Systematic review and meta-analysis of the sero-epidemiological association between Epstein-Barr virus and rheumatoid arthritis

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Cynthia Fraser for helping run the literature search, Dr Neil Basu for providing advice on search terms for rheumatoid arthritis and to Xueli Jia, Katie Bannister and Kubra Boza for their help with foreign language papers. The authors would also like to thank the University of Aberdeen librarians at the Foresterhill medical library for their help in locating articles used for this systematic review and meta-analysis.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Conceptual Fragmentation and the Rise of Eliminativism

Pluralist and eliminativist positions in philosophy – and other disciplines – have proliferated in recent decades. This paper emphasises the sheer scale of this movement: we start by summarising twenty debates which have been affected, thus illustrating how often debates have been transformed by the introduction of pluralist and/or eliminativist thinking. We then provide an explanation of why this shift of philosophical terrain has occurred, an explanation which in turn predicts that its reach will extend to other debates currently unaffected, and for good reasons. We go on to detail the landscape of various different pluralist and eliminativist positions one may favour. We ultimately argue for pluralism at the meta-level: whether one should implement (some stripe of) pluralism or eliminativism depends on the context of discussion and the details of the debate at hand. We use this analysis to dissolve debates between ‘pluralists’ and ‘eliminativists’ in various domains

Freedom of religion under the European Convention on Human Rights: Foreshadowing interpretative dilemmas

This chapter focuses on those provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) most clearly relevant to freedom of religion: Article 9, and Article 2 of the First Protocol. These provisions are placed in context, both in terms of the development of freedom of religion at the international level, and in terms of the history of the drafting of the provisions. The exposition function was particularly important in a text on freedom of religion or belief. It was the first full-length text providing a sustained consideration of freedom of religion under the ECHR, as opposed to in international law more generally. A lack of sympathy, or perhaps better put, a failure of judicial imagination when considering the position of atheists within a religious rights regime, materialised in Lautsi v Italy. Eweida removed the initial hurdle in making a religion or belief claim, a second hurdle is immediately encountered: the margin of appreciation

What is Future-Proof Science?

Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics – those who spread doubt about science – often employ a simple argument: scientists were sure in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Such sceptics draw on dramatic quotes from eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who reportedly stated at the turn of the 20th century “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” shortly before physics was dramatically transformed. They ask: given the history of science, wouldn’t it be naïve to think that current scientific theories reveal ‘the truth’, and will never be discarded in favour of other theories? Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against such potentially dangerous scepticism. It is argued that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity

What is future-proof science?

Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics – those who spread doubt about science – often employ a simple argument: scientists were sure in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Such sceptics draw on dramatic quotes from eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who reportedly stated at the turn of the 20th century “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” shortly before physics was dramatically transformed. They ask: given the history of science, wouldn’t it be naïve to think that current scientific theories reveal ‘the truth’, and will never be discarded in favour of other theories? Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against such potentially dangerous scepticism. It is argued that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity

The Call for a New Definition of Biosignature

The term has become increasingly prevalent in astrobiology literature as our ability to search for life advances. Although this term has been useful to the community, its definition is not settled. Existing definitions conflict sharply over the balance of evidence needed to establish a biosignature, which leads to misunderstanding and confusion about what is being claimed when biosignatures are purportedly detected. To resolve this, we offer a new definition of a biosignature as This definition is strong enough to do the work required of it in multiple contexts-from the search for life on Mars to exoplanet spectroscopy-where the quality and indeed quantity of obtainable evidence is markedly different. Moreover, it addresses the pernicious problem of unconceived abiotic mimics that is central to biosignature research. We show that the new definition yields intuitively satisfying judgments when applied to historical biosignature claims. We also reaffirm the importance of multidisciplinary work on abiotic mimics to narrow the gap between the detection of a biosignature and a confirmed discovery of life

Competition, Imitation and Growth with Step-by-Step Innovation

Is more intense product market competition and imitation good or bad for growth? This question is addressed in the context of an endogenous growth model with “step-by-step” innovations, in which technological laggards must first catch up with the leading-edge technology before battling for techno- logical leadership in the future. In contrast to earlier Schumpeterian models in which innovations are always made by outsider firms who earn no rents if they fail to innovate and become monopolies if they do innovate, here we find: first, that the usual Schumpeterian effect of more intense product market competition (PMC) is almost always outweighed by the increased in- centive for firms to innovate in order to escape competition, so that PMC has a positive effect on growth; second, that a little imitation is almost always growth-enhancing, as it promotes more frequent neck-and-neck competition, but too much imitation is unambiguously growth-reducing. The model thus points to complementary roles for competition (anti-trust) policy and patent policy.Economic

Systematic review and meta-analysis of the sero-epidemiological association between Epstein-Barr virus and systemic lupus erythematosus

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Xueli Jia and Canan Spengler for translating Chinese and Turkish papers, respectively. Funding The Health Services Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorate.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Human Performance on Visually Presented Traveling Salesperson Problems with Varying Numbers of Nodes

We investigated the properties of the distribution of human solution times for Traveling Salesperson Problems (TSPs) with increasing numbers of nodes. New experimental data are presented that measure solution times for carefully chosen representative problems with 10, 20, . . . 120 nodes. We compared the solution times predicted by the convex hull procedure proposed by MacGregor and Ormerod (1996), the hierarchical approach of Graham, Joshi, and Pizlo (2000), and by five algorithms drawn from the artificial intelligence and operations research literature. The most likely polynomial model for describing the relationship between mean solution time and the size of a TSP is linear or near-linear over the range of problem sizes tested, supporting the earlier finding of Graham et al. (2000). We argue the properties of the solution time distributions place strong constraints on the development of detailed models of human performance for TSPs, and provide some evaluation of previously proposed models in light of our findings

Navigating Multimodal Complexity: Advances in Model Design, Dataset Creation, and Evaluation Techniques

Ibn Sina, a philosopher of 11th-century Persia, wrote of a `Floating Man'. This man is floating through a void, without the use of his sight or touch or any of the senses which make us human. Yet as he has a human brain this man, according to Ibn Sina, is capable of imagining and reasoning with the capabilities of any other person. With the development of Large Language Models the field of Artificial Intelligence has come close to making a `Floating Man' - or at least making a `Floating Man' with memories of more books than exist in the wildest dreams of the librarians of Alexandria or Oxford. In this thesis, we question if the `floating man' of AI could benefit from more of his senses, reasoning that as humans a great deal of our experience is multimodal. Our research aims to address the limitations of current NLP models that heavily rely on textual information, often at the expense of multimodal cues. Such errors highlight the critical need for multimodal approaches in many applications, of which we study Visual Question Answering, Citation Recommendation, and Eye-Tracking Prediction, where text alone can lead to biased, harmful, or simply incorrect outcomes, such as mistaking a metal table for one made of wood due to textual biases. Through our research, we aim to show the potential for Multimodality in enriching the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence