How many people on our planet eat insects: 2 billion?

The estimated figure of two billion people consuming insects mentioned in the 2013 FAO/WUR report about edible insects has been cited many times over. This editorial asks four questions to determine the accuracy of the estimated figure: how to define an ‘insect-eating’ person; which percentage of the population eats insects; how does insect consumption develop over time; and how to define an edible insect? Our conclusion is that it is difficult to establish an exact figure of how many people eat insects globally and that the much cited 2 billion figure in the FAO/WUR report must be an overestimation.

A Language Model for Misogyny Detection in Latin American Spanish Driven by Multisource Feature Extraction and Transformers

Creating effective mechanisms to detect misogyny online automatically represents significant scientific and technological challenges. The complexity of recognizing misogyny through computer models lies in the fact that it is a subtle type of violence, it is not always explicitly aggressive, and it can even hide behind seemingly flattering words, jokes, parodies, and other expressions. Currently, it is even difficult to have an exact figure for the rate of misogynistic comments online because, unlike other types of violence, such as physical violence, these events are not registered by any statistical systems. This research contributes to the development of models for the automatic detection of misogynistic texts in Latin American Spanish and contributes to the design of data augmentation methodologies since the amount of data required for deep learning models is considerable.

Triplet births complicated by eclampsia

It is widely recognized that pregnancy and delivery of triplets are very rare. Because of this, it is difficult to get an exact figure of their relative frequency, and all the derived ratios of the number of triplet births to the number of all births differ significantly from each other.

Streaming feature selection algorithms for big data: A survey

Organizations in many domains generate a considerable amount of heterogeneous data every day. Such data can be processed to enhance these organizations’ decisions in real time. However, storing and processing large and varied datasets (known as big data) is challenging to do in real time. In machine learning, streaming feature selection has always been considered a superior technique for selecting the relevant subset features from highly dimensional data and thus reducing learning complexity. In the relevant literature, streaming feature selection refers to the features that arrive consecutively over time; despite a lack of exact figure on the number of features, numbers of instances are well-established. Many scholars in the field have proposed streaming-feature-selection algorithms in attempts to find the proper solution to this problem. This paper presents an exhaustive and methodological introduction of these techniques. This study provides a review of the traditional feature-selection algorithms and then scrutinizes the current algorithms that use streaming feature selection to determine their strengths and weaknesses. The survey also sheds light on the ongoing challenges in big-data research.

Slaves on the Return Voyage from the Carreira Da India (1504-1610): From the Limited Permission to the Uncontrolled Transportation and Diffusion Across the Atlantic

From an early stage of carreira da Índia route, slaves embarked in the ships which performed the return voyage. It remains to be determined an exact figure, as well as how often did the slaves went on this voyage. They usually came from China, India and other parts of Asia, Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde. Most of them did not make it to Lisbon, as they were used in several illegal acts of trafficking and smuggling along the way, thus being mostly traded in the Azores, off the Portuguese coast, or even in Brazil and Galicia. Since mid-sixteenth century, at least, hundreds had been shipped: the sources record a single ship in which the total number of slaves amounted to 300. Despite Crown’s policies aimed at putting a stop to illegal activities and slaves’ mass transportation, the problem resurfaced throughout this period, even if it seems to have caused greater concern in early-seventeenth century.

Incidence of thyroid diseases in a tertiary hospital: a retrospective study

Background: Thyroid gland diseases are common in India, particularly hilly and tribal areas. The incidence of thyroid conditions, exact figure is not available but about 5 lakh cases come for Medical Treatment all over India. To study the prevalence of common thyroid diseases in the Sangareddy district area, which is near Hyderabad, particularly age & sex specific incidence.Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted at the Maheshwara Medical College and Hospital, Chitkul, Sangareddy district of Telangana State. The data was collected from the registers of General Surgery outpatient department, operation theatre, medical record section and cytology, histopathology registers of pathology department. A total number of 64 patients were included in this study who was admitted at this hospital during the period of 2 years, from January 2017 to December 2018. The data was analysed by proper statistical methods.Results: The study had shown that most common conditions in this area are benign diseases. The age group ranges 21-30 years, female are most vulnerable (37.51%). The pathological benign condition most common is nodular goiter 48.43%.Conclusions: The observations in this study made may be useful in future to diagnose the cases and advice regarding prevention of the disease.

Factors of enterprise value - the privatization of ‘Sidex Galati’ Romania (case study)

The enterprise value is central in business transactions (i.e. mergers and acquisitions, entrance of new shareholders or exit, bank loans), privatization of state-owned companies, etc., when the seller and the buyer confront each other’s business valuations trying to identify as many weaknesses as possible on the other side. Such important value as the enterprise’ is not an exact figure that can be calculated with precision at a certain date for a certain company, but an approximation that both buyer and seller may consider in each other’s attempt to close a good deal for himself/ herself. The valuation approach in this paper is a market method for business investments and comparable sales. This retrospective analysis of a major privatization in the Romanian steel industry - when the industry’s 'giant' was sold by the Romanian State - aims to identify key factors of the enterprise value in the context of international transactions. This was a high-profile privatization of great significance for the European steel industry and this analysis aims to understand enterprise value in order to model it. For this purpose, the article takes into consideration the information available regarding the privatization of Sidex Galați, the relevant literature and the author’s experience, supplemented by the information from the post-privatization evolution of the Romanian steel enterprise. As a result, the article draws lessons and concludes on determining factors of enterprise value, such as assets, solvency, company's history, cash flow, taxation etc., while the price transaction in the case of the privatization of Romanian steel enterprises was also influenced by exogenous factors, such as the steel market, the State's need for revenues, the controlling package of the company sold, etc.

From Meaning to Money: Translating Injury into Dollars

Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process. We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards participants considered to be “medium” (rather than “low” or “high”) having the most dispersion. The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants’ perceptions of plaintiffs and defendants, as well as their desire to punish and to take economic losses into account, meaningful anchors predicted unique variance in award judgments: A meaningful large anchor number drove awards up and a meaningful small anchor drove them down, whereas meaningless large and small anchors did not differ significantly. Numeracy did not predict award magnitudes or variability, but surprisingly, more numerate participants reported that it was more difficult to pick an exact figure to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The results support predictions of the theory about qualitative gist and meaningful anchors, and suggest that we can assist jurors to arrive at damage awards by providing meaningful numbers.

Clinical Spectrum and Outcome of Snake Bite Cases in Western Nepal

Background: Prevalence of snake bite is high in Nepal. However, there is no exact figure of mortality and morbidity associated with snake-bite probably due to poor reporting. Objectives: To study demographic characters of snake bite victims, to see clinical symptoms of the bite, outcome of snake bite, use of ASVS and its associated anaphylactic reaction. Methods: A retrospective observational hospital based study carried out through July- October 2017 of the patients with the history of snake bite and visited to secondary level hospital (Army Hospital) at Nepalganj. Result: Among 169 cases of snake bite between 6 months to 83 years, 49.70% was between 20-54 years. Highest number of cases (n=110) came from local areas of Nepalganj like Manikapur, Alanagar, Fulltegra, Daduwa, Gayatrinagar and Samsherganj. Male victims were 61.53% (n=104) and 38.46% (n=65) were female. Commonest site of bite was in lower limb (n=116), followed by upper limb (n=47), head, neck and trunk. Maximum number of cases came to the center within 90 minutes of bite while only n= 28 came after 180 minutes of bite. Use of tourniquet as first aid was seen in 68% (n=115) and 3 cases came in with incised wound and sucked wound. A total of 97.04% (n=164) were dry bite with 26.62% (n=45) only had suspicion of snake bite (snake not seen due to invisibility or bite other than snake). A majority of cases presented without any other symptoms (with only history of bite), 45.56% had bite marks, 17.16% had pain and swelling at the bite site, 6.7% had bleeding from the site and burning and tingling sensation. A total of 2.95% (n=5) of snake bite cases needed ASVS and one developed ASVS complication. Conclusion: Snake bite is more common in adult male between 20-54 years and the commonest site is lower limb. Maximum number of cases presented within in 90 minutes of bite using tourniquet on the affected limb as first aid. Only small percentage of snake bite required anti-snake venom treatment and its complication rate is high.