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Deep Learning Technology: Sebastian Arnold, Betty van Aken, Paul Grundmann, Felix A. Gers and Alexander Löser. Learning Contextualized Document Representations for Healthcare Answer Retrieval. The Web Conference 2020 (WWW'20)
Funded by The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy; Grant: 01MD19013D, Smart-MD Project, Digital Technologies
The Lance Armstrong doping case was a doping investigation that led to American former professional road racing cyclist Lance Armstrong being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and his eventual admission to the doping.
For much of the second phase of his career, Cyclist Lance Armstrong faced constant allegations of doping. Armstrong consistently denied allegations of doping until a partial confession during a broadcast interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013.
Athletes seeking to avoid testing positive use various methods. The most common methods include:
- Urine replacement, which involves replacing dirty urine with clean urine from someone who is not taking banned substances. Urine replacement can be done by catheterization or with a prosthetic penis such as The Original Whizzinator.
- Diuretics, used to cleanse the system before having to provide a sample.
- Blood transfusions, which increase the blood's oxygen carrying capacity, in turn increasing endurance without the presence of drugs that could trigger a positive test result.
The 2007 Tour de France was affected by a series of scandals and speculations related to doping. By the end of the Tour, two cyclists were dismissed for failing tests and the wearer of the yellow jersey was voluntarily retired by his team for lying about his whereabouts and missing doping tests. A fourth rider was confirmed to having used doping while in a training session prior to the 2007 Tour and a fifth rider failed tests late in the race, with his result being officially announced just after the end of the Tour. During the competition, two teams were asked to withdraw after at least one member was found to have doped.
The events generated criticism and a general distrustful attitude toward the sport of professional cycling from media and public opinion. The doping allegations also resulted in several team sponsors threatening to retire their support if events advanced further. Some media such as German TV channels ARD and ZDF left the Tour once the first scandals broke. Following the Tour's conclusion, the sport's governing bodies spoke out about ways to combat the prevalence of doping in cycling and key team sponsors elected to withdraw their support due to the reputational damage caused by the scandals. The 2007 Tour de France has been referred to as one of the most controversial Tours. After the end of the Tour, "The Times" of London ranked it 4th in its list of the top 50 sporting scandals.
Doping in Russian sports has a systemic nature. Russia has had 51 Olympic medals stripped for doping violations – the most of any country, four times the number of the runner-up, and more than a third of the global total. From 2011 to 2015, more than a thousand Russian competitors in various sports, including summer, winter, and Paralympic sports, benefited from a cover-up.
Side effects in women include:
- hair loss
- male pattern baldness
- hypertrophy of the clitoris
- increased sex drive
- irregularities of the menstrual cycle
- development of masculine facial traits
- increased coarseness of the skin
- premature closure of the epiphysis
In countries where the use of these drugs is controlled, there is often a black market trade of smuggled or counterfeit drugs. The quality of these drugs may be poor and can cause health risks. In countries where anabolic steroids are strictly regulated, some have called for a regulatory relief. Steroids are available over-the-counter in some countries such as Thailand and Mexico.
There have been allegations of doping in the Tour de France since the race began in 1903. Early Tour riders consumed alcohol and used ether, among other substances, as a means of dulling the pain of competing in endurance cycling. Riders began using substances as a means of increasing performance rather than dulling the senses, and organizing bodies such as the "Tour" and the International Cycling Union (UCI), as well as government bodies, enacted policies to combat the practice.
Use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling predates the Tour de France. Cycling, having been from the start a sport of extremes, whether of speed by being paced by tandems, motorcycles and even cars, or of distance, the suffering involved encouraged the means to alleviate it. Not until after World War II were sporting or even particularly health issues raised. Those came shortly before the death of Tom Simpson in the Tour de France of 1967. Max Novich referred to the Tour de France in a 1973 issue of "New York State Journal of Medicine" as "a cycling nightmare". In the eyes of a 1998 German observer:
Cheating at the Paralympic Games has caused scandals that have significantly changed the way in which the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) manages the events.
Testing for performance-enhancing drugs has become increasingly strict and more widespread throughout the Games, with powerlifting seeing the most positive results. Competitors without disabilities have also competed in some Paralympic Games, with the Spanish entry in the intellectually disabled basketball tournament at the 2000 Summer Paralympics being the most controversial.
States that agree to the Convention align their domestic rules with the World Anti-Doping Code, which is promulgated by the World Anti-Doping Agency. This includes facilitating doping controls and supporting national testing programmes; encouraging the establishment of "best practice" in the labelling, marketing, and distribution of products that might contain prohibited substances; withholding financial support from those who engage in or support doping; taking measures against manufacturing and trafficking; encouraging the establishment of codes of conduct for professions relating to sport and anti-doping; and funding education and research on drugs in sport.
