Zero-shot large vision-language model prompting for automated bone identification in paleoradiology x-ray archives
Owen Dong, Lily Gao, Manish Kota
et al.
Paleoradiology, the use of modern imaging technologies to study archaeological and anthropological remains, offers new windows on millennial scale patterns of human health. Unfortunately, the radiographs collected during field campaigns are heterogeneous: bones are disarticulated, positioning is ad hoc, and laterality markers are often absent. Additionally, factors such as age at death, age of bone, sex, and imaging equipment introduce high variability. Thus, content navigation, such as identifying a subset of images with a specific projection view, can be time consuming and difficult, making efficient triaging a bottleneck for expert analysis. We report a zero shot prompting strategy that leverages a state of the art Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) to automatically identify the main bone, projection view, and laterality in such images. Our pipeline converts raw DICOM files to bone windowed PNGs, submits them to the LVLM with a carefully engineered prompt, and receives structured JSON outputs, which are extracted and formatted onto a spreadsheet in preparation for validation. On a random sample of 100 images reviewed by an expert board certified paleoradiologist, the system achieved 92% main bone accuracy, 80% projection view accuracy, and 100% laterality accuracy, with low or medium confidence flags for ambiguous cases. These results suggest that LVLMs can substantially accelerate code word development for large paleoradiology datasets, allowing for efficient content navigation in future anthropology workflows.
Non-state actor perceptions of legitimacy and meaningful participation in international climate governance
Lisa Dellmuth, Maria-Therese Gustafsson, Suanne Mistel Segovia-Tzompa
Abstract There is a lively debate about the legitimacy of the international climate regime, as represented by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the quality of non-state actor participation in the regime. This commentary examines perceptions of involved non-state actors from 2021–2022 regarding their participation and regime legitimacy. The findings reveal no legitimacy crisis for the adaptation and mitigation regimes, but the surveyed NSAs are divided in their legitimacy beliefs. NSAs also express significant disappointment about their opportunities for participation.
Meteorology. Climatology, Environmental sciences
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models
Badr AlKhamissi, Muhammad ElNokrashy, Mai AlKhamissi
et al.
The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions -- firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.
Studying Morphological Variation: Exploring the Shape Space in Evolutionary Anthropology
Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Ingrid Daubechies
We present results of a long-term team collaboration of mathematicians and biologists. We focus on building a mathematical framework for the shape space constituted by a collection of homologous bones or teeth from many species. The biological application is to quantitative morphological understanding of the evolutionary history of primates in particular, and mammals more generally. Similar to the practice of biologists, we leverage the power of the whole collection for results that are more robust than can be obtained by only pairwise comparisons, using tools from differential geometry and machine learning. This paper concentrates on the mathematical framework. We review methods for comparing anatomical surfaces, discuss the problem of registration and alignment, and address the computation of different distances. Next, we cover broader questions related to cross-dataset landmark selection, shape segmentation, and shape classification analysis. This paper summarizes the work of many team members other than the authors; in this paper that unites (for the first time) all their results in one joint context, space restrictions prevent a full description of the mathematical details, which are thoroughly covered in the original articles. Although our application is to the study of anatomical surfaces, we believe our approach has much wider applicability.
Notes sur la dimension immunitaire des enclaves pétrolières
Nicolas Donner
This paper considers the ways of establishing oil enclaves in difficult environments and it focuses on procedures that aim to safeguard the extractive activity from external disturbance and/or hostility. First, in addressing the case of enclaves located in extreme environments (hostile to life), we show that the organization of enclaves is an important tool of their immunization: by producing an inclusive and autonomous space, an "architecture of vacuum "(Sloterdijk) allows to free the activity from the conditions and contingencies of the external environment. Secondly, we move to the case of enclaves established in environments that are inhabited and territorialized, where immunization procedures are enriched by defensive (fencing) and intrusive mechanisms (sustainable practices). Finally we discuss the emergence of an ethical paradigm that tangled in strategies that aim to ensure the continuity of extractive activities.
Long-term exposure to air pollution and incidence risk of various arrhythmias: A prospective cohort study
Lu Zhou, Qingli Zhang, Huihuan Luo
et al.
