1. Studies of seasonality in ecological diversity rarely extend over more than a few years, and few studies of seasonal diversity have explicitly investigated the influence of environmental factors on seasonal community composition, especially in tropical communities. 2. Our 10 years of monthly sampling in Amazonian Ecuador yielded 20 996 individuals of 137 fruit-feeding ...

Motor control is an area of natural science exploring how the nervous system interacts with other body parts and the environment to produce purposeful, coordinated actions. A central problem of motor control-the problem of motor redundancy-was formulated by Nikolai Bernstein as the problem of elimination of redundant degrees-of-freedom. Traditionally, this ...

Experimentally investigating the relationship between moral judgment and action is difficult when the action of interest entails harming others. We adopt a new approach to this problem by placing subjects in an immersive, virtual reality environment that simulates the classic "trolley problem." In this moral dilemma, the majority of research ...

In order to generate skilled and efficient actions, the motor system must find solutions to several problems inherent in sensorimotor control, including nonlinearity, nonstationarity, delays, redundancy, uncertainty, and noise. We review these problems and five computational mechanisms that the brain may use to limit their deleterious effects: optimal feedback control, ...

Abstract A lot has been written on cybercrime and its prevention, but the problem has proved particularly resilient to remedial action. Desperate and vulnerable individuals in every continent continue to fall into its trap. Despite this, there is dearth of descriptive study that attempts to unravel the strategies employed by ...

We derive a convex optimization problem on a steady-state nonequilibrium network of biochemical reactions, with the property that energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics both hold at the problem solution. This suggests a new variational principle for biochemical networks that can be implemented in a computationally tractable manner. ...

Aims: With approximately 50% of young people aged 18-24 in tertiary education, these are potential settings for programmes to improve mental health literacy. A survey was carried out with students and staff of a tertiary education institution to investigate psychological distress, actions to deal with mental health problems and first-aid ...

BACKGROUND: Worldwide, over 95% of fire-related burns occur in 'low and middle income countries' (LMIC) [1]. The majority of research, investment and expertise into the prevention and treatment of burns occurs in high income countries (HIC) [2]. Bearing that in mind, this study was conducted in four different LMIC and ...

In this essay, I shall be concerned with the sort of "irregular" causal generalizations that epidemiologists aim to discover. Examples include "Smoking causes lung cancer," "HIV viruses cause AIDs," or "Low dose aspirin prevents strokes." What do these claims mean and how should they guide action? I argue that philosophers ...

The objective of this study is to reflect upon the vulnerabilities experienced by the families dealing with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/Aids), and is based on the pertinent literature. To do this, we attempted to propose consideration related to the plurality of families in contemporaneity, and present the ...

OBJECTIVES: Sustainability of health promotion and injury prevention programmes is a goal of practitioners and an increasingly common requirement of funding bodies. However, less is known about the views held by individual stakeholders involved in such programmes regarding their perceptions of facilitators and barriers to achieving sustainability. This paper aims ...

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have been shown to actively initiate triadic communicative interactions by looking at a human partner or by alternating their gaze between the human and an object when being faced with an out-of-reach reward or an unsolvable problem. It has hardly been investigated, however, whether dogs flexibly ...

We propose a shift in emphasis when communicating to people when the objective is to motivate household disaster preparedness actions. This shift is to emphasize the communication of preparedness actions (what to do about risk) rather than risk itself. We have called this perspective "communicating actionable risk," and it is ...

BACKGROUND: Young people are an important source of first aid for mental health problems in people they are close to, but their first aid skills remain inadequate. Research into the factors that influence mental health first aid skills are required to reveal targets for improving these skills. This study examined ...

This paper studies the efficiency of competitive equilibria in environments with a moral hazard problem and unobserved states, both with retrading in ex post spot markets. The interaction between private information problems and the possibility of retrade creates an externality, unless preferences have special, restrictive properties. The externality is internalized ...

Evolution and the brain have done a marvelous job solving many tricky problems in action control, including problems of learning, hierarchical control over serial behavior, continuous recalibration, and fluency in the face of slow feedback. Given that evolution tends to be conservative, it should not be surprising that these solutions ...

Post-rearrangement diversification of the antibody repertoire relies on a DNA editing factor, the cytidine deaminase AID. How B lymphocytes avoid generalized mutagenesis while expressing high levels of AID remained a long-standing question. Genome-wide studies of AID targeting combined to the discovery of several co-factors controlling its recruitment and its local ...