The Hungerford massacre was a series of random shootings in Hungerford, England, United Kingdom, on 19 August 1987, when Michael Robert Ryan, an unemployed antique dealer and handyman, fatally shot 16 people, including a police officer, before taking his own life. The shootings, committed using a handgun and two semi-automatic rifles, occurred at several locations, including a school he had once attended. 15 other people were also shot but survived. No firm motive for the killings has ever been established, although one psychologist has theorised Ryan's motive for the massacre had been a form of "anger and contempt for the ordinary life" around him, which he himself was not a tangible part of.
A report was commissioned by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 was passed in the wake of the massacre, which bans the ownership of semi-automatic centre-fire rifles and restricts the use of shotguns with a capacity of more than three cartridges. The shootings remain one of the deadliest firearms incidents in British history.
Zhu Ling (, born 1973) is best known as the victim of an unsolved 1995 thallium poisoning case in Beijing, China. Her symptoms were posted to the Internet via a Usenet newsgroup by her friend from Peking University, Bei Zhicheng and were subsequently proven to be caused by thallium poisoning. Her case was then reviewed by physicians in many different countries who examined her symptoms and made suggestions as to diagnoses and treatment. This effort was recognized as the first large scale tele-medicine trial. Her life was ultimately saved, but she suffered serious neurological damage and permanent physical impairment.
This case drew great attention in the Chinese media, because the victim and the suspect were living in the same dormitory in the most prestigious university of China, and the case was never solved. Internet discussion of the crime has continued since then and became a hot topic on major online Chinese communities very frequently as a high-profile cold case.
Juche (; ; ), usually left untranslated, or translated as "self-reliance", is the official state ideology of North Korea, described by the government as Kim Il-sung's "original, brilliant and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought". It postulates that "man is the master of his destiny", that the North Korean masses are to act as the "masters of the revolution and construction", and that by becoming self-reliant and strong a nation can achieve true socialism.
Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) developed the ideology, originally viewed as a variant of Marxism–Leninism until it became distinctly "Korean" in character, whilst incorporating the historical materialist ideas of Marxism–Leninism and strongly emphasising the individual, the nation state and its sovereignty. Consequently, "Juche" was adopted into a set of principles that the North Korean government has used to justify its policy decisions from the 1950s onwards. Such principles include moving the nation towards claimed ""jaju"" (independence), through the construction of ""jarip"" (national economy) and an emphasis upon ""jawi"" (self-defence), in order to establish socialism.
The Practice is firmly rooted in the ideals of sustainability through agricultural independence and a lack of dependency.
The "Juche" ideology has been criticized by many scholars and observers as a mechanism for sustaining the totalitarian rule of the North Korean regime, and justifying the country's heavy-handed isolationism and oppression of the North Korean people. It has also been described as a form of Korean ethnic nationalism, but one which promotes the Kim family as the saviours of the "Korean Race" and acts as a foundation of the subsequent personality cult surrounding them.
Anti-Arabism, Anti-Arab sentiment or Arabophobia is opposition to, or dislike, fear, hatred, and advocacy of genocide of Arab people.
Historically, anti-Arab prejudice has been suggested by such events as the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the condemnation of Arabs in Spain by the Spanish Inquisition, the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, and the 2005 Cronulla riots in Australia. In the current era, racial prejudice against Arabs is apparent in many countries including Iran, Poland, France, Australia, Israel, and the United States (including Hollywood). Various advocacy organizations have been formed to protect the civil rights of Arab citizens in the United States, such as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The International Convention against Doping in Sport is a multilateral UNESCO treaty by which states agree to adopt national measures to prevent and eliminate drug doping in sport.
14 of the 25 most recent winners (56%) have either failed tests or have confessed to have used doping. Together with those who failed tests but never sanctioned, 68% of the winners evidently used doping as detailed in the table below.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is the main regulatory organization looking into the issue of the detection of gene doping. Both direct and indirect testing methods are being researched by the organization. Directly detecting the use of gene therapy usually requires the discovery of recombinant proteins or gene insertion vectors, while most indirect methods involve examining the athlete in an attempt to detect bodily changes or structural differences between endogenous and recombinant proteins.
Indirect methods are by nature more subjective, as it becomes very difficult to determine which anomalies are proof of gene doping, and which are simply natural, though unusual, biological properties. For example, Eero Mäntyranta, an Olympic cross country skier, had a mutation which made his body produce abnormally high amounts of red blood cells. It would be very difficult to determine whether or not Mäntyranta's red blood cell levels were due to an innate genetic advantage, or an artificial one.
