications prior to final lens fitting. Fewer adverse events were seen with SD-SoftK (N¿=¿3) compared with LD-SoftK (N¿=¿8), and 75% of participants preferred SD-SoftK lenses. Conclusion SD-Soft, Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

This thesis analyses the foreign economic policies of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration toward Venezuela from 1957 to 1963. By examining material from U.S. diplomatic document collections, my research intervenes in the historiography of the Alliance for Progress by demonstrating the failures of U.S. policy in Venezuela during the Latin American Cold War. Although the United States supported the democratic government of Rómulo Betancourt politically, it hamstrung his government economically. The Kennedy administration at first provided loans for economic development to Venezuela, though they quickly eliminated this aid and began prioritizing military assistance as the most efficient way of supporting Betancourt’s government. More importantly, by continually limiting imports of Venezuelan oil into the United States, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations hurt Venezuela’s economy and caused Betancourt to face a crisis of legitimacy as his capacity to manage the nation’s natural wealth came into question., 2024, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Thesis (MA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2024., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Here we show how Feynman's simplified model for the Josephson junction, as a macroscopic two-state coupled quantum system, has a one-to-one correspondence with the stable dynamics of two interfacial Rossby waves in piecewise linear shear flows. The conservation of electric charge and energy of the superconducting electron gas layers become, respectively, equivalent to the conservation of wave action and pseudoenergy of the Rossby waves. Quantumlike tunneling is enabled via action at a distance between the two Rossby waves. Furthermore, the quantumlike phenomena of avoided crossing between eigenstates, described by the Klein-Gordon equation, is obtained as well in the classical shear flow system. In the latter, it results from the inherent difference in pseudoenergy between the in-phase and antiphased normal modes of the interfacial waves. This provides an intuitive physical meaning to the role of the wave function's phase in the quantum system. A partial analog to the quantum collapse of the wave function is also obtained due to the existence of a separatrix between normal mode regions of influence on the phase plane, describing the system's dynamics. As for two-state quantum bits (qubits), the two-Rossby wave system solutions can be represented on a Bloch sphere, where the Hadamard gate transforms the two normal modes and eigenstates into an intuitive computational basis in which only one interface is occupied by a Rossby wave. Yet, it is a classical system which lacks exact analogs to collapse and entanglement, and thus cannot be used for quantum computation, even in principle.

Human activities are driving climate, land cover, and population change (global change), and shifting the baseline geographical distribution of snakebite. The interacting effects of global change on snakes and communities at risk of snakebite are poorly understood, limiting capacity to anticipate and manage future changes in snakebite risk. In this modelling study, we projected how global change will affect snakebite envenoming incidence in Sri Lanka, as a model system that has a high incidence of snakebite. We used the shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenario analysis framework to integrate forecasts across the domains of: climate change (historical trend from WorldClim plus three underlying regional circulation models [RCMs] in the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment-South Asia repository, with two emissions pathways [representative concentration pathways RCP4.5 and RCP8.5]); land cover change (Dyna-CLUE model); and human population density change (based on Gridded Population of the World data) from Jan 1, 2010 to Dec 31, 2050. Forecasts were integrated under three different development scenarios: a sustainability pathway (SSP1 and no further emissions), a middle-of-the-road pathway (SSP2 and RCP4.5), and a fossil-fuelled pathway (SSP5 and RCP8.5). For SSP2 and SSP5, we nested three different RCMs (CNRM-CM5, GFDL-CCM3, and MPI-ESM-LR; mean averaged to represent consensus) to account for variability in climate predictions. Data were used as inputs to a mechanistic model that predicted snakebite envenoming incidence based on human-snake contact patterns. From 2010 to 2050, at the national level, envenoming incidence in Sri Lanka was projected to decrease by 12·0-23·0%, depending on the scenario. The rate of decrease in envenoming incidence was higher in SSP5-RCP8.5 than in SSP1 and SSP2-RCP4.5. Change in envenoming incidence was heterogenous across the country. In SSP1, incidence decreased in urban areas expected to have population growth, and with land c

One mechanistic interpretation of baroclinic instability is that of mutual constructive interference of Rossby edge waves. The suppression of baroclinic instability over slopes has been widely established, where previous research argues that a sloping boundary modifies the properties of these Rossby edge waves, but does not provide a mechanistic explanation for the suppression that is valid over all parameter space. In the context of an Eady problem modified by the presence of a sloping boundary, we provide a mechanistic rationalization for baroclinic instability in the presence of slopes that is valid over all parameter space, via an equivalent formulation explicitly in terms of Rossby edge waves. We also highlight the differences between edge-wave phase shifts and normal-mode phase tilts, showing that the edge-wave phase shifts should be the ones that are mechanistically relevant, and normal-mode phase tilt is a potentially misleading quantity to use. Further, we present evidence that the edge-wave phase shifts but not normal-mode phase tilts are well correlated with geometric quantities diagnosed from an analysis framework based on eddy variance ellipses. The result is noteworthy in that the geometric framework makes no explicit reference to the edge-wave structures in its construction, and the correlation suggests the geometric framework can be used in problems where edge-wave structures are not so well defined or readily available. Some implications for parametrization of baroclinic instability and relevant eddy-mean feedbacks are discussed. For completeness, we also provide an explicit demonstration that the linear instability problem of the present modified Eady problem is parity-time symmetric, and speculate about some suggestive links between parity-time symmetry, shear instability, and the edge-wave interaction mechanism.

