This paper analyzes the effective field theory perspective on modern physics through the lens of the quantum theory of gravitational interaction. The historical part argues that the search for a theory of quantum gravity stimulated the change in outlook that characterizes the modern approach to the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity. We present some landmarks covering a long period, i.e., from the beginning of the 1930s until 1994, when, according to Steven Weinberg, the modern bottom-up approach to General Relativity began. Starting from the first attempt to apply the quantum field theory techniques to perturbatively quantize Einstein's theory, we explore its developments and interaction with the top-down approach encoded by String Theory. In the last part of the paper, we focus on this last approach to describe the relationship between our modern understanding of String Theory and Effective Field Theory in today's panorama. To this end, the non-historical part briefly explains the modern concepts of moduli stabilization and Swampland to understand another change in focus that explains the present framework where some string theorists move.
N. I. Briko, V. A. Korshunov, Ja. V. Lobzin
et al.
Pneumococcal infection remains a significant global health problem, and vaccination is the main measure for its prevention. To date, the period of use of pneumococcal conjugated polysaccharide vaccines in Russia exceeds 14 years, and 13-valent conjugated polysaccharide pneumococcal vaccine (PCV13) - more than 10 years. During this time, extensive experience has been accumulated in the use of this type of vaccines, and many studies have been carried out to evaluate their effectiveness and safety.The purpose of this review is to summarize the experience of using PCV13 in Russian Federation with an assessment of its epidemiological and clinical effectiveness. A search was made for scientific publications devoted to the study of the epidemiological efficacy, the safety as well as cost-effectiveness of PCV13 use in Russian Federation. The review included original studies published in Russian journals. The results of the studies carried out indicate the efficacy and safety of PCV13 for both adults and children. The effectiveness of immunization of children at risk (premature, suffering from congenital pathology, having chronic diseases and often ill) was demonstrated, the need and safety of the timely start of vaccination (from 2 months of age) of newborns was shown, the possibility of its combination with immunization against other infections within the framework of the national vaccination schedule, the importance of following the recommended vaccination schedule in accordance with the age of the child. The effectiveness of vaccination of adults suffering from chronic diseases has been shown both in terms of preventing the aggravation of the course of the underlying pathology and reducing the risk of pneumonia. Positive experience has been gained in immunizing adults from occupational risk groups - medical workers, conscripts and persons exposed to a harmful production factor and having occupational lung diseases. The conducted studies have shown a high cost-effectiveness of PCV13 vaccination, however, with any changes in price and epidemiological parameters, it is necessary to clarify the economic feasibility of vaccination under the changed conditions. Taking into account the positive experience gained in immunization, it seems appropriate to further maintain a high level of vaccination coverage of the child population, expanding risk groups among the adult population subject to vaccination against pneumococcal infection within the framework of the National Immunization Schedule, taking into account its epidemiological, clinical and economic efficiency.
N. M. Kolyasnikova, M. G. Toporkova, J. P. Sanchez-Pimentel
et al.
Relevance. The Sverdlovsk region is a highly endemic territory for infections transmitted by ixodic ticks. The possibilities of laboratory diagnostics of tick–borne infections in the routine practice of a clinician in the region today are limited mainly by testing blood serum for antibodies to the tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBE virus) and Lyme disease (LD) pathogens – Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato complex, therefore, among tick-borne infections in the region currently mainly TBE and LD are registered. In case of negative results for antibodies to the pathogens of the above infections, the diagnosis may remain unknown. Aims. To study the etiological structure of infections transmitted by ixodic ticks in the Sverdlovsk region at the present stage, as well as to characterize the epidemiological and clinical features of the course of tick-borne infections detected in conditions of a combination of natural foci. Materials and methods. The study included 227 patients undergoing inpatient or outpatient treatment during the epidemic season of tick activity in 2021 (June-August) at LLS MO "New Hospital" (Urban Center of Natural Focal Infections). The case histories (epidemiological, clinical and laboratory indicators) were studied from each patient, as well as the material (blood) was examined prospectively and retrospectively using molecular biological (PCR) and serological (ELISA, planar protein biochip) methods. Results and discussion. During the study, six diseases were identified among the examined patients: TBE, LD (erythematous and nonerythematous forms), Borrelia miyamotoi disease (BMD), human granulocytic anaplasmosis (HGA), human monocytic ehrlichiosis (HME), as well as "Viral fever transmitted by arthropods" (VFTA). Among the examined patients, the proportion of patients with monoinfection was 49,5%, with mixed infection – 50,5%. Additional studies conducted by us using specific PCR for the presence DNA rickettsia and the causative agent of Q-fever in the blood of patients gave negative results. The general epidemiological characteristics for the above identified infections were the vector-borne mechanism, the prevalence of diseases in groups of middle-aged and elderly people, the largest number of cases of infection with pathogens of any tick-borne infection occurred in Yekaterinburg and its surroundings, for all infections, the duration of tick bite in most cases did not exceed one day; there were differences by sex, incubation period. Clinical symptoms were similar, except for the erythematous form of LD (the presence of erythema migrans at the byte site of tick), because the vast majority of patients had a general infectious syndrome; general laboratory indicators varied. Confirmation of the diagnosis was based on the results of the complex application of molecular biological and serological research methods. Conclusions. The modern etiological structure of infections transmitted by ixodic ticks in the Sverdlovsk region is represented not only by TBE and LD, but also by new disease to our country, such as BMD, HGA, HME, while a high proportion of mixed infections in various combinations has been revealed.
The essay starts with the methodological concept of “recurrence” as a biographical and historical “backward running” generation of knowledge, as elaborated by Gaston Bachelard within the framework of historical epistemology. On the basis of this paradigmatic model case, a relation-theoretical reconstruction of temporality is undertaken with reference to Walter Benjamin's and Achim Landwehr's philosophy of history, in which the three temporal orders past, present and future are no longer conceived as separate dimensions. The temporal relational structure acquires epistemological significance, among other things, through the phenomenon of “absence”, i.e. through the temporal effectiveness of an actual “present absence of the past” in biographically or historically reconstructed temporal relational networks. The relevance of educational theory can be clarified historically, transgenerationally, disciplinary-historically and socio-historically, which we outline in the outlook.
Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to track proficiency based on a question-solving history, allowing us to offer a streamlined curriculum. Recent studies actively utilize attention-based mechanisms to capture the correlation between questions and combine it with the learner's characteristics for responses. However, our empirical study shows that existing attention-based KT models neglect the learner's forgetting behavior, especially as the interaction history becomes longer. This problem arises from the bias that overprioritizes the correlation of questions while inadvertently ignoring the impact of forgetting behavior. This paper proposes a simple-yet-effective solution, namely Forgetting-aware Linear Bias (FoLiBi), to reflect forgetting behavior as a linear bias. Despite its simplicity, FoLiBi is readily equipped with existing attentive KT models by effectively decomposing question correlations with forgetting behavior. FoLiBi plugged with several KT models yields a consistent improvement of up to 2.58% in AUC over state-of-the-art KT models on four benchmark datasets.
Using a canonical topology on differential K-theory induced from the Frechét space topology on differential forms and the discrete topology on topological K-theory, we prove that differential K-theory is uniquely determined by the character diagram up to a unique natural equivalence, thus giving an affirmative answer to a question asked by Simons and Sullivan in \cite{SS10}. We further deduce rigidity results including that there is a unique way of realizing $\RR/\ZZ$-K-theory as the flat theory, strengthening the results of \cite{BS10}.
Assuming that music can be expressive, I try to answer the question whether musical expressiveness has epistemic value. The article has six parts. In the first part, I provide examples of what music can express. I suggest that it can express inner states with phenomenal character. In the second part, I build up an argument in favor of the claim that, granted its expressiveness, music can convey conceptual content which is not verbal, and which cannot be expressed verbally. This conclusion is limited to concepts like lyrical, nostalgic, melancholy, joyful, distressful etc. In the third part, I explain what musical expressive content is, in contrast and by analogy to, propositional content. In the fourth part, I apply Mitchell Green’s multi- space model of artistic expression to music. I argue that Green’s theory of expression provides a powerful explanation of how a musical sequence can express states with phenomenal character. In the fifth part, I use that model to define adequacy conditions for musical expressive ascriptions. In the last part, I attempt to explain musical knowledge by combining Green’s multi-space model with Sosa-style virtue epistemology.
