TRENDS IN THE ORGANIZATION OF WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

Explored in this paper are the potential effects on the American capitalist system of the latest trends in technology and the division of labor.http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

Three decades of inequality in neonatal and early childhood mortality in singleton births in Scotland

BACKGROUND: Socioeconomic inequality in child mortality highlights opportunities for policies to reduce child deaths. METHODS: We used singleton birth, death and maternity records from Scotland, 1981-2011, to examine mortality rate differences by age across deprivation quintiles over time. We measured the difference between the most and least deprived quintiles (Q5-Q1) and the slope index of inequality (SII) across all quintiles-measures of the absolute deprivation gap, providing an indication of the public health impact. RESULTS: Q5-Q1 remained relatively constant from 1990 onwards for early neonates, widened in the mid-2000s for late neonates, increased in the 1990 s then decreased in the 2000 s in the post-neonates and declined over time in early childhood. The trend over time in SII showed no significant change for early neonates (P = 0.440), significant decrease for post-neonates (P = 0.010) and early childhood (P = 0.043), and significant increase for late neonates (P = 0.011). CONCLUSIONS: Over three decades, the absolute deprivation gap in mortality widened in late neonates but stabilized or declined at other ages. This may reflect improved survival beyond the early neonatal period of babies with conditions related to socioeconomic inequality such as prematurity. Monitoring birth cohort data could enhance understanding of this vulnerable group

Discovery of protein-protein interactions using a combination of linguistic, statistical and graphical information

BACKGROUND: The rapid publication of important research in the biomedical literature makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep current with significant work in their area of interest. RESULTS: This paper reports a scalable method for the discovery of protein-protein interactions in Medline abstracts, using a combination of text analytics, statistical and graphical analysis, and a set of easily implemented rules. Applying these techniques to 12,300 abstracts, a precision of 0.61 and a recall of 0.97 were obtained, (f = 0.74) and when allowing for two-hop and three-hop relations discovered by graphical analysis, the precision was 0.74 (f = 0.83). CONCLUSION: This combination of linguistic and statistical approaches appears to provide the highest precision and recall thus far reported in detecting protein-protein relations using text analytic approaches

Estimating vocal repertoire size is like collecting coupons: a theoretical framework with heterogeneity in signal abundance

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available via Elsevier at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519315001125.Vocal repertoire size is an important behavioural measure in songbirds and mammals with complex vocal communication systems, and has traditionally been used as an indicator of individual fitness, cognitive ability, and social structure. Estimates of asymptotic repertoire size have typically been made using curve fitting techniques. However, the exponential model usually applied in these techniques has never been provided with a theoretical justification based on probability theory, and the model has led to inaccurate estimates. We derived the precise expression for the expected number of distinct signal types observed for a fixed sampling effort: a variation of what is known in the statistical literature as the "Coupon Collector׳s problem". We used empirical data from three species (northern mockingbird, Carolina chickadee, and rock hyrax) to assess the performance of the Coupon Collector model compared to commonly used techniques, such as exponential fitting and repertoire enumeration, and also tested the different models against simulated artificial data sets with the statistical properties of the empirical data. We found that when signal probabilities are dissimilar, the Coupon Collector model provides far more accurate estimates of repertoire size than traditional techniques. Enumeration and exponential curve fitting greatly underestimated repertoire size, despite appearing to have reached saturation. Application of the Coupon Collector model can generate more accurate estimates of repertoire size than the commonly used exponential model of repertoire discovery, and could go a long way towards re-establishing repertoire size as a useful indicator in animal communication research.We would like to thank Carl Wagner for the derivation of the expected value expressions, and Jan Rosinski for fruitful discussion. This work was supported by the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, an Institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture through NSF Award #EF-0832858, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. AK is supported by the Herchel Smith Fund as a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge

Tracking cryptic animals using acoustic multilateration: A system for long-range wolf detection.

The study of animal behavior in the wild requires the ability to locate and observe animals with the minimum disturbance to their natural behavior. This can be challenging for animals that avoid humans, are difficult to detect, or range widely between sightings. Global Positioning System (GPS) collars provide one solution but limited battery life, and the disturbance to the animal caused by capture and collaring can make this impractical in many applications. Wild wolves Canis lupus are an example of a species that is difficult to study in the wild, yet are of considerable conservation and management importance. This manuscript presents a system for accurately locating wolves using differences in the time of arrival of howl vocalizations at multiple recorders (multilateration), synchronized via GPS. This system has been deployed in Yellowstone National Park for two years and has recorded over 1200 instances of howling behavior. As most instances of howling occur at night, or when human observers are not physically present, the system provides location information that would otherwise be unavailable to researchers. The location of a vocalizing animal can, under some circumstances, be determined to within an error of approximately 20 m and at ranges up to 7 km

Probabilistic Modeling Processes for Oil and Gas

Different uncertainties are researched for providing safe and effective development of hydrocarbon deposits and rational operation of oil and gas systems (OGS). The original models and methods, applicable in education and practice for solving problems of system engineering, are proposed. These models allow us to analyze natural and technogenic threats for oil and gas systems on a probabilistic level for a given prognostic time. Transformation and adaptation of models are demonstrated by examples connected with non-destructive testing. The measures of counteraction to threats for the typical manufacturing processes of gas preparation equipment on enterprise are analyzed. The risks for pipelines, pumping liquefied natural gas across the South American territory, are predicted. Results of probabilistic modeling of the sea gas and oil-producing systems from their vulnerability point of view (including various scenarios of possible terrorist influences) are analyzed and interpreted