The global impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the backlash towards reproductive justice that it represents warrant a global feminist response informed by broad theoretical and geopolitical lenses. We consider how a solidaristic, transnational feminist movement might learn from Latin American feminist movements that have been successful in uniting broad coalitions in the fight for reproductive justice as situated within far-reaching political goals. The success of such a global movement must be decolonial and must contend with the (...) fact that overlapping realities of global inequality, severe poverty, extractivism, and western-backed violence are fundamentally implicated in reproductive justice. (shrink)

The idea of food sovereignty has its roots primarily in the response of small producers in developing countries to decreasing levels of control over land, production practices, and food access. While the concerns of urban Chicagoans struggling with low food access may seem far from these issues, the authors believe that the ideas associated with food sovereignty will lead to the construction of solutions to what is often called the “food desert” issue that serve and empower communities in ways that (...) less democratic solutions do not. In Chicago and elsewhere, residents and activists often see and experience racial and economic inequalities through the variety of stores and other food access sites available in their community. The connections between food access, respect, and activism are first considered through a set of statements of Chicagoans living in food access poor areas. We will then discuss these connections through the work and philosophy of activists in Chicago centered in food sovereignty and food justice. Particular focus will be placed on Growing Power, an urban food production, distribution, and learning organization working primarily in Milwaukee and Chicago, and Healthy South Chicago, a community coalition focused on health issues in a working class area of the city. (shrink)

In the industrial context, steel is a broadly-used raw material with applications in many different fields. Due to its high impact in the activity of many industries all over the world, forecasting its price is of utmost importance for a huge amount of companies. In this work, non-linear neural models are applied for the first time to different datasets in order to validate their suitability when predicting the price of this commodity. In particular, the NAR, NIO and NARX neural network (...) models are innovatively applied for the first time to forecast the price of hot rolled steel in Spain. Besides these variety of models, different datasets consisting of a set of heterogenous variables from the last seven years and related to the price of this commodity are benchmarked and analyzed. The results showed that NARX is the best performing model when the price of raw materials used to produce steel and the stock market prices of three major global steel producing companies are employed as input to this predictive model. Consequently, this result may boost the application of Machine Learning in companies, in order to schedule the supplying operations according to the price forecasting. (shrink)

Axiom weakening is a novel technique that allows for fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. In a multi-agent setting, integrating ontologies corresponding to multiple agents may lead to inconsistencies. Such inconsistencies can be resolved after the integrated ontology has been built, or their generation can be prevented during ontology generation. We implement and compare these two approaches. First, we study how to repair an inconsistent ontology resulting from a voting-based aggregation of views of heterogeneous agents. Second, we prevent the generation of (...) inconsistencies by letting the agents engage in a turn-based rational protocol about the axioms to be added to the integrated ontology. We instantiate the two approaches using real-world ontologies and compare them by measuring the levels of satisfaction of the agents w.r.t. the ontology obtained by the two procedures. (shrink)

The interpretation of propositions in Lukasiewicz's infinite-valued calculus as answers in Ulam's game with lies--the Boolean case corresponding to the traditional Twenty Questions game--gives added interest to the completeness theorem. The literature contains several different proofs, but they invariably require technical prerequisites from such areas as model-theory, algebraic geometry, or the theory of ordered groups. The aim of this paper is to provide a self-contained proof, only requiring the rudiments of algebra and convexity in finite-dimensional vector spaces.

Aim of this paper is to provide a self-contained presentation of the natural equivalence between MV-algebras and lattice-ordered abelian groups with strong unit.

We introduce and discuss a knowledge-driven distillation approach to explaining black-box models by means of two kinds of interpretable models. The first is perceptron (or threshold) connectives, which enrich knowledge representation languages such as Description Logics with linear operators that serve as a bridge between statistical learning and logical reasoning. The second is Trepan Reloaded, an ap- proach that builds post-hoc explanations of black-box classifiers in the form of decision trees enhanced by domain knowledge. Our aim is, firstly, to target (...) a model-agnostic distillation approach exemplified with these two frameworks, secondly, to study how these two frameworks interact on a theoretical level, and, thirdly, to investigate use-cases in ML and AI in a comparative manner. Specifically, we envision that user-studies will help determine human understandability of explanations generated using these two frameworks. (shrink)

Axiom weakening is a technique that allows for a fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. Its main advantage is that it repairs on- tologies by making axioms less restrictive rather than by deleting them, employing the use of refinement operators. In this paper, we build on pre- viously introduced axiom weakening for ALC, and make it much more irresistible by extending its definitions to deal with SROIQ, the expressive and decidable description logic underlying OWL 2 DL. We extend the definitions of (...) refinement operator to deal with SROIQ constructs, in particular with role hierarchies, cardinality constraints and nominals, and illustrate its application. Finally, we discuss the problem of termi- nation of an iterated weakening procedure. (shrink)

Most cells communicate with their immediate neighbors through the exchange of cytosolic molecules such as ions, second messengers and small metabolites. This activity is made possible by clusters of intercellular channels called gap junctions, which connect adjacent cells. In terms of molecular architecture, intercellular channels consist of two channels, called connexons, which interact to span the plasma membranes of two adjacent cells and directly join the cytoplasm of one cell to another. Connexons are made of structural proteins named connexins, which (...) compose a multigene family. Connexin channels participate in the regulation of signaling between developing and differentiated cell types, and recently there have been some unexpected findings. First, unique ionic‐ and size‐selectivities are determined by each connexin; second, the establishment of intercellular communication is defined by the expression of compatible connexins; third, the discovery of connexin mutations associated with human diseases and the study of knockout mice have illustrated the vital role of cell‐cell communication in a diverse array of tissue functions. (shrink)

The publication of "The Practice of Liberal Pluralism" by Willam Galston has appeared as an event of first importance regarding contemporary theory about the relation between pluralism and liberalism. William Galston’s theory has had a visible evolution: in "Liberal Purposes", the main object is a critique of neutralism and a defence of perfectionist liberalism, whereas "Liberal Pluralism" main concern was to draw the limits of state intervention. This evolution is the object of numerous questions in the following discussion. "The Practice (...) of Liberal Pluralism" operates an interesting synthesis on this point. Galston defines himself as a liberal pluralist such as Berlin, but although he acknowledges that conflict between values can be tragic, he minimizes this aspect in the following discussions, and considers the possibility of having prima facie duties. One of the main arguments for the defence of value pluralism is its capacity to explain the complexity of the moral universe. Galston endorses a political pluralism, which means that the sources of authority are multiple. Galston’s liberalism is very tolerant regarding non-liberal communitarian practices, although this tolerance is based on the defence of an exit right, which is a fundamental notion in his theory. In the following discussion, Galston proposes how to understand this right of exit in an adequate manner. (shrink)

Ontologies represent principled, formalised descriptions of agents’ conceptualisations of a domain. For a community of agents, these descriptions may differ among agents. We propose an aggregative view of the integration of ontologies based on Judgement Aggregation (JA). Agents may vote on statements of the ontologies, and we aim at constructing a collective, integrated ontology, that reflects the individual conceptualisations as much as possible. As several results in JA show, many attractive and widely used aggregation procedures are prone to return inconsistent (...) collective ontologies. We propose to solve the possible inconsistencies in the collective ontology by applying suitable weakenings of axioms that cause inconsistencies. (shrink)

Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based on removing a few axioms from the ontology to regain consistency. We propose a new method based on weakening these axioms to make them less restrictive, employing (...) the use of refinement operators. We introduce the theoretical framework for weakening DL ontologies, propose algorithms to repair ontologies based on the framework, and provide an analysis of the computational complexity. Through an empirical analysis made over real-life ontologies, we show that our approach preserves significantly more of the original knowledge of the ontology than removing axioms. (shrink)

Background: Mental fatigue can impact physical demands and tactical behavior in sport-related contexts. Small-sided games are often used to develop a specific sport-related context. However, the effects of mental fatigue on physical demands and tactical behaviors during soccer SSGs have not been aggregated for systematical assessment.Objective: This systematic review was conducted to compare the effects of mental fatigue vs. control conditions in terms of the total running distance and tactical behavior of soccer players during SSGs.Methods: The data sources utilized were (...) PubMed, PsycINFO, Scielo, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science. The study eligibility criteria were established based on PICOS: Population: healthy youth and young adult men soccer players with regular training practice and belonging to teams with regular competitions; Intervention: exposed to mental fatigue-induced protocols only before SSGs; Comparator: control conditions before SSGs; Outcomes: physical demands and tactical behavior ; Study design: counterbalanced cross-over design; and only full-text and original articles written in English.Results: The database search initially identified 111 titles. From those, six articles were eligible for the systematic review and meta-analysis. Results showed no significant effect of fatigue on total running distance and tactical behavior.Conclusions: A non-significant effect of mental fatigue on total running distance and tactical behaviors performed by soccer players during SSGs was found in this systematic review. (shrink)

En este artículo se parte del planteamiento de Merleau-Ponty del cuerpo como una existencia ambigua, que no se puede reducir a un mero sujeto o a una mera cosa. Esto lleva a explorar el cuerpo desde ambas perspectivas. En primer lugar, se analiza el cuerpo como un objeto producto de las representaciones del capitalismo cognitivo y del sistema farmacopornográfico de poder descrito por Paul Beatriz Preciado. En segundo lugar, se analiza el cuerpo como sujeto, como elemento que posibilita la acción (...) política, a partir de las reflexiones que han realizado Judith Butler y Jacques Rancière en torno al cuerpo vulnerable y al cuerpo estético, respectivamente. De esta manera, se encuentra que si bien el cuerpo se encuentra atravesado por los diferentes dispositivos de poder del capitalismo contemporáneo, así mismo en este se encuentra la potencialidad de resistencia y emancipación frente a estos mecanismos. (shrink)

