A Poisson Mixed Model with Nonnormal Random Effect Distribution

We propose in this paper a random intercept Poisson model in which the random effect distribution is assumed to follow a generalized log-gamma (GLG) distribution. We derive the first two moments for the marginal distribution as well as the intraclass correlation. Even though numerical integration methods are in general required for deriving the marginal models, we obtain the multivariate negative binomial model for a particular parameter setting of the hierarchical model. An iterative process is derived for obtaining the maximum likelihood estimates for the parameters in the multivariate negative binomial model. Residual analysis are proposed and two applications with real data are given for illustration.Comment: Submitted in the Computational Statistics & Data Analysis journa

Activity schedule and foraging in Protopolybia sedula (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

Protopolybia sedula is a social swarming wasp, widely spread throughout many countries in the Americas, including most of Brazil. Despite its distribution, studies of its behavioral ecology are scarce. This study aimed to describe its foraging activity and relation to climatic variables in the city of Juiz de Fora in southeastern Brazil. Three colonies were under observation between 07:00 and 18:00 during April 2012, January 2013, and March 2013. Every 30 minutes, the number of foragers leaving and returning to the colony was registered along with air temperature and relative humidity. Activity began around 07:30¸ increased between 10:30 and 14:30, and ended around 18:30. A mean of 52.7 exits and 54 returns were measured every 30 minutes. The daily mean values were 1,107 ± 510.6 exits and 1,135 ± 854.8 returns. Only one colony showed a significant correlation between forager exits and temperature (rs = 0.8055; P \u3c 0.0001) and between exits and relative humidity (rs = -0.7441; P = 0.0001). This paper shows that climatic variables are likely to have little control on the foraging rhythm of P. sedula when compared to other species, suggesting the interaction of other external and internal factors as stimuli of species foraging behavio

Role of antiviral therapy in the natural history of hepatitis B virus-related chronic liver disease

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a dynamic state of interactions among HBV, hepatocytes, and the host immune system. Natural history studies of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection have shown an association between active viral replication and adverse clinical outcomes such as cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The goal of therapy for CHB is to improve quality of life and survival by preventing progression of the disease to cirrhosis, decompensation, end-stage liver disease, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and death. This goal can be achieved if HBV replication is suppressed in a sustained manner. The accompanying reduction in histological activity of CHB lessens the risk of cirrhosis and of HCC, particularly in non-cirrhotic patients. However, CHB infection cannot be completely eradicated, due to the persistence of covalently closed circular DNA in the nucleus of infected hepatocytes, which may explain HBV reactivation. Moreover, the integration of the HBV genome into the host genome may favour oncogenesis, development of HCC and may also contribute to HBV reactivation

A Fully Attention-Based Information Retriever

Recurrent neural networks are now the state-of-the-art in natural language processing because they can build rich contextual representations and process texts of arbitrary length. However, recent developments on attention mechanisms have equipped feedforward networks with similar capabilities, hence enabling faster computations due to the increase in the number of operations that can be parallelized. We explore this new type of architecture in the domain of question-answering and propose a novel approach that we call Fully Attention Based Information Retriever (FABIR). We show that FABIR achieves competitive results in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) while having fewer parameters and being faster at both learning and inference than rival methods.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 201

Informational engagement in online social networks: how to calculate?

Introduction: This study juts the insertion of online social networks in the current informational scenario of society, emphasizing the importance of analyzing the informational engagement of individuals in these social media as a way of understanding the informational behavior of the population through the access and use of the information made available. by these communicational means. Method: It presents the proposed formulas for calculating informational engagement in online social networks by adjusting the quantification of existing interaction tools on social media such as like, share and comment. Thus, the suggested formulas assign weights based on the sample under analysis and which represent the level of relative engagement of a publication on online social networks. Results: It proves that the formulas presented are amenable to application on the online social networks Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter for presenting a dynamic of weights for each type of interaction, thus reflecting the relative engagement made by people in a publication for each context analyzed. Conclusion: It contributes to the development of research aimed at analyzing online social networks and enables a better understanding of the factors that involve the individual's informational behavior through the use of social media.Introdução: Ressalta a inserção dos sites de redes sociais no atual cenário informacional da sociedade dando ênfase a importância da análise do engajamento informacional dos indivíduos como forma de compreender o comportamento informacional da população mediante o acesso e uso das informações disponibilizadas nos sites de redes sociais.   Método: Apresenta a proposta de fórmulas para o cálculo do engajamento informacional nos sites de redes sociais por meio da quantificação das ferramentas de interação existente nas mídias sociais como o curtir, compartilhar e comentar. Assim, as fórmulas sugeridas atribuem pesos que representam o nível de engajamento do indivíduo perante a ação realizada em uma publicação. Resultados: Comprova que as fórmulas apresentadas são passíveis de aplicação por apresentar uma dinâmica de pesos para cada tipo de interação, refletindo assim o real engajamento realizado pelas pessoas em uma publicação. Conclusão: Contribui com o desenvolvimento de pesquisas voltadas para a análise de sites de redes sociais e possibilita uma melhor compreensão acerca dos fatores que envolvem o comportamento informacional do indivíduo mediante o uso das mídias sociais

