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Speaking of Food: Understanding How People Talk About Food Experiences
No full text’How was your lunch?’ Even simple food talk reveals how people translate multisensory impressions into language, ofering insights for HCI applications such as food recommendation and health management. While prior work has emphasised the multisensory nature of eating, less is known about the linguistic strategies through which people articulate such experiences. We conducted a mixed methods study combining self-reports and interviews to examine how non-verbal sensory input is transformed into verbal expression. Our analysis shows that participants structured their accounts through temporal phases that integrated perception, cognition, affective reaction, and behaviour; employed associative strategies that shaped expectations; and expressed ambivalence, where positive and negative evaluations coexisted in descriptions such as guilty pleasure. Building on these fndings, we propose a lens that highlights the role of time, association, and evaluative language in food talk, enabling designers to translate everyday expressions into actionable insights for food-related HCI design
Humans have already endangered their shared cultural heritage by amplifying extreme weather events
No full textWorld Heritage Sites (WHSs) hold international cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The frequency and severity of extreme climate events at these sites are changing, but the extent to which this is attributed to human activity is unknown. To address this, we conduct an attribution study for three climate extremes for all WHSs inscribed with cultural value. As of the early 21st century, human activities have on average increased extreme heat days by 46 per year at WHSs. Consecutive dry days intensified in WHS-dense Mediterranean regions, while changes in extreme rainfall were highly regional. WHSs in low-income countries experience the highest contribution of human activity to extreme heat days, in contrast to predominantly low-to-moderate contributions for WHSs in high-income regions. By showing how human-driven climate extremes vary at WHSs globally, we demonstrate how attribution studies can inform international policy coordination and site-level adaptation for cultural heritage
Teaching Pathology Foundation Models to Accurately Predict Gene Expression with Parameter Efficient Knowledge Transfer
No full textGene expression profiling provides critical insights into cellular heterogeneity, biological processes, and disease mechanisms. There has been an increasing interest in computational approaches that can predict gene expression directly from digitalized histopathology images. While image foundation models have shown promise in a variety of pathology downstream analysis, their performances on gene expression prediction are still limited. Explicitly incorporating information from the transcriptomic models can help image models address domain shift, yet the fine-tuning and alignment of foundation models can be expensive. In this work, we propose Parameter Efficient Knowledge trAnsfer (PEKA), a novel framework that leverages Block-Affine Adaptation and integrates knowledge distillation and structure alignment losses for cross-modal knowledge transfer. We evaluated PEKA for gene expression prediction using multiple spatial transcriptomics datasets (comprising 206,123 image tiles with matched gene expression profiles) that included various types of tissue. PEKA achieved at least 5% performance improvement over baseline foundation models while also outperforming alternative parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies. We have released the code, datasets and aligned models at Github to facilitate broader adoption and further development for parameter efficient model alignment
Family, switching of
No full textThis article investigates the religious implications of switching one’s family through adoption, marriage and slavery. The first section summarizes the legal and religious implications of the process, such as adherence to new family cults and leaving behind one’s own gods. This first section goes on to survey mythical and ‘unofficial’ adoptions and fostering that occurred as a result of child exposure. In the second section the article focuses on the implications of marriage on the religious life of a woman who, upon leaving her father’s house and entering her new household, would encounter new household gods and traditions. A third section describes the implications of religious adherence for slaves when changing masters and families: to what extent was a slave forced to worship the owner’s gods? And could they continue their individual religious practice on changing families
A clinical practice guideline for tuberculous meningitis
No full textTuberculous meningitis is the most severe form of tuberculosis, causing death or disability in around half of those affected. There are no up-to-date international guidelines defining its optimal management. Therefore, the Tuberculous Meningitis International Research Consortium conducted a systematic review of available evidence to address key management questions and to develop practice guidance. The consortium includes representatives from India, Indonesia, South Africa, Uganda, Viet Nam, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. Questions were developed using the Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome (PICO) format for tuberculous meningitis diagnosis, anti-tuberculosis chemotherapy, adjunctive anti-inflammatory therapy, and neurocritical and neurosurgical care. A Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations approach was used to assess the certainty (or quality) of evidence and establish the direction and strength of recommendations for each PICO-based question. We provide evidence-based recommendations for the optimal treatment and diagnosis of tuberculous meningitis, alongside expert opinion. We expose substantial knowledge and evidence gaps, thereby highlighting current research priorities
Spatiotemporal dynamics of local transport greenhouse gases using mobile phone data: A framework for emissions estimation, allocation, and determinants identification
No full textEstimating and allocating greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions from transport at the urban scale is essential for guiding local decarbonisation strategies and enabling effective carbon governance. However, conventional top-down methods often obscure the spatial, temporal, and behavioural complexity of urban mobility, limiting the design of targeted interventions. This study presents a novel bottom-up framework that leverages individual-level mobile phone data to estimate, allocate, and analyse transport-related GHG emissions at high spatial and temporal resolution. The framework supports multiple accounting perspectives, including territorial and residence-based principles, while enabling contributor tracing by traveller types and the identification of localised emission determinants. Applied to Greater London, the framework reveals significant shifts in emission patterns between pre- and post-pandemic periods, highlighting increased emissions from residents and trip-attracted individuals, alongside persistent dominance by pass-through travellers. It also captures how behavioural changes, such as remote work, have reshaped emissions determinants. The proposed approach provides a scalable and policy-relevant tool to support localised climate action and lays a foundation for evidence-based transport carbon trading systems
Local Causal Reasoning in Multiagent Systems
No full textCausal reasoning is essential for the design, audit, and interpretation of decision-making in multi-agent systems. Recent developments have brought this need to the fore in multi-agent LLM systems,
notably in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where techniques from
information retrieval are used to augment model inference within modular workflows. We propose a behaviour-centric model of system configurations and a unified language for reasoning about such systems.
Our framework introduces an intervention operator that captures the
notion of mechanism change, reflecting interventionist views of causation, while a separation-logic-style conjunction supports local reasoning
via explicit system interfaces, consistent with mechanistic accounts that
explain phenomena through organized and modifiable parts. Agent policy changes are treated as interventions on the components they control,
enabling counterfactual analysis and attribution of responsibility within
the same logic. We define actual causation directly in this language and
show, via time-unfolding of finite system runs, that our notion aligns with
the Halpern-Pearl account of actual causation in the acyclic structural
model induced by the run. We establish van Benthem-Hennessy-Milnerstyle correspondence results: a bisimulation that respects both transitions and interventions characterizes logical equivalence under finiteness
assumptions. Thus, we integrate system evolution with modular decomposition within a single language: its modalities refer directly to configuration transitions, interventions on mechanisms, and interface-indexed
decompositions. We apply the framework to a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow for LLM-based systems to specify explicit interfaces, model mechanism changes as interventions, and answer design-time
causal queries such as, whether some admissible mechanism change guarantees a stated safety constraint while preserving invariants modularly
across an interface