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RGB and CYMK are two major coloring schemes currently available for light colors and pigment colors, respectively. Both systems use letter-based color codes that require a large range of values to represent different colors. The problem is that these two systems are hard to use for manipulating any operations involving combinations of colors, and they lack the capacity for inter-changeability or unification. Based on prime number theory and Goldbach’s conjecture, this study presents a universal color system (C235) using a number-based structure to encode, compute and unify all colors on a color wheel. The proposed C235 system offers a unified representation for the efficient encoding and effective manipulation of color. It can be applied to designing a high-rate LCD system and colorizing objects with multiple attributes and DNA codons, opening the door to manipulating colors and lights for even broader applications.

Item does not contain fulltext De novo variants are a leading cause of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), but because every monogenic NDD is different and usually extremely rare, it remains a major challenge to understand the complete phenotype and genotype spectrum of any morbid gene. According to OMIM, heterozygous variants in KDM6B cause "neurodevelopmental disorder with coarse facies and mild distal skeletal abnormalities." Here, by examining the molecular and clinical spectrum of 85 reported individuals with mostly de novo (likely) pathogenic KDM6B variants, we demonstrate that this description is inaccurate and potentially misleading. Cognitive deficits are seen consistently in all individuals, but the overall phenotype is highly variable. Notably, coarse facies and distal skeletal anomalies, as defined by OMIM, are rare in this expanded cohort while other features are unexpectedly common (e.g., hypotonia, psychosis, etc.). Using 3D protein structure analysis and an innovative dual Drosophila gain-of-function assay, we demonstrated a disruptive effect of 11 missense/in-frame indels located in or near the enzymatic JmJC or Zn-containing domain of KDM6B. Consistent with the role of KDM6B in human cognition, we demonstrated a role for the Drosophila KDM6B ortholog in memory and behavior. Taken together, we accurately define the broad clinical spectrum of the KDM6B-related NDD, introduce an innovative functional testing paradigm for the assessment of KDM6B variants, and demonstrate a conserved role for KDM6B in cognition and behavior. Our study demonstrates the critical importance of international collaboration, sharing of clinical data, and rigorous functional analysis of genetic variants to ensure correct disease diagnosis for rare disorders.

The catalytic cycle of cytochrome c oxidase (COX) couples the reduction of oxygen to the translocation of protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane and involves several intermediate states of the heme a

Future wearable and portable devices with multiple transmit antennas operating below 6 GHz are constrained by regulatory limitations on the level of electromagnetic radiation a user can be exposed to, measured using the specific absorption rate (SAR). Signaling designs that are optimized to include SAR constraints can improve the performance of uplink transmission. These signaling schemes could include closed-loop beamforming, closed-loop precoding, and space-time coding, which have all been shown to achieve increased rates when optimized as a function of SAR. Previous research addressed SAR constrained optimization only within a single coherence time block. In this paper, we present transmit policies that dynamically allocate user electromagnetic radiation exposure over time. We propose three exposure allocation methods — optimal, uniform, and asymptotic — in the practical case with causal channel state information (CSI), and an on-off transmission approach for the low SAR-to-noise ratio regime. Our results demonstrate that the performance of SAR-aware transmission can be further improved by exploiting frequency and time diversity.

Reliability engineering concerned with failure of technical inanimate systems usually uses the vocabulary and notions of human mortality, e.g., infant mortality vs. senescence mortality. Yet, few data are available to support such a parallel description. Here, we focus on early-stage (infant) mortality for two inanimate systems, incandescent light bulbs and soap films, and show the parallel description is clearly valid. Theoretical considerations of the thermo-electrical properties of electrical conductors allow us to link bulb failure to inherent mechanical defects. We then demonstrate the converse, that is, knowing the failure rate for an ensemble of light bulbs, it is possible to deduce the distribution of defects in wire thickness in the ensemble. Using measurements of lifetimes for soap films, we show how this methodology links failure rate to geometry of the system; in the case presented, this is the length of the tube containing the films. In a similar manner, for a third example, the time-dependent death rate due to congenital aortic valve stenosis is related to the distribution of degrees of severity of this condition, as a function of time. The results not only validate clearly the parallel description noted above, but also point firmly to application of the methodology to humans, with the consequent ability to gain more insight into the role of abnormalities in infant mortality.

This brief overview offers some centennial reflections on Hoover collectors and key collections, Hoover exhibitions and publications.

