Effect Of Disparity Research Articles

The effect of capacity redundancy disparity on the robustness of interconnected networks

Cascading failures in interconnected networks have received more and more attention. In previous works, the basic assumption is that networks share the same capacity redundancy. However, this setting cannot capture the real case very well. Hence, in this paper, we analyze the effect of capacity redundancy disparity on the robustness of interconnected networks. In isolated networks, it is well known that the complex network’s robustness can be improved by increasing its capacity redundancy. In interconnected networks where two networks share the same capacity redundancy, the similar result holds. Yet this result is not necessarily true in interconnected networks where two networks are different in capacity redundancy. We find that when the capacity redundancy of one network is fixed, the robustness of the whole system may not follow another network’s capacity redundancy. More specifically, when the fixed network’s capacity redundancy is very small or very large, the robustness of the whole system increases as another network’s capacity redundancy increases. But there exists a certain range within which the increase of one network’s capacity redundancy results in the robustness decline of the whole system. This counterintuitive feature appears under different coupling patterns such as assortative, disassortative, or random coupling. This result advances our understanding of the robustness of interconnected networks.

Aging, Spatial Disparity, and the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion.

The present study examined age-related differences in multisensory integration and the effect of spatial disparity on the sound-induced flash illusion—-an illusion used in previous research to assess age-related differences in multisensory integration. Prior to participation in the study, both younger and older participants demonstrated their ability to detect 1–2 visual flashes and 1–2 auditory beep presented unimodally. After passing the pre-test, participants were then presented 1–2 flashes paired with 0–2 beeps that originated from one of five speakers positioned equidistantly 100cm from the participant. One speaker was positioned directly below the screen, two speakers were positioned 50cm to the left and right from the center of the screen, and two more speakers positioned to the left and right 100cm from the center of the screen. Participants were told to report the number of flashes presented and to ignore the beeps. Both age groups showed a significant effect of the beeps on the perceived number of flashes. However, neither younger nor older individuals showed any significant effect of spatial disparity on the sound-induced flash illusion. The presence of a congruent number of beeps increased accuracy for both older and younger individuals. Reaction time data was also analyzed. As expected, older individuals showed significantly longer reaction times when compared to younger individuals. In addition, both older and younger individuals showed a significant increase in reaction time for fusion trials, where two flashes and one beep are perceived as a single flash, as compared to congruent single flash trials. This increase in reaction time was not found for fission trials, where one flash and two beeps were perceived as two flashes. This suggests that processing may differ for the two forms for fission as compared to fusion illusions.

Rhythm makes the world go round: An MEG-TMS study on the role of right TPJ theta oscillations in embodied perspective taking

While some aspects of social processing are shared between humans and other species, some aspects are not. The former seems to apply to merely tracking another's visual perspective in the world (i.e., what a conspecific can or cannot perceive), while the latter applies to perspective taking in form of mentally “embodying” another's viewpoint. Our previous behavioural research had indicated that only perspective taking, but not tracking, relies on simulating a body schema rotation into another's viewpoint. In the current study we employed Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and revealed that this mechanism of mental body schema rotation is primarily linked to theta oscillations in a wider brain network of body-schema, somatosensory and motor-related areas, with the right posterior temporo-parietal junction (pTPJ) at its core. The latter was reflected by a convergence of theta oscillatory power in right pTPJ obtained by overlapping the separately localised effects of rotation demands (angular disparity effect), cognitive embodiment (posture congruence effect), and basic body schema involvement (posture relevance effect) during perspective taking in contrast to perspective tracking. In a subsequent experiment we interfered with right pTPJ processing using dual pulse Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (dpTMS) and observed a significant reduction of embodied processing. We conclude that right TPJ is the crucial network hub for transforming the embodied self into another's viewpoint, body and/or mind, thus, substantiating how conflicting representations between self and other may be resolved and potentially highlighting the embodied origins of high-level social cognition in general.

Potential effects of gender disparity in downregulation of AKT after post-cerebral ischemia and reperfusion

Potential effects of gender disparity in downregulation of AKT after post-cerebral ischemia and reperfusion

Race and sex disparities in long-term survival of oral and oropharyngeal cancer in the United States.