To investigate the association of long-term exposure to air pollution with incident arrhythmia from various causes, this prospective cohort study included 442,386 participants from the UK Biobank cohort. Residential annual average exposures at baseline were evaluated, including fine particles (PM2.5), coarse particles (PM2.5–10), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx). We further constructed a composite air pollution score (APS) to evaluate the concomitant exposure to these four pollutants. The associations of air pollutants with various arrhythmia subtypes were assessed utilizing the Cox proportional hazards model, and the hazard ratios (HRs) for incident arrhythmias were estimated. A total of 41,021 patients with incident arrhythmia were recorded. The HRs of overall arrhythmia associated with a 10 μg/m3 increment in PM2.5, PM2.5–10, NO2, and NOx were 1.26, 0.95, 1.03, and 1.02, respectively. The HR was 1.08 in the highest quintile of the APS compared to the lowest one. For cause-specific arrhythmias, the HRs per unit increment in APS were 1.45, 1.67, 1.51, 1.80, 2.63, and 4.66 for atrial fibrillation, atrioventricular block, ventricular fibrillation/tachycardia, intraventricular block, supraventricular tachycardia, and ventricular premature beats, respectively. Females, older individuals, overweight or obese individuals, and those with low education attainment, low income, or cardiometabolic morbidities had higher HRs associated with pollutants. Long-term exposure to air pollution is linked to increased incidence risks of atrial and ventricular arrhythmias. More focus should be shifted to the impact of air pollution on other arrhythmias besides atrial fibrillation.
Ecology, Environmental sciences
Le recyclage des coquillages fossiles dans l’espace sénégambien : histoire et archéologie
Michel Waly DIOUF
Cet article examine la réutilisation des coquillages fossiles et décrit en même temps les anomalies ou les déformations observées sur les individus. La démarche adoptée repose en effet sur une combinaison de plusieurs activités allant de la recherche documentaire à l’examen du mobilier coquillier, en passant par les enquêtes ethnographiques, la prospection et les fouilles archéologiques. Nos fouilles effectuées sur le site de Balloum, près du village de Moundé (basSaloum) ont mis au jour des spécimens coquilliers déformés ou réutilisés le plus souvent en des objets de parures ou d’ustensiles. Mots-clés : ,
Anthropology, Sociology (General)
The Batch Artifact Scanning Protocol: A new method using computed tomography (CT) to rapidly create three-dimensional models of objects from large collections en masse
Katrina Yezzi-Woodley, Jeff Calder, Mckenzie Sweno
et al.
Within anthropology, the use of three-dimensional (3D) imaging has become increasingly common and widespread since it broadens the available avenues for addressing a wide range of key anthropological issues. The ease with which 3D models can be generated and shared has major impact on research, cultural heritage, education, science communication, and public engagement, as well as contributing to the preservation of the physical specimens and archiving collections in widely accessible data bases. Current scanning protocols have the ability to create the required research quality 3D models; however, they tend to be time and labor intensive and not practical when working with large collections. Here we describe a streamlined Batch Artifact Scanning Protocol to rapidly create 3D models using a medical CT scanner. While this method can be used on a variety of material types, we have, for specificity, applied our protocol to a large collection of experimentally broken ungulate limb bones. By employing the Batch Artifact Scanning Protocol, we were able to efficiently create 3D models of 2,474 bone fragments at a rate of less than 4 minutes per specimen.
TOURIST SATISFACTION DURING THE PANDEMIC: AN ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF MEASURES TO PREVENT COVID-19 IN A MEDITERRANEAN COASTAL DESTINATION
Indrajeet MALLICK, Daniel MIRAVET, Aaron GUTIÉRREZ
The impact of the COVID-19 on tourist satisfaction is a particular relevant issue, due to the role that elements such as the prevention measures implemented at the destination might play. For this reason, this article examines tourist satisfaction during the peak tourist season of 2020 in a mature coastal destination in Catalonia in relation to safety and prevention measures imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We use explanatory factor analysis and partial least squares path modelling for comparing the determinants of tourist satisfaction prior and during the pandemic based on surveys conducted in 2019 (N = 1556) and 2020 (N = 2220). The results suggest that the determinants of overall tourist satisfaction in 2019 remained significant in 2020. Moreover, although tourists especially appreciated feeling safe in 2020, our results suggest that such a perception was unrelated to measures to prevent COVID-19. The paper raises concerns towards the management of situations such as the pandemic in tourist destinations, as a proper balance must be found between the need of making visitors feel safe, and avoiding measures that can be felt as invasive or annoying, hampering the tourist experience.
Geography. Anthropology. Recreation, Geography (General)
General-purpose cooperativeness and altruism in humans: elements of the mathematical framework for the Interdependence Hypothesis
Misha Perepelitsa
We propose a decision-making model for joint intentionality by interpreting it as group-mindedness at the microlevel. We apply this model to give a formal justification of the first part of the Interdependence Hypothesis due to Tomasello et al. [Current Anthropology, 2012] which asserts that the emergence of joint intentionality evolved due to the challenges of difficult collaborative foraging practices among early humans, and that its evolution led to robust collaboration and some form of altruism. In another application of the microlevel group-mindedness we consider the problem of establishing cooperation in high-risk-of-defection strategic conflicts and we show that the emergence of cooperation in such situations can be explained in the context of cultural group selection as the result of adaptive learning.
Distribution-free changepoint detection tests based on the breaking of records
Jorge Castillo-Mateo
The analysis of record-breaking events is of interest in fields such as climatology, hydrology or anthropology. In connection with the record occurrence, we propose three distribution-free statistics for the changepoint detection problem. They are CUSUM-type statistics based on the upper and/or lower record indicators observed in a series. Using a version of the functional central limit theorem, we show that the CUSUM-type statistics are asymptotically Kolmogorov distributed. The main results under the null hypothesis are based on series of independent and identically distributed random variables, but a statistic to deal with series with seasonal component and serial correlation is also proposed. A Monte Carlo study of size, power and changepoint estimate has been performed. Finally, the methods are illustrated by analyzing the time series of temperatures at Madrid, Spain. The R package $\texttt{RecordTest}$ publicly available on CRAN implements the proposed methods.
Drought and Water Scarcity Management Policy in England and Wales—Current Failings and the Potential of Civic Innovation
Kevin Grecksch, Catharina Landström
Drought management in England and Wales takes place in a narrow, confined governance space. Assessed against current literature on drought management, England and Wales show little innovativeness and little actual willingness to change. We ask how drought and water scarcity management is currently done, who is involved (or not) and, foremost, what are the current problems and deficiencies with current English and Welsh drought and water scarcity management that require attention. We are also interested in the question of what can be done to improve drought and water scarcity management in England and Wales. This research therefore explores how we can create a continuous relationship between the different actors contributing different levels of knowledge and we plead to widen the drought governance space in order to face the current and future water governance challenges. First, we present an empirically based critique of current drought and water scarcity management in England and Wales, highlighting the contrast between available drought and water scarcity management options and what is currently applied in England and Wales. Second, we present and introduce Environmental Competency Groups, a methodology aiming to bring local residents’ experience-based knowledge of water management in relation to particular catchments to bear on the generation of scientific knowledge. It has been successfully trialed in relation to both droughts and flooding in England and Wales. We argue that this is a successful way to bring together people with different perspectives and knowledge in order to overcome the deficiencies of current drought and water scarcity management in England and Wales.
Detecting the dominant contributions of runoff variance across the source region of the Yellow River using a new decomposition framework
Jingkai Xie, Yue-Ping Xu, Yuxue Guo
et al.
Quantifying the contributions of climatic variables to runoff variance is still a great challenge to water resource management. This study adopted an extended Budyko framework to investigate the effects of terrestrial water storage changes (ΔS) on runoff variance across the source region of the Yellow River, China, during the period of 2003–2014. A new decomposition framework based on the extended Budyko framework was proposed to effectively quantify the contributions of different climatic variables including precipitation, PET and ΔS to runoff variance. The results demonstrated that the extended Budyko framework showed a better performance in presenting the water and energy balance than the original Budyko framework, especially at fine time scales. Meanwhile, the variance in runoff estimated by the new decomposition framework was close to that of runoff observations, indicating that this framework can effectively capture the variation in runoff during 2003–2014. It was also found that precipitation was the most important factor that contributed to runoff changes, while PET made a slightly smaller contribution compared to precipitation. Notably, the results also emphasized the important effects of ΔS on runoff variance at fine time scales, which was useful to better understand the interactions between atmospheric and hydrological processes for regions. HIGHLIGHTS
A new decomposition framework was proposed to effectively quantify the contributions of different climatic variables to runoff variance.;
Precipitation was the most important factor that contributed to runoff changes, while PET made a slightly smaller contribution compared to precipitation.;
The important effects of ΔS on runoff variance at fine time scales can not be neglected.;
River, lake, and water-supply engineering (General), Physical geography
['FRACTURE ANALYSIS AND RESERVOIR POTENTIAL OF EXPOSED EOCENE SUCCESSIONS ALONG KOHAT-ORAKZAI TRANSACT KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA, NW PAKISTAN']
Muhammad Yaseen, Shahid Ali Shah, Junaid Khan
et al.