The health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed limitations in health systems worldwide, making it necessary to establish a bioethical framework that provides tools to drive health professionals’ decision-making amid scarce health resources. Bioethical models such as principlism, utilitarianism, and personalism seek to focus clinical decisions on respect for people’s rights and dignity, thus protecting the medical practice. Personalism provides a person-centered approach to respect for human dignity during health emergencies to avoid giving material meaning to the individual. Decision (...) criteria are required to face bioethical conflicts in clinical practice, reducing the legal, emotional, and ethical burden of decision-making in pandemic situations. (shrink)

We aimed to characterize the age of onset of training, age at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and performance perception during the menstrual cycle and examined the impact of these reproductive variables on body composition, morphology, and body weight satisfaction in Brazilian elite futsal players. The study consisted of 115 female Brazilian elite futsal players from the top national teams. Data were collected during the twentieth Women’s Brazil Futsal Cup. Players were interviewed and self-reported their age of onset of training, age at (...) menarche, menstrual periodicity, and the menstrual period, where they performed best. We also asked for what they considered to be their ideal body weight as well as information related to their training. Subsequently, anthropometric measurements were performed to estimate the body composition and determine morphological characteristics. Fifty-nine players were postmenarche-trained and 52 were premenarche-trained. Eighteen, 65, and 28 were classified as early, normal, and late menarche, respectively. Only 11 and 1 had irregular menstrual cycles and were amenorrheic, respectively. Seventy-three, 23, and 9 reported that their game performance was the best at the follicular phase, menses, and luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, respectively. No associations between the four reproductive-related variables were found. Postmenarche-trained players had significant lower age at menarche and higher percentage body fat. The somatotype profile registered lower ectomorphy rate for the postmenarche-trained participants after controlling for covariates. Early menarche group presented higher sum of six skinfold thickness and endomorphy rate compared to normal and late menarche groups. No differences were found when menstrual periodicity groups and best performance groups were compared, except for higher femur width in the regular menstrual cycle group compared to the irregular one. The association between body weight satisfaction and the four reproductive-related variables were not observed. Premenarche-trained Brazilian elite futsal players had the menarche later than the postmenarche-trained athletes. Most of the participants had menarche age classified as “normal,” presented “regular” menstrual cycles and perceived to perform better during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. (shrink)

Pensar en el cine como ocasión y potencia del pensamiento significa en efecto, en primer lugar, sustraer la imagen contemporánea del dominio de los estudios especializados y, en segundo lugar, pensar a partir de aquello que el cine crea (como recordaba Deleuze): esto es, las imágenes mismas. El cine redescubre su potencia a través de sus propias formas. Entrevistas de la revista italiana Fata Morgana con: Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, Jean-luc Nancy, Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, Werner Herzog, Raúl Ruiz, (...) Yervant Gianikian, Ángela Ricci Lucchi, Edgar Reitz, Paul Schraoer, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jean-Louis Comolli, Nuccio Ordine. (shrink)

There is much effort nowadays to protect communication networks against different cybersecurity attacks (which are more and more sophisticated) that look for systems’ vulnerabilities they could exploit for malicious purposes. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) are popular tools to detect and classify such attacks, most of them based on ML models. However, ML-based NIDSs cannot be trained by feeding them with network traffic data as it is. Thus, a Feature Engineering (FE) process plays a crucial role transforming network traffic raw (...) data onto derived one suitable for ML models. In this work, we study the effects of applying one such FE technique in different ways on the performance of two ML models (linear and non-linear) and their selected features. This the Feature as a Counter approach. The derived observations are computed from either with the same number of raw samples, (batch-based approaches) or by aggregating them by time intervals (timestamp-based approach). Results show that there is no significant differences between the proposed approaches neither in the performance of the models nor in the selected features that validate our proposal making it feasible to be widely used as a standard FE method. (shrink)

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Background: Treating medication-refractory freezing of gait in Parkinson’s disease remains challenging despite several trials reporting improvements in motor symptoms using subthalamic nucleus or globus pallidus internus deep brain stimulation. Pedunculopontine nucleus region DBS has been used for medication-refractory FoG, with mixed findings. FoG, as a paroxysmal phenomenon, provides an ideal framework for the possibility of closed-loop DBS.Methods: In this clinical trial, five subjects with medication-refractory FoG underwent bilateral GPi DBS implantation to address levodopa-responsive PD symptoms with open-loop stimulation. Additionally, PPN (...) DBS leads were implanted for CL-DBS to treat FoG. The primary outcome of the study was a 40% improvement in medication-refractory FoG in 60% of subjects at 6 months when “on” PPN CL-DBS. Secondary outcomes included device feasibility to gauge the recruitment potential of this four-lead DBS approach for a potentially larger clinical trial. Safety was judged based on adverse events and explantation rate.Findings: The feasibility of this approach was demonstrated as we recruited five subjects with both “on” and “off” medication freezing. The safety for this population of patients receiving four DBS leads was suboptimal and associated with a high explantation rate of 40%. The primary clinical outcome in three of the five subjects was achieved at 6 months. However, the group analysis of the primary clinical outcome did not reveal any benefit.Interpretation: This study of a human PPN CL-DBS trial in medication-refractory FoG showed feasibility in recruitment, suboptimal safety, and a heterogeneous clinical effect in FoG outcomes. (shrink)