What is trust and how should it be studied? In this essay, we seek to reconstruct the sociological theory of trust and propose an alternate strategy focused on analyzing the skillful nature of the “trust methods” employed by ordinary people. Instead of treating trust as a static property that can be measured by close-format survey questions, we conceptualize trusting as a skillful practice that is highly context-dependent and attuned to temporal variables such as speed, duration, sequence, and timing. To illustrate this approach, we draw on interviews with Long COVID patients focusing on how they account for who, what, when and how they distinguish responsible trust from blind faith.

We reply to Esposito and Möllering by clarifying what we meant by the procedure of “critical reconstruction”. It is not an external critique, because we have carefully followed the logic of trust research. But it is also not easily reconcilable with trust research, as Möllering argues, because we show that by doing so one is led to certain aporias, conundrums, and contradictions that do not permit leaving the concept as we found it. We reject any attempt to found the concept of trust in a theoretical constant such as complexity or irreducible uncertainty, and emphasize the need for an ethnomethodological approach that limits itself to how the actors themselves draw the distinctions between trust and blind faith, trust and mistrust, etc. This commitment is all the more necessary now, when trust research has become part of the very phenomenon it studies.

Farming vehicles are relatively heavy and slow-moving machines, typically equipped with rubber tracks or flotation tires (or both). The objective of this study was to develop, validate, and openly share a new mechanistic code for calculating asphalt pavement responses under the loading conditions of such vehicles. For a given farming vehicle, the loading geometry was modeled by exploiting symmetry considerations and representing tread contact areas as groups of rotated rectangular patches. For the purpose of calculating responses, the pavement system was modeled as a layered elastic half-space, loaded vertically by many small identical circular areas—collectively approximating the patches. Computational efficiency was sought by solving the layered model for one circular area and executing a series of coordinate transformations, interpolations, and translations, to represent the entire vehicle loading. The new code is named LynFarm; it was validated through its ability to reproduce mechanical responses generated by farming vehicles as they were driven over an instrumented asphalt pavement section. LynFarm is openly shared on GitHub for further verification, validation, and improvement by the pavement engineering community.

We study the generalized doubling method for pairs of representations of G x GLk where G is a symplectic group, split special orthogonal group or split general spin group. We analyze the poles of the local integrals and prove that the global completed L-function with a cuspidal representation of GLk twisted by a highly ramified Hecke character is entire. We obtain a new proof of the weak functorial transfer of cuspidal automorphic representations of G to the natural general linear group, which is independent of the trace formula and its prerequisites, by combining our results with the Converse Theorem.

Background & Aims: In primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), static liver stiffness measurement (LSM) has proven prognostic value. However, the added prognostic value of LSM time course in this disease remains uncertain.Methods: We conducted an international retrospective cohort study among patients with PBC treated with ursodeoxycholic acid and followed by vibration-controlled transient elastography between 2003 and 2022. Using joint modeling, the association of LSM trajectory and the incidence of serious clinical events (SCE), defined as cirrhosis complications, liver transplantation, or death, was quantified using the hazard ratio and its confidence interval. Results: A total of 6362 LSMs were performed in 3078 patients (2007 on ursodeoxycholic acid alone; 13% with cirrhosis), in whom 316 SCE occurred over 14,445 person-years (median follow-up, 4.2 years; incidence rate, 21.9 per 1000 person-years). LSM progressed in 59% of patients (mean, 0.39 kPa/year). After adjusting for prognostic factors at baseline, including LSM, any relative change in LSM was associated with a significant variation in SCE risk (P < .001). For example, the adjusted hazard ratios (95% confidence interval) associated with a 20% annual variation in LSM were 2.13 (1.89–2.45) for the increase and 0.40 (0.33–0.46) for the decrease. The association between LSM trajectory and SCE risk persisted regardless of treatment response or duration, when patients with cirrhosis were excluded, and when only death or liver transplantation was considered. Conclusions: Tracking longitudinal changes in LSM using vibration-controlled transient elastography provides valuable insights into PBC prognosis, offering a robust predictive measure for the risk of SCE. LSM could be used as a clinically relevant surrogate end point in PBC clinical trials.

The Worldsoils project has developed a pre-operational Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) monitoring system in a cloud environment. The system predicts topsoil organic carbon content at regional and continental scales from Earth Observation (EO) satellite data with a continuous cover over Europe. The system utilizes spectral models for croplands and a digital soil mapping approach for permanently vegetated areas such as grasslands and forests. Models strongly rely on soil reflectance composites from the Sentinel 2 multispectral instrument providing the median reflectance for all valid pixels over a period of three years. The bare soil frequency, a proxy for the degree of crop cover, is clearly lower in a Mediterranean pilot region compared to croplands in temperate regions. This is due to the extensive crop cover in the Mediterranean with winter cereals and fodder crops. The graphical user interface provides SOC content and the prediction interval ratio (i.e. 90 % uncertainty interval divided by the median) for 50 m pixels in three pilot regions and 100 m pixels for the rest of Europe. The SOC prediction algorithms are reasonable compared to others at the continental scale (R2: 0.41 for croplands and 0.28 for permanently vegetated areas). Apart from tree crops in Macedonia (Greece) the soil reflectance composite attributes the correct model to validation sets of cropland and grassland in the pilot regions. The SOC prediction is satisfactory in Wallonia (Belgium; R2 0.51) but is less accurate in Greece and the Czech Republic. In particular in Greece, the poor performance is linked to the low bare soil frequency due to the abundance of tree crops, cereals and fodder crops. The monitoring system can reproduce spatial patterns in SOC content similar to the ones obtained from a detailed regional algorithm using the new generation of hyperspectral satellites. However, the very high values in kettle holes in a morainic landscape of Northern Germany are underestimated.

