Global Category Research Articles

FedART: A neural model integrating federated learning and adaptive resonance theory

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, prevailing FL approaches aggregate the clients’ local models into a global model through multi-round iterative parameter averaging. This leads to the undesirable bias of the aggregated model towards certain clients in the presence of heterogeneous data distributions among the clients. Moreover, such approaches are restricted to supervised classification tasks and do not support unsupervised clustering. To address these limitations, we propose a novel one-shot FL approach called Federated Adaptive Resonance Theory (FedART) which leverages self-organizing Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) models to learn category codes, where each code represents a cluster of similar data samples. In FedART, the clients learn to associate their private data with various local category codes. Under heterogeneity, the local codes across different clients represent heterogeneous data. In turn, a global model takes these local codes as inputs and aggregates them into global category codes, wherein heterogeneous client data is indirectly represented by distinctly encoded global codes, in contrast to the averaging out of parameters in the existing approaches. This enables the learned global model to handle heterogeneous data. In addition, FedART employs a universal learning mechanism to support both federated classification and clustering tasks. Our experiments conducted on various federated classification and clustering tasks show that FedART consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods on data with heterogeneous distribution across clients.

The Adams isomorphism revisited

We establish abstract Adams isomorphisms in an arbitrary equivariantly presentable equivariantly semiadditive global category. This encompasses the well-known Adams isomorphism in equivariant stable homotopy theory, and applies more generally in the settings of G-Mackey functors, G-global homotopy theory, and equivariant Kasparov categories.

A library for innovative category exemplars (ALICE) database: Streamlining research with printable 3D novel objects

This paper introduces A Library for Innovative Category Exemplars (ALICE) database, a resource that enhances research efficiency in cognitive and developmental studies by providing printable 3D objects representing 30 novel categories. Our research consists of three experiments to validate the novelty and complexity of the objects in ALICE. Experiment 1 assessed the novelty of objects through adult participants’ subjective familiarity ratings and agreement on object naming and descriptions. The results confirm the general novelty of the objects. Experiment 2 employed multidimensional scaling (MDS) to analyze perceived similarities between objects, revealing a three-dimensional structure based solely on shape, indicative of their complexity. Experiment 3 used two clustering techniques to categorize objects: k-means clustering for creating nonoverlapping global categories, and hierarchical clustering for allowing global categories that overlap and have a hierarchical structure. Through stability tests, we verified the robustness of each clustering method and observed a moderate to good consensus between them, affirming the strength of our dual approach in effectively and accurately delineating meaningful object categories. By offering easy access to customizable novel stimuli, ALICE provides a practical solution to the challenges of creating novel physical objects for experimental purposes.

Habitat niches of bird species along a recovery gradient in the Chocó tropical forest

Conservation programs need improved tools to measure the recovery of animal diversity across restoration gradients. We used soundscapes and expert identifications of bird species to calculate niche position (i.e., mean of environmental conditions across all areas a species occupies) and niche breadth (i.e., the standard deviation of the species distribution) along a recovery gradient; from agriculture to early (up to 20 yrs) and late (up to 38 yrs) recovery, to old-growth forests. Our survey included 323 bird species and was conducted in 66 plots in the lowland Chocoan tropical rainforest in Ecuador where less than 11% of the forest remains intact, and large areas are currently undergoing regeneration post-abandonment. First, we validated our niche metrics by contrasting them against independent global categories of forest density dependency. We then explained the niche metrics of the bird species with different ecological traits, gathered from the literature, reflecting species-specific primary diet, morphology and distribution, and accounting for the phylogenetic relatedness of species. Finally, we explored the phylogenetic signal present in bird species’ ecological traits and recovery niche metrics. Niche position and breadth across the recovery gradient closely followed global categories of forest density dependency. However, our approach provided a more fine-scaled sorting of bird species in forest plots categorized as late recovery and old-growth. Granivorous birds occupied niche positions in active cacao and pasture plots and were replaced by frugivorous birds in older regeneration plots. Along the recovery gradient, tail length and handwing index decreased with niche position, supporting previous observations that birds in old-growth forests are less mobile. Birds in old-growth forests had smaller global distribution ranges than birds in agricultural plots. Finally, the latitudinal distribution of birds in the study area averaged south of the equator, with birds in old-growth plots averaging latitudinal centroids in wet forests north of the equator, whereas birds in agriculture plots averaged latitudinal centroids further south of the country, towards the dry and open Tumbesian forest. Frugivores, invertivores and vertivores had broader niche breadths, but these decreased (marginally) with tail length. We suggest these recovery niche metrics as a potentially powerful tool for the rapid assessment of the recovery process, which might support conservation strategies such as biodiversity credits, compensation payments, and strategic land purchases. With the increasing availability of information-intensive models for bird species identification, such as deep learning artificial intelligence, our new niche metrics open the avenue for rapid assessment of tropical biodiversity and new conservation areas at larger scales.

