Flores is an isolated previously rabies-free Indonesian island which has been experiencing a canine rabies outbreak which resulted in at least 113 human deaths. It started with the importation of three dogs from rabies endemic Sulawesi in September of 1997. Local authorities responded with massive killing of dogs starting in early 1998. Approximately 70% of the dogs, in the district where rabies had been introduced, were killed during that year, yet canine rabies still exists on Flores at this time (June 2004). Approximately 50 percent of dog bite cases and human deaths were in children under 15 years of age. Between 1998 and the end of 2002, 3,389 post-exposure rabies treatments were provided and none of the treated subjects died. Almost all patients were given the Thai Red Cross intradermal rabies postexposure treatment regimen using tissue culture rabies vaccine. A small but unknown number of patients with very severe exposures also received equine rabies immune globulin. This occurrence indicates that even massive culling of the dog population, without an intensive vaccination campaign of the survivors, will not arrest an outbreak even if it occurs on a small island.
One of the biggest challenges hindering progress in low-resource and multilingual machine translation is the lack of good evaluation benchmarks. Current evaluation benchmarks either lack good coverage of low-resource languages, consider only restricted domains, or are low quality because they are constructed using semi-automatic procedures. In this work, we introduce the FLORES-101 evaluation benchmark, consisting of 3001 sentences extracted from English Wikipedia and covering a variety of different topics and domains. These sentences have been translated in 101 languages by professional translators through a carefully controlled process. The resulting dataset enables better assessment of model quality on the long tail of low-resource languages, including the evaluation of many-to-many multilingual translation systems, as all translations are multilingually aligned. By publicly releasing such a high-quality and high-coverage dataset, we hope to foster progress in the machine translation community and beyond.
In December 1991, 30 conductivity‐temperature‐depth (CTD) stations to 1000 dbar were obtained from the R/V Baruna Jaya I in the Flores Sea, Banda Sea, and Alor‐Wetar passage of the Indonesian sea. A salinity maximum within the interval 100–150 dbar and a salinity minimum within the interval 300–350 dbar mark water mass core layers derived from the North Pacific. They are drawn into the Flores Sea from the Makassar Strait, with subsequent flow into the Banda Sea, and are weakened en route by strong vertical mixing characteristic of the Indonesian seas. In the Flores Sea, water below 300 dbar becomes saltier with increased distance from the Makassar Strait, suggesting that an advective process may be drawing relatively salty water into the Flores Sea lower thermocline from the Banda Sea. The Banda‐to‐Flores Sea flow may be a consequence of vertical transfer of horizontal momentum produced by the same turbulent processes that are responsible for enhanced vertical mixing. The interocean transport profile may not correspond exactly with the Pacific‐to‐Indian Ocean pressure gradient profile, as deeper water is carried along with the through flow by the effects of eddy viscosity. The 550‐m sill at the southern end of the Makassar Strait creates a situation where downward flux of momentum entrains deeper water that must be compensated by lower thermocline water drawn from the Banda Sea. Geostrophic transport relative to 1000 dbar in the Banda Sea shows not only a strong through flow transport in the upper 300 dbar (6.3×10 6 m 3 s −1 ) but also a deeper flow toward the Flores Sea (1.5×10 6 m 3 s −1 from 300 to 500 dbar and an additional 2.4×10 6 m 3 s −1 from 500 to 1000 dbar). A simple model suggests that the magnitude of the deeper westward flow is proportional to the vertical eddy viscosity coefficient. Water mass analysis shows that either the South Pacific or Indian Ocean can provide the lower thermocline Banda Sea water.
The genetics of human short stature Flores Island in Indonesia has a long history of hominin occupation, including by the extinct Homo floresiensis and a more recent settlement by modern humans. Furthermore, Flores has an extant population of pygmy humans, and H. floresiensis exhibited a diminutive adult size relative to other hominins. Tucci et al. examined genetic variation among 32 individuals, including 10 sequenced genomes, from a population of pygmies living close to the cave where H. floresiensis remains were discovered. These individuals exhibit signatures of polygenic selection explaining the short stature and have genomic content from both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but no additional archaic lineages. Thus, restricted height is under selection at this location and has evolved independently at least twice in hominins. Science , this issue p. 511
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