Graph analysis of dream reports is especially informative about psychosis

Early psychiatry investigated dreams to understand psychopathologies. Contemporary psychiatry, which neglects dreams, has been criticized for lack of objectivity. In search of quantitative insight into the structure of psychotic speech, we investigated speech graph attributes (SGA) in patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type I, and non-psychotic controls as they reported waking and dream contents. Schizophrenic subjects spoke with reduced connectivity, in tight correlation with negative and cognitive symptoms measured by standard psychometric scales. Bipolar and control subjects were undistinguishable by waking reports, but in dream reports bipolar subjects showed significantly less connectivity. Dream-related SGA outperformed psychometric scores or waking-related data for group sorting. Altogether, the results indicate that online and offline processing, the two most fundamental modes of brain operation, produce nearly opposite effects on recollections: While dreaming exposes differences in the mnemonic records across individuals, waking dampens distinctions. The results also demonstrate the feasibility of the differential diagnosis of psychosis based on the analysis of dream graphs, pointing to a fast, low-cost and language-invariant tool for psychiatric diagnosis and the objective search for biomarkers. The Freudian notion that ‘‘dreams are the royal road to the unconscious’’ is clinically useful, after all.

Heterologous microsatellite primer pairs informative for the whole genus Arachis

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Karyotypic Data on 28 Species of Scinax (Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae): Diversity and Informative Variation

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Informative Radio Models in Brazil: The All-News Networks

This study analyzes the particularities of Brazilian radio networks that adopt the all-news format and briefly presents the main national and international experiences for the implementation of the model and its conceptualization. Besides the bibliographic review, we use the multiple-case study, analyzing as the empirical objects CBN and BandNews FM networks. Also, we apply methodological procedures of systematic non-participant observation, supplemented by interviews and surveys. We conclude that the different all-news programming models and network organizations influence the processes of production, information structure, broadcasting language, and therefore the stations' profile. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Aspectos computacionais para inferência na distribuição gama generalizada

Pós-graduação em Matematica Aplicada e Computacional - FCT

Dyslexic children suffer from less informative visual cues to control posture

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of manipulation of the characteristics of visual stimulus on postural control in dyslexic children. A total of 18 dyslexic and 18 non-dyslexic children stood upright inside a moving room, as still as possible, and looked at a target at different conditions of distance between the participant and a moving room frontal wall (25-150 cm) and vision (full and central). The first trial was performed without vision (baseline). Then four trials were performed in which the room remained stationary and eight trials with the room moving, lasting 60 s each. Mean sway amplitude, coherence, relative phase, and angular deviation were calculated. The results revealed that dyslexic children swayed with larger magnitude in both stationary and moving conditions. When the room remained stationary, all children showed larger body sway magnitude at 150 cm distance. Dyslexic children showed larger body sway magnitude in central compared to full vision condition. In the moving condition, body sway magnitude was similar between dyslexic and non-dyslexic children but the coupling between visual information and body sway was weaker in dyslexic children. Moreover, in the absence of peripheral visual cues, induced body sway in dyslexic children was temporally delayed regarding visual stimulus. Taken together, these results indicate that poor postural control performance in dyslexic children is related to how sensory information is acquired from the environment and used to produce postural responses. In conditions in which sensory cues are less informative, dyslexic children take longer to process sensory stimuli in order to obtain precise information, which leads to performance deterioration. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Concordance Probability and Discriminatory Power in Proportional Hazards Regression

The concordance probability is used to evaluate the discriminatory power and the predictive accuracy of nonlinear statistical models. We derive an analytic expression for the concordance probability in the Cox proportional hazards model. The proposed estimator is a function of the regression parameters and the covariate distribution only and does not use the observed event and censoring times. For this reason it is asymptotically unbiased, unlike Harrell's c-index based on informative pairs. The asymptotic distribution of the concordance probability estimate is derived using U-statistic theory and the methodology is applied to a predictive model in lung cancer.

Efficient and Ad Hoc Estimation in the Bivariate Censoring Model

A large number of proposals for estimating the bivariate survival function under random censoring has been made. In this paper we discuss nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation and the bivariate Kaplan-Meier estimator of Dabrowska. We show how these estimators are computed, present their intuitive background and compare their practical performance under different levels of dependence and censoring, based on extensive simulation results, which leads to a practical advise.

Semiparametric Methods for Semi-competing Risks Problem with Censoring and Truncation

Studies of chronic life-threatening diseases often involve both mortality and morbidity. In observational studies, the data may also be subject to administrative left truncation and right censoring. Since mortality and morbidity may be correlated and mortality may censor morbidity, the Lynden-Bell estimator for left truncated and right censored data may be biased for estimating the marginal survival function of the non-terminal event. We propose a semiparametric estimator for this survival function based on a joint model for the two time-to-event variables, which utilizes the gamma frailty specification in the region of the observable data. Firstly, we develop a novel estimator for the gamma frailty parameter under left truncation. Using this estimator, we then derive a closed form estimator for the marginal distribution of the non-terminal event. The large sample properties of the estimators are established via asymptotic theory. The methodology performs well with moderate sample sizes, both in simulations and in an analysis of data from a diabetes registry.