Isabel de Villena : Prayer and Franciscan Spirituality

This essay examines traces of the oral in the prayers written by Isabel de Villena (1430-1490), abbess of the Santa Trinitat convent in Valencia. The essay compares the prayers of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane in the Vita Christi with St Francis's Office of the Passion. It finds that whilst there are some similarities between St Francis's Office and Villena's Vita Christi, this is because of technique in using phrases from the Psalms rather than direct influence.Este ensayo examina los rasgos de lo oral en las oraciones escritas enfocándose en las que redacta Isabel de Villena (1430-1490), abadesa del Convento de la Santa Trinitat de Valencia. Se comparan las oraciones de Cristo en el Jardín de Getsemane de la Vita Christi de Villena con las del Oficio de la Pasión de San Francisco de Asís. Aunque se pueden destacar algunos ejemplos de oraciones paralelas en ambos autores, más bien se debe dicha similtud a la técnica en que se enredan versos de los psalmos, un estilo de rezar que es promulgado por los franciscanos

A Review of the Monitoring of Market Power The Possible Roles of TSOs in Monitoring for Market Power Issues in Congested Transmission Systems

The paper surveys the literature and publicly available information on market power monitoring in electricity wholesale markets. After briefly reviewing definitions, strategies and methods of mitigating market power we examine the various methods of detecting market power that have been employed by academics and market monitors/regulators. These techniques include structural and behavioural indices and analysis as well as various simulation approaches. The applications of these tools range from spot market mitigation and congestion management through to long-term market design assessment and merger decisions. Various market-power monitoring units already track market behaviour and produce indices. Our survey shows that these units collect a large amount of data from various market participants and we identify the crucial role of the transmission system operators with their access to dispatch and system information. Easily accessible and comprehensive data supports effective market power monitoring and facilitates market design evaluation. The discretion required for effective market monitoring is facilitated by institutional independence.Electricity, liberalisation, market power, regulation

Unbiased estimates of galaxy scaling relations from photometric redshift surveys

Many physical properties of galaxies correlate with one another, and these correlations are often used to constrain galaxy formation models. Such correlations include the color-magnitude relation, the luminosity-size relation, the Fundamental Plane, etc. However, the transformation from observable (e.g. angular size, apparent brightness) to physical quantity (physical size, luminosity), is often distance-dependent. Noise in the distance estimate will lead to biased estimates of these correlations, thus compromising the ability of photometric redshift surveys to constrain galaxy formation models. We describe two methods which can remove this bias. One is a generalization of the V_max method, and the other is a maximum likelihood approach. We illustrate their effectiveness by studying the size-luminosity relation in a mock catalog, although both methods can be applied to other scaling relations as well. We show that if one simply uses photometric redshifts one obtains a biased relation; our methods correct for this bias and recover the true relation

Comparing hospital and telephone follow-up after treatment for breast cancer: randomised equivalence trial

Objective To compare traditional hospital follow-up with telephone follow-up by specialist nurses after treatment for breast cancer. Design A two centre randomised equivalence trial in which women remained in the study for a mean of 24 months. Setting Outpatient clinics in two NHS hospital trusts in the north west of England Participants 374 women treated for breast cancer who were at low to moderate risk of recurrence. Interventions Participants were randomised to traditional hospital follow-up (consultation, clinical examination, and mammography as per hospital policy) or telephone follow-up by specialist nurses (consultation with structured intervention and mammography according to hospital policy). Main outcome measures Psychological morbidity (state-trait anxiety inventory, general health questionnaire (GHQ-12)), participants’ needs for information, participants’ satisfaction, clinical investigations ordered, and time to detection of recurrent disease. Results The 95% confidence interval for difference in mean state-trait scores adjusted for treatment received (−3.33 to 2.07) was within the predefined equivalence region (−3.5 to 3.5). The women in the telephone group were no more anxious as a result of foregoing clinic examinations and face-to-face consultations and reported higher levels of satisfaction than those attending hospital clinics (intention to treat P<0.001). The numbers of clinical investigations ordered did not differ between groups. Recurrences were few (4.5%), with no differences between groups for time to detection (median 60.5 (range 37-131) days in hospital group v 39.0 (10-152) days in telephone group; P=0.228). Conclusions Telephone follow-up was well received by participants, with no physical or psychological disadvantage. It is suitable for women at low to moderate risk of recurrence and those with long travelling distances or mobility problems and decreases the burden on busy hospital clinics

