A study on the chains of strategic interactions between civilians and belligerent organizations over resources, in the midst of the Colombian armed confrontation (1990 – 2010)

Based on interview and survey data, this document explores the logics of these interactions as well as their aggregate outcomes. Unlike customary accounts that portray civilians as mere subjects of belligerent’s power or receptors of their violence, the study of how belligerents and civilians solve what I coin as the “Resource Dilemma” reveals that, rather than passive actors, civilians are strategic in making a set of decisions, resort to social, cultural and economic capitals, and have the capacity to negotiate the terms of their subjection. As such, this document explores how, why and when civilians cooperate, negotiate, prevaricate, or resist with a belligerent organization’s demand for resources.Sociolog

Approximate Bayesian Computation and compartmental metapopulation model to describe COVID-19 in Finland

At the beginning of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, when there were no vaccines available, a considerable number of governments around the world imposed mobility restrictions to control the spread of the disease. Mobility restrictions are part of the so-called Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). NPIs are measures taken by individuals or mandated by governments to prevent the spread of the disease. Some of the most notable NPIs include social distancing, use of face masks, remote working, closure of non-essential businesses, and travel restrictions. In Finland, these and other NPIs were essential to control the disease during the first wave of the epidemic, from March 2020 to May 2020. The aim of this thesis is to use a compartmental metapopulation model to study the COVID-19 epidemic and the role of NPIs in Finland. The model is informed with mobility data from a telecommunications operator and calibrated to describe the epidemic during the first wave. Furthermore, the model is calibrated using Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), a set of algorithms that make it possible to infer model parameters without an explicit function for the likelihood of data being produced by the model. The purpose of the model is to analyze the effect of NPIs in Finland through counterfactual scenarios. Counterfactual scenarios affect aspects of the calibrated model to present alternate scenarios of the original situation. This thesis uses two classes of counterfactual scenarios based on mobility data. The first class reduces or increases the number of contacts made inside the region. Similarly, the second class increases or reduces the cross-border traffic between the regions in Finland. The analysis performed in this thesis confirms that NPIs applied in Finland were crucial to reducing the incidence in Finland during the first wave. Moreover, NPIs which prevent contacts inside regions, such as social distancing, have a more significant impact on reducing the incidence than those that limit traffic between the regions. Finally, the results of this analysis, i.e., the observed effect of NPIs and the software package developed for calibrating the model through ABC, could further analyze the situation of COVID-19 or future epidemics

Estudio definitivo de la carretera Chiguata - Santa Lucia, tramo del km 33+600 al km 37+070

Este proyecto nace a raíz de la necesidad de nuevas rutas de conexión entre departamentos que cumplan los estándares adecuados de transitabilidad, con esto garantizar la seguridad, comodidad del transporte y disminuir los tiempos de viaje; asimismo que mejoren el nivel de vida de la población de la zona de sierra entre las regiones de Arequipa y Puno con un mejor acceso a servicios de salud, educación, vivienda y otros. Por estos motivos es que se presenta una alternativa a la carretera Arequipa - Yura - Santa Lucia, que es la ruta PE 34C carretera Arequipa - Chiguata - Santa Lucia, en el proyecto se analiza un tramo de esta ruta que comprende desde el km 33+600 al km 37+070. Para la formulación de este proyecto se reunió información social, geográfica y condiciones ambientales con los que se realizaron los estudios previos que fueron: el estudio de tránsito, la topografía y estudio de suelos a nivel de subrasante. Se realizó el mejoramiento del diseño geométrico, utilizando la norma vigente del manual de carreteras: DG 2018, para elaborar el diseño en planta, en perfil y el diseño de las secciones transversales; luego se procedió a realizar el diseño del pavimento, determinando un óptimo contenido de asfalto, haciendo uso de agregados de canteras cercanas a la zona del proyecto, obteniendo los espesores finales de base granular y carpeta asfáltica; asimismo se ejecutó el diseño de drenaje; costos y presupuestos; y finalmente se realizó la gestión de riesgos

Dirac equation for massive neutrinos in a Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime from a 5D vacuum

Starting from a Dirac equation for massless neutrino in a 5D Ricci-flat background metric, we obtain the effective 4D equation for massive neutrino in a Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SdS) background metric from an extended SdS 5D Ricci-flat metric. We use the fact that the spin connection is defined to an accuracy of a vector, so that the covariant derivative of the spinor field is strongly dependent of the background geometry. We show that the mass of the neutrino can be induced from the extra space-like dimension.Comment: accepted in Physics Letters

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Modelling human choices: MADeM and decision‑making

Research supported by FAPESP 2015/50122-0 and DFG-GRTK 1740/2. RP and AR are also part of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics FAPESP grant (2013/07699-0). RP is supported by a FAPESP scholarship (2013/25667-8). ACR is partially supported by a CNPq fellowship (grant 306251/2014-0)

Mortality from gastrointestinal congenital anomalies at 264 hospitals in 74 low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries: a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study

