Search

Campylobacter is a human food-borne pathogen frequently associated with poultry and poultry products and can be found in high numbers within the gut contents of colonized broilers. The number of Campylobacter on broiler carcasses increases markedly during automated defeathering as rubber picker fingers press on the abdomen and can force gut contents out of the cloaca. One method to prevent this increase is to plug the cloaca and prevent escape of gut contents. For a plug to be effective, it must resist expulsion during picking. In the current work, we test shredded sponge or paper as a means to plug broiler carcass cloacae during automated feather removal. Broiler carcass cloacae were plugged before scalding and carcasses were sampled to determine the bacterial numbers present on breast skin after scalding (before feather picking) and again after feather picking. Neither 50 cc of shredded paper nor 25 cc of shredded sponge was effective as a cloacal plug. However, a plug made of 50 cc shredded sponge material was effective to occlude broiler carcass vents during automated defeathering. Significantly fewer Campylobacter cells were detected on the breast skin of post pick carcasses plugged with 50 mL of shredded sponge than on post pick unplugged control carcasses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly thought that unconscious processes cannot produce actions deserving praise or blame. I present a thought experiment designed to generate a contradicting intuition: at least in this case, we do give credit for the product of an unconscious process. The target is creativity. Many instances of creative thought begin with a step that unconsciously generates a new idea by combining existing ideas. The resulting ideas are selected and developed by later processing. This first step could be replaced with a simple machine that randomly pairs concepts. Now, imagine a philosopher, Liberty, who gets all of his paper ideas from this machine. Compare him to another philosopher, Libertad, who comes up with all the same papers using her own mind. If you share the intuition that Liberty's work deserves less credit for creativity, you are giving credit for the product of an unconscious process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces and studies jumping pure grammars, which are conceptualized just like classical pure grammars except that during the applications of their productions, they can jump over symbols in either direction within the rewritten strings. The paper compares the generative power of jumping pure grammars with that of classical pure grammars while distinguishing between their versions with and without erasing productions. Apart from sequential versions, the paper makes an analogical study in terms of parallel versions of jumping pure grammars represented by 0L grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the comparative literature on divorce by theorizing how international institutions and norms influence societal divorce rates. Drawing on developmental idealism and world society theory, the paper argues that global institutions legitimize cultural principles such as individualism, human rights, and gender equality, which reshape "modern" understandings of marriage and family relations. Formal international institutions and treaties do not explicitly proclaim or codify the right to divorce, but we suggest that new norms regarding divorce emerge from the "penumbras" of world culture and diffuse globally. Panel regression models covering 84 countries between 1970 and 2008 find a strong association between global cultural influence and divorce rates, controlling for other factors. Results highlight the effects of world society on the private lives of individuals, and suggest that world society affects a wider set of outcomes than the conventional literature would predict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new unreliable failure detector, called the Impact failure detector (FD), that, contrarily to the majority of traditional FDs, outputs a trust level value which expresses the degree of confidence in the system. An impact factor is assigned to each process and the trust level is equal to the sum of the impact factors of the processes not suspected of failure. Moreover, a threshold parameter defines a lower bound value for the trust level, over which the confidence in the system is ensured. In particular, we defined a flexibility property that denotes the capacity of the Impact FD to tolerate a certain margin of failures or false suspicions, i.e. its capacity of considering different sets of responses that lead the system to trusted states. The Impact FD is suitable for systems that present node redundancy, heterogeneity of nodes, clustering feature and allow a margin of failures which does not degrade the confidence in the system. The paper also includes a timer-based distributed algorithm which implements an Impact FD, as well as its proof of correctness, for systems whose links are lossy asynchronous or for those whose all (or some) links are eventually timely. Performance evaluation results, based on PlanetLab (Planetlab. http://www.planet-lab.org. 