Learning an Artist's Style: Just What Does a Pigeon See in a Picasso?

Judgments of style in art, music, and literature are commonplace, although the mechanisms providing for this structural sensitivity are not well understood. Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita (1995) showed that pigeons trained to discriminate colour slides of paintings of Picasso from those of Monet could generalise this discrimination not only to new paintings of Picasso and Monet, but also to paintings of other cubist and impressionist painters. These results suggest that the bases for such judgments of artistic style may be simpler than normally thought. This tacit sensitivity to artistic style is explored in terms of a simple PCA network model applied to pixel-maps of the paintings. The eigenvectors obtained from the singular value decomposition of sets of these pixel-maps provide for descriptions of the stimuli in terms of visual “macro-features”. These macro-features provide a simple basis not only for recognising previously-experienced paintings, but for the successful discrimination of novel paintings into various style categories. A summary of simulations of the performance of Watanabe et al.’s pigeons using precisely the same stimuli and tasks is provided. The results suggest that the eigen-decomposition is a necessary first-step, and that the bases for judgments of style may indeed be quite simple

Land use effects on pesticides in sediments of prairie pothole wetlands in North and South Dakota

Prairie potholes are the dominant wetland type in the intensively cultivated northern Great Plains of North America, and thus have the potential to receive pesticide runoff and drift. We examined the presence of pesticides in sediments of 151 wetlands split among the three dominant land use types, Conservation Reserve Program(CRP), cropland, and native prairie, in North and South Dakota in 2011. Herbicides (glyphosate and atrazine) and fungicides were detected regularly, with no insecticide detections. Glyphosate was the most detected pesticide, occurring in 61% of all wetlands, with atrazine in only 8% of wetlands. Pyraclostrobin was one of five fungicides detected, but the only one of significance, being detected in 31% of wetlands. Glyphosate was the only pesticide that differed by land use, with concentrations in cropland over four-times that in either native prairie or CRP, which were equal in concentration and frequency of detection. Despite examining several landscape variables, such as wetland proximity to specific crop types, watershed size, and others, land use was the best variable explaining pesticide concentrations in potholes. CRP ameliorated glyphosate in wetlands at concentrations comparable to native prairie and thereby provides another ecosystem service from this expansive program

Cue interaction and judgments of causality: Contributions of causal and associative processes

In four experiments, the predictions made by causal model theory and the Rescorla-Wagner model were tested by using a cue interaction paradigm that measures the relative response to a given event based on the influence or salience of an alternative event. Experiments 1 and 2 uncorrelated two variables that have typically been confounded in the literature (causal order and the number of cues and outcomes) and demonstrated that overall contingency judgments are influenced by the causal structure of the events. Experiment 3 showed that trial-by-trial prediction responses, a second measure of causal assessment, were not influenced by the causal structure of the described events. Experiment 4 revealed that participants became less sensitive to the influence of the causal structure in both their ratings and their predictions as trials progressed. Thus, two experiments provided evidence for high-level (causal reasoning) processes, and two experiments provided evidence for low-level (associative) processes. We argue that both factors influence causal assessment, depending on what is being asked about the events and participants' experience with those events

An integrative multi-omics analysis to identify candidate DNA methylation biomarkers related to prostate cancer risk

Abstract: It remains elusive whether some of the associations identified in genome-wide association studies of prostate cancer (PrCa) may be due to regulatory effects of genetic variants on CpG sites, which may further influence expression of PrCa target genes. To search for CpG sites associated with PrCa risk, here we establish genetic models to predict methylation (N = 1,595) and conduct association analyses with PrCa risk (79,194 cases and 61,112 controls). We identify 759 CpG sites showing an association, including 15 located at novel loci. Among those 759 CpG sites, methylation of 42 is associated with expression of 28 adjacent genes. Among 22 genes, 18 show an association with PrCa risk. Overall, 25 CpG sites show consistent association directions for the methylation-gene expression-PrCa pathway. We identify DNA methylation biomarkers associated with PrCa, and our findings suggest that specific CpG sites may influence PrCa via regulating expression of candidate PrCa target genes

An integrative multi-omics analysis to identify candidate DNA methylation biomarkers related to prostate cancer risk

It remains elusive whether some of the associations identified in genome-wide association studies of prostate cancer (PrCa) may be due to regulatory effects of genetic variants on CpG sites, which may further influence expression of PrCa target genes. To search for Cp

Materials

The fingerprint images we used in this project were sourced from the NIST Special Database 300 , which consists of 8871 rolled fingerprints, which were donated to NIST by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Unfortunately, NIST has not made this special database openly available, and we do not have permission to “distribute it further, publish, copy, or disseminate it in any way or form whatsoever, whether for profit or not.” If you’d like to access the images we used in this project, contact [email protected] to get permission from NIST to use the database (it’s freely available for biometrics related research, development, and education), forward Jason Tangen the automated access email, and he’ll send you a link to the images we used in this project

Communication

Preprints, publications, presentations, and other resources related to the communication of this project will be stored in this component