Gold Standard Online Debates Summaries and First Experiments Towards Automatic Summarization of Online Debate Data

Usage of online textual media is steadily increasing. Daily, more and more news stories, blog posts and scientific articles are added to the online volumes. These are all freely accessible and have been employed extensively in multiple research areas, e.g. automatic text summarization, information retrieval, information extraction, etc. Meanwhile, online debate forums have recently become popular, but have remained largely unexplored. For this reason, there are no sufficient resources of annotated debate data available for conducting research in this genre. In this paper, we collected and annotated debate data for an automatic summarization task. Similar to extractive gold standard summary generation our data contains sentences worthy to include into a summary. Five human annotators performed this task. Inter-annotator agreement, based on semantic similarity, is 36% for Cohen's kappa and 48% for Krippendorff's alpha. Moreover, we also implement an extractive summarization system for online debates and discuss prominent features for the task of summarizing online debate data automatically.Comment: accepted and presented at the CICLING 2017 - 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic

Investigation of Somatic Mutations in Human Brains Targeting Genes Associated With Parkinson's Disease

BACKGROUND: Somatic single nucleotide variant (SNV) mutations occur in neurons but their role in synucleinopathies is unknown. AIM: We aimed to identify disease-relevant low-level somatic SNVs in brains from sporadic patients with synucleinopathies and a monozygotic twin carrying LRRK2 G2019S, whose penetrance could be explained by somatic variation. METHODS AND RESULTS: We included different brain regions from 26 Parkinson's disease (PD), one Incidental Lewy body, three multiple system atrophy cases, and 12 controls. The whole SNCA locus and exons of other genes associated with PD and neurodegeneration were deeply sequenced using molecular barcodes to improve accuracy. We selected 21 variants at 0.33–5% allele frequencies for validation using accurate methods for somatic variant detection. CONCLUSIONS: We could not detect disease-relevant somatic SNVs, however we cannot exclude their presence at earlier stages of degeneration. Our results support that coding somatic SNVs in neurodegeneration are rare, but other types of somatic variants may hold pathological consequences in synucleinopathies

Some remarks on a new exotic spacetime for time travel by free fall

This work is essentially a review of a new spacetime model with closed causal curves, recently presented in another paper (Class. Quantum Grav. \textbf{35}(16) (2018), 165003). The spacetime at issue is topologically trivial, free of curvature singularities, and even time and space orientable. Besides summarizing previous results on causal geodesics, tidal accelerations and violations of the energy conditions, here redshift/blueshift effects and the Hawking-Ellis classification of the stress-energy tensor are examined.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures. Submitted as a contribution to the proceedings of "DOMOSCHOOL - International Alpine School of Mathematics and Physics, Domodossola 2018". Possible text overlaps with my previous work arXiv:1803.08214, of which this is essentially a review. Additional results concerning redshift/blueshift effects and the classification of the stress-energy tensor are presented her

Sequestration of Martian CO2 by mineral carbonation

Carbonation is the water-mediated replacement of silicate minerals, such as olivine, by carbonate, and is commonplace in the Earth’s crust. This reaction can remove significant quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere and store it over geological timescales. Here we present the first direct evidence for CO2 sequestration and storage on Mars by mineral carbonation. Electron beam imaging and analysis show that olivine and a plagioclase feldspar-rich mesostasis in the Lafayette meteorite have been replaced by carbonate. The susceptibility of olivine to replacement was enhanced by the presence of smectite veins along which CO2-rich fluids gained access to grain interiors. Lafayette was partially carbonated during the Amazonian, when liquid water was available intermittently and atmospheric CO2 concentrations were close to their present-day values. Earlier in Mars’ history, when the planet had a much thicker atmosphere and an active hydrosphere, carbonation is likely to have been an effective mechanism for sequestration of CO2

A soft-bodied mollusc with radula from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale

Author Posting. © Nature Publishing Group, 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature 442 (2006): 159-163, doi:10.1038/nature04894.Odontogriphus omalus was originally described as a problematic non-biomineralized lophophorate organism. Here we reinterpret Odontogriphus based on 189 new specimens including numerous exceptionally well-preserved individuals from the Burgess Shale collections of the Royal Ontario Museum. This additional material provides compelling evidence that the feeding apparatus in Odontogriphus is a radula of molluscan architecture comprising two primary bipartite tooth rows attached to a radular membrane and showing replacement by posterior addition. Further characters supporting molluscan affinity include a broad foot bordered by numerous ctenidia located in a mantle groove and a stiffened cuticular dorsum. Odontogriphus has a radula similar to Wiwaxia corrugata but lacks a scleritome. We interpret these animals to be members of an early stem-group mollusc lineage that likely originated in the Neoproterozoic Ediacaran Period, providing support for the retention of a biomat-based grazing community from the late Precambrian until at least the Middle Cambrian.Our research was in part supported by a Post-Doctoral Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant (to JBC-2005) and by a Swedish Research Council grant (to CS)