Since Franco Moretti coined the successful term distant reading, quantitative/computational text analysis methods have gained wide circulation in literary studies. The diffusion of distant reading approaches has raised a lively debate and has attracted various criticisms, both from “traditional literary scholars” and from self-critical adopters. One important reason underlying these critical positions is the fact that it lacks sound and coherent rationales from the point of view of the theory: distant reading is the first methodology in literary studies that does not come with a theory of literature embedded in it. Consequently, all distant reading studies derive their theoretical frameworks and terms from literary theories that mostly rely on the notion that literary texts can be explained only by the way of interpretation. On what grounds, then, can we construct a theory of literature amenable to distant reading methods? I think that the better theoretical frameworks are the cognitive and bio-evolutionistic approaches to literature and cultural evolution studies. These theoretical approaches require a change in the level of description of the literary domain and justify the move from "interpretation" to "explanation" as the real aim of the scholarly inquiry.
Computational linguistics. Natural language processing, Epistemology. Theory of knowledge
Machine learning especially deep neural networks have achieved great success but many of them often rely on a number of labeled samples for supervision. As sufficient labeled training data are not always ready due to e.g., continuously emerging prediction targets and costly sample annotation in real world applications, machine learning with sample shortage is now being widely investigated. Among all these studies, many prefer to utilize auxiliary information including those in the form of Knowledge Graph (KG) to reduce the reliance on labeled samples. In this survey, we have comprehensively reviewed over 90 papers about KG-aware research for two major sample shortage settings -- zero-shot learning (ZSL) where some classes to be predicted have no labeled samples, and few-shot learning (FSL) where some classes to be predicted have only a small number of labeled samples that are available. We first introduce KGs used in ZSL and FSL as well as their construction methods, and then systematically categorize and summarize KG-aware ZSL and FSL methods, dividing them into different paradigms such as the mapping-based, the data augmentation, the propagation-based and the optimization-based. We next present different applications, including not only KG augmented prediction tasks such as image classification, question answering, text classification and knowledge extraction, but also KG completion tasks, and some typical evaluation resources for each task. We eventually discuss some challenges and open problems from different perspectives.
Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer user-questions from a knowledge graph (KG) by identifying the reasoning relations between topic entity and answer. As a complex branch task of KGQA, multi-hop KGQA requires reasoning over the multi-hop relational chain preserved in KG to arrive at the right answer. Despite recent successes, the existing works on answering multi-hop complex questions still face the following challenges: i) The absence of an explicit relational chain order reflected in user-question stems from a misunderstanding of a user's intentions. ii) Incorrectly capturing relational types on weak supervision of which dataset lacks intermediate reasoning chain annotations due to expensive labeling cost. iii) Failing to consider implicit relations between the topic entity and the answer implied in structured KG because of limited neighborhoods size constraint in subgraph retrieval-based algorithms.To address these issues in multi-hop KGQA, we propose a novel model herein, namely Relational Chain based Embedded KGQA (Rce-KGQA), which simultaneously utilizes the explicit relational chain revealed in natural language question and the implicit relational chain stored in structured KG. Our extensive empirical study on three open-domain benchmarks proves that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts like GraftNet, PullNet and EmbedKGQA. Comprehensive ablation experiments also verify the effectiveness of our method on the multi-hop KGQA task. We have made our model's source code available at github: https://github.com/albert-jin/Rce-KGQA.
Background. The epidemiological situation in the Astrakhan region indicates the activation of the natural foci of the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF), due to a sharp increase in carriers and guardians of the CCHF pathogen, Hyalomma marginatum, on both farm animals and in open biotopes. Natural conditions in combination with human activities (animal husbandry, crop production) and the lack of anti-tick measures create a favorable environment for the population of vectors and, therefore, for the circulation of the CCHF virus.Aim - identification of features of ecological and epidemiological manifestations of the CCHF in the Astrakhan region in 2000-2016.Results. The state of the natural foci of CCHF was monitored, which is endemic and the most severely occurring natural focal disease of arbovirus etiology in the Astrakhan region, preserving the tendency to expand the range. For the analyzed period from 2000 to 2016.151 cases of CCHF were registered in the Astrakhan region, the average long-term incidence rate of the population was 0.88 ± 0.2 per 100 ths of the population. The disease is registered in all districts of the region and the city of Astrakhan, but the largest number is noted in the floodplain-delta regions, where there are favorable conditions for grazing cattle. There is a clear connection between the infection and certain landscapes, where the necessary set of conditions for the circulation of the pathogen is provided.
