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Maternal relinquishment: reforms, rights, and other myths
No full textCertain perennial controversies within adoption law and practice cannot be ignored. In Ireland, for example, redress schemes enabling access to previously sealed birth or medical records have served to perpetuate discrimination and inequality, while reparations for abuses suffered in Mother and Baby Institutions have excluded certain categories of survivor (McGettrick). In respect of England, the UK Government still refuses to offer apology, in contrast to their Scottish and Welsh counterparts. Moreover, judicial acknowledgement of the intergenerational impacts of severing natal bonds in the present day can often be inconsistent. Recent case law at times harks back to an earlier era: parental consent to an adoption can be dispensed with quite quickly and relatively easily, and judicial bars can be placed on contact, to embed new family, adoptive “permanence.” The right to respect for family life (under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights) remains delicate and is easily infringed—and then justified—within this area of family law.<br/
Epidemic Oracle: an approach to boost security and performance of delay tolerant networks
No full textDelay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) play a vital role in disaster response to address intermittent connectivity, in particular when Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to relay critical information. However, most existing DTN protocols are highly susceptible to Denial-of-Service (DoS)attacks because their flooding-based or simplistic routing decisions can be exploited by malicious nodes to quickly saturate buffers, exhausting network resources and disrupting legitimate traffic. This paper presents an Epidemic Oracle (EO) implementation, to mitigate DoS threats by intelligently removing delivered messages from all buffers, thus reducing overhead and freeing network resources. Through extensive simulation in the ONE environment, EO is evaluated against three established encounter-based DTN protocols-Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and Spray and Wait Binary-under varying buffer sizes, transmission speeds, and both aggressive and stealthy DoS attacks. The findings indicate that EO substantially increases delivery ratios while curtailing buffer congestion, even under severe adversarial conditions. These improvements highlight the potential of oracle-based interventions to bolster performance in UAV-assisted disaster scenarios, paving the way for more resilient and efficient DTNs in emergency communications
Automated specular reflection detection using weak annotation for deep learning training
No full textThe presence of specular reflection on endoscopic images can hide important underlying features and limit extraction of clinically relevant information. To address this challenge, software-based solutions to remove specular reflection can be applied, which requires the specular reflection detection and removal. In this paper, we proposed an automated detection of specular reflection using ResUNet++, which was trained using weakly annotated data to overcome the lack of annotated data and the requirement of repetitive parameter adjustment. Analytical specular reflection detection methods: K-means clustering and histogram thresholding were evaluated to provide weak annotations to train the ResUNet++. The performance of ResUNet++ when trained using the weak annotations was compared with convolutional-based model, the simple Unet, and the state-of-the-art transformer-based model. Experimental results showed that fully unsupervised K-means clustering and histogram thresholding were sufficient to provide weak annotation for training the deep learning models. This shows that the fully analytical method can minimize human supervision on the creation of training data and on the training of the deep learning models. Moreover, we showed that ResUNet++ had better performance than the state-of-the-art when trained solely using weakly annotated data and faster inference time, making it suitable for future near-real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/ajsugiarti/Weak-Annotation-Specs.<br/
Light travel time effects in ilkonova models
No full textThe extremely rapid evolution of kilonovae results in spectra that change on an hourly basis. These spectra are key to understanding the processes occurring within the event, but this rapid evolution is an unfamiliar domain compared to other explosive transient events, such as supernovae. In particular, the most obvious P Cygni feature in the spectra of AT2017gfo – commonly attributed to strontium – possesses an emission component that emerges after, and ultimately outlives, its associated absorption dip. This delay is theorised to arise from reverberation effects, wherein photons emitted earlier in the kilonova’s evolution are scattered before reaching the observer, causing them to be detected at later times. We aim to examine how the finite speed of light – and therefore the light travel time to an observer – contributes to the shape and evolution of spectral features in kilonovae. Using a simple model, and tracking the length of the journey photons undertake to an observer, we are able to test the necessity of accounting for this time delay effect when modelling kilonovae. In periods where the photospheric temperature is rapidly evolving, we show spectra synthesised using a time independent approach are visually distinct from those where these time delay effects are accounted for. Therefore, in rapidly evolving events such as kilonovae, time dependence must be taken into account
