Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls : Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity.

An overview of the taxonomic instability of endangered Golden and Zhobi mahseer in Pakistan

In South and South East Asia three genera of fish species i.e. Tor, Neolissochilus and Naziritor are commonly known as Mahseer with at least 47 species. Among these 23 belongs to genus Tor, 22 to Neolissochilus and one to Naziritor i.e. Naziritor zhobensis. Recently another species added to genus Naziritor is Naziritor chelynoides in India. Among Tor species Tor putitora (Hamilton) is the most widely distributed Mahseer in Pakistan and other countries of the Indian subcontinent. However, based alone on morphological characters some authors identify the Pakistani counterparts as Tor macrolepis (Heckel), (a species presumed to be found exclusively in the Indus River system) distinct from Tor putitora (a species found in Ganga Brahmaputra River system). In order to resolve this taxonomic ambiguity, present study carried out meristic and morphometric measurements of Mahseer collected from a total of 11 water bodies of Pakistan. Ratios between the morphometric characters were calculated and statistically analyzed using t-test and correlation coefficient. Two species identified as Tor putitora and Naziritor zhobensis were the sole Mahseer inhabitants of Indus system in Pakistan. Tor putitora occurred at all surveyed sites while Nazirtor zhobensis had a distribution range from river Zhob to tributaries of river Gomal the right bank tributaries of River Indus. The study corroborates that there are no unequivocal morphological synapomorphies in any existing populations of both species. The study further demonstrates that head length, a character frequently used in Mahseer taxonomy, is not a good measure for species identification. Finally the present study establishes that Naziritor zhobensis still exists in the water bodies of Pakistan and that golden Mahseer occurring in Indus riverine system of Pakistan is Tor putitora.

PANOLA: A Personal Assistant for Supporting Users in Preserving Privacy

Privacy is the right of individuals to keep personal information to themselves. When individuals use online systems, they should be given the right to decide what information they would like to share and what to keep private. When a piece of information pertains only to a single individual, preserving privacy is possible by providing the right access options to the user. However, when a piece of information pertains to multiple individuals, such as a picture of a group of friends or a collaboratively edited document, deciding how to share this information and with whom is challenging. The problem becomes more difficult when the individuals who are affected by the information have different, possibly conflicting privacy constraints. Resolving this problem requires a mechanism that takes into account the relevant individuals’ concerns to decide on the privacy configuration of information. Because these decisions need to be made frequently (i.e., per each piece of shared content), the mechanism should be automated. This article presents a personal assistant to help end-users with managing the privacy of their content. When some content that belongs to multiple users is about to be shared, the personal assistants of the users employ an auction-based privacy mechanism to regulate the privacy of the content. To do so, each personal assistant learns the preferences of its user over time and produces bids accordingly. Our proposed personal assistant is capable of assisting users with different personas and thus ensures that people benefit from it as they need it. Our evaluations over multiagent simulations with online social network content show that our proposed personal assistant enables privacy-respecting content sharing.

Machine Learning in Mobile Crowd Sourcing: A Behavior-Based Recruitment Model

With the advent of mobile crowd sourcing (MCS) systems and its applications, the selection of the right crowd is gaining utmost importance. The increasing variability in the context of MCS tasks makes the selection of not only the capable but also the willing workers crucial for a high task completion rate. Most of the existing MCS selection frameworks rely primarily on reputation-based feedback mechanisms to assess the level of commitment of potential workers. Such frameworks select workers having high reputation scores but without any contextual awareness of the workers, at the time of selection, or the task. This may lead to an unfair selection of workers who will not perform the task. Hence, reputation on its own only gives an approximation of workers’ behaviors since it assumes that workers always behave consistently regardless of the situational context. However, following the concept of cross-situational consistency, where people tend to show similar behavior in similar situations and behave differently in disparate ones, this work proposes a novel recruitment system in MCS based on behavioral profiling. The proposed approach uses machine learning to predict the probability of the workers performing a given task, based on their learned behavioral models. Subsequently, a group-based selection mechanism, based on the genetic algorithm, uses these behavioral models in complementation with a reputation-based model to recruit a group of workers that maximizes the quality of recruitment of the tasks. Simulations based on a real-life dataset show that considering human behavior in varying situations improves the quality of recruitment achieved by the tasks and their completion confidence when compared with a benchmark that relies solely on reputation.