Ignited by the Qur’an

The Danish lawyer and politician Rasmus Paludan has gained notoriety for filming and uploading footage of demonstrations and burning copies of the Qur’an, first in 2019 in Denmark and later in Sweden. Based on videos and material from social and conventional media, this article investigates the background and political and legal opportunity structures of Paludan’s activism. It argues that Paludan’s actions are situated in reference to broader debates on freedom of expression in general and understanding of blasphemy in particular. Paludan’s treatment of the Qur’an resembles a global injustice symbol (Olesen 2015; 2016). The symbol becomes global in nature when it resonates cross-nationally and cross-culturally. In 2023, as the symbol spread to the global public sphere, the Danish government decided to introduce a blasphemy clause that had been repealed five years previously. This underlines Sherwood’s argument that blasphemy has made a paradoxical return as a contested global category in the twenty-first century.

Факторы обеспечения финансовой устойчивости организации высшего образования

This article identifies significant factors influencing the financial sustainability of higher education organizations and presents an authorial classification thereof. It is noted that the entire diversity of factors ensuring the sustainability of the university’s economic activities can be expressed through cost and non-financial indicators. Among the former are microeconomic, macroeconomic, and market factors determining the level of income of higher education organizations, their potential revenue streams, key expenditure items, as well as strategies for conducting activities based on the situation in the educational services market. Non-financial factors are subdivided into organizational-legal, political, social, and global categories. They imply an indirect but significant influence on the financial sustainability of an educational organization, regulating its activities through documents, state policies in various spheres, the university’s image in the domestic and global educational environment, etc. The prepared classification of factors provides a visual representation of the components of financial sustainability of higher education organizations, which can be effectively utilized in organizing management by stakeholders.

Exploring the Severity Strata of Disease Activity and Repigmentation in Vitiligo Based on Validated Physician Global Assessment (PGA) Scores.

Background/Objectives: There is currently no guidance on how to interpret the global degrees of activity (worsening) and repigmentation (improvement) in vitiligo. Stratification into global degrees can be completed for static evaluations (e.g., visible disease activity signs) and dynamic assessments (e.g., evolution over time). For the latter, the Vitiligo Disease Activity Score (VDAS15&60) and Vitiligo Disease Improvement Score (VDIS15&60) were recently validated. Methods: In the current study, a Physician Global Assessment (PGA) for disease activity (worsening) and repigmentation (improvement) was evaluated for validity (construct) and reliability (inter- and intrarater) based on a photo set of 66 patients. Subsequently, the PGA activity (worsening) and repigmentation (improvement) were used to stratify the Vitiligo Extent Score plus (VESplus), VDAS15&60 or VDIS15&60 into three global categories (slightly, moderately and much worse/improved), based on ROC analysis. Results: For the VESplus, cut-off values for the categories 'slightly, moderately and much worse' were >0.3%, >27.71% and >128.75% BSA (relative changes in the affected total BSA), respectively. For the categories 'slightly, moderately and much improved', they were >0%, >4.87% and >36.88% BSA (relative changes in the affected total BSA), respectively. The optimal cut-off values of the number of active (VDAS15) body areas were >0 areas for slightly worse, >2 areas for moderately worse and >7 for much worse. For VDIS15, the cut-off values for slightly improved and moderately improved were >0 and >1. For VDAS60 and VDIS60, the cut-off points were >0.5, >3, >9.5 and >0.5 and >1.5, respectively. The results should be interpreted with caution in patients with extensive vitiligo due to the rather limited disease extent of the included patient population (VESplus (median: 3.2%)). Conclusions: This research will aid in the development of more detailed international definitions.

Leadership Education and Development: An Exploration of Australian Academic Educators’ Perceptions of Leadership Education for Health and Human Service Sector Leaders

The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of postgraduate leadership courses and programs offered by Australian Higher Education Institutions for leaders and potential leaders in the Health & Human Service (H&HS) sector including structure, content, and teaching practices from the perspective of educators. Ten educators from a range of institutions were interviewed. Interview data was coded and analyzed using Inductive Content Analysis. Six global categories represent the broad range of experiences and perspectives of participants in this study. Findings demonstrate formal education has the potential to positively impact the development of leaders in the H&HS sector.

A personalized federated learning method based on the residual multi-head attention mechanism

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique for training machine learning models across multiple clients collaboratively. It allows multiple local devices to cooperatively train global models without compromising data privacy or necessitating extensive data transfer. However, the inherent data heterogeneity across clients poses a challenge, as a single global model trained through FL struggles to adapt to the diverse distributions present in individual client data. This discrepancy leads to a marked decline in model accuracy, slows down FL convergence, and even makes FL divergent. To this end, this paper proposes a method termed Residual Attention for Federated Learning (RAFL), aimed at personalized federated learning (PFL) by applying a residual multi-head attention mechanism to enrich personalized feature information. Additionally, it leverages a global category embedding layer to learn global feature information. In order to evaluate our proposed method's effectiveness, we perform extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, comparing it with eight benchmark methods. The experimental results demonstrate that RAFL has better personalized learning capability compared to the other benchmark methods. On three benchmark datasets, RAFL achieves the highest accuracy. Notably, the accuracy is about two and a half percentage points higher than the current sota PFL methods.

The tone of the president's immigration rhetoric

AbstractWe examine the tone of the president's immigration policy speeches as a function of the political context, policy characteristics, and individual presidents in two ways. First, we describe the tone of the president's immigration rhetoric using DICTION software and its five global categories of tone. Second, we hypothesize that commonality and optimism, two categories of tone expressive of immigration policy, will co‐vary by political context, policy characteristics of immigration, and a president's approach to rhetoric. To test our expectations, we collected presidential mentions of immigration since 1953 from the Public Papers of the Presidents. Key variables, like the president's honeymoon and the post‐9/11 era, increase a president's commonality tone, and the president's approval ratings encourage greater optimism. Individual presidents also shape presidential rhetoric, indicating the importance of presidential style to immigration tone, especially for optimism. We conclude with implications of our work for the systematic study of presidential tone and the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform.

OUTSOURCING AS AN ACTOR IN HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Among all other resources, Human Resources are the most relevant in increasing the efficiency of companies' operations. Currently, the attitude towards the role and importance of Human Resources has changed significantly. As the issue of using modern information technologies and thinking in global categories becomes more active, special emphasis is placed on relationships with that personnel who can offer innovations to company leaders. In fact, they constitute the main core of the intellectual capital of production. The purpose of the article is to analyze the role and place of information technologies in the management (including strategy) of Human Resources. The subject of the research is outsourcing in personnel management. When does a company turn to outsourcing? This is the main issue around which many discussions and scientific disputes have been and are being conducted today in the scientific space. Research on Human Resources outsourcing in Georgia is still scarce. This article is a modest attempt to fill this gap. As a result of the study, both general and case-specific factors of Human Resources management that are currently relevant for Georgia were identified.

European models of festive communication: national and international

A holiday is an eternal and global category of human existence. All tribes and peoples had and have their own system of celebrations, and solemn events designed to unite people, protect and promote the values around which society organizes its life. The purpose of the article is to show the historically determined uniqueness of national holidays and to trace the trend towards the creation of a pan European fund of mass holiday culture using concrete examples. The methodology of the article is based on descriptive and comparative methodological approaches of ethnological studies. Scientific novelty. The article examines historically formed models of holiday traditions of the peoples of Europe, which reflect the specifics of the state system of each country, and those that have gained international distribution. Conclusions. Holidays change throughout historical development depending on economic, political and cultural transformations. The study made it possible to trace the processes of detraditionalization of European society and the associated transition to new modern forms of mass culture.