Biologically, for any organism life does not start at birth but at fertilization of the embryo. Embryonic development is of great importance because it determines congenital anomalies and influences their severity. Whereas there is detailed qualitative knowledge of the successive steps of embryonic development, little is known about their probabilities of success or failure. Embryonic mortality as a function of post fertilization time provides a simple (albeit crude) way to identify major defects. We find that, in line with the few other species for which data are available, the embryonic mortality of zebrafish has a prominent peak shortly after fertilization. This is called the early embryonic mortality (EEM) effect. Although a number of immediate causes of death (e.g. infection, excess of carbon dioxide or of lactic acid, chromosomal defects) can be cited, the common underlying factor remains unknown. After reviewing embryonic mortality data available for chicken and a few other farm animals, we explain that zebrafish are particularly suited for such a study because embryogenesis can be followed from its very beginning and can be observed easily thanks to transparent egg shells. We report the following findings. (i) The mortality peak occurs in the first 15% of the 75-80 hours of embryogenesis and it is about 50 times higher than the low plateau which follows. (ii) The shape of the age-specific death rate is largely independent of the death level. Presently, little is known about the nature of embryonic defects. However, by reviewing two special cases we show that even small initial defects, e.g. spatial cellular asymmetries or irregularities in the timing of development, carry with them lethal effects in later stages of embryogenesis., 25 pages, 11 figures

Electromagnetic exposure from wireless devices is strictly regulated around the world to ensure the safety of consumers. Recent studies have demonstrated that multi-antenna systems can leverage signal-level exposure models to jointly mitigate user radiation absorption and achieve high data rates. This is especially important for millimeter wave technologies, which are susceptible to power back-off techniques due to high propagation and blockage losses. However, prior models require significant overhead in the form of exposure measurements to compute model parameters and cannot be easily modified to predict electromagnetic absorption in different testing configurations. This article proposes methods to approximate the characteristic matrix of a quadratic model for two exposure measures in the millimeter wave band: incident power density and surface specific absorption rate (SAR). The presented models can be calculated with a small number of parameters and can be altered to account for mutual coupling, near-field effects, and changes in the exposure scenario. Spatial sampling schemes based on these models are derived to determine how many testing points are necessary to estimate exposure in a region within a specified margin of error. Software simulation results with half-wave dipoles validate the accuracy of the proposed models in a millimeter wave scenario.

We propose a novel equivalent model for a quantizer with noisy input (the desired signal corrupted by measurement noise). It presents the quantizer output as a sum of the desired signal after it passes through a nonlinear element with a known equivalent transfer function and an equivalent additive white noise. The equivalent transfer function takes the form of a conditional expectation of the quantizer output given the desired signal portion of its input. The proposed model proves to be effective for the analysis and design of MIMO systems employing low-resolution quantizers (analog to digital and digital to analog converters, ADCs and DACs, respectively). We also demonstrate the efficacy of the model through several example applications for 1) the design of digital dither that mitigates the effect of DAC quantization error in a MIMO transmitter and significantly reduces the DAC resolution requirement; 2) the determination of the minimal ADC resolution required for operation of conventional MIMO receivers designed for infinite-resolution ADC arrays, without incurring significant performance degradation; and 3) the design of simple MIMO receivers (ML and MMSE) that mitigate the effect of insufficient ADC resolution, thereby extending the receiver SNR operating range without an undue complexity increase.

The paper presents complexity results and performance guaranties for a family of approximation algorithms for an optimisation problem arising in software testing and manufacturing. The problem is formulated as a partitioning of a set where each element has an associated subset in another set, but can also be viewed as a scheduling problem with infinitely large communication delay, precedence constraints in the form of a bipartite graph, and duplication.

Electromagnetic exposure metrics such as specific absorption rate (SAR) are used to assess the user safety of portable wireless devices under all transmitting conditions. When there are multiple transmitter chains operating at a single frequency, the process of determining compliance is complicated by the fact that testing needs to cover all possible combinations of transmissions from all antennas. For $N$ antennas, the number of possible distinct transmitted signals can grow quickly with $N$ . We propose a compliance test whose measurement time burden is linear in $N$ , independently of the number or type of transmitted signals. For $N\geq 3$ antennas, the proposed test requires $7N-12$ excitations and corresponding measurements per probe location. Using analysis, simulations, and measurements with SAR compliance tools, we establish the accuracy of the method as compared with exhaustive measurements over all possible transmitted signals. The method is useful in evaluating the compliance of portable devices that use codebooks or beamforming as part of their transmission capabilities.

