Ethics across borders

This article takes what has always been a methodological and ethical question for anthropologists (how should we relate to others?) and turns it into an ethnographic one (how do those we study think ethically across borders?). We show that, paradoxically, anthropologists’ commitment to their own forms of ethics across borders have frequently effaced alternative conceptions among the people we study, whilst the burgeoning field of the anthropology of ethics has reintroduced ideas of cultural boundedness and incommensurability into the anthropological canon. Moreover, within anthropology, a focus on either universal motivation or cultural relativism has obscured ethics across borders, which as a practice is premised on both the existence of ethical difference and the possibility of transcending it. In relation to an example taken from Evans’ work on Ahmadi Muslims in India, we develop the idea that ethics across borders depends as much on the creative production and elaboration of incommensurable differencem - a process we call “incommensuration” - as on the identification of affinities. As suggested by the collection this essay introduces, ethics across borders in this sense must be widespread, and deserves greater ethnographic attention, particularly with regard to the diverse ways in which difference and affinity are imagined.This article and the collection it introduces grew out of an interdisciplinary seminar organized by Jonathan Mair from 2012 to 2013 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, as part of a Melon Newton Research Fellowship. Articles collected here were presented at a conference convened by Mair and Evans under the title “Ethical Conversations Across Borders” in January 2014 held in Cambridge with the support of CRASSH, King’s College, Cambridge and St. John’s College, Cambridge. We would like to thank participants and contributors to the seminar and conference for their contribution to the development of the project, including Michael Banner, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Jane Heal, Caroline Humphrey, Paolo Heywood, Tim Jenkins, James Laidlaw, Michael Lempert, Hallvard Lillehammer, Patrick McKearney, and Alice Wilson. We would also like to thank Marie Lemaire and Ruth Rushworth for invaluable organizational support. Nicholas Evans’ contribution to this project is due, in part, to a generous research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) to which we also extend our thanks. Finally, we are extremely grateful to Giovanni da Col and two anonymous reviewers of this introduction for their insightful comments, and to Sean Dowdy, Andra Le-Roux Kemp, and Justin Dyer for their very significant help with its production.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from HAU via http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.01

Beyond cultural intimacy: The tensions that make truth for India's Ahmadi Muslims

How should anthropologists write about the public self-presentation of minority groups? In the Indian town of Qadian, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community – a marginal group with a long history of persecution in South Asia – uses visual media to counter hostility and produce images of its members as exemplary Muslims. That such images are artificially produced is an intimate secret shared by the town’s residents. Understanding this secret without undermining the political struggle that Ahmadi Muslims are engaged in means moving beyond the idea that truth need be located in either the everyday or the public. For Ahmadis in Qadian, the disjuncture between these realms is a space of possibility that reveals truth.Fieldwork in Qadian was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/I901957/1)

Witnessing a potent truth: rethinking responsibility in the anthropology of theisms

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12380For Ahmadi Muslims in the Indian town of Qadian, a major part of ethical behaviour is the cultivation of a relationship of subordination to potent religious truths. This involves both manifesting and witnessing the truth of their religion in the form of polemical arguments and religious travel. I argue that understanding how moral character develops out of such a relationship requires us to turn our analytical attention away from agency and towards responsibility. Such a move has important implications for the more general anthropological study of theisms

Baseline Systems for the First Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification Challenge: Score and Embedding Fusion

Deep learning has brought impressive progress in the study of both automatic speaker verification (ASV) and spoofing countermeasures (CM). Although solutions are mutually dependent, they have typically evolved as standalone sub-systems whereby CM solutions are usually designed for a fixed ASV system. The work reported in this paper aims to gauge the improvements in reliability that can be gained from their closer integration. Results derived using the popular ASVspoof2019 dataset indicate that the equal error rate (EER) of a state-of-the-art ASV system degrades from 1.63% to 23.83% when the evaluation protocol is extended with spoofed trials.%subjected to spoofing attacks. However, even the straightforward integration of ASV and CM systems in the form of score-sum and deep neural network-based fusion strategies reduce the EER to 1.71% and 6.37%, respectively. The new Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification (SASV) challenge has been formed to encourage greater attention to the integration of ASV and CM systems as well as to provide a means to benchmark different solutions.Comment: 8 pages, accepted by Odyssey 202

Isolation and Characterization of Pluripotent Human Spermatogonial Stem Cell-Derived Cells

Several reports have documented the derivation of pluripotent cells (multipotent germline stem cells) from spermatogonial stem cells obtained from the adult mouse testis. These spermatogonia-derived stem cells express embryonic stem cell markers and differentiate to the three primary germ layers, as well as the germline. Data indicate that derivation may involve reprogramming of endogenous spermatogonia in culture. Here, we report the derivation of human multipotent germline stem cells (hMGSCs) from a testis biopsy. The cells express distinct markers of pluripotency, form embryoid bodies that contain derivatives of all three germ layers, maintain a normal XY karyotype, are hypomethylated at the H19 locus, and express high levels of telomerase. Teratoma assays indicate the presence of human cells 8 weeks post-transplantation but limited teratoma formation. Thus, these data suggest the potential to derive pluripotent cells from human testis biopsies but indicate a need for novel strategies to optimize hMGSC culture conditions and reprogramming

Chiropractic and self-care for back-related leg pain: design of a randomized clinical trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Back-related leg pain (BRLP) is a common variation of low back pain (LBP), with lifetime prevalence estimates as high as 40%. Often disabling, BRLP accounts for greater work loss, recurrences, and higher costs than uncomplicated LBP and more often leads to surgery with a lifetime incidence of 10% for those with severe BRLP, compared to 1-2% for those with LBP.</p> <p>In the US, half of those with back-related conditions seek CAM treatments, the most common of which is chiropractic care. While there is preliminary evidence suggesting chiropractic spinal manipulative therapy is beneficial for patients with BRLP, there is insufficient evidence currently available to assess the effectiveness of this care.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>This study is a two-site, prospective, parallel group, observer-blinded randomized clinical trial (RCT). A total of 192 study patients will be recruited from the Twin Cities, MN (n = 122) and Quad Cities area in Iowa and Illinois (n = 70) to the research clinics at WHCCS and PCCR, respectively.</p> <p>It compares two interventions: chiropractic spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) plus home exercise program (HEP) to HEP alone (minimal intervention comparison) for patients with subacute or chronic back-related leg pain.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Back-related leg pain (BRLP) is a costly and often disabling variation of the ubiquitous back pain conditions. As health care costs continue to climb, the search for effective treatments with few side-effects is critical. While SMT is the most commonly sought CAM treatment for LBP sufferers, there is only a small, albeit promising, body of research to support its use for patients with BRLP.</p> <p>This study seeks to fill a critical gap in the LBP literature by performing the first full scale RCT assessing chiropractic SMT for patients with sub-acute or chronic BRLP using important <b>patient-oriented </b>and <b>objective biomechanical </b>outcome measures.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials.gov <a href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00494065">NCT00494065</a></p

<i>Spitzer</i> Microlensing Parallax Reveals Two Isolated Stars in the Galactic Bulge

We report the mass and distance measurements of two single-lens events from the 2017 $\textit {Spitzer}$ microlensing campaign. The ground-based observations yield the detection of finite-source effects, and the microlens parallaxes are derived from the joint analysis of ground-based observations and $\textit {Spitzer}$ observations. We find that the lens of OGLE-2017-BLG-1254 is a 0.60 ± 0.03 M ⊙ star with D LS = 0.53 ± 0.11 kpc, where D LS is the distance between the lens and the source. The second event, OGLE-2017-BLG-1161, is subject to the known satellite parallax degeneracy, and thus is either a ${0.51}_{-0.10}^{+0.12}\,{M}_{\odot }$ star with D LS = 0.40 ± 0.12 kpc or a ${0.38}_{-0.12}^{+0.13}\,{M}_{\odot }$ star with D LS = 0.53 ± 0.19 kpc. Both of the lenses are therefore isolated stars in the Galactic bulge. By comparing the mass and distance distributions of the eight published $\textit {Spitzer}$ finite-source events with the expectations from a Galactic model, we find that the $\textit {Spitzer}$ sample is in agreement with the probability of finite-source effects occurring in single-lens events

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery