Perspectives of Polish-Romanian bilateral cooperation prior to the Polish EU presidency

Against the background of the economic crisis, which significantly diminishes the Europeans’ capacity to act in a coherent manner, Bucharest and Warsaw face common challenges, which may be easier to tackle if the two manage to reach a coordinated approach on the major policy dossiers. This is not an easy task, given that significant changes in the European strategic thinking have started shaping up the policy preferences of EU member states on important dossiers such as fiscal and monetary, energy and security policy. Whether Poland and Romania will manage to coordinate their positions on these sensitive policy dossiers, will impact Europe’s response towards these policies as well as these countries’ influence inside the EU

Protective effect of antirheumatic drugs on dementia in rheumatoid arthritis patients

INTRODUCTION Rheumatoid Arthritis is a systemic inflammatory disease and classical disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (cDMARDs) have proven efficacy. It is unknown what impact cDMARDs might have on dementia as an outcome. METHODS Incident diagnoses of Rheumatoid Arthritis in persons over 18 years from 1995 to 2011 were identified from the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink. 3,876 cDMARD users were propensity score matched to 1,938 non-users, on a wide range of confounders. Impact on dementia was assessed using survival models. RESULTS cDMARD users were at reduced risk of dementia (hazard ratio: 0.60; 95% confidence intervals: 0.42-0.85). The effect was strongest in Methotrexate users (0.52; 0.34-0.82). DISCUSSION The strong effect of cDMARD use on a halving of dementia risk requires replication in a trial and may provide an important therapeutic pharmacological treatment. </p

Methods of Object Tracking

This paper presents two methods of object detection/tracking in a video. Thefirst method will use the motion tracking technique combined with density detectionwhich will be described. The second one is based on the SURF algorithm

Presence of mammalian predators decreases tolerance to human disturbance in a breeding shorebird

Nonlethal disturbance can impose fitness costs, particularly during sensitive life history stages such as reproduction. Prey animals are thus expected to assess the costs and benefits of expressing antipredator behavior in different circumstances and to respond optimally according to the perceived risk of predation. One prediction of this hypothesis is that the response to nonlethal disturbance should be elevated when the risk of predation is high, although few studies have tested this prediction with respect to the distribution of actual predators in nature. We used landscape-level variation in the distribution of large mammalian predators (feral cats) to investigate antipredator behavior in a small breeding shorebird, the Two-banded Plover Charadrius falklandicus. We used 8 sites in the Falkland Islands and Argentina and measured the flushing distances of incubating Two-banded Plovers in response to a controlled human approach to the nest. We found that flushing distances were increased at sites where mammalian predators were present and decreased where exposure to humans was high. These effects were additive, and we interpret them as the effects of generalization and habituation, respectively.</p

Why is my Agent so Slow? Deploying Human-Like Conversational Turn-Taking

The emphasis on one-to-one speak/wait spoken conversational interaction with intelligent agents leads to long pauses between conversational turns, undermines the flow and naturalness of the interaction, and undermines the user experience. Despite ground breaking advances in the area of generating and understanding natural language with techniques such as LLMs, conversational interaction has remained relatively overlooked. In this workshop we will discuss and review the challenges, recent work and potential impact of improving conversational interaction with artificial systems. We hope to share experiences of poor human/system interaction, best practices with third party tools, and generate design guidance for the community.</p

Why is my Agent so Slow? Deploying Human-Like Conversational Turn-Taking

The emphasis on one-to-one speak/wait spoken conversational interaction with intelligent agents leads to long pauses between conversational turns, undermines the flow and naturalness of the interaction, and undermines the user experience. Despite ground breaking advances in the area of generating and understanding natural language with techniques such as LLMs, conversational interaction has remained relatively overlooked. In this workshop we will discuss and review the challenges, recent work and potential impact of improving conversational interaction with artificial systems. We hope to share experiences of poor human/system interaction, best practices with third party tools, and generate design guidance for the community.</p