Whisper is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) model (Radford et al., 2022). Although Swiss German dialects are allegedly not part of Whisper’s training data, preliminary experiments showed Whisper can transcribe Swiss German quite well, with the output being a speech translation into Standard German. To gain a better understanding of Whisper’s performance on Swiss German, we systematically evaluate it using automatic, qualitative, and human evaluation. We test its performance on three existing test sets: SwissDial (Dogan-Schönberger et al., 2021), STT4SG-350 (Plüss et al., 2023), and Swiss Parliaments Corpus (Plüss et al., 2021). In addition, we create a new test set for this study based on short mock clinical interviews. To automatically evaluate performance, we used word error rate (WER) and BLEU. We also conducted a qualitative analysis of Whisper’s performance, discussing its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, 28 people participated in a survey evaluating Whisper’s performance. All of our evaluations showed that Whisper is a viable ASR system for Swiss German, so long as the Standard German output is desired.

Emotion Focused Group Therapy has demonstrated preliminary efficacy for multiple syndromes. The groups involve individual chair-work in the context of the group, followed by interpersonal processing of the aroused emotions. So far there has been limited investigation of the mechanisms of change, including participants’ experiences of the change process. This study aimed to qualitatively examine participants’ experiences of the change process during Emotion Focused Group Therapy. Sixteen participants were interviewed about their experiences of the change process during the therapy group. The interview was structured to move from overarching reflections on the process of change, to specific experiences of their own chair-work and watching others’ chair-work. During the interview, participants were shown salient video segments of the group to prime their recall of moments of high arousal that were deemed likely to contain emotional change processes. Thematic Analysis extracted five main themes: Value of Vulnerability; Connectedness; Vicarious Emotional Processing; Understanding My Critic; and Barriers to Emotional Processing. These findings suggest that there may be both common and unique change processes that occur during Emotion Focused Group Therapy, compared with the individual Emotion Focused Therapy.

Living in dynamic environments such as the social domain, where interaction with others determines the reproductive success of individuals, requires the ability to recognize opportunities to obtain natural rewards and cope with challenges that are associated with achieving them. As such, actions that promote survival and reproduction are reinforced by the brain reward system, whereas coping with the challenges associated with obtaining these rewards is mediated by stress-response pathways, the activation of which can impair health and shorten lifespan. While much research has been devoted to understanding mechanisms underlying the way by which natural rewards are processed by the reward system, less attention has been given to the consequences of failure to obtain a desirable reward. As a model system to study the impact of failure to obtain a natural reward, we used the well-established courtship suppression paradigm in Drosophila melanogaster as means to induce repeated failures to obtain sexual reward in male flies. We discovered that beyond the known reduction in courtship actions caused by interaction with non-receptive females, repeated failures to mate induce a stress response characterized by persistent motivation to obtain the sexual reward, reduced male-male social interaction, and enhanced aggression. This frustrative-like state caused by the conflict between high motivation to obtain sexual reward and the inability to fulfill their mating drive impairs the capacity of rejected males to tolerate stressors such as starvation and oxidative stress. We further show that sensitivity to starvation and enhanced social arousal is mediated by the disinhibition of a small population of neurons that express receptors for the fly homologue of neuropeptide Y. Our findings demonstrate for the first time the existence of social stress in flies and offers a framework to study mechanisms underlying the crosstalk between reward, stress, and reproduction in a simple nervous

"The engineered perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip is formed by a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a 'buffer zone', is established along Gaza's 'borders', extending deep into Palestinian residential areas and farmlands— further compounding the Gaza Strip's isolation from the rest of Palestine. Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian lands by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by unannounced aerial spraying of military herbicides, extending the reach of Israeli violence into the realm of chemical warfare. Today, the spraying has destroyed entire swaths of arable land in Gaza, forcibly changing a once-lush Palestinian landscape, and providing the Israeli army with better visibility to fire at Palestinian targets with lethal force from a distance. This book is a vivid document of this latest stage of Israeli warfare, including original maps, images and visualisations which deepen our understanding of its environmental and human impact. It collects new documents, original archival materials, stills of drone footage, first-hand testimonies of farmers, organisers and protesters, and documents affected vegetation in Gaza as 'silent witnesses' to Israeli settler-colonial violence." --Provided by publisher., Foreword by Eyal Weizman -- Introduction: Colonial Legacies of Farm Warfare -- Chapter 1: Reconfiguration of Biopolitical Landscapes in Palestine -- Chapter 2: The Disappearing Trees of Gaza -- Chapter 3: The Al-Shawwa Citrus Export Company -- Chapter 4: Israeli Herbicidal Warfare as Colonial Practice -- Conclusion: Sowing New Landscapes of Resistance, "The engineered perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip is formed by a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a 'buffer zone', is established along Gaza's 'borders', extending deep into Palestinian residential areas and farmlands— further compounding the Gaza Strip's isolation from the rest of Palestine. Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian lands by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by unannounced aerial spraying of military herbicides, extending the reach of Israeli violence into the realm of chemical warfare. Today, the spraying has destroyed entire swaths of arable land in Gaza, forcibly changing a once-lush Palestinian landscape, and providing the Israeli army with better visibility to fire at Palestinian targets with lethal force from a distance. This book is a vivid document of this latest stage of Israeli warfare, including original maps, images and visualisations which deepen our understanding of its environmental and human impact. It collects new documents, original archival materials, stills of drone footage, first-hand testimonies of farmers, organisers and protesters, and documents affected vegetation in Gaza as 'silent witnesses' to Israeli settler-colonial violence." --Provided by publisher.

