4,600 research outputs found
Towards an expanded model of litigation
Introduction: The call for contributions for this workshop describes the important new challenges for the legal search
community this domain brings. Rather than just understanding the challenges this domain poses in terms of
their technical properties, we would like to suggest that understanding these challenges as socio-technical
challenges will be important. That is, as well as calling for research on a technical level to address these
challenges we are also calling for work to understand the social practices of those involved in e-discovery
(ED) and related legal work. A particularly interesting feature of this field is that it is likely that search
technologies will (at least semi-)automate responsiveness review in the relatively near term and this will
change the way that the work is organised and done in many ways – offering new possibilities for new
ways of organising the work. As well as designing those technologies for automating responsiveness
review we need to be envisioning how the work will be done in the future, how these technologies will
impact the organisation of the case and so on. In this position paper we therefore outline the importance of
understanding the wider social context of ED when designing tools and technologies to support and change
the work. We would like to reinforce and expand on Conrad’s call for IR researchers to understand just
what ED entails [2], include the stages that come both before and after core retrieval activities.
The importance of considering the social aspects of work in the design of the technology has been
established for some time. Ushering in this ‘turn to the social,’ and focusing on interface design, Gentner
and Grudin [4] described how the GUI has already changed from an interface for engineers, representing
the engineering model of the machine to one that supported single ‘everyman’ users (based on ideas from
psychology). From then onwards the interface has evolved to support groups of users, taking into account
the social and organisational contexts of use. This has particular resonance for the design of ED
technologies: during ED in particular and the wider legal process there are often many lawyers involved –
reviewing documents, determining issues, etc. Even if the way that their work is organised currently is not
seen as collaborative in the traditional sense – with individual lawyers working on individual document sets
to review them - their work needs to be coordinated and it seems likely that their work could be enhanced
by, for example, knowledge of what their colleagues had found, how the case was shaping up, new key
terms and facts turned up and so on. Work is often modelled for the purposes of design using process
models, but this misses out on the richness and variety actually found when one examines how the work is
carried out [3]. Technologies which strictly enforce the process models can often hinder the work, or end
up being worked around as was the case with workflow systems since people interpret processes very
flexibly to get the work done ([1], [3]). Other studies in other fields have found similar problems when
systems are designed on for example cognitive models of how the work is done; they often do not take into
account the situated nature of the work and thus they can be very difficult to use [5]. We believe, like [2],
that a clear understanding of the social practices of ED is vital for the creation of high-quality, meaningful
tools and technologies. We furthermore propose that work practice studies, to be used in combination with
other methods, are a central part of getting the detailed understanding of the work practices central to
designing useful and intelligent tools. Work practice studies would involve ethnographies, consisting
primarily of observation, undertaken of practitioners engaging in the work of ED
Active cloaking of finite defects for flexural waves in elastic plates
We present a new method to create an active cloak for a rigid inclusion in a
thin plate, and analyse flexural waves within such a plate governed by the
Kirchhoff plate equation. We consider scattering of both a plane wave and a
cylindrical wave by a single clamped inclusion of circular shape. In order to
cloak the inclusion, we place control sources at small distances from the
scatterer and choose their intensities to eliminate propagating orders of the
scattered wave, thus reconstructing the respective incident wave. We then vary
the number and position of the control sources to obtain the most effective
configuration for cloaking the circular inclusion. Finally, we successfully
cloak an arbitrarily shaped scatterer in a thin plate by deriving a
semi-analytical, asymptotic algorithm.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, 1 tabl
Demography and disorders of the French Bulldog population under primary veterinary care in the UK in 2013
Abstract Background Despite its Gallic name, the French Bulldog is a breed of both British and French origin that was first recognised by The Kennel Club in 1906. The French Bulldog has demonstrated recent rapid rises in Kennel Club registrations and is now (2017) the second most commonly registered pedigree breed in the UK. However, the breed has been reported to be predisposed to several disorders including ocular, respiratory, neurological and dermatological problems. The VetCompass™ Programme collates de-identified clinical data from primary-care veterinary practices in the UK for epidemiological research. Using VetCompass™ clinical data, this study aimed to characterise the demography and common disorders of the general population of French Bulldogs under veterinary care in the UK. Results French Bulldogs comprised 2228 (0.49%) of 445,557 study dogs under veterinary care during 2013. Annual proportional birth rates showed