171,619 research outputs found
Meat we don't greet: How sausages can save pigs or how effacing livestock makes room for emancipation
Get PDFI propose that the intensification of meat production ironically makes meat concepts available to be populated by plants. I argue that what I call “technologies of effacement” facilitate the intensification of animal farming and slaughter by blocking face-to-face encounters between animals and people (Levinas 1969; Efstathiou 2018, 2019). My previous ethnographic work on animal research identifies technologies of effacement as including (a) architectures and the built environment, (b) entry and exit rules, (c) special garments, (d) naming and labeling procedures, and (e) protocols for handling animals (Efstathiou 2018, 2019). Building on ethnographic research by Dawn Coppin (2003) and Nöellie Vialles (1994), in the United States and France respectively, I propose that (a) Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) buildings, gestation, and farrowing crates; (b) rules for entering and exiting the slaughterhouse; (c) white slaughterhouse garments; (d) unique identification systems; and (e) “trapping” animals before stunning can all operate as technologies of effacement. Though developed to serve other manifest aims, like hygiene, expediency, or safety, these technologies operate to sustain routine, inviting one to look at animals as tokens of a known type while blocking encounters between humans and animals (and also among animals) as radically different, morally significant Others (Efstathiou 2018, 2019)
Complex systems modeling for supply and demand in health and social care
Get PDFThis paper introduces a major new cross-disciplinary research project that looks at the UK health and social care system, as part of an ambitious, broader initiative to apply methods from complexity science to a range of key global challenges. This particular project aims to develop new, integrated models for the supply and demand of both health and social care, in the context of the societal change brought about by migration, mobility and the ageing population. We discuss the background to the work, and the broad way in which we intend to leverage complexity science. This is made more specific with a brief discussion on existing demographic models, and some examples of model-building in progress. We conclude with a glimpse into the subtly difficult problems of fostering such innovative interdisciplinarity
Word Embeddings for the Software Engineering Domain
No full textA .bin file for a word2vec model pre-trained on 15GB of Stack Overflow posts.
For more details refer to the following paper:
Efstathiou, V., Chatzilenas, C., Spinellis, D., 2018. "Word Embeddings for the Software Engineering Domain". In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. ACM</p
The one-point PDF of the initial conditions of our local Universe from the IRAS PSC redshift catalogue
Get PDFThe algorithm ZTRACE of Monaco & Efstathiou is applied to the IRAS PSCz catalogue to reconstruct the initial conditions of our local Universe with a resolution down to similar to5 h(-1) Mpc. The one-point probability distribution function (PDF) of the reconstructed initial conditions is consistent with the assumptions that: (i) IRAS galaxies trace mass on scales of similar to5 h(-1) Mpc and (ii) the statistics of the primordial density fluctuations are Gaussian. We use simulated PSCz catalogues, constructed from N-body simulations with Gaussian initial conditions, to show that local non-linear bias can cause the recovered initial PDF (assuming no bias) to be non-Gaussian. However, for plausible bias models, the distortions of the recovered PDF would be difficult to detect using the volume finely sampled by the PSCz catalogue. So, for Gaussian initial conditions, a range of bias models remain compatible with our PSCz reconstruction results
NEW QUALITATIVE FEATURES IN INTRAMOLECULAR DYNAMICS: SIMPLE EXAMPLES
Get PDFAuthor Institution: Universite du Littoral, UMR 8101 du CNRS, 59140; Dunkerque France; Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen 9747 AC, The NetherlandsMany simple quantum atomic or molecular systems possess several mutually commuting (exactly or approximately) observables (energy, angular momentum, ...). We will demonstrate that the patterns formed by joint spectra of mutually commuting operators show several specific qualitative features associated with bifurcations, monodromy, etc. Generic modifications of such patterns under the variation of one or several external parameters as well as their relation to the symmetry of the system will be discussed. As concrete systems, we will use the examples of hydrogen atom in the presence of small static electric and magnetic field, vibrational structure of triatomic linear molecules with Fermi resonance and small detuning (CO, and CS like molecules), rovibrational structure of tetrahedral molecules (such as methane or silane). Different patterns in the joint spectra of commuting operators (integrals of motion) are related to different dynamical regimes of the corresponding classical systems and to the presence of singularities of classical fibrations defined by the integrable approximations to these systems. In quantum analog systems, such singularities manifest themselves as \emph{defects of regular lattices\/}. The difference between the standard defects used in solid state physics (dislocations, disclinations, vacancies) and defects which appear in the joint spectra due to the presence of monodromy will be explained. K. Efstathiou, D. Sadovskii, B. Zhilinskii. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, submitted. R. Cushman, H. R. Dullin, A. Giacobbe, D. D. Holm, M. Joyeux, P. Lynch, D.A. Sadovskii, B. Zhilinskii. Phys. Rev. Lett., 93 024302-1-4 (2004) K. Efstathiou, D.A. Sadovskii and B.I. Zhilinskii. SIADS, 3, 261-351 (2004)
