Another Heavy Road of Decompositionality: Notes from a Dying Adverb

This contribution reports on a pilot case study conducted on historical corpus data from Old and Middle English (primarily Taylor et al. 2003, Kroch and Taylor 2000) and concerned with the ramifications of an ambiguous adverb (eft, ‘again’) at the syntax-semantics interface. The disappearance of the adverb is linked to the development of again’s partially similar functions during the Middle English period. Akin to studies on the adverb again (e.g. Fabricius-Hansen 2001, Gergel and Beck 2015, Beck and Gergel 2015), at least some instances of eft are claimed to require a particular type of analysis of so-called decompositional adverbs, namely one based on lexical rather than only on structural factors. Furthermore, the development shows characteristics of a cyclical development (cf. Jespersen 1917, van Gelderen 2011)

Foregrounding Pacific Epistemologies in Curriculum Review: Exercising Educator Agency in a Process of Institutional Change

In this paper, we will reflect on our experiences relating to two major processes of transformation in the Sociology programme: 1) curriculum alignment and 2) online course conversion. Our curriculum review journey began in 2011 with the Strategic Total Academic Review (STAR) project. Three years later, as we continued to develop and review our curriculum, we were directed by the University to begin converting our courses to an online delivery format. The two coinciding processes not only resulted in an overhaul of our curriculum but also entailed a re-structuring and re-imagining of our learning and teaching practices. While curriculum alignment required us to be more explicit and strategic about designing student learning outcomes and activities, online conversion challenged us to do this in a completely new format, using new technologies. This was a demanding process, but we also gained valuable experience. In particular, while the effectiveness of peer learning and interaction on an online learning platform has been argued by educational researchers worldwide, in the Pacific context, the positioning of learning as a dialogic process of collective knowledge construction takes on added significance. As we attempted to align learning outcomes with online learning activities, our major goal was to weld the interactive potentials of online educational technologies with a culturally relevant learning process informed by Pacific epistemologies. The paper will focus on this particular aspect of our curriculum transformation process: our search for Pacific-style online learning through weaving together of curriculum alignment, online pedagogy and Pacific epistemologies

Mixture-of-Experts Variational Autoencoder for Clustering and Generating from Similarity-Based Representations on Single Cell Data

Clustering high-dimensional data, such as images or biological measurements, is a long-standingproblem and has been studied extensively. Recently, Deep Clustering has gained popularity due toits flexibility in fitting the specific peculiarities of complex data. Here we introduce the Mixture-of-Experts Similarity Variational Autoencoder (MoE-Sim-VAE), a novel generative clustering model.The model can learn multi-modal distributions of high-dimensional data and use these to generaterealistic data with high efficacy and efficiency. MoE-Sim-VAE is based on a Variational Autoencoder(VAE), where the decoder consists of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This specific architecture allows for various modes of the data to be automatically learned by means of the experts.Additionally, we encourage the lower dimensional latent representation of our model to follow aGaussian mixture distribution and to accurately represent the similarities between the data points. Weassess the performance of our model on the MNIST benchmark data set and challenging real-worldtasks of clustering mouse organs from single-cell RNA-sequencing measurements and defining cellsubpopulations from mass cytometry (CyTOF) measurements on hundreds of different datasets.MoE-Sim-VAE exhibits superior clustering performance on all these tasks in comparison to thebaselines as well as competitor methods.Comment: Submitted to PLOS Computational Biolog

Advancing the Provision of Pain Education and Learning (APPEAL) study

Objectives Unrelieved pain is a substantial public health concern necessitating improvements in medical education. The Advancing the Provision of Pain Education and Learning (APPEAL) study aimed to determine current levels and methods of undergraduate pain medicine education in Europe. Design and methods Using a cross-sectional design, publicly available curriculum information was sought from all medical schools in 15 representative European countries in 2012–2013. Descriptive analyses were performed on: the provision of pain teaching in dedicated pain modules, other modules or within the broader curriculum; whether pain teaching was compulsory or elective; the number of hours/credits spent teaching pain; pain topics; and teaching and assessment methods. Results Curriculum elements were publicly available from 242 of 249 identified schools (97%). In 55% (133/242) of schools, pain was taught only within compulsory non-pain-specific modules. The next most common approaches were for pain teaching to be provided wholly or in part via a dedicated pain module (74/242; 31%) or via a vertical or integrated approach to teaching through the broader curriculum, rather than within any specific module (17/242; 7%). The curricula of 17/242 schools (7%) showed no evidence of any pain teaching. Dedicated pain modules were most common in France (27/31 schools; 87%). Excluding France, only 22% (47/211 schools) provided a dedicated pain module and in only 9% (18/211) was this compulsory. Overall, the median number of hours spent teaching pain was 12.0 (range 4–56.0 h; IQR: 12.0) for compulsory dedicated pain modules and 9.0 (range 1.0–60.0 h; IQR: 10.5) for other compulsory (non-pain specific) modules. Pain medicine was principally taught in classrooms and assessed by conventional examinations. There was substantial international variation throughout. Conclusions Documented pain teaching in many European medical schools falls far short of what might be expected given the prevalence and public health burden of pain

Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis

We present an algorithm for reconstructing the radiance field of a large-scale scene from a single casually captured video. The task poses two core challenges. First, most existing radiance field reconstruction approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses from Structure-from-Motion algorithms, which frequently fail on in-the-wild videos. Second, using a single, global radiance field with finite representational capacity does not scale to longer trajectories in an unbounded scene. For handling unknown poses, we jointly estimate the camera poses with radiance field in a progressive manner. We show that progressive optimization significantly improves the robustness of the reconstruction. For handling large unbounded scenes, we dynamically allocate new local radiance fields trained with frames within a temporal window. This further improves robustness (e.g., performs well even under moderate pose drifts) and allows us to scale to large scenes. Our extensive evaluation on the Tanks and Temples dataset and our collected outdoor dataset, Static Hikes, show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.Comment: Project page: https://localrf.github.io

History and contemporary displacement in Suva's informal settlements

Urban areas are products of history. They have been created by processes, power structures and interests that have emerged over time. Access to and control over urban land are important issues in which conflicts reveal the interests of different stakeholders. In such contexts, urban land security for poorer sections of society is particularly crucial. Fiji’s land tenure systems have developed over the course of 3,000 years of human settlement. Land grabbing in the 1860s resulted in the restructuring of Indigenous land tenure. Today around 90 percent of the land in Fiji belongs to Indigenous Fijians. Yet Fiji’s capital Suva has only 10% of its land area classified as native land. This chapter provides a historical sketch of land ownership in Suva. It asks why and how land grabbing eliminated native land from this part of Fiji and considers how the historic evolution of the system has impacted Suva in more recent decades. The chapter focuses on those people who live in informal settlements, where housing expenses are low

SpEYEders: Adults’ and children’s affective responses during immersive playful gaze interactions transforming virtual spiders

Specific phobias like spider phobia represent a frequent mental health problem in children and adolescents, demanding innovative prevention and treatment approaches. We therefore develop an eye tracking supported Virtual Reality serious game for school-aged children, realizing gaze interactions to promote attention towards, and positive experiences during exposure to spiders. Within pilot studies in adults (n=30) and children (n=14) without fear of spiders, we assessed positive and negative affect during prototype gaze feedback through five different variants: If gazed for few seconds, the virtual spider changed into a shrunk, a rainbow coloured, or dying spider, or morphed into a smileyball, or speaks friendly. We found the highest positive affect for the rainbow and smileyball variant, followed by the shrunk and friendly speaking variant. In contrast, the dying variant was excluded due to the possible induction of negative affect. Findings indicate eligible variants for the further development of the VR serious game

The dynamics of root cap sloughing in Arabidopsis is regulated by peptide signalling

The root cap protects the stem cell niche of angiosperm roots from damage. In Arabidopsis, lateral root cap (LRC) cells covering the meristematic zone are regularly lost through programmed cell death, while the outermost layer of the root cap covering the tip is repeatedly sloughed. Efficient coordination with stem cells producing new layers is needed to maintain a constant size of the cap. We present a signalling pair, the peptide IDA-LIKE1 (IDL1) and its receptor HAESA-LIKE2 (HSL2), mediating such communication. Live imaging over several days characterized this process from initial fractures in LRC cell files to full separation of a layer. Enhanced expression of IDL1 in the separating root cap layers resulted in increased frequency of sloughing, balanced with generation of new layers in a HSL2-dependent manner. Transcriptome analyses linked IDL1-HSL2 signalling to the transcription factors BEARSKIN1/2 and genes associated with programmed cell death. Mutations in either IDL1 or HSL2 slowed down cell division, maturation and separation. Thus, IDL1-HSL2 signalling potentiates dynamic regulation of the homeostatic balance between stem cell division and sloughing activity

Analyse, Bewertung und Sicherung alpiner Freiräume durch Raumordnung und räumliche Planung

