Laboratory observations of midwater spawning by Illex illecebrosus

Visual observations and video-tape records were made for the first time of mid-water spawning by Illex illecebrosus in the Aquatron Laboratory pool tank. Coupled with data on the density of egg masses, they allow some conclusions to be drawn concerning possible mid-water spawning sites in nature

Secure and linear cryptosystems using error-correcting codes

A public-key cryptosystem, digital signature and authentication procedures based on a Gallager-type parity-check error-correcting code are presented. The complexity of the encryption and the decryption processes scale linearly with the size of the plaintext Alice sends to Bob. The public-key is pre-corrupted by Bob, whereas a private-noise added by Alice to a given fraction of the ciphertext of each encrypted plaintext serves to increase the secure channel and is the cornerstone for digital signatures and authentication. Various scenarios are discussed including the possible actions of the opponent Oscar as an eavesdropper or as a disruptor

Epigenetic modification of the oxytocin and glucocorticoid receptor genes is linked to attachment avoidance in young adults

Attachment in the context of intimate pair bonds is most frequently studied in terms of the universal strategy to draw near, or away, from significant others at moments of personal distress. However, important interindividual differences in the quality of attachment exist, usually captured through secure versus insecure – anxious and/or avoidant – attachment orientations. Since Bowlby’s pioneering writings on the theory of attachment, it has been assumed that attachment orientations are influenced by both genetic and social factors – what we would today describe and measure as gene by environment interaction mediated by epigenetic DNA modification – but research in humans on this topic remains extremely limited. We for the first time examined relations between intra-individual differences in attachment and epigenetic modification of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) and glucocorticoid receptor (NR3C1) gene promoter in 109 young adult human participants. Our results revealed that attachment avoidance was significantly and specifically associated with increased OXTR and NR3C1 promoter methylation. These findings offer first tentative clues on the possible etiology of attachment avoidance in humans by showing epigenetic modification in genes related to both social stress regulation and HPA axis functioning

Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Field training can be accelerated through the use of grid-based representations in NeRF's learned mapping from spatial coordinates to colors and volumetric density. However, these grid-based approaches lack an explicit understanding of scale and therefore often introduce aliasing, usually in the form of jaggies or missing scene content. Anti-aliasing has previously been addressed by mip-NeRF 360, which reasons about sub-volumes along a cone rather than points along a ray, but this approach is not natively compatible with current grid-based techniques. We show how ideas from rendering and signal processing can be used to construct a technique that combines mip-NeRF 360 and grid-based models such as Instant NGP to yield error rates that are 8% - 76% lower than either prior technique, and that trains 22x faster than mip-NeRF 360.Comment: Project page: https://jonbarron.info/zipnerf

The influence of feature selection methods on accuracy, stability and interpretability of molecular signatures

Motivation: Biomarker discovery from high-dimensional data is a crucial problem with enormous applications in biology and medicine. It is also extremely challenging from a statistical viewpoint, but surprisingly few studies have investigated the relative strengths and weaknesses of the plethora of existing feature selection methods. Methods: We compare 32 feature selection methods on 4 public gene expression datasets for breast cancer prognosis, in terms of predictive performance, stability and functional interpretability of the signatures they produce. Results: We observe that the feature selection method has a significant influence on the accuracy, stability and interpretability of signatures. Simple filter methods generally outperform more complex embedded or wrapper methods, and ensemble feature selection has generally no positive effect. Overall a simple Student's t-test seems to provide the best results. Availability: Code and data are publicly available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~ahaury/

Eclipse: Disambiguating Illumination and Materials using Unintended Shadows

Decomposing an object's appearance into representations of its materials and the surrounding illumination is difficult, even when the object's 3D shape is known beforehand. This problem is ill-conditioned because diffuse materials severely blur incoming light, and is ill-posed because diffuse materials under high-frequency lighting can be indistinguishable from shiny materials under low-frequency lighting. We show that it is possible to recover precise materials and illumination -- even from diffuse objects -- by exploiting unintended shadows, like the ones cast onto an object by the photographer who moves around it. These shadows are a nuisance in most previous inverse rendering pipelines, but here we exploit them as signals that improve conditioning and help resolve material-lighting ambiguities. We present a method based on differentiable Monte Carlo ray tracing that uses images of an object to jointly recover its spatially-varying materials, the surrounding illumination environment, and the shapes of the unseen light occluders who inadvertently cast shadows upon it.Comment: Project page: https://dorverbin.github.io/eclipse

The dynamics of proving uncolourability of large random graphs I. Symmetric Colouring Heuristic

We study the dynamics of a backtracking procedure capable of proving uncolourability of graphs, and calculate its average running time T for sparse random graphs, as a function of the average degree c and the number of vertices N. The analysis is carried out by mapping the history of the search process onto an out-of-equilibrium (multi-dimensional) surface growth problem. The growth exponent of the average running time is quantitatively predicted, in agreement with simulations.Comment: 5 figure

Exploring the effect of attachment styles and winning or losing a status contest on testosterone levels

A person's ability to form relationships and seek and attain social status affects their chances of survival. We study how anxious and avoidant-attachment styles and subsequent winning or losing affects the testosterone (T) levels of team members playing two status contests. The first is a management game played by teams striving to earn the most profits. Winners and losers emerge due to the cognitive endeavor of the players, which provokes intense status dynamics. Avoidant-attached winners do not show higher T levels whereas anxious-attached winners do. The second is an economic game which is rigged and favors some teams to become richer than others; teams have the option though to trade with each other and reduce the self-perpetuating rich-poor dynamics embedded in the game. Besides attachment styles, we here also explore how authentic pride as a self-conscious emotion affects team members' T levels as players trade with others to create more fairness. As in the first status contest, players' T levels are not significantly affected by their avoidant attachment style, neither as a main effect nor in interaction with winning or losing the game. However, similar to the first game, players' anxious attachment style affects their T levels: anxious-attached players generate significantly higher T levels when winning the game, but only when experiencing high authentic pride during the game. In short, the moderating effects of attachment style on winners' T levels are partly replicated in both status games which allows us to better understand the functioning of working models of attachment styles during and after status contests and gives us a better understanding of working models of attachment styles in general