1,647 research outputs found
The flavour singlet mesons in QCD
We study the flavour singlet mesons from first principles using lattice QCD.
We explore the splitting between flavour singlet and non-singlet for vector and
axial mesons as well as the more commonly studied cases of the scalar and
pseudoscalar mesons.Comment: 12 pages, LATEX, 4 ps figure
Should we welcome robot teachers?
Abstract Current uses of robots in classrooms are
reviewed and used to characterise four scenarios: (s1)
Robot as Classroom Teacher; (s2) Robot as Companion
and Peer; (s3) Robot as Care-eliciting Companion; and (s4)
Telepresence Robot Teacher. The main ethical concerns
associated with robot teachers are identified as: privacy;
attachment, deception, and loss of human contact; and
control and accountability. These are discussed in terms of
the four identified scenarios. It is argued that classroom
robots are likely to impact children’s’ privacy, especially
when they masquerade as their friends and companions,
when sensors are used to measure children’s responses, and
when records are kept. Social robots designed to appear as
if they understand and care for humans necessarily involve
some deception (itself a complex notion), and could
increase the risk of reduced human contact. Children could
form attachments to robot companions (s2 and s3), or robot
teachers (s1) and this could have a deleterious effect on
their social development. There are also concerns about the
ability, and use of robots to control or make decisions
about children’s behaviour in the classroom. It is concluded
that there are good reasons not to welcome fully fledged
robot teachers (s1), and that robot companions (s2 and 3)
should be given a cautious welcome at best. The limited
circumstances in which robots could be used in the classroom
to improve the human condition by offering otherwise
unavailable educational experiences are discussed
Edge-Based Compartmental Modeling for Infectious Disease Spread Part III: Disease and Population Structure
We consider the edge-based compartmental models for infectious disease spread
introduced in Part I. These models allow us to consider standard SIR diseases
spreading in random populations. In this paper we show how to handle deviations
of the disease or population from the simplistic assumptions of Part I. We
allow the population to have structure due to effects such as demographic
detail or multiple types of risk behavior the disease to have more complicated
natural history. We introduce these modifications in the static network
context, though it is straightforward to incorporate them into dynamic
networks. We also consider serosorting, which requires using the dynamic
network models. The basic methods we use to derive these generalizations are
widely applicable, and so it is straightforward to introduce many other
generalizations not considered here
Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration \ud
Should we grant rights to artificially intelligent robots? Most current and near-future robots do not meet the hard criteria set by deontological and utilitarian theory. Virtue ethics can avoid this problem with its indirect approach. However, both direct and indirect arguments for moral consideration rest on ontological features of entities, an approach which incurs several problems. In response to these difficulties, this paper taps into a different conceptual resource in order to be able to grant some degree of moral consideration to some intelligent social robots: it sketches a novel argument for moral consideration based on social relations. It is shown that to further develop this argument we need to revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. It is suggested that we need a social ecology, which may be developed by engaging with Western ecology and Eastern worldviews. Although this relational turn raises many difficult issues and requires more work, this paper provides a rough outline of an alternative approach to moral consideration that can assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purpose
Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on STEMI care: An expanded analysis from the United States.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic migitation measures on of ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) care.
BACKGROUND: We previously reported a 38% decline in cardiac catheterization activations during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic mitigation measures. This study extends our early observations using a larger sample of STEMI programs representative of different US regions with the inclusion of more contemporary data.
METHODS: Data from 18 hospitals or healthcare systems in the US from January 2019 to April 2020 were collecting including number activations for STEMI, the number of activations leading to angiography and primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI), and average door to balloon (D2B) times. Two periods, January 2019-February 2020 and March-April 2020, were defined to represent periods before (BC) and after (AC) initiation of pandemic mitigation measures, respectively. A generalized estimating equations approach was used to estimate the change in response variables at AC from BC.
RESULTS: Compared to BC, the AC period was characterized by a marked reduction in the number of activations for STEMI (29%, 95% CI:18-38, p \u3c .001), number of activations leading to angiography (34%, 95% CI: 12-50, p = .005) and number of activations leading to PPCI (20%, 95% CI: 11-27, p \u3c .001). A decline in STEMI activations drove the reductions in angiography and PPCI volumes. Relative to BC, the D2B times in the AC period increased on average by 20%, 95%CI (-0.2 to 44, p = .05).
CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 Pandemic has adversely affected many aspects of STEMI care, including timely access to the cardiac catheterization laboratory for PPCI
Exact equations for SIR epidemics on tree graphs
We consider Markovian susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) dynamics on time-invariant weighted contact networks where the infection and removal processes are Poisson and where network links may be directed or undirected. We prove that a particular pair-based moment closure representation generates the expected infectious time series for networks with no cycles in the underlying graph. Moreover, this “deterministic” representation of the expected behaviour of a complex heterogeneous and finite Markovian system is straightforward to evaluate numerically
Microguards and micromessengers of the genome
The regulation of gene expression is of fundamental importance to maintain organismal function and integrity and requires a multifaceted and highly ordered sequence of events. The cyclic nature of gene expression is known as ‘transcription dynamics’. Disruption or perturbation of these dynamics can result in significant fitness costs arising from genome instability, accelerated ageing and disease. We review recent research that supports the idea that an important new role for small RNAs, particularly microRNAs (miRNAs), is in protecting the genome against short-term transcriptional fluctuations, in a process we term ‘microguarding’. An additional emerging role for miRNAs is as ‘micromessengers’—through alteration of gene expression in target cells to which they are trafficked within microvesicles. We describe the scant but emerging evidence that miRNAs can be moved between different cells, individuals and even species, to exert biologically significant responses. With these two new roles, miRNAs have the potential to protect against deleterious gene expression variation from perturbation and to themselves perturb the expression of genes in target cells. These interactions between cells will frequently be subject to conflicts of interest when they occur between unrelated cells that lack a coincidence of fitness interests. Hence, there is the potential for miRNAs to represent both a means to resolve conflicts of interest, as well as instigate them. We conclude by exploring this conflict hypothesis, by describing some of the initial evidence consistent with it and proposing new ideas for future research into this exciting topic
Evidence for an oscillatory signature in atmospheric neutrino oscillation
Muon neutrino disappearance probability as a function of neutrino flight
length L over neutrino energy E was studied. A dip in the L/E distribution was
observed in the data, as predicted from the sinusoidal flavor transition
probability of neutrino oscillation. The observed L/E distribution constrained
nu_mu nu_tau neutrino oscillation parameters; 1.9x10^-3 < Delta m^2 <
3.0x10^-3 eV^2 and \sin^2(2theta) > 0.90 at 90% confidence level.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PR
Effects of non-perturbatively improved dynamical fermions in QCD at fixed lattice spacing
We present results for the static inter-quark potential, lightest glueballs,
light hadron spectrum and topological susceptibility using a non-perturbatively
improved action on a lattice at a set of values of the bare
gauge coupling and bare dynamical quark mass chosen to keep the lattice size
fixed in physical units ( fm). By comparing these measurements with a
matched quenched ensemble, we study the effects due to two degenerate flavours
of dynamical quarks. With the greater control over residual lattice spacing
effects which these methods afford, we find some evidence of charge screening
and some minor effects on the light hadron spectrum over the range of quark
masses studied (). More substantial differences between
quenched and unquenched simulations are observed in measurements of topological
quantities.Comment: 53 pages, LaTeX/RevTeX, 16 eps figures; corrected clover action
expression and various typos, no results change
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