Are there specific design elements of choice experiments and types of people that influence choice response certainty?

The development of more realistic choice experiments has taken on board a number of suggestions in the broader hypothetical bias literature. One issue, in particular, is the increasing interest in finding ways to bridge the gap between the stated choice response and real choosing, as a way of increasing the confidence with which an individual would hypothetically purchase or use an alternative that is actually chosen in the choice experiment. In this paper we investigate the relationship between the respondent's response to a certainty question, defined on a 1-10 scale of surety, and features of the choice experiment that may have a bearing on the degree of confidence that can be placed on the stated choice, controlling for exogenous effects such as socioeconomic characteristics and attitudes to vehicle emissions. The focus on response certainty in this paper is as an external validity test. We find, using a generalised ordered logit model, compelling evidence that the number of acceptable alternatives and hence associated levels of attributes, together with the contrast of attribute levels of each designed alternative relative to an experienced status quo (or reference) alternative, play an important role in establishing certainty of response in a real market. The evidence should be taken on board in the future design of more realistic choice experiments

The age of anxiety? It depends where you look: changes in STAI trait anxiety, 1970–2010

Purpose Population-level surveys suggest that anxiety has been increasing in several nations, including the USA and UK. We sought to verify the apparent anxiety increases by looking for systematic changes in mean anxiety questionnaire scores from research publications. Methods We analyzed all available mean State–Trait Anxiety Inventory scores published between 1970 and 2010. We collected 1703 samples, representing more than 205,000 participants from 57 nations. Results Results showed a significant anxiety increase worldwide, but the pattern was less clear in many individual nations. Our analyses suggest that any increase in anxiety in the USA and Canada may be limited to students, anxiety has decreased in the UK, and has remained stable in Australia. Conclusions Although anxiety may have increased worldwide, it might not be increasing as dramatically as previously thought, except in specific populations, such as North American students. Our results seem to contradict survey results from the USA and UK in particular. We do not claim that our results are more reliable than those of large population surveys. However, we do suggest that mental health surveys and other governmental sources of disorder prevalence data may be partially biased by changing attitudes toward mental health: if respondents are more aware and less ashamed of their anxiety, they are more likely to report it to survey takers. Analyses such as ours provide a useful means of double-checking apparent trends in large population surveys

Optimal control of a commercial building's thermostatic load for off-peak demand response

This paper studies the optimal control of a commercial building's thermostatic load during off-peak hours as an ancillary service to the transmission system operator of a power grid. It provides an algorithmic framework which commercial buildings can implement to cost-effectively increase their electricity demand at night while they are unoccupied, instead of using standard inflexible setpoint control. Consequently, there is minimal or no impact on user comfort, while the building manager gains an additional income stream from providing the ancillary service, and can benefit further by pre-conditioning the building for later periods. The framework helps determine the amount of flexibility that should be offered for the service, and cost optimized profiles for electricity usage when delivering the service. Numerical results show that there can be an economic incentive to participate even if the payment rate for the ancillary service is less than the price of electricity.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figure

MetaboListem and TABoLiSTM: two deep learning algorithms for metabolite named entity recognition

Reviewing the metabolomics literature is becoming increasingly difficult because of the rapid expansion of relevant journal literature. Text-mining technologies are therefore needed to facilitate more efficient literature reviews. Here we contribute a standardised corpus of full-text publications from metabolomics studies and describe the development of two metabolite named entity recognition (NER) methods. These methods are based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks and each incorporate different transfer learning techniques (for tokenisation and word embedding). Our first model (MetaboListem) follows prior methodology using GloVe word embeddings. Our second model exploits BERT and BioBERT for embedding and is named TABoLiSTM (Transformer-Affixed BiLSTM). The methods are trained on a novel corpus annotated using rule-based methods, and evaluated on manually annotated metabolomics articles. MetaboListem (F1 score 0.890, precision 0.892, recall 0.888) and TABoLiSTM (BioBERT version: F1 score 0.909, precision 0.926, recall 0.893) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on metabolite NER. A training corpus with full-text sentences from $>$1,000 full-text Open Access metabolomics publications with 105,335 annotated metabolites was created, as well as a manually annotated test corpus (19,138 annotations). This work demonstrates that deep learning algorithms are capable of identifying metabolite names accurately and efficiently in text. The proposed corpus and NER algorithms can be used for metabolomics text-mining tasks such as information retrieval, document classification and literature-based discovery. They are available from https://github.com/omicsNLP/MetaboliteNER

Theoretical Models of Sunspot Structure and Dynamics

Recent progress in theoretical modeling of a sunspot is reviewed. The observed properties of umbral dots are well reproduced by realistic simulations of magnetoconvection in a vertical, monolithic magnetic field. To understand the penumbra, it is useful to distinguish between the inner penumbra, dominated by bright filaments containing slender dark cores, and the outer penumbra, made up of dark and bright filaments of comparable width with corresponding magnetic fields differing in inclination by some 30 degrees and strong Evershed flows in the dark filaments along nearly horizontal or downward-plunging magnetic fields. The role of magnetic flux pumping in submerging magnetic flux in the outer penumbra is examined through numerical experiments, and different geometric models of the penumbral magnetic field are discussed in the light of high-resolution observations. Recent, realistic numerical MHD simulations of an entire sunspot have succeeded in reproducing the salient features of the convective pattern in the umbra and the inner penumbra. The siphon-flow mechanism still provides the best explanation of the Evershed flow, particularly in the outer penumbra where it often consists of cool, supersonic downflows.Comment: To appear in "Magnetic Coupling between the Interior and the Atmosphere of the Sun", eds. S.S. Hasan and R.J. Rutten, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Berlin, 200

Snapshot Provisioning of Cloud Application Stacks to Face Traffic Surges

Traffic surges, like the Slashdot effect, occur when a web application is overloaded by a huge number of requests, potentially leading to unavailability. Unfortunately, such traffic variations are generally totally unplanned, of great amplitude, within a very short period, and a variable delay to return to a normal regime. In this report, we introduce PeakForecast as an elastic middleware solution to detect and absorb a traffic surge. In particular, PeakForecast can, from a trace of queries received in the last seconds, minutes or hours, to detect if the underlying system is facing a traffic surge or not, and then estimate the future traffic using a forecast model with an acceptable precision, thereby calculating the number of resources required to absorb the remaining traffic to come. We validate our solution by experimental results demonstrating that it can provide instantaneous elasticity of resources for traffic surges observed on the Japanese version of Wikipedia during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011.Les pics de trafic, tels que l'effet Slashdot, apparaissent lorsqu'une application web doit faire face un nombre important de requêtes qui peut potentiellement entraîner une mise hors service de l'application. Malheureusement, de telles variations de traffic sont en général totalement imprévues et d'une grande amplitude, arrivent pendant une très courte période de temps et le retour à un régime normal prend un délai variable. Dans ce rapport, nous présentons PeakForecast qui est une solution intergicielle élastique pour détecter et absorber les pics de trafic. En particulier, PeakForecast peut, à partir des traces de requêtes reçues dans les dernières secondes, minutes ou heures, détecter si le système sous-jacent fait face ou non à un pic de trafic, estimer le trafic futur en utilisant un modèle de prédiction suffisamment précis, et calculer le nombre de ressources nécessaires à l'absorption du trafic restant à venir. Nous validons notre solution avec des résultats expérimentaux qui démontrent qu'elle fournit une élasticité instantanée des ressources pour des pics de trafic qui ont été observés sur la version japonaise de Wikipedia lors de l'accident nucléaire de Fukushima Daiichi en mars 2011

A 15-year perspective of the fabry outcome survey

The Fabry Outcome Survey (FOS) is an international long-term observational registry sponsored by Shire for patients diagnosed with Fabry disease who are receiving or are candidates for therapy with agalsidase alfa (agala). Established in 2001, FOS provides long-term data on agala safety/efficacy and collects data on the natural history of Fabry disease, with the aim of improving clinical management. The FOS publications have helped establish prognostic and severity scores, defined the incidence of specific disease variants and implications for clinical management, described clinical manifestations in special populations, confirmed the high prevalence of cardiac morbidity, and demonstrated correlations between ocular changes and Fabry disease severity. These FOS data represent a rich resource with utility not only for description of natural history/therapeutic effects but also for exploratory hypothesis testing and generation of tools for diagnosis/management, with the potential to improve future patient outcomes

Allocation of nutrients during the reproductive cycle of Ophidiaster ophidianus (Echinodermata: Asteroidea)

Copyright © 2011 Taylor & Francis.The reproductive cycle of Ophidiaster ophidianus (strictly protected status) from Sa˜o Miguel Island, in the Azorean Archipelago was studied. The reproductive strategy; the energy allocation of each sex during the reproductive cycle and the nutritional condition of the population were analyzed. Gonadal index (GI) showed a clear seasonal pattern with spawning between August and October but histological examination revealed that gamete release can occur throughout the entire year. The pyloric caeca index (PCI) showed little annual variation but with an inverse relationship with the GI. Allocation of energy to the gonads and to the pyloric caeca reflected the seasonal reproductive strategy of this species. Individuals were able to simultaneously develop gonads, pyloric caeca, and quickly regenerate lost arms. There was a major expenditure of energy by females compared to males but, sexual size dimorphism was not observed. The reproductive pattern observed in O. ophidianus combining rich food availability and seawater temperatures characteristic of a temperate zone may be the key to the success of this species in the Azorean oceanic Island.Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

Neural processing of criticism and positive comments from relatives in individuals with schizotypal personality traits

Objectives. High negative expressed emotion by family members towards schizophrenia patients increases the risk of subsequent relapse. The study aimed to determine whether individuals with high schizotypy (HS) and low schizotypy (LS) would differ in activation of brain areas involved in cognitive control when listening to relative criticism

Factors affecting the prey preferences of jackals (Canidae)

Prey selection by carnivores can be affected by top-down and bottom-up factors. For example, large carnivores may facilitate food resources for mesocarnivores by providing carcasses to scavenge, however mesocarnivores may hunt large prey themselves, and their diets might be affected by prey size and behaviour. We reviewed jackal diet studies and determined how the presence of large carnivores and various bottom-up factors affected jackal prey selection. We found 20 studies of black-backed jackals (Canis mesomelas) from 43 different times or places, and 13 studies of Eurasian golden jackals (Canis aureus) from 23 different times or places reporting on 3900 and 2440 dietary records (i.e. scats or stomach contents), respectively. Black-backed jackals significantly preferred small ( 120 kg) hider species and follower species of any body size. They had a preferred and accessible prey weight range of 14-26 kg, and a predator to ideal prey mass ratio of 1:3.1. Eurasian golden jackal significantly prefer to prey on brown hare (Lepus europaeus; 4 kg), yielding a predator to preferred prey mass ratio of 1:0.6, and a preferred and accessible prey weight range of 0 – 4 kg and 0 – 15 kg, respectively. Prey preferences of jackals differed significantly in the presence of apex predators, but it was not entirely due to carrion availability of larger prey species. Our results show that jackal diets are affected by both top-down and bottom-up factors, because apex predators as well as prey size and birthing behaviour affected prey preferences of jackals. A better understanding of the factors affecting jackal prey preferences, as presented here, could lead to greater acceptance of mesocarnivores and reduced human-wildlife conflict