Purpose: Astigmatism blurs the retinal image of a circular spot along a particular orientation rendering it an elliptical shape. Astigmatic patients demonstrate adaptation to residual astigmatic blur that may affect their discrimination between oval and circular targets. The Wilkins Egg and Ball Test (WEBT) was created to detect altered visual perception due to residual astigmatic blur by discriminating a circle within a row of oval elements. This prospective, cross-sectional study examined the utility of WEBT in detecting uncorrected residual astigmatism on the perception of form symmetry in astigmatic and keratoconic participants as well as normal participants with induced astigmatism at four primary meridians. Methods: The mean search time (sT) and number of errors (noE) of 33 non-astigmatic controls (mean age: 24±5, range: 18–43, 6 males), 23 astigmatic participants (mean age: 36±12, range: 18–43, 6 males) and 13 keratoconic participants (N=22 eyes, mean age: 36 ±12, range: 18–58, 6 males) were measured under baseline, and 2.00 DC induced cylinder at four primary meridians, and for uncorrected, spherical-correction only, and fully corrected conditions, respectively. Mean sT and noE were converted to Z-scores, combined for each condition, and compared using repeated measures ANOVA with post-hoc analysis. Results: Combined Z-scores for the controls were significantly worse (p<0.001) for all induced cylinder conditions. The induced 180° condition was significantly better than 45° and 90° conditions (p=0.04), but not the 135° condition. For both astigmatic and keratoconic cohorts, Z-scores of the uncorrected condition were significantly worse than the fully corrected condition (both p<0.01), but the fully corrected and spherical-only conditions did not differ significantly (p=0.06 and p=0.05, respectively). Conclusion: In accommodating young adults, WEBT detected altered visual perception due to overall blur, and moderate-high amounts of uncorrected induced astigmat, This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Parts of this study were funded by the Hadassah Academic College Conference and Research Board grant awarded to Eyal Gal., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

Asaf Achiron,1 Tal Yahalomi,2 Amit Biran,1 Eliya Levinger,1 Eyal Cohen,1 Uri Elbaz,3 Asim Ali,4,5 Kamiar Mireskandari,4,5 Raimo Tuuminen,6,7 Oleksiy V Voytsekhivskyy8 1Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel and Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 2Department of Ophthalmology, Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital and the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel; 3Department of Ophthalmology, Rabin Medical Center, Petach-Tikva and Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 4Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 5Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences, the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; 6Helsinki Retina Research Group, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; 7Department of Ophthalmology, Kymenlaakso Central Hospital, Kotka, Finland; 8Kyiv Clinical Ophthalmology Hospital Eye Microsurgery Center, Kyiv, UkraineCorrespondence: Oleksiy V Voytsekhivskyy, Kyiv Clinical Ophthalmology Hospital Eye Microsurgery Center, Komarov Ave. 3, Medical City, Kyiv, 03680, Ukraine, Tel +38067-584-28-11, Email iolpower@ukr.netPurpose: To compare the accuracy of 16 intraocular lens (IOL) power calculation formulas in pediatric cataract eyes.Patients and Methods: The data records of pediatric patients who had been implanted with three IOL models (SA60AT, MA60AC, and enVista-MX60) between 2012 and 2018 were analyzed. The accuracy of 16 IOL power calculation methods was evaluated: Barrett Universal II (BUII), Castrop, EVO 2.0, Haigis, Hill-RBF 3.0, Hoffer Q, Hoffer QST, Holladay 1, Kane, LSF AI, Naeser 2, Pearl-DGS, SRK/T, T2, VRF, and VRF-G. The non-optimized (ULIB/IOLcon) and optimized constants were used for IOL power calculation. The mean prediction error (PE), Performance Index (FPI), and all descriptive statistics were calculated.Results: Ninety-seven eyes of 97 pediatric

Alkaloids play an essential role in protecting plants against herbivores. Humans can also benefit from the pharmacological effects of these compounds. Plants produce an immense variety of structurally different alkaloids, including quinolizidine alkaloids, a group of bi-, tri-, and tetracyclic compounds produced by Lupinus species. Various lupin species produce different alkaloid profiles. To study the composition of quinolizidine alkaloids in lupin seeds, we collected 31 populations of two wild species native to Israel, L. pilosus and L. palaestinus, and analyzed their quinolizidine alkaloid contents. Our goal was to study the alkaloid profiles of these two wild species to better understand the challenges and prospective uses of wild lupins. We compared their profiles with those of other commercial and wild lupin species. To this end, a straightforward method for extracting alkaloids from seeds and determining the quinolizidine alkaloid profile by LC–MS/MS was developed and validated in-house. For the quantification of quinolizidine alkaloids, 15 analytical reference standards were used. We used GC–MS to verify and cross-reference the identity of certain alkaloids for which no analytical standards were available. The results enabled further exploration of quinolizidine alkaloid biosynthesis. We reviewed and re-analyzed the suggested quinolizidine alkaloid biosynthesis pathway, including the relationship between the amino acid precursor l-lysine and the different quinolizidine alkaloids occurring in seeds of lupin species. Revealing alkaloid compositions and highlighting some aspects of their formation pathway are important steps in evaluating the use of wild lupins as a novel legume crop.

A principal incentivizes a group of agents to work by choosing a monitoring structure and a scheme of performance-contingent rewards. The monitoring structure partitions the set of agents into monitoring teams, each delivering a signal of joint performance. We show that unlike under partial implementation, the principal always exhausts her monitoring capacity to optimally implement work as a unique outcome. Optimal monitoring teams are homogeneous between them: equally sized and with agents allocated in an anti-assortative fashion. Higher-effort-cost agents receive lower rents, and they tend to be monitored more closely than lower-effort-cost agents when the principal's allocation is constrained.