'Online. Access date: 16 September 2016') traces, confirm the degree of flexible applicability of our FD and that, due to the accepted margin of failure, both failures and false suspicions are more tolerated when compared to traditional unreliable FDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the global dynamics of an age-structured human immunodeficiency virus infection model which incorporates a logistic growth term for the target cells and antiretroviral therapy. We perform some rigourous analyses for the model, including presenting an explicit formula for the reproductive number of the model, addressing the persistence of the solution semi-flow and the existence of a global attractor. Based on these analyses we establish some results on stability and instability for the system. The existence of Hopf bifurcation is also obtained around the positive equilibrium. Finally, some numerical examples are provided to illustrate our obtained results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alasdair MacIntyre is often interpreted as a wholesale skeptic of human rights. Although understandable, given his caustic criticism of rights discourse and theory, this misunderstanding overlooks his openness to subjective moral rights within the context of social practices. This paper traces the roots of his skepticism to the practical embodiment of rights discourse within liberal modernity. In MacIntye's view, the modes of claiming rights in practice presuppose the existence of natural rights, which commits the "individualist fallacy": the potential value of the right for the individual right-holder is presumed to ground an adequate reason to impose duties on others, without due consideration of the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter for common action. And, any proposed theory of human rights runs the risk of justifying that use and institutional embodiment of the human rights concept in practice. Despite his negativity, this paper interrogates the extent to which MacIntyre's thought remains open to justificatory foundations for some concept of "human rights" within the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Wigglesworth claims that syntactic criteria of theoretical equivalence are not appropriate for settling questions of equivalence between logical theories, since such criteria judge classical and intuitionistic logic to be equivalent; he concludes that logicians should use semantic criteria instead. However, this is an artefact of the particular syntactic criterion chosen, which is an implausible criterion of theoretical equivalence (even in the non-logical case). Correspondingly, there is nothing to suggest that a more plausible syntactic criterion should not be used to settle questions of equivalence between different logical theories; such a criterion (which may already be found in the literature) is exhibited and shown to judge classical and intuitionistic logic to be inequivalent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural realists might reasonably predict that foreign policy elites in countries like Japan and Australia would view China's economic and military rise as a potential threat and seek to balance against it. However, the actual policy behaviour of Japanese and Australian policy elites has been quite complex—pushing forward at times, hesitating at others and generally uncertain if an explicit counter-coalition against China through bilateral security cooperation is the right policy path. Why is this? This paper explains the puzzle by focusing on the perceptions of policy-makers regarding the risk of provoking China; entrapment with the other; and entrapment with the United States. The paper demonstrates how policy-makers' concerns regarding entrapment or abandonment related to their mutual US ally—as well as concerns about potentially provoking China—have had an instrumental effect on the degree to which Japan and Australia have strengthened their security commitments to each other. While the rise of China—and the relative decline of US power—has shaped the overall direction of Japan–Australia security ties, such structural imperatives are of course also complicated by how domestic actors think about the tactical aspects of understanding and surviving these structural features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time-to-event outcomes are often evaluated on the hazard scale, but interpreting hazards may be difficult. Recently in the causal inference literature concerns have been raised that hazards actually have a built-in selection bias that prevents simple causal interpretations. This is a problem even in randomized controlled trials, where hazard ratios have become a standard measure of treatment effects. Modelling on the hazard scale is nevertheless convenient, for example to adjust for covariates; using hazards for intermediate calculations may therefore be desirable. In this paper we present a generic method for transforming hazard estimates consistently to other scales at which these built-in selection biases are avoided. The method is based on differential equations and generalizes a well-known relation between the Nelson–Aalen and Kaplan–Meier estimators. Using the martingale central limit theorem, we show that covariances can be estimated consistently for a large class of estimators, thus allowing for rapid calculation of confidence intervals. Hence, given cumulative hazard estimates based on, for example, Aalen's additive hazard model, we can obtain many other parameters without much more effort. We give several examples and the associated estimators. Coverage and convergence speed are explored via simulations, and the results suggest that reliable estimates can be obtained in real-life scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sliced inverse regression is a popular tool for sufficient dimension reduction, which replaces covariates with a minimal set of their linear combinations without loss of information on the conditional distribution of the response given the covariates. The estimated linear combinations include all covariates, making results difficult to interpret and perhaps unnecessarily variable, particularly when the number of covariates is large. In this paper, we propose a convex formulation for