Extrapolation techniques applied to matrix methods in neutron diffusion problems

A general matrix method is developed for the solution of characteristic-value problems of the type arising in many physical applications. The scheme employed is essentially that of Gauss and Seidel with appropriate modifications needed to make it applicable to characteristic-value problems. An iterative procedure produces a sequence of estimates to the answer; and extrapolation techniques, based upon previous behavior of iterants, are utilized in speeding convergence. Theoretically sound limits are placed on the magnitude of the extrapolation that may be tolerated. This matrix method is applied to the problem of finding criticality and neutron fluxes in a nuclear reactor with control rods. The two-dimensional finite-difference approximation to the two-group neutron fluxes in a nuclear reactor with control rods. The two-dimensional finite-difference approximation to the two-group neutron-diffusion equations is treated. Results for this example are indicated

How can diagnostic assessment programs be implemented to enhance inter-professional collaborative care for cancer?

BackgroundInter-professional collaborative care (ICC) for cancer leads to multiple system, organizational, professional, and patient benefits, but is limited by numerous challenges. Empirical research on interventions that promote or enable ICC is sparse so guidance on how to achieve ICC is lacking. Research shows that ICC for diagnosis could be improved. Diagnostic assessment programs (DAPs) appear to be a promising model for enabling ICC. The purpose of this study was to explore how DAP structure and function enable ICC, and whether that may be associated with organizational and clinical outcomes.MethodsA case study approach will be used to explore ICC among eight DAPs that vary by type of cancer (lung, breast), academic status, and geographic region. To describe DAP function and outcomes, and gather information that will enable costing, recommendations expressed in DAP standards and clinical guidelines will be assessed through retrospective observational study. Data will be acquired from databases maintained by participating DAPs and the provincial cancer agency, and confirmed by and supplemented with review of medical records. We will conduct a pilot study to explore the feasibility of estimating the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio using person-level data from medical records and other sources. Interviews will be conducted with health professionals, staff, and referring physicians from each DAP to learn about barriers and facilitators of ICC. Qualitative methods based on a grounded approach will be used to guide sampling, data collection and analysis.DiscussionFindings may reveal opportunities for unique structures, interventions or tools that enable ICC that could be developed, implemented, and evaluated through future research. This information will serve as a formative needs assessment to identify the nature of ongoing or required improvements, which can be directly used by our decision maker collaborators, and as a framework by policy makers, cancer system managers, and DAP managers elsewhere to strategically plan for and implement diagnostic cancer services

Foraging behaviour alters with social environment in a juvenile songbird

Early independence from parents is a critical period where social information acquired vertically may become outdated, or conflict with new information. However, across natural populations, it is unclear if newly independent young persist in using information from parents, or if group-level effects of conformity override previous behaviours. Here, we test if wild juvenile hihi (Notiomystis cincta, a New Zealand passerine) retain a foraging behaviour from parents, or if they change in response to the behaviour of peers. We provided feeding stations to parents during chick-rearing to seed alternative access routes, and then tracked their offspring's behaviour. Once independent, juveniles formed mixed-treatment social groups, where they did not retain preferences from their time with parents. Instead, juvenile groups converged over time to use one access route­ per group, and juveniles that moved between groups switched to copy the locally favoured option. Juvenile hihi did not copy specific individuals, even if they were more familiar with the preceding bird. Our study shows that early social experiences with parents affect initial foraging decisions, but social environments encountered later on can update transmission of arbitrary behaviours. This suggests that conformity may be widespread in animal groups, with potential cultural, ecological and evolutionary consequences.Peer reviewe

Analysing age structure, residency and relatedness uncovers social network structure in aggregations of young birds

