We apply, for the first time, Bayes Linear Emulation and History Matching to the calibration of non-perturbative models in Monte Carlo event generators. In contrast to the usual approach of "Monte Carlo tuning", History Matching does not result in best-fit plus ellipsoidal parameter uncertainty estimates but instead identifies all parameter space regions that are consistent with data. This approach leads to a systematic and robust quantification of parametric uncertainties in the models, especially in those challenging cases where different, possibly disjoint, regions of parameter space deliver similar results, which are usually not properly treated with current methodology. We highlight the power of this method with the hadronisation models available through Sherpa: the built-in cluster fragmentation Ahadic and string fragmentation through an interface to Pythia.
Para Foucault, la realidad social es un efecto del discurso científico, que tiende a vincularse con los intereses políticos y hegemónicos. Muestra el carácter históricamente contingente de las verdades establecidas y realza las voces de quienes han excluidos por los discursos dominantes. Propone separar la verdad de la ciencia y defiende la diversificación de las fuentes y tipos de discursos. En cambio, Bourdieu cree en una ciencia social que establezca sus propios criterios internos de funcionamiento sin la influencia de intereses políticos y económicos. De esta forma, la ciencia puede desenmascarar los mecanismos a través de los cuales los grupos dominantes presentan su interés particularista como el interés general. Bourdieu defiende un universalismo real dónde los intereses que se proclamen como universales deban ser realmente acordes con los valores de la virtud cívica (igualdad, fraternidad, honestidad, altruismo o desinterés). Por otro lado, ambos autores comparten que la alienación está en la base de la opresión y, por ello, abogan por construcciones cognitivas alternativas que desnaturalicen las actuales clasificaciones sociales.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social sciences (General)
We overview the history of primordial black hole (PBH) research from the first papers around 50 years ago to the present epoch. The history may be divided into four periods, the dividing lines being marked by three key developments: inflation on the theoretical front and the detection of microlensing events by the MACHO project and gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA project on the observation front. However, they are also characterised by somewhat different focuses of research. The period 1967-1980 covered the groundbreaking work on PBH formation and evaporation. The period 1980-1996 mainly focussed on their formation, while the period 1996-2016 consolidated the work on formation but also collated the constraints on the PBH abundance. In the period 2016-2024 there was a shift of emphasis to the search for evidence for PBHs and - while opinions about the strength of the purported evidence vary - this has motivated more careful studies of some aspects of the subject. Certainly the soaring number of papers on PBHs in this last period indicates a growing interest in the topic.
Modeling policies for sequential clinical decision-making based on observational data is useful for describing treatment practices, standardizing frequent patterns in treatment, and evaluating alternative policies. For each task, it is essential that the policy model is interpretable. Learning accurate models requires effectively capturing the state of a patient, either through sequence representation learning or carefully crafted summaries of their medical history. While recent work has favored the former, it remains a question as to how histories should best be represented for interpretable policy modeling. Focused on model fit, we systematically compare diverse approaches to summarizing patient history for interpretable modeling of clinical policies across four sequential decision-making tasks. We illustrate differences in the policies learned using various representations by breaking down evaluations by patient subgroups, critical states, and stages of treatment, highlighting challenges specific to common use cases. We find that interpretable sequence models using learned representations perform on par with black-box models across all tasks. Interpretable models using hand-crafted representations perform substantially worse when ignoring history entirely, but are made competitive by incorporating only a few aggregated and recent elements of patient history. The added benefits of using a richer representation are pronounced for subgroups and in specific use cases. This underscores the importance of evaluating policy models in the context of their intended use.
Accessing clean and pure water is a crisis for women and families all over the world. Without the proper resources to receive water can lead to the fatality of women and their families. This paper explores water scarcity and household coping mechanisms to water scarcity with special reference to women households in Chidothe village. It identifies the sources of water in Chidothe village, understands the challenges faced by women in fetching water and explores household coping mechanisms to water scarcity with the purpose of raising awareness to the community’s situation. Although the water supply system was expanded in 2001, many areas including Chidothe village are still experiencing water problems. In the past years’ researchers and policy makers have focused on improving the performance of water utility infrastructure in order to eliminate this threat. However, little efforts have been made to understand social issues to water shortage and how people respond to them. Data gathering methods were individual interviews and focus group discussions. All interviews were audio recorded. The data was processed manually and analyzed thematically. The results were analyzed through insights and arguments from Feminist Political Ecology (FPE). The study reveals that women and girls in Chidothe Village have a greater responsibility to fetch water, are facing challenges to access portable water such as lack of money to connect to tap water, the absence of water kiosks in the village further worsens the problem and circumstances force them to draw water from unsafe sources, hence, exposing themselves to diseases. The results imply that there is an urgent need to address water supply systems in order to prevent people from water borne diseases. The study concludes that there is need to incorporate women in decision making to articulate their concerns and interests at local level and also water aid stakeholders should use gender sensitive approaches when planning, designing and implementing water projects.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Arts in general
Recently, ChatGPT, along with DALL-E-2 and Codex,has been gaining significant attention from society. As a result, many individuals have become interested in related resources and are seeking to uncover the background and secrets behind its impressive performance. In fact, ChatGPT and other Generative AI (GAI) techniques belong to the category of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), which involves the creation of digital content, such as images, music, and natural language, through AI models. The goal of AIGC is to make the content creation process more efficient and accessible, allowing for the production of high-quality content at a faster pace. AIGC is achieved by extracting and understanding intent information from instructions provided by human, and generating the content according to its knowledge and the intent information. In recent years, large-scale models have become increasingly important in AIGC as they provide better intent extraction and thus, improved generation results. With the growth of data and the size of the models, the distribution that the model can learn becomes more comprehensive and closer to reality, leading to more realistic and high-quality content generation. This survey provides a comprehensive review on the history of generative models, and basic components, recent advances in AIGC from unimodal interaction and multimodal interaction. From the perspective of unimodality, we introduce the generation tasks and relative models of text and image. From the perspective of multimodality, we introduce the cross-application between the modalities mentioned above. Finally, we discuss the existing open problems and future challenges in AIGC.
Elham Khanlarzadeh, Zohre Sadeghian, Farnaz Fariba
et al.
Background and Objectives: Health-promoting lifestyle is one of the most important ways to control hypertension. It is a way by which people try to prevent diseases and disabilities and improve their health. This study aims to investigate the health-promoting lifestyle and its effective factors in patients with hypertension in Hamadan, Iran.
Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 310 patients with hypertension referred to comprehensive urban health services centers in Hamadan in 2020, who were selected by a multi-stage sampling method. The data collection tool was a two-part questionnaire including a demographic form and the health-promoting lifestyle profile (HPLP). The findings were analyzed using the chi-square test, t-test, Mann–Whitney U test, analysis of variance, and Spearman correlation test.
Results: The mean score of HPLP was 129.8±16.6 (ranged 49-196), indicating a moderate level. The difference in HPLP score in terms of age, sex, marital status, educational level, comorbidity, and family history of hypertension was statistically significant. The HPLP score had a significant negative correlation between age (P<0.001), systolic blood pressure (P= 0.01), and diastolic blood pressure (P<0.001).
Conclusion: The health-promoting lifestyle of hypertensive patients in Hamadan is not at a good level. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize these behaviors in the educational programs for these patients and make them aware of the consequences of a poor health-promoting lifestyle.
El primer editor de la Fazienda de Ultramar, Moshé Lazar, fue el primero en establecer que el material bíblico de la obra provenía de un original hebreo. Para demostrar su hipótesis incluyó en su pionera edición de 1965 numerosas notas a pie estableciendo correspondencias entre determinados pasajes o palabras de la Fazienda y de la Biblia hebrea. Sin embargo, Lazar a menudo obvió aquellas partes donde la obra sigue la Vulgata, ocultando así las correspondencias entre ambas obras. En el presente artículo se demostrará que las contribuciones de la Vulgata a la Fazienda son mucho mayores de lo que se ha aceptado, sugiriendo que los pasajes del Viejo Testamento de la Fazienda provienen de dos fuentes distintas: la Biblia hebrea y la Vulgata latina.
I study the effects of US salary history bans which restrict employers from inquiring about job applicants' pay history during the hiring process, but allow candidates to voluntarily share information. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that these policies narrowed the gender pay gap significantly by 2 p.p., driven almost entirely by an increase in female earnings. The bans were also successful in weakening the auto-correlation between current and future earnings, especially among job-changers. I provide novel evidence showing that when employers could no longer nudge candidates for information, the likelihood of voluntarily disclosing salary history decreased among job applicants and by 2 p.p. more among women. I then develop a salary negotiation model with asymmetric information, where I allow job applicants to choose whether to reveal pay history, and use this framework to explain my empirical findings on disclosure behavior and gender pay gap.
A crucial step in the history of General Relativity was Einstein's adoption of the principle of general covariance which demands a coordinate independent formulation for our spacetime theories. General covariance helps us to disentangle a theory's substantive content from its merely representational artifacts. It is an indispensable tool for a modern understanding of spacetime theories. Motivated by quantum gravity, one may wish to extend these notions to quantum spacetime theories (whatever those are). Relatedly, one might want to extend these notions to discrete spacetime theories (i.e., lattice theories). This paper delivers such an extension with surprising consequences. One's first intuition regarding discrete spacetime theories may be that they introduce a great deal of fixed background structure (i.e., a lattice) and thereby limit our theory's possible symmetries down to those which preserve this fixed structure (i.e., discrete symmetries). However, as I will discuss, these intuitions are doubly wrong and overhasty. Discrete spacetime theories can and do have continuous translation and rotation symmetries. Moreover, the exact same theory can be given a wide variety of lattice structures and can even be described with no lattice at all. As my discrete analog of general covariance will reveal: lattice structure is rather less like a fixed background structure or part of an underlying manifold and rather more like a coordinate system, i.e., merely a representational artifact. Thus, the world cannot be "fundamentally set on a square lattice" (or any other lattice) any more than it could be "fundamentally set in a certain coordinate system". Like coordinate systems, lattice structures are just not the sort of thing that can be fundamental; they are both thoroughly representational. Spacetime cannot be discrete (even when it might be representable as such).
The history of meta-learning methods based on gradient descent is reviewed, focusing primarily on methods that adapt step-size (learning rate) meta-parameters.
The article examines L.N. Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories. The analysis is provided with hitherto unpublished archival sources, namely letters to Archbishop Innokenty (Borisov) of Crimean monks and white clergy. The study reveals the reasons why the Crimean War, according to some, turned out to be a defeat for Russia, and according to others, it was the victory of the indestructible Russian spirit. The author shows how Tolstoy recreated the psychological picture of the Crimean War in the Sevastopol stories, clearly outlined its spiritual meanings; and how an artistic, imaginative system of Tolstoy’s narrative is built in an interpolar space: peace and war, eternal and momentary, divine and human. Truth is the protagonist of the Sevastopol stories, and it is revealed in them in all the variety of Tolstoy’s artistic techniques, the origin of which lies in real life. Tolstoy’s own unique system of moral assessments was further developed in the novel “War and Peace.” The author of the article outlines parallels between the Crimean War and the Patriotic War of 1812 — both in historical memory and in the work of Tolstoy.
D. Jiménez-López, P. Corcho-Caballero, S. Zamora
et al.