Edge artificial intelligence (AI) is an innovative computing paradigm that aims to shift the training and inference of machine learning models to the edge of the network. This paradigm offers the opportunity to significantly impact our everyday lives with new services such as autonomous driving and ubiquitous personalized health care. Nevertheless, bringing intelligence to the edge involves several major challenges, which include the need to constrain model architecture designs, the secure distribution and execution of the trained models, and the substantial network load required to distribute the models and data collected for training. In this article, we highlight key aspects in the development of edge AI in the past and connect them to current challenges. This article aims to identify research opportunities for edge AI, relevant to bring together the research in the fields of artificial intelligence and edge computing., QC 20240828

This paper examines the distinct effects of linguistics distance and language literacy on the labor market integration of migrant men and women. Using data from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2018 in 16 countries of destination mainly from Europe and more than 110 languages of origin, we assess migrant labor force participation, employment, working hours, and occupational prestige. The study finds that linguistics distance of the first language studied has a significant negative association with labor force participation, employment, and working hours of migrant women, even after controlling for their abilities in their destination language, education, and cultural distance between the country of origin and destination. In contrast, linguistics distance is only negatively associated with migrant men's working hours. This suggests that linguistic distance serves as a proxy for cultural aspects, which are not captured by cultural distance and hence shape the labor market integration of migrant women due to cultural factors rather than human capital. We suggest that the gender aspect of the effect of language proximity is essential in understanding the intersectional position of migrant women in the labor force.

Emotion Focused Group Therapy has demonstrated preliminary efficacy for multiple syndromes. The groups involve individual chair-work in the context of the group, followed by interpersonal processing of the aroused emotions. So far there has been limited investigation of the mechanisms of change, including participants’ experiences of the change process. This study aimed to qualitatively examine participants’ experiences of the change process during Emotion Focused Group Therapy. Sixteen participants were interviewed about their experiences of the change process during the therapy group. The interview was structured to move from overarching reflections on the process of change, to specific experiences of their own chair-work and watching others’ chair-work. During the interview, participants were shown salient video segments of the group to prime their recall of moments of high arousal that were deemed likely to contain emotional change processes. Thematic Analysis extracted five main themes: Value of Vulnerability; Connectedness; Vicarious Emotional Processing; Understanding My Critic; and Barriers to Emotional Processing. These findings suggest that there may be both common and unique change processes that occur during Emotion Focused Group Therapy, compared with the individual Emotion Focused Therapy.

We study binary action network games with strategic complementarities. An agent acts if the aggregate social influence of her friends exceeds a transfer levied on the agent by a principal. The principal seeks to maximize her revenue while inducing everyone to act in a unique equilibrium. We characterize optimal transfers showing that agents who are more popular than their friends receive preferential treatment. Our main result is that under mild conditions complete core‐periphery networks deliver the highest revenue to the principal. Furthermore, we show that the revenue is higher in networks where links are allocated unequally across agents. Hence, the principal benefits from creating “influentials” by linking well‐connected hubs to less popular periphery.

The Mediterranean Sea has been sampled irregularly by research vessels in the past, mostly by national expeditions in regional waters. To monitor the hydrographic, biogeochemical and circulation changes in the Mediterranean Sea, a systematic repeat oceanographic survey programme called Med-SHIP was recommended by the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM) in 2011, as part of the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP). Med-SHIP consists of zonal and meridional surveys with different frequencies, where comprehensive physical and biogeochemical properties are measured with the highest international standards. The first zonal survey was done in 2011 and repeated in 2018. In addition, a network of meridional (and other key) hydrographic sections were designed: the first cycle of these sections was completed in 2016, with three cruises funded by the EU project EUROFLEETS2. This paper presents the physical and chemical data of the meridional and key transects in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean Sea collected during those cruises.