Alpine Freiräume werden zusehends knapper. Diese Aussage gilt in den Alpen für den naturgemäß raren Dauersiedlungsraum, der z.B. in Tirol nur 11,8 % des Staatsgebietes umfasst. Die Bevölkerung wächst in vielen Talschaften und damit auch die erforderliche Infrastruktur. Aber auch die Freiräume, die in den darüber gelegenen Höhenstufen der Alpen liegen, werden sukzessiv zerschnitten und mit technischen Anlagen (z.B. Seilbahnen, hydroelektrischen Anlagen) bzw. immer intensiveren Nutzungen (z.B. EMountainbikes) erschlossen. Im Freistaat Bayern begann die alpenweite Erhaltung von Freiräumen mit der Implementierung des Alpenplans als raumordnerische Zielsetzung bereits im Jahr 1972. Die dadurch betriebene Zonierung des gesamten bayerischen Alpenraums nach drei Intensitätsstufen der verkehrlichen Nutzung war eine echte Innovation des Normgebers. Sie zielte mit ihrer sogenannten Zone C auf den damals noch jungen Naturschutz und die Verringerung alpiner Naturgefahren ab. In der Hauptsache jedoch galt diese planerische Initiative der nicht anlagengebundenen, landschaftsbezogenen Erholung, das heißt Freizeit- und Tourismusaktivitäten in der Natur. Heute bestehen mehr oder weniger erfolgreiche, verwandte Initiativen in allen deutschsprachigen Alpenstaaten und der Schweiz. Sie zu analysieren, ihre Festlegung, Funktionsweise und planerische Umsetzung vergleichend zu beschreiben sowie kritisch zu hinterfragen ist die Zielsetzung dieser Arbeit. Weil der Erhalt von Freiräumen ein transnationales Thema darstellt, gerade in den vielfach von politischen Grenzen durchzogenen Alpen, wird dabei auch auf die rahmensetzenden Vorgaben der völkerrechtlich verbindlichen Alpenkonvention aus dem Jahr 1991 abgehoben und die neue EU-Initiative EUSALP sowie deren potenzielle Auswirkungen erörtert. Im Fokus steht aber die Zusammenführung von Ansätzen zum Erhalt von Freiräumen für den Menschen (Einheimische und ihre traditionellen Wirtschaftsweisen, aber auch Besucher) und das Naturerbe. Die heute gängigen Praktiken im Umgang mit alpinen Freiräumen in Raumordnung und räumlicher Planung im deutschsprachigen Alpenraum und der Schweiz werden aufgezeigt sowie kritisch bewertet. Zudem werden künftige Möglichkeiten von grenzüberschreitenden harmonisierten Verfahrensweisen debattiert.The analysis, evaluation and safeguarding of Alpine open spaces through regional and spatial planning Alpine open spaces are becoming noticeably scarcer. This statement applies to the inherently restricted area of permanent settlement in the Alps, which, e.g., covers only 11.8 % of the territory of the Tyrol. The population is growing in many of the valleys and with it the infrastructure required. However, the open spaces, situated at altitudes above the settlements, are also being successively broken up and exploited using technical equipment (e.g. cable cars, hydro-electric facilities) or increasingly intensive types of use (e.g. e-mountain bikes). In Bavaria the conservation of open space began as early as 1972 with the implementation of the Alpine plan (Alpenplan), which set spatial planning objectives for the entire Alpine area. This led to the division of the Bavarian Alpine area into three zones of varying intensity of traffic use, a true legislative innovation. The so-called Zone C was intended for nature protection, still in its infancy at that time, and also aimed to reduce natural Alpine hazards. Primarily, however, this planning initiative was related to the role of the landscape for recreation, i. e. to leisure and touristic activities in natural surroundings. Today, there are similar initiatives of varying success in all the Germanspeaking Alpine states and in Switzerland. This paper aims to analyse these initiatives, comparing and critically assessing their stipulation, functioning and planning implementation. As the conservation of open space is a transnational issue, especially in the Alps, which are dissected by many political borders, reference is also made to the framework provisions of the internationally binding Alpine Convention from 1991 and to the new EU initiative EUSALP, and their potential consequences. The focus of attention is, however, on bringing together approaches for conserving open space for people (local inhabitants and their traditional economic activities, but also visitors) and natural heritage. Presentday regional and spatial planning practices related to Alpine open spaces in the Germanspeaking Alps and in Switzerland are presented and critically evaluated and future options for harmonising approaches across the borders are discussed

Progranulin Gene Variability and Plasma Levels in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia

Basing on the assumption that frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (BPD) might share common aetiological mechanisms, we analyzed genetic variation in the FTLD risk gene progranulin (GRN) in a German population of patients with schizophrenia (n = 271) or BPD (n = 237) as compared with 574 age-, gender- and ethnicity-matched controls. Furthermore, we measured plasma progranulin levels in 26 German BPD patients as well as in 61 Italian BPD patients and 29 matched controls