Advocate cultivation of academic ethics : Why is it necessary? [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]

We teach and practice ethical behavior with all clinical and research activities. Notably, we are well educated to treat the subjects participating in research studies with high ethical standards. However, the ethics of interacting with colleagues, or with junior faculty members, are neither well defined nor taught. Dealing with junior faculty has parallels to dealing with vulnerable research subjects such as children, mentally or physically challenged groups, prison inmates or army recruits. Like any other vulnerable population, lower-ranking faculty members are often at the mercy of department chairs or other higher-ranked faculty members. Herein we present some potentially unethical or unfair examples related to academic research. Our goal is to educate the academic community of conceptual paths and to prevent similar untoward occurrences from happening in the future. Unethical behaviors related to sexual misconduct have already been described elsewhere and are not included in this manuscript. © 2020 Janket SJ et al.Peer reviewe

Improving three layer neural net convergence

The authors investigate the relationship between three layer feed forward back-propagation nets (using the terminology of Rumelhart et al., see Nature vol.323, p.533 et seq., 1986) and the committee net of (Nilsson, see Learning Machines, McGraw-Hill, 1956), and show that a simple modification to the algorithm of the latter makes them, in respect of their power to classify data sets, equivalent. Two algorithms may, however, be equivalent in power but differ greatly in their practicality. In the second part the authors conduct some experiments in order to determine whether the modified committee algorithm can compete with back-propagation in a variety of applications. It is found that the committee algorithm (a) is about ten times as fast in some applications and (b) is much less prone to getting trapped in local minima. The theoretical interest in the paper stems from the ease of analysing the committee algorithm together with the equivalence. The experimental interest is that this method of speeding up back-propagation may be used with other improvements to reduce training times in some application

The estimation of economic benefits of urban trees using contingent valuation method in Tasik Perdana, Kuala Lumpur

Urban trees provide a multitude of tangible and intangible services which include provisionary, regulatory, as well as cultural and support services to the community. Unfortunately, to set a monetary value on these said services is challenging to say the least. Ignorance of such monetary value is unintentional and this is mainly due to the lack of awareness and the absence of monetary value of the services itself. Hence, the quality of these urban trees degrades over time as no one appreciates its monetary value. In light of this situation, a study was initiated to determine the economic benefits of the urban trees that were planted surrounding Tasik Perdana (TP) area. For this purpose, a total of 313 respondents were interviewed in the TP area using the contingent valuation method (CVM). The objective of this study was to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for these urban trees. WTP represents the willingness of a person to pay in monetary terms to secure and sustain these urban trees. Hence, seven bid prices were used and distributed to the respondents: RM1.00, RM5.00, RM10.00, RM15.00, RM20.00, RM25.00 and RM30.00. Logit and linear regression models were applied to predict the maximum, mean, and median WTP. The study concludes that the estimated mean WTP is RM10.32 per visit and the estimated median WTP is RM10.08 per visit

Mark correlations: relating physical properties to spatial distributions

Mark correlations provide a systematic approach to look at objects both distributed in space and bearing intrinsic information, for instance on physical properties. The interplay of the objects' properties (marks) with the spatial clustering is of vivid interest for many applications; are, e.g., galaxies with high luminosities more strongly clustered than dim ones? Do neighbored pores in a sandstone have similar sizes? How does the shape of impact craters on a planet depend on the geological surface properties? In this article, we give an introduction into the appropriate mathematical framework to deal with such questions, i.e. the theory of marked point processes. After having clarified the notion of segregation effects, we define universal test quantities applicable to realizations of a marked point processes. We show their power using concrete data sets in analyzing the luminosity-dependence of the galaxy clustering, the alignment of dark matter halos in gravitational $N$-body simulations, the morphology- and diameter-dependence of the Martian crater distribution and the size correlations of pores in sandstone. In order to understand our data in more detail, we discuss the Boolean depletion model, the random field model and the Cox random field model. The first model describes depletion effects in the distribution of Martian craters and pores in sandstone, whereas the last one accounts at least qualitatively for the observed luminosity-dependence of the galaxy clustering.Comment: 35 pages, 12 figures. to be published in Lecture Notes of Physics, second Wuppertal conference "Spatial statistics and statistical physics

Tracking down protein-protein interaction via FRET-system using site-specific thiol-labeling

A novel Cys-specific bioorthogonalized linker was synthesized and applied in combination with bioorthogonally applicable fluorescent markers to track down protein–protein (p38-MK2) interactions by FRET.</p

Hospital-based Diagnosis of Hemorrhagic Fever, Encephalitis, and Hepatitis in Cambodian Children

Surveillance was conducted for three clinical syndromes (hemorrhagic fever, encephalitis, and hepatitis) in Cambodian children admitted to the National Pediatric Hospital in Phnom Penh from July 1996 through September 1998. Acute- and convalescent-phase sera, and cerebrospinal fluid, when applicable, underwent diagnostic evaluation for infections with Dengue virus (DENV), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), and Hepatitis A, B, C, and E viruses. Of 621 children admitted with hemorrhagic fever, 499 (80%) were confirmed to have either primary or secondary DENV infection. DENV rates were as high as 10.6/100 hospital admissions in September 1998. Of 50 children with clinical encephalitis, 9 (18%) had serologic evidence of JEV infection. Forty-four children had clinical hepatitis, most (55%) due to Hepatitis A virus (HAV). One patient had Hepatitis B virus, and no patients had hepatitis C or E. This study identified a large number of children with vaccine-preventable diseases (JEV and HAV)

Approximate Ginzburg-Landau solution for the regular flux-line lattice. Circular cell method

A variational model is proposed to describe the magnetic properties of type-II superconductors in the entire field range between $H_{c1}$ and $H_{c2}$ for any values of the Ginzburg-Landau parameter $\kappa>1/\sqrt{2}$. The hexagonal unit cell of the triangular flux-line lattice is replaced by a circle of the same area, and the periodic solutions to the Ginzburg-Landau equations within this cell are approximated by rotationally symmetric solutions. The Ginzburg-Landau equations are solved by a trial function for the order parameter. The calculated spatial distributions of the order parameter and the magnetic field are compared with the corresponding distributions obtained by numerical solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equations. The comparison reveals good agreement with an accuracy of a few percent for all $\kappa$ values exceeding $\kappa \approx 1$. The model can be extended to anisotropic superconductors when the vortices are directed along one of the principal axes. The reversible magnetization curve is calculated and an analytical formula for the magnetization is proposed. At low fields, the theory reduces to the London approach at $\kappa \gg 1$, provided that the exact value of $H_{c1}$ is used. At high fields, our model reproduces the main features of the well-known Abrikosov theory. The magnetic field dependences of the reversible magnetization found numerically and by our variational method practically coincide. The model also refines the limits of some approximations which have been widely used. The calculated magnetization curves are in a good agreement with experimental data on high-T$_c$ superconductors.Comment: 8 pages, RevTex, 6 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.