Since the introduction of doping tests in 1964, many cyclists were caught in the Tour de France. In recent years, 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis and points classification winner Erik Zabel, along with most of their Team Telekom team-mates, confessed to using erythropoietin (EPO). In 1997, former points classification winner Djamolidine Abdoujaparov was disqualified from the Tour de France for doping use. In 1998, the Festina affair had several main contenders removed from the race. In the next years, several riders were removed from the Tour de France for doping (see List of doping cases in cycling).
In addition, several riders were not allowed to start the previous Tour, including Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso because of their involvement in the Operación Puerto doping case, a Spanish investigation against doctor Eufemiano Fuentes and a number of accomplices accused of administering prohibited doping products to approximately two hundred professional athletes, to enhance their performance.
After the completion of the 2006 Tour, winner Floyd Landis was found to have an elevated testosterone to epitestosterone ratio on a sample taken following Stage 17 of the race, and at the time of the 2007 Tour prologue. Since the results of an independent arbitration hearing were still pending Landis was prevented from defending his title. He was stripped of his 2006 Tour title in September 2007.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) determined that non therapeutic form of genetic manipulation for enhancement of athletic performance is not allowed in sport. The WADA code implemented guidelines to determine if said technology should be prohibited in sport. If two of the three conditions are met, then the technology is prohibited in sport; harmful to one's health, performance enhancing, and/or against the "spirit of sport". The high risks associated with gene therapy can be outweighed by the potential save the lives of individuals with diseases. According to Alain Fischer, who was involved in clinical trials of gene therapy in children with severe combined immunodeficiency, "Only people who are dying would have reasonable grounds for using it. Using gene therapy for doping is ethically unacceptable and scientifically stupid." As seen with past cases, including the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone THG, athletes may choose to incorporate risky genetic technologies into their training regimes.
The mainstream perspective is that gene doping is dangerous and unethical, as is any application of a therapeutic intervention for non-therapeutic or enhancing purposes, and that it compromises the ethical foundation of medicine and the spirit of sport. Others, who support human enhancement on broader grounds, or who see a false dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" or a denial of the role of technology in improving athletic performance, do not oppose or support gene doping.
According to British journalist Andrew Jennings, a KGB colonel stated that the agency's officers had posed as anti-doping authorities from the International Olympic Committee to undermine doping tests and that Soviet athletes were "rescued with [these] tremendous efforts". On the topic of the 1980 Summer Olympics, a 1989 Australian study said "There is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner, who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might as well have been called the Chemists' Games."
Documents obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated prior to the country's decision to boycott the Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. The communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field, was prepared by Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture. Portugalov was also one of the main figures involved in the implementation of the Russian doping program prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics.
For much of his career, Lance Armstrong faced persistent allegations of doping, but until 2006 no official investigation was undertaken. The first break in the case came in 2004, when SCA Promotions, a Dallas-based insurer, balked at paying a $5 million bonus to Armstrong for winning his sixth consecutive Tour. SCA president Bob Hamman had read "L.A. Confidentiel", a book by cycling journalists Pierre Ballester and David Walsh which detailed circumstantial evidence of massive doping by Armstrong and members of his U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team. In 2006, an arbitration panel ruled that SCA had to pay. However, Hamman's real goal was to force an investigation by sporting authorities. He believed that if someone in a position to investigate the matter found that Armstrong had indeed doped, he could be stripped of his Tour victories--allowing SCA to get its money back. His hunch proved correct; officials from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) asked to review the evidence Hamman had gleaned.
Armstrong has been criticized for his disagreements with outspoken opponents of doping such as Paul Kimmage and Christophe Bassons. Bassons wrote a number of articles for a French newspaper during the 1999 Tour de France which made references to doping in the peloton. Subsequently, Armstrong had an altercation with Bassons during the 1999 Tour de France where Bassons said Armstrong rode up alongside on the Alpe d'Huez stage to tell him "it was a mistake to speak out the way I (Bassons) do and he (Armstrong) asked why I was doing it. I told him that I'm thinking of the next generation of riders. Then he said 'Why don't you leave, then?'"
Armstrong later confirmed Bassons's story. On the main evening news on TF1, a French television station, Armstrong said: "His accusations aren't good for cycling, for his team, for me, for anybody. If he thinks cycling works like that, he's wrong and he would be better off going home". Kimmage, a professional cyclist in the 1980s who later became a sports journalist, referred to Armstrong as a "cancer in cycling". He also asked Armstrong questions in relation to his "admiration for dopers" at a press conference at the Tour of California in 2009, provoking a scathing reaction from Armstrong. This spat continued and is exemplified by Kimmage's articles in "The Sunday Times".
Another notable critic of Armstrong was David Walsh, also a reporter for "The Sunday Times". Referred to as a "little troll" by Armstrong, Walsh revealed in a 2001 "Sunday Times" story that he had ties to controversial Italian doctor Michele Ferrari. Two years later, Walsh's book "L.A. Confidentiel" alleged, based on testimony by Armstrong's former masseuse Emma O'Reilly, that clandestine trips were made to pick up and deliver doping products to Armstrong's team.
