45 research outputs found
Ning Wang, Making a Market Economy; Yan Sun, Corruption and Market in Contemporary China
These two works shed light on the conditions under which, in the course of the last 25 years, the command economy has been dismantled and gradually replaced by a market system in China . Yan Sun, a professor of political science, is interested in corruption from a double perspective, both at the macro and the micro level. Ning Wang, a neo-institutionalist economist, asks how, thanks to the reforms, a region (Jingzhou, south of Hubei ) has been converted to pisciculture. Corruption is a crucia..
Long-term visual and treatment outcomes of whole-population pre-school visual screening (PSVS) in children:a longitudinal, retrospective, population-based cohort study
Background: This study reports the long-term visual and treatment outcomes in a whole-population, orthoptic-delivered pre-school visual screening (PSVS) programme in Scotland and further examines their associations with socioeconomic backgrounds and home circumstances.Methods: Retrospective case review was conducted on 430 children who failed PSVS. Outcome measures included best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), severity of amblyopia (mild, moderate and severe), binocular vision (BV) (normal, poor and none), ophthalmic diagnosis and treatment modalities. Parameters at discharge were compared to those at baseline and were measured against the Scottish index of multiple deprivation (SIMD) and Health plan indicator (HPI), which are indices of deprivation and status of home circumstances.Results: The proportion of children with amblyopia reduced from 92.3% (373/404) at baseline to 29.1% (106/364) at discharge (p < 0.001). Eighty percent (291/364) had good BV at discharge compared to 29.2% (118/404) at baseline (p < 0.001). Children from more socioeconomically deprived areas (OR 2.19, 95% CI 1.01-4.30, p = 0.003) or adverse family backgrounds (OR 3.94, 95% CI 1.99-7.74, p = 0.002) were more likely to attend poorly and/or become lost to follow-up. Children from worse home circumstances were five times more likely to have residual amblyopia (OR 5.37, 95% CI 3.29-10.07, p < 0.001) and three times more likely to have poor/no BV (OR 3.41, 95% CI 2.49-4.66, p < 0.001) than those from better home circumstances.Conclusions: Orthoptic-delivered PSVS is successful at screening and managing amblyopia. Children from homes requiring social care input are less likely to attend and are more likely to have poorer visual outcomes.</p
P-13 Steroid response in descemet’s membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK): A 7-year longitudinal study of 993 non-glaucomatous eyes
Trochleitis Without Imaging Abnormality
Trochleitis is an uncommon inflammation of the trochlea/peritrochlear region, and there are relatively few reports to guide management in the scientific literature. Clinically, there is characteristic pain and tenderness over the trochlea and pain on vertical ductions. Orbital imaging can show localised swelling and superior oblique inflammation. We report a case of trochleitis, diagnosed clinically, with no demonstrable radiological features, successfully managed by peritrochlear injection of dexamethasone/lidocaine
Neo-functionalization of a Teosinte branched 1 homologue mediates adaptations of upland rice
The rice orthologue of maize domestication gene Teosinte branched 1 (Tb1) affects tillering. But, unlike maize Tb1 gene, it was not selected during domestication. Here, we report that an OsTb1 duplicate gene (OsTb2) has been artificially selected during upland rice adaptation and that natural variation in OsTb2 is associated with tiller number. Interestingly, transgenic rice overexpressing this gene shows increased rather than decreased tillering, suggesting that OsTb2 gains a regulatory effect opposite to that of OsTb1 following duplication. Functional analyses suggest that the OsTb2 protein positively regulates tillering by interacting with the homologous OsTb1 protein and counteracts the inhibitory effect of OsTb1 on tillering. We further characterize two functional variations within OsTb2 that regulate protein function and gene expression, respectively. These results not only present an example of neo-functionalization that generates an opposite function following duplication but also suggest that the Tb1 homologue has been selected in upland rice
Author Profiling Tracks at FIRE
[EN] Benchmarking activities are vital for fostering research and addressing new challenging problems. During the last 10 years of the FIRE initiative we have been involved in the organization of more than ten tracks, with the aim of the creation of new resources in several languages that were made available to the research community. This allowed to compare the new several approaches on the same datasets. In this chapter we will focus on the description of three author profiling tracks, on their data creation as well as the results analysis.The work on the author profiling data in Arabic was made possible by NPRP Grant #9-175-1-033 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authorsRosso, P.; Rangel Pardo, FM. (2020). Author Profiling Tracks at FIRE. SN Computer Science. 1:1-11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-020-0073-1S1111Al Sukhni E, Alequr Q. 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Pan@fire: Overview of the cross-language !ndian text re-use detection competition. In: 2nd and 3th international workshops FIRE 2010 and 2011, multilingual information access in south Asian Languages, Springer, LNCS(7536); 2013. pp 59–70.Bensalem I, Boukhalfa I, Rosso P, Abouenour L, Darwish K, Chikhi S. Overview of the araplagdet pan@ fire2015 shared task on Arabic plagiarism detection. In: Notebook papers of FIRE 2015, FIRE-2015, Gandhinagar, India, December 4–6, CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, vol 1587; 2015. pp 111–122.Bishop-Clark C. Cognitive style, personality, and computer programming. Computers in human behavior, vol. 11–2. New York: Elsevier; 1995. p. 241–60.Castro D, Souza E, de Oliveira AL. Discriminating between brazilian and european portuguese national varieties on twitter texts. In: 5th Brazilian conference on intelligent systems (BRACIS); 2016. pp 265–270.Celli F, Polonio L. Relationships between personality and interactions in Facebook. 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India: Bangalore; 2014.Flores E, Rosso P, Moreno L, Villatoro-Tello E. Pan@ fire 2015: Overview of cl-soco track on the detection of cross-language source code re-use. In: Proceedings of the seventh forum for information retrieval evaluation (FIRE 2015), Gandhinagar, India; 2015. pp 4–6.Franco-Salvador M, Rangel F, Rosso P, Taule M, Marti M. Language variety identification using distributed representations of words and documents. Experimental IR meets multilinguality, multimodality, and interaction. Berlin: Springer; 2015. p. 28–40.Golbeck J, Robles C, Turner K. Predicting personality with social media. In: CHI’11 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, ACM; 2011. pp 253–262.Gupta P, Clough P, Rosso P, Stevenson M. Pan@fire: Overview of the cross-language Indian news story search (CLINSS) track. In: Notebook papers of FIRE 2012, FIRE-2012, Kolkata, India, December 17–19; 2012.Gupta P, Clough P, Rosso P, Stevenson M, Banchs R. Pan@fire: Overview of the cross-language Indian news story search (CLINSS) track. In: Notebook Papers of FIRE 2013, FIRE-2013, Delhi, India, December 4–6; 2013.Holmes J, Meyerhoff M. The handbook of language and gender. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. New York: Wiley; 2003.Huang C, Lee L. Contrastive approach towards text source classification based on top-bag-of-word similarity. In: In PACLIC; 2008. pp 404–410.Karimi Z, Baraani-Dastjerdi A, Ghasem-Aghaee N, Wagner S. Links between the personalities, styles and performance in computer programming. J Syst Softw. 2016;111:228–41.Koppel M, Argamon S, Shimoni AR. Automatically categorizing written texts by author gender. Lit Linguist Comput. 2002;17:4.Kosinski M, Bachrach Y, Kohli P, Stillwell D, Graepel T. Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks. New York: Springer; 2013. p. 1–24.Litvinova T, Litvinlova O, Zagorovskaya O, Seredin P, Sboev A, Romanchenko O. “ruspersonality”: a Russian corpus for authorship profiling and deception detection. In: Intelligence, social media and web (ISMW FRUCT), 2016 international FRUCT conference on, IEEE; 2016. pp 1–7.Litvinova T, Seredin P, Litvinova O, Zagorovskaya O, Sboev A, Gudovskih D, Moloshnikov I, Rybka R. Gender prediction for authors of Russian texts using regression and classification techniques. In: CDUD@ CLA; 2016. pp 44–53.Litvinova T, Gudovskikh D, Sboev A, Seredin P, Litvinova O, Pisarevskaya D, Rosso P. Author gender prediction in Russian social media texts. In: Conference on analysis of images, social networks, and texts, AIST-2017, IEEE; 2017. pp 1101–1106.Litvinova T, Rangel F, Rosso P, Seredin P, Litvinova O. Overview of the rusprofiling pan at fire track on cross-genre gender identification in Russian. In: Notebook papers of FIRE 2017, FIRE-2017, Bangalore, India, December 8–11, CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, vol 2036; 2017. pp 1–7.Lui M, Cook P. Classifying English documents by national dialect. In: Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop; 2013. pp 5–15.Maharjan S, Shrestha P, Solorio T, Hasan R. A straightforward author profiling approach in mapreduce. In: Advances in artificial intelligence. Iberamia; 2014. pp 95–107.Maier W, Gomez-Rodriguez C. Language variety identification in Spanish tweets. In: LT4CloseLang 2014; 2014.Mairesse F, Walker MA, Mehl MR, Moore RK. Using linguistic cues for the automatic recognition of personality in conversation and text. J Artif Intell Res. 2007;30–1:457–500.Malmasi S, Zampieri M, Ljubešić N, Nakov P, Ali A, Tiedemann J. Discriminating between similar languages and Arabic dialect identification: a report on the third DSL shared task. In: Proceedings of the third workshop on NLP for similar languages, varieties and dialects (VarDial3); 2016. pp 1–14.Maulana Siagian AHA, Aritsugi M. Dbms-ku approach for author profiling and deception detection in Arabic. In: Metha P, Rosso P, Majumder P, Mitra M (Eds) Working notes of the forum for information retrieval evaluation (FIRE 2019). CEUR workshop proceedings. CEUR-WS.org, Kolkata, India, December 12–15; 2019.Neuman Y, Cohen Y. A vectorial semantics approach to personality assessment. Sci Rep. 2014;4:4761.Oberlander J, Nowson S. Whose thumb is it anyway?: classifying author personality from weblog text. In: Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on main conference poster sessions, Association for Computational Linguistics; 2006. pp 627–634.Paruma-Pabón OH, González FA, Aponte J, Camargo JE, Restrepo-Calle F. Finding relationships between socio-technical aspects and personality traits by mining developer e-mails. In: Proceedings of the 9th international workshop on cooperative and human aspects of software engineering, ACM; 2016. pp 8–14.Pennebaker JW, Mehl MR, Niederhoffer KG. Psychological aspects of natural language use: our words, our selves. Annu Rev Psychol. 2003;54(1):547–77.Quercia D, Lambiotte R, Stillwell D, Kosinski M, Crowcroft J. The personality of popular Facebook users. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative Work, ACM; 2012. pp 955–964.Rangel F, Rosso P. On the multilingual and genre robustness of emographs for author profiling in social media. In: 6th international conference of CLEF on experimental IR meets multilinguality, multimodality, and interaction, Springer-Verlag, LNCS(9283); 2015. pp 274–280.Rangel F, Rosso P. On the impact of emotions on author profiling. Inf Process Manag. 2016;52(1):73–92.Rangel F, Rosso P. On the implications of the general data protection regulation on the organisation of evaluation tasks. 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Improving polymerase chain reaction diagnostic rates for herpes simplex keratitis: results of a pilot study.
BACKGROUND: Laboratory confirmation is crucial for diagnosis and management of herpes simplex virus (HSV) keratitis. However, the sensitivity of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in keratitis is low (25%) compared with that of mucocutaneous disease (75%). We developed an educational intervention aimed at improving the diagnostic yield of PCR.
METHODS: The medical records of keratitis cases seen at the emergency department of a London tertiary ophthalmic referral hospital over two distinct periods, before and after an educational program on swab technique, were reviewed retrospectively.
RESULTS: A total of 252 HSV cases were included. Increases in the laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of HSV-1 were observed, in both first presentations (11.1%-57.7%) and recurrent cases (20%-57.6%). The rate of positive HSV-1 PCR in eyes with an epithelial defect increased from 19% pre-intervention to 62% post intervention. Notably, 3% were positive for varicella zoster virus DNA, and there was a single case of Acanthamoeba keratitis.
CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that, with proper swabbing technique, PCR may be more sensitive than previously reported
The new age and indigenous spirituality: Searching for the sacred
This thesis examines the New Age spiritual movement in its relationship with Indigenous cultures. Indigenous spiritual traditions have been appropriated to support relevant New Age theories. It critiques New Age perceptions of Indigenous cultures as misinformed and argues this misinformation is proliferated through certain New Age practices. It argues that the New Age can achieve a sustaining, earth-based spiritual practice without resorting to the appropriation of Indigenous traditions. Neo-paganism holds many of the qualities that New Agers seek in Indigenous traditions and is a potential alternative avenue of spiritual solace to the appropriation of Indigenous culture. The embodiment of New Age goals can be understood within the context of environmental ethics philosophies. Alternative festivals that operate with a spiritual ethic are explored as evidence that the New Age can and in some areas, does operate in a positive, life-affirming manner. Importantly, the thesis argues that re-interpretation of Indigenous culture by the New Age is neither welcome nor necessary
Eesti erakondade ideoloogilised profiilid ning nende arvestamine valimisreklaamis
Ideological profiles of Estonian parties and their reflection in electoral advertisements
The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to analyse the ideological profiles of six Estonian
political parties belonging to the XI Composition of the Riigikogu and see how they were
reflected in electoral advertisements. This study is based on the example of the 2011 Estonian
parliamentary election campaign. First, it needed to be clarified how the parties themselves
see their profile and how it is described by independent experts. In order to do that, interviews
were conducted with independent political experts and the parties’ campaign coordinators. In
addition, the author studied the slogans in election ads and visual idiosyncrasies to see how
they reflected the ideological views of the party.
The ideological views of political parties can be positioned on the basis of certain
characteristics on a left-right ideological spectrum, which enables to identify the ideological
profile of a party. The main difference between left- and right-wing parties is that the first are
in favour of the state playing a greater role in organising people’s lives while the latter prefer
to minimize its influence.
There are several characteristics to make a distinction between left- and right-wing
ideological profiles and some party profiles encompass features from both directions. On the
basis of the study, it could be maintained that the parties of the previous (XI) Composition of
the Riigikogu are more or less located around the centre of the political continuum. None of
them is extremely radical; however, the ideological profiles of a number of parties might also
entail characteristics rather far from the centre.
The wider purpose of the current empirical study was to understand and describe the political
landscape in Estonia, which was also achieved. The ideological characteristics of the political
parties were identified along with their relation to the development of the parties’ ideological
profiles.
Furthermore, it could be concluded from the study that ideological standpoints also occur in
campaign advertising, since the slogans present the electorate with the parties’ political
postures, which in a broader perspective are associated with their ideological views as a
system of certain ideas, rules and values. Nevertheless, whether these ideological profiles as
understood by the voters coincide with the parties’ own perception of themselves is an issue
in itself.
The interviews conducted with independent political experts shed light to the fact that the
marketing side of the election campaigns is strongly associated with the way the parties
represent their ideological standpoints. In fact, political parties are not always able to act
according to the ideological views presented in the campaigns. For example, a people’s party,
whose main aim is to obtain as many votes as possible, cannot express very radical and
controversial beliefs in public without risking to lose votes, even though these beliefs may be
in accordance with the ideology that the party is supposed to represent.
The current situation in the society also has an influence on the parties’ ideological profiles.
According to campaign coordinators, the initial ideological views form the core in developing
the campaign, but this is not the main and only feature. The content of the campaign and
election ads is to a great extent influenced by on-going processes in the society and by the
target market. These are the three parameters shaping the parties’ ideological profile when
creating an election campaign. For example, the election campaign coordinator of The
Estonian Reform Party admitted that compared to the time before the economic crisis the
right-wing profile of the party concerning social issues had indeed shifted a little to the left
before the previous elections.
It is difficult to say whether people understand on the basis of political advertising the exact
ideological view they support in the elections. While the parties’ political experts believe that
election ads give a true account of their core ideology, the current study allows us to conclude
that the advertising of some parties is more elaborate on those terms while in the case of
others ideological profiles remain vaguer. In addition, each party holds certain unconditional
convictions. For example, The Estonian Reform Party, presenting itself as a liberal party,
prioritizes fostering free market economy and the neo-liberal belief in self-regulating markets.
The unswerving course of the Union of Pro Patria and Respublica is promoting nationalconservative
views, where every political standpoint is explained through the aim of
maintaining the Estonian nation.
The slogans of parties very often entail characteristics from both sides of the political
spectrum. However, the current study indicates that in the decision-making process, voters
tend to be leaded by the core ideological characteristics as identified by the parties themselves,
and the slight ideological shifts conditioned by the current situation tend to be ignored. The
main reason for this is that Estonian political culture is in the ideological phase: the keywords
of ideologies and values of the society have already been developed; nevertheless, the
influence of the Soviet past on Estonian political culture is still evident. It is natural that party profiles cannot yet have reached the critical-rational phase, be clear and unambiguous and
take long-term political practices into account.
In conclusion, the present bachelor thesis helps to dissect the ideological profiles of the key
parties in the political landscape of Estonia and understand the role of those profiles in
election advertising. Consequently, the author is of the opinion that initially established goals
have been achieved.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4054526~S1*es
