Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series Learning Efficient Nash Equilibria in Distributed Systems Manor Road Building, Oxford Ox1 3uq Learning Efficient Nash Equilibria in Distributed Systems 1. Learning Equilibrium in Complex Interactive Systems

An individual's learning rule is completely uncoupled if it does not depend directly on the actions or payoffs of anyone else. We propose a variant of log linear learning that is completely uncoupled and that selects an efficient (welfare-maximizing) pure Nash equilibrium in all generic n-person games that possess at least one pure Nash equilibrium. In games that do not have such an equilibrium, there is a simple formula that expresses the long-run probability of the various disequilibrium states in terms of two factors: i) the sum of payoffs over all agents, and ii) the maximum payoff gain that results from a unilateral deviation by some agent. This welfare/stability trade-off criterion provides a novel framework for analyzing the selection of disequilibrium as well as equilibrium states in n-person games. Game theory has traditionally focussed on situations that involve a small number of players. In these environments it makes sense to assume that players know the structure of the game and can predict the strategic behavior of their opponents. But there are many situations involving huge numbers of players where these assumptions are not particularly persuasive. Commuters in city traffic are engaged in a game because each person's choice of route affects the driving time of many other drivers, yet it is doubtful that anyone 'knows the game' or fully takes into account the strategies of the other players as is usually posited in game theory. Other examples include decentralized procedures for routing data on the internet, and the design of information sharing protocols for distributed sensors that are attempting to locate a target. These types of games pose novel and challenging questions. Can such systems equilibrate even though agents are unaware of the strategies and behaviors of most (or perhaps all) of the other agents? What kinds of adaptive learning rules make sense in such environments? How long does it take to reach equilibrium assuming it can be reached at all? And what can be said about the welfare properties of the equilibria that result from particular learning rules? In the last few years the study of these issues has been developing rapidly among computer theorists have been investigating the question of whether decentralized rules can be devised that converge to Nash equilibrium (or correlated equilibrium) in general n-person games A related question is whether decentralized learning procedures can be devised that optimize some overall measure of performance or welfare …
Of early animals, anaerobic mitochondria, and a modern sponge

The origin and early evolution of animals marks an important event in life's history. This event is historically associated with an important variable in Earth history – oxygen. One view has it that an increase in oceanic oxygen levels at the end of the Neoproterozoic Era (roughly 600 million years ago) allowed animals to become large and leave fossils. How important was oxygen for the process of early animal evolution? New data show that some modern sponges can survive for several weeks at low oxygen levels. Many groups of animals have mechanisms to cope with low oxygen or anoxia, and very often, mitochondria – organelles usually associated with oxygen – are involved in anaerobic energy metabolism in animals. It is a good time to refresh our memory about the anaerobic capacities of mitochondria in modern animals and how that might relate to the ecology of early metazoans.
Reduced amino acid alphabets exhibit an improved sensitivity and selectivity in fold assignment

MOTIVATION Many proteins with vastly dissimilar sequences are found to share a common fold, as evidenced in the wealth of structures now available in the Protein Data Bank. One idea that has found success in various applications is the concept of a reduced amino acid alphabet, wherein similar amino acids are clustered together. Given the structural similarity exhibited by many apparently dissimilar sequences, we undertook this study looking for improvements in fold recognition by comparing protein sequences written in a reduced alphabet. RESULTS We tested over 150 of the amino acid clustering schemes proposed in the literature with all-versus-all pairwise sequence alignments of sequences in the Distance mAtrix aLIgnment database. We combined several metrics from information retrieval popular in the literature: mean precision, area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve and recall at a fixed error rate and found that, in contrast to previous work, reduced alphabets in many cases outperform full alphabets. We find that reduced alphabets can perform at a level comparable to full alphabets in correct pairwise alignment of sequences and can show increased sensitivity to pairs of sequences with structural similarity but low-sequence identity. Based on these results, we hypothesize that reduced alphabets may also show performance gains with more sophisticated methods such as profile and pattern searches. AVAILABILITY A table of results as well as the substitution matrices and residue groupings from this study can be downloaded from (http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/publications/supplements/alphabets).
Demographic, familial and trait predictors of fruit and vegetable consumption by pre-school children

Abstract Objective: To examine the contribution to fruit and vegetable eating in children of potential predictive variables within the domains of demographics, parental feeding practices and personality traits. Design: Cross-sectional survey. Setting: Questionnaires were distributed to parents through 22 London nursery schools. Subjects: Questionnaires were completed and returned by 564 parents or principal caregivers of 2–6-year-old children. Results: Significant predictors of children's fruit and vegetable intake emerged from all three domains examined. Demographic variables associated with child's vegetable consumption were mother's education and child's age and gender. Only ethnicity was significantly associated with fruit consumption. Parental consumption, breast-feeding and early introduction to fruit and vegetables were related to intake of both. Family mealtimes were associated with higher intake of vegetables, but not of fruit. Two characteristics of children themselves (food neophobia and enjoyment of food) were strongly related to the consumption of fruit and vegetables. Subsequent multivariate analyses revealed that parental intake and child food neophobia independently predicted intake of both foods. In the presence of these, fruit consumption was affected by breast-feeding and early introduction to fruit, whereas vegetable consumption was related only to child's gender and enjoyment of food. Conclusions: These findings may be used to inform future interventions aimed at increasing children's consumption of fruit and vegetables. Parents should be made aware of the possible impact of their own behaviour on the eating habits of their children.
Attribute reduction theory and approach to concept lattice

The theory of the concept lattice is an efficient tool for knowledge representation and knowledge discovery, and is applied to many fields successfully. One focus of knowledge discovery is knowledge reduction. This paper proposes the theory of attribute reduction in the concept lattice, which extends the theory of the concept lattice. In this paper, the judgment theorems of consistent sets are examined, and the discernibility matrix of a formal context is introduced, by which we present an approach to attribute reduction in the concept lattice. The characteristics of three types of attributes are analyzed.
Krylov subspace methods for solving large unsymmetric linear systems

Some algorithms based upon a projection process onto the Krylov subspace K/sub m/ = Span(r/sub 0/, Ar/sub 0/,., A/sup m-1/r/sub 0/) are developed, generalizing the method of conjugate gradients to unsymmetric systems. These methods are extensions of Arnoldi's algorithm for solving eigenvalue problems. The convergence is analyzed in terms of the distance of the solution to the subspace K/sub m/ and some error bounds are established showing in particular a similarity with the conjugate gradient method (for symmetric matrices) when the eigenvalues are real. Several numerical experiments are described and discussed.
An Automatic Method of Finding Topic Boundaries

This article outlines a new method of locating discourse boundaries based on lexical cohesion and a graphical technique called dotplotting. The application of dotplotting to discourse segmentation can be performed either manually, by examining a graph, or automatically, using an optimization algorithm. The results of two experiments involving automatically locating boundaries between a series of concatenated documents are presented. Areas of application and future directions for this work are also outlined.
Reproducibility, accuracy and concordance of Accutrend® Plus for measuring circulating lipid concentration in adults

Introduction The determination of lipid biomarkers by capillary sampling may be useful in the screening, diagnosis and/or personal management of hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular risk. It remains unclear whether the use of the Accutrend® Plus system is appropriate. This study aimed to assess its reproducibility, accuracy and concordance for blood lipid profiling in adults. Materials and methods: Fasting capillary total cholesterol (TC) and triglyceride (TG) concentration on Accutrend® Plus were compared with their venous analogues obtained by a laboratory reference method in sixty-one adults (27 men and 34 women, aged 33.0 years). Supplementary capillary sampling was performed at two consecutive days taking into account macro-nutrient intake. Results: The day-to-day reproducibility of the Accutrend® Plus system proved to be high for TC (ICC = 0.85, P < 0.001), but moderate for TG (ICC = 0.68, P < 0.001). Strong correlations (r ≥ 0.80, P < 0.001) with the reference method were found for TC and TG. Mean difference (limits of agreement) were: 0.26 mmol/L (−0.95, 1.47) for TC, and −0.16 mmol/L (−1.29, 0.98) for TG. The concordance for subject classification according to the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) guidelines was significant (P < 0.001), with substantial agreement for TC (κw = 0.67), and moderate agreement for TG (κw = 0.50). Conclusions: Day-to-day reproducibility of the Accutrend® Plus device for TC and TG is not optimal and lacks accuracy when compared to the reference laboratory method. The concordance between both methods for classifying subjects according to the NCEP is inadequate. Accutrend® Plus device should not be interchangeably used as a substitution for the standard laboratory methods in the diagnosis of hyperlipidemia.
DRP Report : Quantitative Association Mining From Bottom Up and Heuristic Search Perspectives

The traditional association mining focuses on discovering frequent patterns from the categorical data, such as the supermarket transaction data. The quantitative association mining (QAM) is a nature extension of the traditional association mining. It refers to the task of discovering association rules from quantitative data instead of from categorical data. The discrepancies between the two types of data lead to different analytical methods and mining algorithms. Several properties and interestingness measures that play important roles in the traditional association mining do not apply anymore in the quantitative situation. In this paper, we propose two quantitative association mining algorithms from the bottom up and heuristic search perspectives respectively. They take two new interestingness measures, density and correlation, which are better fits for the quantitative situation. The algorithms can find strong correlated intervals in a generally less correlated environment. Experiment results from neuroscience and health social network data validate the feasibility of our algorithms.
Fast and deterministic computation of fixation probability in evolutionary graphs

