Developmental plasticity of muscle cellularity and swim performance of juvenile Chinook salmon in response to temperature

I investigated the influence of incubation temperature on muscle development and swim performance in juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). In 2011 and 2012, embryos were incubated at different combinations of temperature (7, 9, 15 °C), before and after the onset of free swimming. High-intensity fixed velocity swim tests were performed to assess anaerobic capacity of juveniles. In 2012, these tests were done at a standardized body size (~40 mm). The mean (least-squares) logged times to fatigue of the 15 °C-incubated fish was higher (0.623 ± 0.049 SE) than the 7 °C-incubated fish (0.435 ± 0.048 SE) even after acclimation at a common temperature (9 °C). This indicates a carry-over effect of incubation temperature on swim performance. However, cross-sectional fibre area and number did not correlate with individual swim performance. My study shows the importance of controlling for body size in studies linking muscle cellularity to swim performance

Experimental Study of Moisture Buffering with Simultaneous Indoor RH and Temperature Variation

Hygroscopic materials have the potential to adsorb and release moisture from the environment; effectively buffering the humidity on an indoor environment. This study explores a method to obtain a moisture buffering value of common building materials by developing experimental methods with conditions closer to reality, as opposed to previous step response of humidity variation. Comparing a sinusoidal response with step-response profile modified from the NORD Test for simultaneous temperature and humidity variation, allowed for the variations to be ranked according to their predicted performance over time. This outcome could potentially aid designers in the practical application of hygroscopic non-structural elements where the consideration of moisture buffering can be included in their design; with a more plausible estimation of how hygroscopic materials would respond to environmental condition variations

JETS: Jointly Training FastSpeech2 and HiFi-GAN for End to End Text to Speech

In neural text-to-speech (TTS), two-stage system or a cascade of separately learned models have shown synthesis quality close to human speech. For example, FastSpeech2 transforms an input text to a mel-spectrogram and then HiFi-GAN generates a raw waveform from a mel-spectogram where they are called an acoustic feature generator and a neural vocoder respectively. However, their training pipeline is somewhat cumbersome in that it requires a fine-tuning and an accurate speech-text alignment for optimal performance. In this work, we present end-to-end text-to-speech (E2E-TTS) model which has a simplified training pipeline and outperforms a cascade of separately learned models. Specifically, our proposed model is jointly trained FastSpeech2 and HiFi-GAN with an alignment module. Since there is no acoustic feature mismatch between training and inference, it does not requires fine-tuning. Furthermore, we remove dependency on an external speech-text alignment tool by adopting an alignment learning objective in our joint training framework. Experiments on LJSpeech corpus shows that the proposed model outperforms publicly available, state-of-the-art implementations of ESPNet2-TTS on subjective evaluation (MOS) and some objective evaluations.Comment: Submitted to INTERSPEECH 202

A Rigorous Free-form Lens Model of Abell 2744 to Meet the Hubble Frontier Fields Challenge

Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) imaging of the most powerful lensing clusters provides access to the most magnified distant galaxies. The challenge is to construct lens models capable of describing these complex massive, merging clusters so that individual lensed systems can be reliably identified and their intrinsic properties accurately derived. We apply the free-form lensing method (WSLAP+) to A2744, providing a model independent map of the cluster mass, magnification, and geometric distance estimates to multiply-lensed sources. We solve simultaneously for a smooth cluster component on a pixel grid, together with local deflections by the cluster member galaxies. Combining model prediction with photometric redshift measurements, we correct and complete several systems recently claimed, and identify 4 new systems - totalling 65 images of 21 systems spanning a redshift range of 1.4<z<9.8. The reconstructed mass shows small enhancements in the directions where significant amounts of hot plasma can be seen in X-ray. We compare photometric redshifts with "geometric redshifts", finding a high level of self-consistency. We find excellent agreement between predicted and observed fluxes - with a best-fit slope of 0.999+-0.013 and an RMS of ~0.25 mag, demonstrating that our magnification correction of the lensed background galaxies is very reliable. Intriguingly, few multiply-lensed galaxies are detected beyond z~7.0, despite the high magnification and the limiting redshift of z~11.5 permitted by the HFF filters. With the additional HFF clusters we can better examine the plausibility of any pronounced high-z deficit, with potentially important implications for the reionization epoch and the nature of dark matter.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ with newly identified lensed images in complete HFF dat

Cost effectiveness of strategies to combat cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and tobacco use in sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia: mathematical modelling study

Objective To determine the relative costs and health effects of interventions to combat cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and tobacco related disease in order to guide the allocation of resources in developing countries

Cost effectiveness of strategies to combat cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and tobacco use in sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia: mathematical modelling study

Objective To determine the relative costs and health effects of interventions to combat cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and tobacco related disease in order to guide the allocation of resources in developing countries.Design Cost effectiveness analysis of 123 single or combined prevention and treatment strategies for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and smoking by means of a lifetime population model.Setting Two World Health Organization sub-regions of the world: countries in sub-Saharan Africa with very high adult and high child mortality (AfrE) and countries in South East Asia with high adult and high child mortality (SearD).Data sources Demographic and epidemiological data were taken from the WHO databases of mortality and global burden of disease. Estimates of intervention coverage, effectiveness, and resource needs were drawn from clinical trials, observational studies, and treatment guidelines. Unit costs were taken from the WHO-CHOICE (Choosing Interventions that are Cost-Effective) price database.Main outcome measures Cost per disability adjusted life year (DALY) averted, expressed in international dollars ($Int) for the year 2005.Results Most of the interventions studied were considered highly cost effective, meaning they generate one healthy year of life at a cost of 25$Int150 and <$Int230 per DALY averted in AfrE and SearD respectively); and retinopathy screening and glycaemic control for patients with diabetes (<$Int2100 and <$Int950 per DALY averted in AfrE and SearD respectively).Conclusion This comparative economic assessment has identified a set of population-wide and individual strategies for prevention and control of cardiovascular disease that are inexpensive and cost effective in low resource settings

Adjusting for Gene-Specific Covariates to Improve RNA-seq Analysis

Summary This paper suggests a novel positive false discovery rate (pFDR) controlling method for testing gene-specific hypotheses using a gene-specific covariate variable, such as gene length. We suppose the null probability depends on the covariate variable. In this context, we propose a rejection rule that accounts for heterogeneity among tests by employing two distinct types of null probabilities. We establish a pFDR estimator for a given rejection rule by following Storey\u27s q-value framework. A condition on a type 1 error posterior probability is provided that equivalently characterizes our rejection rule. We also present a suitable procedure for selecting a tuning parameter through cross-validation that maximizes the expected number of hypotheses declared significant. A simulation study demonstrates that our method is comparable to or better than existing methods across realistic scenarios. In data analysis, we find support for our method\u27s premise that the null probability varies with a gene-specific covariate variable