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Conspiracy theories are narratives, they tell mostly fictional stories. In that sense, conspiracy theories are creative productions similar to other productions involving narratives, such as poems, films, or stories. However, contrary to these productions regularly studied in the field of creativity, conspiracy theories remain unexplored in this field. The present contribution proposes to consider conspiracy narratives as creative products. We discuss the extent to which these narratives meet the criteria of the standard definition of creativity and how their negative individual and societal consequences place conspiracy narratives in the dark side of creativity. We argue that this new perspective on conspiracies may partly change the way we study their construction and their psychological convenience. We finally discuss some theoretical and methodological perspectives linked to this proposition. Overall, this contribution intends to draw the attention of creativity researchers to these real‐world and abundant creative products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this era of internet transfer of information is in digital form using multimedia files such as image, video, audio, etc. which relies on secure communication techniques to convey information safely. Due to the frequent transfer of videos over the internet nowadays they have become a good cover media for secure and covert communication in the form of video steganography. For efficient video steganography, it must fulfill its basic requirements such as capacity, imperceptibility, and robustness. In order to make a balance between imperceptibility and robustness, an efficient video steganography scheme is proposed for Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) videos. This scheme employs DWT (discrete wavelet transforms) for embedding the secret message inside the video frames utilizing only luminance (Y) component, and the security of the proposed scheme is strengthen by pre-processing the secret message with encryption before embedding. The embedding process is done by utilizing the middle-frequency sub-bands after applying second level 2-D DWT to the video frames to decompose it into 16 sub-bands. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested on different videos with quality metrics including peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM) index, bit error rate (BER) and also by applying Gaussian and salt & pepper noise attacks. Moreover, the scheme is tested for the different level of compression on stego-video and also compared with U and V components used while embedding. Experimental results show that for both types of videos (HD and SD) the proposed scheme is able to achieve high imperceptibility. Further, it also provides robustness against different types of noise attacks and different compression levels which makes the proposed scheme evident for secure data transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Sessile serrated adenomas (SSAs) are important premalignant lesions that are difficult to detect during colonoscopy due to poor definition, concealment by mucous caps, and flat appearance. High definition (HD) colonoscopy may uniquely aid in the detection of these inconspicuous lesions compared to standard definition (SD) colonoscopes. In the absence of existing clinical guidelines to obligate the use of HD colonoscopy for colorectal cancer screening in average-risk patients, demonstrating the benefit of HD colonoscopy on SSA detection rate (SSADR) may help strengthen the evidence to recommend its use in all settings., Aim: To evaluate the benefit of HD colonoscopy compared to SD colonoscopy on SSADR in average-risk patients undergoing screening colonoscopy., Methods: Data from screening colonoscopies for patients aged 50-76 years two years before and two years after the transition from SD colonoscopy to HD colonoscopy at our large, academic teaching center were collected. Patients with symptoms of colorectal disease, positive occult blood test, history of colon polyps, cancer, polyposis syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease or family history of colon cancer or polyps were excluded. Patients whose endoscopists did not perform colonoscopies both before and after scope definition change were also excluded. Differences in individual endoscopist SSADR, average SSADR, and overall SSADR with SD colonoscopy vs HD colonoscopy were also evaluated for significance., Results: A total of 3657 colonoscopies met eligibility criteria with 2012 colonoscopies from the SD colonoscopy period and 1645 colonoscopies from the HD colonoscopy period from a pool of 11 endoscopists. Statistically significant improvements of 2.30% in mean SSADR and 2.53% in overall SSADR were noted with HD colonoscopy ( P = 0.00028 and P = 0.00849, respectively). On the individual level, three endoscopists experienced statistically significant benefit with HD colonoscopy (+5.74%, P = 0.0056; +4.50%, P = 0.0278; +4.84%, P = 0.03486)., Conclusion: Our study suggests that HD colonoscopy statistically significantly improves sessile serrated adenoma detection rate in the screening of average risk patients during screening colonoscopy. By improving the detection and removal of these lesions, adoption of HD colonoscopy may reduce the significant premalignant burden of sessile serrated adenomas., Competing Interests: Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflict of interests that are related to the work submitted for consideration of publication., (©The Author(s) 2022. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.)

A generalized analysis for the evaluation of intermodulation distortions due to nonlinear response of a Mach-Zehnder external intensity modulator has been proposed in this letter. The analysis holds for every modulating signal that can be assumed as a Gaussian process (e.g., subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) and CDMA). In this letter, an experimental confirmation of the theoretical results and a proposal for standard definition are presented [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]