Investigations of a possible connection between population density and the propagation and magnitude of epidemics have so far led to mixed and unconvincing results. There are three reasons for that. (i) Previous studies did not focus on the appropriate density interval. (ii) For the density to be a meaningful variable the population must be distributed as uniformly as possible. If an area has towns and cities where a majority of the population is concentrated its average density is meaningless. (iii) In the propagation of an epidemic the initial proportion of susceptibles (that is to say persons who have not developed an immunity) is an essential, yet usually unknown, factor. The assumption that most of the population is susceptible holds only for new strain of diseases. It will be shown that when these requirements are taken care of, the size of epidemics is indeed closely connected with the population density. This empirical observation comes as a welcome confirmation of the classical KMK (Kermack-McKendrick 1927) model. Indeed, one of its key predictions is that the size of the epidemic increases strongly (and in a non linear way) with the initial density of susceptibles. An interesting consequence is that, contrary to common beliefs, in sparsely populated territories, like Alaska, Australia or the west coast of the United states the size of epidemics among native populations must have been limited by the low density even for diseases for which the natives had no immunity (i.e., were susceptibles)., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures

We provide a mutual information lower bound that can be used to analyze the effect of training in models with unknown parameters. For large-scale systems, we show that this bound can be calculated using the difference between two derivatives of a conditional entropy function. The bound does not require explicit estimation of the unknown parameters. We provide a step-by-step process for computing the bound, and provide an example application. A comparison with known classical mutual information bounds is provided., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.00970

Le concept de réseau est aujourd'hui largement entré dans le vocabulaire des sciences sociales. En histoire, l'introduction du vocabulaire des réseaux a souvent été liée à des démarches situées à une échelle « micro » et travaillant à mettre en évidence l'agency individuelle. Depuis les années 1990, une analyse de réseaux plus formalisée a fait des apparitions épisodiques, et inégales selon les domaines linguistiques, dans d'autres travaux historiques fondés au contraire sur des observations systématiques à une échelle macro. Après 30 ans d'une intégration de la catégorie à la démarche historique, un véritable savoir-faire historien émerge autour des questionnements auxquels elle est associée et des méthodologies qu'elle implique. Cependant, si l'analyse de réseaux a déjà largement fait la preuve de son intérêt dans certains domaines spécifiques de l’histoire, il existe trop peu de dialogue entre ceux qui la pratiquent ; notre souhait, en donnant à voir les parentés et les différences entre des textes issus de pays et de sous-disciplines variés, est bien de promouvoir un tel dialogue., The concept of network has widely been adopted in the vocabulary of social sciences. Historical research using the vocabulary of networks has often been associated to a “micro” approach aiming to highlight individual agency. Since 1990, a more formalized approach to network analysis has unevenly appeared, depending on the linguistic area, in other historical research based, on the contrary, on systematic macro scale observations. After 30 years of integrating the questions and the methods of the network approach into historical research it is possible to observe the emergence of a true “savoir faire” of historians. However, although the interest of applying a network approach in certain specific domains has been largely shown, there is still little dialog among researchers who practice it. By showing the relations and the differences between texts coming from different countries and various sub-disciplines we wish to contribute to such dialogue.

This manuscript proposes a significant step in our long-run investigation of infant mortality across species. Since 2016 (Berrut et al. 2016) a succession of studies (Bois et al. 2019) have traced infant mortality from organisms of high complexity (e.g. mammals) down to unicellular organisms. Infant mortality may be considered as a filtering process through which organisms with potentially lethal congenital defects are eliminated. Such defects may have many causes but here we focus particularly on mishaps resulting from non-optimal conditions in the production of proteins, enzymes and other crucial macromolecules. The statistical signature of infant mortality consists in a falling age-specific death rate. The question we address here is whether infant mortality episodes take place in bacteria in the minutes precededing or following cell division. It will be shown that while experiments carried out in the 20th century tried but failed to detect such an effect (mostly because of limited sample size), more recent observations provided consistent evidence of a sizeable mortality, with a rate of the order of 0.7 per 1,000 per hour, in the exponential growth phase of E. coli. A further crucial test will be to measure the age-specific, post-division death rate. An experiment is outlined for that purpose. It is based on the selection of stained cells through flow cytometry and the derivation of their ages at death from their sizes. If an infant mortality effect can be identified in E. coli it can be conjectured that a similar effect also exists in other unicellular organisms, both prokaryote and eukaryote., Comment: 16 p., 5 figures

The influence of per capita income on life expectancy is well documented, mostly through studies of multinational samples. However, one expects fairly weak correlations at both ends of the life span, that is to say in early infancy and in age groups of elderly from 85 to 100 years. The reason is that at both ends mortality is largely controled by biological factors rather than by socio-economic conditions. In order to test this conjecture, we explore the influence of income on age groups, separately in France, the United States and South Korea. More precisely in each country we compare income and mortality data in as many regional subunits as possible. One noteworthy constatation is that, contrary to a common view, personal income is only weakly correlated with infant mortality (i.e. mortality under the age of one year). More broadly, we propose as a conjecture that the common pattern revealed by the analysis of the three countries is also valid in other developed countries., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Birth rates differ strongly across European states, despite the deep economic harmonisation process related to European integration. This study uses large scale administrative data from France and Germany to analyse and directly compare fertility patterns in two major European economies over a period of 15 years. Strong evidence is found that opportunity costs play a role in fertility decisions, and for a positive income effect for females with high earnings. Females in Germany adapt their fertility behaviour more strongly in response to economic incentives than their counterpartsin France. This is explained by pronounced differences in the national approaches to childcare support.

Using data from both the US and UK we examine the survival and mortality of companies in both the early stage or start-up and mature phases. The shape of the mortality curve is broadly similar to that of humans. Even small single cellular organisms such as rotifers have a similar shape. The mortality falls in the early stages in a hyperbolic manner until around 20–30 years when it begins to rise broadly according to the Gompertz exponential law. To explain in simple terms these features we adapt the MinMax model introduced by the authors elsewhere to explain the shape of the human mortality curve.

In a general way at all ages and for almost all diseases, male death rates are higher than female death rates. Here we report a case in which the opposite holds, namely for tuberculosis (TB) mortality between the ages of 5 and 25, female death rates are about two times higher than male rates. What makes this observation of interest is that it occurs in all countries for which data are available (e.g. Britain, Switzerland and United States), and in all years from the end of the 19th century up to the time in the 1960s when TB became a very rare disease in all developed countries. The fact that this regularity holds despite a drastic reduction in the number of deaths is also noteworthy. So far, the reason of this anomaly remains an open question but the effect is so accurate that it can be used for probing the reliability of mortality records. This will be explained in the case of developing countries. For instance, it turns out that in South African TB death data as published (and revised) by the “World Health Organization”, female deaths were certainly under-estimated by a factor of two. Another implication of our results comes once they are combined with the finding of Bini et al. (2014). It is suggested that clearer insight may be gained by testing the levels of testosterone, progesterone and estrogens in TB patients (particularly in children and young adults) on the one hand and in control groups of healthy volunteers of same sex and age on the other hand.

One-bit transceivers with strongly nonlinear characteristics are being considered for wireless communication because of their low cost and low power consumption. Although each such transceiver can support only a low data rate, multiple such transceivers can be used to obtain an aggregate high data rate. An important part of many communication systems is the process of channel estimation, which is particularly challenging when the estimation process uses these transceivers. The standard analysis of estimation mean-square error versus training length that is available for linear transceivers does not apply with the nonlinearities inherent in one-bit transceivers. We analyze the training requirements in a large- scale system and show that the optimal number of training symbols strongly depends on the number of receivers, and the optimal number of training symbols can be significantly smaller than the number of transmitters. These results contrast sharply with classical results obtained with linear transceivers.

Ever since the studies of Louis-Adolphe Bertillon in the late 19th century it has been known that marital status and number of children markedly affect death and suicide rates. This led in 1898 Emile Durkheim to conjecture a connection between social isolation (especially at family level) and suicide. However, further progress was long hampered by the limited statistical data available from death certificates. Recently, it was shown by the present authors that disability data from census records can be used as a reliable substitute for mortality data. This opens a new route to investigations of family ties because census information goes much beyond the limited data reported on death certificates. It is shown that the disability rate of adults decreases when they have more family links. More precisely, the reduction of the parents' disability brought about by the presence of a child reveals that the strength of ties between parents and child is highest in the first year after birth and then weakens steadily as the child ages. It will also be seen that the strength of the bond between husband and wife is highest when they are of same age and decreases fairly steadily when the age gap increases., 20 p., 10 figures

In the development of 5G communication systems, multiantenna transmitting architectures and millimeter-wave operating frequency bands are effective ways to improve the communication data rate. In order to estimate the electromagnetic exposure under multiantenna transmitters installed in portable devices working in long-term evolution (LTE) and millimeter-wave bands, this paper generalizes a low-order model to higher orders based on the Fourier series expansion for a fast and accurate evaluation and prediction of electromagnetic absorption (EA) as a function of the phase difference among multiple transmitters. Several numerical and experimental examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed high-order model in multiple LTE, 5G, and millimeter-wave communication bands. With the excellent capability of calculating and predicting EA with a low error, this high-order model can be used to improve the bio-electromagnetic performances of multiantenna portable devices when combined with other communication technologies.

