Ethical Concerns of Heroism Training

Heroism training programs originated in the mid-2000s with the goal to “Train everyday heroes” (Heroic Imagination Project, 2017). Most participants of these programs are students between the ages of 10 and 20. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that these programs may create more courageous and prosocial people (Heiner, 2018; Kohen & Sólo, 2019), however there is very little discussion in the emerging academic field of heroism science about the potential ethical concerns of training minors to be heroes (Beggan, 2019; Franco & Zimbardo, 2016; Franco et al., 2017). With the growth of heroism science scholarship, it would be wise to examine and offer best practices for the ethical training of heroism with minors. Heroic action is inherently risky, and while training programs currently discuss mortality and risk assessment, minors have not developed the neural or cognitive capacity to assess risks as adults can. Furthermore, the content and goals of heroism training may go against schools’ and parents’ wishes. Heroism training programs also have the potential to make heroism seem glamorous, which could lead some participants to seek out, or create, situations requiring heroic action. The paper discusses these, and other, ethical concerns in training minors to be heroes. The paper concludes with a variety of best practice recommendations for heroism training programs working with minors including; obtaining parent consent for training, working to improve minors’ risk assessment abilities, domain specific training, and involving parents and other relevant stakeholders in the heroism training process

Backstreaming from oil diffusion pumps Final report, Dec. 1, 1963 - May 30, 1966

Backstreaming from oil diffusion and turbomolecular pump

Ohio Upholds Traditional Exception to General Rule of Corporate Successor Nonliability

The purpose of this Note is to carefully analyze the Ohio Supreme Court\u27s reasoning in Welco and its implications. Part II discusses corporate successor liability in general, and then focuses narrowly on the mere continuation exception to successor nonliability. Part III breaks down the case itself, presenting the facts, procedure, and reasoning of the majority and dissent. Finally, Part IV analyzes the court\u27s refusal to expand the mere continuation exception, suggesting that had the court chosen to expand the the exception, the advantages of a cash-for-assets acquisition in Ohio would have been lost

Artificial Intelligence and Antibody Genus Claims

Antibodies are the guard dogs of the human immune system. They travel through the bloodstream, sniffing out foreign invaders (antigens), binding to them, and preventing them from harming the body. Instead of having a nose, four legs, and a tail, antibodies are Y-shaped proteins comprised of amino acids that viciously protect their hosts. Think of the tips of the “Y” as mouths that can bite certain antigens and lock them in place, rendering them harmless. Antibodies have the ability to identify a plethora of antigens to bind to and neutralize; “[s]ome researchers have estimated that the theoretical number of different types of antibodies . . . is on par with the number of stars in the galaxy.

CSM-423 - Evolutionary Solo Pong Players

An Internet Java Applet http://www.cs.essex.ac.uk/staff/poli/ SoloPong/ allows users anywhere to play the Solo Pong game. We compare people?s performance to a hand coded ?Optimal? player and programs automatically produced by artificial intelligence. The AI techniques are: genetic programming, including a hybrid of GP and a human designed algorithm, and a particle swarm optimiser. The AI approaches are not fine tuned. GP and PSO find good players. Evolutionary computation (EC) is able to beat both human designed code and human players

Uncovering the expression patterns of chimeric transcripts using surveys of affymetrix GeneChips.

BACKGROUND: A chimeric transcript is a single RNA sequence which results from the transcription of two adjacent genes. Recent studies estimate that at least 4% of tandem human gene pairs may form chimeric transcripts. Affymetrix GeneChip data are used to study the expression patterns of tens of thousands of genes and the probe sequences used in these microarrays can potentially map to exotic RNA sequences such as chimeras. RESULTS: We have studied human chimeras and investigated their expression patterns using large surveys of Affymetrix microarray data obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus. We show that for six probe sets, a unique probe mapping to a transcript produced by one of the adjacent genes can be used to identify the expression patterns of readthrough transcripts. Furthermore, unique probes mapping to an intergenic exon present only in the MASK-BP3 chimera can be used directly to study the expression levels of this transcript. CONCLUSIONS: We have attempted to implement a new method for identifying tandem chimerism. In this analysis unambiguous probes are needed to measure run-off transcription and probes that map to intergenic exons are particularly valuable for identifying the expression of chimeras

Evolving better RNAfold structure prediction

Grow and graft genetic programming (GGGP) evolves more than 50000 parameters in a state-of-the-art C program to make functional source code changes which give more accurate predictions of how RNA molecules fold up. Genetic improvement updates 29% of the dynamic programming free energy model parameters. In most cases (50.3%) GI gives better results on 4655 known secondary structures from RNA_STRAND (29.0% are worse and 20.7% are unchanged). Indeed it also does better than parameters recommended by Andronescu, M., et al.: Bioinformatics 23(13) (2007) i19–i28

Finite element approximation of a sixth order nonlinear degenerate parabolic equation

We consider a finite element approximation of the sixth order nonlinear degenerate parabolic equation ut = ?.( b(u)? 2u), where generically b(u) := |u|? for any given ? ? (0,?). In addition to showing well-posedness of our approximation, we prove convergence in space dimensions d ? 3. Furthermore an iterative scheme for solving the resulting nonlinear discrete system is analysed. Finally some numerical experiments in one and two space dimensions are presented

CSM-464: On the Limiting Distribution of Program Sizes in Tree-based Genetic Programming

We provide strong theoretical and experimental evidence that standard sub-tree crossover with uniform selection of crossover points pushes a population of a-ary GP trees towards a distribution of tree sizes of the form: [see document for formula] where n is the number of internal nodes in a tree and pa is a constant. This result generalises the result previously reported in [7, 10, 8, 9] for the case a = 1

Ethical Concerns of Heroism Training

Heroism training programs originated in the mid-2000s with the goal to “Train everyday heroes” (Heroic Imagination Project, 2017). Most participants of these programs are students between the ages of 10 and 20. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that these programs may create more courageous and prosocial people (Heiner, 2018; Kohen & Sólo, 2019), however there is very little discussion in the emerging academic field of heroism science about the potential ethical concerns of training minors to be heroes (Beggan, 2019; Franco & Zimbardo, 2016; Franco et al., 2017). Heroic action is inherently risky, and while training programs currently discuss mortality and risk assessment, minors have not developed the neural or cognitive capacity to assess risks as adults can. Furthermore, the content and goals of heroism training may go against schools’ and parents’ wishes. Heroism training programs also have the potential to make heroism seem glamorous, which could lead some participants to seek out, or create, situations requiring heroic action. The paper discusses these, and other, ethical concerns in training minors to be heroes. The paper concludes with a variety of best practice recommendations for heroism training programs working with minors including; obtaining parent consent for training, working to improve minors’ risk assessment abilities, domain specific training, and involving parents and other relevant stakeholders in the heroism training process