Context. There are typically two different approaches to inferring the mass formation history (MFH) of a given galaxy from its luminosity in different bands. Non-parametric methods are known for their flexibility and accuracy, while parametric models are more computationally efficient. Aims. In this work we propose an alternative, based on a polynomial expansion around the present time, that combines the advantages of both techniques. Methods. In our approach, the MFH is decomposed through an orthonormal basis of N polynomials in lookback time. To test the proposed framework, synthetic observations are generated from models based on common analytical approximations (exponential, delayed-$τ$, and Gaussian star formation histories), as well as cosmological simulations for the Illustris-TNG suite. A normalized distance is used to measure the quality of the fit, and the input MFH is compared with the polynomial reconstructions both at the present time and through cosmic evolution. Our polynomial expansion is also compared with widely used parametric and non-parametric methods such as CIGALE anda PROSPECTOR. Results. The observed luminosities are reproduced with an accuracy of around 10 per cent for a constant star formation rate (N=1) and better for higher-order polynomials. Our method provides good results on the reconstruction of the total stellar mass, the star formation rate, and even its first derivative for smooth star formation histories, but it has difficulties in reproducing variations on short timescales and/or star formation histories that peak at the earliest times of the Universe. Conclusions. The polynomial expansion appears to be a promising alternative to other analytical functions used in parametric methods, combining both speed and flexibility.
BackgroundHepcidin is a polypeptide hormone mainly produced by hepatocytes to modulate systemic iron balance. A drastic downregulation of the hepcidin gene was found in liver cancers. However, there is a paucity of information about the clinical significance of hepcidin gene downregulation in liver cancers.MethodsHepcidin expression profiles were assessed using multiple public datasets via several bioinformatics platforms. Clinical and pathological information was utilized to stratify patients for comparison. Patient survival outcomes were evaluated using the Kaplan-Meier plotter, a meta-analysis tool. Tumor immune infiltration was analyzed using the single sample gene set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) approach on the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. Hepcidin antagonist Fursultiamine was used to treat liver cancer HepG2 and Huh7 cells together with Sorafenib.ResultsHepcidin gene was predominantly expressed in benign liver tissues but drastically decreased in liver cancer tissues. Hepcidin reduction in liver cancers correlated with risk factors like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and liver fibrosis, as well as cancer grade and tumor stage. Hepcidin downregulation was associated with a rapid cancer progression and worse disease-specific survival, especially in patients of the White race without alcohol consumption history. Hepcidin expression in liver cancer tissues positively correlated with the bone morphogenetic protein-6 (BPM6)/interleukin-6 (IL6) cytokines and cytotoxic immune infiltration. Blocking hepcidin action with its antagonist Fursultiamine moderately reduced Sorafenib-induced apoptotic cell death in HepG2 and Huh7 cells.ConclusionHepcidin downregulation in liver cancers correlated with liver cancer risk factors, cancer aggressiveness, cytotoxic immune cell infiltration, and patient survival outcomes. BMP6/IL6 pathway insufficiency is a potential cause of hepcidin downregulation in liver cancers.
Neoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
BACKGROUND There is an increasing demand for high quality subnational estimates of under-five mortality. In low and middle income countries, where the burden of under-five mortality is concentrated, vital registration is often lacking and household surveys, which provide full birth history data, are often the most reliable source. Unfortunately, these data are spatially sparse and so data are pulled from other sources to increase the available information. Summary birth histories represent a large fraction of the available data, and provide numbers of births and deaths aggregated over time, along with the mother's age. OBJECTIVE Specialized methods are needed to leverage this information, and previously the Brass method, and variants, have been used. We wish to develop a model-based approach that can propagate errors, and make the most efficient use of the data. Further, we strive to provide a method that does not have large computational overhead. CONTRIBUTION We describe a computationally efficient model-based approach which allows summary birth history and full birth history data to be combined into analyses of under-five mortality in a natural way. The method is based on fertility and mortality models that allow direct smoothing over time and space, with the possibility for including relevant covariates that are associated with fertility and/or mortality. We first examine the behavior of the approach on simulated data, before applying the model to survey and census data from Malawi.