Making norms to tackle global challenges: The role of Intergovernmental Organisations

This paper argues that Intergovernmental Organisations (IGOs) can play a significant role in the processes of system transformation required by Grand Challenges. The reason is their potential to influence socio-technical regimes connected to policy areas in which they have authority. Supported by mandates, moral standing and technical expertise, IGOs act in two ways: operating with high level of political support, these organisations guide priority setting and norm development through the definition of collective problems and solutions, including STI aspects, establishing a shared vision; involving public and private actors, IGOs implement and protect novel practices that reinforce the new norms, from legally binding agreements to the creation of new spaces for international collaboration. These processes are examined here in the field of global health, where outside pressure directed at the intellectual property rules in connection to access to medicines prompted the WHO to define the health challenge as a need to stimulate innovation and ensure wide access to technology at the same time. Two of the solutions implemented by IGOs to achieve both goals are analysed: the Medicines Patent Pool, designed by UNITAID to fulfil access and innovation needs in relation to HIV/AIDS drugs, and WIPO Re:Search, set up by WIPO to support collaboration and accelerate discovery and product development for Neglected Tropical Diseases, Malaria and Tuberculosis

Cold shoulder for the mutuals

This article for the Financial World Magazine discusses the prospects for mutuals and building society in the post-2008 crisis regulatory environment

Geiger-Mode Avalanche Photodiodes in Particle Detection

It is well known that avalanche photodiodes operated in the Geiger mode above the breakdown voltage offer a virtually infinite sensitivity and time accuracy in the picosecond range that can be used for single photon detection. However, their performance in particle detection remains still unexplored. In this contribution, we are going to expose the different steps that we have taken in order to prove the efficiency of Geiger mode avalanche photodiodes in the aforementioned field. In particular, we will present an array of pixels of 1mmx1mm fabricated with a standard CMOS technology for characterization in a test beam.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of LCWS1

PyPlutchik: Visualising and comparing emotion-annotated corpora

The increasing availability of textual corpora and data fetched from social networks is fuelling a huge production of works based on the model proposed by psychologist Robert Plutchik, often referred simply as the “Plutchik Wheel”. Related researches range from annotation tasks description to emotions detection tools. Visualisation of such emotions is traditionally carried out using the most popular layouts, as bar plots or tables, which are however sub-optimal. The classic representation of the Plutchik’s wheel follows the principles of proximity and opposition between pairs of emotions: spatial proximity in this model is also a semantic proximity, as adjacent emotions elicit a complex emotion (a primary dyad) when triggered together; spatial opposition is a semantic opposition as well, as positive emotions are opposite to negative emotions. The most common layouts fail to preserve both features, not to mention the need of visually allowing comparisons between different corpora in a blink of an eye, that is hard with basic design solutions. We introduce PyPlutchik the Pyplutchik package is available as a Github repository (http://github.com/alfonsosemeraro/pyplutchik) or through the installation commands pip or conda. For any enquiry about usage or installation feel free to contact the corresponding author, a Python module specifically designed for the visualisation of Plutchik’s emotions in texts or in corpora. PyPlutchik draws the Plutchik’s flower with each emotion petal sized after how much that emotion is detected or annotated in the corpus, also representing three degrees of intensity for each of them. Notably, PyPlutchik allows users to display also primary, secondary, tertiary and opposite dyads in a compact, intuitive way. We substantiate our claim that PyPlutchik outperforms other classic visualisations when displaying Plutchik emotions and we showcase a few examples that display our module’s most compelling features

Extracting Hα\alpha flux from photometric data in the J-PLUS survey

We present the main steps that will be taken to extract H$\alpha$ emission flux from Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) photometric data. For galaxies with $z\lesssim0.015$, the H$\alpha$+[NII] emission is covered by the J-PLUS narrow-band filter $F660$. We explore three different methods to extract the H$\alpha$ + [NII] flux from J-PLUS photometric data: a combination of a broad-band and a narrow-band filter ($r'$ and $F660$), two broad-band and a narrow-band one ($r'$, $i'$ and $F660$), and a SED-fitting based method using 8 photometric points. To test these methodologies, we simulated J-PLUS data from a sample of 7511 SDSS spectra with measured H$\alpha$ flux. Based on the same sample, we derive two empirical relations to correct the derived H$\alpha$+[NII] flux from dust extinction and [NII] contamination. We find that the only unbiased method is the SED fitting based one. The combination of two filters underestimates the measurements of the H$\alpha$ + [NII] flux by a 28%, while the three filters method by a 9%. We study the error budget of the SED-fitting based method and find that, in addition to the photometric error, our measurements have a systematic uncertainty of a 4.3%. Several sources contribute to this uncertainty: differences between our measurement procedure and the one used to derive the spectroscopic values, the use of simple stellar populations as templates, and the intrinsic errors of the spectra, which were not taken into account. Apart from that, the empirical corrections for dust extinction and [NII] contamination add an extra uncertainty of 14%. Given the J-PLUS photometric system, the best methodology to extract H$\alpha$ + [NII] flux is the SED-fitting based one. Using this method, we are able to recover reliable H$\alpha$ fluxes for thousands of nearby galaxies in a robust and homogeneous way.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures. Minor changes to match the published versio

