Echolocation calls, wing shape, diet and phylogenetic diagnosis of the endemic Chinese bat Myotis pequinius

We describe the echolocation calls, flight morphology and diet of the endemic Chinese bat Myotis pequinius Thomas, 1908. Orientation calls are broadband, and reach low terminal frequencies. Diet comprised 80% beetles by volume. Wing shape and call design suggest that the bats fly in cluttered habitats, and the possession of moderately long ears and the dietary composition imply they forage at least sometimes by gleaning. Myotis pequinius resembles a larger Oriental version of the western Palaearctic species M. nattereri. Phylogenetic analysis based on sequences of the cytochrome b gene of mitochondrial DNA (1,140 base pairs) from a range of Palaearctic Myotis species confirmed that M. pequinius is close to the nattereri group, and is a sister-species to the eastern Palaearctic M. bombinus. One bat sequenced from China could not be identified from available species descriptions. It was smaller than M. pequinius, and also differed from it in sequence divergence by 6.7%, suggesting the existence of additional, cryptic taxonomic diversity in this group. Our phylogenetic analysis also supports the recognition of M. schaubi as a species distinct from M. nattereri in Transcaucasia and south-western Asia. Myotis nattereri tschuliensis is more closely related to M. schaubi than to M. nattereri, and is best considered either as a subspecies of M. schaubi, or possibly as a distinct species.

4D GPR tracking of water infiltration in fractured high-porosity limestone

Three thousand liters of water were infiltrated from a 4 m diameter pond to track flow and transport inside fractured carbonates with 20-40 % porosity. Sixteen time-lapse 3D Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) surveys with repetition intervals between 2 hrs and 5 days monitored the spreading of the water bulb in the subsurface. Based on local travel time shifts between repeated GPR survey pairs, localized changes of volumetric water content can be related to the processes of wetting, saturation and drainage. Deformation bands consisting of thin sub vertical sheets of crushed grains reduce the magnitude of water content changes but enhance flow in sheet parallel direction. This causes an earlier break through across a stratigraphic boundary compared to porous limestone without deformation bands. This experiment shows how time-lapse 3D GPR or 4D GPR can non-invasively track ongoing flow processes in rock-volumes of over 100 m3.

Executive functioning of 4 children with hyperphenylalaninemia from childhood to adolescence

Hyperphenylalaninemia is a variant of phenylketonuria, and debate remains as to what, if any, active management of this condition is required to preserve cognitive function and psychological well-being. This study is the first to examine longitudinally the executive function (EF) in adolescents with hyperphenylalaninemia. Two sibling pairs with mild hyperphenylalaninemia underwent neuropsychological examination in early childhood and again in adolescence using EF tests that were highly sensitive to phenylalanine exposure. By early adolescence, none of the 4 children demonstrated EF impairment. The children demonstrated a typical developmental trajectory of EF from childhood to adolescence, given phenylalanine exposure consistent with their condition.

Global, regional, and national age–sex specifi c all-cause and cause-specifi c mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013