Source Code Embeddings
No full text<p>A set of six pretrained fastText models for semantic representations of source code. </p>
<p>Each of the models has been trained on high-quality GitHub repositories where the primary language is one of Java, Python, C++, C#, C, PHP. For collecting training data 13.144 repositories were cloned, 2.402.790.348 lines of code were read out of 944,467,560 files and preprocessed, to finally produce a total of 944.467.560 tokens of clean training data. </p>
<p>For further details refer to the following paper: </p>
<p>Efstathiou, V., Spinellis, D., 2019. "Semantic Source Code Models Using Identifier Embeddings". In <em>16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories: Data Showcase Track. MSR'19. </em></p>
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Models of hierarchical: galaxy formation
Get PDFA semi-analytic galaxy formation model, N-body GALFORM, is developed which uses outputs from an N-body simulation to follow the merger histories of dark matter halos and treats baryonic processes using the semi-analytic model of Cole et al. We find that, apart from limited mass resolution, the only significant differences between this model and the Monte-Carlo based model of Cole et al. are due to known inaccuracies in the distribution of halo progenitor masses in the Monte-Carlo method. N-body GALFORM is used to compare Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and semi-analytic calculations of radiative cooling in the absence of star formation. We consider two cases: firstly, a simulation of a representative volume of the Universe with relatively poor mass resolution, and, secondly, a high resolution simulation of the formation of a single galaxy. We find good agreement between the models in terms of the mass of gas which cools in each halo, the masses of individual galaxies, and the spatial distribution of the galaxies. The semi-analytic model is then compared with a realistic, high-resolution galaxy simulation which includes prescriptions for star formation and feedback. A semi-analytic model without feedback is found to best reproduce the masses of the simulated galaxy and its progenitors. This model is used to populate a large volume with semi-analytic galaxies. The resulting luminosity function has an order of magnitude too many galaxies at high and low luminosities. We conclude that, while SPH and semi-analytic cooling calculations are largely consistent and therefore likely to be reasonably reliable, current numerical models of galaxy formation still contain major uncertainties due to the treatment of feedback, which will lead them to predict very different galaxy populations. Further work is required to find simulation algorithms which can simultaneously produce realistic individual galaxies and a population with reasonable statistical properties
Mitomycin C in highly myopic eyes - Author reply
No full textOphthalmology. 2005 Feb;112(2):208-18; discussion 219.
Mitomycin C modulation of corneal wound healing after photorefractive keratectomy in highly myopic eyes.
Gambato C, Ghirlando A, Moretto E, Busato F, Midena E.
SourceRefractive Surgery Service and Antimetabolite Therapy Research Unit, Department of Ophthalmology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
Abstract
PURPOSE: To evaluate the role of topical mitomycin C in corneal wound healing (CWH) after photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) in highly myopic eyes.
DESIGN: Prospective, double-masked, randomized clinical trial.
PARTICIPANTS: Seventy-two eyes of 36 patients affected by high (>7 diopters) myopia.
METHODS: In each patient, one eye was randomly assigned to PRK with intraoperative topical 0.02% mitomycin C application, and the fellow eye was treated with a placebo. Postoperatively, mitomycin C-treated eyes received artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months), whereas the fellow eye was treated with fluorometholone sodium 2% and artificial tears (3 times daily, tapered in 3 months).
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA) and best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), contrast sensitivity, manifest refraction, and biomicroscopy. Contrast sensitivity was determined using the Pelli-Robson chart. Corneal confocal microscopy documented CWH.
RESULTS: Mean follow-up was 18 months (range, 12-36). No side effects or toxic effects were documented. At 12-month follow-up examination, UCVAs (logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution) were 0.4+/-0.48 and 0.5+/-0.53 (P = .03) in mitomycin C-treated eyes and corticosteroid-treated eyes, respectively. At 1 year, corneal haze developed in 20% of corticosteroid-treated eyes, versus 0% of mitomycin C-treated eyes. At 12, 24, and 36 months, corneal confocal microscopy showed activated keratocytes and extracellular matrix significantly more evident in untreated eyes (Ps = 0.004, 0.024, and 0.046, respectively).
CONCLUSION: Topical intraoperative application of 0.02% mitomycin C can reduce haze formation in highly myopic eyes undergoing PRK.
Comment in
Ophthalmology. 2006 Feb;113(2):357; author reply 357-8
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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