The Earth surface Mineral dust source InvesTigation (EMIT) is a remote visible to shortwave infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectrometer that has been operating onboard the International Space Station since July 2022. This article describes EMIT's on-orbit spectroradiometric calibration and validation. Accurate spectroscopy is vital to achieve consistent mapping results with orbital imaging spectrometers. EMIT takes a unique approach to this challenge, with just six optical elements, no shutter, and no onboard calibration systems. Its simple design focuses on uniformity and stability to enable vicarious spectroradiometric calibration. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach is successful, approaching the fidelity of manual field spectroscopy in some cases, and enabling new and more accurate products across diverse Earth science disciplines. EMIT achieves several notable firsts for an instrument of its class. It demonstrates successful on-orbit adjustments of Focal Plane Array (FPA) alignment with sub-micron precision. It offers spectral uniformity better than 98%. Optical artifacts in the measurement channels are at least three orders of magnitude below the primary solar-reflected surface signals. Its noise performance enables percent-level discrimination in the depths of mineral absorption features. In these aspects, EMIT satisfies the stringent performance needs for the next generation of VSWIR imaging spectrometers to observe the Earth's ecosystems, geology, and water resources., EMIT is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Venture Instrument program, under the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate. K. Dana Chadwick is supported by the NASA Applied Sciences Program. Carlos P´ erez García- Pando and María Gonçalves Ageitos acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant FRAGMENT (grant agreement No. 773051), and the AXA Chair on Sand and Dust Storms at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center funded by the AXA Research Fund. Martina Klose has received funding through the Helmholtz Association’s Initiative and Networking Fund (grant agreement No. VH-NG-1533). We thank Jeffrey Czapla-Myers and the University of Arizona team for their maintenance and operation of the Railroad Valley automated calibration facility. This research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We acknowledge the support and assistance of NASA’s International Space Station Program. The USGS authors’ contribution to this published Work was prepared by U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties and constitutes a “work of the United States government,” and is considered to be in the public domain and therefore domestic copyright does not apply. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Copyright 2024 California Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. US Government Support Acknowledged., Peer Reviewed, Article signat per 56 autors: David R. Thompson, Robert O. Green, Christine Bradley, Philip G. Brodrick, Natalie Mahowald, Eyal Ben Dor, Matthew Bennett, Michael Bernas, Nimrod Carmon, K. Dana Chadwick, Roger N. Clark, Red Willow Coleman, Evan Cox, Ernesto Diaz, Michael L. Eastwood, Regina Eckert, Bethany L. Ehlmann, Paul Ginoux, María Gonçalves Ageitos, Kathleen Grant, Luis Guanter, Daniela Heller Pearlshtien, Mark Helmlinger, Harrison Herzog, Todd Hoefen, Yue Huang, Abigail Keebler, Olga Kalashnikova, Didier Keymeulen, Raymond Kokaly, Martina Klose, Longlei Li, Sarah R. Lundeen, John Meyer, Elizabeth Middleton, Ron L. Miller, Pantazis Mouroulis, Bogdan Oaida, Vincenzo Obiso, Francisco Ochoa, Winston Olson-Duvall, Gregory S. Okin, Thomas H. Painter, Carlos Pérez García-Pando, Randy Pollock, Vincent Realmuto, Lucas Shaw, Peter Sullivan, Gregg Swayze, Erik Thingvold, Andrew K. Thorpe, Suresh Vannan, Catalina Villarreal, Charlene Ung, Daniel W. Wilson, Sander Zandbergen., Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::13 - Acció per al Clima, Postprint (published version)

The Mediterranean Sea has been sampled irregularly by research vessels in the past, mostly by national expeditions in regional waters. To monitor the hydrographic, biogeochemical and circulation changes in the Mediterranean Sea, a systematic repeat oceanographic survey programme called Med-SHIP was recommended by the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM) in 2011, as part of the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP). Med-SHIP consists of zonal and meridional surveys with different frequencies, where comprehensive physical and biogeochemical properties are measured with the highest international standards. The first zonal survey was done in 2011 and repeated in 2018. In addition, a network of meridional (and other key) hydrographic sections were designed: the first cycle of these sections was completed in 2016, with three cruises funded by the EU project EUROFLEETS2. This paper presents the physical and chemical data of the meridional and key transects in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean Sea collected during those cruises.

Inherited macular dystrophies (iMDs) are a group of genetic disorders, which affect the central region of the retina. To investigate the genetic basis of iMDs, we used single-molecule Molecular Inversion Probes to sequence 105 maculopathy-associated genes in 1352 patients diagnosed with iMDs. Within this cohort, 39.8% of patients were considered genetically explained by 460 different variants in 49 distinct genes of which 73 were novel variants, with some affecting splicing. The top five most frequent causative genes were ABCA4 (37.2%), PRPH2 (6.7%), CDHR1 (6.1%), PROM1 (4.3%) and RP1L1 (3.1%). Interestingly, variants with incomplete penetrance were revealed in almost one-third of patients considered solved (28.1%), and therefore, a proportion of patients may not be explained solely by the variants reported. This includes eight previously reported variants with incomplete penetrance in addition to CDHR1:c.783G>A and CNGB3:c.1208G>A. Notably, segregation analysis was not routinely performed for variant phasing-a limitation, which may also impact the overall diagnostic yield. The relatively high proportion of probands without any putative causal variant (60.2%) highlights the need to explore variants with incomplete penetrance, the potential modifiers of disease and the genetic overlap between iMDs and age-related macular degeneration. Our results provide valuable insights into the genetic landscape of iMDs and warrant future exploration to determine the involvement of other maculopathy genes.

The Mediterranean Sea has been sampled irregularly by research vessels in the past, mostly by national expeditions in regional waters. To monitor the hydrographic, biogeochemical and circulation changes in the Mediterranean Sea, a systematic repeat oceanographic survey programme called Med-SHIP was recommended by the Mediterranean Science Commission (CIESM) in 2011, as part of the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP). Med-SHIP consists of zonal and meridional surveys with different frequencies, where comprehensive physical and biogeochemical properties are measured with the highest international standards. The first zonal survey was done in 2011 and repeated in 2018. In addition, a network of meridional (and other key) hydrographic sections were designed: the first cycle of these sections was completed in 2016, with three cruises funded by the EU project EUROFLEETS2. This paper presents the physical and chemical data of the meridional and key transects in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean Sea collected during those cruises.

Liat Gantz,1 Joan Gispets,2 Arnold Wilkins,3 Eyal Gal1,2 1Department of Optometry and Vision Science, Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel; 2University Vision Centre, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain; 3Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UKCorrespondence: Liat Gantz, Email liatg@hac.ac.il

