The Last Martyrs - Omagh, Sinn Fein and The Republican Transition from Armalites to Ballot Boxes

This paper examines the transition of Sinn Fein, once seen as an extremist front organization for the Irish Republican Army, into the leading voice in the Catholic Irish nationalist community. The paper follows the transitions in Sinn Fein\u27s political strategy and rhetoric, from providing justification for the ongoing military campaign in the 1970s, through its acceptance of the legitimacy of the Irish Republic in the 1980s and to its final repudiation of violence in the wake of the Omagh bombing in 1998. Specific attention is given to the pragmatic leadership of the Belfast faction lead by Gerry Adams. While journalists and other historians have examined Adams\u27 leadership during this transition, this paper updates and re-contextualizes the process in light of new evidence and more than a decade of peace. Sources used in this paper are primarily newspaper articles of the time and Adams own writings. Additional context was found in the work of other historians and political scientists studying this transformation in the Republican movement. This paper is intended to synthesize and further their work, in the hope of providing an example and insight into how violent revolutionary movements can transition into legitimate participants in the political process

An Ensemble Teacher-Student Learning Approach with Poisson Sub-sampling to Differential Privacy Preserving Speech Recognition

We propose an ensemble learning framework with Poisson sub-sampling to effectively train a collection of teacher models to issue some differential privacy (DP) guarantee for training data. Through boosting under DP, a student model derived from the training data suffers little model degradation from the models trained with no privacy protection. Our proposed solution leverages upon two mechanisms, namely: (i) a privacy budget amplification via Poisson sub-sampling to train a target prediction model that requires less noise to achieve a same level of privacy budget, and (ii) a combination of the sub-sampling technique and an ensemble teacher-student learning framework that introduces DP-preserving noise at the output of the teacher models and transfers DP-preserving properties via noisy labels. Privacy-preserving student models are then trained with the noisy labels to learn the knowledge with DP-protection from the teacher model ensemble. Experimental evidences on spoken command recognition and continuous speech recognition of Mandarin speech show that our proposed framework greatly outperforms existing state-of-the-art DP-preserving algorithms in both ASR tasks

Reading faces: differential lateral gaze bias in processing canine and human facial expressions in dogs and 4-year-old children

Sensitivity to the emotions of others provides clear biological advantages. However, in the case of heterospecific relationships, such as that existing between dogs and humans, there are additional challenges since some elements of the expression of emotions are species-specific. Given that faces provide important visual cues for communicating emotional state in both humans and dogs, and that processing of emotions is subject to brain lateralisation, we investigated lateral gaze bias in adult dogs when presented with pictures of expressive human and dog faces. Our analysis revealed clear differences in laterality of eye movements in dogs towards conspecific faces according to the emotional valence of the expressions. Differences were also found towards human faces, but to a lesser extent. For comparative purpose, a similar experiment was also run with 4-year-old children and it was observed that they showed differential processing of facial expressions compared to dogs, suggesting a species-dependent engagement of the right or left hemisphere in processing emotions

Tropheryma whipplei bivalvular endocarditis and polyarthralgia: a case report.

INTRODUCTION: Tropheryma whipplei infection should be considered in patients with suspected infective endocarditis with negative blood cultures. The case (i) shows how previous symptoms can contribute to the diagnosis of this illness, and (ii) elucidates current recommended diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to Whipple's disease. CASE PRESENTATION: A 71-year-old Swiss man with a past history of 2 years of diffuse arthralgia was admitted for a possible endocarditis with severe aortic and mitral regurgitation. Serial blood cultures were negative. Our patient underwent replacement of his aortic and mitral valve by biological prostheses. T. whipplei was documented by polymerase chain reactions on both removed valves and on stools, as well as by valve histology. A combination of hydroxychloroquine and doxycycline was initiated as lifetime treatment followed by the complete disappearance of his arthralgia. CONCLUSIONS: This case report underlines the importance of considering T. whipplei as a possible causal etiology of blood culture-negative endocarditis. Lifelong antibiotic treatment should be considered for this pathogen (i) due to the significant rate of relapses, and (ii) to the risk of reinfection with another strain since these patients likely have some genetic predisposition