Science across the Meiji divide: Vernacular literary genres as vectors of science in modern Japan.

Histories of Japanese science have been integral in affirming the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as the starting point of modern Japan. Vernacular genres, characterized as "premodern," have therefore largely been overlooked by historians of science, regardless of when they were published. Paradoxically, this has resulted in the marginalization of the very works through which most people encountered science. This article addresses this oversight and its historiographical ramifications by focusing on kyūri books - popular works of science - published in the years following the Restoration, when there was unprecedented public interest in science. It asks, what if we take these kyūri books on their own terms as science books, just as those of the time saw them? This article explores three genres of kyūri books, namely fictionalized formats, such as the epic tale (monogatari); epistolary guides; and genres, such as the sutra, that drew on religious textual practices. It argues that these literary genres provided interpretive frameworks that shaped readers' encounters with "modern" science. This exploration underscores the importance of engaging with vernacular genres to understand the emergence of science as a global category in the nineteenth century.

Against ‘The Poor’ as a global category

ABSTRACT Monique Deveaux’s book Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements is an important intervention in global justice dialogues. It explores with nuance the case for viewing persons facing poverty globally as potential agents of justice, and it does excellent work in offering exemplar groups where that potential is actualized. The book may put the final nail in framings of global justice as primarily transfers from ‘rich to poor.’ Yet, it also has a tendency to implicitly reinforce those same framings, in part by adopting a Global North/South dichotomy, and in particular by treating ‘the poor’ as a category of persons. Such a label may homogenize, presenting persons in ways that do not fully acknowledge their agency and multifaceted humanity. It may also undermine one of the core aims in Deveaux’s account, reinforcing forms of global social distance rather than highlighting possibilities for solidarity across borders. Alternate framings are proposed.

Contextos de contaminação em enfermeiros por SARS-COV-2, durante a pandemia

Introduction: The infection of nurses during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic involved multifactorial causes and consequences. Objective: To unveil the initial variables in the process of infection of nurses by SARS-CoV-2, in their personal discursive and reflective perception. Material and Methods: A cross-sectional, exploratory, and qualitative study, with the content analysis of data from 33 questionnaires, applied to a sample of Portuguese nurses infected and confined by SARS-CoV-2. Results: From the analysis of the discursive components, a Categorical Tree emerged with 3 generations of categories as follows: 1st global category: “Infection: The Beginning (1.)”, which inserts two 2nd generation categories: “Source of Infection (1.1.)” and “Intricacies of Life (1.2.)”. This one, “Intricacies of Life (1.2.)”, explains the infection variables, through four 3rd generation categories: “Work (1.2.1)”, “Community (1.2.2)”, “House/Family (1.2.3)” and “I don’t know (1.2.4)”. Conclusions: The workplace was mostly identified as a source of Infection (69.7%), either through confirmed patients (36.4%) or through the application of nursing care practices (24.2%). Further qualitative studies are proposed, based on the experiences.

METODOLOGIAS ATIVAS NO ENSINO DE LÍNGUAS: A APRENDIZAGEM POR INTERAÇÃO EM MEIO REMOTO

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic has intensified the creative use of technological resources that significantly promote dynamic communication among learners. This study investigated the contribution of active methodologies in remote English language classes for the interaction between basic level learners. Based on this goal, we analyzed the resources that promote the linguistic development of students through interaction in virtual environments, based on studies on active methodologies on learning, interaction and teaching of foreign languages and sociocultural theory. Data were generated from an online questionnaire applied to students, interactions in the Google Classroom environment, and the field observation journal of synchronous interactions in Google Meet and were analyzed in the light of grounded theory. By contrasting the instruments, we obtained three global categories that emerged from the comparison and contrast between them: flexibility, autonomy, and interaction. The categories showed that creative tasks developed through active methodologies, such as video production, autonomous activities such as prior access to video classes and flexible tasks such as the activities available in the weekly forums, allowed learners to identify possible errors regarding the use of the language and collaborate with colleagues, solving problems collaboratively and answering questions. The results confirm the contributions of active methodologies in the online environment.

From Climate Change and Migration to Environments and Mobilities Downscaling and Rethinking Global Categories and their Nexus

From Climate Change and Migration to Environments and Mobilities Downscaling and Rethinking Global Categories and their Nexus

Approaching and Re-stating the Question of Global Anxieties: Some Suggestions for Psychology and Therapy Studies

Anxiety caused by the psychosocial reality of war, pandemic, natural disasters, or poverty, among other factors, may be studied from two kinds of methodological premises: first, the deep and unencumbered perception of anxiety as a metacognitive process indicating diminution in energy levels and normative expression or behaviors of individuals. The subject finds oneself in a situation that is out of sync with the environment, and experiences low emotive valence. Anxiety is cognitively visible as a state of depression that continues to intimidate and demoralize the person. It represents a dispirited state of the individual as it encounters a world of depleted resources, and as it constantly fears for its existence or survival. The collective cognitive fear that underlays human survival also creates preconditions for global anxiety. Global anxiety is a global category – an obscure, introspective moment in the lives of peoples within a territory or among migrant populations across frontiers. Secondly, it could indicate toward historically localized expressions and as such anxiety could be studied pluralistically – as its pre-conditions arise in times and locations. Yet on the whole, if we were to analyse the causal variants or consequences of anxieties on a quantitative scale, we could possibly determine how conditions conducive to emotional redressal could be procured or administered for well-being and the Human devolopment index. In either case, the need to identify, analyze and alleviate the pressures and tensions causing anxiousness, and to diminish or palliate physiological conditions that induce anxiety remain our conscious rudder for anxiety studies.

Spatial and temporal analysis (2009–2020) of the biological parameters, abundance and distribution of Trachurus mediterraneus (Steindachner, 1868) in the Western Mediterranean

Trachurus mediterraneus is captured as by catch by the fishing fleet in the Spanish Mediterranean and usually landed as the global category of Trachurus spp., consequently there is a prominent lack of biological data on this species. The knowledge of the spatial and temporal evolution of its distribution, abundance and main biological parameters is essential to achieve a proper management and sustainable exploitation. Data collected in the MEDiterranean International Acoustic Survey (MEDIAS) 2009–2020 time series, carried out in July, has been analyzed to determine the evolution of the main ecological aspects of T. mediterraneus in two GFCM management units: Northern Spain (GSA06) and Northern Alboran Sea (GSA01). The results suggest a possible neritic distribution of T. mediterraneus, mainly concentrated at depths less than 60 m in GSA01 and up to 105 m in GSA06, as well as the existence of significant differences in abundance and length frequency distributions among GSAs. Furthermore, preliminary results regarding T. mediterraneus age and growth seemed to indicate a faster growth during the first two years in GSA01 than in GSA06. In both areas, potential changes in the life history traits of this species were evidenced, with a decreasing trend in the size at first maturity and condition factor over the years. Finally, five persistent distribution areas were located along the study area, highlighting Málaga Bay as a possible recruitment ground. The relevance of this study lies in the growing need for robust and current biological data of intermediate species in the marine food web and it contributes to the global purpose of achieving an integrated management of fishery resources.

Reasonable object detection guided by knowledge of global context and category relationship

The mainstream object detectors usually treat each region separately, which overlooks the important global context information and the associations between object categories. Existing methods model global context via attention mechanism, which requires ad hoc design and prior knowledge. Some works combine CNN features with label dependencies learned from a pre-defined graph and word embeddings, which ignore the gap between visual features and textual corpus and are usually task-specific (depend on RoIPool/RoIAlign). In order to get rid of the previous specific settings, and enable different types of detectors to refine detection results with the help of prior knowledge, in this paper, we propose KROD (Knowledge-guided Reasonable Object Detection), which consists of the GKM (Global Category Knowledge Mining) module and CRM (Category Relationship Knowledge Mining) module, to improve detection performance by mimicking the processes of human reasoning. For a given image, GKM introduces global category knowledge into the detector by simply attaching a multi-label image classification branch to the backbone. Meanwhile, CRM input the raw detection outputs to the object category co-occurrence based knowledge graph to further refine the original results, with the help of GCN (Graph Convolutional Network). We also propose a novel loss-aware module to distinctively correct the classification probability of different detected boxes. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments show that the proposed KROD can improve different baseline models (both anchor-based and anchor-free) by a large margin (1.2% ∼ 1.8% higher AP) with marginal loss of efficiency on MS COCO.