The Return of Quarantinism and How to Keep It in Check: From Wishful Regulations to Political Accountability

Concerns about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases have given a new lease of life to quarantinist measures: a series of time-honoured techniques for controlling the spread of infectious diseases through breaking the chain of human contagion. Since such measures typically infringe individual rights or privacy their use is subject to legal regulations and gives rise to ethical and political worries and suspicions. Yet in some circumstances they can be very effective. After considering some case studies that show how epidemics are unique, fluid and affected by a multitude of contingent factors, it is argued that the legal and ethical guidelines may not always be the best approach to discipline the use of quarantinist measures. An alternative model based on ex-post political accountability for reasonableness is proposed. This model restores the centrality of political decision and expert judgement in situations characterized by high risk, uncertainty and contingency. It is argued that such alternative model affords quicker and more flexible responses to serious outbreaks of infections, while providing adequate protection against abuses

Perceptions of assessment among teachers of English in Church schools

This research paper attempts to create a snapshot of the perceptions of assessment among teachers of English within Church secondary schools. The aim was to bring forth the teachers’ opinions about assessment as they experience the myriad changes that are affecting education now. It also seeks to give an overview of what assessment procedures were in place before the reform, and if any changes were made, what were they. Data was collected using an online questionnaire made up of multiple-choice items amd items on a 4-point Likert scale. The research found that many teachers still view examinations as being useful in this day and age, but that diversifying continuous assessment is the way forward. However, they do not think that stress will be alleviated with the new proposals being proposed. Teachers in Church schools feel that they are not ready for these changes, nor are their students or their parents. Thus, there is a clear demand for support and professional development sessions to be provided by the Secretariat for Catholic Education (SfCE).peer-reviewe

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Topological aspects of generalized Harper operators

A generalized version of the TKNN-equations computing Hall conductances for generalized Dirac-like Harper operators is derived. Geometrically these equations relate Chern numbers of suitable (dual) bundles naturally associated to spectral projections of the operators.Comment: 8 pages; needs aipproc.cls and corresponding style files. To appear in: "The Eight International Conference on Progress in Theoretical Physics", Mentouri University, Constantine, Algeria, October 2011; Conference proceedings of the AIP, edited by N. Mebarki and J. Mimoun

Generalized TKNN-equations

We derive generalized TKNN-equations via bundle representations of the noncommutative torus with rational deformation parameter, the bundle coming from spectral projections in the torus algebra. These equations relate Chern numbers of dual bundles which we interpret as Hall conductances for Dirac-like Hamiltonians describing magnetic Bloch electrons in a strong magnetic field. We also present their generalizations for irrational values of the deformation parameter.Comment: v2: 32 pages; Sect. 1 and Sect. 2.5 partially rewritten; additional minor corrections; references added. Key words: TKNN-equations, Noncommutative torus, vector bundles, Chern number

Deep Neural Networks for Anatomical Brain Segmentation

We present a novel approach to automatically segment magnetic resonance (MR) images of the human brain into anatomical regions. Our methodology is based on a deep artificial neural network that assigns each voxel in an MR image of the brain to its corresponding anatomical region. The inputs of the network capture information at different scales around the voxel of interest: 3D and orthogonal 2D intensity patches capture the local spatial context while large, compressed 2D orthogonal patches and distances to the regional centroids enforce global spatial consistency. Contrary to commonly used segmentation methods, our technique does not require any non-linear registration of the MR images. To benchmark our model, we used the dataset provided for the MICCAI 2012 challenge on multi-atlas labelling, which consists of 35 manually segmented MR images of the brain. We obtained competitive results (mean dice coefficient 0.725, error rate 0.163) showing the potential of our approach. To our knowledge, our technique is the first to tackle the anatomical segmentation of the whole brain using deep neural networks