183 research outputs found

    Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

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    This Open Access book combines philosophical and historical analysis of various forms of alternatives to mechanism and mechanistic explanation, focusing on the 19th century to the present. It addresses vitalism, organicism and responses to materialism and its relevance to current biological science. In doing so, it promotes dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life. It points towards the integration of genomic science into the broader history of biology. It details a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally

    Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

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    Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

    Resilient Resistances : the self-organization of sex workers against the German Prostitute Protection Act

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    In 2013, sex workers in Germany began to organize collectively. Through the foundation of the Professional Association for Erotic and Sexual Service Providers, these activists sought to refute victimizing discourses and prevent the introduction of controlling and repressive legislation. Sex worker activists built on the institutionalized structures of the former German whore movement and aimed at preserving the political gains it had achieved through prostitution law reform in 2001. At the same time, sex worker activists established a form of self-organization and self-representation hitherto unknown in Germany. Despite their mobilizations, the Prostitute Protection Act was adopted in 2016 and largely ignored the political demands of sex worker activists. Scholarship examining the collective mobilizations of sex workers is still scarce, and existing works are predominantly pessimistic about their probability, durability, and impact. Scholars furthermore contend that effective policy-making on prostitution is impeded by heavy political contestations and moralization. Moreover, Europe has been the site of a profound shift towards the repression and criminalization of sex work since the turn of the century, and Germany plays a unique role within these processes due to its comparably liberal legal framework on prostitution. In spite of these challenging conditions, the self-organization of sex workers against the German Prostitute Protection Act illustrates that sex workers do operate as collective political actors. However, they remain underexplored as such in the fields of sex work research and social movement studies. Filling this gap in research, this thesis analyse the emergence, development, and outcomes of sex workers’ collective self-organization against the German Prostitute Protection Act. In doing so, I adopt a relational approach which traces the interactions between sex worker activists, their institutional context, and other political actors mobilizing in the field of prostitution politics, and show their relevance to sex workers’ political self-organization. My conceptual framework brings feminist theory into conversation with social movement scholarship. Building on a Foucauldian understanding of power, resistance, and their intimate interrelation, I flesh out the political subjectivities and agency expressed by sex worker activists, while feminist theories of democracy permit me to uncover dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within social movement processes. In order to challenge hierarchical research settings and centre sex worker activists as producers of situated knowledges, my methodological approach departs from feminist epistemologies, complicates the standardization of Participatory Action Research in sex work studies, and instead merges feminist constructivist Grounded Theory with participatory elements. I draw on ethnographic field work mainly conducted between September 2018 and August 2020, and my rich data set triangulates in-depth interviews with participant observation and document analysis. Transporting the reflexive praxis of sex work research into social movement research, I discuss ethical dilemmas I encountered throughout the project. By reconstructing the political process at the micro- and meso-level from the perspective of sex worker activists, my analysis yields crucial results. I first demonstrate how power relations inherent in German prostitution politics produced sex workers as political subjects and agents who resisted victimization and strategically reacted to the political threat presented by the Prostitute Protection Act. While sex worker activists failed in their declared goal of preventing the law, I contend that they succeeded in establishing themselves as political actors, and in building a sustained and diversifying social movement in the face of continued adversities. I then draw attention to the antagonistic dynamic between sex worker activists and anti-prostitution campaigners, and argue that contestation between a marginalized and a hegemonic political actor first spurred the former’s access to the public sphere, and eventually aggravated its political exclusion. Sex worker movements are heterogenous political actors in themselves, and activists’ social locations are shaped by intersecting power relations. I thus direct two intersectional lenses onto the German sex worker movement. First, I examine cooperative and conflictual relations within the sex worker movement, and show how sex worker activists seek to dismantle internal hierarchies by grappling with intersectional political analyses. As part of this, I expand scholarship on protest repertoires by identifying care work as an essentially political practice which ensures both the survival of marginalized communities and the social movements emerging from them. Then, I delineate the manifold and unpredictable coalition building activities which sex worker activist engage in. Here, I indicate that sex worker activists still lack durable political alliances, but show the recent progress made with respect to union organizing. Finally, sex worker activists’ efforts to forge both community and coalitions attest to a growth in intersectional consciousness and practices among them. Contrary to previous academic assessments of sex worker movements, my findings reveal sex worker activists as complex political actors whose collective mobilizations are resilient rather than fragile. In scrutinizing the transforming resistances exerted by sex worker activists, my analysis uncovers historically contingent power formations between state, feminist, and conservative actors in the field of prostitution politics, and stresses the need for relations of solidarity which bridge across the differences within the sex worker movement, as well as those between sex worker activists and other political actors. As such, my findings have further implications for the study of marginalized social movements and contemporary political contestations at the intersection of gender, sexuality, migration, and labour

    Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad: actas de las VIII Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en ciberseguridad: Vigo, 21 a 23 de junio de 2023