Until his 2013 admission, Armstrong continually denied using illegal performance-enhancing drugs and described himself as the most tested athlete in the world. However, a 1999 urine sample showed traces of corticosteroid; a medical certificate showed he used an approved cream for saddle sores which contained the substance. O'Reilly claimed that team officials conspired with a compliant doctor to falsify Armstrong's prescription, and that Armstrong never had the condition. She also claimed that, on other occasions, she was asked to dispose of used syringes for Armstrong and pick up strange parcels for the team.
From his return to cycling in the fall of 2008 through March 2009, Armstrong submitted to twenty-four unannounced drug tests by various anti-doping authorities. All of the tests were negative for performance-enhancing drugs.
U.S. federal prosecutors pursued allegations of doping by Armstrong from 2010–2012. The effort convened a grand jury to investigate doping charges, including taking statements under oath from Armstrong's former team members and other associates; met with officials from France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy; and requested samples from the French anti-doping agency. The investigation was led by federal agent Jeff Novitzky, who also investigated suspicions of steroid use by baseball players Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. The probe was terminated on February 3, 2012 with no charges filed.
Tyler Hamilton, a professional cyclist who rode as Lance Armstrong's principal Domestique on the U.S. Postal Cycling team from 1999 through 2001, has extensively documented the history and methods of doping by Armstrong, himself, and others in "The Secret Race", a book co-authored with Daniel Coyle and published in 2012. The book also describes the investigation by Jeff Novitzky and the Food and Drug Administration and Hamilton's befuddlement that the investigation was dropped.
The IPC announced that, due to serious difficulties in determining the eligibility of athletes, it was suspending all official sporting activities involving an intellectual disability. The IPC attempted to develop a revised system for testing for intellectual disabilities but announced on 1 February 2003 that all events involving learning difficulties would be abandoned for the 2004 Summer Paralympics in Athens.
Following an anti-corruption drive, the International Sports Federation for Persons with an Intellectual Disability (INAS-FID) lobbied to have these athletes reinstated. Beginning in 2004, athletes with an intellectual disability began to be re-integrated into Paralympic sport competitions. The IPC stated that it would re-evaluate their participation following the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games. In November 2009 the ban was lifted and the IPC introduced a series of "sports intelligence" tests to confirm claimed disabilities. The first IPC-run event where intellectual disability athletes were allowed to compete again was the 2009 IPC Swimming European Championships.
Frustrated with local physicians' inability to help Zhu Ling, her friends Cai Quanqing and Bei Zhicheng, undergraduate students in Peking University, posted an "SOS" letter on a number of Internet usenet groups on April 10, 1995, describing their friend's symptoms and asking for help with a diagnosis. It was remarkable that by 1995 only a few research institutes in China had Internet connections, including Cai's advisor. Responses began pouring in within a matter of hours, and news reports hailed the event as a milestone in remote diagnosis by Internet, especially in China. Of the more than 1,500 responses which Zhu Ling's friends received, roughly one-third proposed that she was suffering from thallium poisoning, the common antidote for which is known as Prussian blue.
Subsequent tests confirmed that Zhu Ling had extraordinarily high levels of thallium in her body, about 10,000 times more than normal people. Doctors were able to administer the antidote, Prussian blue in time to save her life, but she sustained serious permanent neurological damage. While she has recovered the ability to breathe on her own, she still cannot speak and remains largely paralyzed and almost blind, with severely reduced mental function. In addition, she has contracted Hepatitis C from a tainted blood transfusion. Once again, her family and friends are using the Internet to seek help for her, but this time they ask for donations to help pay for her care and rehabilitation on a website dedicated to the cause.
Folie à deux (; ; French for "madness of two"), or shared psychosis, is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief and sometimes hallucinations are transmitted from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called "folie à trois", "folie à quatre", "folie en famille" ("family madness"), or even "folie à plusieurs" ("madness of many").
Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as shared psychotic disorder (DSM-IV – 297.3) and induced delusional disorder (F24) in the ICD-10, although the research literature largely uses the original name. This disorder is not in the current DSM (DSM-5). The disorder was first conceptualized in 19th-century French psychiatry by Charles Lasègue and Jean-Pierre Falret and is also known as Lasègue-Falret syndrome.
Formicophilia, a form of zoophilia, is the sexual interest in being crawled upon or nibbled by insects, such as ants, or other small creatures. This paraphilia often involves the application of insects to the genitals, but other areas of the body may also be the focus. The desired effect may be a tickling, stinging or in the case of slugs, slimy sensation, or the infliction of psychological distress on another person. The term was coined by Ratnin Dewaraja and John Money in 1986 from the Latin "formica" (ant) + the Greek "philia" (love).