The Farr-Bertillon law states that the mortality rate of single and widowed persons is about three times the rate of married people of same age. This excess mortality can be measured with good accuracy for all ages except for young widowers. The reason is that, at least nowadays, very few people become widowed under the age of 30. Here we show that disability data from census records can also be used as a reliable substitute for mortality rates. In fact excess-disability and excess-mortality go hand in hand. Moreover, as there are about ten times more cases of disability than deaths, the disability variable is able to offer more accurate measurements in all cases where the number of deaths is small. This allows a more accurate investigation of the young widower effect; it confirms that, as already suspected from death rate data, there is a huge spike between the ages of 20 and 30. By using disability rates we can also study additional features not accessible using death rate data. For example we can examine the health impact of a change in living place. The observed temporary inflated disability rate confirms what could be expected by invoking the "Transient Shock" conjecture formulated by the authors in a previous paper., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures

In radio frequency systems where a load is driven by a source through a passive impedance matching circuit, the bandwidth over which match can be attained is limited. The Bode–Fano upper bound is often invoked to find this limit. We show that the bound is loose for some loads and, hence, cannot be attained by any network. We present a simple method to improve the bound and give conditions under which the improved bound is tight. The improved bound requires no additional assumptions or conditions beyond what is used for the Bode–Fano bound. Applications to analytical and numerical load models are demonstrated.

After birth, setting up an effective immune system is a major challenge for all living organisms. In this paper we show that this process can be explored by using the age-specific infant death rate as a kind of sensor. This is made possible because, as shown by the authors in Berrut et al. (2016), between birth and a critical age t c , for all mammals the death rate decreases with age as a smooth hyperbolic function. For humans t c is equal to 10 years. It turns out that for some causes of deaths and specific ages the hyperbolic fall displays temporary spikes which, it is assumed, correspond to specific events in the organism’s response to exogenous factors. One of these spikes occurs 10 days after birth and there is another at the age of 300 days. It is shown that the first spike is related to viral infections whereas the second is related to bacterial diseases. By going back to former time periods during which infant mortality was much higher than it is currently, one gets a magnified view of these peaks. They give us useful information about how an organism adapts to new conditions. Apart from the reaction to pathogens, the same methodology can be used to study the response to changes in other external conditions, e.g. temperature or oxygen level.

Fifth generation (5G) and beyond cellular systems are expected to support multiple uplink transmit antennas. Previous research demonstrates that designing waveforms satisfying near field user exposure constraints affects the far-field data rates achievable by portable devices using multiple transmit antennas. Therefore, user exposure constraints need to be taken into account in the uplink transmission covariance matrix design (e.g., precoder design) for 5G. Specific absorption rate (SAR) is a widely accepted user exposure measurement used in wireless communication regulations throughout the world. In this paper, we perform sum-rate analysis for a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with SAR constraints enforced at each user. The maximum achievable sum rates for various channel state information at the transmitter scenarios are studied in this paper. The SAR-aware MIMO transmission methods are based on the modified waterfilling algorithm. Simulation results show our proposed methods outperform the conventional transmission strategy for the two user case.

Humans have two facets, biological and social. Whereas it is a common idea that poor social conditions affect the biological facet for instance by reducing life expectancy, there are few known cases where an economic effect is affected by the biological facet in a way which can be predicted. The purpose of the paper is to present such a case. In other words, we are going to decompose an economic phenomenon into its biological and social components, a step which provides a marked conceptual simplification. The economic phenomenon that we consider here is one of the most basic that one can think of, namely the relationship between personal income and life expectancy. Intuitively, one is not really surprised that wealthy people live longer than poor people. Here, however, we show an effect which is far less obvious, namely the fact that this relationship does not hold at both extremities of the lifespan interval. The disconnection between income and neonatal (i.e. , in the first 28 days after birth) mortality is quite impressive. This observation is particularly significant on account of the fact that the infant mortality (i.e. , in the first 365 days after birth) is often taken by economists as a proxy of development when no reliable income data are available. This indicator may be valid for very poor countries where the burden of death due to infectious diseases remains very high, but it is not valid in developed countries such as those considered in this paper. More specifically, we explore the influence of income on mortality by age, separately in France, the United States and South Korea. The same pattern appears for the curves of the (income-mortality) correlation as a function of age. We conjecture that this pattern will be observed in any developed country where the test can be performed. For the test to be possible the main requirement is the availability of income and age-specific mortality data at regional level.

This paper considers a variant of the relocation problem, which is formulated from an urban renewal project. There is a set of jobs to be processed in a two-machine flow shop subject to a given initial resource level. Each job consumes some units of the resource to start its processing on machine 1 and will return some amount of the resource when it is completed on machine 2. The amount of resource released by a job is not necessarily equal to the amount of resource acquired by the job for starting the process. Subject to the resource constraint, the problem is to find a feasible schedule whose makespan is minimum. In this paper, we first prove the NP-hardness of two special cases. Two heuristic algorithms with different processing characteristics, permutation and non-permutation, are designed to construct feasible schedules. Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms are also proposed to produce approximate solutions. We design and conduct computational experiments to appraise the performances of the proposed algorithms.

The artery wall is equipped with a water permeation barrier that allows blood to flow at high pressure without significant water leak. The precise location of this barrier is unknown despite its importance in vascular function and its contribution to many vascular complications when it is compromised. Herein we map the water permeability in intact arteries, using coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy and isotopic perfusion experiments. Generation of the CARS signal is optimized for water imaging with broadband excitation. We identify the water permeation barrier as the endothelial basolateral membrane and show that the apical membrane is highly permeable. This is confirmed by the distribution of the AQP1 water channel within endothelial membranes. These results indicate that arterial pressure equilibrates within the endothelium and is transmitted to the supporting basement membrane and internal elastic lamina macromolecules with minimal deformation of the sensitive endothelial cell. Disruption of this pressure transmission could contribute to endothelial cell dysfunction in various pathologies.

On the centennial of the Russian Revolution, the article recounts the remarkable experiences of an American eyewitness to the Revolution: historian Frank A. Golder (1877–1929). Golder is best remembered today as the man responsible for amassing the extraordinary Russia and East European collections housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. He was in St. Petersburg in 1914 when Russia entered the Great War; he was in Petrograd in 1917 when the February Revolution brought an end to the Romanov dynasty; he was in Soviet Russia in 1921– 1923 as a famine relief worker, a collector of books, periodicals, and manuscripts, and a political observer of Lenin's government; and he was in the Soviet Union for extended visits in 1925 and 1927, recording the changes in Soviet society after Lenin. Golder kept a detailed diary and was a prolific correspondent and thus left behind extensive documentation of his Russian sojourns. These record his personal efforts to reestablish Russian-American cultural ties suspended during Russia's time of troubles, to serve as a link and a lifeline. The article describes Golder's connections to artists and intellectuals in the Russian capitals and focuses on two cultural institutions: the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Rumiantsev Museum Library (today the Russian State Library) in Moscow.

This paper is about infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, “infant” refers to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition provides a systems science perspective in which birth constitutes a sudden transition falling within the field of application of the Transient Shock (TS) conjecture put forward in Richmond and Roehner (2016c). This conjecture provides predictions about the timing and shape of the death rate peak. It says that there will be a death rate spike whenever external conditions change abruptly and drastically and also predicts that after a steep rise there will be a much longer hyperbolic relaxation process. These predictions can be tested by considering living organisms for which the transient shock occurs several days after birth. Thus, for fish there are three stages: egg, yolk-sac and young adult phases. The TS conjecture predicts a mortality spike at the end of the yolk-sac phase and this timing is indeed confirmed by observation. Secondly, the hyperbolic nature of the relaxation process can be tested using very accurate Swiss statistics for postnatal death rates spanning the period from one hour immediately after birth through to age 10 years. It turns out that since the 19th century despite a significant and large reduction in infant mortality, the shape of the age-specific death rate has remained basically unchanged. Moreover the hyperbolic pattern observed for humans is also found for small primates as recorded in the archives of zoological gardens. Our overall objective is to identify a series of cases which start from simple systems and move step by step to more complex organisms. The cases discussed here we believe represent initial landmarks in this quest.

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) is an exposure safety measure used by regulatory agencies for determining the compliance of portable wireless transmitting devices. It has been shown that compliance of devices with multiple transmitter chains operating at a single frequency can be determined with measurement time that is linear in the number of antennas per probe location. One known example relies on a specific set of excitation signals that turns on one or two antennas at a time. We provide a general requirement on the excitation signals such that a wide class of signals can be used for SAR compliance in linear time. This general requirement allows a subset of the signal "codebook" of the device to be considered as the excitation signals for SAR compliance. We give an example where the excitation signals turn all of the antennas on simultaneously and show its advantages over the existing method.

The precise location and nature of the artery water permeability barrier is unknown. Water imaging in arteries with femtosecond coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy reveals that this barrier is formed by the endothelial basolateral membrane.

