Scissor-type knife improves the safety of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) among endoscopists without experience in ESD: A randomized ex vivo study

Background and study aims Endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is technically challenging, difficult to learn, and carries a substantial risk of perforation, all of which remain significant barriers to its adoptability. We aimed to determine whether use of a novel scissor-type knife improved efficacy and safety among novice performers of ESD. Materials and methods Following a brief didactic session on ESD, participants performed ESD of two lesions (2 cm diameter) in an ex vivo porcine gastric model. One resection was performed with a conventional knife and the other with the scissor knife (order of knife randomized). We recorded procedure time, successful en bloc resection, and adverse events (including full-thickness perforation and muscle injury) for each dissection. Participants completed a post-study survey. Results 10 endoscopists (8 trainees, 2 staff) considered novices in ESD participated. Compared with the conventional knife, use of the scissor knife was associated with a significantly shorter time to completion of submucosal dissection (mean 6.2 [SD 5.6] vs. 15.6 [SD 15.6] minutes; P = 0.04) and total procedure time was not significantly different (22.1 [SD 13.3] vs. 24.9 [SD 26.5] minutes; P = 0.65). Scissor knife use was also associated with a significantly lower proportion of perforation and/or muscle injury (10.0 % vs. 70.0 %; P < 0.01) and proportion of muscle injury alone (10.0 % vs. 60.0 %; P  = 0.02). Conclusions Among novices performing ESD on an ex vivo animal model, use of a scissor knife was associated with a significantly lower proportion of adverse events without prolonging procedure time. Scissor-type knives may improve ESD safety, at least among novices

Examining the importance of local and global patterns for familiarity detection in soccer action sequences

Pattern recognition is a defining characteristic of expertise across multiple domains. Given the dynamic interactions at local and global levels, team sports can provide a vehicle for investigating skilled pattern recognition. The aims of this study were to investigate whether global patterns could be recognised on the basis of localised relational information and if relations between certain display features were more important than others for successful pattern recognition. Elite (n = 20), skilled (n = 34), and less-skilled (n = 37) soccer players completed three recognition paradigms of stimuli presented in point-light-stimuli format across three counterbalanced conditions: ‘whole-part’; ‘part-whole’; and ‘whole-whole’. ‘Whole’ clips represented a 11v11 soccer match and ‘part’ clips presented the same passages of play with only two centre forwards or two peripheral players. Elite players recognised significantly more accurately than the skilled and less-skilled groups. Participants were significantly more accurate in the ‘whole-whole’ condition compared to others, and recognised stimuli featuring the two central attacking players significantly more accurately than those featuring peripheral players. Findings provide evidence that elite players can encode localised relations and then extrapolate this information to recognise more global macro patterns

Value Kaleidoscope: Engaging AI with Pluralistic Human Values, Rights, and Duties

Human values are crucial to human decision-making. Value pluralism is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering lying to a friend to protect their feelings, how does one balance honesty with friendship?). As statistical learners, AI systems fit to averages by default, washing out these potentially irreducible value conflicts. To improve AI systems to better reflect value pluralism, the first-order challenge is to explore the extent to which AI systems can model pluralistic human values, rights, and duties as well as their interaction. We introduce ValuePrism, a large-scale dataset of 218k values, rights, and duties connected to 31k human-written situations. ValuePrism's contextualized values are generated by GPT-4 and deemed high-quality by human annotators 91% of the time. We conduct a large-scale study with annotators across diverse social and demographic backgrounds to try to understand whose values are represented. With ValuePrism, we build Kaleido, an open, light-weight, and structured language-based multi-task model that generates, explains, and assesses the relevance and valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human values, rights, and duties within a specific context. Humans prefer the sets of values output by our system over the teacher GPT-4, finding them more accurate and with broader coverage. In addition, we demonstrate that Kaleido can help explain variability in human decision-making by outputting contrasting values. Finally, we show that Kaleido's representations transfer to other philosophical frameworks and datasets, confirming the benefit of an explicit, modular, and interpretable approach to value pluralism. We hope that our work will serve as a step to making more explicit the implicit values behind human decision-making and to steering AI systems to make decisions that are more in accordance with them

Rising Anti-Gender Movements and Populism in Europe : An Analysis and Discussion in the Context of Turkey’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention

There is an increasing global anti-rights movement—the child of marriage of the right-wing populist and anti-gender movements—that affects the rights of not only women and LGBTQIs but also refugees, asylum seekers, and various minorities. Although this research only focuses on the event of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, it provides valuable perspective to understand and prevent the further spread of anti-gender and right-wing populist tactics and rhetoric. Despite the limitations, by offering and adapting various concepts such as political diffusion, absence in the media, and exiting treaties, the research revealed meaningful connections and insight while attempting to identify the possible effects of the event. While the influence and role of the Polish and Hungarian governments and other opposition actors on the right-wing populist and anti-gender movements between 2021 and March 2023 are exposed, the possible impacts of encouragement and an increase in anti-rights tendencies are presented. In this way, this research contributes to the literature by offering a current assessment and developments regarding the anti-rights movement in Eastern Europe while filling the gap within by considering the approach of political diffusion and the withdrawal's resonance in the movement

Rising Anti-Gender Movements and Populism in Europe : An Analysis and Discussion in the Context of Turkey’s Withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention

There is an increasing global anti-rights movement—the child of marriage of the right-wing populist and anti-gender movements—that affects the rights of not only women and LGBTQIs but also refugees, asylum seekers, and various minorities. Although this research only focuses on the event of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, it provides valuable perspective to understand and prevent the further spread of anti-gender and right-wing populist tactics and rhetoric. Despite the limitations, by offering and adapting various concepts such as political diffusion, absence in the media, and exiting treaties, the research revealed meaningful connections and insight while attempting to identify the possible effects of the event. While the influence and role of the Polish and Hungarian governments and other opposition actors on the right-wing populist and anti-gender movements between 2021 and March 2023 are exposed, the possible impacts of encouragement and an increase in anti-rights tendencies are presented. In this way, this research contributes to the literature by offering a current assessment and developments regarding the anti-rights movement in Eastern Europe while filling the gap within by considering the approach of political diffusion and the withdrawal's resonance in the movement

Early Power Estimation for VLSI Circuits

111 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Power estimation for register files at the microarchitectural level requires predictions of activity and capacitance of power hungry nodes in the register file. Both of these predictors are developed in this research, thus making it possible to estimate power for multiported, pipelined register files at the microarchitectural level.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Early Power Estimation for VLSI Circuits

SRC / SRC 99-TJ-682Ope

High-level power estimation with interconnect effects

We extend earlier work on high-level average power estimation to include the power due to interconnect loading. The resulting technique is a combination of a RTL-level gate count prediction method and average interconnect estimation based on Rent’s rule. The method can be adapted to be used with different place and route engines and standard cell libraries. For a number of benchmark circuits, the method is verified by extracting wire lengths from a layout of each circuit and then comparing the predicted (at RTL) power against that measured using SPICE. An average error of 14.4 % is obtained for the average interconnect length, and an average error of 25.8 % is obtained for average power estimation including interconnect effects

Early Power Estimation for VLSI Circuits

111 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Power estimation for register files at the microarchitectural level requires predictions of activity and capacitance of power hungry nodes in the register file. Both of these predictors are developed in this research, thus making it possible to estimate power for multiported, pipelined register files at the microarchitectural level.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD