848 research outputs found
The Bayesian Spatial Bradley--Terry Model: Urban Deprivation Modeling in Tanzania
Identifying the most deprived regions of any country or city is key if policy
makers are to design successful interventions. However, locating areas with the
greatest need is often surprisingly challenging in developing countries. Due to
the logistical challenges of traditional household surveying, official
statistics can be slow to be updated; estimates that exist can be coarse, a
consequence of prohibitive costs and poor infrastructures; and mass
urbanisation can render manually surveyed figures rapidly out-of-date.
Comparative judgement models, such as the Bradley--Terry model, offer a
promising solution. Leveraging local knowledge, elicited via comparisons of
different areas' affluence, such models can both simplify logistics and
circumvent biases inherent to house-hold surveys. Yet widespread adoption
remains limited, due to the large amount of data existing approaches still
require. We address this via development of a novel Bayesian Spatial
Bradley--Terry model, which substantially decreases the amount of data
comparisons required for effective inference. This model integrates a network
representation of the city or country, along with assumptions of spatial
smoothness that allow deprivation in one area to be informed by neighbouring
areas. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of this method, through a
novel comparative judgement data set collected in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the journal of the Royal
Statistical Society: Series
On the stationarity of linearly forced turbulence in finite domains
A simple scheme of forcing turbulence away from decay was introduced by
Lundgren some time ago, the `linear forcing', which amounts to a force term
linear in the velocity field with a constant coefficient. The evolution of
linearly forced turbulence towards a stationary final state, as indicated by
direct numerical simulations (DNS), is examined from a theoretical point of
view based on symmetry arguments. In order to follow closely the DNS the flow
is assumed to live in a cubic domain with periodic boundary conditions. The
simplicity of the linear forcing scheme allows one to re-write the problem as
one of decaying turbulence with a decreasing viscosity. Scaling symmetry
considerations suggest that the system evolves to a stationary state, evolution
that may be understood as the gradual breaking of a larger approximate symmetry
to a smaller exact symmetry. The same arguments show that the finiteness of the
domain is intimately related to the evolution of the system to a stationary
state at late times, as well as the consistency of this state with a high
degree of isotropy imposed by the symmetries of the domain itself. The
fluctuations observed in the DNS for all quantities in the stationary state can
be associated with deviations from isotropy. Indeed, self-preserving isotropic
turbulence models are used to study evolution from a direct dynamical point of
view, emphasizing the naturalness of the Taylor microscale as a self-similarity
scale in this system. In this context the stationary state emerges as a stable
fixed point. Self-preservation seems to be the reason behind a noted similarity
of the third order structure function between the linearly forced and freely
decaying turbulence, where again the finiteness of the domain plays an
significant role.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, changes in the discussion at the end of section
VI, formula (60) correcte
Crater lake cichlids individually specialize along the benthic-limnetic axis
A common pattern of adaptive diversification in freshwater fishes is the repeated evolution of elongated open water (limnetic) species and high-bodied shore (benthic) species from generalist ancestors. Studies on phenotype-diet correlations have suggested that population-wide individual specialization occurs at an early evolutionary and ecological stage of divergence and niche partitioning. This variable restricted niche use across individuals can provide the raw material for earliest stages of sympatric divergence. We investigated variation in morphology and diet as well as their correlations along the benthic-limnetic axis in an extremely young Midas cichlid species, Amphilophus tolteca, endemic to the Nicaraguan crater lake Asososca Managua. We found that A. tolteca varied continuously in ecologically relevant traits such as body shape and lower pharyngeal jaw morphology. The correlation of these phenotypes with niche suggested that individuals are specialized along the benthic-limnetic axis. No genetic differentiation within the crater lake was detected based on genotypes from 13 microsatellite loci. Overall, we found that individual specialization in this young crater lake species encompasses the limnetic- as well as the benthic macro-habitat. Yet there is no evidence for any diversification within the species, making this a candidate system for studying what might be the early stages preceding sympatric divergence
Classical and quantum ergodicity on orbifolds
We extend to orbifolds classical results on quantum ergodicity due to
Shnirelman, Colin de Verdi\`ere and Zelditch, proving that, for any positive,
first-order self-adjoint elliptic pseudodifferential operator P on a compact
orbifold X with positive principal symbol p, ergodicity of the Hamiltonian flow
of p implies quantum ergodicity for the operator P. We also prove ergodicity of
the geodesic flow on a compact Riemannian orbifold of negative sectional
curvature.Comment: 14 page
Fully Automatic Expression-Invariant Face Correspondence
We consider the problem of computing accurate point-to-point correspondences
among a set of human face scans with varying expressions. Our fully automatic
approach does not require any manually placed markers on the scan. Instead, the
approach learns the locations of a set of landmarks present in a database and
uses this knowledge to automatically predict the locations of these landmarks
on a newly available scan. The predicted landmarks are then used to compute
point-to-point correspondences between a template model and the newly available
scan. To accurately fit the expression of the template to the expression of the
scan, we use as template a blendshape model. Our algorithm was tested on a
database of human faces of different ethnic groups with strongly varying
