Village Water Ozonation System

The Village Water Ozonation System (VWOS) team’s core mission statement is to provide economically sustainable and culturally sensitive drinking water solutions for communities, to empower communities with the ability to properly maintain their drinking water supply, and to transform people’s lives by decreasing the occurrences of waterborne diseases. Currently, the VWOS team is partnering with Friends in Action to design and implement two drinking water treatment systems for the community living on Rama Cay, an island in the Bluefields Lagoon on the eastern coastline of Nicaragua. The wells on the island are contaminated with E. coli and other bacteria and contain high levels of salt that cause the water to be unhealthy, distasteful, and corrosive to metal equipment in the system. The team hopes to design a system that will disinfect the water, remove salinity from the well water with a safe and efficient disposal of all byproducts, and decrease corrosion agents. VWOS is partnering with Forward Edge International for the third time (Nicaragua 2009 and Mexico 2016) to design water treatment systems for communities in Oaxaca, Mexico and Kijabe, Kenya. The system for Oaxaca is ready for implementation and awaits availability to travel. The system for Kijabe is in the initial stage of communicating with the client on specifics for the design.https://mosaic.messiah.edu/engr2021/1018/thumbnail.jp

Explainable AI using expressive Boolean formulas

We propose and implement an interpretable machine learning classification model for Explainable AI (XAI) based on expressive Boolean formulas. Potential applications include credit scoring and diagnosis of medical conditions. The Boolean formula defines a rule with tunable complexity (or interpretability), according to which input data are classified. Such a formula can include any operator that can be applied to one or more Boolean variables, thus providing higher expressivity compared to more rigid rule-based and tree-based approaches. The classifier is trained using native local optimization techniques, efficiently searching the space of feasible formulas. Shallow rules can be determined by fast Integer Linear Programming (ILP) or Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) solvers, potentially powered by special purpose hardware or quantum devices. We combine the expressivity and efficiency of the native local optimizer with the fast operation of these devices by executing non-local moves that optimize over subtrees of the full Boolean formula. We provide extensive numerical benchmarking results featuring several baselines on well-known public datasets. Based on the results, we find that the native local rule classifier is generally competitive with the other classifiers. The addition of non-local moves achieves similar results with fewer iterations, and therefore using specialized or quantum hardware could lead to a speedup by fast proposal of non-local moves.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures, 4 table

In search of the authentic nation: landscape and national identity in Canada and Switzerland

While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity-forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation-states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration

Clinical efficacy and safety of zoledronic acid in prostate and breast cancer

The anti-estrogen treatment for hormone-sensitive breast cancer and the androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer can lead to the development of osteoporosis and bone fractures. Metastases associated with prostate and breast cancer can also occur in bone. Bisphosphonates are used in these types of bone dysfunction. Zoledronic acid is the most potent bisphosphonate. In osteoporosis, zoledronic acid inhibits bone reabsorption and increases bone mineral density for at least a year after intravenous administration. The efficacy and safety of zoledronic acid in osteoporosis secondary to hormone-sensitive cancers (prostate and breast), and in the bone metastases associated with these cancers are reviewed

Groups and individuals: conformity and diversity in the performance of gendered identities

The nature and role of social groups is a central tension in sociology. On the one hand, the idea of a group enables sociologists to locate and describe individuals in terms of characteristics that are shared with others. On the other, emphasizing the fluidity of categories such as gender or ethnicity undermines their legitimacy as ways of classifying people and, by extension, the legitimacy of categorization as a goal of sociological research. In this paper, we use a new research method known as the Imitation Game to defend the social group as a sociological concept. We show that, despite the diversity of practices that may be consistent with self‐identified membership of a group, there are also shared normative expectations – typically narrower in nature than the diversity displayed by individual group members – that shape the ways in which category membership can be discussed with, and performed to, others. Two claims follow from this. First, the Imitation Game provides a way of simultaneously revealing both the diversity and ‘groupishness’ of social groups. Second, that the social group, in the quasi‐Durkheimian sense of something that transcends the individual, remains an important concept for sociology

SupplementFile2

R script "tryRollWindows.R" – for performing genome-anchored smoothed FST and diversity significance analysis. Also included is the data file "Fig3_data_forMark.csv" referenced in the script