Against Normative Nationalism

Normative nationalism is the view that national boundaries represent more than an accumulation of tradition and history. Borders are morally significant insofar as the communities they create may appropriately be construed as composed of individuals with particular obligations to one another that they do not have to people outside the communities. I reject normative nationalism in this paper and seek to highlight the defects in criticisms of cosmopolitanism that presume or defend the legitimacy of normative nationalism. I utilize a distinction between demands of activity and demands of justification to point to some flaws in the normative nationalist framework preferred by Thomas Nagel, bring up a thought experiment to move a blind spot in David Miller’s treatment of the issue to the foreground, and conclude by suggesting the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen may be a stronger candidate for consideration as a theory of international justice because of its ability to handle more of our intuitions

Universal abundance fluctuations across microbial communities, tropical forests, and urban populations

The growth of complex populations, such as microbial communities, forests, and cities, occurs over vastly different spatial and temporal scales. Although research in different fields has developed detailed, system-specific models to understand each individual system, a unified analysis of different complex populations is lacking; such an analysis could deepen our understanding of each system and facilitate cross-pollination of tools and insights across fields. Here, we analyze time-series data of the human gut microbiome, tropical forest, and urban employment using a shared framework. We demonstrate that a single, three-parameter model of stochastic population dynamics can reproduce the empirical distributions of population abundances and fluctuations in all three data sets. The three parameters characterizing a species measure its mean abundance, deterministic stability, and stochasticity. Our analysis reveals that, despite the vast differences in scale, all three systems occupy a similar region of parameter space when time is measured in generations. In other words, although the fluctuations observed in these systems may appear different, this difference is primarily due to the different observation periods for each system. Further, we show that the distribution of temporal abundance fluctuations is described by just two parameters and derive a two-parameter functional form for abundance fluctuations to improve risk estimation and forecasting

Coalescence of Water Drops in Water-ULSD Dispersions via Electrowetting

Coalescence of water droplets is an important phenomenon in many industrial applications. One approach for coalescing water droplets is by applying an external voltage across the drops. Coalescence occurs when spreading and motion of the drops due to the electrical field brings the drops into contact. Electrowettable surfaces were prepared with poly(styrene-co-methyl methacrylate) as the dielectric film and Fluropelâ„¢ as the hydrophobic surface layer. The surface of a stainless steel disk was coated in a way that the dielectric coating layer thickness varied with radial position with minimum thicknesses at the center and at the outer edge of the disk and a maximum at an intermediate radial position of the disk surface. The thickness gradient influenced the droplet movement and contributed to the coalescence. Two disks were assembled with a thin slit between the disks. Emulsions of water droplets in ultra low sulfur diesel fuel were pumped through the thin slit. Experiments showed significant increase in drop sizes when the disks were electrified compared to non-electrified disks

Is Performance Fairness Achievable In Presence Of Attackers Under Federated Learning?

In the last few years, Federated Learning (FL) has received extensive attention from the research community because of its capability for privacy-preserving, collaborative learning from heterogeneous data sources. Most FL studies focus on either average performance improvement or the robustness to attacks, while some attempt to solve both jointly. However, the performance disparities across clients in the presence of attackers have largely been unexplored. In this work, we propose a novel Fair Federated Learning scheme with Attacker Detection capability (abbreviated as FFL+AD) to minimize performance discrepancies across benign participants. FFL+AD enables the server to identify attackers and learn their malign intent (e.g., targeted label) by investigating suspected models via top performers. This two-step detection method helps reduce false positives. Later, we introduce fairness by regularizing the benign clients\u27 local objectives with a variable boosting parameter that gives more emphasis on low performers in optimization. Under standard assumptions, FFL+AD exhibits a convergence rate similar to FedAvg. Experimental results show that our scheme builds a more fair and more robust model, under label-flipping and backdoor attackers, compared to prior schemes. FFL+AD achieves competitive accuracy even when 40% of the clients are attackers

Weil’s disease with cutaneous manifestation

Leptospirosis can present with a wide range of clinical manifestations. Its severe form, called Weil’s disease, can result in multiorgan dysfunction and death. Hence, an early diagnosis is very essential. The patient being reported had a fever with maculopapular rash, which was initially treated as viral fever. He was later diagnosed to have Weil’s disease; which improved with penicillin therapy. Cutaneous manifestation in leptospirosis is uncommon, and awareness about this can help to prevent life-threatening complications

Ocular pulse amplitudes in diabetics in South India

OBJECTIVES: Describe the objectives of your study 1. To document any difference in Ocular Pulse Amplitudes with increasing severity of Diabetic retinopathy. 2. To document any difference in Ocular Pulse Amplitudes between Diabetics with and without systemic Hypertension METHODS: Explain the clinical and statistical methods used This study was a prospective non randomised observational study to look at the ocular pulse amplitudes using dynamic contour tonometry in various stages of diabetic retinopathy and also in patients with Hypertension. Participants were divided into groups based on the presence or absence of Diabetes. There were 3 groups, 50 in each group, namely: 1. No diabetes, 2. Diabetes with no diabetic retinopathy and 3. Diabetes with retinopathy. Participants with retinopathy were further divided into 3 sub groups: mild diabetic retinopathy, moderate diabetic retinopathy and severe non proliferative diabetic retinopathy and proliferative diabetic retinopathy being clumped into the last group Statistical analysis was done mostly with hypothesis testing for 2 means, from which the sample size was calculated. ANOVA was also used. RESULTS: The total number of participants included in the study was 172. 3 Patients, who were screened to be selected in the No DM arm, who were found to have raised HbA1c (>6.5 mg/dl) were taken out of the study and referred to Department of Medicine, CMC Vellore. 4 patients enrolled were not able to sit by the slit lamp for the period of time required and therefore the quality index was not 1 or 2 in these participants. Therefore, they were taken out of the study. One of the patients had a neck ailment and mechanically found it difficult to place her chin on the chin rest on the slit lamp. Though not mentioned in the criteria, she was not selected in the study for obvious reasons. 3 patients refused to undergo blood tests to confirm absence of Diabetes. All three were women. Two of them felt that they were too anaemic for blood tests and the third did not want to be poked repeatedly after the trained nursing staff failed to get a vein in two attempts. Therefore, these 3 women were not included in the study. Conclusions: 1. OPA is reduced in diabetics with severe NPDR and PDR as compared to normals and patients with milder grades of retinopathy 2. Reduced OPA is seen in non- hypertensive patients with diabetic retinopathy as compared to normals and hypertensives with diabetic retinopathy 3. Further studies with larger sample sizes in each grade of diabetic retinopathy is needed to evaluate the exact effect of hypertension in these patient

End-to-End Machine Learning Applications Framework for Earth Science

No abstract availabl