Another Heavy Road of Decompositionality: Notes from a Dying Adverb

This contribution reports on a pilot case study conducted on historical corpus data from Old and Middle English (primarily Taylor et al. 2003, Kroch and Taylor 2000) and concerned with the ramifications of an ambiguous adverb (eft, ‘again’) at the syntax-semantics interface. The disappearance of the adverb is linked to the development of again’s partially similar functions during the Middle English period. Akin to studies on the adverb again (e.g. Fabricius-Hansen 2001, Gergel and Beck 2015, Beck and Gergel 2015), at least some instances of eft are claimed to require a particular type of analysis of so-called decompositional adverbs, namely one based on lexical rather than only on structural factors. Furthermore, the development shows characteristics of a cyclical development (cf. Jespersen 1917, van Gelderen 2011)

Foregrounding Pacific Epistemologies in Curriculum Review: Exercising Educator Agency in a Process of Institutional Change

In this paper, we will reflect on our experiences relating to two major processes of transformation in the Sociology programme: 1) curriculum alignment and 2) online course conversion. Our curriculum review journey began in 2011 with the Strategic Total Academic Review (STAR) project. Three years later, as we continued to develop and review our curriculum, we were directed by the University to begin converting our courses to an online delivery format. The two coinciding processes not only resulted in an overhaul of our curriculum but also entailed a re-structuring and re-imagining of our learning and teaching practices. While curriculum alignment required us to be more explicit and strategic about designing student learning outcomes and activities, online conversion challenged us to do this in a completely new format, using new technologies. This was a demanding process, but we also gained valuable experience. In particular, while the effectiveness of peer learning and interaction on an online learning platform has been argued by educational researchers worldwide, in the Pacific context, the positioning of learning as a dialogic process of collective knowledge construction takes on added significance. As we attempted to align learning outcomes with online learning activities, our major goal was to weld the interactive potentials of online educational technologies with a culturally relevant learning process informed by Pacific epistemologies. The paper will focus on this particular aspect of our curriculum transformation process: our search for Pacific-style online learning through weaving together of curriculum alignment, online pedagogy and Pacific epistemologies

Mixture-of-Experts Variational Autoencoder for Clustering and Generating from Similarity-Based Representations on Single Cell Data

Clustering high-dimensional data, such as images or biological measurements, is a long-standingproblem and has been studied extensively. Recently, Deep Clustering has gained popularity due toits flexibility in fitting the specific peculiarities of complex data. Here we introduce the Mixture-of-Experts Similarity Variational Autoencoder (MoE-Sim-VAE), a novel generative clustering model.The model can learn multi-modal distributions of high-dimensional data and use these to generaterealistic data with high efficacy and efficiency. MoE-Sim-VAE is based on a Variational Autoencoder(VAE), where the decoder consists of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This specific architecture allows for various modes of the data to be automatically learned by means of the experts.Additionally, we encourage the lower dimensional latent representation of our model to follow aGaussian mixture distribution and to accurately represent the similarities between the data points. Weassess the performance of our model on the MNIST benchmark data set and challenging real-worldtasks of clustering mouse organs from single-cell RNA-sequencing measurements and defining cellsubpopulations from mass cytometry (CyTOF) measurements on hundreds of different datasets.MoE-Sim-VAE exhibits superior clustering performance on all these tasks in comparison to thebaselines as well as competitor methods.Comment: Submitted to PLOS Computational Biolog

