Spanish question answering evaluation

This paper reports the most significant issues related to the launching of a Monolingual Spanish Question Answering evaluation track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2003). It introduces some questions about multilingualism and describes the methodology for test suite production, task, judgment of answers as well as the results obtained by the participant systems

Numerical study of jets produced by conical wire arrays on the Magpie pulsed power generator

The aim of this work is to model the jets produced by conical wire arrays on the MAGPIE generator, and to design and test new setups to strengthen the link between laboratory and astrophysical jets. We performed the modelling with direct three-dimensional magneto-hydro-dynamic numerical simulations using the code GORGON. We applied our code to the typical MAGPIE setup and we successfully reproduced the experiments. We found that a minimum resolution of approximately 100 is required to retrieve the unstable character of the jet. We investigated the effect of changing the number of wires and found that arrays with less wires produce more unstable jets, and that this effect has magnetic origin. Finally, we studied the behaviour of the conical array together with a conical shield on top of it to reduce the presence of unwanted low density plasma flows. The resulting jet is shorter and less dense.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Science. HEDLA 2010 conference procedings. Final pubblication will be available on Springe

'Who Wrote 2 Thessalonians:A Fresh Look at an Old Problem'

In light of the New Perspective on Paul, recognition of apocalyptic as a central category in Pauline theology, and the crumbling consensus concerning seven authentic epistles of Paul, it is time to reconsider the arguments for the authenticity of his letters. Here the specific question of the authorship of 2 Thessalonians is re-examined. It is noted that many of the standard arguments for or against the authenticity of 2 Thessalonians are either irrelevant or inconclusive. This discussion seeks to reveal the slender evidential basis of certain ‘classic’ arguments against the authenticity of the letter, and also to present some fresh reasons why the epistle should be regarded as written by Paul. The implications of including 2 Thessalonians among the authentic Pauline writings are then examined. In particular, it is suggested that the development in Paul’s thinking as reflected in 2 Thessalonians reveals that his theological formulations developed in response to situations in his fledgling communities. In this regard, Paul’s theological positions emerged through a negotiated response to pressing pastoral situations

Genome-wide association study of kidney function decline in individuals of European descent.

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified multiple loci associated with cross-sectional eGFR, but a systematic genetic analysis of kidney function decline over time is missing. Here we conducted a GWAS meta-analysis among 63,558 participants of European descent, initially from 16 cohorts with serial kidney function measurements within the CKDGen Consortium, followed by independent replication among additional participants from 13 cohorts. In stage 1 GWAS meta-analysis, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at MEOX2, GALNT11, IL1RAP, NPPA, HPCAL1, and CDH23 showed the strongest associations for at least one trait, in addition to the known UMOD locus, which showed genome-wide significance with an annual change in eGFR. In stage 2 meta-analysis, the significant association at UMOD was replicated. Associations at GALNT11 with Rapid Decline (annual eGFR decline of 3 ml/min per 1.73 m(2) or more), and CDH23 with eGFR change among those with CKD showed significant suggestive evidence of replication. Combined stage 1 and 2 meta-analyses showed significance for UMOD, GALNT11, and CDH23. Morpholino knockdowns of galnt11 and cdh23 in zebrafish embryos each had signs of severe edema 72 h after gentamicin treatment compared with controls, but no gross morphological renal abnormalities before gentamicin administration. Thus, our results suggest a role in the deterioration of kidney function for the loci GALNT11 and CDH23, and show that the UMOD locus is significantly associated with kidney function decline.Kidney International advance online publication, 10 December 2014; doi:10.1038/ki.2014.361

Experimental Studies of Magnetically Driven Plasma Jets

We present experimental results on the formation of supersonic, radiatively cooled jets driven by pressure due to the toroidal magnetic field generated by the 1.5 MA, 250 ns current from the MAGPIE generator. The morphology of the jet produced in the experiments is relevant to astrophysical jet scenarios in which a jet on the axis of a magnetic cavity is collimated by a toroidal magnetic field as it expands into the ambient medium. The jets in the experiments have similar Mach number, plasma beta and cooling parameter to those in protostellar jets. Additionally the Reynolds, magnetic Reynolds and Peclet numbers are much larger than unity, allowing the experiments to be scaled to astrophysical flows. The experimental configuration allows for the generation of episodic magnetic cavities, suggesting that periodic fluctuations near the source may be responsible for some of the variability observed in astrophysical jets. Preliminary measurements of kinetic, magnetic and Poynting energy of the jets in our experiments are presented and discussed, together with estimates of their temperature and trapped toroidal magnetic field.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Reproducibility in the absence of selective reporting : An illustration from large-scale brain asymmetry research

Altres ajuts: Max Planck Society (Germany).The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an "ideal publishing environment," that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes

Automatically Evolving Rule Induction Algorithms

Research in the rule induction algorithm field produced many algorithms in the last 30 years. However, these algorithms are usually obtained from a few basic rule induction algorithms that have been often changed to produce better ones. Having these basic algorithms and their components in mind, this work proposes the use of Grammar-based Genetic Programming (GGP) to automatically evolve rule induction algorithms. The proposed GGP is evaluated in extensive computational experiments involving 11 data sets. Overall, the results show that effective rule induction algorithms can be automatically generated using GGP. The automatically evolved rule induction algorithms were shown to be competitive with well-known manually designed ones. The proposed approach of automatically evolving rule induction algorithms can be considered a pioneering one, opening a new kind of research area