Branislav Jurco, Christian Saemann, Urs Schreiber
et al.
The key open problem of string theory remains its non-perturbative completion to M-theory. A decisive hint to its inner workings comes from numerous appearances of higher structures in the limits of M-theory that are already understood, such as higher degree flux fields and their dualities, or the higher algebraic structures governing closed string field theory. These are all controlled by the higher homotopy theory of derived categories, generalised cohomology theories, and $L_\infty$-algebras. This is the introductory chapter to the proceedings of the LMS/EPSRC Durham Symposium on Higher Structures in M-Theory. We first review higher structures as well as their motivation in string theory and beyond. Then we list the contributions in this volume, putting them into context.
Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory’s emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critical realism complicate its notion of the bifurcation between epistemology and ontology. But taking feminist theory seriously also involves careful attention to the risks of epistemic violence, to questions about credible witnesses. I argue that both paradigms will be improved by better theorization of (1) ideology as part of social ontology and (2) interactions between the context of knowledge production and social ontology. Attending to what is missing, distorted, or occluded between the knower, knowledge, and object of knowledge can provide resources for theorizing social ontology.
En las coordenadas conceptuales que efectivamente pautan el desarrollo de las ciencias biológicas podemos encontrar claves capaces de guiar al pensamiento cuando éste enfrenta escenarios contrafactuales alternativos a lo efectivamente ocurrido. En lo que respecta a ese tópico, la distinción entre una entidad individual y la función que esa entidad puede venir a desempeñar en un determinado proceso o sistema, merece ser destacada como uno de los mayores rendimientos que puede darnos el examen de los marcos teóricos que efectivamente guían el desarrollo de la Biología. A primera vista, estos pueden parecer estrechos, y demasiado apegados a la concreción como para poder enfrentar una Historia Natural de los mundos posibles, pero no lo son. Todo lo que puede caber en esa historia contrafáctica, ya tiene su correlato en la Historia Natural efectiva del mundo que nos rodea; y el pensamiento biológico se desarrolló para enfrentar los desafíos que eso conlleva.
[In the conceptual framework, that effectively guides the development of biological sciences, we can find keys able for guiding thought when it faces alternative counterfactual scenarios to what has actually occurred. Concerning this issue, the distinction between an individual entity and the function which that that may come to play in a particular process or system, deserves to be highlighted as one of the conceptual resulting from the examination of the theoretical backgrounds that effectively guide the development of Biology. At first glance, these theoretical backgrounds may seem narrow and too attached to the concreteness, to be able for face a Natural History of possible worlds, but they are not. All that can fit in that counterfactual History already has its correlate in the actual Natural History of the world surrounding us; and biological thinking growth to face the challenges that this entails.]
In abelian categories like the category of R-modules and even in the category S-Act 0 of S-acts with a unique zero, idempotent radicals and torsion theories are equivalent, and the τ-torsion and τ- torsion free classes of a torsion theory τ are closed under coproducts. These are not necessarily true in the category S-Act of S-acts. In this paper, we prove that torsion theories are equivalent with the Kurosh- Amitsur radicals. We, also, show that the class of Kurosh-Amitsur radicals is a reflective subcategory of Hoehnke radicals, as a poset.
This issue of Footprint explores the potential role of analytic philosophy in the context of architecture’s typical affinity with continental philosophy over the past three decades. In the last decades of the twentieth century, philosophy became an almost necessary springboard from which to define a work of architecture. Analytic philosophy took a notable backseat to continental philosophy. With this history in mind, this issue of Footprint sought to open the discussion on what might be offered by the less familiar branches of epistemology and logic that are more prevalent and developed in the analytic tradition.
The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the various articles attempt to demonstrate that such difference of background assumptions is a common human habit and that some of the techniques of analytic philosophy may help to leap these chasms. The hope is that this is a start of a larger conversation in architecture theory that has as of yet not begun.