Survey of the quality of experimental design, statistical analysis and reporting of research using animals

For scientific, ethical and economic reasons, experiments involving animals should be appropriately designed, correctly analysed and transparently reported. This increases the scientific validity of the results, and maximises the knowledge gained from each experiment. A minimum amount of relevant information must be included in scientific publications to ensure that the methods and results of a study can be reviewed, analysed and repeated. Omitting essential information can raise scientific and ethical concerns. We report the findings of a systematic survey of reporting, experimental design and statistical analysis in published biomedical research using laboratory animals. Medline and EMBASE were searched for studies reporting research on live rats, mice and non-human primates carried out in UK and US publicly funded research establishments. Detailed information was collected from 271 publications, about the objective or hypothesis of the study, the number, sex, age and/or weight of animals used, and experimental and statistical methods. Only 59% of the studies stated the hypothesis or objective of the study and the number and characteristics of the animals used. Appropriate and efficient experimental design is a critical component of high-quality science. Most of the papers surveyed did not use randomisation (87%) or blinding (86%), to reduce bias in animal selection and outcome assessment. Only 70% of the publications that used statistical methods described their methods and presented the results with a measure of error or variability. This survey has identified a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve experimental design and reporting in publications describing research using animals. Scientific publication is a powerful and important source of information; the authors of scientific publications therefore have a responsibility to describe their methods and results comprehensively, accurately and transparently, and peer reviewers and journal editors share the responsibility to ensure that published studies fulfil these criteria

Asymptotically Lifshitz wormholes and black holes for Lovelock gravity in vacuum

Static asymptotically Lifshitz wormholes and black holes in vacuum are shown to exist for a class of Lovelock theories in d=2n+1>7 dimensions, selected by requiring that all but one of their n maximally symmetric vacua are AdS of radius l and degenerate. The wormhole geometry is regular everywhere and connects two Lifshitz spacetimes with a nontrivial geometry at the boundary. The dynamical exponent z is determined by the quotient of the curvature radii of the maximally symmetric vacua according to n(z^2-1)+1=(l/L)^2, where L corresponds to the curvature radius of the nondegenerate vacuum. Light signals are able to connect both asymptotic regions in finite time, and the gravitational field pulls towards a fixed surface located at some arbitrary proper distance to the neck. The asymptotically Lifshitz black hole possesses the same dynamical exponent and a fixed Hawking temperature given by T=z/(2^z pi l). Further analytic solutions, including pure Lifshitz spacetimes with a nontrivial geometry at the spacelike boundary, and wormholes that interpolate between asymptotically Lifshitz spacetimes with different dynamical exponents are also found.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur

Vascular adaptation to exercise in humans: Role of hemodynamic stimuli

On the 400th anniversary of Harvey’s Lumleian lectures, this review focuses on “hemodynamic” forces associated with the movement of blood through arteries in humans and the functional and structural adaptations that result from repeated episodic exposure to such stimuli. The late 20th century discovery that endothelial cells modify arterial tone via paracrine transduction provoked studies exploring the direct mechanical effects of blood flow and pressure on vascular function and adaptation in vivo. In this review, we address the impact of distinct hemodynamic signals that occur in response to exercise, the interrelationships between these signals, the nature of the adaptive responses that manifest under different physiological conditions, and the implications for human health. Exercise modifies blood flow, luminal shear stress, arterial pressure, and tangential wall stress, all of which can transduce changes in arterial function, diameter, and wall thickness. There are important clinical implications of the adaptation that occurs as a consequence of repeated hemodynamic stimulation associated with exercise training in humans, including impacts on atherosclerotic risk in conduit arteries, the control of blood pressure in resistance vessels, oxygen delivery and diffusion, and microvascular health. Exercise training studies have demonstrated that direct hemodynamic impacts on the health of the artery wall contribute to the well-established decrease in cardiovascular risk attributed to physical activity. © 2017 the American Physiological Society