Low-count Time Series Anomaly Detection

Low-count time series describe sparse or intermittent events, which are prevalent in large-scale online platforms that capture and monitor diverse data types. Several distinct challenges surface when modelling low-count time series, particularly low signal-to-noise ratios (when anomaly signatures are provably undetectable), and non-uniform performance (when average metrics are not representative of local behaviour). The time series anomaly detection community currently lacks explicit tooling and processes to model and reliably detect anomalies in these settings. We address this gap by introducing a novel generative procedure for creating benchmark datasets comprising of low-count time series with anomalous segments. Via a mixture of theoretical and empirical analysis, our work explains how widely-used algorithms struggle with the distribution overlap between normal and anomalous segments. In order to mitigate this shortcoming, we then leverage our findings to demonstrate how anomaly score smoothing consistently improves performance. The practical utility of our analysis and recommendation is validated on a real-world dataset containing sales data for retail stores.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, to be published in IEEE 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP

The efficacy of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy and their combination on functioning and quality of life in depression:a meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: There is growing recognition of the importance of both functioning and quality of life (QoL) outcomes in the treatment of depressive disorders, but the meta-analytic evidence is scarce. The objective of this meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was to determine the absolute and relative effects of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy and their combination on functioning and QoL in patients with depression. METHOD: One hundred and fifty-three outcome trials involving 29 879 participants with depressive disorders were identified through database searches in Pubmed, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. RESULTS: Compared to control conditions, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy yielded small to moderate effect sizes for functioning and QoL, ranging from g = 0.31 to g = 0.43. When compared directly, initial analysis yielded no evidence that one of them was superior. After adjusting for publication bias, psychotherapy was more efficacious than pharmacotherapy (g = 0.21) for QoL. The combination of psychotherapy and medication performed significantly better for both outcomes compared to each treatment alone yielding small effect sizes (g = 0.32 to g = 0.39). Both interventions improved depression symptom severity more than functioning and QoL. CONCLUSION: Despite the small number of comparative trials for some of the analyses, this study reveals that combined treatment is superior, but psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy alone are also efficacious for improving functioning and QoL. The overall relatively modest effects suggest that future tailoring of therapies could be warranted to better meet the needs of individuals with functioning and QoL problems

Contribution of scarred uterus to ruptured uterus in rural Nigeria

Background: Ruptured Uterus is one of the worst obstetric catastrophes that cause maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. Though surgical incisions on the uterus are thought to contribute to this catastrophe, no work had been done in our environment to find out how scarred uterus had been contributing to uterine rupture in our area of practice hence the need for this work.Methods: This is a retrospective study involving all the cases of ruptured uterus managed at Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Afikpo in Ebonyi State of Nigeria over 10 years.Results: During the ten years under review, the incidence of ruptured uterus was 0.66% or 1 in 151 deliveries. Of the 74 cases of ruptured uterus, 28 or 37.8% occurred in those with scarred uterus. This translates to 1 uterine rupture caused by scarred uterus in every 2.6 cases of uterine rupture. Previous cesarean section was the commonest scar followed by previous uterine rupture and cornual ectopic pregnancy. There was no rupture from a myomectomy scar.Conclusions: Scarred uterus is a significant cause of uterine rupture, every effort must be made to reduce uterine scars and our women should be encouraged to utilize available health services

Effects of semantic plausibility, syntactic complexity and n-gram frequency on children's sentence repetition

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three factors in a sentence repetition task performed by children aged 4–7 and 11–12 years. It was found that semantic plausibility benefitted performance in both age groups; syntactic complexity disadvantaged the younger group but benefitted the older group; while contrary to previous findings, n-gram frequency did not facilitate, and in a post-hoc analysis even hampered, performance. This new evidence suggests that n-gram frequency effects might be restricted to the highly constrained and frequent n-grams used in previous investigations, and that semantics and morphosyntax play a more powerful role than n-gram frequency, supporting the role of abstract linguistic knowledge in children's sentence processing

New evidence for learning-based accounts of gaze following:Testing a robotic prediction

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language. However, how gaze following emerges has been a topic of great debate. The most widely-accepted developmental theories suggest that infants are able to gaze follow only by understanding shared attention. Another group of theories suggests that infants may learn to follow gaze based on low-level social reinforcement. Nagai et al. [Advanced Robotics, 20, 10 (2006)] successfully taught a robot to gaze follow purely through social reinforcement, and found that the robot learned to follow gaze in the horizontal plane before it learned to follow gaze in the vertical plane. In the current study, we tested whether 12-month-old infants were also better at gaze following in the horizontal than the vertical plane. This prediction does not follow from the predominant developmental theories, which have no reason to assume differences between infants' ability to follow gaze in the two planes. We found that infants had higher accuracy when following gaze in the horizontal than the vertical plane (p =.01). These results confirm a core prediction of the robot model, suggesting that children may also learn to gaze follow through reinforcement learning. This study was pre-registered, and all data, code, and materials are openly available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/fqp8z/)