Abstract : In evolutionary graph theory biologists study the problem of determining the probability that a small number of mutants overtake a population that is structured on a weighted, possibly directed graph. Currently Monte Carlo simulations are used for estimating such fixation probabilities on directed graphs, since no good analytical methods exist. In this paper, we introduce a novel deterministic algorithm for computing fixation probabilities for strongly connected directed, weighted evolutionary graphs under the case of neutral drift, which we show to be a lower bound for the case where the mutant is more fit than the rest of the population (previously, this was only observed from simulation). We also show that, in neutral drift, fixation probability is additive under the weighted, directed case. We implement our algorithm and show experimentally that it consistently outperforms Monte Carlo simulations by several orders of magnitude, which can allow researchers to study fixation probability on much larger graphs.
Monitoring breathing activity and sleep patterns using multimodal non-invasive technologies

The monitoring of sleeping behavioral patterns is of major importance for various reasons such as the detection and treatment of sleep disorders, the assessment of the effect of different medical conditions or medications on the sleep quality, and the assessment of mortality risks associated with sleeping patterns in adults and children. Sleep monitoring by itself is a difficult problem due to both privacy and technical considerations. The proposed system uses a combination of non-invasive sensors to assess and report sleep patterns and breathing activity: a contact-based pressure mattress and a non-contact 2D image acquisition device. To evaluate our system, we used real data collected in Heracleia Lab's assistive living apartment. Our system uses Machine Learning and Computer Vision techniques to automatically analyze the collected data, recognize sleep patterns and track the breathing behavior. It is non-invasive, as it does not disrupt the user's usual sleeping behavior and it can be used both at the clinic and at home with minimal cost. Going one step beyond, we developed a mobile application for visualizing the analyzed data and monitor the patient's sleep status remotely.
Different Impacts of Blood Pressure Variability on the Progression of Cerebral Microbleeds and White Matter Lesions

Background and Purpose— Cerebral microbleeds (CMB) and white matter lesions (WML) are cerebral small vessel diseases. Hypertension is considered the most important risk factor. Its mechanism is not yet clarified. Our study assessed the association of blood pressure variability (BPV) with CMB and WML progression. Methods— Patients with a history of ischemic stroke within 1 to 6 months were consecutively recruited and followed-up for 12 to 18 months. Blood pressure was measured monthly and controlled to a target level. BPV was quantified by the maximum, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, successive variation, standard deviation independent of mean, and successive variation independent of mean. Magnetic resonance imaging was performed at baseline and the end of the study. CMB and WML were rated using Microbleed Anatomic Rating Scale and Age-Related White Matter Changes scales, respectively. Multiple logistic analyses assessed BPV associations with CMB and WML development. Results— Of 720 patients recruited, 500 and 584 had follow-up results for CMB and WML, respectively; 13.2% and 48.1% showed CMB and WML progression, respectively, over a median of 14 months. Patients with CMB had a higher mean, maximum, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, successive variation, standard deviation independent of the mean, and successive variation independent of the mean in either systolic blood pressure or diastolic blood pressure (P<0.05). Systolic blood pressure variability was an independent risk factor for deep and infratentorial CMB progression, whereas diastolic blood pressure variability was independently associated with CMB development in deep regions. WML progression was not significantly associated with BPV between visits. Conclusion— BPV independently predicts CMB progression in deep and infratentorial regions. Clinical Trial Registration Information— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identi-fier: NCT00202020.
Psychometric Properties of the Hypoglycemia Fear Survey-II for Adults With Type 1 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE To perform the first comprehensive psychometric evaluation of the Hypoglycemia Fear Survey-II (HFS-II), a measure of the behavioral and affective dimensions of fear of hypoglycemia, using modern test-theory methods, including item-response theory (IRT). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Surveys completed in four previous studies by 777 adults with type 1 diabetes were aggregated for analysis, with 289 subjects completing both subscales of the HFS-II and 488 subjects completing only the Worry subscale. The aggregated sample (53.3% female, 44.4% using insulin pumps) had a mean age of 41.9 years, diabetes duration of 23.8 years, HbA1c value of 7.7%, and 1.4 severe hypoglycemic episodes in the past year. Data analysis included exploratory factor analysis using polychoric correlations and IRT. Factors were analyzed for fit, trait-level locations, point-measure correlations, and separation values. RESULTS Internal and test-retest reliability was good, as well as convergent validity, as demonstrated by significant correlations with other measures of psychological distress. Scores were significantly higher in subjects who had experienced severe hypoglycemia in the past year. Factor analyses validated the two subscales of the HFS-II. Item analyses showed that 12 of 15 items on the Behavior subscale, and all of the items on the Worry subscale had good-fit statistics. CONCLUSIONS The HFS-II is a reliable and valid measure of the fear of hypoglycemia in adults with type 1 diabetes, and factor analyses and IRT support the two separate subscales of the survey.
Laparoscopic Virtual Mirror New Interaction Paradigm for Monitor Based Augmented Reality

A major roadblock for using augmented reality in many medical and industrial applications is the fact that the user cannot take full advantage of the 3D virtual data. This usually requires the user to move the virtual object, which disturbs the real/virtual alignment, or to move his head around the real objects, which is not always possible and/or practical. This problem becomes more dramatic when a single camera is used for monitor based augmentation, such as in augmented laparoscopic surgery. In this paper we introduce an interaction and 3D visualization paradigm, which presents a new solution to this old problem. The interaction paradigm uses an interactive virtual mirror positioned into the augmented scene, which allows easy and complete interactive visualization of 3D virtual data. This paper focuses on the exemplary application of such visualization techniques to laparoscopic interventions. A large number of such interventions aims at regions inside a specific organ, e.g. blood vessels to be clipped for tumor resection. We use high-resolution intra-operative imaging data generated by a mobile C-arm with cone-beam CT imaging capability. Both the C-arm and the laparoscope are optically tracked and registered in a common world coordinate frame. After patient positioning, port placement, and carbon dioxide insufflation, a C-arm volume is reconstructed during patient exhalation and superimposed in real time on the laparoscopic live video without any need for an additional patient registration procedure. To overcome the missing perception of 3D depth and shape when rendering virtual volume data directly on top of the organ's surface view, we introduce the concept of a laparoscopic virtual mirror: A virtual reflection plane within the live laparoscopic video, which is able to visualize a reflected side view of the organ and its interior. This enables the surgeon to observe the 3D structure of, for example, blood vessels by moving the virtual mirror within the augmented monocular view of the laparoscope.
Geochronology and geochemistry of early‐middle Silurian intrusive rocks in the Lanzhou–Baiyin regions, eastern part of Qilian Block, NW China: Source and tectonic implications

The Qilian Block is one of many continental blocks involved in the early Paleozoic orogenesis of the Central China Orogen, which experienced complex interaction with adjacent blocks and orogens. In this study, we present zircon U–Pb–Hf isotopic, whole‐rock elemental, and Sr–Nd isotopic data of the early‐middle Silurian intrusive rocks in the Lanzhou–Baiyin regions, eastern part of the Qilian Block, to constrain their source and tectonic settings. The Houchangchuan granodiorite and Shichuan monzogranite were emplaced at ca. 437 Ma and ca. 428 Ma, respectively. These granitoids are peraluminous (A/CNK = 1.1–1.3), enriched in LREEs and LILEs (Rb, Th, U, Pb), depleted in HFSEs (Nb, Ta) with negative Eu and Sr anomalies, and have relatively high whole‐rock εNd(t), −4.3 to −2.1, and zircon εHf(t), −10.9 to 1.1, values. The Shichuan monzonite is characterized by intermediate SiO2, metaluminous (A/CNK = ~0.8), and high LREEs fractionation with LILEs (Th, U, Pb) enrichment and HFSEs (Nb, Ta) depletion. We suggest the Houchangchuan granodiorite and Shichuan monzogranite were derived from the metasedimentary (metapelitic) source, which could be the Mesoproterozoic basement of the Qilian Block, and the mantle‐derived materials injected into their source region. The Shichuan monzonite could have a mantle‐derived origin. Integrated with data from previous studies, the early‐middle Silurian (437–428 Ma) intrusive rocks in the eastern part of the Qilian Block were formed during the transition period from a syn‐collisional to postcollisional setting, relating to the collisional process after the consumption of North Qilian Ocean (Proto‐Tethys Ocean) in the northern margin of the Gondwana continent.
Bending Without Breaking: A Two-Study Examination of Employee Resilience in the Face of Job Insecurity

Job insecurity is a ubiquitous threat that has been linked to a number of undesirable emotional, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. Against this backdrop, popular and academic accounts have hailed the ability to bounce back from threats (i.e., resilience) as a crucial competency. We leverage the cognitive-relational model of stress to examine the extent to which resilience (operationalized as both dispositional tendencies and coping strategies) mitigates several negative consequences of job insecurity. We tested the moderating role of resilience in 2 studies. In a cross-sectional study with a sample of 1,071 university employees in the United States, we found resilience weakened the relationships between job insecurity and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and psychological contract breach. In a 2-wave study with 335 employees demographically representative of working population of the United States, we found that resilience mitigated the negative consequences of job insecurity on emotional exhaustion and interpersonal counterproductive work behaviors assessed 1 month later. Results of both studies converge to support the proposed buffering effect of resilience during times of job insecurity.