In earlier centuries kings and governments employed astrologists to help them take the best decisions. Present-day governments no longer employ astrologists but still have no clear analytical tool to replace them. Over the past two decades we have developed a methodology for the scientific investigation of recurrent historical events. It consists in two steps. (i) Identification and comparison of historical episodes driven by a common mechanism. (ii) Under the reasonable assumption that what has happened several times in the past is likely to happen again, one then derives testable predictions. This of course is nothing other than the protocol used in experimental science when exploring new phenomena. We believe such a tool can give decision makers much better insight. In the present paper we illustrate this analysis by considering challenges, that span more than a century, to US hegemony in the Pacific. The outcomes suggest that it is only through the sidelining of one of the contenders that the confrontation will end. At the time of writing (late 2018) early evidence of this confrontation is already visible at three levels. (i) Growing US concerns for domestic security that are leading to a new form of McCarthyism. (ii) Political instability due to China-US polarization in several Asian countries as well as in the countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative. (iii) Tension and sanctions in procurement and trade., Comment: 38 pages, 5 figures

One of the many interests of the late Dietrich Stauffer was the modelling of mortality. Here we review the features of mortality data for various biological species. Age specific mortality (death rate) leads to a discussion of possible models of the death rate, including that of Gompertz, raising the interesting question: is our lifetime finite or could we contemplate living for ever? The answer judging from many different data sources is that without radical changes in our biology it seems death above age 120 is extremely unlikely. We then show how a toy model, linking mortality to the immune system, can predict the general variation of the death rate with time, spanning both infant and adult phases. The outcome provides underpinning support for the many nutritionists and medical experts who increasingly advocate the benefits to mortality of a healthy lifestyle. Age specific mortality within social networks is also shown to be significantly affected by both psychological and physical shocks. The review concludes with the description of novel experiments using soap films for the study of failure. These allow for a reproduction of high infant mortality, the so-called bath-tub curve of mortality, and the Gompertz law.

Various biomaterials have shown promise as sorbents to remove heavy metals from polluted waters at lower cost than conventional wastewater treatment technologies. The aim of this study is to characterize the ability of the freshwater diatom Navicula subminuscula Manguin to biosorb cadmium, copper and zinc from aqueous solutions. Our results indicate that the biosorption of metals by N. subminuscula increased as the initial concentration of metal ions increased in the medium until a concentration of 100-130 mg L -1 . Biosorption equilibrium was established in 30 minutes. The maximum metal ions biosorbed was found to be 42, 90 and 127 for 16 10 8 diatoms per liter for Cd, Cu and Zn, respectively. The maximum uptake of metals was obtained at pH 6.0 for Cu and at pH 8.0 for Cd and Zn. An increase in the biosorp tion of P. lanceolatum was observed with an increase in temperature from 15 to 25°C. The biosorption of all three metal ions followed the Langmuir isotherm. Competitive biosorption of cadmium, copper and zinc ions was also achieved. The FTIR (Fourier Transformed Infra Red spectroscopy) results of algal biomass revealed the different functional groups at the diatom surface that are able to react with metals in the med ium. The results all together suggest that N. subminusculacan be used as a biosorbent for an efficient removal of heavy metals from aqueous solutions which temperature and pH values could be close to the mean ones of the Tensiftriver.

The influence of conspecific interactions on behavior of individuals is an interesting topic, but with elusive proof. Here, we studied one species of ants Solenopsis invicta (social insects) and one species of tephritid fruit fly Bactrocera dorsalis (non-social insect) to determine whether lifespan of organisms could be affected by changes in the number of individuals interacting. In our experiments, isolated individuals, and the individuals that were grouped every 10 insects, were compared. We found that “singles” had a shorter life expectancy than grouped individuals. We also observed the upsurge of death in 3–4 days after isolation in S. invicta and B. dorsalis . This observation suggests an abrupt transition, which affects S. invicta and B. dorsalis . Our study showed that lifespan of individuals can be affected by group effect, and the effect was not limited to eusocial insects. A hypothesis of initial shock effect, which occurred within 4 to 5 days after isolation, was suggested and need further research to prove it.

The resonant coil magnetometer quantifies paramagnetic particles (PMPs) and has been used to develop magneto-immunoassays in a range of formats. The advantage of magneto-immunoassays is that they are relatively inexpensive, portable, easy to perform and give results in under 5 min. Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Virus (PRRSV) is an infection of domesticated pigs producing large economic losses in the swine industry current diagnosis is performed using commercially available ELISA kits. Here we describe the development of a competitive magneto-immunoassay (MIA) and pilot study with porcine serum samples. The data show that this technology has the potential for use as a rapid and portable in field system for the detection of antibodies in porcine serum to PRRSV. A range of assay parameters and magnetometer settings were optimised, including the concentration of antibody conjugated PMPs used in the assay and movement of an external magnet to pull particles to a sensor surface. PRRSV positive control serum demonstrated competition with antibody conjugated PMPs with a dose dependent relationship. The magneto-immunoassay developed showed good agreement with the PRRS IDEXX X3 ELISA. The PRRSV magneto-immunoassay demonstrated a sensitivity of 73% and specificity of 100%. The results suggest that a rapid assay using the magnetometer technology detects specific anti-PRRSV antibody in pig serum. The magneto-immunoassay is suitable for use as a rapid ‘on-site’ method for the serological detection of PRRSV infection. Keywords: Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory virus, Resonant Coil Magnetometer, Magneto-immunoassay, Competitive immunoassay, Serology, Pig serum