expressions. Experimental results show that the obtained point-to-point
correspondence is both highly accurate and consistent for most of the tested 3D
face models
A geometric approach to visualization of variability in functional data
We propose a new method for the construction and visualization of boxplot-type displays for functional data. We use a recent functional data analysis framework, based on a representation of functions called square-root slope functions, to decompose observed variation in functional data into three main components: amplitude, phase, and vertical translation. We then construct separate displays for each component, using the geometry and metric of each representation space, based on a novel definition of the median, the two quartiles, and extreme observations. The outlyingness of functional data is a very complex concept. Thus, we propose to identify outliers based on any of the three main components after decomposition. We provide a variety of visualization tools for the proposed boxplot-type displays including surface plots. We evaluate the proposed method using extensive simulations and then focus our attention on three real data applications including exploratory data analysis of sea surface temperature functions, electrocardiogram functions and growth curves
Exploring Alumni Stories Through Qualitative Research
This presentation describes a project designed to connect current psychology undergraduates with alumni from the same program. Purposive sampling was used to recruit diverse alumni following different career paths (i.e., graduate school or straight to work), representing alumni who identified as first generation, nontraditional, Latina/Latino or as a student of color. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand alumni career paths and gather information about decision-making, barriers, supports, and advice for current psychology majors. Interviews were audio-taped and are currently being transcribed. Some alumni agreed to participate in an âAlumni Profile,â which highlighted specific alumni by name, shared details of individualâs specific story, and were made publicly available. The current presentation will share the experiences of the undergraduate researchers exploring qualitative research, learning about career options available after graduation, and benefits for current students
Three-dimensional analysis of sexual dimorphism in ribcage kinematics of modern humans
Objectives: Sexual dimorphism is an important biological factor underlying morphological variation in the human skeleton. Previous research found sex-related differences in the static ribcage, with males having more horizontally oriented ribs and a wider lower ribcage than females. Furthermore, a recent study found sex-related differences in the kinematics of the human lungs, with cranio-caudal movements of the caudal part of the lungs accounting for most of the differences between sexes. However, these movements cannot be quantified in the skeletal ribcage, so we do not know if the differences observed in the lungs are also reflected in sex differences in the motion of the skeletal thorax. Materials and methods: To address this issue, we quantified the morphological variation of 42 contemporary human ribcages (sex-balanced) in both maximal inspiration and expiration using 526 landmarks and semilandmarks. Thoracic centroid size differences between sexes were assessed using a t test, and shape differences were assessed using Procrustes shape coordinates, through mean comparisons and dummy regressions of shape on kinematic status. A principal components analysis was used to explore the full range of morphological variation. Results: Our results show significant size differences between males and females both in inspiration and expiration (p <.01) as well as significant shape differences, with males deforming more than females during inspiration, especially in the mediolateral dimension of the lower ribcage. Finally, dummy regressions of shape on kinematic status showed a small but statistically significant difference in vectors of breathing kinematics between males and females (14.78°; p <.01). Discussion: We support that sex-related differences in skeletal ribcage kinematics are discernible, even when soft tissues are not analyzed. We hypothesize that this differential breathing pattern is primarily a result of more pronounced diaphragmatic breathing in males, which might relate to differences in body composition, metabolism, and ultimately greater oxygen demand in males compared to females. Future research should further explore the links between ribcage morphological variation and basal metabolic rate
New quantitative approaches reveal the spatial preference of nuclear compartments in mammalian fibroblasts
The nuclei of higher eukaryotic cells display compartmentalization and certain nuclear compartments have been shown to follow a degree of spatial organization. To date, the study of nuclear organization has often involved simple quantitative procedures that struggle with both the irregularity of the nuclear boundary and the problem of handling replicate images. Such studies typically focus on inter-object distance, rather than spatial location within the nucleus. The concern of this paper is the spatial preference of nuclear compartments, for which we have developed statistical tools to quantitatively study and explore nuclear organization. These tools combine replicate images to generate âaggregate maps' which represent the spatial preferences of nuclear compartments. We present two examples of different compartments in mammalian fibroblasts (WI-38 and MRC-5) that demonstrate new knowledge of spatial preference within the cell nucleus. Specifically, the spatial preference of RNA polymerase II is preserved across normal and immortalized cells, whereas PML nuclear bodies exhibit a change in spatial preference from avoiding the centre in normal cells to exhibiting a preference for the centre in immortalized cells. In addition, we show that SC35 splicing speckles are excluded from the nuclear boundary and localize throughout the nucleoplasm and in the interchromatin space in non-transformed WI-38 cells. This new methodology is thus able to reveal the effect of large-scale perturbation on spatial architecture and preferences that would not be obvious from single cell imaging
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