Colya N. Englisch, Karl T. Boden, Clemens N. Rudolph
et al.
Purpose: Implantation cysts of the iris are rare benign lesions resulting from epithelial downgrowth after trauma or surgery. This report highlights the management of an exceptional case of implantation cysts manifestation five decades after penetrating childhood trauma. Observation: A 59-year-old male patient with a history of penetrating trauma of the cornea at the age of 4 years presented with cystic anterior chamber lesions exhibiting pigment deposition. The pupil was distorted and almost entirely covered. 50 MHz ultrasound biomicroscopy and anterior segment optical coherence tomography displayed no evidence of malignancy. The cystic lesions were excised in an endothelium-protective manner and histopathological analysis revealed dysplasia-free corneal squamous epithelium compatible with implantation cysts of the iris. Conclusion and importance: Implantation cysts of the iris are benign and rare. Anterior segment imaging is required to exclude malignancies. Most cases emerge after surgery or trauma within months to a few years after injury. However, occurrence can also be delayed by several decades. It is thus mandatory to demand a full and long–lasting ophthalmological anamnesis, to accurately distinguish, diagnose, and treat cystic lesions of the iris.
Electronic health records include information on patients' status and medical history, which could cover the history of diseases and disorders that could be hereditary. One important use of family history information is in precision health, where the goal is to keep the population healthy with preventative measures. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques can assist with identifying information that could assist health professionals in identifying health risks before a condition is developed in their later years, saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. We survey the literature on the techniques from the NLP field that have been developed to utilise digital health records to identify risks of familial diseases. We highlight that rule-based methods are heavily investigated and are still actively used for family history extraction. Still, more recent efforts have been put into building neural models based on large-scale pre-trained language models. In addition to the areas where NLP has successfully been utilised, we also identify the areas where more research is needed to unlock the value of patients' records regarding data collection, task formulation and downstream applications.
The southern Mediterranean region, particularly North Africa, is a crucial area for biodiversity conservation. However, the impacts of climate change on plant species in this region are not well understood. Dendroecology, the study of tree rings, is a valuable technique for analyzing the effects of environmental changes on woody plants over time. In this study, we intend to assess the state of the art in dendrochronological research in North Africa and identify knowledge gaps and limitations in the field. The period of analysis spans from 1979 to 2023. We used all the available literature in Dendrobox and Google Scholar during this period. Our study revealed several research gaps in the region, including the need for more studies on the history of forest fires and their relationship to climate conditions in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the impact of climate on the anatomical characteristics of growth rings, and the effects of climate change on tree species diversity and forest health. Applying this technique in the future would allow for detailed insights into the effect of climate on the internal structure and growth of forest trees. The findings of this study will help guide future research and contribute to a better understanding of the climate-growth relationship of woody plants in North Africa.
In the article, selected names of places in southern Warmia will be discussed and subjected to linguistic analysis. On this basis, the division of these toponyms will be made in terms of the linguistic affiliation of their morphemes, which have their source in Polish, German and Prussian. The history of the activity of the Commission for the Determination of Place Names will also be presented, which after World War II, immediately after the incorporation of Warmia into the Polish state, began intensive work on giving German names their Polish equivalents. The collected material will make it possible to formulate the methods most likely used by the Commission during its work, as well as to show conclusions regarding the impact of national identity and state policy on changes in the naming of places in Warmia.
Li-Xin Guo, Meng-Long Hsieh, Olga Gorodetskaya
et al.
Abstract The Yellow River Plain (YRP), being regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization, is traditionally thought to be the locale of the Great Flood, a hazardous flood (or floods) tamed by Yu who started China’s first “dynasty”, Xia, in ~ 2000 BC. However, by integrating published archaeological data, we propose that the Great Flood in fact impacted the Jianghan Plain (JHP) along the middle course of the Yangtze River. The arguments include: (1) around the era of the Great Flood, the most civilized and populated society in East Asia, named the Jianghan society, was located around the JHP (at that time, the habitation on the YRP remained limited); (2) the Jianghan society lived on river resources (shipping and rice growing) and was thus subject to flood risks (but not for the people inhabiting the YRP); (3) the people in the Jianghan society were experienced in dredging moats/ditches for shipping and irrigation; (4) unlike the floods on the YRP that were characterized by dynamic sedimentation and channel avulsion, those on the JHP typically occurred with slow-moving water manageable to ancient people; (5) the JHP has been associated with lake/wetland systems serving as detention basins during floods. Here, the recorded method for controlling the Great Flood, dredging channels to divert flood water to a “sea”, was feasible. Known speleothem paleo-rainfall data from multiple sites show that the climate of the JHP had been wet since the middle Holocene (earlier than the era of the Great Flood) and significantly turned dry after ~ 1850 BC (~ 150 years later than the Great Flood). Thus, the uniqueness of the Great Flood was likely to reflect an increase in land use on the JHP with the expansion of the Jianghan society, and the success in taming this flood was mainly due to the efforts of the society, not by luck.
Analizamos en el presente trabajo una estatua del tipo convencionalmente denominado Orante sumerio, depositada en el Museo Arqueológico Nacional (Madrid), y expuesta actualmente en sus salas de Egipto, Nubia y Oriente Próximo. Revisaremos la pieza en detalle, comentando sus características y estado de conservación, haremos una breve referencia al significado que pudo tener en la sociedad en que surgió, y finalmente nos plantearemos su posible origen geográfico y su cronología, así como ciertos elementos que tal vez podrían ser indicios de una discutible antigüedad.
History of the arts, Museums. Collectors and collecting
The association of weights in a distributed consensus protocol quantify the trust that an agent has on its neighbors in a network. An important problem in such networked systems is the uncertainty in the estimation of trust between neighboring agents, coupled with the losses arising from mistakenly associating wrong amounts of trust with different neighboring agents. We introduce a probabilistic approach which uses the historical data collected in the network, to determine the level of trust between each agent. Specifically, using the finite history of the shared data between neighbors, we obtain a configuration which represents the confidence estimate of every neighboring agent's trustworthiness. Finally, we propose a History-Data-Driven (HDD) distributed consensus protocol which translates the computed configuration data into weights to be used in the consensus update. The approach using the historical data in the context of a distributed consensus setting marks the novel contribution of our paper.
Charles A. Kang, Mark W. McClure, Somasekhar Reddy
This document describes the functioning of the automated history matching and optimization workflow implemented with the ResFrac hydraulic fracturing and reservoir simulator. The purpose of the automated history matching and optimization workflow is enable automated calibration of simulator models to observed data and application to forward optimization. The automated workflow works by solving a formal mathematical optimization problem to minimize misfit with observations from any point in the lifecycle of a hydraulically fractured reservoir, or to maximize a quantity of interest associated such a reservoir, such as net present value. Objective function evaluations in the optimization problem consist of runs of the ResFrac simulator, which is a physics-based model of hydraulic fracturing and reservoir phenomena. The workflow employs a proxy model to improve computational speed and applies experimental design and Bayesian sampling techniques to generate points with which to train the proxy model. This document also provides an overview of the software infrastructure developed to support the automated workflow.