Advancing the Provision of Pain Education and Learning (APPEAL) study

Objectives Unrelieved pain is a substantial public health concern necessitating improvements in medical education. The Advancing the Provision of Pain Education and Learning (APPEAL) study aimed to determine current levels and methods of undergraduate pain medicine education in Europe. Design and methods Using a cross-sectional design, publicly available curriculum information was sought from all medical schools in 15 representative European countries in 2012–2013. Descriptive analyses were performed on: the provision of pain teaching in dedicated pain modules, other modules or within the broader curriculum; whether pain teaching was compulsory or elective; the number of hours/credits spent teaching pain; pain topics; and teaching and assessment methods. Results Curriculum elements were publicly available from 242 of 249 identified schools (97%). In 55% (133/242) of schools, pain was taught only within compulsory non-pain-specific modules. The next most common approaches were for pain teaching to be provided wholly or in part via a dedicated pain module (74/242; 31%) or via a vertical or integrated approach to teaching through the broader curriculum, rather than within any specific module (17/242; 7%). The curricula of 17/242 schools (7%) showed no evidence of any pain teaching. Dedicated pain modules were most common in France (27/31 schools; 87%). Excluding France, only 22% (47/211 schools) provided a dedicated pain module and in only 9% (18/211) was this compulsory. Overall, the median number of hours spent teaching pain was 12.0 (range 4–56.0 h; IQR: 12.0) for compulsory dedicated pain modules and 9.0 (range 1.0–60.0 h; IQR: 10.5) for other compulsory (non-pain specific) modules. Pain medicine was principally taught in classrooms and assessed by conventional examinations. There was substantial international variation throughout. Conclusions Documented pain teaching in many European medical schools falls far short of what might be expected given the prevalence and public health burden of pain

Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis

We present an algorithm for reconstructing the radiance field of a large-scale scene from a single casually captured video. The task poses two core challenges. First, most existing radiance field reconstruction approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses from Structure-from-Motion algorithms, which frequently fail on in-the-wild videos. Second, using a single, global radiance field with finite representational capacity does not scale to longer trajectories in an unbounded scene. For handling unknown poses, we jointly estimate the camera poses with radiance field in a progressive manner. We show that progressive optimization significantly improves the robustness of the reconstruction. For handling large unbounded scenes, we dynamically allocate new local radiance fields trained with frames within a temporal window. This further improves robustness (e.g., performs well even under moderate pose drifts) and allows us to scale to large scenes. Our extensive evaluation on the Tanks and Temples dataset and our collected outdoor dataset, Static Hikes, show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.Comment: Project page: https://localrf.github.io

Wie viel ist genug? Breitbandausbau in Deutschland

Der Weg in die Gigabitgesellschaft: Wie sollen Breitbandziele in Deutschland über das Jahr 2018 hinaus konkret definiert, umgesetzt und finanziert werden? Dorothee Bär, Bundesministerium für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur, weist darauf hin, dass das BMVI gleich zu Beginn der aktuellen Legislaturperiode mit der Netzallianz Digitales Deutschland eine Plattform der innovations- und investitionsbereiten Unternehmen gegründet hat. Peter Knauth, Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie, stellt die Maßnahmen des BMWi im Rahmen seiner umfassenden Digitalen Strategie 2025 vor, die von der Unterstützung von Start-ups, einer innovations- und investitionsorientierten Optimierung des Ordnungsrahmens, der intelligenten Vernetzung zentraler Sektoren, einer neuen Datenpolitik und der Unterstützung von KMU reichen. Wilhelm Eschweiler, Bundesnetzagentur, möchte den vielfältigen Herausforderungen des Breitbandausbaus mit einem flexiblen Regulierungsansatz begegnen, der regionale Marktverhältnisse berücksichtigt und Investitionsanreize erhält. Für Wolfgang Kopf, Deutsche Telekom AG, muss die Verhinderung einer digitalen Spaltung zwischen städtischen und ländlichen Räumen Vorrang haben vor Maximalbandbreiten für einige wenige Prozent der Bevölkerung in den Ballungsräumen und ausgewählten Gebieten. Nach Ansicht von Valentina Daiber, Telefónica Germany, benötigt Deutschland einen digitalen Quantensprung und eine mutige, ambitionierte Zielsetzung für seine digitale Agenda 2030. Aus Sicht von Wilhelm Dresselhaus, Nokia Deutschland, wird es sich beim Netz für die Gigabitgesellschaft um eine Mischung aus Festnetz- und Mobilfunktechnologien handeln, in dem Endkunden unterbrechungsfrei zwischen den verschiedenen Zugangstechnologien hin und her wechseln können. Auch für Iris Henseler-Unger und Christian Wernick, WIK-Consult GmbH, Bad Honnef, sollte der Ausbau flächendeckender Gigabitnetze, möglichst bis 2025, im Mittelpunkt stehen. Sie empfehlen ein politisches Ziel zu definieren, das d