fitting sparse sliced inverse regression in high dimensions. Our proposal estimates the subspace of the linear combinations of the covariates directly and performs variable selection simultaneously. We solve the resulting convex optimization problem via the linearized alternating direction methods of multiplier algorithm, and establish an upper bound on the subspace distance between the estimated and the true subspaces. Through numerical studies, we show that our proposal is able to identify the correct covariates in the high-dimensional setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Determinants of hypertension diagnosis and/or awareness and control among older adults are understudied in Albania, a former communist country in South Eastern Europe, which is experiencing rapid demographic, socioeconomic and epidemiological transition. This paper examines the association of individual, interpersonal, organizational and community factors with hypertension awareness and control among older adults in Tirana, the Albanian capital. Methods Using 2012 International Mobility in Aging Study data on older adults from Albania's capital city (n = 393) and the socioecological model as a conceptual framework, multinomial regression models identified factors associated with controlled, uncontrolled and undiagnosed hypertension. Results For hypertension, 17.3% participants had none, 23.4% were controlled, 48.4% were uncontrolled and 10.9% were undiagnosed/unaware. Compared to those with controlled hypertension, in multivariable models, a high level of friend support was negatively associated with uncontrolled (OR: 0.4; 95% CI: 0.2–0.9) and undiagnosed (OR: 0.2; 95% CI: 0.1–0.6) hypertension. A high level of perceived neighbourhood safety was negatively associated with uncontrolled (OR: 0.6; 95% CI: 0.3–1.0) and undiagnosed (OR: 0.4; 95% CI: 0.2–1.0) hypertension. Compared to those with no hypertension, children's social support was positively associated with uncontrolled (OR: 2.2; 95% CI: 1.1–4.3) and undiagnosed (OR: 3.6; 95% CI: 1.3–9.6) hypertension. Conclusion This study provides new insights about distinct risk factors for inadequate hypertension management in Albania. It highlights the importance of community-level factors (safety) and interpersonal factors (family and friend ties) to hypertension diagnosis/awareness and control, which may provide novel intervention opportunities for hypertension programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Some of the inappropriate use of antibiotics is related to the dispensing of antibiotics without a medical prescription.Objectives: To identify the intrinsic factors (socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes) and extrinsic factors (patient-related factors and health-system-related factors) related to the dispensing or selling of antibiotics without a medical prescription (DAwMP) by workers at retail pharmacies, when this should be done by prescription according to the legislation in force in each country.Methods: We conducted a search of the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases, with studies being required to meet the following inclusion criteria: (i) they were published in English or Spanish; (ii) the designated study objective was to explore factors linked to dispensing without prescription; (iii) the study population was defined as pharmacy workers.Results: Thirty-three papers were included. While pharmacy workers' socio-demographic characteristics had no influence on dispensing without prescription (only 2/9 of the quantitative studies that statistically evaluated gender showed a relationship, 2/7 with respect to age and 0/3 with respect to professional status), training (5/8), knowledge and attitudes did however prove significant (12/13). In the case of qualitative or mixed studies, patient-related factors [lack of knowledge (7/13), high demand (9/13), self-medication (6/13) and low socio-economic status (5/13)] and health-system-related factors [lack of rigour in antibiotic policies (7/13) and pressure from pharmacy owners (5/13)] are mentioned in relation to dispensing without a prescription.Conclusions: The results of this review appear to indicate that factors associated with dispensing without prescription are all modifiable. This may be of use when it comes to designing interventions aimed at curtailing this practice and thereby reducing antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance levels worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread proliferation of location-acquisition techniques and GPS -embedded mobile devices have resulted in the generation of geo-tagged data at unprecedented scale and have essentially enhanced the user experience in location-based services associated with social networks. Such location-based social networks allow people to record and share their location and are a rich source of information which can be exploited to study people's various attributes and characteristics to provide various Geo-Social (GS) services. In this paper, we propose two new types of queries called Top-k famous places T k F P and Socio-Spatial Skyline Query S S S Q query, which enrich the semantics of the conventional spatial queries by introducing a social relevance component. In addition, three approaches namely, (1) Social-First, (2) Spatial-First and (3) Hybrid are proposed to efficiently process T k F P and S S S Q queries. Finally, we conduct an extensive evaluation of the proposed schemes using real and synthetic datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that people migrate to seek better living opportunities, and migration experiences affect life conditions considerably upon return. Research focused on gendered perspectives has illustrated that men and women experience migration differently and that this difference clearly affects their living conditions upon return. However, few studies have sought to further examine the factors that determine the differences in men and women's perceptions upon return. This paper investigates the case of Ethiopian returnees by exploring three sets of independent variables: (1) the migration experience, (2) the return experience, and (3) the post-return conditions in Ethiopia. For this analysis, we utilize a subsample of returnees based on a household survey conducted among 1,284 households in five regions of Ethiopia in 2011. The subsample consists of 146 returnees and provides valuable information on the diverse experiences of returnees. Both the descriptive and logistic regression analyses demonstrate that: first, women have significantly worse perceptions of their living conditions upon return to Ethiopia than men do; second, migration experiences are the most significant variables that influence perceptions of living conditions upon return. Considering this latter result, we conclude by highlighting the importance of situating return experiences within the wider context of the entire migration cycle and recognizing the long-term effects of migration experiences that persist after return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile crowd sensing, also called crowd sensing over smartphones, has been an appealing paradigm for collecting sensory data over a vast urban area, due to advantages of low deployment cost and widely spatial coverage of geographically distributed smartphones or other smart devices. In the paper, we focus on a nontrivial problem of making an agreement between crowdsourcers and smartphone users to find the most efficient assignment of sensing tasks to smartphone users. However, there exist several technical challenges such as the incentive issue to encourage participation of smartphone users, preserving private information and distributed implementation in practice. Existing approaches usually have several limitations, e.g. the absence of proper incentives, the assumption of a centralized auctioneer or platform. To this end, we propose a distributed auction framework that explicitly models the interaction between crowdsourcers and smartphone users, achieving the optimal social profit and providing proper incentives to entities without disclosing their privacy as well. We demonstrate that the proposed distributed auction algorithm satisfies a lot of good properties, including optimality of social profit, computation efficiency, convergence, individual rationality through both solid theoretical analysis and extensive experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the access to a cloud computing environment is provided on-demand, offering transparent services to clients. Although the cloud allows an abstraction of the behavior of the infrastructure in the service providers (involving logical and physical resources), the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) fulfilment remain a challenge, because depending on the service demand and the system configuration, the providers may not be able to meet the clients requirements. In this way, mechanisms that take account of load balancing and resource provisioning algorithms to provide an efficient load distribution in the available resources are necessary. However, the studies in the literature do not effectively address the problem of the resource provisioning to meet clients requirements using optimization techniques, restricting the analysis to a limited set of objectives. This paper proposes algorithms to address the computational resource provisioning problem using optimization techniques on-the-fly. The techniques optimize the use of the resources available in the cloud infrastructure, aiming to fulfill the clients requirements defined in the SLAs, and ensuring the efficient use of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a fundamental disagreement about which norm regulates assertion. Proponents of factive accounts argue that only true propositions are assertable, whereas proponents of non-factive accounts insist that at least some false propositions are. Puzzlingly, both views are supported by equally plausible (but apparently incompatible) linguistic data. This paper delineates an alternative solution: to understand truth as the aim of assertion, and pair this view with a non-factive rule. The resulting account is able to explain all the relevant linguistic data, and finds independent support from general considerations about the differences between rules and aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the quality of human–computer interaction, it is important for computers to be able to identify the images quickly that can trigger pleasant feelings and create a good user experience. To reach this goal, the affective classification of images is an important prerequisite. Prior research into affective image classification used image features as categorical measurable signals. However, these techniques failed to provide a good correlation between the signal properties of image features and the expected affective experience of the viewer, leaving the research unable to bridge the affective gap. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a method of affective image classification based on information about the user's experience collected through measurable eye movements and electroencephalography (EEG) signals. This approach bridges the affective gap by establishing an association between experience information (measurable signal properties) and the expected affective experience of the viewer. First, we screened eye movement indexes and EEG indexes to provide an affective correlation index. Then we built an experience space based on participants' physiological data obtained using an eye tracker and EEG recorder simultaneously. Next, physiological experience data from the experience space were extracted, analyzed mathematically and normalized to obtain parametric physiological experience data. Using a multiple linear regression technique, we connected the participants' affective states and physiological experience data. We developed a quantitative mapping between the affective experience states and the sample images to acquire the classification of affective images. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed classification method, we conducted a study in which 16 abstract art paintings were classified as positive, negative or neutral based on subjects' physiological responses. The results showed that the proposed affective image classification method was accurate and successful in identifying images that can lead to a pleasurable experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly believed that human-centred design (HCD) approach is very beneficial to interactive systems development. However, not much is known about the state of HCD practice in developing countries, especially the sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the state of HCD practice in three Nigerian software companies. We used the interview technique to explore two key issues. First, the perception of humans as a component of sociotechnical systems, and second, how HCD process is being approached in software companies. A cross-case analysis of the three companies was performed and the usability maturity model-human-centredness scale was used to determine the state of maturity of the three companies. The outcomes of this study reveal that HCD practice is currently at the least stage of maturity in the three companies and user involvement is not practiced in the right manner. The outcomes of the study suggest the need for reflective HCD practice and localizing human–computer interaction approaches to contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been observed that converting scFv formatted antibodies to full-length IgG often associates with loss of affinity. We aim to address this issue in this paper by establishing an integrated affinity maturation method applying yeast display technology platform. To demonstrate that, we employed a human thrombopoietin receptor targeting antibody named 3D9 which was identified previously from a combinational antibody library in scFv-Fc fusion protein form. We have observed that significant potency loss happened when 3D9 was transformed to full-length IgG form. In this study, we tested whether the potency of the full-length IgG can be improved by affinity maturation of 3D9 using a modified Fab yeast display platform. An efficient CDR3 targeted mutagenesis strategy was designed for Fab library with pre-designed CDR diversity. Next generation sequencing was also used for evaluation of the enrichment process and investigation of sequence-function relationship of the antibody. A variant with improved affinity and higher potency was identified. The study demonstrates that the strategy we used here are efficient for optimizing affinity and activity of full-length IgGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing social expectation regarding the joint realisation of scientific and societal impact from publicly funded research. Achieving this goal involves facing important challenges, which affect individual researchers, research performing organisations, and the science governance system as a whole. This special section includes conceptual, methodological, and empirical papers that aim to contribute to the building of an improved appreciation of the factors and dynamics shaping the intertwined quest for scientific quality and societal impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a solar jet phenomenon associated with the C5.4 class flare on 2014 November 11. The data of the jet was provided by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) aboard Hinode, and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph and Domeless Solar Telescope (DST) at Hida Observatory, Kyoto University. These plentiful data enabled us to present this series of papers to discuss all the processes of the observed phenomena, including energy storage, event trigger, and energy release. In this paper, we focus on the energy release process of the observed jet, and mainly describe our spectral analysis on the Hα data of DST to investigate the internal structure of the Hα jet and its temporal evolution. This analysis reveals that in the physical quantity distributions of the Hα jet, such as line-of-sight velocity and optical thickness, there is a significant gradient in the direction crossing the jet. We interpret this internal structure as the consequence of the migration of the energy release site, based on the idea of ubiquitous reconnection. Moreover, by measuring the horizontal flow of the fine structures in the jet, we succeeded in deriving the three-dimensional velocity field and the line-of-sight acceleration field of the Hα jet. The analysis result indicates that part of the ejecta in the Hα jet experienced additional acceleration after it had been ejected from the lower atmosphere. This secondary acceleration was found to occur in the vicinity of the intersection between the trajectories of the Hα jet and the X-ray jet observed by Hinode/XRT. We propose that a fundamental cause of this phenomenon is magnetic reconnection involving the plasmoid in the observed jet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]