Context, content, and the occasional costs of implicature computation

The computation of scalar implicatures is sometimes costly relative to basic meanings. Among the costly computations are those that involve strengthening “some” to “not all” and strengthening inclusive disjunction to exclusive disjunction. The opposite is true for some other cases of strengthening, where the strengthened meaning is less costly than its corresponding basic meaning. These include conjunctive strengthenings of disjunctive sentences (e.g., free-choice inferences) and exactly-readings of numerals. Assuming that these are indeed all instances of strengthening via implicature/exhaustification, the puzzle is to explain why strengthening sometimes increases costs while at other times it decreases costs. I develop a theory of processing costs that makes no reference to the strengthening mechanism or to other aspects of the derivation of the sentence’s form/meaning. Instead, costs are determined by domain-general considerations of the grammar’s output, and in particular by aspects of the meanings of ambiguous sentences and particular ways they update the context. Specifically, I propose that when the hearer has to disambiguate between a sentence’s basic and strengthened meaning, the processing cost of any particular choice is a function of (i) a measure of the semantic complexity of the chosen meaning and (ii) a measure of how much relevant uncertainty it leaves behind in the context. I measure semantic complexity with Boolean Complexity in the propositional case and with semantic automata in the quantificational case, both of which give a domain-general measure of the minimal representational complexity needed to express the given meaning. I measure relevant uncertainty with the information-theoretic notion of entropy; this domain-general measure formalizes how ‘far’ the meaning is from giving a complete answer to the question under discussion, and hence gives an indication of how much representational complexity is yet to come. Processing costs thus follow from domain-general considerations of current and anticipated representational complexity. The results might also speak to functional motivations for having strengthening mechanisms in the first place. Specifically, exhaustification allows language users to use simpler forms than would be available without it to bot

Effect of Altitudinal and Seasonal Factors on Diatomological Mapping of Waterbodies: Implication in Drowning Investigations

Diatoms are an essential part of forensic investigation in drowning cases. They are used to differentiate between ante-mortem and post-mortem drowning and to ascertain the site of drowning. However, to do so it is imperative to perform the diatomological mapping of water sources in different regions. The issue of localizing a drowning site may be resolved with the help of diatomological monitoring and mapping of the water sources, which generates substantial references for meeting the ‘criterion of concordance’. The present study has generated a database of diatom diversity in relation to different seasons and altitudes. Water sampling was made from low, mid and high altitudes during summer and autumn seasons. Important information was found after a microscopic examination of diatoms in water samples from different water bodies at different geographical altitudes. Twenty-seven diatom genera have been observed in the water samples from the selected localities. The findings of the current study have exposed the significant effect of seasonal changes and varied altitudes on occurrence of diatoms. A variety of commonly occurring site restricted diatoms were identified in the water samples. This useful information can be significant while investigating drowning cases from this particular region when the drowning site is either questioned or unknown

Immobilization and stability studies of a lipase from thermophilic Bacillus sp: The effect of process parameters on immobilization of enzyme

A thermostable lipase was partially purified from the culture supernatant of a thermophilic Bacillus sp. The enzyme is optimally active at 60\ub0C and pH 8.0. The enzyme showed enhancement in activity in presence of benzene or hexane (30% v/v each). The activity (assayed by determining the release of pNP from pNP laurate) was stimulated up to 60% of these solvents in enzyme reaction mixture. The catalytic properties of this thermostable enzyme can be further improved via the use of different immobilization techniques and reaction conditions. Enzyme was immobilized on different solid supports and their enzyme activity and stability was compared. The enzyme was adsorbed on silica and HP-20 beads followed by cross-linking with gluteraldehyde on HP-20, which improved the thermostability of enzyme. The optimum pH (pH 8.5) was nearly same for aqueous and immobilized enzyme while optimum temperature was nearly 5\ub0C higher in case of immobilized enzyme. The immobilized/cross linked enzyme was more thermostable at 70 and 80\ub0C in comparison to aqueous and surface adsorbed lipase on silica and HP-20. The optimum temperature for esterification reactions was determined to be 60- 65\ub0C . Half-life of immobilized lipase was nearly 2.5 x higher than the aqueous enzyme at 70\ub0C . Esterification of methanol and oleic acid to methyl oleate by immobilized enzyme was studied in detail

Molecular Depiction of Thirteen Indian Toxic Plants with ITS Markers

Plant identification is an overwhelming task due to different biological attributes and great diversity in plant species. In the absence of physical markers, molecular techniques have become useful for the identification of species of origin of medicinal plant seeds, pastes, and formulations of suspected plants. The ITS region of nuclear rRNA was amplified from thirteen different toxic plant species by using universal primer ITS 1 & 4. Nucleotide sequences of all selected plants were submitted in NCBI and accession numbers were acquired. The results of this study give accurate identification of thirteen plant species and proved the ITS region of 18s-26s nuclear ribosome to be an important tool for phylogenetic analysis and species identification of plants. The sequence was aligned with top matched reference sequence and presented in Clustal Omega software for making a phylogenetic neighbour tree. The significance of these findings is paramount in forensic toxicology scenarios especially when fragmentary plant material is found in the stomach/intestine and its morphological identification becomes impossible. In these circumstances, the PCR based molecular technique surely plays a significant role in solving complicated forensic cases

Toward a Human-Centered AI-assisted Colonoscopy System

AI-assisted colonoscopy has received lots of attention in the last decade. Several randomised clinical trials in the previous two years showed exciting results of the improving detection rate of polyps. However, current commercial AI-assisted colonoscopy systems focus on providing visual assistance for detecting polyps during colonoscopy. There is a lack of understanding of the needs of gastroenterologists and the usability issues of these systems. This paper aims to introduce the recent development and deployment of commercial AI-assisted colonoscopy systems to the HCI community, identify gaps between the expectation of the clinicians and the capabilities of the commercial systems, and highlight some unique challenges in Australia.Comment: 9 page

FTIR Analysis of Some Pills of Forensic Interest

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the use of modern Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy with quick and easy Diamond Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) technique for generating a spectral library of some benzodiazepines of forensic interest. These types of drugs can be seized as bulk street drugs as well as traces found at the scene of crime. There can be legal queries regarding identification of these drugs which a forensic expert has to answer. In these cases, the standard reference database is required for comparison. The modern FTIR systems with diamond ATR proves to be a rapid, sensitive and non-destructive analysis of samples with very little effort. This spectral library can be used as a reference library when an unknown sample is suspected of being benzodiazepine

Malignant Biliary Obstruction: Evidence for Best Practice

What should be done next? Is the stricture benign? Is it resectable? Should I place a stent? Which one? These are some of the questions one ponders when dealing with biliary strictures. In resectable cases, ongoing questions remain as to whether the biliary tree should be drained prior to surgery. In palliative cases, the relief of obstruction remains the main goal. Options for palliative therapy include surgical bypass, percutaneous drainage, and stenting or endoscopic stenting (transpapillary or via an endoscopic ultrasound approach). This review gathers scientific foundations behind these interventions. For operable cases, preoperative biliary drainage should not be performed unless there is evidence of cholangitis, there is delay in surgical intervention, or intense jaundice is present. For inoperable cases, transpapillary stenting after sphincterotomy is preferable over percutaneous drainage. The use of plastic stents (PS) has no benefit over Self-Expandable Metallic Stents (SEMS). In case transpapillary drainage is not possible, Endoscopic Ultrasonography- (EUS-) guided drainage is still an option over percutaneous means. There is no significant difference between the types of SEMS and its indication should be individualized

Security source code analysis of applications in Android OS

It is a known fact that Android mobile phones' security has room for improvement. Many malicious app developers have targeted android mobile phones, mainly because android as an open operating system provides great flexibility to developers and there are many android phones which do not have the latest security updates. With the update of marshmallow in android, applications request permission only during runtime, but not all users have this update. This is important because user permission is required to perform certain actions. The permissions may be irrelevant to the features provided by an application. The purpose of this research is to investigate the use and security risk of seeming irrelevant permissions in applications available from Google store. Two different applications which seem to ask irrelevant permissions during installation were selected from Google store. To test these applications, static analysis, dynamic analysis and reverse engineering tools were used. Findings show potentially malicious behavior, demonstrating that downloading apps from Google play store do not guarantee security

Few-Shot Anomaly Detection for Polyp Frames from Colonoscopy

Anomaly detection methods generally target the learning of a normal image distribution (i.e., inliers showing healthy cases) and during testing, samples relatively far from the learned distribution are classified as anomalies (i.e., outliers showing disease cases). These approaches tend to be sensitive to outliers that lie relatively close to inliers (e.g., a colonoscopy image with a small polyp). In this paper, we address the inappropriate sensitivity to outliers by also learning from inliers. We propose a new few-shot anomaly detection method based on an encoder trained to maximise the mutual information between feature embeddings and normal images, followed by a few-shot score inference network, trained with a large set of inliers and a substantially smaller set of outliers. We evaluate our proposed method on the clinical problem of detecting frames containing polyps from colonoscopy video sequences, where the training set has 13350 normal images (i.e., without polyps) and less than 100 abnormal images (i.e., with polyps). The results of our proposed model on this data set reveal a state-of-the-art detection result, while the performance based on different number of anomaly samples is relatively stable after approximately 40 abnormal training images.Comment: Accept at MICCAI 202