Citizens United and the balance between individual and corporate political speech

In an attempt to create stronger protection for free speech rights, the Supreme Court, in its ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), has issued a determination that limits the rights of citizens in favor of artificial industrial entities. The majority’s stated position, that corporations cannot be regulated differently from real human beings, cannot be justified according to values enshrined in the Constitution. They further claim that large sums of unregulated money accrued for capital investment cannot be demonstrated to cause corruption, which is an obvious mischaracterization of financial influence in the current political process. By ignoring the purpose of the federal legislation as a balancing agent between artificial organizations and citizens, the Supreme Court has opened the door for a centralized control of public policy and other ideas through information dissemination that can now be dictated by financially privileged government instantiated organizations. My thesis is to provide a philosophical justification for the equilibrium needed between competing agents in the political and social arena that was removed by this recent court decision. One foundation to do this will be John Stuart Mill’ On Liberty, a traditionally well accepted and respected commentary on balancing social freedom and interaction. Additionally I will use Milton Friedman, a respected libertarian philosopher, to elaborate on the modern impact of imbalanced regulation between citizen, state, and business entity, and outline a direction toward solutions for this difficult problem. Through analysis of the case along with these two philosopher’s positions, my aim is to articulate the imbalance that currently exists in political speech

Rootstock Breeding for Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Citrus

Citrus species are the most widely produced fruit crops in the world. Citrus fruits are mainly produced in coastal areas in several countries as well as Mediterranean region, and production in these regions is affected by both biotic and abiotic stresses, including drought, extreme temperature, salinity, citrus canker, citrus tristeza virus, citrus greening, and others. The use of rootstocks in fruit production includes not only stronger resistance against pathogens but also a higher tolerance to abiotic stress conditions such as salinity, heavy metals, nutrient stress, water stress, and alkalinity. There is extensive genetic diversity in citrus which provides several materials to be used as rootstocks against abiotic stress. In this work, we tried to provide an overview of the abiotic stresses in citrus by combining literature with our studies, role of citrus rootstocks commercially used against abiotic stresses and rootstock breeding in citrus

The oculocardiac reflex and visual training

The oculocardiac reflex is a change in heart rate or rhythm produced by manipulation of the eyes or adnexia. It is known to occur during surgery on the eyes when traction is applied to the extraocular muscles. This study evaluates the possibility that the oculocardiac reflex can be elicited by doing prism rocks. To assess heart rate the subject was connected to a heart rate monitor and to produce the oculocardiac reflex a 20 diopter prism was placed before the right eye. Control data was obtained by use of a plano lens. No significant changes in heart rate were produced by either the prism or the plano lens (t-test for related measures). This suggests that the oculocardiac reflex is not a major problem for normal children doing jump ductions

Finding Order in Chaos: A Novel Data Augmentation Method for Time Series in Contrastive Learning

The success of contrastive learning is well known to be dependent on data augmentation. Although the degree of data augmentations has been well controlled by utilizing pre-defined techniques in some domains like vision, time-series data augmentation is less explored and remains a challenging problem due to the complexity of the data generation mechanism, such as the intricate mechanism involved in the cardiovascular system. Moreover, there is no widely recognized and general time-series augmentation method that can be applied across different tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method for quasi-periodic time-series tasks that aims to connect intra-class samples together, and thereby find order in the latent space. Our method builds upon the well-known mixup technique by incorporating a novel approach that accounts for the periodic nature of non-stationary time-series. Also, by controlling the degree of chaos created by data augmentation, our method leads to improved feature representations and performance on downstream tasks. We evaluate our proposed method on three time-series tasks, including heart rate estimation, human activity recognition, and cardiovascular disease detection. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed approach outperforms prior works on optimal data generation and known data augmentation techniques in the three tasks, reflecting the effectiveness of the presented method. Source code: https://github.com/eth-siplab/Finding_Order_in_ChaosComment: To be published in the Proceedings of NeurIPS 202

Sonografische Topografie der großen abdominalen Organe und echografische Graviditätsdiagnostik beim Kleinen Igeltenrek - Echinops telfairi

Die sonografische Darstellung und Differenzierung einiger abdominaler Organe und der Trächtigkeit ist bei Echinops telfairi mit Hilfe hochfrequenter Schallköpfe mit einer Leistung von 12 bis 15 MHz möglich. Wegen der Wehrhaftigkeit der Tiere ist die Untersuchung nur mit einem Assistenten durchführbar. Ablenkungen durch genaue Beobachtung des Tieres empfehlen die Videoaufzeichnung der Untersuchung zur nachherigen Betrachtung und Auswertung. Regelmäßig sonografisch darstellbare Organe sind Harnblase, Nieren, Gebärmutterkörper, Milz, Leber, Gallenblase, Magen und Darmschlingen ohne Unterscheidung zwischen Dünn- und Dickdarm. Ultraschallbilder der Gebärmutterhörner lassen sich in 67,19% und solche der Hoden in 45,83% der Fälle produzieren. Die individuellen Schwankungen sind vor allem abhängig vom Verfettungsgrad des untersuchten Tieres. Die besondere Beschaffenheit des Fettes kann zu Verwechslungen mit parenchymatösem Gewebe führen. Die sonografischen Trächtigkeitsuntersuchungen zeigen deutlich die unterschiedlichen Entwicklungsstadien von Feten verschiedener Muttertiere. Die Erstdetektion der Trächtigkeit ist ab Tag 14 p.c. möglich, eine sichere Aussage über das Vorliegen einer Trächtigkeit aber erst ab Tag 28 p.c. Ein Rückschluss aus dem Gestationsalter auf den Entwicklungsstand der Feten oder umgekehrt kann im Gegensatz zu Hund, Katze und Heimtieren nicht gezogen werden