Bounded Abstract Effects

Effect systems have been a subject of active research for nearly four decades, with the most notable practical example being checked exceptions in programming languages such as Java. While many exception systems support abstraction, aggregation, and hierarchy (e.g., via class declaration and subclassing mechanisms), it is rare to see such expressive power in more generic effect systems. We designed an effect system around the idea of protecting system resources and incorporated our effect system into the Wyvern programming language. Similar to type members, a Wyvern object can have effect members that can abstract lower-level effects, allow for aggregation, and have both lower and upper bounds, providing for a granular effect hierarchy. We argue that Wyvern’s effects capture the right balance of expressiveness and power from the programming language design perspective. We present a full formalization of our effect-system design, showing that it allows reasoning about authority and attenuation. Our approach is evaluated through a security-related case study.

EFFECT OF FOOTBALL ON REHABILITATION OF ANKLE INJURY PATIENTS

ABSTRACT Introduction: Brief introduction: Ankle tendon and ligament sports injuries are common in football players. Objective: To continue to improve special strength training related to the characteristics of football after rehabilitation of injured ankle tendons and ligaments. Methods: Two master football sportsmen were rehabilitated by multi-point equal-length, short-arc and long-arc equal-speed training combined with balance ability exercises. Results: There were two long muscle L be maintain muscle tone plantar flexors force four times of 96 n/m, n/m 121, 140 n/m, 145 n/m than back flexors force of 63 n/m, 52 n/m, 60 n/m, 74 n/m tall. Plantar flexor fatigue was 57%, 30%, 29%, 12%, 28%, 18%, 20%, 21%. Conclusions: With the passing of time, the relative peak moment value of the right ankle plantar flexor muscle group of the two patients kept rising, the dorsiflexor muscle was basically flat, and the work fatigue index decreased step by step, indicating that the right ankle muscle strength level was significantly improved, the anti-fatigue ability was improved, and the rehabilitation treatment had a good effect. Level of evidence II; Therapeutic studies - investigation of treatment results.

Basics of high throughput sequencing Summary

Sequencing can provide genomic characterisation of a specific organism, as well as of a whole environmental or clinical sample. High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) makes it possible to generate an enormous amount of genomic data at gradually decreasing costs and almost in real-time. HTS is used, among others, in medicine, veterinary medicine, microbiology, virology and epidemiology. The paper presents practical aspects of the HTS technology. It describes generations of sequencing, which vary in throughput, read length, accuracy and costs ̶ and thus are used for different applications. The stages of HTS, as well as their purposes and pitfalls, are presented: extraction of the genetic material, library preparation, sequencing and data processing. For success of the whole process, all stages need to follow strict quality control measurements. Choosing the right sequencing platform, proper sample and library preparation procedures, as well as adequate bioinformatic tools are crucial for high quality results.

Anatomical and histological traits of Brycon amazonicus liver cultivated in a semi-intensive system

The work aimed to evaluate the weight-length relationship and the condition factor, characterizing the biometry, anatomy, histology and volumetric density of the liver of Brycon amazonicus, in different stages of body growth. The experiment used twenty specimens in four stages of body growth (PI, PII, PIII and PIV) harvested every 90 days, containing five specimens, each group. The livers were dissected, weighed (g) and processed routinely using the hematoxylin and eosin technique. The data were submitted to analysis of variance, Pearson’s correlation test and linear regression. The equation that represented the weight-length relation was W = 0.05902 x L2.63, with negative allometric growth, but with a relative condition factor equal to 1.0. The liver was divided into three lobes with the gallbladder close to the right lobe and its color varied from light red to dark red, not varying in relation to other fish species. The hepatosomatic relationship followed body growth until the PII group stage and then declined, demonstrating the behavior of its development in Brycon amazonicus. The organ consists predominantly of hepatocytes, followed by sinusoidal vessels and capillaries, with histological morphology similar to that of many species of fish. Melanomacrophage centers were found only in the most developed animals, but in small quantities, prompting the development of new research on this cell, in this species. In this way, research of this nature allows the characterization of fish species, helping to improve breeding methods, understanding pathological processes caused by diseases, and obtaining better productive capacity, serving an increasingly demanding and prosperous market.