Responding to Konstantin Morozov’s article, which criticizes the Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership, I point out that the reality of the right to unconsciously interact with objects, on which he heavily relies, is dubious.

Let $\pi$ be a probability distribution in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and f a test function, and consider the problem of variance reduction in estimating $\mathbb{E}_\pi(f)$. We first construct a sequence of estimators for $\mathbb{E}_\pi (f)$, say $({1}/{k})\sum_{i=0}^{k-1} g_n(X_i)$, where the $X_i$ are samples from $\pi$ generated by the Metropolized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm and $g_n$ is the approximate solution of the Poisson equation through the weak approximate scheme recently invented by Mijatović and Vogrinc (2018). Then we prove under some regularity assumptions that the estimation error variance $\sigma_\pi^2(g_n)$ can be as arbitrarily small as the approximation order parameter $n\rightarrow\infty$. To illustrate, we confirm that the assumptions are satisfied by two typical concrete models, a Bayesian linear inverse problem and a two-component mixture of Gaussian distributions.

Antimicrobial use among hospital-at-home (HaH) patients across three Mayo Clinic sites was evaluated from 2023 to 2024. Nearly three-quarters of patients were administered an antibiotic during HaH admission. Ceftriaxone was the most commonly used antibiotic and respiratory infections were the most common antimicrobial indication. Further investigation into stewardship opportunities is warranted.

Whey, a greenish-yellow liquid resulting from curd separation in cheese manufacturing, was historically considered economically insignificant in the dairy industry and often discarded into the environment without proper oversight. However, recognizing its high nutritional value, whey has become a valuable ingredient in the food industry. Unprocessed whey (raw material) is highly susceptible to contamination, as it can serve as a substrate for the multiplication of a range of microorganisms, including spoilage, spore forming, pathogenic and toxin producing bacteria, particularly if stored at inappropriate temperatures. Staphylococcus aureus is one of these potential pathogenic bacteria often associated to dairy, that can also persist in the environment through biofilm formation and, once reaching the food matrix, can grow and produce enterotoxins. During the processing of whey powder production, there are points where S. aureus might find its way into the final product. Here we demonstrate critical contamination steps, and we highlight the need for more research to assess the microbiological integrity of whey powder, especially in Brazil, where its production has been growing in recent years. Considering the increasing use of whey powder as an ingredient for various formulations, continuous surveillance for the presence of spoilage microbiota and potentially pathogens, including S. aureus and associated enterotoxins is indispensable to prevent food poisoning outbreaks.

6D pose estimation can perceive an object’s position and orientation in 3D space, playing a critical role in robotic grasping. However, traditional sparse keypoint-based methods generally rely on a limited number of feature points, restricting their performance under occlusion and viewpoint variations. To address this issue, we propose a novel Neighborhood-aware Graph Aggregation Network (NGANet) for precise pose estimation, which combines fully convolutional networks and graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to establish dense correspondences between 2D–3D and 3D–3D spaces. The $K$-nearest neighbor algorithm is integrated to build neighborhood relationships within isolated point clouds, followed by GCNs to aggregate local geometric features. When combined with mesh data, both surface details and topological shapes can be modeled. A positional encoding attention mechanism is introduced to adaptively fuse these multimodal features into a unified, spatially coherent representation about pose-specific features. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed NGANet achieves a higher estimation accuracy on LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. In addition, its effectiveness is also validated under real-world scenarios.

Epistemic democrats indirectly evaluate democratic decisions by directly evaluating the inputs into the election. However, the fundamental problem of measurement in the philosophy of science shows that procedures are often as difficult to evaluate as outcomes. This paper brings this highly refined framework into political philosophy to show that epistemic democrats face an analogous ‘fundamental problem of evaluation’. This cross-fertilization of political philosophy with the philosophy of science shows that the quality of democratic mechanisms and their inputs regarding their ability to track the truths of justice is as difficult to evaluate as the quality of the resulting decisions themselves.

This article presents a critique of Sergei Sazonov’s entrepreneurial theory of ownership. The article first reconstructs Sazonov’s response to the private duty imposition objection. It then demonstrates that Sazonov’s theory cannot overcome this objection because it is based on an ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘use’. The entrepreneurial theory of ownership understands ‘use’ in a rather narrow and contradictory sense, which differs from the meaning in which this concept appears in objections to theories of original appropriation.

Recently, mathematical and computational approaches have been incorporated into ICSI interventions as guiding tools. However, those tools carry no prognostic potential. Improving this capability may enhance ICSI attempts and assist clinicians working in infertility clinics. This study, thus aimed to investigate whether parental parameters could have predictive potential for the quality of resulting embryos with the ICSI approach using mathematical modelling techniques. Patient data including follicle number, MI and MII oocyte numbers, sperm number, sperm morphology and motility for 765 distinct couples attending British Cyprus IVF hospital was collected. Furthermore, morphological quality data as well as aneuploidy status for the 4123 resultant embryos were obtained. Regression analyses were conducted to observe the possible correlations between parental parameters and embryo quality and ploidy. Correlation analyses showed that follicle and oocyte numbers, as well as sperm parameters can be indicative of morphological quality of resulting embryos via ICSI (p values < 0.05). On the other hand, aneuploidy prediction remains too complicated to be predicted solely by these parameters (p values > 0.05). This study indicates a predictive potential of infertility measurements for male and female partners on ICSI success and is expected to act as a basis for the development of prognostic softwares to be used in IVF clinics.

This article focused on the erotic encounters between male characters in the Ottoman frontier epic of the Battalname that led to conversion to Islam. It argues that these moments of eroticism between two male warriors parallel other literary and cultural expressions wherein male-male eroticism was the norm. Romantic and erotic encounters in these frontier epics have focused on the much more limited cases of female-male interactions, obscuring the fact that these were more often the exception. While male-male eroticism has been largely studied for elite literary works, narratives considered to be expressions of folktale have been treated as if they belong to separate cultural worlds. I show that some of the language of eroticism and conversion had strong parallels between the two forms of cultural expression and thus highlight the normalized all-male space of eroticism both in the Ottoman frontier and in nascent Ottoman urban culture.

Why are some firms more successful than others in obtaining privileged treatment from their government? Trade policy, as an unusually targeted tool, offers a rich context to understand such questions of special-interest politics and corporate power. Studying decisions on anti-dumping petitions in the United States, we introduce a novel source of privileged treatment. We argue that firms with more linkages throughout the domestic economy enjoy a privileged political position. Benefits to these firms extend indirectly to a wider set of constituents, which allows firms to assemble broader coalitions and to portray protectionist policy as more than purely particularistic politics. We provide evidence for this argument by developing original measures of linkages between firms, derived from over 600,000 customer–supplier relationships among industries, matching them with data on anti-dumping petitions filed by US firms, written briefs filed by members of Congress on behalf of these firms, and the geographic distribution of industries. Our account identifies a new explanation of differences in the political influence of firms, underscores the relevance of domestic production networks in politics, and offers a novel perspective on cleavages and coalitions in trade politics. Our results also suggest that the expansion of global supply chains, long considered a hallmark of political power, has weakened the clout of some of the largest firms by limiting their domestic footprint.

Max Nicholls had an almost unique experience as a medical practitioner, researcher and teacher of medical genetics. An earlier paper described his contribution to the etiology of neurofibromatosis. This was followed by Nicholls’ own experience as lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Australia. This note draws attention to his research in immunology. For example, he was instrumental in the study of the buffy coat leuko-agglutination (BCLA) test, a sensitive assay for cell-mediated immunity that he introduced to detect conditions (including cancer) in preclinical stages.