An analytical study of liquid outflow from cylindrical tanks during weightlessness Final report

Liquid outflow from cylindrical tanks during weightlessnes

Two Concepts of Religious Freedom in the European Court of Human Rights

This paper considers the way in which recent historical work on the history of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience opens up a new interpretation of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in the headscarf cases. These decisions have been widely criticized as adopting a militantly secularist approach to the presence of Islamic religious symbols in the public sphere, an approach that seems inconsistent or even overtly discriminatory in light of the court’s recent decision in Lautsi that the compulsory display of crucifixes in the classroom did not breach Italy’s convention obligations. I argue that the headscarf cases turn less on the balance between state neutrality and religious belief, than on an understanding of certain religious symbols as a threat to public order and as harbingers of sectarian strife which undermine democracy

What should freedom of religion become?

This interdisciplinary volume examines the relationship between secularism, freedom of religion and human rights in legal, theoretical, historical and political perspective. It brings together chapters from leading scholars of human rights, law and religion, political theory, religious studies and history, and provides insights into the state of the debate about the relationship between these concepts. Comparative in orientation, its chapters draw on constitutional and political discourses and experience not only from Western Europe and the United States, but also from India, the Arab world, and Malaysia.1: What Should Freedom of Religion Become?, Nehal Bhuta 2: Reimagining Secularism: Respect, Domination and Principled Distance, Rajeev Bhargava 3: Citizenship, Religious Rights, and State Identity in Arab Constitutions: Who is Free and What Are They Free to Do?, Nathan J. Brown 4: Communal Religious Rights or Majoritarian Oppression: Conversion and Proselytism Laws in Malaysia and India, Carolyn Evans and Timnah Rachel Baker 5: Too Much Secularism? Religious Freedom in European History and the European Court of Human Rights, Samuel Moyn 6: US Exceptionalism in the Regulation of Religion, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan 7: Rethinking Secularism in Europe, Lorenzo Zucc

Dendrochronology in the Blackwater Ecological Preserve

The Blackwater Ecological Preserve (BEP), located in southeastern Virginia, holds significant ecological importance as it contains the northernmost intact community of Pinus palustris, longleaf pine. At the BEP, we cored longleaf pine and recorded sample data including tree height and diameter at breast height (DBH). Two sites on the BEP, the 20’s series and 40’s series, were found to correlate within, but not between, sites. Statistical and qualitative analyses were conducted to find differences between the sites significant enough to affect correlation within a chronology. This data is being incorporated into a larger dendrochronology and climate analysis study on longleaf and other pine species on the BEP. This research is important for several reasons. Currently, no baseline master chronology exists for any tree species of the BEP, so the age of the pine populations is unknown. Additionally, there is a significant lack of research on climate related growth trends involving the longleaf pine near the northern range limit. The information produced from this study may have implications in the future management of the Preserve and its pine populations.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/gradposters2023_sciences/1018/thumbnail.jp

Comparative study between effectiveness of low molecular weight heparin injection and unfractionated heparin in terms of morbidity and outcome in COVID-19 cases

Background: The novel coronavirus 2019 presented a variety of disease spectrums that range from asymptomatic to sepsis with multi-organ dysfunction and death. One of the mechanisms being a hypercoagulable state with micro and macro-circulatory thrombosis is found in critically ill COVID-19 patient with ARDS with pathology consistent with a vascular occlusive aetiology of respiratory failure rather than more classic finding of ARDS. Venous thromboembolism, MI, acute peripheral arterial thrombosis is seen in COVID-19. Endothelial cells dysfunction induced by infection causing excess thrombin generation, fibrinolysins shutdown, hypoxia inducible transcription factor dependent signalling pathways, increasing blood viscosity leading to Hypercoagulable state. Early application of anticoagulant therapy in severe COVID-19 was suggested for improving outcome in patients with elevated d-dimer. Aim of study was comparing effectiveness of LMWH with unfractionated heparin in outcome of COVID-19.Methods: This retrospective observational study including 400 patients meeting inclusion criteria were divided 2 groups out of which 200 patients were treated with inj. LMWH and other 200 were treated with injection heparin and various parameters were compared. A probability value (p value) of less than or equal to 0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: Death rate is seen lower with LMWH in critically ill patients with high discharge rate with minimal lab parameter derangement and high efficacy to lower down inflammatory markers (LDH, ferritin, CRP, D-dimer, ESR) in comparison to unfractionated heparin.Conclusions: Early use of LMWH may be beneficial for the outcome

Do Language Models Learn about Legal Entity Types during Pretraining?