Eyal Gal,1,2 Joan Gispets,2 Arnold Wilkins,3 Meira Zyroff,1 Efrat Netanya‌,1 Liat Gantz1 1Department of Optometry and Vision Science, Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel; 2University Vision Centre, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain; 3Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UKCorrespondence: Liat Gantz; Eyal Gal, Department of Optometry and Vision Science, Hadassah Academic College, 37 Hanevi’im St, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 9101001, Israel, Email liatg@hac.ac.il; gale@hac.ac.ilPurpose: Astigmatism blurs the retinal image of a circular spot along a particular orientation rendering it an elliptical shape. Astigmatic patients demonstrate adaptation to residual astigmatic blur that may affect their discrimination between oval and circular targets. The Wilkins Egg and Ball Test (WEBT) was created to detect altered visual perception due to residual astigmatic blur by discriminating a circle within a row of oval elements. This prospective, cross-sectional study examined the utility of WEBT in detecting uncorrected residual astigmatism on the perception of form symmetry in astigmatic and keratoconic participants as well as normal participants with induced astigmatism at four primary meridians.Methods: The mean search time (sT) and number of errors (noE) of 33 non-astigmatic controls (mean age: 24± 5, range: 18– 43, 6 males), 23 astigmatic participants (mean age: 36± 12, range: 18– 43, 6 males) and 13 keratoconic participants (N=22 eyes, mean age: 36± 12, range: 18– 58, 6 males) were measured under baseline, and 2.00 DC induced cylinder at four primary meridians, and for uncorrected, spherical-correction only, and fully corrected conditions, respectively. Mean sT and noE were converted to Z-scores, combined for each condition, and compared using repeated measures ANOVA with post-hoc analysis.Results: Combined Z-scores for the controls were significantly worse (p< 0.001) for all induced cylinder condition

The neuropeptide hormone oxytocin and the steroid hormone testosterone have received attention as modulators of behavior in the context of intergroup conflict. However, to date, their interactive effect has yet to be tested. Here, in a double-blind placebo-control design, 204 participants (102 female participants) self-administrated oxytocin or placebo and completed an experimental economic game modeling intergroup conflict. Salivary testosterone (n = 192) was measured throughout the task to assess endogenous reactivity. As a caveat, even at this sample size, our derived power to detect small effects for 2- and 3-way interactions was relatively low. For male participants, changes in testosterone predicted willingness to sacrifice investments for the betterment of the group. Intranasal administration of oxytocin strongly diminished this effect. In female participants, we found no credible evidence for association between changes in testosterone and investments, rather, oxytocin effects were independent of testosterone. This 3-way interaction was of medium to large effect size (Odds Ratio 5.11). Behavior was also affected by social cues such as signaling of ingroup and outgroup members. Our findings provide insights as to the biological processes underpinning parochial altruism and suggest an additional path for the dual influence of oxytocin and testosterone on human social behavior.

Standard temporal planning assumes that planning takes place offline and then execution starts at time 0. Recently, situated temporal planning was introduced, where planning starts at time 0 and execution occurs after planning terminates. Situated temporal planning reflects a more realistic scenario where time passes during planning. However, in situated temporal planning a complete plan must be generated before any action is executed. In some problems with time pressure, timing is too tight to complete planning before the first action must be executed. For example, an autonomous car that has a truck backing towards it should probably move out of the way now and plan how to get to its destination later. In this paper, we propose a new problem setting: concurrent planning and execution, in which actions can be dispatched (executed) before planning terminates. Unlike previous work on planning and execution, we must handle wall clock deadlines that affect action applicability and goal achievement (as in situated planning) while also supporting dispatching actions before a complete plan has been found. We extend previous work on metareasoning for situated temporal planning to develop an algorithm for this new setting. Our empirical evaluation shows that when there is strong time pressure, our approach outperforms situated temporal planning.

Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be viewed as 0-gram language modeling where equal probability is assigned to all tokens. We also demonstrate the empirical importance of compression for downstream success of pre-trained language models. We control the compression ability of several BPE tokenizers by varying the amount of documents available during their training: from 1 million documents to a character-based tokenizer equivalent to no training data at all. We then pre-train English language models based on those tokenizers and fine-tune them over several tasks. We show that there is a correlation between tokenizers' compression and models' downstream performance, suggesting that compression is a reliable intrinsic indicator of tokenization quality. These correlations are more pronounced for generation tasks (over classification) or for smaller models (over large ones). We replicated a representative part of our experiments on Turkish and found similar results, confirming that our results hold for languages with typological characteristics dissimilar to English. We conclude that building better compressing tokenizers is a fruitful avenue for further research and for improving overall model performance.

Large language models hold significant promise in multilingual applications. However, inherent biases stemming from predominantly English-centric pre-training have led to the widespread practice of pre-translation, i.e., translating non-English inputs to English before inference, leading to complexity and information loss. This study re-evaluates the need for pre-translation in the context of PaLM2 models (Anil et al., 2023), which have been established as highly performant in multilingual tasks. We offer a comprehensive investigation across 108 languages and 6 diverse benchmarks, including open-end generative tasks, which were excluded from previous similar studies. Our findings challenge the pre-translation paradigm established in prior research, highlighting the advantages of direct inference in PaLM2. Specifically, PaLM2-L consistently outperforms pre-translation in 94 out of 108 languages. These findings pave the way for more efficient and effective multilingual applications, alleviating the limitations associated with pre-translation and unlocking linguistic authenticity.