Hydrothermal pressure-temperature control on CO2 emissions and seismicity at Campi Flegrei (Italy)

Fluids supplied by stored magma at depth are causal factors of volcanic unrest, as they can cause pressurization/heating of hydrothermal systems. However, evidence for links between hydrothermal pressurization, CO2 emission and volcano seismicity have remained elusive. Here, we use recent (2010−2020) observations at Campi Flegrei caldera (CFc) to show hydrothermal pressure, gas emission and seismicity at CFc share common source areas and well-matching temporal evolutions. We interpret the recent escalation in seismicity and surface gas emissions as caused by pressure-temperature increase at the top of a vertically elongated (0.3–2 km deep) gas front. Using mass (steam) balance considerations, we show hydrothermal pressurization is causing energy transfer from the fluids to the host rocks, ultimately triggering low magnitude earthquakes within a seismogenetic volume containing the hydrothermal system. This mechanism is probably common to other worldwide calderas in similar hydrothermal activity state

Auditory laterality in a nocturnal, fossorial marsupial (Lasiorhinus latifrons) in response to bilateral stimuli

Behavioural lateralisation is evident across most animal taxa, although few marsupial and no fossorial species have been studied. Twelve wombats (Lasiorhinus latifrons) were bilaterally presented with eight sounds from different contexts (threat, neutral, food) to test for auditory laterality. Head turns were recorded prior to and immediately following sound presentation. Behaviour was recorded for 150 seconds after presentation. Although sound differentiation was evident by the amount of exploration, vigilance and grooming performed after different sound types, this did not result in different patterns of head turn direction. Similarly, left-right proportions of head turns, walking events and food approaches in the post-sound period were comparable across sound types. A comparison of head turns performed before and after sound showed a significant change in turn direction (χ2 1 = 10.65, P = 0.001) from a left preference during the pre-sound period (mean 58% left head turns, CI 49-66%) to a right preference in the post-sound (mean 43% left head turns, CI 40-45%). This provides evidence of a right auditory bias in response to the presentation of the sound. This study therefore demonstrates that laterality is evident in southern hairy-nosed wombats in response to a sound stimulus, although side biases were not altered by sounds of varying context

Elicitation of Preferences under Ambiguity

This paper is about behaviour under ambiguity ‒ that is, a situation in which probabilities either do not exist or are not known. Our objective is to find the most empirically valid of the increasingly large number of theories attempting to explain such behaviour. We use experimentally-generated data to compare and contrast the theories. The incentivised experimental task we employed was that of allocation: in a series of problems we gave the subjects an amount of money and asked them to allocate the money over three accounts, the payoffs to them being contingent on a ‘state of the world’ with the occurrence of the states being ambiguous. We reproduced ambiguity in the laboratory using a Bingo Blower. We fitted the most popular and apparently empirically valid preference functionals [Subjective Expected Utility (SEU), MaxMin Expected Utility (MEU) and α­-MEU], as well as Mean-Variance (MV) and a heuristic rule, Safety First (SF). We found that SEU fits better than MV and SF and only slightly worse than MEU and α­-MEU

Predicting Physical Time Series Using Dynamic Ridge Polynomial Neural Networks

Forecasting naturally occurring phenomena is a common problem in many domains of science, and this has been addressed and investigated by many scientists. The importance of time series prediction stems from the fact that it has wide range of applications, including control systems, engineering processes, environmental systems and economics. From the knowledge of some aspects of the previous behaviour of the system, the aim of the prediction process is to determine or predict its future behaviour. In this paper, we consider a novel application of a higher order polynomial neural network architecture called Dynamic Ridge Polynomial Neural Network that combines the properties of higher order and recurrent neural networks for the prediction of physical time series. In this study, four types of signals have been used, which are; The Lorenz attractor, mean value of the AE index, sunspot number, and heat wave temperature. The simulation results showed good improvements in terms of the signal to noise ratio in comparison to a number of higher order and feedforward neural networks in comparison to the benchmarked techniques