3,594 research outputs found
Net Surface Flux Budget Over Tropical Oceans Estimated from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)
Bayesian Statistical Inference on Elliptical Matrix Distributions
In this paper we are concerned with Bayesian statistical inference for a class of elliptical distributions with parameters μ and Σ. Under a noninformative prior distribution, we obtain the posterior distribution, posterior mean, and generalized maximim likelihood estimators of μ and Σ. Under the entropy loss and quadratic loss, the best Bayesian estimators of Σ are derived as well. Some applications are given
Study of ratio of tritium concentration in plants water to tritium concentration in air moisture for chronic atmospheric release of tritium
AbstractSpecific activity models (SA) are often used to estimate tritium concentration in the plants for chronic-release of atmospheric HTO in some regulatory models by some countries and commissions. In such models, a major assumption is that the value of specific activity of tritium of tritium oxide in vegetation to the specific activity of tritium of tritium oxide in air moisture is maintained at a constant ratio (R). The value of R is an important factor in determining tritium concentration and dose from chronic atmospheric release. But the value of R recommended is different from different models. Concentrations of tritium in plants will be have huge difference in plants because of the difference of the value of R, and this in turn would result in difference of ingestion dose via food chain. Some studies suggested that a site-specific distribution of R should be developed in suing a specific activity model. In this study, distribution of R is established for the Qinshan NPP Base. The environmental monitoring data of tritium concentration in five type plants (rapeseed, tea, cabbage, radish and rice) and air at three sampling points (Xiajiawan, Qinlian and Ganpu) around Qinshan NPP Base(QNNP) over a 4 years period as the basis for analysis, and the tritium ratio(R) between plant water and air moisture were determined. The results showed the average value of R of five plants were 0.103, 0.687, 1.055, 0.695 and 0.183 respectively. These values of R are mostly consistent with the law presented by foreign literature, only the value of R for cabbage is greater than the value of R for foliage vegetation presented by foreign reports. This is partly attributable to the difference of experimental conditions. The concentration of HTO of vegetations around QNNP could be assessed using the values of R recommended by this report for chronic release of atmospheric HTO
Identification of Properties Important to Protein Aggregation Using Feature Selection
Background: Protein aggregation is a significant problem in the biopharmaceutical industry (protein drug stability) and is associated medically with over 40 human diseases. Although a number of computational models have been developed for predicting aggregation propensity and identifying aggregation-prone regions in proteins, little systematic research has been done to determine physicochemical properties relevant to aggregation and their relative importance to this important process. Such studies may result in not only accurately predicting peptide aggregation propensities and identifying aggregation prone regions in proteins, but also aid in discovering additional underlying mechanisms governing this process.
Results: We use two feature selection algorithms to identify 16 features, out of a total of 560 physicochemical properties, presumably important to protein aggregation. Two predictors (ProA-SVM and ProA-RF) using selected features are built for predicting peptide aggregation propensity and identifying aggregation prone regions in proteins. Both methods are compared favourably to other state-of-the-art algorithms in cross validation. The identified important properties are fairly consistent with previous studies and bring some new insights into protein and peptide aggregation. One interesting new finding is that aggregation prone peptide sequences have similar properties to signal peptide and signal anchor sequences.
Conclusions: Both predictors are implemented in a freely available web application (http://www.abl.ku.edu/ProA/ webcite). We suggest that the quaternary structure of protein aggregates, especially soluble oligomers, may allow the formation of new molecular recognition signals that guide aggregate targeting to specific cellular sites
Risk Factors for Invasive Cryptococcus neoformans Diseases: A Case-Control Study
Background: Cryptococcus neoformans is a ubiquitous environmental fungus that can cause life-threatening meningitis and fungemia, often in the presence of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), liver cirrhosis, diabetes mellitus, or other medical conditions. To distinguish risk factors from comorbidities, we performed a hospital-based, density-sampled, matched case-control study. Methods: All new-onset cryptococcal meningitis cases and cryptococcemia cases at a university hospital in Taiwan from 2002–2010 were retrospectively identified from the computerized inpatient registry and were included in this study. Controls were selected from those hospitalized patients not experiencing cryptococcal meningitis or cryptococcemia. Controls and cases were matched by admission date, age, and gender. Conditional logistic regression was used to analyze the risk factors. Results: A total of 101 patients with cryptococcal meningitis (266 controls) and 47 patients with cryptococcemia (188 controls), of whom 32 patients had both cryptococcal meningitis and cryptococcemia, were included in this study. Multivariate regression analysis showed that AIDS (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = 181.4; p < 0.001), decompensated liver cirrhosis (aOR = 8.5; p = 0.008), and cell-mediated immunity (CMI)-suppressive regimens without calcineurin inhibitors (CAs) (aOR = 15.9; p < 0.001) were independent risk factors for cryptococcal meningitis. Moreover, AIDS (aOR = 216.3, p < 0.001), decompensated liver cirrhosis (aOR = 23.8; p < 0.001), CMI-suppressive regimens without CAs (aOR = 7.3; p = 0.034), and autoimmune diseases (aOR = 9.3; p = 0.038) were independent risk factors for developing cryptococcemia. On the other hand, diabetes mellitus and other medical conditions were not found to be risk factors for cryptococcal meningitis or cryptococcemia. Conclusions: The findings confirm AIDS, decompensated liver cirrhosis, CMI-suppressive regimens without CAs, and autoimmune diseases are risk factors for invasive C. neoformans diseases
Open Set Synthetic Image Source Attribution
AI-generated images have become increasingly realistic and have garnered
significant public attention. While synthetic images are intriguing due to
their realism, they also pose an important misinformation threat. To address
this new threat, researchers have developed multiple algorithms to detect
synthetic images and identify their source generators. However, most existing
source attribution techniques are designed to operate in a closed-set scenario,
i.e. they can only be used to discriminate between known image generators. By
contrast, new image-generation techniques are rapidly emerging. To contend with
this, there is a great need for open-set source attribution techniques that can
identify when synthetic images have originated from new, unseen generators. To
address this problem, we propose a new metric learning-based approach. Our
technique works by learning transferrable embeddings capable of discriminating
between generators, even when they are not seen during training. An image is
first assigned to a candidate generator, then is accepted or rejected based on
its distance in the embedding space from known generators' learned reference
points. Importantly, we identify that initializing our source attribution
embedding network by pretraining it on image camera identification can improve
our embeddings' transferability. Through a series of experiments, we
demonstrate our approach's ability to attribute the source of synthetic images
in open-set scenarios
VideoFACT: Detecting Video Forgeries Using Attention, Scene Context, and Forensic Traces
Fake videos represent an important misinformation threat. While existing
forensic networks have demonstrated strong performance on image forgeries,
recent results reported on the Adobe VideoSham dataset show that these networks
fail to identify fake content in videos. In this paper, we show that this is
due to video coding, which introduces local variation into forensic traces. In
response, we propose VideoFACT - a new network that is able to detect and
localize a wide variety of video forgeries and manipulations. To overcome
challenges that existing networks face when analyzing videos, our network
utilizes both forensic embeddings to capture traces left by manipulation,
context embeddings to control for variation in forensic traces introduced by
video coding, and a deep self-attention mechanism to estimate the quality and
relative importance of local forensic embeddings. We create several new video
forgery datasets and use these, along with publicly available data, to
experimentally evaluate our network's performance. These results show that our
proposed network is able to identify a diverse set of video forgeries,
including those not encountered during training. Furthermore, we show that our
network can be fine-tuned to achieve even stronger performance on challenging
AI-based manipulations
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