Aligning Manifolds of Double Pendulum Dynamics Under the Influence of Noise

This study presents the results of a series of simulation experiments that evaluate and compare four different manifold alignment methods under the influence of noise. The data was created by simulating the dynamics of two slightly different double pendulums in three-dimensional space. The method of semi-supervised feature-level manifold alignment using global distance resulted in the most convincing visualisations. However, the semi-supervised feature-level local alignment methods resulted in smaller alignment errors. These local alignment methods were also more robust to noise and faster than the other methods.Comment: The final version will appear in ICONIP 2018. A DOI identifier to the final version will be added to the preprint, as soon as it is availabl

Natural ventilation for the prevention of airborne contagion.

BACKGROUND: Institutional transmission of airborne infections such as tuberculosis (TB) is an important public health problem, especially in resource-limited settings where protective measures such as negative-pressure isolation rooms are difficult to implement. Natural ventilation may offer a low-cost alternative. Our objective was to investigate the rates, determinants, and effects of natural ventilation in health care settings. METHODS AND FINDINGS: The study was carried out in eight hospitals in Lima, Peru; five were hospitals of "old-fashioned" design built pre-1950, and three of "modern" design, built 1970-1990. In these hospitals 70 naturally ventilated clinical rooms where infectious patients are likely to be encountered were studied. These included respiratory isolation rooms, TB wards, respiratory wards, general medical wards, outpatient consulting rooms, waiting rooms, and emergency departments. These rooms were compared with 12 mechanically ventilated negative-pressure respiratory isolation rooms built post-2000. Ventilation was measured using a carbon dioxide tracer gas technique in 368 experiments. Architectural and environmental variables were measured. For each experiment, infection risk was estimated for TB exposure using the Wells-Riley model of airborne infection. We found that opening windows and doors provided median ventilation of 28 air changes/hour (ACH), more than double that of mechanically ventilated negative-pressure rooms ventilated at the 12 ACH recommended for high-risk areas, and 18 times that with windows and doors closed (p < 0.001). Facilities built more than 50 years ago, characterised by large windows and high ceilings, had greater ventilation than modern naturally ventilated rooms (40 versus 17 ACH; p < 0.001). Even within the lowest quartile of wind speeds, natural ventilation exceeded mechanical (p < 0.001). The Wells-Riley airborne infection model predicted that in mechanically ventilated rooms 39% of susceptible individuals would become infected following 24 h of exposure to untreated TB patients of infectiousness characterised in a well-documented outbreak. This infection rate compared with 33% in modern and 11% in pre-1950 naturally ventilated facilities with windows and doors open. CONCLUSIONS: Opening windows and doors maximises natural ventilation so that the risk of airborne contagion is much lower than with costly, maintenance-requiring mechanical ventilation systems. Old-fashioned clinical areas with high ceilings and large windows provide greatest protection. Natural ventilation costs little and is maintenance free, and is particularly suited to limited-resource settings and tropical climates, where the burden of TB and institutional TB transmission is highest. In settings where respiratory isolation is difficult and climate permits, windows and doors should be opened to reduce the risk of airborne contagion

A transfer-learning approach to feature extraction from cancer transcriptomes with deep autoencoders

Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science.The diagnosis and prognosis of cancer are among the more challenging tasks that oncology medicine deals with. With the main aim of fitting the more appropriate treatments, current personalized medicine focuses on using data from heterogeneous sources to estimate the evolu- tion of a given disease for the particular case of a certain patient. In recent years, next-generation sequencing data have boosted cancer prediction by supplying gene-expression information that has allowed diverse machine learning algorithms to supply valuable solutions to the problem of cancer subtype classification, which has surely contributed to better estimation of patient’s response to diverse treatments. However, the efficacy of these models is seriously affected by the existing imbalance between the high dimensionality of the gene expression feature sets and the number of sam- ples available for a particular cancer type. To counteract what is known as the curse of dimensionality, feature selection and extraction methods have been traditionally applied to reduce the number of input variables present in gene expression datasets. Although these techniques work by scaling down the input feature space, the prediction performance of tradi- tional machine learning pipelines using these feature reduction strategies remains moderate. In this work, we propose the use of the Pan-Cancer dataset to pre-train deep autoencoder architectures on a subset com- posed of thousands of gene expression samples of very diverse tumor types. The resulting architectures are subsequently fine-tuned on a col- lection of specific breast cancer samples. This transfer-learning approach aims at combining supervised and unsupervised deep learning models with traditional machine learning classification algorithms to tackle the problem of breast tumor intrinsic-subtype classification.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

World citation and collaboration networks: uncovering the role of geography in science

Modern information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, have diminished the role of spatial distances and territorial boundaries on the access and transmissibility of information. This has enabled scientists for closer collaboration and internationalization. Nevertheless, geography remains an important factor affecting the dynamics of science. Here we present a systematic analysis of citation and collaboration networks between cities and countries, by assigning papers to the geographic locations of their authors' affiliations. The citation flows as well as the collaboration strengths between cities decrease with the distance between them and follow gravity laws. In addition, the total research impact of a country grows linearly with the amount of national funding for research & development. However, the average impact reveals a peculiar threshold effect: the scientific output of a country may reach an impact larger than the world average only if the country invests more than about 100,000 USD per researcher annually.Comment: Published version. 9 pages, 5 figures + Appendix, The world citation and collaboration networks at both city and country level are available at http://becs.aalto.fi/~rajkp/datasets.htm

An experimental test of non-local realism

Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism' - a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.Comment: Minor corrections to the manuscript, the final inequality and all its conclusions do not change; description of corrections (Corrigendum) added as new Appendix III; Appendix II replaced by a shorter derivatio

Effect modification of environmental factors on influenza-associated mortality: a time-series study in two Chinese cities

Background: Environmental factors have been associated with transmission and survival of influenza viruses but no studies have ever explored the role of environmental factors on severity of influenza infection.Methods: We applied a Poisson regression model to the mortality data of two Chinese metropolitan cities located within the subtropical zone, to calculate the influenza associated excess mortality risks during the periods with different levels of temperature and humidity.Results: The results showed that high absolute humidity (measured by vapor pressure) was significantly (p < 0.05) associated with increased risks of all-cause and cardiorespiratory deaths, but not with increased risks of pneumonia and influenza deaths. The association between absolute humidity and mortality risks was found consistent among the two cities. An increasing pattern of influenza associated mortality risks was also found across the strata of low to high relative humidity, but the results were less consistent for temperature.Conclusions: These findings highlight the need for people with chronic cardiovascular and respiratory diseases to take extra caution against influenza during hot and humid days in the subtropics and tropics. © 2011 Yang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.published_or_final_versio

Cyanobacterial bloom mitigation using proteins with high isoelectric point and chitosan-modified soil

A new environmental friendly method was developed for cyanobacterial blooms mitigation using local lake shore soil modified by protein with high isoelectric point (pI) and chitosan jointly. Results suggested that 5 mg/L lysozyme (pI ≈ 11) and 100 mg/L bromelain (pI ≈ 9.5) modified 10 mg/L soil can both reduce the surface charge of microcystis aeruginosa, the dominant species forming cyanobacterial blooms, from -26 mv to -10 mv and remove 73% and 60% of algal cells in 30 min, respectively. The limited improvement of removal efficiency was due to the small flocs (< 60 μm) formed by charge neutralization, which need more than 90 min to settle in static condition. However, when the small flocs were linked and bridged by the other modifier, chitosan with long polymer chain, large flocs of about 800 μm and 300 μm were fomed and more than 80% of algal cells were removed in 5 min and 30 min by lysozyme-chitosan modified soil and bromelain-chitosan modified soil, respectively. The lower removal ability of bromelain-modified soil was due to the lower charge density leading to less powerful in destabilization of algal cells. Depending on the bi-component modification mechanism including charge neutralization of proteins with high pI and netting and bridging function of chitosan with long polymer chain, it is possible to flocculate cyanobacterial blooms in natural waters effectively using locally available materials

Remote sensing of impervious surface growth: A framework for quantifying urban expansion and re-densification mechanisms

