The Role of Chance in Fencing Tournaments: an Agent-Based Approach

It is a widespread belief that success is mainly due to innate qualities, rather than to external forces.This is particularly true in sport competitions, where individual talent is usually considered the main, if not the only, ingredient in order to reach success. In this study, with the help of both real data and agent-based simulations, we explore the limits of this belief by quantifying the relative weight of talent and chance in fencing, a combat sport involving a weapon. Fencing competitions are structured as direct elimination tournaments, where randomness is explicitly present in some rules. Our dataset covers the last decade of international events and consists of both single competition results and annual rankings for male and female fencers under 20 years old (Junior category). Our model is calibrated on the dataset and parametrized by just one free variable 'a' describing the importance of talent - and, consequently, of chance - in competitions (a = 1 indicates the ideal scenario where only talent matters, a = 0 the complete random one). Our agent-based approach is able to reproduce the main stylized facts observed in real data, at the level of both single fencing tournaments and entire careers of a given community of fencers. We find that simulations approximate very well the real data for both Junior Men and Women when talent weights slightly less than chance, i.e. when 'a' is around 0.45. We conclude that the role of chance in fencing is unusually high and it probably represents an extreme case for individual sports. Our results shed light on the importance of external factors in both athletes' results in single tournaments and their entire career, making even more unfair the ``winner-takes-all'' disparities in remuneration which often occur among the winner and the other classified.

Three classes of epigenomic regulators converge to hyperactivate the essential maternal gene deadhead within a heterochromatin mini-domain

The formation of a diploid zygote is a highly complex cellular process that is entirely controlled by maternal gene products stored in the egg cytoplasm. This highly specialized transcriptional program is tightly controlled at the chromatin level in the female germline. As an extreme case in point, the massive and specific ovarian expression of the essential thioredoxin Deadhead (DHD) is critically regulated in Drosophila by the histone demethylase Lid and its partner, the histone deacetylase complex Sin3A/Rpd3, via yet unknown mechanisms. Here, we identified Snr1 and Mod(mdg4) as essential for dhd expression and investigated how these epigenomic effectors act with Lid and Sin3A to hyperactivate dhd. Using Cut&Run chromatin profiling with a dedicated data analysis procedure, we found that dhd is intriguingly embedded in an H3K27me3/H3K9me3-enriched mini-domain flanked by DNA regulatory elements, including a dhd promoter-proximal element essential for its expression. Surprisingly, Lid, Sin3a, Snr1 and Mod(mdg4) impact H3K27me3 and this regulatory element in distinct manners. However, we show that these effectors activate dhd independently of H3K27me3/H3K9me3, and that dhd remains silent in the absence of these marks. Together, our study demonstrates an atypical and critical role for chromatin regulators Lid, Sin3A, Snr1 and Mod(mdg4) to trigger tissue-specific hyperactivation within a unique heterochromatin mini-domain.

The Imminently Dying Donor

As the supply-demand gap for organs for transplantation grows, transplant programs are more accepting of less healthy donors. This chapter focuses on the extreme case: whether and when individuals who have life-limiting conditions (LLC) should be considered for living organ donation. Two types of cases are examined: living donation by individuals with advanced progressive severe debilitating disease for whom there is no ameliorative therapy; and pre-mortem living donation by individuals who are imminently dying or would die of the donation process itself. With appropriate safeguards, some donations by individuals with LLC could be ethical. Pre-mortem donations challenge the dead donor rule (DDR), an ethical norm that prohibits organ procurement until after the individual is dead. The chapter argues that attempts to circumvent the DDR fail to respect the living donor as a patient in his or her own right.

Long COVID Oral Cavity Symptoms Based on Selected Clinical Cases

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is characterized by variable clinical features, different durations, and several previously unheard-of late complications. Knowledge about this infection is constantly evolving.The aim of the study is to present selected cases of the most common symptoms of long COVID in the oral cavity.Among the 1,256 studied patients, 32% of them had discoloration, ulceration, and hemorrhagic changes on the oral mucosa, 29.69% had mycosis located on the tongue, 25.79% of patients had aphthous-like lesions on the hard palate, and in 12.5% atrophic cheilitis was observed. During the anamnesis, approximately 60% of patients reported salivary secretory disorders in the initial period of infection, which is 6.68% prolonged up to 4 months after systemic symptoms disappeared. In an extreme case, an aphthous-like lesion was located on the hard palate, which persisted for 6 months. Approximately 36% of patients did not agree to the proposed treatment. As a result, they only received recommendations on the use of oral hygiene products and received weekly check-ups. In this group of patients, most pathological changes spontaneously cleared after 3 weeks. The elderly with coexisting diseases, persons with a more severe SARS-CoV-2, and hospitalized patients had more extensive and severe lesions in the oral cavity that persisted for a long time after infection.In patients after the SARS-CoV-2 infection and suspected of this infection, a detailed intraoral examination should be performed, and the patient must be obligatorily monitored for a minimum period of 6 months. Depending on the patient's clinical condition, changes in the oral cavity require observation, basic or specialist treatment. In the case of changes in the cavity without pain symptoms, observation should be made for approximately 4 weeks and wait for the spontaneous regression of the changes. However, when pain occurs, a good solution is to use laser biostimulation. In the case of complex pathological changes occurring in the oral cavity, the patient should be directed for specialist treatment.

