“You say it best when you say nothing at all”: effects of reparation, apology and expressions of emotions on intergroup forgiveness

Three experiments examined the effects of a perpetrator group member expressing various emotions or no emotion on victim group members’ propensity to forgive the perpetrator group and hold positive outgroup beliefs. All studies were conducted in Bosnia Herzegovina. In Study 1 (N = 112), a member of the Serbian outgroup expressed No Emotion, Image Shame, Moral Shame or Guilt whilst talking about her group’s involvement in a recent atrocity (Srebrenica). The first condition elicited more forgiveness and more favorable outgroup cognitions in comparison with the other three conditions. This effect was replicated in Studies 2 (N = 90) and 3 (N = 98), which also incorporated manipulations of apologies and reparations respectively. Apologies had no effect on intergroup forgiveness or positive outgroup cognitions; reparations had more positive effects irrespective of emotions expressed

The New Yugoslavia: Myth or Reality

With this paper I intend to investigate the possibility of creating a new Yugoslavia considering its historical background and national complexity. One point of view maintains that nationalism is insurmountable obstacle for the future union of South Slavs. In contrast, a historical perspective shows that South Slavs reaction to external forces had led to more or less successful unifications in the past and this creates the possibility of another union in the future

Tasks prioritization for whole-body realtime imitation of human motion by humanoid robots

International audienceThis paper deals with on-line motion imitation of a human being by a humanoid robot using inverse kinematics (IK). First, the human observed trajectories are scaled in order to match the robot geometric and kinematic description. Second, a task prioritization process is defined using both equality and minimized constraints in the robot IK model, with four tasks: balance management, end-effectors tracking, joint limits avoidance and staying close to the human joint trajectories. The method was validated using the humanoid robot NAO

Microperimetry hill of vision and volumetric measures of retinal sensitivity

Purpose: Mean retinal sensitivity is the main output measure used in microperimetry. It is, however, of limited use in patients with poor vision because averaging is weighted toward zero in those with significant scotomas creating an artificial floor effect. In contrast, volumetric measures avoid these issues and are displayed graphically as a hill of vision. Methods: An open-source program was created to manipulate raw sensitivity threshold data files obtained from MAIA microperimetry. Thin plate spline interpolated heat maps and three-dimensional hill of vision plots with an associated volume were generated. Retrospective analyses of microperimetry volumes were undertaken in patients with a range of retinal diseases to assess the qualitative benefits of three-dimensional visualization and volumetric measures. Simulated pathology was applied to radial grid patterns to investigate the performance of volumetric sensitivity in nonuniform grids. Results: Volumetric analyses from microperimetry in RPGR-related retinitis pigmentosa, choroideremia, Stargardt disease, and age-related macular degeneration were analyzed. In simulated nonuniform testing grids, volumetric sensitivity was able to detect differences in retinal sensitivity where mean sensitivity could not. Conclusions: Volumetric measures do not suffer from averaging issues and demonstrate superior performance in nonuniform testing grids. Additionally, volume measures enable detection of localized retinal sensitivity changes that might otherwise be undetectable in a mean change. Translational Relevance: As microperimetry has become an outcome measure in several gene-therapy clinical trials, three-dimensional visualization and volumetric sensitivity enables a complementary analysis of baseline disease characteristics and subsequent response to treatment, both as a signal of safety and efficacy

Characterizing visual fields in RPGR related retinitis pigmentosa using octopus static-automated perimetry