In this report the development of a low SWAP-C mid-infrared imaging system is outlined. This system is designed with a commercially available Vanadium-oxide (VOx) microbolometer camera costing $250 controlled via a Raspberry Pi (RPi) and Python. The camera used was previously characterized to have a NEDT of 25 mK for an integration time of 3.43s at 7 Hz framerate, but from software modifications discussed in this paper it was found that the cameras framerate can be pushed to 32 Hz lowering this integration time to 0.75 s. Due to the low SWAP-C characteristics of the design and the plug-and-play nature of the camera paired with Python code, this system can enable MIR imaging applications that are currently limited by the SWAPC characteristics of currently available detection systems. After outlining the development of interfacing the camera with a computer/microcontroller, the cameras code is extended to a client-server operation that allows for wireless control of the imaging system. This further enables remote operation for applications such as dronebased monitoring/surveillance or trace explosives detection. The report concludes with the discussion of two potential applications of distributed imaging and spectroscopic organics detection.

In 2015 in the United States 612,000 persons died from cancer whereas only 470 died from tuberculosis (TB), a disease which was the main cause of death around 1900. How can one explain such a huge discrepancy in treatment progress? A statistical and medical comparison between TB and cancer will give some clues. What makes the question of particular interest is the fact that TB and cancer also share important features. Both TB and cancer can affect several organs, e.g. the lungs, brain, bones, intestines, skin. What in cancer is called “malignant neoplasm” (tumor) is called “granuloma” in TB. By isolating malignant cells from the rest of the body, such clusters protect the host’s organism but at the same time they are “secure beachheads” from where malignant cells can wander off to new locations. Thus, metastatic tumors have a TB parallel in the form of secondary granulomas. To investigate this parallel more closely we use the age-specific response of organs. Called spectrometric analysis in a previous paper (Berrut et al. 2017), this method provides information about how fast tumors develop and how serious they become. A characterization of the response to TB of organ j is given by the following (age-dependent) death ratio: T j ( t ) = ( death by TB of type j at age t ) ∕ ( all TB deaths at age t ) . The development of cancer tumors can be described by similar profile functions C j ( t ) . It appears that for the same organ T j ( t ) is similar in shape to C j ( t ) . In other words, the idiosyncrasies of each organ are more determinant than the functional differences between TB and cancer. Such observations bring to light vulnerabilities in the way the immune system provides protection to various organs.

Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) is a measure used by regulatory agencies for determining the exposure safety compliance of portable wireless transmitting devices. For devices with multiple transmitter chains operating at a single frequency, determining compliance is complicated by the fact that testing needs to cover all possible combinations of transmissions from all antennas. We give a compliance test of multi-antenna devices with measurement time which is linear in the number of antennas N. The proposed test requires 7N −12 measurements per probe location for N ≥ 3, independently of the number and type of transmitted signals. We evaluate the performance of the proposed test for noisy SAR measurements.

Classical beamforming techniques rely on highly linear transmitters and receivers to allow phase-coherent combining at the transmitter and receiver. The transmitter uses beamforming to steer signal power towards the receiver, and the receiver uses beamforming to gather and coherently combine the signals from multiple receiver antennas. When the transmitters and receivers are instead constrained for power and cost reasons to be non-linear one-bit devices, the potential advantages and performance metrics associated with beamforming are not as well understood. We define beamforming at the transmitter as a codebook design problem to maximize the minimum distance between codewords. We define beamforming at the receiver as the maximum likelihood detector of the transmitted codeword. We show that beamforming with one-bit transceivers is a constellation design problem, and that we can come within a few dB SNR of the capacity attained by linear transceivers., 7 pages, presented in 2018 Information Theory and Applications Workshop

The aim of the plsRglm package is to deal with complete and incomplete datasets through several new techniques or, at least, some which were not yet implemented in R. Indeed, not only does it make available the extension of the PLS regression to the generalized linear regression models, but also bootstrap techniques, leave-one-out and repeated $k$-fold cross-validation. In addition, graphical displays help the user to assess the significance of the predictors when using bootstrap techniques. Biplots (Fig. 4) can be used to delve into the relationship between individuals and variables., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures