Institute of the Americas

Federated learning (FL) has recently enabled deep learning models to scale over distributed client data. In this context, a new area of research has emerged, extending to various vision tasks from a domain generalisation (DG) paradigm known as Federated Domain Generalisation (FDG). Common challenges in this framework, such as data heterogeneity, obtaining domain-invariant representations, and addressing privacy concerns, have been addressed in recent years. However, we have observed that all approaches consider the entire client source data, which is often heterogeneous, corrupted, or redundant. To tackle these challenges, we propose FEDALV, the first Federated Active Learning (FAL) framework for DG. Prior to implementing our sampling strategy, we establish and solve the generalisation problem with our FDG pipeline, FEDA, leveraging the free energy alignment between each source domain and the target. Furthermore, this measure facilitates FEDALV in the active learning setting by sampling the most informative source samples only from clients aligned with the target domain. Our extensive empirical study demonstrates the superiority of our method in accuracy and efficiency compared to multiple contemporary methods. FEDALV manages to achieve the performance of the full training target accuracy while sampling as little as 5% of the source client's data.

This research undertakes a quantitative exploration of the impact of procurement mo-dalities on economic efficiency and inclusive procurement within the Dominican Repub-lic's public sector. Applying data science methodologies and machine learning techniques, this study analyzes a rich dataset of public procurement contracts spanning from 2018 to 2023. A focus is placed on understanding how different procurement modalities affect contract amounts and processing times—two key indicators of economic efficiency. Machine learning models, including Random Forest and Gradient Boosting, are em-ployed to predict these essential metrics across different procurement modalities. The findings indicate a significant positive correlation between certain procurement modali-ties and economic efficiency. The machine learning models reveal that procurement strategies focused on local sourcing and transparent bidding processes tend to yield high-er economic returns and more equitable outcomes. This research underscores the poten-tial of quantitative analysis to inform procurement policies, fostering a more economi-cally efficient and inclusive procurement ecosystem in the Dominican Republic's public sector. The insights garnered from this study could have significant implications for the design of more inclusive procurement strategies, contributing to socio-economic growth and corruption reduction in the Dominican Republic.

Since early 2020, pundits and commentators have scrutinized the history of past pandemics for answers to a series of questions shaped by COVID-19: what strategies have worked in the past to stem the spread of contagion? How long do epidemics typically last? Are vaccines an effective “magic bullet” against infectious diseases? The coronavirus crisis spawned comparisons to diseases as epidemiologically diverse as influenza, the Black Death, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and polio, as people excavated the records of past pandemics to try to make sense of the worst public-health disaster for over a century.1 Policy proscriptions emerged quickly from these historical analogies. Many public-health experts pointed to the trajectories of epidemics like the 1918–19 influenza outbreak and SARS to convey the gravity of what would happen if political leaders did not quickly and decisively issue stay-at-home-orders, close schools, and mandate social distancing.2

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Studia Religiologica » 2019 » Tom 52, Numer 3 » Benzedeiras: Lights and Shadows of the Religious Healing Practice in Brazilian Folk Catholicism A A A

Joseph U. Lenti, Redeeming the Revolution: The State and Organized Labor in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), pp. xvi + 355, 35.00 pb - Volume 50 Issue 3

The AIDS crisis in the US in the 1980s radically transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and capitalism. Opportunistic infections given free rein in human bodies by HIV rendered employees visible to employers and to health care providers as an economic risk, and set the stage for battles between health capitalists, politicians, and AIDS activists over access to health care. Health capitalism in 1980s America was both an arena of integration of queer Americans into mainstream society and also a political cul-de-sac, blunting the radical possibilities of sexual politics that were alive in the years before the AIDS crisis. In this article I focus on activist groups, primarily ACT UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis, National Gay Rights Advocates, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the liberal politicians who led legislative battles at federal and state level to force the health care system to respond to AIDS. In shifting our gaze from the Reagan administration and the religious right as the primary foils to AIDS activism, we can gain new insights into the direction of liberal politics in an era of supposed conservative ascendancy. An understanding of how AIDS activists and their allies negotiated questions of health access suggests that health care activism was in part a marker of class privilege, as gay activists and liberal Democrats openly embraced a medical model for sexual minorities that lifted them above the stigma of a public welfare system and integrated them further into heteronormative capitalism.

This paper reports some activities of a pilot project that aimed to identify then to assess initial contributions made by selected American companies conducting business in Poland at various times since the collapse of Communism in 1991. It chronicles surveys undertaken by the author’s graduate students that included administration of questionnaires with personal interviews of company managers, obstacles encountered, efforts to overcome obstacles, implications for future research, plus preliminary projections of strategies United States government officials need to adopt to maintain repatriation of corporate profits. This research raises questions whether American FDI should be presumed to be good for either America or host countries such as Poland, as well as the extent to which the American taxpayer should tolerate sequestration of assets abroad by giant Fortune-ranked corporations that were chartered in the United States. Questions arise also concerning the propriety if not the legality of large accounting and international law firms assisting and encouraging American corporations in such efforts to hide assets abroad.

Days of Rage is a journalistic history of the revolutionary violence that grew out of the 1960s radicalism of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther party (BPP), and that continued, haltingly, into the early 1980s. Authored by the Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough, the book is written in a popular style, with storytelling prioritized over historical analysis. Its strength lies in its breadth. While the well-known story of the Weather Underground sits at the center of Burrough's narrative, he also recounts the exploits of less prominent groups such as the cult-like Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the Puerto Rican independence outfit Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), and the BPP offshoot Black Liberation Army (BLA). The aims, personnel, and undertakings of these short-lived radical factions—all committed to revolutionary acts of terrorism, such as bombings, kidnappings, and police murders—are recounted in exhaustive detail. As a consequence, the stories of overlooked figures such as the SLA founder Donald DeFreeze, the United Freedom Front leader Raymond Luc Levasseur, and the Family member Silvia Baraldini, are told alongside those of better-known underground figures such as William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Assata Shakur. The author provides a “straightforward narrative history” that is both tragic and ironic: “many idealistic young Americans, passionately committed to creating a better world for themselves and those less fortunate, believed they had to kill people to do it” (p. 6).