Purpose: Peripheral visual fields have not been as well defined by static automated perimetry as kinetic perimetry in RPGR-related retinitis pigmentosa. This study explores the pattern and sensitivities of peripheral visual fields, which may provide an important end point when assessing interventional clinical trials. Methods: A retrospective observational cross-sectional study of 10 genetically confirmed RPGR subjects was performed. Visual fields were obtained using the Octopus 900 perimeter. Interocular symmetry and repeatability were quantified. Visual fields were subdivided into central and peripheral subfields for analysis. Results: Mean patient age was 32 years old (20 to 49 years old). Average mean sensitivity was 7 dB (SD = 3.67 dB) and 6.8 dB (SD = 3.4 dB) for the right and left eyes, respectively, demonstrating interocular symmetry. Coefficient of repeatability for overall mean sensitivity: <2 dB. Nine out of 10 subjects had a preserved inferotemporal subfield, whose mean sensitivity was highly correlated to the central field (r2 = 0.78, P = 0.002 and r2 = 0.72, P = 0.002 for the right and left eyes, respectively). Within the central field, sensitivities were greater in the temporal than the nasal half (t-test, P = 0.01 and P = 0.03 for the right and left eyes, respectively). Conclusions: Octopus static-automated perimeter demonstrates good repeatability. Interocular symmetry permits use of the noninterventional eye as an internal control. In this cohort, the inferotemporal and central visual fields are preserved into later disease stages likely mapping to populations of surviving cones. Translational Relevance: A consistently preserved inferotemporal island of vision highly correlated to that of the central visual field may have significance as a possible future therapeutic site

Restoration of Vision with Ectopic Expression of Human Rod Opsin

SummaryMany retinal dystrophies result in photoreceptor loss, but the inner retinal neurons can survive, making them potentially amenable to emerging optogenetic therapies. Here, we show that ectopically expressed human rod opsin, driven by either a non-selective or ON-bipolar cell-specific promoter, can function outside native photoreceptors and restore visual function in a mouse model of advanced retinal degeneration. Electrophysiological recordings from retinal explants and the visual thalamus revealed changes in firing (increases and decreases) induced by simple light pulses, luminance increases, and naturalistic movies in treated mice. These responses could be elicited at light intensities within the physiological range and substantially below those required by other optogenetic strategies. Mice with rod opsin expression driven by the ON-bipolar specific promoter displayed behavioral responses to increases in luminance, flicker, coarse spatial patterns, and elements of a natural movie at levels of contrast and illuminance (≈50–100 lux) typical of natural indoor environments. These data reveal that virally mediated ectopic expression of human rod opsin can restore vision under natural viewing conditions and at moderate light intensities. Given the inherent advantages in employing a human protein, the simplicity of this intervention, and the quality of vision restored, we suggest that rod opsin merits consideration as an optogenetic actuator for treating patients with advanced retinal degeneration

Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction via Recurrent Hybrid Convolutional Neural Networks with an Improved Focal Loss

Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) may bring huge health risks and dangerous effects to a patient’s body when taking two or more drugs at the same time or within a certain period of time. Therefore, the automatic extraction of unknown DDIs has great potential for the development of pharmaceutical agents and the safety of drug use. In this article, we propose a novel recurrent hybrid convolutional neural network (RHCNN) for DDI extraction from biomedical literature. In the embedding layer, the texts mentioning two entities are represented as a sequence of semantic embeddings and position embeddings. In particular, the complete semantic embedding is obtained by the information fusion between a word embedding and its contextual information which is learnt by recurrent structure. After that, the hybrid convolutional neural network is employed to learn the sentence-level features which consist of the local context features from consecutive words and the dependency features between separated words for DDI extraction. Lastly but most significantly, in order to make up for the defects of the traditional cross-entropy loss function when dealing with class imbalanced data, we apply an improved focal loss function to mitigate against this problem when using the DDIExtraction 2013 dataset. In our experiments, we achieve DDI automatic extraction with a micro F-score of 75.48% on the DDIExtraction 2013 dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach by 2.49

The rhetorical complexity of competitive and common victimhood in conversational discourse

Much current research on collective victimhood acknowledges the role of rhetoric but does not fully address the implications for micro-level variation in personal expressions of victimhood. The focus has tended to be on individual differences in collective victimhood construals where people may either see their group as the sole possessor of victim-status or may incorporate other groups into an inclusive category. While recent research sees a strategic element in some “inclusivity”, we argue that all claims of victimhood are strategic. By using a discursive approach, we show variability in the expression of victimhood and how this accomplishes different activities in conversations. Several focus groups consisting of victims from Northern Ireland were analysed to identify presentations of victimhood and their relation to the unfolding dynamics of the conversation. We demonstrate that presentation of victimhood is an interactional concern, link this to the concept of “needs” and suggest implications this might have