We present a novel optimization-based method for the combination of cluster ensembles for the class of problems with intracluster criteria, such as Minimum-Sum-of-Squares-Clustering (MSSC). We propose a simple and efficient algorithm-called EXAMCE-for this class of problems that is inspired from a Set-Partitioning formulation of the original clustering problem. We prove ...

Subspaces offer convenient means of representing information in many pattern recognition, machine vision, and statistical learning applications. Contrary to the growing popularity of subspace representations, the problem of efficiently searching through large subspace databases has received little attention in the past. In this paper, we present a general solution to ...

With today's information enriched environment and the increasing demands placed upon time and human resources, problems need to be approached and articulated efficiently, according to the author. In this article, she provides a step-by-step approach to calling managers and executives to action and winning their attention and support.

Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when ...

BACKGROUND: Public health nurse (PHN) home visiting programs have been widely employed to improve life course trajectories for high risk mothers. Home visiting programs are often lengthy, during which PHNs simultaneously address multiple problems using diverse interventions over several client encounters. To manage PHN caseloads it is critical to understand ...

The borderland of the val de Lièpvre, with lands in Alsace and in the Duchy of Lorraine, and divided by religion and language, offers a rich collection of sources for the history of witchcraft persecution. The territory sharply reveals what was undoubtedly characteristic of witchcraft trials more widely. The crime ...

Activation-induced deaminase (AID) is a B lymphocyte-specific DNA deaminase that triggers Ig class-switch recombination (CSR) and somatic hypermutation. It shuttles between cytoplasm and nucleus, containing a nuclear export sequence (NES) at its carboxyterminus. Intriguingly, the precise nature of this NES is critical to AID's function in CSR, though not in ...

The Rai and Binet staging systems, which are used as standard methods for evaluating the prognosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), have some restrictions in identifying patients with early-stage CLL who will progress rapidly. To solve this defect, other prognostic parameters have become important in recent years. Intracellular up-regulation of ...

We report our experience on rituximab-cyclophosphamide-dexamethasone (RCD) combination therapy for the treatment of autoimmune disorders (AIDs) in 48 chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients. Overall, 81% of patients were relapsing for AID after previous treatment with corticosteroids, splenectomy, rituximab or alemtuzumab. Diagnosis of AID was autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA) in 26 ...

This paper argues that the concept of human dignity, as currently contested, offers no clear guidance to lawmakers. Within the "bioethical triangle", human dignity has a quite different significance depending upon whether one is a utilitarian, a human rights theorist, or a dignitarian. Having rejected the possibility of an easy ...

The cytidine deaminase AID hypermutates immunoglobulin genes but can also target oncogenes, leading to tumorigenesis. The extent of AID's promiscuity and its predilection for immunoglobulin genes are unknown. We report here that AID interacted broadly with promoter-proximal sequences associated with stalled polymerases and chromatin-activating marks. In contrast, genomic occupancy of ...

Activation-induced deaminase (AID) is a B lymphocyte-specific DNA deaminase that triggers Ig class-switch recombination (CSR) and somatic hypermutation. It shuttles between cytoplasm and nucleus, containing a nuclear export sequence (NES) at its carboxyterminus. Intriguingly, the precise nature of this NES is critical to AID's function in CSR, though not in ...

ABSTRACT Photovoice is a participatory action research methodology that involves the use of photography and enables people to document, reflect upon, and communicate community needs to policymakers for the purpose of promoting social change. We describe how photovoice was used to engage rural youth in childhood obesity prevention research and ...

In this paper, a new self-organizing map (SOM) based adaptation procedure is proposed to address the multiple watchman route problem with the restricted visibility range in the polygonal domain W. A watchman route is represented by a ring of connected neuron weights that evolves in W, while obstacles are considered ...

We present results of simulation research on the constrained regularized least-squares (RLS) solution of the ill-conditioned inverse problem in turbidimetric measurements. The problem is formulated in terms of the discretized Fredholm integral equation of the first kind. The inverse problem in turbidimetric measurements consists in determining particle size distribution (PSD) ...

The co phylogeny reconstruction problem is that of finding minimum cost explanations of differences between historical associations. The problem arises in parasitology, molecular systematics, and biogeography. Existing software tools for this problem either have worst-case exponential time or use heuristics that do not guarantee optimal solutions. To date, no polynomial ...

Diffusion of particles in confined domains with absorbing spots on the otherwise reflecting boundaries is ubiquitous in nature and technology. Because of nonuniform boundary conditions, the problem of finding the mean first passage time (MFPT) of the particle to one of the spots is extremely complicated. We show how the ...

We consider the harmonic inversion problem, and the associated spectral estimation problem, both of which are key numerical problems in NMR data analysis. Under certain conditions (in particular, in exact arithmetic) these problems have unique solutions. Therefore, these solutions must not depend on the inversion algorithm, as long as it ...

Embedding automation can be a step ahead in histology processing development. Among advantages in replacing time-consuming manual embedding, the possibility of the final specimen orientation by the grossing person is very attractive for surgical pathology. There is not yet a satisfactory technological solution for 2 main problems in the design ...

We present a natural vector-valued fitness function f for the multi-objective shortest path problem, which is a fundamental multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem known to be NP-hard. Thereafter, we conduct a rigorous runtime analysis of a simple evolutionary algorithm (EA) optimizing f. Interestingly, this simple general algorithm is a fully polynomial-time ...

Humans need to solve computationally intractable problems such as visual search, categorization, and simultaneous learning and acting, yet an increasing body of evidence suggests that their solutions to instantiations of these problems are near optimal. Computational complexity advances an explanation to this apparent paradox: (1) only a small portion of ...

A numerical improvement of the Fourier modal method with adaptive spatial resolution is obtained. It is shown that the solutions of all the eigenvalue problems corresponding to homogeneous regions can be deduced straightforwardly from the solution of one of these problems. Numerical examples demonstrate that computation time saving can be ...

The human brain consists of millions of neural nerve cells being interconnected and firing in parallel in order to process information. A fundamental question is how this parallel neuron-firing can result in a unified experience. This is the so-called binding problem--a problem that is one of today's key questions about ...

A temporal contiguity hypothesis for the experience of veracity is tested which states that a solution candidate to a cognitive problem is more likely to be experienced as correct the faster it succeeds the problem. Experiment 1 varied the onset time of the appearance of proposed solutions to anagrams (50 ...

Successful employment of numerical techniques for the solution of forward and inverse ECG problems requires the ability to both quantify and minimize approximation errors introduced as part of the discretization process. Our objective is to develop discretization and refinement strategies involving hybrid-shaped finite elements so as to minimize approximation errors ...

The choice of the regularization parameter has a profound effect on the solution of ill-posed inverse problems such as optical topography. We review 11 different methods for selecting the Tikhonov regularization parameter that have been described previously in the literature. We test them on two trial problems, deblurring and optical ...

This paper examines the interaction between Semiotic choices and the presentation and solution of a family of contemporary mathematical problems centred around the so-called 'stable marriage problem'. I investigate how a socially restrictive choice of signs impacts mathematical production both in terms of problem formation and of solutions. I further ...

The modified Thomson problem, which concerns an assembly of N particles mutually interacting through a Coulombic potential and subject to a Coulombic-harmonic confinement, is introduced. For sufficiently strong confinement strengths M, properties of its solutions (such as the energy and the particle positions at the minimum, and the corresponding zero-point ...

The use of points of overdetermination, so-called CHIEF points, in numerical solutions to exterior Helmholtz problems for the elimination of spurious modes is well established. Further, the number and relative position of such points in two-dimensional radially symmetric geometries has been demonstrated theoretically. Since CHIEF points require lower computational overhead ...

Nearest prototype methods can be quite successful on many pattern classification problems. In these methods, a collection of prototypes has to be found that accurately represents the input patterns. The classifier then assigns classes based on the nearest prototype in this collection. In this paper, we first use the standard ...

Dimensionality reduction is an important issue in many machine learning and pattern recognition applications, and the trace ratio (TR) problem is an optimization problem involved in many dimensionality reduction algorithms. Conventionally, the solution is approximated via generalized eigenvalue decomposition due to the difficulty of the original problem. However, prior works ...

The phase retrieval problem is a problem of a reconstruction of a signal from the magnitude of its Fourier transform. In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing an unknown one-dimensional signal from the magnitude of its Fourier transform and the magnitude of the Fourier transform of another signal ...

The cophylogeny reconstruction problem is that of finding minimal cost explanations of differences between evolutionary histories of ecologically linked groups of biological organisms. We present a proof that shows that the general problem of reconciling evolutionary histories is NP-complete and provide a sharp boundary where this intractability begins. We also ...