Special types of environment, Environmental sciences
Analyse des stratégies territoriales multi-niveaux au sein du « Collectif 5C », un réseau wallon de coopératives alimentaires
Florence Lanzi, Julien Noel, Kevin Maréchal
Our empirical study is based on the qualitative analysis of a Collective of cooperatives engaged in proximity-based food systems in Belgium. By comparing the territorial strategies of three member-cooperatives, we underline the diversity of spatial and organizational forms coexisting within the Collective “5C”. We also show that this diversity is not simply needed in order to answer the variety of context faced by coops within-territory; but it also represents opportunities for strategies between-territories. Which in turn could benefit the relocalization and reconnexion project hold in each cooperative. Indeed, by collaborating between organizations situated in cities and countryside areas, they could overcome some of their internal obstacles that often leads to trade-offs between the alternative dimension of the project and its economic viability. We then point to the crucial role played by meta-organizations as the “Collective 5C” for the coordination and regulation of inter-territorial relations.
Mechanical properties and constitutive analyses of basalt fiber crumb rubber mortars in soft rock roadways
Wei-Guo Qiao, Pershin Vladimir, Jun-Ling Qin
et al.
Uniaxial compressive stress-strain curves of several groups of basalt fiber crumb rubber mortars (BF-CRM) with different contents are tested. By comparing with the GZH model, the improved values of the parameters of the BF-CRM constitutive model based on the GZH model are obtained. Then, taking the supporting scheme of main substation of the mine as the background, using FLAC3D to simulate the roadway support, using BF-CRM to replace the ordinary mortars in the original support, and combining with the triaxial compression test of different confining pressure, the application effect of BF-CRM in roadways support is studied and analyzed.
POSTSOCIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF CITIES IN THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA - A CASE STUDY OF NOVI SAD AND PETROVARADIN
Milka Bubalo Živković, Tamara Lukić, Bojan Đerčan
Novi Sad and Petrovaradin, as two inseparable entities, have undergone large urban changes in the latest decades. Huge
transformations in morphological features and spatial structure of Novi Sad occurred in the period from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the end of the second decade of the 21st century. The transformation of Petrovaradin followed at a slower
pace at first but later on it intensified. The paper data rely on General Urban Plans of Novi Sad from the years 1985, 2000 and 2006. The comparative method, field research and analysis were applied to identify the parts of the city which underwent the largest transformation processes. Certain changes in the structure of street networks, changes in the inner physiognomy of the settlement, as well as disruption of architectural balance have been recognized. The direction of urban transformations has been identified by the analysis of social changes. Also, the present and potential problems were pointed out including the
improvements which the inhabitants gained due to urban transformations of Novi Sad and Petrovaradin. It has been
estimated that urban transformation in Novi Sad led to disruption of architectural style in certain parts of the city by
erecting modern buildings which do not integrate into the setting of architecture from earlier periods neither with their exterior nor with the materials used. Contemporary building structures occupy larger areas of municipal building land, the number of apartments per unit area increases, the need for parking spaces also increases and green areas are reduced in the city.
JOG volume 67 issue 266 Cover and Back matter
Environmental sciences, Meteorology. Climatology
Cross-Cultural Similarity Features for Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning of Pragmatically Motivated Tasks
Jimin Sun, Hwijeen Ahn, Chan Young Park
et al.
Much work in cross-lingual transfer learning explored how to select better transfer languages for multilingual tasks, primarily focusing on typological and genealogical similarities between languages. We hypothesize that these measures of linguistic proximity are not enough when working with pragmatically-motivated tasks, such as sentiment analysis. As an alternative, we introduce three linguistic features that capture cross-cultural similarities that manifest in linguistic patterns and quantify distinct aspects of language pragmatics: language context-level, figurative language, and the lexification of emotion concepts. Our analyses show that the proposed pragmatic features do capture cross-cultural similarities and align well with existing work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. We further corroborate the effectiveness of pragmatically-driven transfer in the downstream task of choosing transfer languages for cross-lingual sentiment analysis.
Effects of match period and playing position on the individual and collective dynamics in professional soccer: a case study
Gibson Moreira Praça, André Gustavo Pereira de Andrade, Sarah da Glória Teles Bredt
et al.
This study aimed to compare the width, the length, the length per width ratio, and the stretch index between the first and the second halves in official soccer matches, and to compare the spatial exploration index between players from different positions. Seventeen professional soccer players from a Brazilian club participated in the study and were monitored during six official matches by a GPS device. Collective positional data were compared between the two halves using a paired t-test, while the spatial exploration index was compared between the playing positions and within the halves by a mixed two-way ANOVA. The results revealed no differences between the two halves for the collective variables. The highest values of spatial exploration index were reported for central midfielders and wing forwards. We conclude that the tactical behavior of professional soccer players is position-dependent, and midfielders are the most exploratory players on the pitch.
Sports, Medicine (General)