A child’s right to veto in England and Russia – Another welfare ploy?

In the context of the history of the Adoption and Children Act 2002, this article contrasts the approach of English legislation and case-law with the Family Code of the Russian Federation in relation to a child’s right to veto decisions made about his future. Referring to empirical research conducted in Russia, it concludes that there is considerable merit in requiring the child’s consent

Making a case for introspection

Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence

Drying and Deposition of Picolitre Droplets of Colloidal Suspensions in Binary Solvent Mixtures

This work was supported by EPSRC grant number RG5560

Current iodine status and progress over the last decade towards elimination of iodine deficiency in Rajkot District, Gujarat

Objective: To find out prevalence of goitre in primary school children; to compare prevalence with previous survey; to determine median urinary iodine concentration; to assess level of iodine in salt samples at household and retail shop level; and to study profile of salt sold at retail shops. Design & Settings: 30 cluster survey study in primary schools of Rajkot district. Subjects: Children studying in 1st to 7th standard. Methods: Total 70 students including five boys and five girls from 1st to 7th standard present in class on the day of visit were selected randomly for Goitre examination, so, total 2100 students were examined in schools. Urine sample was collected from one boy & one girl from each standard in each cluster. From community, 28 students including two boys and two girls from each standard in same age group were examined and also salt samples were tested from their households. From each village, one retail shop was visited and salts were purchased and tested for iodine on the spot with spot kit. Results: Goitre prevalence was found 8.8% among primary school children compare to 5.6% in 1999. As the age increases the Goitre prevalence also increases except in age group of 12 years. Median urinary iodine excretion level was found 110 µg/L. Iodine level >15 ppm was found in 81% salts samples tested at household level. Conclusion: Present study showed mild Goitre prevalence in primary school children in Rajkot district of Gujarat but still iodine content of salt found inadequate at household level

Sexual and geographic dimorphism in northern rockhopper penguins breeding in the South Atlantic Ocean

The Endangered northern rockhopper penguin Eudyptes moseleyi, like all penguins, is monomorphic, making sex determination of individuals in the field challenging. We examined the degree of sexual size dimorphism of adult birds across the species’ breeding range in the Atlantic Ocean and developed discriminant functions (DF) to predict individuals’ sex using morphometric measurements. We found significant site-specific differences in both bill length and bill depth, with males being the larger sex on each island. Across all islands, bill length contributed 78% to dissimilarity between sexes. Penguins on Gough Island had significantly longer bills, whilst those from Tristan da Cunha had the deepest. Island-specific DFs correctly classified 82-94% of individuals, and all functions performed significantly better than chance. The model for Nightingale Island correctly classified the greatest proportion of individuals (94-95%), while that for Tristan da Cunha performed the poorest (80-82%). A discriminant function derived from all sites accurately sexed 86-88% of northern rockhopper penguins achieving similar accuracy to island-specific functions. While molecular techniques conclusively determine an individual’s sex, morphometric measurements can provide a reliable estimate with close to 90% accuracy using a method that is less invasive and requires little technical expertise. Sexing is an important tool for meaningful interpretation of ecological data. Consideration of sex-specific differences in future studies will aid investigation of a potential sex-dependent vulnerability in this Endangered species.© The authors 2019. Open Access under Creative Commons by Attribution Licence. Use, distribution and reproduction are unrestricted. Authors and original publication must be credited. The attached file is the published pdf

Continuous Estimation of Emotions in Speech by Dynamic Cooperative Speaker Models

Automatic emotion recognition from speech has been recently focused on the prediction of time-continuous dimensions (e.g., arousal and valence) of spontaneous and realistic expressions of emotion, as found in real-life interactions. However, the automatic prediction of such emotions poses several challenges, such as the subjectivity found in the definition of a gold standard from a pool of raters and the issue of data scarcity in training models. In this work, we introduce a novel emotion recognition system, based on ensemble of single-speaker-regression-models (SSRMs). The estimation of emotion is provided by combining a subset of the initial pool of SSRMs selecting those that are most concordance among them. The proposed approach allows the addition or removal of speakers from the ensemble without the necessity to re-build the entire machine learning system. The simplicity of this aggregation strategy, coupled with the flexibility assured by the modular architecture, and the promising results obtained on the RECOLA database highlight the potential implications of the proposed method in a real-life scenario and in particular in WEB-based applications

Collider Signatures of the N=3 Lee-Wick Standard Model

Inspired by the Lee-Wick higher-derivative approach to quantum field theory, Grinstein, O'Connell, and Wise have illustrated the utility of introducing into the Standard Model negative-norm states that cancel quadratic divergences in loop diagrams, thus posing a potential resolution of the hierarchy problem. Subsequent work has shown that consistency with electroweak precision parameters requires many of the partner states to be too massive to be detected at the LHC. We consider the phenomenology of a yet-higher derivative theory that exhibits three poles in its bare propagators (hence N=3), whose states alternate in norm. We examine the interference effects of W boson partners on LHC scattering cross sections, and find that the N=3 LWSM already makes verifiable predictions at 10 fb^(-1) of integrated luminosity.Comment: 15 pages, 4 PDF figures. Version accepted for publication by JHE

Impact of picolitre droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces with ultra-low spreading ratios

EPSR

Likelihood informed dimension reduction for inverse problems in remote sensing of atmospheric constituent profiles

We use likelihood informed dimension reduction (LIS) (T. Cui et al. 2014) for inverting vertical profile information of atmospheric methane from ground based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) measurements at Sodankyl\"a, Northern Finland. The measurements belong to the word wide TCCON network for greenhouse gas measurements and, in addition to providing accurate greenhouse gas measurements, they are important for validating satellite observations. LIS allows construction of an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithm that explores only a reduced dimensional space but still produces a good approximation of the original full dimensional Bayesian posterior distribution. This in effect makes the statistical estimation problem independent of the discretization of the inverse problem. In addition, we compare LIS to a dimension reduction method based on prior covariance matrix truncation used earlier (S. Tukiainen et al. 2016)