Evaluation of Solid Particle Number Sensors for Periodic Technical Inspection of Passenger Cars

Following the increase in stringency of the European regulation limits for laboratory and real world automotive emissions, one of the main transport related aspects to improve the air quality is the mass scale in-use vehicle testing. Solid particle number (SPN) emissions have been drastically reduced with the use of diesel and gasoline particulate filters which, however, may get damaged or even been tampered. The feasibility of on-board monitoring and remote sensing as well as of the current periodical technical inspection (PTI) for detecting malfunctioning or tampered particulate filters is under discussion. A promising methodology for detecting high emitters is SPN testing at low idling during PTI. Several European countries plan to introduce this method for diesel vehicles and the European Commission (EC) will provide some guidelines. For this scope an experimental campaign was organized by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EC with the participation of different instrument manufacturers. Idle SPN concentrations of vehicles without or with a malfunctioning particulate filter were measured. The presence of particles under the current cut-off size of 23 nm as well as of volatile particles during idling are presented. Moreover, the extreme case of a well performing vehicle tested after a filter regeneration is studied. In most of the cases the different sensors used were in good agreement, the high sub-23 nm particles existence being the most challenging case due to the differences in the sensors’ efficiency below the cut-off size.

Case Selection Criteria, Methods, and Data Treatment

This chapter examines the criteria for selecting the cases analysed in this study. It explains the application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as its principal empirical method. It discusses CDA methods and data treatment as well as the empirical analysis of CDA results. Finally, it compares and summarises the case selection criteria.Four countries were compared: Switzerland, Uruguay, Cuba, and Colombia. These cases are also linked to the correlated variables in the quantitative model and to the sufficient conditions in the QCA. Cases were selected based on the “extreme case method”.Each of the selected countries serves as a proxy of a larger group of countries (Latin American Strong Catholic, Secular, Communism, Protestant or mixed Old World.).Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and religion constitute the qualitative method (micro-component). Sixty semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed using memos and open coding.

Evaluating Image Normalization via GANs for Environmental Mapping: A Case Study of Lichen Mapping Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Illumination variations in non-atmospherically corrected high-resolution satellite (HRS) images acquired at different dates/times/locations pose a major challenge for large-area environmental mapping and monitoring. This problem is exacerbated in cases where a classification model is trained only on one image (and often limited training data) but applied to other scenes without collecting additional samples from these new images. In this research, by focusing on caribou lichen mapping, we evaluated the potential of using conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) for the normalization of WorldView-2 (WV2) images of one area to a source WV2 image of another area on which a lichen detector model was trained. In this regard, we considered an extreme case where the classifier was not fine-tuned on the normalized images. We tested two main scenarios to normalize four target WV2 images to a source 50 cm pansharpened WV2 image: (1) normalizing based only on the WV2 panchromatic band, and (2) normalizing based on the WV2 panchromatic band and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance (SR) imagery. Our experiments showed that normalizing even based only on the WV2 panchromatic band led to a significant lichen-detection accuracy improvement compared to the use of original pansharpened target images. However, we found that conditioning the cGAN on both the WV2 panchromatic band and auxiliary information (in this case, Sentinel-2 SR imagery) further improved normalization and the subsequent classification results due to adding a more invariant source of information. Our experiments showed that, using only the panchromatic band, F1-score values ranged from 54% to 88%, while using the fused panchromatic and SR, F1-score values ranged from 75% to 91%.

Nest parasitism, promiscuity, and relatedness among wood ducks

Nest parasitism is a common reproductive strategy used by many species of cavity nesting birds. Among these, the wood duck (Aix sponsa) is known to have evolved very specific strategies of when and whom to parasitize that is often based on population and/or environmental queues. Here, we investigated the genetic relationship of two female wood ducks competing over an artificial nesting box in Delaware, including the continued incubation of one female despite the death and body remains of the other female throughout the incubation process. We test whether such an extreme case of nest parasitism can be explained by relatedness, egg lineage composition, or a combination of other factors. To do so, we extracted genomic DNA from blood and tissue of the females, as well as chorioallantoic membranes of all viable and inviable eggs. Subsequently, we assessed relatedness among females and eggs based on hundreds of nuclear loci and the mitochondrial control region. We concluded that (1) the two incubating females were entirely unrelated, (2) the single clutch is in fact represented by a minimum of four unrelated females, and (3) a single female can lay eggs sired by different males. The latter finding is the first direct evidence for successful extra-pair copulation in wood ducks. With decreasing costs and increasing effectiveness, genomic methods have the potential to provide important insights into more complex ecological and evolutionary tactics of such populations.

Legal Aspects of Cybersecurity in the Energy Sector—Current State and Latest Proposals of Legislative Changes by the EU

Due to the strategic nature of the energy sector, legal solutions to protect cross-border electricity and gas connections will be of particular importance. The author realizes that at the present stage of development, the cross-border impact may also be manifested by generating units (e.g., wind farms) or even end users themselves. The lack of harmonized regulations in this area may not only lead to limitations in the physical supply of electricity and gas, but also affect future investment decisions regarding, for example, new generation capacities. In a broader aspect, it will delay, and in the extreme case prevent, the achievement of the objectives resulting from the EU energy policy, in particular integration within the single energy market. In this article, the author identifies devices and entities responsible for energy infrastructure that should be classified as necessary for the functioning of the single energy market. The research includes the analysis and evaluation of regulations governing cybersecurity in the energy sector, taking into account the interdependencies within, intersectoral and cross-border. In addition, the author refers to the need to introduce individual legal solutions regarding the protection of energy infrastructure.