ABSTRACT Data from digital technologies are increasingly integrated in public health research. In April of 2020, we interviewed a subset of participants who completed a survey approximately one month earlier. Using the survey, we contacted and interviewed participants who had expressed their willingness or unwillingness to share digital data for use in public health. We followed a directed content analysis approach for the analysis of the interview data. Among participants who had reported being unwilling to share data, concerns about privacy, (...) confidentiality, and the purpose of the research were cited. During the interviews, 76.9% of the participants who had who had previously indicated that they were unwilling to share their data, expressed willingness to share data in order to assist with COVID-19 prevention. Our results contribute to our understanding of people’s perspectives on sharing personal data and of the way their perspectives can vary as a function of potential uses of their personal information. (shrink)

Why do humans menstruate while most mammals do not? Here, we present our answer to this long‐debated question, arguing that (i) menstruation occurs as a mechanistic consequence of hormone‐induced differentiation of the endometrium (referred to as spontaneous decidualization, or SD); (ii) SD evolved because of maternal–fetal conflict; and (iii) SD evolved by genetic assimilation of the decidualization reaction, which is induced by the fetus in non‐menstruating species. The idea that menstruation occurs as a consequence of SD has been proposed in (...) the past, but here we present a novel hypothesis on how SD evolved. We argue that decidualization became genetically stabilized in menstruating lineages, allowing females to prepare for pregnancy without any signal from the fetus. We present three models for the evolution of SD by genetic assimilation, based on recent advances in our understanding of the mechanisms of endometrial differentiation and implantation. Testing these models will ultimately shed light on the evolutionary significance of menstruation, as well as on the etiology of human reproductive disorders like endometriosis and recurrent pregnancy loss. (shrink)

Information Retrieval systems benefit from the use of long queries containing a large volume of search-relevant information. This situation is not common, as users of such systems tend to use very short and precise queries with few keywords. In this work we propose a modification of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique using data from the document collection and its vocabulary for a better representation of short queries. Additionally, a study is carried out on how the modification of the proposed (...) LDA weighted vectors increase the performance using relevant documents as feedback. The work shown in this paper is tested using three biomedical corpora (TREC Genomics 2004, TREC Genomics 2005 and OHSUMED) and one legal corpus (FIRE 2017). Results prove that the application of the proposed representation technique, as well as the feedback adjustment, clearly outperforms the baseline methods (BM25 and non-modified LDA). (shrink)

This paper responds to Marina Marren’s “The Contemplative Community: Pre-Socratic Teachings and Their Appropriation in the Phaedo” by listing areas of agreement and raising questions for further consideration. Marren’s position—that the comedic aspects of the dialogue can be understood through a retrieval of Anaxagorean mixing of opposites and Heraclitean images of doubling—is discussed. The response then challenges Marren to clarify why we should think that Plato would disagree with Socrates regarding the status of the forms and to think more deeply (...) about divinization as a theme in the Phaedo. (shrink)

El objetivo de esta investigación fue determinar el nivel predictivo de los factores técnico-docentes de la enseñanza media en el éxito académico en una universidad estatal chilena, desagregado en tres variantes: tiempo de titulación, rendimiento académico y relación titulado-desertor de cada carrera.Metodológicamente, se realiza un análisis descriptivo y correlacional, aplicando modelos de regresión. Se consideraron como factores técnico-docentes el colegio de proveniencia, la modalidad educacional y el promedio de notas.Los resultados indican que existe baja correlación entre las variables predictoras y (...) el rendimiento universitario y los análisis de regresión muestra un bajo nivel predic- tivo las variables predictoras. (shrink)