Background Up-to-date evidence on levels and trends for age-sex-specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality is essential for the formation of global, regional, and national health policies. In the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 (GBD 2013) we estimated yearly deaths for 188 countries between 1990, and 2013. We used the results to assess whether there is epidemiological convergence across countries. Methods We estimated age-sex-specific all-cause mortality using the GBD 2010 methods with some refinements to improve accuracy applied to an updated database of vital registration, survey, and census data. We generally estimated cause of death as in the GBD 2010. Key improvements included the addition of more recent vital registration data for 72 countries, an updated verbal autopsy literature review, two new and detailed data systems for China, and more detail for Mexico, UK, Turkey, and Russia. We improved statistical models for garbage code redistribution. We used six different modelling strategies across the 240 causes; cause of death ensemble modelling (CODEm) was the dominant strategy for causes with sufficient information. Trends for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias were informed by meta-regression of prevalence studies. For pathogen-specific causes of diarrhoea and lower respiratory infections we used a counterfactual approach. We computed two measures of convergence (inequality) across countries: the average relative difference across all pairs of countries (Gini coefficient) and the average absolute difference across countries. To summarise broad findings, we used multiple decrement life-tables to decompose probabilities of death from birth to exact age 15 years, from exact age 15 years to exact age 50 years, and from exact age 50 years to exact age 75 years, and life expectancy at birth into major causes. For all quantities reported, we computed 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs). We constrained cause-specific fractions within each age-sex-country-year group to sum to all-cause mortality based on draws from the uncertainty distributions. Findings Global life expectancy for both sexes increased from 65·3 years (UI 65·0–65·6) in 1990, to 71·5 years (UI 71·0–71·9) in 2013, while the number of deaths increased from 47·5 million (UI 46·8–48·2) to 54·9 million (UI 53·6–56·3) over the same interval. Global progress masked variation by age and sex: for children, average absolute differences between countries decreased but relative differences increased. For women aged 25–39 years and older than 75 years and for men aged 20–49 years and 65 years and older, both absolute and relative differences increased. Decomposition of global and regional life expectancy showed the prominent role of reductions in age-standardised death rates for cardiovascular diseases and cancers in high-income regions, and reductions in child deaths from diarrhoea, lower respiratory infections, and neonatal causes in low-income regions. HIV/AIDS reduced life expectancy in southern sub-Saharan Africa. For most communicable causes of death both numbers of deaths and age-standardised death rates fell whereas for most non-communicable causes, demographic shifts have increased numbers of deaths but decreased age-standardised death rates. Global deaths from injury increased by 10·7%, from 4·3 million deaths in 1990 to 4·8 million in 2013; but age-standardised rates declined over the same period by 21%. For some causes of more than 100 000 deaths per year in 2013, age-standardised death rates increased between 1990 and 2013, including HIV/AIDS, pancreatic cancer, atrial fibrillation and flutter, drug use disorders, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and sickle-cell anaemias. Diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, neonatal causes, and malaria are still in the top five causes of death in children younger than 5 years. The most important pathogens are rotavirus for diarrhoea and pneumococcus for lower respiratory infections. Country-specific probabilities of death over three phases of life were substantially varied between and within regions. Interpretation For most countries, the general pattern of reductions in age-sex specific mortality has been associated with a progressive shift towards a larger share of the remaining deaths caused by non-communicable disease and injuries. Assessing epidemiological convergence across countries depends on whether an absolute or relative measure of inequality is used. Nevertheless, age-standardised death rates for seven substantial causes are increasing, suggesting the potential for reversals in some countries. Important gaps exist in the empirical data for cause of death estimates for some countries; for example, no national data for India are available for the past decade.

Cryptanalysis of Tav-128 Hash Function

Many RFID protocols use cryptographic hash functions for their security. The resource constrained nature of RFID systems forces the use of light weight cryptographic algorithms. Tav-128 is one such 128-bit light weight hash function proposed by Peris-Lopez et al. for a low-cost RFID tag authentication protocol. Apart from some statistical tests for randomness by the designers themselves, Tav-128 has not undergone any other thorough security analysis. Based on these tests, the designers claimed that Tav-128 does not posses any trivial weaknesses. In this article, we carry out the first third party security analysis of Tav-128 and show that this hash function is neither collision resistant nor second preimage resistant. Firstly, we show a practical collision attack on Tav-128 having a complexity of 237 calls to the compression function and produce message pairs of arbitrary length which produce the same hash value under this hash function. We then show a second preimage attack on Tav-128 which succeeds with a complexity of 262 calls to the compression function. Finally, we study the constituent functions of Tav-128 and show that the concatenation of nonlinear functions A and B produces a 64-bit permutation from 32-bit messages. This could be a useful light weight primitive for future RFID protocols.

Scale adaptive tracking using mean shift and efficient feature matching

The mean shift tracker has achieved great success in visual object tracking due to its efficiency being nonparametric. However, it is still difficult for the tracker to handle scale changes of the object. In this paper, we associate a scale adaptive approach with the mean shift tracker. Firstly, the target in the current frame is located by the mean shift tracker. Then, a feature point matching procedure is employed to get the matched pairs of the feature point between target regions in the current frame and the previous frame. We employ FAST-9 corner detector and HOG descriptor for the feature matching. Finally, with the acquired matched pairs of the feature point, the affine transformation between target regions in the two frames is solved to obtain the current scale of the target. Experimental results show that the proposed tracker gives satisfying results when the scale of the target changes, with a good performance of efficiency.

