Web users with autism: eye tracking evidence for differences

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people with autism may have different processing strategies when accessing the web. However, limited empirical evidence is available to support this. This paper presents an eye tracking study with 18 participants with high-functioning autism and 18 neurotypical participants to investigate the similarities and differences between these two groups in terms of how they search for information within web pages. According to our analysis, people with autism are likely to be less successful in completing their searching tasks. They also have a tendency to look at more elements on web pages and make more transitions between the elements in comparison to neurotypical people. In addition, they tend to make shorter but more frequent fixations on elements which are not directly related to a given search task. Therefore, this paper presents the first empirical study to investigate how people with autism differ from neurotypical people when they search for information within web pages based on an in-depth statistical analysis of their gaze patterns

DeepWAS: multivariate genotype-phenotype associations by directly integrating regulatory information using deep learning

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify genetic variants associated with traits or diseases. GWAS never directly link variants to regulatory mechanisms. Instead, the functional annotation of variants is typically inferred by post hoc analyses. A specific class of deep learning-based methods allows for the prediction of regulatory effects per variant on several cell type-specific chromatin features. We here describe "DeepWAS", a new approach that integrates these regulatory effect predictions of single variants into a multivariate GWAS setting. Thereby, single variants associated with a trait or disease are directly coupled to their impact on a chromatin feature in a cell type. Up to 61 regulatory SNPs, called dSNPs, were associated with multiple sclerosis (MS, 4,888 cases and 10,395 controls), major depressive disorder (MDD, 1,475 cases and 2,144 controls), and height (5,974 individuals). These variants were mainly non-coding and reached at least nominal significance in classical GWAS. The prediction accuracy was higher for DeepWAS than for classical GWAS models for 91% of the genome-wide significant, MS-specific dSNPs. DSNPs were enriched in public or cohort-matched expression and methylation quantitative trait loci and we demonstrated the potential of DeepWAS to generate testable functional hypotheses based on genotype data alone. DeepWAS is available at https://github.com/cellmapslab/DeepWAS

Legislative Bargaining with Heterogeneous Disagreement Values: Theory and Experiments

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous `disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under unanimity rule, equilibrium payoffs are strictly increasing in disagreement values. Under all less-than-unanimity rules, expected payoffs are either decreasing or first increasing and then decreasing in disagreement values. We conduct experiments involving three players using majority and unanimity rule, finding support for these predictions

Wear and corrosion interactions on titanium in oral environment : literature review

The oral cavity is a complex environment where corrosive substances from dietary, human saliva, and oral biofilms may accumulate in retentive areas of dental implant systems and prostheses promoting corrosion at their surfaces. Additionally, during mastication, micromovements may occur between prosthetic joints causing a relative motion between contacting surfaces, leading to wear. Both processes (wear and corrosion) result in a bio-tribocorrosion system once that occurs in contact with biological tissues and fluids. This review paper is focused on the aspects related to the corrosion and wear behavior of titanium-based structures in the oral environment. Furthermore, the clinical relevance of the oral environment is focused on the harmful effect that acidic substances and biofilms, formed in human saliva, may have on titanium surfaces. In fact, a progressive degradation of titanium by wear and corrosion (tribocorrosion) mechanisms can take place affecting the performance of titanium-based implant and prostheses. Also, the formation of wear debris and metallic ions due to the tribocorrosion phenomena can become toxic for human tissues. This review gathers knowledge from areas like materials sciences, microbiology, and dentistry contributing to a better understanding of bio-tribocorrosion processes in the oral environment.(undefined