We analyze the operation of transformer language adapters, which are small modules trained on top of a frozen language model to adapt its predictions to new target languages. We show that adapted predictions mostly evolve in the source language the model was trained on, while the target language becomes pronounced only in the very last layers of the model. Moreover, the adaptation process is gradual and distributed across layers, where it is possible to skip small groups of adapters without decreasing adaptation performance. Last, we show that adapters operate on top of the model's frozen representation space while largely preserving its structure, rather than on an 'isolated' subspace. Our findings provide a deeper view into the adaptation process of language models to new languages, showcasing the constraints imposed on it by the underlying model and introduces practical implications to enhance its efficiency., Comment: 18 pages

Queer youth face increased mental health risks, such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Hindered by negative stigma, they often avoid seeking help and rely on online resources, which may provide incompatible information. Although access to a supportive environment and reliable information is invaluable, many queer youth worldwide have no access to such support. However, this could soon change due to the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. This paper aims to comprehensively explore the potential of LLMs to revolutionize emotional support for queers. To this end, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of LLM's interactions with queer-related content. To evaluate response quality, we develop a novel ten-question scale that is inspired by psychological standards and expert input. We apply this scale to score several LLMs and human comments to posts where queer youth seek advice and share experiences. We find that LLM responses are supportive and inclusive, outscoring humans. However, they tend to be generic, not empathetic enough, and lack personalization, resulting in nonreliable and potentially harmful advice. We discuss these challenges, demonstrate that a dedicated prompt can improve the performance, and propose a blueprint of an LLM-supporter that actively (but sensitively) seeks user context to provide personalized, empathetic, and reliable responses. Our annotated dataset is available for further research.

Model selection for a given target task can be costly, as it may entail extensive annotation of the quality of outputs of different models. We introduce DiffUse, an efficient method to make an informed decision between candidate text generation models based on preference annotations. DiffUse reduces the required amount of annotations, thus saving valuable time and resources in performing evaluation. DiffUse intelligently selects instances by clustering embeddings that represent the semantic differences between model outputs. Thus, it is able to identify a subset of examples that are more informative for preference decisions. Our method is model-agnostic, and can be applied to any text generation model for selecting between models, prompts and configurations. Moreover, we propose a practical iterative approach for dynamically determining how many instances to annotate. In a series of experiments over hundreds of model pairs, we demonstrate that DiffUse can dramatically reduce the required number of annotations -- by up to 75% -- while maintaining high evaluation reliability., Comment: Accepted to ACL (main conference)

Graph generation is a fundamental problem in various domains, including chemistry and social networks. Recent work has shown that molecular graph generation using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is advantageous compared to traditional generative approaches which require converting continuous latent representations into graphs. One issue which arises when treating graph generation as sequential generation is the arbitrary order of the sequence which results from a particular choice of graph flattening method. In this work we propose using RNNs, taking into account the non-sequential nature of graphs by adding an Orderless Regularization (OLR) term that encourages the hidden state of the recurrent model to be invariant to different valid orderings present under the training distribution. We demonstrate that sequential graph generation models benefit from our proposed regularization scheme, especially when data is scarce. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research on graph generation and provide a valuable tool for various applications requiring the synthesis of realistic and diverse graph structures., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

Allergic diseases are a growing health concern in industrialized countries. Despite a number of effective therapeutic options for the prevention and treatment of the pathophysiologic responses which characterize allergic diseases, the induction of true allergen desensitization remains an elusive therapeutic goal. Only immunotherapy (IT) has been shown to have any effect on the underlying hypersensitivities which mediate allergic reactions, and traditional protein-based allergen IT has a limited scope of efficacy. However, a number of reagents collectively termed DNA‐based immunotherapeutics have proven highly effective in both the prevention and reversal of Th2-mediated hypersensitivity states in mouse models of allergic disease. Four basic DNA-based immunotherapeutic modalities have been used for these studies. These include immunization with gene vaccines, allergen mixed with immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotide (ISS-ODN), and physical allergen-ISS-ODN conjugates (AIC), as well as immunomodulation with ISS-ODN alone. Results from many laboratories have generated guarded optimism that DNA-based immunotherapeutics may be effective for the reversal of allergic hypersensitivity states in humans, and several clinical trials have already been initiated. This review will focus on our present understanding of the biological activities of DNA-based immunotherapeutics and their application to the treatment of allergic diseases., Institutos Nacionales de Salud, Dynavax Thecnologies Corporation, Depto. de Medicina, Fac. de Medicina, TRUE, pub

This study investigated whether immunostimulatory DNA sequences (ISS) induce a transient or sustained inhibition of Th2 responses to inhaled antigen. We sensitized mice with subcutaneous injections to develop a Th2 response to ovalbumin (ova) and then administered a dose of ISS prior to ova inhalation challenge. Mice were then rechallenged with ova by inhalation a second time at varying time points after the first ova inhalation (1 to 8 weeks later) to determine whether the ISS dose administered prior to the first ova inhalation protected against a subsequent second ova inhalation challenge. A single dose of ISS inhibited the Th2 response to the first inhalation of ova antigen, as well as 4 weeks later to the second inhalation of ova. However, ISS did not inhibit a Th2 response to the second inhalation of ova 8 weeks later. The reversible inhibition of Th2 responses at 8 weeks suggests the need for repeated ISS administration at monthly intervals., Depto. de Medicina, Fac. de Medicina, TRUE, pub

The lack of high-quality data for content-grounded generation tasks has been identified as a major obstacle to advancing these tasks. To address this gap, we propose Genie, a novel method for automatically generating high-quality content-grounded data. It consists of three stages: (a) Content Preparation, (b) Generation: creating task-specific examples from the content (e.g., question-answer pairs or summaries). (c) Filtering mechanism aiming to ensure the quality and faithfulness of the generated data. We showcase this methodology by generating three large-scale synthetic data, making wishes, for Long-Form Question-Answering (LFQA), summarization, and information extraction. In a human evaluation, our generated data was found to be natural and of high quality. Furthermore, we compare models trained on our data with models trained on human-written data -- ELI5 and ASQA for LFQA and CNN-DailyMail for Summarization. We show that our models are on par with or outperforming models trained on human-generated data and consistently outperforming them in faithfulness. Finally, we applied our method to create LFQA data within the medical domain and compared a model trained on it with models trained on other domains., Comment: Accepted to ICLR24