For a Mental Emancipation

Es vergeht keinen Tag, an dem die Medien keine Akte körperlicher Aggressionen gegen Menschen allein aufgrund ihrer Hautfarbe, ihrer Religionszugehörigkeit oder ihrer Herkunft aufdecken. Im Laufe der Zeit haben wir uns fast an diese Art von Nachrichten gewöhnt. Doch obwohl sie angeprangert werden, ändert sich nichts, die Situation wird immer schlimmer. Aus diesem Grund haben Etienne Achille und Lydie Moudileno ihren Essay Mythologies postcoloniales: Pour une décolonisation du quotidien veröffentlicht, in dem sie versuchen, nicht mehr zu denunzieren, sondern die Ursachen dieses Phänomens zu verstehen und Lösungen anzubieten. Die Tatsache, dass die französische Gesellschaft Rasse nicht als ein Produkt der Fantasie betrachtet, ist an sich schon ein echtes Problem. Darüber hinaus vergisst man bei der Beachtung falscher Probleme, z.B. im Zusammenhang mit Verhalten oder Sprache, schließlich die tatsächliche Schwierigkeit. Mit einem postkolonialen Ansatz analysieren die Autoren Aspekte und Faktoren in der zeitgenössischen französischen Gesellschaft, die rassistische Mythen oder Vorurteile bilden, die den Prozess der ‚Entrassisierung‘ verzögern.Not a day goes by without the media revealing acts of physical aggression against people simply because of their skin color, religious affiliation or their origin. Over time we have become almost accustomed to this kind of news. Yet despite being denounced, nothing changes – the situation gets worse and worse. This is why Etienne Achille and Lydie Moudileno have jointly published their essay Mythologies postcoloniales: Pour une décolonisation du quotidien in which they try no longer to denounce, but to understand the causes of this phenomenon and provide solutions. The fact that French society does not think of race as a product of the imagination is, in itself, already a real problem. Moreover, by paying attention to false problems such as those related to behaviors or language, we end up forgetting the real one. By adopting a postcolonial approach, the authors analyze aspects and factors in contemporary French society that constitute racial myths or prejudice that delay the process of de-racialization

UHPLC-HRMS based targeted and untargeted screening of plasticizers in the marine environment

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Learning Dynamics of Linear Denoising Autoencoders

Denoising autoencoders (DAEs) have proven useful for unsupervised representation learning, but a thorough theoretical understanding is still lacking of how the input noise influences learning. Here we develop theory for how noise influences learning in DAEs. By focusing on linear DAEs, we are able to derive analytic expressions that exactly describe their learning dynamics. We verify our theoretical predictions with simulations as well as experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10. The theory illustrates how, when tuned correctly, noise allows DAEs to ignore low variance directions in the inputs while learning to reconstruct them. Furthermore, in a comparison of the learning dynamics of DAEs to standard regularised autoencoders, we show that noise has a similar regularisation effect to weight decay, but with faster training dynamics. We also show that our theoretical predictions approximate learning dynamics on real-world data and qualitatively match observed dynamics in nonlinear DAEs.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, accepted at the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 201

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy in pregnancy: a case report and literature review

Background: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is rare in pregnancy and is characterized by left ventricular dysfunction with apical ballooning. This transient cardiac dysfunction may affect women of childbearing age in the antepartum, intrapartum or postpartum period. Most patients respond well to medical management with resolution of cardiac dysfunction within weeks. Case presentation: A 35-year-old female in her second pregnancy presented with severe preeclampsia at 31 weeks of gestation. She subsequently developed severe substernal chest pain and workup showed a stress induced cardiomyopathy prior to her delivery via caesarean section. She had full recovery of her cardiac function by 12 weeks postpartum after medical management. Conclusions: Stress induced cardiomyopathy, though rare, should be considered after acute myocardial infarction has been ruled out in gravid females presenting with acute chest pain. Management should involve a multidisciplinary team. Cardiac functio