Systematic reviews on leptospirosis

OBJECTIVES: To find the existing clinical evidence on interventions for leptospirosis. The objective is to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of any intervention on leptospirosis through systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).DATA SOURCE: The sources of studies used (where there were no limitations concerning language, date, or other restrictions) were: EMBASE, LILACS, MEDLINE, the Cochrane Controlled Clinical Trials Database, and the Cochrane Hepato-Biliary Group Randomized Trials register.SELECTION OF STUDIES: Type of Study: All systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials. Participants: patients with clinical and/or laboratorial diagnosis of leptospirosis, and subjects potencially exposed to leptospirosis as defined by the authors Interventions: any intervention for leptospirosis (as antibiotics or vaccines for prevention or treatment).DATA COLLECTION: The assessment will be independently made by the reviewers and cross-checked. The external validity was assessed by analysis of: studies, interventions, and outcomes.DATA SYNTHESIS: Located 163 studies using the search strategy described above, at the electronic databases above. Only 2 hits were selected, which are protocols of systematic reviews of Cochrane Collaboration, and not full reviews. One of the protocols evaluates antibiotics for treatment, and the other evaluates antibiotics for prevention of leptospirosis.CONCLUSIONS: There were not complete systematic reviews on interventions for leptospirosis. Any interventions for leptospirosis, such as prevention and treatment remains unclear for guidelines and practice.Federal University of São PauloUNIFESPSciEL

Neurophysiological investigation of auditory augmentation to facilitate observational learning of everyday actions

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis explores the neurophysiology of auditory augmentation of observed actions, and its effects on motor learning, neural activity, and plasticity. To this end, three studies were conducted. In the first study, we used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to determine the effects of practising a motor task via sonification of combined action observation and motor imagery (sAOMI) on corticospinal excitability, compared to practising without extrinsic auditory information. In addition, we aimed at probing practice-dependent audiomotor plasticity. To this extent we used a variation of a commonly used method to probe and induce plasticity in humans, auditory paired associative stimulation (aPAS). Practice significantly increased corticospinal excitability, but sonification did not affect it. In addition, while aPAS completed alone significantly modulated corticospinal excitability, when practice primed aPAS, no neuromodulation was found. In a follow-up study, we explored the effects of sAOMI on corticospinal excitability during action observation (AO) or AOMI of the same action, and whether sonification induced audiomotor resonance, which is usually interpreted as development of an audiomotor association. The results corroborated and extended the findings of the previous study: practice increased corticospinal excitability at rest and during AO and AOMI, but sonification did not affect it. In addition, with sonification did not induce an audiomotor association. In a third study, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and other psychophysical measures, including a motor imagery questionnaire and mental chronometry, to assess changes resulting from practising with sonified action observation, followed by motor imagery of the same action. After two practice sessions, performance and kinaesthetic motor imagery vividness significantly improved, and participants’ mental chronometry was significantly more aligned with the speed of the observed action, compared to pre-practice measures. Sonification did not induce changes in any measure. EEG analysis revealed that participants who practised with sonification were able to sustain event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the lower alpha band (7-10 Hz) for longer, compared to participants who practices without sonification. No changes in higher alpha (10-12 Hz) or Beta (16-25 Hz) bands were found. Taken together, convergent results from this thesis suggest that sonified action observation has little effect on neurophysiological and behavioural markers of motor imagery ability and performance in healthy individuals. On the other hand, practising with sonified action observation may induce attentional modulations that enhance the learner’s ability to sustain action-related attentional processing for longer. We discuss these results in the context of contemporary neurocomputational theories of perception and action

Completing the Bootstrap Program for TTˉ\mathrm{T}\bar{\mathrm{T}}-Deformed Massive Integrable Quantum Field Theories

In recent years a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to the investigation of 2D quantum field theories perturbed by certain types of irrelevant operators. These are the composite field $\mathrm{T}\bar{\mathrm{T}}$ - constructed out of the components of the stress-energy tensor - and its generalisations - built from higher-spin conserved currents. The effect of such perturbations on the infrared and ultraviolet properties of the theory has been extensively investigated. In the context of integrable quantum field theories, a fruitful perspective is that of factorised scattering theory. In fact, the above perturbations were shown to preserve integrability. The resulting deformed scattering matrices - extensively analysed with the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz - provide the first step in the development of a complete bootstrap program. In this letter we present a systematic approach to computing matrix elements of operators in generalised $\mathrm{T}\bar{\mathrm{T}}$-perturbed models, based on employing the standard form factor program. Our approach is very general and can be applied to all theories with diagonal scattering. We show that the deformed form factors, just as happens for the $S$-matrix, factorise into the product of the undeformed ones and of a perturbation- and theory-dependent term. From these solutions, correlation functions can be obtained and their asymptotic properties studied. Our results set the foundations of a new research program for massive integrable quantum field theory perturbed by irrelevant operators.Comment: 5 pages (letter), 3 pages (supplementary material), 1 figure. Version 2 contains 5 additional reference