Forensic Analysis and Identification Processes in Mass Disasters: Explosion of Gun Powder in the Fireworks Factory

A mass disaster is a situation that involves criticality between the number of victims and resources, in terms of both men and means, present on the site of an event that is mostly unexpected and sudden. In the multidisciplinary teams that intervene, the role of forensic pathologists, who are responsible for the direction and coordination of post-mortem operations, is central, and must remain so. The authors report the case of an explosion of a pyrotechnic artifice factory, as a result of which numerous victims and injuries are recorded. So, the team completed the autopsies and created a protocol to obtain biological samples (bones, blood, teeth, muscles), while the forensic pathologists contacted the families of the alleged victims and each provided a blood sample that was collected for the DNA. The geneticist, using the method of gene extraction and amplification, obtained the DNA from each bone, tooth, and muscle of blood taken from the victims and then compared it with that extracted from the blood samples of the relatives; the electropherograms showed at least one allele for each genetic marker of the “Combined DNA Index System” in common between the victims and the families, thus allowing to establish the identity of all the subjects involved in the event. Having established the identity of all workers, it was possible to determine their whereabouts in the environment at the time of the location of fires and explosions. The results of the various forensic analyzes (autopsies, genetic investigations and even traumatological investigations) have allowed us to validate a scientific method useful in all mass disasters even when any type of anthropological or forensic dental research is difficult.

Identification of Inter-Turn Short-Circuits in Induction Motor Stator Winding Using Simulated Annealing

This paper presents a method of inter-turn short-circuit identification in induction motors during load current variations based on a hybrid analytic approach that combines the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing. With this approach, the essence of the method relies on determining the reference matrices and calculating the distance between the reference matric values and the test matrix. As a whole, it is a novel approach to the process of identifying faults in induction motors. Moreover, applying a discrete optimization algorithm to search for alternative solutions makes it possible to obtain the true minimal values of the matrices in the identification process. The effectiveness of the applied method in the monitoring and identification processes of the inter-turn short-circuit in the early stage of its creation was confirmed in tests carried out for several significant state variables describing physical magnitudes of the selected induction motor model. The need for identification of a particular fault is related to a gradual increase in its magnitude in the process of the induction motor’s exploitation. The occurrence of short-circuits complicates the dynamic properties of the measured diagnostic signals of the system to a great extent.

Suicide of a Tenor Amidst the Stage Setting of the Werther Opera's Death Scene

Background: Reporting on suicide can elicit an increase in suicides, a phenomenon termed the “Werther effect.” The name can be traced back to an alleged spike in suicides after the publication of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, in which the protagonist Werther dies by suicide. Aims: Acknowledging the importance and primacy of systematic ecological and individual-level studies, we provide a historical single-case report of the suicide of a “late arrival of the Werther epidemic,” as the death was headlined in a news report in 1927. Method: Archival research on tenor Paul Vidal's suicide was conducted. Results: Vidal reconstructed the scene of the final act of the opera Werther in his apartment and died by a gunshot, as did Werther. Limitations: Causal interpretations must be made with caution. Conclusion: Striking similarities between Werther's and Vidal's deaths support the idea of strong identification with the fictional narrative and suggest causal effects. Considering the repeated high level of immersiveness and the intense emotions of opera performances, it is likely that performing the role of Werther increases identification processes, contributing to detrimental effects. The lack of knowledge regarding the role of fictional suicide stories on artists' suicides is discussed.

Novel cancer subtyping method based on patient-specific gene regulatory network

The identification of cancer subtypes is important for the understanding of tumor heterogeneity. In recent years, numerous computational methods have been proposed for this problem based on the multi-omics data of patients. It is widely accepted that different cancer subtypes are induced by different molecular regulatory networks. However, only a few incorporate the differences between their molecular systems into the identification processes. In this study, we present a novel method to identify cancer subtypes based on patient-specific molecular systems. Our method realizes this by quantifying patient-specific gene networks, which are estimated from their transcriptome data, and by clustering their quantified networks. Comprehensive analyses of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) datasets applied to our method confirmed that they were able to identify more clinically meaningful cancer subtypes than the existing subtypes and found that the identified subtypes comprised different molecular features. Our findings also show that the proposed method can identify the novel cancer subtypes even with single omics data, which cannot otherwise be captured by existing methods using multi-omics data.

Polymedia repertoires of networked individuals

This article introduces the concept of the polymedia repertoire to explore how social meaning is indexed through the interplay of communicative resources at different levels of expression (from choice of media to individual signs) in digitally mediated interactions. The multi-layered polymedia repertoire highlights how people move fluidly between media platforms, semiotic modes and linguistic resources in the course of their everyday interactions, and enables us to locate digital communications within individuals’ wider practices. The potential of our theoretical contribution is illustrated through analysis of mobile phone messaging between participants in a large multi-sited ethnography of the communicative practices of multilingual migrants working in linguistically diverse UK city neighbourhoods. Our analysis of mobile messaging exchanges in a day-in-the-life of these networked individuals reveals the importance of device attention in shaping interpersonal interactions, as well as the complex ways in which choices at different levels of a polymedia repertoire are structured by social relationships, communicative purpose and (dis)identification processes.

Historical identity in the coordinate system of world development

The purpose of the article is to analyze the systemic characteristics of historical identity as a scientific category and to comprehend its substantive core on the basis of the paradigm that dominates in a particular historical period. Methodology. Research methods are based on the fundamental principles of historical and cultural studies analysis. The conceptual methodological core of the research is the system analysis of identity as a complex hierarchical system, self-developing in the chronotopе. The scientific novelty lies in the conceptualization of the phenomenon of historical identity from the standpoint of its temporality in the context of the acceleration of identification processes. The invariant and variable nature of the phenomenon is revealed. Conclusions. Based on the memorial paradigm about the continuity of history in its correlation with time, it is shown that historical identity is a sociology-cultural construct, the key mechanism for the formation of which is the dichotomy of «memory-oblivion».

Application of Machine Vision in Classifying Gait Frailty Among Older Adults

Background: Frail older adults have an increased risk of adverse health outcomes and premature death. They also exhibit altered gait characteristics in comparison with healthy individuals.Methods: In this study, we created a Fried’s frailty phenotype (FFP) labelled casual walking video set of older adults based on the West China Health and Aging Trend study. A series of hyperparameters in machine vision models were evaluated for body key point extraction (AlphaPose), silhouette segmentation (Pose2Seg, DPose2Seg, and Mask R-CNN), gait feature extraction (Gaitset, LGaitset, and DGaitset), and feature classification (AlexNet and VGG16), and were highly optimised during analysis of gait sequences of the current dataset.Results: The area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) at the physical frailty state identification task for AlexNet was 0.851 (0.827–0.8747) and 0.901 (0.878–0.920) in macro and micro, respectively, and was 0.855 (0.834–0.877) and 0.905 (0.886–0.925) for VGG16 in macro and micro, respectively. Furthermore, this study presents the machine vision method equipped with better predictive performance globally than age and grip strength, as well as than 4-m-walking-time in healthy and pre-frailty classifying.Conclusion: The gait analysis method in this article is unreported and provides promising original tool for frailty and pre-frailty screening with the characteristics of convenience, objectivity, rapidity, and non-contact. These methods can be extended to any gait-related disease identification processes, as well as in-home health monitoring.

Where I Belong: Identification Processes of Young Volunteers in Super-Diverse Cities

In the context of super-diverse cities, scholars and policy makers are increasingly interested in the potential of volunteering to establish identification for newcomers and locals alike. In this paper, we address the question of how young volunteers in Rotterdam and Vienna negotiate belonging within their super-diverse surroundings. Our exploratory study builds on a cross-national research project in which we collected qualitative interview data from volunteering youth. We follow a weak-theory approach and conceptualise belonging as emotional, procedural, and relational. We trace identification processes of newcomers and locals in terms of belonging through volunteering in urban contexts of super-diversity. Our paper demonstrates that volunteering serves as a vehicle for feelings of belonging and inclusion for young volunteers, specifically addressing the urban super-diversity of Vienna and Rotterdam. Our research also indicates the partiality and temporality of volunteering as a source of belonging and the function of volunteering as a structure of inclusion, not necessarily enabling structural inclusion.

Dynamic Privacy-Preserving Recommendations on Academic Graph Data

In the age of digital information, where the internet and social networks, as well as personalised systems, have become an integral part of everyone’s life, it is often challenging to be aware of the amount of data produced daily and, unfortunately, of the potential risks caused by the indiscriminate sharing of personal data. Recently, attention to privacy has grown thanks to the introduction of specific regulations such as the European GDPR. In some fields, including recommender systems, this has inevitably led to a decrease in the amount of usable data, and, occasionally, to significant degradation in performance mainly due to information no longer being attributable to specific individuals. In this article, we present a dynamic privacy-preserving approach for recommendations in an academic context. We aim to implement a personalised system capable of protecting personal data while at the same time allowing sensible and meaningful use of the available data. The proposed approach introduces several pseudonymisation procedures based on the design goals described by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity in their guidelines, in order to dynamically transform entities (e.g., persons) and attributes (e.g., authored papers and research interests) in such a way that any user processing the data are not able to identify individuals. We present a case study using data from researchers of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (Brunswick, Germany). Building a knowledge graph and exploiting a Neo4j database for data management, we first generate several pseudoN-graphs, being graphs with different rates of pseudonymised persons. Then, we evaluate our approach by leveraging the graph embedding algorithm node2vec to produce recommendations through node relatedness. The recommendations provided by the graphs in different privacy-preserving scenarios are compared with those provided by the fully non-pseudonymised graph, considered as the baseline of our evaluation. The experimental results show that, despite the structural modifications to the knowledge graph structure due to the de-identification processes, applying the approach proposed in this article allows for preserving significant performance values in terms of precision.

Palatoscopy (Rugoscopy) assistance in forensic investigations

Human identification is most challenging field in forensics. Scrutiny of the fingerprints ,teeth and DNA comparison are commonly used techniques, thus allowing quicker and secure fast and identification processes. Palatal rugae markings are unique to an individual and are stable throughout the life. Rugae don’t undergo any changes apart from in length throughout the life. Thuspalatoscopy or palatal rugoscopy is used as an aid in forensic investigations.