An idealized numerical study of tropical cyclogenesis and evolution at the Equator

Tropical cyclone formation and evolution at, or near, the Equator is explored using idealized three‐dimensional model simulations, starting from a prescribed, initial, weak counterclockwise rotating vortex in an otherwise quiescent, nonrotating environment. Three simulations are carried out in which the maximum tangential wind speed (5 m surn:x-wiley:qj:media:qj3701:qj3701-math-0001) is specified at an initial radius of 50, 100, or 150 km. After a period of gestation lasting between 30 and 60 hr, the vortices intensify rapidly, the evolution being similar to that for vortices away from the Equator. In particular, the larger the initial vortex size, the longer the gestation period, the larger the maximum intensity attained, and the longer the vortex lifetime. Beyond a few days, the vortices decay as the cyclonic vorticity source provided by the initial vortex is depleted and negative vorticity surrounding the vortex core is drawn inwards by the convectively driven overturning circulation. In these negative vorticity regions, the flow is inertially/centrifugally unstable. The vortex evolution during the mature and decay phases differs from that in simulations away from the Equator, where inertially unstable regions are much more limited in area. Vortex decay in the simulations appears to be related intimately to the development of inertial instability, which is accompanied by an outward‐propagating band of deep convection. The degree to which this band of deep convection is realistic is unknown

Racial Disparities in Incidence of Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer and Patient Survival

Background & Aims: Increasing rates of young-onset colorectal cancer (CRC) have attracted substantial research and media attention, but we know little about racial disparities among younger adults with CRC. We examined racial disparities in young-onset CRC by comparing CRC incidence and relative survival among younger (<50-year-old) adults in 2 time periods. Methods: Using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program of cancer registries, we estimated CRC incidence rates (per 100,000 persons 20–49 years old) from 1992 through 2014 for different periods (1992–1996 vs 2010–2014) and races (white vs black). Relative survival was calculated as the ratio of observed survival to expected survival in a comparable cancer-free population. Results: From 1992–1996 to 2010–2014, CRC incidence increased from 7.5 to 11.0 per 100,000 in white individuals and from 11.7 to 12.7 per 100,000 in black individuals. The increase in rectal cancer was larger in whites (from 2.7 to 4.5 per 100,000) than in blacks (from 3.4 to 4.0 per 100,000); in the 2010–2014 period, blacks and whites had similar rates of rectal cancer. Compared with whites, blacks had smaller increases in relative survival with proximal colon cancer but larger increases in survival with rectal cancer (from 55.3% to 70.8%). Conclusion: In an analysis of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database, we found racial disparities in incidence of young-onset CRC and patient survival for cancer of the colon but minimal difference for rectal cancer. Well-documented and recent increases in young-onset CRC have largely been due to increases in rectal cancer, especially in whites

Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication

Compression has been advocated as one of the principles which pervades inductive inference and prediction - and, from there, it has also been recurrent in definitions and tests of intelligence. However, this connection is less explicit in new approaches to intelligence. In this paper, we advocate that the notion of compression can appear again in definitions and tests of intelligence through the concepts of `mind-reading¿ and `communication¿ in the context of multi-agent systems and social environments. Our main position is that two-part Minimum Message Length (MML) compression is not only more natural and effective for agents with limited resources, but it is also much more appropriate for agents in (co-operative) social environments than one-part compression schemes - particularly those using a posterior-weighted mixture of all available models following Solomonoff¿s theory of prediction. We think that the realisation of these differences is important to avoid a naive view of `intelligence as compression¿ in favour of a better understanding of how, why and where (one-part or two-part, lossless or lossy) compression is needed.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and we thank Kurt Kleiner for some challenging and ultimately very helpful questions in the broad area of this work. We also acknowledge the funding from the Spanish MEC and MICINN for projects TIN2009-06078-E/TIN, Consolider-Ingenio CSD2007-00022 and TIN2010-21062-C02, and Generalitat Valenciana for Prometeo/2008/051.Dowe, DL.; Hernández Orallo, J.; Das, PK. (2011). Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication. En Artificial General Intelligence. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6830:204-211. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22887-2_21S2042116830Chaitin, G.J.: Godel’s theorem and information. International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21(12), 941–954 (1982)Dowe, D.L.: Foreword re C. S. Wallace. Computer Journal 51(5), 523–560 (2008); Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issueDowe, D.L.: Minimum Message Length and statistically consistent invariant (objective?) Bayesian probabilistic inference - from (medical) “evidence”. Social Epistemology 22(4), 433–460 (2008)Dowe, D.L.: MML, hybrid Bayesian network graphical models, statistical consistency, invariance and uniqueness. In: Bandyopadhyay, P.S., Forster, M.R. (eds.) Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Statistics, vol. 7, pp. 901–982. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2011)Dowe, D.L., Hajek, A.R.: A computational extension to the Turing Test. Technical Report #97/322, Dept Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 9 pp (1997)Dowe, D.L., Hajek, A.R.: A non-behavioural, computational extension to the Turing Test. In: Intl. Conf. on Computational Intelligence & multimedia applications (ICCIMA 1998), Gippsland, Australia, pp. 101–106 (February 1998)Hernández-Orallo, J.: Beyond the Turing Test. J. Logic, Language & Information 9(4), 447–466 (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J.: Constructive reinforcement learning. International Journal of Intelligent Systems 15(3), 241–264 (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J.: On the computational measurement of intelligence factors. In: Meystel, A. (ed.) Performance metrics for intelligent systems workshop, pp. 1–8. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, U.S.A (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D.L.: Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence 174(18), 1508–1539 (2010)Hernández-Orallo, J., Minaya-Collado, N.: A formal definition of intelligence based on an intensional variant of Kolmogorov complexity. In: Proc. Intl Symposium of Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS 1998), pp. 146–163. ICSC Press (1998)Legg, S., Hutter, M.: Universal intelligence: A definition of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines 17(4), 391–444 (2007)Lewis, D.K., Shelby-Richardson, J.: Scriven on human unpredictability. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 17(5), 69–74 (1966)Oppy, G., Dowe, D.L.: The Turing Test. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford (2011), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/Salomon, D., Motta, G., Bryant, D.C.O.N.: Handbook of data compression. Springer-Verlag New York Inc., Heidelberg (2009)Sanghi, P., Dowe, D.L.: A computer program capable of passing I.Q. tests. In: 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science (and 7th Australasian Society for Cognitive Science Conference), vol. 2, pp. 570–575. Univ. of NSW, Sydney, Australia (July 2003)Sayood, K.: Introduction to data compression. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2006)Scriven, M.: An essential unpredictability in human behavior. In: Wolman, B.B., Nagel, E. (eds.) Scientific Psychology: Principles and Approaches, pp. 411–425. Basic Books (Perseus Books), New York (1965)Searle, J.R.: Minds, brains and programs. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3, 417–457 (1980)Solomonoff, R.J.: A formal theory of inductive inference. Part I. Information and control 7(1), 1–22 (1964)Sutton, R.S.: Generalization in reinforcement learning: Successful examples using sparse coarse coding. Advances in neural information processing systems, 1038–1044 (1996)Sutton, R.S., Barto, A.G.: Reinforcement learning: An introduction. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)Turing, A.M.: Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59, 433–460 (1950)Veness, J., Ng, K.S., Hutter, M., Silver, D.: A Monte Carlo AIXI Approximation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, JAIR 40, 95–142 (2011)Wallace, C.S.: Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Wallace, C.S., Boulton, D.M.: An information measure for classification. Computer Journal 11(2), 185–194 (1968)Wallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: Intrinsic classification by MML - the Snob program. In: Proc. 7th Australian Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 37–44. World Scientific, Singapore (November 1994)Wallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: Minimum message length and Kolmogorov complexity. Computer Journal 42(4), 270–283 (1999); Special issue on Kolmogorov complexityWallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: MML clustering of multi-state, Poisson, von Mises circular and Gaussian distributions. Statistics and Computing 10, 73–83 (2000

Complex differences in infection rates between ethnic groups in Scotland: a retrospective, national census-linked cohort study of 1.65 million cases

Background Ethnicity can influence susceptibility to infection, as COVID-19 has shown. Few countries have systematically investigated ethnic variations in infection. Methods We linked the Scotland 2001 Census, including ethnic group, to national databases of hospitalizations/deaths and serological diagnoses of bloodborne viruses for 2001–2013. We calculated age-adjusted rate ratios (RRs) in 12 ethnic groups for all infections combined, 15 infection categories, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B (HBV) and hepatitis C (HCV) viruses. Results We analysed over 1.65 million infection-related hospitalisations/deaths. Compared with White Scottish, RRs for all infections combined were 0.8 or lower for Other White British, Other White and Chinese males and females, and 1.2–1.4 for Pakistani and African males and females. Adjustment for socioeconomic status or birthplace had little effect. RRs for specific infection categories followed similar patterns with striking exceptions. For HIV, RRs were 136 in African females and 14 in males; for HBV, 125 in Chinese females and 59 in males, 55 in African females and 24 in males; and for HCV, 2.3–3.1 in Pakistanis and Africans. Conclusions Ethnic differences were found in overall rates and many infection categories, suggesting multiple causative pathways. We recommend census linkage as a powerful method for studying the disproportionate impact of COVID-19

Meditation-induced bliss viewed as release from conditioned neural (thought) patterns that block reward signals in the brain pleasure center

The nucleus accumbens orchestrates processes related to reward and pleasure, including the addictive consequences of repeated reward (e.g., drug addiction and compulsive gambling) and the accompanying feelings of craving and anhedonia. The neurotransmitters dopamine and endogenous opiates play interactive roles in these processes. They are released by natural rewards (i.e., food, water, sex, money, play, etc.) and are released or mimicked by drugs of abuse. Repeated drug use induces conditioned down-regulation of these neurotransmitters, thus causing painful suppression of everyday pleasure. As with many spiritual traditions, Buddhism provides strong advice against the pursuit of worldly pleasures to attain the ‘‘good life.’’ In contrast, many forms of meditation give rise to an immense and abiding joy. Most of these practices involve ‘‘stilling the mind,’’ whereby all content-laden thought (e.g., fantasies, daydreams, plans) ceases, and the mind enters a state of openness, formlessness, clarity, and bliss. This can be explained by the Buddhist suggestion that almost all of our everyday thoughts are a form of addiction. It follows that if we turn off this internal ‘‘gossip of ego,’’ we will find relief from the biochemical dopamine/opiate down-regulation, which is, perhaps, the perpetual concomitant of our daily rumination

Molecular and Historical Aspects of Corn Belt Dent Diversity

Tens-of-thousands of open-pollinated cultivars of corn (Zea mays L.) are being maintained in germplasm banks. Knowledge of the amount and distribution of genetic variation within and among accessions can aid end users in choosing among them. We estimated molecular genetic variation and looked for influences of pedigree, adaptation, and migration in the genetic makeup of conserved Corn-Belt Dent-related germplasm. Plants sampled from 57 accessions representing Corn-Belt Dents, Northern Flints, Southern Dents, plus 12 public inbreds, were genotyped at 20 simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci. For 47 of the accessions, between 5 and 23 plants per accession were genotyped (mean = 9.3). Mean number of alleles per locus was 6.5 overall, 3.17 within accessions, and 3.20 within pooled inbreds. Mean gene diversity was 0.53 within accessions and 0.61 within pooled inbreds. Open-pollinated accessions showed a tendency toward inbreeding (FIS = 0.09), and 85% of genetic variation was shared among them. A Fitch-Margoliash tree strongly supported the distinctiveness of flint from dent germplasm but did not otherwise reveal evidence of genetic structure. Mantel tests revealed significant correlations between genetic distance and geographical (r = 0.54, P= 0.04) or maturity zone (r = 0.33, P = 0.03) distance only if flint germplasm was included in the analyses. A significant correlation (r = 0.76, P \u3c 0.01) was found between days to pollen shed and maturity zone of accession origin. Pedigree, rather than migration or selection, has most influenced the genetic structure of the extant representatives of the open-pollinated cultivars at these SSR loci