Dual compressible hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes based on extended unitary operations

A crucial issue with hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes is the amount of data that is allocated to the participants. The smaller the amount of allocated data, the better the performance of a scheme. Moreover, quantum data is very hard and expensive to deal with, therefore, it is desirable to use as little quantum data as possible. To achieve this goal, we first construct extended unitary operations by the tensor product of n, n ≥ 2, basic unitary operations, and then by using those extended operations, we design two quantum secret sharing schemes. The resulting dual compressible hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes, in which classical data play a complementary role to quantum data, range from threshold to access structure. Compared with the existing hybrid quantum secret sharing schemes, our proposed schemes not only reduce the number of quantum participants, but also the number of particles and the size of classical shares. To be exact, the number of particles that are used to carry quantum data is reduced to 1 while the size of classical secret shares also is also reduced to l−2 m−1 based on ((m+1, n′)) threshold and to l−2 r2 (where r2 is the number of maximal unqualified sets) based on adversary structure. Consequently, our proposed schemes can greatly reduce the cost and difficulty of generating and storing EPR pairs and lower the risk of transmitting encoded particles.

Low probability differentials and the cryptanalysis of full-round CLEFIA-128

So far, low probability differentials for the key schedule of block ciphers have been used as a straightforward proof of security against related-key differential analysis. To achieve resistance, it is believed that for cipher with k-bit key it suffices the upper bound on the probability to be 2− k . Surprisingly, we show that this reasonable assumption is incorrect, and the probability should be (much) lower than 2− k . Our counter example is a related-key differential analysis of the well established block cipher CLEFIA-128. We show that although the key schedule of CLEFIA-128 prevents differentials with a probability higher than 2− 128, the linear part of the key schedule that produces the round keys, and the Feistel structure of the cipher, allow to exploit particularly chosen differentials with a probability as low as 2− 128. CLEFIA-128 has 214 such differentials, which translate to 214 pairs of weak keys. The probability of each differential is too low, but the weak keys have a special structure which allows with a divide-and-conquer approach to gain an advantage of 27 over generic analysis. We exploit the advantage and give a membership test for the weak-key class and provide analysis of the hashing modes. The proposed analysis has been tested with computer experiments on small-scale variants of CLEFIA-128. Our results do not threaten the practical use of CLEFIA.

Histogram matching and global initialization for laser-only SLAM in large unstructured environments

This paper presents an enhanced algorithm for matching laser scan maps using histogram correlations. The histogram representation effectively summarizes a map's salient features such that pairs of maps can be matched efficiently without any prior guess as to their alignment. The histogram matching algorithm has been enhanced in order to work well in outdoor unstructured environments by using entropy metrics, weighted histograms and proper thresholding of quality metrics. Thus our large-scale scan-matching SLAM implementation has a vastly improved ability to close large loops in real-time even when odometry is not available. Our experimental results have demonstrated a successful mapping of the largest area ever mapped to date using only a single laser scanner. We also demonstrate our ability to solve the lost robot problem by localizing a robot to a previously built map without any prior initialization.

Proportionality : a valid alternative to correlation for relative data

Relative abundance data is common in the life sciences, but appreciation that it needs special analysis and interpretation is scarce. Correlation is popular as a statistical measure of pairwise association but should not be used on data that carry only relative information. Using timecourse yeast gene expression data, we show how correlation of relative abundances can lead to conclusions opposite to those drawn from absolute abundances, and that its value changes when different components are included in the analysis. Once all absolute information has been removed, only a subset of those associations will reliably endure in the remaining relative data, specifically, associations where pairs of values behave proportionally across observations. We propose a new statistic φ to describe the strength of proportionality between two variables and demonstrate how it can be straightforwardly used instead of correlation as the basis of familiar analyses and visualization methods.

Log delta analysis: Interpretable differencing of Business process event logs

This paper addresses the problem of identifying and explaining behavioral differences between two business process event logs. The paper presents a method that, given two event logs, returns a set of statements in natural language capturing behavior that is present or frequent in one log, while absent or infrequent in the other. This log delta analysis method allows users to diagnose differences between normal and deviant executions of a process or between two versions or variants of a process. The method relies on a novel approach to losslessly encode an event log as an event structure, combined with a frequency-enhanced technique for differencing pairs of event structures. A validation of the proposed method shows that it accurately diagnoses typical change patterns and can explain differences between normal and deviant cases in a real-life log, more compactly and precisely than previously proposed methods.