Fight for Peace Academies in Rio and London - assessing their progress and impact

The purpose of the research conducted by the Centre for Institutional Studies, University of East London between April 2012 and May 2013 is to independently assess the effect of the Fight for Peace (FFP) Academies on the lives of young people in London, UK, and Rio, Brazil. The research is also designed to provide information to inform practice and development of FFP as an organisation. This report identifies factors which explain how FFP programmes impact upon the life course of young people and summarises the main outcomes. A short report summarising the findings were published in November 2012 and can be found on the Centre’s website (www.uel.ac.uk/csjc)

Opportunity lost: Mystification, elite politics and financial reform in the UK

The first phase of the crisis in Britain – from the 2007 failure of Northern Rock to the post Lehman systemic crisis of autumn 2008 – was a demystifying moment, when finance sector alibis, technocratic expertise and the assumptions of the political classes were tested and found wanting under pressure of unanticipated events. The banking rescue of 2007-8 amounted to the socialization of banking losses at a cost to the UK taxpayer of up to £1,000 billion or more (if we include contingent liabilities and exclude quantitative easing). British taxpayers got very little in return. The challenge of a brief democratic moment was met by the restatement of old pre-crisis narratives about the importance of ‘flexible’, market responsive regulation, and about the social value of finance. The result so far is marginalisation of left and radical forces (or no change on the past twenty-five years). Against this background, this essay has two interlinked aims. First, it presents an analysis of political obstacles to democratic control and reform of the finance sector that caused the financial crisis of 2007-8; a crisis that, after extreme intervention to save banks and support markets, has by 2010-11 become a fiscal crisis for individual states and a sovereign debt crisis for the eurozone. Second, it addresses (in this context) the role of ‘ideology’ within the socio-political process by examining how discourses format the world through what is now called ‘performativity’. And it shows how this new kind of discursive description can be developed and integrated with more established kinds of institutional analysis so as to generate new insights into the political obstacles to reform. The argument below is illustrated with UK evidence and our aim is to provide an analysis of national peculiarities, but the issues raised are relevant to other jurisdictions (national and supra national). We hope to raise broad questions about the mechanisms of elite power in present day capitalism where the importance of narrative has intensified since Reagan and Thatcher. We also aim to encourage reflection on how narrative power could be challenged so as to deliver a more democratic reform of finance

Benchmarking genetically improved BarraCUDA on epigenetic methylation NGS datasets and nVidia GPUs

BarraCUDA uses CUDA graphics cards to map DNA reads to the human genome. Previously its software source code was genetically improved for short paired end next generation sequences. On longer noisy epigenetics strings using nVidia Titan and twin Tesla K40 the same GI-ed code is more than 3 times faster than bwa-meth on an 8 core CPU

VariScan Software

Linux / Mac OS X : The package includes executables for linux (variscan) and Mac OS X (variscan). For other Unix-based platforms you will have to compile it from the source files included in the VariScan package. Windows: The package includes (src directory), the source code, the project (variscan.dev) and makefile (variscan.win) files to be used, for instance, for the Dev-C++ (a free Integrated Development Environment for the C/C++ programming language)Podeu consultar l'article relacionat a: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/7384Podeu consultar la pàgina de desenvolupament del programari: http://www.ub.edu/softevol/VariScan is a software package for the analysis of DNA sequence polymorphisms at the whole genome scale. Among other features, the software: (1) can conduct many population genetic analyses; (2) incorporates a multiresolution wavelet transform-based method that allows capturing relevant information from DNA polymorphism data; and (3) it facilitates the visualization of the results in the most commonly used genome browsers