A substantial body of literature has accumulated on the topic of using remotely sensed data to map impervious surfaces which are widely recognized as an important indicator of urbanization. However, the remote sensing of impervious surface growth has not been successfully addressed. This study proposes a new framework for deriving and summarizing urban expansion and re-densification using time series of impervious surface fractions (ISFs) derived from remotely sensed imagery. This approach integrates multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA), analysis of regression residuals, spatial statistics (Getis_Ord) and urban growth theories; hence, the framework is abbreviated as MRGU. The performance of MRGU was compared with commonly used change detection techniques in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. The results suggested that the ISF regression residuals were optimal for detecting impervious surface changes while Getis_Ord was effective for mapping hot spot regions i n the regression residuals image. Moreover, the MRGU outputs agreed with the mechanisms proposed in several existing urban growth theories, but importantly the outputs enable the refinement of such models by explicitly accounting for the spatial distribution of both expansion and re - densification mechanisms. Based on Landsat data, the MRGU is somewhat restricted in its ability to measure re-densification in the urban core but this may be improved through the use of higher spatial resolution satellite imagery. The paper ends with an assessment of the present gaps in remote sensing of impervious surface growth and suggests some solutions. The application of impervious surface fractions in urban change detection is a stimulating new research idea which is driving future research with new models and algorithms

Sp110 transcription is induced and required by Anaplasma phagocytophilum for infection of human promyelocytic cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The tick-borne intracellular pathogen, <it>Anaplasma phagocytophilum </it>(Rickettsiales: Anaplasmataceae) causes human granulocytic anaplasmosis after infection of polymorphonuclear leucocytes. The human Sp110 gene is a member of the nuclear body (NB) components that functions as a nuclear hormone receptor transcriptional coactivator and plays an important role in immunoprotective mechanisms against pathogens in humans. In this research, we hypothesized that Sp110 may be involved in the infection of human promyelocytic HL-60 cells with <it>A. phagocytophilum</it>.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The human Sp110 and <it>A. phagocytophilum msp4 </it>mRNA levels were evaluated by real-time RT-PCR in infected human HL-60 cells sampled at 0, 12, 24, 48, 72 and 96 hours post-infection. The effect of Sp110 expression on <it>A. phagocytophilum </it>infection was determined by RNA interference (RNAi). The expression of Sp110 was silenced in HL-60 cells by RNAi using pre-designed siRNAs using the Nucleofector 96-well shuttle system (Amaxa Biosystems, Gaithersburg, MD, USA). The <it>A. phagocytophilum </it>infection levels were evaluated in HL-60 cells after RNAi by real-time PCR of <it>msp4 </it>and normalizing against human <it>Alu </it>sequences.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>While Sp110 mRNA levels increased concurrently with <it>A. phagocytophilum </it>infections in HL-60 cells, the silencing of Sp110 expression by RNA interference resulted in decreased infection levels.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results demonstrated that Sp110 expression is required for <it>A. phagocytophilum </it>infection and multiplication in HL-60 cells, and suggest a previously undescribed mechanism by which <it>A. phagocytophilum </it>modulates Sp110 mRNA levels to facilitate establishment of infection of human HL-60 cells.</p

Preparation of distilled and purified continuous variable entangled states

The distribution of entangled states of light over long distances is a major challenge in the field of quantum information. Optical losses, phase diffusion and mixing with thermal states lead to decoherence and destroy the non-classical states after some finite transmission-line length. Quantum repeater protocols, which combine quantum memory, entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping, were proposed to overcome this problem. Here we report on the experimental demonstration of entanglement distillation in the continuous-variable regime. Entangled states were first disturbed by random phase fluctuations and then distilled and purified using interference on beam splitters and homodyne detection. Measurements of covariance matrices clearly indicate a regained strength of entanglement and purity of the distilled states. In contrast to previous demonstrations of entanglement distillation in the complementary discrete-variable regime, our scheme achieved the actual preparation of the distilled states, which might therefore be used to improve the quality of downstream applications such as quantum teleportation