Animal sociality arises from the cumulative effects of both individual social decisions and environmental factors. While juveniles' social interactions with parents prior to independence shape later life sociality, in most bird and mammal species at least one sex undergoes an early life dispersal before first-year reproduction. The social associations from this period could also have implications for later life yet are rarely characterized. Here, we derived predictions from available examples of juvenile groups in the literature (mobile ‘flocks’, spatially stable ‘gangs’ or adult-associated ‘crèches’) and then used three cohorts of juvenile hihi, Notiomystis cincta, a threatened New Zealand passerine, to demonstrate how multistate modelling and social network analysis approaches can be used to characterize group type based on residency, movement, relatedness and social associations. At sites where hihi congregated, we found that juveniles were resighted at a higher frequency than adults and associated predominantly with unrelated juveniles rather than siblings or parents. Movement between group sites occurred, but associations developed predominantly within the sites. We suggest therefore that juvenile hihi social structure is most similar to a ‘gang’, a group structure in which juveniles congregate without adults at predictable sites. Such gangs have previously only been described formally in ravens, Corvus corax. By combining spatial and social network analyses, our study demonstrates how social group structures can be described and therefore facilitate broader comparisons and discussion about the form and function of juvenile groups across taxa

Face Detection on Embedded Systems

Over recent years automated face detection and recognition (FDR) have gained significant attention from the commercial and research sectors. This paper presents an embedded face detection solution aimed at addressing the real-time image processing requirements within a wide range of applications. As face detection is a computationally intensive task, an embedded solution would give rise to opportunities for discrete economical devices that could be applied and integrated into a vast majority of applications. This work focuses on the use of FPGAs as the embedded prototyping technology where the thread of execution is carried out on an embedded soft-core processor. Custom instructions have been utilized as a means of applying software/hardware partitioning through which the computational bottlenecks are moved to hardware. A speedup by a factor of 110 was achieved from employing custom instructions and software optimizations

UV irradiation induces homologous recombination genes in the model archaeon, Halobacterium sp. NRC-1

BACKGROUND: A variety of strategies for survival of UV irradiation are used by cells, ranging from repair of UV-damaged DNA, cell cycle arrest, tolerance of unrepaired UV photoproducts, and shielding from UV light. Some of these responses involve UV-inducible genes, including the SOS response in bacteria and an array of genes in eukaryotes. To address the mechanisms used in the third branch of life, we have studied the model archaeon, Halobacterium sp. strain NRC-1, which tolerates high levels of solar radiation in its natural hypersaline environment. RESULTS: Cells were irradiated with 30–70 J/m(2 )UV-C and an immunoassay showed that the resulting DNA damage was largely repaired within 3 hours in the dark. Under such conditions, transcriptional profiling showed the most strongly up-regulated gene was radA1, the archaeal homolog of rad51/recA, which was induced 7-fold. Additional genes involved in homologous recombination, such as arj1 (recJ-like exonuclease), dbp (eukaryote-like DNA binding protein of the superfamily I DNA and RNA helicases), and rfa3 (replication protein A complex), as well as nrdJ, encoding for cobalamin-dependent ribonucleotide reductase involved in DNA metabolism, were also significantly induced in one or more of our experimental conditions. Neither prokaryotic nor eukaryotic excision repair gene homologs were induced and there was no evidence of an SOS-like response. CONCLUSION: These results show that homologous recombination plays an important role in the cellular response of Halobacterium sp. NRC-1 to UV damage. Homologous recombination may permit rescue of stalled replication forks, and/or facilitate recombinational repair. In either case, this provides a mechanism for the observed high-frequency recombination among natural populations of halophilic archaea

Analysing age structure, residency and relatedness uncovers social network structure in aggregations of young birds

Animal sociality arises from the cumulative effects of both individual social decisions and environmental factors. While juveniles' social interactions with parents prior to independence shape later life sociality, in most bird and mammal species at least one sex undergoes an early life dispersal before first-year reproduction. The social associations from this period could also have implications for later life yet are rarely characterized. Here, we derived predictions from available examples of juvenile groups in the literature (mobile 'flocks', spatially stable 'gangs' or adult-associated 'creches') and then used three cohorts of juvenile hihi, Notiomystis cincta, a threatened New Zealand passerine, to demonstrate how multistate modelling and social network analysis approaches can be used to characterize group type based on residency, movement, relatedness and social associations. At sites where hihi congregated, we found that juveniles were resighted at a higher frequency than adults and associated predominantly with unrelated juveniles rather than siblings or parents. Movement between group sites occurred, but associations developed predominantly within the sites. We suggest therefore that juvenile hihi social structure is most similar to a 'gang', a group structure in which juveniles congregate without adults at predictable sites. Such gangs have previously only been described formally in ravens, Corvus corax. By combining spatial and social network analyses, our study demonstrates how social group structures can be described and therefore facilitate broader comparisons and discussion about the form and function of juvenile groups across taxa. (C) 2020 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Analysing age structure, residency and relatedness uncovers social network structure in aggregations of young birds

Animal sociality arises from the cumulative effects of both individual social decisions and environmental factors. While juveniles' social interactions with parents prior to independence shape later life sociality, in most bird and mammal species at least one sex undergoes an early life dispersal before first-year reproduction. The social associations from this period could also have implications for later life yet are rarely characterized. Here, we derived predictions from available examples of juvenile groups in the literature (mobile 'flocks', spatially stable 'gangs' or adult-associated 'creches') and then used three cohorts of juvenile hihi, Notiomystis cincta, a threatened New Zealand passerine, to demonstrate how multistate modelling and social network analysis approaches can be used to characterize group type based on residency, movement, relatedness and social associations. At sites where hihi congregated, we found that juveniles were resighted at a higher frequency than adults and associated predominantly with unrelated juveniles rather than siblings or parents. Movement between group sites occurred, but associations developed predominantly within the sites. We suggest therefore that juvenile hihi social structure is most similar to a 'gang', a group structure in which juveniles congregate without adults at predictable sites. Such gangs have previously only been described formally in ravens, Corvus corax. By combining spatial and social network analyses, our study demonstrates how social group structures can be described and therefore facilitate broader comparisons and discussion about the form and function of juvenile groups across taxa. (C) 2020 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

A new gene expression signature, the ClinicoMolecular Triad Classification, may improve prediction and prognostication of breast cancer at the time of diagnosis

Abstract Introduction When making treatment decisions, oncologists often stratify breast cancer (BC) into a low-risk group (low-grade estrogen receptor-positive (ER+)), an intermediate-risk group (high-grade ER+) and a high-risk group that includes Her2+ and triple-negative (TN) tumors (ER-/PR-/Her2-). None of the currently available gene signatures correlates to this clinical classification. In this study, we aimed to develop a test that is practical for oncologists and offers both molecular characterization of BC and improved prediction of prognosis and treatment response. Methods We investigated the molecular basis of such clinical practice by grouping Her2+ and TN BC together during clustering analyses of the genome-wide gene expression profiles of our training cohort, mostly derived from fine-needle aspiration biopsies (FNABs) of 149 consecutive evaluable BC. The analyses consistently divided these tumors into a three-cluster pattern, similarly to clinical risk stratification groups, that was reproducible in published microarray databases (n = 2,487) annotated with clinical outcomes. The clinicopathological parameters of each of these three molecular groups were also similar to clinical classification. Results The low-risk group had good outcomes and benefited from endocrine therapy. Both the intermediate- and high-risk groups had poor outcomes, and their BC was resistant to endocrine therapy. The latter group demonstrated the highest rate of complete pathological response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy; the highest activities in Myc, E2F1, Ras, β-catenin and IFN-γ pathways; and poor prognosis predicted by 14 independent prognostic signatures. On the basis of multivariate analysis, we found that this new gene signature, termed the "ClinicoMolecular Triad Classification" (CMTC), predicted recurrence and treatment response better than all pathological parameters and other prognostic signatures. Conclusions CMTC correlates well with current clinical classifications of BC and has the potential to be easily integrated into routine clinical practice. Using FNABs, CMTC can be determined at the time of diagnostic needle biopsies for tumors of all sizes. On the basis of using public databases as the validation cohort in our analyses, CMTC appeared to enable accurate treatment guidance, could be made available in preoperative settings and was applicable to all BC types independently of tumor size and receptor and nodal status. The unique oncogenic signaling pathway pattern of each CMTC group may provide guidance in the development of new treatment strategies. Further validation of CMTC requires prospective, randomized, controlled trials