Cord blood vitamin D and neurocognitive development are nonlinearly related in toddlers

Background Little is known about the relation between vitamin D status in early life and neurodevelopment outcomes. Objective This study was designed to examine the association of cord blood 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] at birth with neurocognitive development in toddlers. Methods As part of the China-Anhui Birth Cohort Study, 363 mother-infant pairs with completed data were selected. Concentrations of 25(OH)D in cord blood were measured by radioimmunoassay. Mental development index (MDI) and psychomotor development index (PDI) in toddlers were assessed at age 16–18 mo by using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. The data on maternal sociodemographic characteristics and other confounding factors were also prospectively collected. Results Toddlers in the lowest quintile of cord blood 25(OH)D exhibited a deficit of 7.60 (95% CI: −12.4, −2.82; P = 0.002) and 8.04 (95% CI: −12.9, −3.11; P = 0.001) points in the MDI and PDI scores, respectively, compared with the reference category. Unexpectedly, toddlers in the highest quintile of cord blood 25(OH)D also had a significant deficit of 12.3 (95% CI: −17.9, −6.67; P < 0.001) points in PDI scores compared with the reference category. Conclusions This prospective study suggested that there was an inverted-U–shaped relation between neonatal vitamin D status and neurocognitive development in toddlers. Additional studies on the optimal 25(OH)D concentrations in early life are needed.

Centroid training to achieve effective text classification

Traditional text classification technology based on machine learning and data mining techniques has made a big progress. However, it is still a big problem on how to draw an exact decision boundary between relevant and irrelevant objects in binary classification due to much uncertainty produced in the process of the traditional algorithms. The proposed model CTTC (Centroid Training for Text Classification) aims to build an uncertainty boundary to absorb as many indeterminate objects as possible so as to elevate the certainty of the relevant and irrelevant groups through the centroid clustering and training process. The clustering starts from the two training subsets labelled as relevant or irrelevant respectively to create two principal centroid vectors by which all the training samples are further separated into three groups: POS, NEG and BND, with all the indeterminate objects absorbed into the uncertain decision boundary BND. Two pairs of centroid vectors are proposed to be trained and optimized through the subsequent iterative multi-learning process, all of which are proposed to collaboratively help predict the polarities of the incoming objects thereafter. For the assessment of the proposed model, F1 and Accuracy have been chosen as the key evaluation measures. We stress the F1 measure because it can display the overall performance improvement of the final classifier better than Accuracy. A large number of experiments have been completed using the proposed model on the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1) which is important standard dataset in the field. The experiment results show that the proposed model has significantly improved the binary text classification performance in both F1 and Accuracy compared with three other influential baseline models.

Medical semantic similarity with a neural language model

Advances in neural network language models have demonstrated that these models can effectively learn representations of words meaning. In this paper, we explore a variation of neural language models that can learn on concepts taken from structured ontologies and extracted from free-text, rather than directly from terms in free-text. This model is employed for the task of measuring semantic similarity between medical concepts, a task that is central to a number of techniques in medical informatics and information retrieval. The model is built with two medical corpora (journal abstracts and patient records) and empirically validated on two ground-truth datasets of human-judged concept pairs assessed by medical professionals. Empirically, our approach correlates closely with expert human assessors ($\approx$ 0.9) and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art benchmarks for medical semantic similarity. The demonstrated superiority of this model for providing an effective semantic similarity measure is promising in that this may translate into effectiveness gains for techniques in medical information retrieval and medical informatics (e.g., query expansion and literature-based discovery).

Complete-linkage clustering for voice activity detection in audio and visual speech

We propose a novel technique for conducting robust voice activity detection (VAD) in high-noise recordings. We use Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) to train two generic models; speech and non-speech. We then score smaller segments of a given (unseen) recording against each of these GMMs to obtain two respective likelihood scores for each segment. These scores are used to compute a dissimilarity measure between pairs of segments and to carry out complete-linkage clustering of the segments into speech and non-speech clusters. We compare the accuracy of our method against state-of-the-art and standardised VAD techniques to demonstrate an absolute improvement of 15% in half-total error rate (HTER) over the best performing baseline system and across the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database. We then apply our approach to the Audio-Visual Database of American English (AVDBAE) to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in using visual, audio-visual or a proposed fusion of these features.