Language Models (LMs) have proven their ability to acquire diverse linguistic knowledge during the pretraining phase, potentially serving as a valuable source of incidental supervision for downstream tasks. However, there has been limited research conducted on the retrieval of domain-specific knowledge, and specifically legal knowledge. We propose to explore the task of Entity Typing, serving as a proxy for evaluating legal knowledge as an essential aspect of text comprehension, and a foundational task to numerous downstream legal NLP applications. Through systematic evaluation and analysis and two types of prompting (cloze sentences and QA-based templates) and to clarify the nature of these acquired cues, we compare diverse types and lengths of entities both general and domain-specific entities, semantics or syntax signals, and different LM pretraining corpus (generic and legal-oriented) and architectures (encoder BERT-based and decoder-only with Llama2). We show that (1) Llama2 performs well on certain entities and exhibits potential for substantial improvement with optimized prompt templates, (2) law-oriented LMs show inconsistent performance, possibly due to variations in their training corpus, (3) LMs demonstrate the ability to type entities even in the case of multi-token entities, (4) all models struggle with entities belonging to sub-domains of the law (5) Llama2 appears to frequently overlook syntactic cues, a shortcoming less present in BERT-based architectures. The code of the experiments is available at https://github.com/clairebarale/ probing_legal_entity_types

Automated Refugee Case Analysis: An NLP Pipeline for Supporting Legal Practitioners

In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline for retrieving, processing, and extracting targeted information from legal cases. We investigate an under-studied legal domain with a case study on refugee law in Canada. Searching case law for past similar cases is a key part of legal work for both lawyers and judges, the potential end-users of our prototype. While traditional named-entity recognition labels such as dates provide meaningful information in legal work, we propose to extend existing models and retrieve a total of 19 useful categories of items from refugee cases. After creating a novel data set of cases, we perform information extraction based on state-of-the-art neural named-entity recognition (NER). We test different architectures including two transformer models, using contextual and non-contextual embeddings, and compare general purpose versus domain-specific pre-training. The results demonstrate that models pre-trained on legal data perform best despite their smaller size, suggesting that domain matching had a larger effect than network architecture. We achieve a F1 score above 90% on five of the targeted categories and over 80% on four further categories.Comment: 9 pages, preprint of long paper accepted to Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 202

An unusual initial presentation of mantle cell lymphoma arising from the lymphoid stroma of warthin tumor.

BackgroundWarthin tumors presenting concomitantly with a lymphoma is vanishingly rare with only 15 reported cases in English literature. Herein, we report an unusual initial presentation of a mantle cell lymphoma involving the lymphoid stroma of a Warthin tumor.Case presentationA seventy-seven year old otherwise healthy gentleman with a 50-pack year smoking history presents with a slowly enlarging left cheek mass. CT scan of the neck demonstrated a left parotid gland tumor measuring 3.4 cm in greatest dimension. He underwent a left superficial parotidectomy, with subsequent histopathologic examination revealing a Warthin tumor with extensive expansion of the lymphoid stroma. Flow cytometric, immunohistochemical, and cytogenetic studies of the stromal component of the tumor confirmed the presence of a mantle cell lymphoma. Clinical staging demonstrated stage IVa disease, and was considered to be at low to intermediate risk due to the slow growth of the parotid lesion. The patient is undergoing close follow up with repeat PET-CT scans at six months.ConclusionTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first well documented collision tumor between mantle cell lymphoma and a Warthin tumor. This case also brings to light the significance of thorough evaluation of the lymphoid component of Warthin tumor