Substorm onset identification using neural networks and Pi2 pulsations

International audienceThe pattern recognition capabilities of artificial neural networks (ANNs) have for the first time been used to identify Pi2 pulsations in magnetometer data, which in turn serve as indicators of substorm onsets and intensifications. The pulsation spectrum was used as input to the ANN and the network was trained to give an output of +1 for Pi2 signatures and -1 for non-Pi2 signatures. In order to evaluate the degree of success of the neural-network procedure for identifying Pi2 pulsations, the ANN was used to scan a number of data sets and the results compared with visual identification of Pi2 signatures. The ANN performed extremely well with a success rate of approximately 90% for Pi2 identification and a timing accuracy generally within 1 min compared to visual identification. A number of potential applications of the neural-network Pi2 scanning procedure are discussed

Parents' and children's informed and voluntary consent to heart surgery: Protocol

This research is intended to increase understanding of the views and experiences of children aged 6-15 years having heart surgery, their needs, hopes and fears, in order that parents and practitioners may provide children with more research-based information and support. The aim is to contribute to ways of involving children in the decision making process before heart surgery, so that their acceptance or consent, as well as their parents’ consent, are well informed and voluntary. The research will also examine children’s, parents and staff views about the age of consent, and when children become competent to give consent to heart surgery ‘as well as their parents can’

A critical realist analysis of consent to surgery for children, human nature and dialectic: the pulse of freedom

Consent can only be voluntary, freely given and uncoerced. Can this legal adult standard also apply to children? High-risk surgery is seldom a wanted choice, but compared with the dangers of the untreated problem, surgery can become the least unwanted option. Critical realism helps to reveal explicit and hidden levels of informed and voluntary consent at empirical, actual and real levels, on the four planes of social being and through the four-stage dialectic. Instead of starting with the rational-legal adult patient standard of consent, and assessing how young children fail this, understanding of consent could start at the other end of life. What does innate physical-social-moral-intuitive human nature in the emotional embodied person tell us about the meaning and purpose of consent/refusal for self-preservation, for avoiding suffering and promoting wellbeing? This discussion paper considers examples of life-giving treatment for children, and ethical dilemmas including one of conjoined twins, when only one child could survive separation

Dialectic and informed and voluntary consent: the pulse of freedom

The pulse in the title Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (Bhaskar, 2008) suggests a beating heart, and consent is at the heart of freedom. Its absence is at the heart of coercion. From personal to political, marriage to the vote, consent threads through daily interactions. Consent may be respected or not. A mouse click ‘consenting’ to cookies may join thousands of individuals’ clicks used by agencies for advertising or for fixing elections. The agencies may bypass consent when they rely not only on the first uninformed, unthinking click, but also on the half-attentive skimming of messages when readers may scarcely notice how these can alter their beliefs and behaviours. Consent to medical treatment or surgery is a major topic in bioethics, and the topic of our research. Yet we also aim to understand the meaning and purpose of consent more broadly in personal and political contexts. Our paper reviews how critical realism can help to deepen analysis, first of consent and second of why consent matters when it is more than a cerebral or arbitrary choice but expresses powerfully held values. This discussion paper is based on earlier research about parents’ consent to children’s heart surgery (Alderson, 1990) and related current research (Sutcliffe et al., 2019), children’ consent to orthopaedic surgery (Alderson 1993), children’s share in managing diabetes (Alderson et al., 2006; Sutcliffe, 2010) and parents’ decisions about neonatal care (Alderson et al., 2005; Mendizabal, 2017)

Biological surrogacy in tropical seabed assemblages fails

Surrogate taxa are used widely to represent attributes of other taxa for which data are sparse or absent. Because surveying and monitoring marine biodiversity is resource intensive, our understanding and management of marine systems will need to rely on the "availability of effective surrogates. The ability of any marine taxon to adequately, represent another, however, is largely unknown because there are rarely sufficient data for multiple taxa in the same region(s). Here, we defined a taxonomic group to be a surrogate for another taxonomic group if they possessed similar assemblage patterns. We investigated effects on surrogate performance of (1) grouping species by taxon at various levels of resolution, (2) selective removal of rare species from analysis, and (3) the number of clusters used to define assemblages, using samples for 11 phyla distributed across 1189 sites sampled from the seabed of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. This spatially and taxonomically comprehensive data set provided an opportunity for extensive testing of surrogate performance in a tropical marine system using these three approaches. for the first time, as resource and data constraints were previously limiting. We measured surrogate performance as to how similarly sampling sites were divided into assemblages between taxa. For each taxonomic group independently, we grouped sites into assemblages using. He linger distances and medoid clustering. We then used a similarity index to quantify the concordance of assemblages between all pairs Of taxonomic groups. Surrogates performed better when taxa were grouped at a phylum level, compared to taxa grouped at a finer taxonomic resolution, and were unaffected by the exclusion of spatially rare species. Mean surrogate performance increased as the number of clusters decreased. Moreover, no taxonomic group was a particularly good surrogate for any other, suggesting that the use of any one (or few) group(s) for mapping seabed biodiversity patterns is imprudent; sampling several taxonomic groups appears to be essential for understanding tropical/subtropical seabed communities. Consequently, where resource constraints do not allow complete surveying of biodiversity, it may be preferable to exclude rare species to allow investment in a broader range of taxonomic groups