that the proportional ownership of French Bulldog puppies rose steeply from 0.02% of the annual birth cohort attending VetCompass™ practices in 2003 to 1.46% in 2013. The median age of the French Bulldogs overall was 1.3 years (IQR 0.6–2.5, range 0.0–13.0). The most common colours of French Bulldogs were brindle (solid or main) (32.36%) and fawn (solid or main) (29.9%). Of the 2228 French Bulldogs under veterinary care during 2013, 1612 (72.4%) had at least one disorder recorded. The most prevalent fine-level precision disorders recorded were otitis externa (14.0%, 95% CI: 12.6–15.5), diarrhoea (7.5%, 95% CI: 6.4–8.7), conjunctivitis (3.2%, 95% CI: 2.5–4.0), nails overlong (3.1%, 95% CI% 2.4–3.9) and skin fold dermatitis (3.0%, 95% CI% 2.3–3.8). The most prevalent disorder groups were cutaneous (17.9%, 95% CI: 16.3–19.6), enteropathy (16.7%, 95% CI: 15.2–18.3), aural (16.3%, 95% CI: 14.8–17.9), upper respiratory tract (12.7%, 95% CI: 11.3–14.1) and ophthalmological (10.5%, 95% CI: 9.3–11.9). Conclusions Ownership of French Bulldogs in the UK is rising steeply. This means that the disorder profiles reported in this study reflect a current young UK population and are likely to shift as this cohort ages. Otitis externa, diarrhoea and conjunctivitis were the most common disorders in French Bulldogs. Identification of health priorities based on VetCompass™ data can support evidence–based reforms to improve health and welfare within the breed
HIV with contact-tracing: a case study in Approximate Bayesian Computation
Missing data is a recurrent issue in epidemiology where the infection process
may be partially observed. Approximate Bayesian Computation, an alternative to
data imputation methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo integration, is
proposed for making inference in epidemiological models. It is a
likelihood-free method that relies exclusively on numerical simulations. ABC
consists in computing a distance between simulated and observed summary
statistics and weighting the simulations according to this distance. We propose
an original extension of ABC to path-valued summary statistics, corresponding
to the cumulated number of detections as a function of time. For a standard
compartmental model with Suceptible, Infectious and Recovered individuals
(SIR), we show that the posterior distributions obtained with ABC and MCMC are
similar. In a refined SIR model well-suited to the HIV contact-tracing data in
Cuba, we perform a comparison between ABC with full and binned detection times.
For the Cuban data, we evaluate the efficiency of the detection system and
predict the evolution of the HIV-AIDS disease. In particular, the percentage of
undetected infectious individuals is found to be of the order of 40%
Higher order topological actions
In classical mechanics, an action is defined only modulo additive terms which
do not modify the equations of motion; in certain cases, these terms are
topological quantities. We construct an infinite sequence of higher order
topological actions and argue that they play a role in quantum mechanics, and
hence can be accessed experimentally.Comment: 7 page
The spatial sensitivity of the spectral diversity–biodiversity relationship: an experimental test in a prairie grassland
Remote sensing has been used to detect plant biodiversity in a range of ecosystems based on the varying spectral properties of different species or functional groups. However, the most appropriate spatial resolution necessary to detect diversity remains unclear. At coarse resolution, differences among spectral patterns may be too weak to detect. In contrast, at fine resolution, redundant information may be introduced. To explore the effect of spatial resolution, we studied the scale dependence of spectral diversity in a prairie ecosystem experiment at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, Minnesota, USA. Our study involved a scaling exercise comparing synthetic pixels resampled from high-resolution images within manipulated diversity treatments. Hyperspectral data were collected using several instruments on both ground and airborne platforms. We used the coefficient of variation (CV) of spectral reflectance in space as the indicator of spectral diversity and then compared CV at different scales ranging from 1 mm2 to 1 m2 to conventional biodiversity metrics, including species richness, Shannon’s index, Simpson’s index, phylogenetic species variation, and phylogenetic species evenness. In this study, higher species richness plots generally had higher CV. CV showed higher correlations with Shannon’s index and Simpson’s index than did species richness alone, indicating evenness contributed to the spectral diversity. Correlations with species richness and Simpson’s index were generally higher than with phylogenetic species variation and evenness measured at comparable spatial scales, indicating weaker relationships between spectral diversity and phylogenetic diversity metrics than with species diversity metrics. High resolution imaging spectrometer data (1 mm2 pixels) showed the highest sensitivity to diversity level. With decreasing spatial resolution, the difference in CV between diversity levels decreased and greatly reduced the optical detectability of biodiversity. The optimal pixel size for distinguishing a diversity in these prairie plots appeared to be around 1 mm to 10 cm, a spatial scale similar to the size of an individual herbaceous plant. These results indicate a strong scaledependence of the spectral diversity-biodiversity relationships, with spectral diversity best able to detect a combination of species richness and evenness, and more weakly detecting phylogenetic diversity. These findings can be used to guide airborne studies of biodiversity and develop more effective large-scale biodiversity sampling methods
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