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    Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad (8ª. 2023. Vigo)atlanTTicAMTEGA: Axencia para a modernización tecnolóxica de GaliciaINCIBE: Instituto Nacional de Cibersegurida

    Personalized Event Prediction for Electronic Health Records

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    Clinical event sequences consist of hundreds of clinical events that represent records of patient care in time. Developing accurate predictive models of such sequences is of a great importance for supporting a variety of models for interpreting/classifying the current patient condition, or predicting adverse clinical events and outcomes, all aimed to improve patient care. One important challenge of learning predictive models of clinical sequences is their patient-specific variability. Based on underlying clinical conditions, each patient's sequence may consist of different sets of clinical events (observations, lab results, medications, procedures). Hence, simple population-wide models learned from event sequences for many different patients may not accurately predict patient-specific dynamics of event sequences and their differences. To address the problem, we propose and investigate multiple new event sequence prediction models and methods that let us better adjust the prediction for individual patients and their specific conditions. The methods developed in this work pursue refinement of population-wide models to subpopulations, self-adaptation, and a meta-level model switching that is able to adaptively select the model with the best chance to support the immediate prediction. We analyze and test the performance of these models on clinical event sequences of patients in MIMIC-III database.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2104.0178

    Colonial and Post-colonial Rangeland Enclosures amid Climate Uncertainty: The Case of Maasai Pastoralists of Kajiado County, Kenya

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    The enclosure of common resources in Kenya's rangelands became more pronounced after Kenya's independence because of adverse land reform policies, which proved ineffective in addressing the prior injustices of the forceful dispossession of Maasai pastoralists by the British colonial authority. The ongoing enclosure of common resources by both state and private capital for economic gain has left the herder community exposed to the adverse effects of climate change. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the adaptive capacity of Maasai to the intersecting stresses of climate change and resource enclosure. It examines the implications of common-resource enclosures for the Maasai livestock economy and the coping mechanisms they have undertaken to build adaptive capacity to changing climate conditions. The analysis employs an ethnographic approach using interviews and participant observation to collect data from field research in Ildamat-Oloyiankalani, Kajiado County, Kenya. The study is embedded in the daily herding and resource foraging practices of Maasai that took place during the prolonged drought period of 2017 and 2018 and in their ongoing experience of the intersecting stresses of climate change and common-resource enclosures. The study unveiled three major insights. First, that a tightening grip over common resources by private property growth has undermined the consensus-based democratic governance of resources, disrupted herders' access rights and exposed them to climate risks. Second, that pastoralists developed collective grazing arrangements and acquired exclusive grazing rights as mechanisms to improve herd mobility and resource access to cope with the intersecting stresses of climate change and the enclosure of grazing commons. Lastly, the study found that the implications of growing resource pressure and climate risk have driven pastoralists to actively assemble to disrupt further enclosure of their commons and to protect their rights. These insights confirm the importance of pastoralists' access rights to rangeland resources. In conclusion, the thesis broadly argues that facilitating extractive capitalism by disrupting pastoralists' access rights through common-resource enclosures adversely affects their ability to cope with the intersecting stresses of climate and environmental change. Therefore, it is critical that resource governing policies facilitate the democratisation of grazing and water resources to protect the commons from further enclosure and to ensure equitable access. This would restore the commons approach and protect the remaining herders' access rights, lowering their vulnerability to the intersecting stresses of climate and environmental change

    11th International Conference on Business, Technology and Innovation 2022

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    Welcome to IC – UBT 2022 UBT Annual International Conference is the 11th international interdisciplinary peer reviewed conference which publishes works of the scientists as well as practitioners in the area where UBT is active in Education, Research and Development. The UBT aims to implement an integrated strategy to establish itself as an internationally competitive, research-intensive university, committed to the transfer of knowledge and the provision of a world-class education to the most talented students from all background. The main perspective of the conference is to connect the scientists and practitioners from different disciplines in the same place and make them be aware of the recent advancements in different research fields, and provide them with a unique forum to share their experiences. It is also the place to support the new academic staff for doing research and publish their work in international standard level. This conference consists of sub conferences in different fields like: Security Studies Sport, Health and Society Psychology Political Science Pharmaceutical and Natural Sciences Mechatronics, System Engineering and Robotics Medicine and Nursing Modern Music, Digital Production and Management Management, Business and Economics Language and Culture Law Journalism, Media and Communication Information Systems and Security Integrated Design Energy Efficiency Engineering Education and Development Dental Sciences Computer Science and Communication Engineering Civil Engineering, Infrastructure and Environment Architecture and Spatial Planning Agriculture, Food Science and Technology Art and Digital Media This conference is the major scientific event of the UBT. It is organizing annually and always in cooperation with the partner universities from the region and Europe. We have to thank all Authors, partners, sponsors and also the conference organizing team making this event a real international scientific event. Edmond Hajrizi, President of UBT UBT – Higher Education Institutio
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