Summary Background Congenital anomalies are the fifth leading cause of mortality in children younger than 5 years globally. Many gastrointestinal congenital anomalies are fatal without timely access to neonatal surgical care, but few studies have been done on these conditions in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). We compared outcomes of the seven most common gastrointestinal congenital anomalies in low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries globally, and identified factors associated with mortality. Methods We did a multicentre, international prospective cohort study of patients younger than 16 years, presenting to hospital for the first time with oesophageal atresia, congenital diaphragmatic hernia, intestinal atresia, gastroschisis, exomphalos, anorectal malformation, and Hirschsprung’s disease. Recruitment was of consecutive patients for a minimum of 1 month between October, 2018, and April, 2019. We collected data on patient demographics, clinical status, interventions, and outcomes using the REDCap platform. Patients were followed up for 30 days after primary intervention, or 30 days after admission if they did not receive an intervention. The primary outcome was all-cause, in-hospital mortality for all conditions combined and each condition individually, stratified by country income status. We did a complete case analysis. Findings We included 3849 patients with 3975 study conditions (560 with oesophageal atresia, 448 with congenital diaphragmatic hernia, 681 with intestinal atresia, 453 with gastroschisis, 325 with exomphalos, 991 with anorectal malformation, and 517 with Hirschsprung’s disease) from 264 hospitals (89 in high-income countries, 166 in middleincome countries, and nine in low-income countries) in 74 countries. Of the 3849 patients, 2231 (58·0%) were male. Median gestational age at birth was 38 weeks (IQR 36–39) and median bodyweight at presentation was 2·8 kg (2·3–3·3). Mortality among all patients was 37 (39·8%) of 93 in low-income countries, 583 (20·4%) of 2860 in middle-income countries, and 50 (5·6%) of 896 in high-income countries (p<0·0001 between all country income groups). Gastroschisis had the greatest difference in mortality between country income strata (nine [90·0%] of ten in lowincome countries, 97 [31·9%] of 304 in middle-income countries, and two [1·4%] of 139 in high-income countries; p≤0·0001 between all country income groups). Factors significantly associated with higher mortality for all patients combined included country income status (low-income vs high-income countries, risk ratio 2·78 [95% CI 1·88–4·11], p<0·0001; middle-income vs high-income countries, 2·11 [1·59–2·79], p<0·0001), sepsis at presentation (1·20 [1·04–1·40], p=0·016), higher American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) score at primary intervention (ASA 4–5 vs ASA 1–2, 1·82 [1·40–2·35], p<0·0001; ASA 3 vs ASA 1–2, 1·58, [1·30–1·92], p<0·0001]), surgical safety checklist not used (1·39 [1·02–1·90], p=0·035), and ventilation or parenteral nutrition unavailable when needed (ventilation 1·96, [1·41–2·71], p=0·0001; parenteral nutrition 1·35, [1·05–1·74], p=0·018). Administration of parenteral nutrition (0·61, [0·47–0·79], p=0·0002) and use of a peripherally inserted central catheter (0·65 [0·50–0·86], p=0·0024) or percutaneous central line (0·69 [0·48–1·00], p=0·049) were associated with lower mortality. Interpretation Unacceptable differences in mortality exist for gastrointestinal congenital anomalies between lowincome, middle-income, and high-income countries. Improving access to quality neonatal surgical care in LMICs will be vital to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3.2 of ending preventable deaths in neonates and children younger than 5 years by 2030

25th annual computational neuroscience meeting: CNS-2016

The same neuron may play different functional roles in the neural circuits to which it belongs. For example, neurons in the Tritonia pedal ganglia may participate in variable phases of the swim motor rhythms [1]. While such neuronal functional variability is likely to play a major role the delivery of the functionality of neural systems, it is difficult to study it in most nervous systems. We work on the pyloric rhythm network of the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) [2]. Typically network models of the STG treat neurons of the same functional type as a single model neuron (e.g. PD neurons), assuming the same conductance parameters for these neurons and implying their synchronous firing [3, 4]. However, simultaneous recording of PD neurons shows differences between the timings of spikes of these neurons. This may indicate functional variability of these neurons. Here we modelled separately the two PD neurons of the STG in a multi-neuron model of the pyloric network. Our neuron models comply with known correlations between conductance parameters of ionic currents. Our results reproduce the experimental finding of increasing spike time distance between spikes originating from the two model PD neurons during their synchronised burst phase. The PD neuron with the larger calcium conductance generates its spikes before the other PD neuron. Larger potassium conductance values in the follower neuron imply longer delays between spikes, see Fig. 17.Neuromodulators change the conductance parameters of neurons and maintain the ratios of these parameters [5]. Our results show that such changes may shift the individual contribution of two PD neurons to the PD-phase of the pyloric rhythm altering their functionality within this rhythm. Our work paves the way towards an accessible experimental and computational framework for the analysis of the mechanisms and impact of functional variability of neurons within the neural circuits to which they belong