History and contemporary displacement in Suva's informal settlements

Urban areas are products of history. They have been created by processes, power structures and interests that have emerged over time. Access to and control over urban land are important issues in which conflicts reveal the interests of different stakeholders. In such contexts, urban land security for poorer sections of society is particularly crucial. Fiji’s land tenure systems have developed over the course of 3,000 years of human settlement. Land grabbing in the 1860s resulted in the restructuring of Indigenous land tenure. Today around 90 percent of the land in Fiji belongs to Indigenous Fijians. Yet Fiji’s capital Suva has only 10% of its land area classified as native land. This chapter provides a historical sketch of land ownership in Suva. It asks why and how land grabbing eliminated native land from this part of Fiji and considers how the historic evolution of the system has impacted Suva in more recent decades. The chapter focuses on those people who live in informal settlements, where housing expenses are low

A guide to precise measurements of isotope abundance by ESI-Orbitrap MS

Stable isotopes of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur are widespread in nature. Nevertheless, their relative abundance is not the same everywhere. This is due to kinetic isotope effects in enzymes and other physical principles such as equilibrium thermodynamics. Variations in isotope ratios offer unique insights into environmental pollution, trophic relationships in ecology, metabolic disorders and Earth history including climate history. Although classical isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) techniques still struggle to access intramolecular information like site-specific isotope abundance, electrospray ionization&ndash;Orbitrap mass spectrometry can be used to achieve precise and accurate intramolecular quantification of isotopically substituted molecules (&lsquo;isotopocules&rsquo;). This protocol describes two procedures. In the first one, we provide a step-by-step beginner&rsquo;s guide for performing multi-elemental, intramolecular and site-specific stable isotope analysis in unlabeled polar solutes by direct infusion. Using a widely available calibration solution, isotopocules of trifluoroacetic acid and immonium ions from the model peptide MRFA are quantified. In the second approach, nitrate is used as a simple model for a flow injection routine that enables access to a diverse range of naturally occurring isotopic signatures in inorganic oxyanions. Each procedure takes 2&ndash;3 h to complete and requires expertise only in general mass spectrometry. The workflows use optimized Orbitrap IRMS data-extraction and -processing software and are transferable to various analytes amenable to soft ionization, including metabolites, peptides, drugs and environmental pollutants. Optimized mass spectrometry systems will enable intramolecular isotope research in many areas of biology. &nbsp;</p

SpEYEders: Adults’ and children’s affective responses during immersive playful gaze interactions transforming virtual spiders

Specific phobias like spider phobia represent a frequent mental health problem in children and adolescents, demanding innovative prevention and treatment approaches. We therefore develop an eye tracking supported Virtual Reality serious game for school-aged children, realizing gaze interactions to promote attention towards, and positive experiences during exposure to spiders. Within pilot studies in adults (n=30) and children (n=14) without fear of spiders, we assessed positive and negative affect during prototype gaze feedback through five different variants: If gazed for few seconds, the virtual spider changed into a shrunk, a rainbow coloured, or dying spider, or morphed into a smileyball, or speaks friendly. We found the highest positive affect for the rainbow and smileyball variant, followed by the shrunk and friendly speaking variant. In contrast, the dying variant was excluded due to the possible induction of negative affect. Findings indicate eligible variants for the further development of the VR serious game

The dynamics of root cap sloughing in Arabidopsis is regulated by peptide signalling

The root cap protects the stem cell niche of angiosperm roots from damage. In Arabidopsis, lateral root cap (LRC) cells covering the meristematic zone are regularly lost through programmed cell death, while the outermost layer of the root cap covering the tip is repeatedly sloughed. Efficient coordination with stem cells producing new layers is needed to maintain a constant size of the cap. We present a signalling pair, the peptide IDA-LIKE1 (IDL1) and its receptor HAESA-LIKE2 (HSL2), mediating such communication. Live imaging over several days characterized this process from initial fractures in LRC cell files to full separation of a layer. Enhanced expression of IDL1 in the separating root cap layers resulted in increased frequency of sloughing, balanced with generation of new layers in a HSL2-dependent manner. Transcriptome analyses linked IDL1-HSL2 signalling to the transcription factors BEARSKIN1/2 and genes associated with programmed cell death. Mutations in either IDL1 or HSL2 slowed down cell division, maturation and separation. Thus, IDL1-HSL2 signalling potentiates dynamic regulation of the homeostatic balance between stem cell division and sloughing activity