To investigate the effect of race and sex on long-term survival of oral and oropharyngeal cancer. The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database was queried for adult oral and oropharyngeal cancer patients with at least 25-year follow-up. Kaplan-Meier survival curves and cox proportional hazards model were used to identify differences. Of the 22,162 patients identified, 70.3% were males. Only 8.9% were alive at 25 years post-diagnosis. Black males show the poorest overall and disease-specific survival rates (p < 0.001). After controlling for covariates, Blacks had a 40% higher hazard of mortality compared with Whites (HR 1.40, 95% CI 1.35-1.46), while females had a 9% reduction in mortality risk (HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.88-0.94). Overall and disease-specific survival is poor for oral and oropharyngeal cancer patients, and Black men fare worst. This illustrates the need for long-term cancer survival plans incorporating disparity effects in overall cancer outcomes.

Effect of socioeconomic status disparity on child language and neural outcome: how early is early?

It is not news that poverty adversely affects child outcome. The literature is replete with reports of deleterious effects on developmental outcome, cognitive function, and school performance in children and youth. Causative factors include poor nutrition, exposure to toxins, inadequate parenting, lack of cognitive stimulation, unstable social support, genetics, and toxic environments. Less is known regarding how early in life adverse effects may be detected. This review proposes to elucidate "how early is early" through discussion of seminal articles related to the effect of socioeconomic status on language outcome and a discussion of the emerging literature on effects of socioeconomic status disparity on brain structure in very young children. Given the young ages at which such outcomes are detected, the critical need for early targeted interventions for our youngest is underscored. Further, the fiscal reasonableness of initiating quality interventions supports these initiatives. As early life adversity produces lasting and deleterious effects on developmental outcome and brain structure, increased focus on programs and policies directed to reducing the impact of socioeconomic disparities is essential.

A 3D Index $(\Delta {\rm X}_{{\rm 3D}})$ for Evaluating Image Quality of Stereoscopic Displays

In stereoscopic displays, crosstalk is typically observed when the views for both eyes are not clearly separated. Crosstalk affects the quality of 3D images and can cause visual fatigue in observers. According to the results of perception experimentation, different visual depth (disparity) and motion blur can also affect the perception of 3D image quality. Therefore, considering the effects of crosstalk, disparity, and motion blur, we propose an evaluation index to quantify 3D image performance for stereoscopic displays. This index assesses the optical quality of a 3D display as well as the effects of image content. According to human vision experimentation, the 3D image index (ΔX <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3D</sub> ) is validated to have a high positive correlation (0.8) with human perception. After combining the human visual mechanism and ΔX <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3D</sub> , the proposed index can represent the visual quality of static and dynamic images on stereoscopic displays.

The effects of stereo disparity on the behavioural and electrophysiological correlates of perception of audio–visual motion in depth

Motion is represented by low-level signals, such as size-expansion in vision or loudness changes in the auditory modality. The visual and auditory signals from the same object or event may be integrated and facilitate detection. We explored behavioural and electrophysiological correlates of congruent and incongruent audio–visual depth motion in conditions where auditory level changes, visual expansion, and visual disparity cues were manipulated. In Experiment 1 participants discriminated auditory motion direction whilst viewing looming or receding, 2D or 3D, visual stimuli. Responses were faster and more accurate for congruent than for incongruent audio–visual cues, and the congruency effect (i.e., difference between incongruent and congruent conditions) was larger for visual 3D cues compared to 2D cues. In Experiment 2, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected during presentation of the 2D and 3D, looming and receding, audio–visual stimuli, while participants detected an infrequent deviant sound. Our main finding was that audio–visual congruity was affected by retinal disparity at an early processing stage (135–160ms) over occipito-parietal scalp. Topographic analyses suggested that similar brain networks were activated for the 2D and 3D congruity effects, but that cortical responses were stronger in the 3D condition. Differences between congruent and incongruent conditions were observed between 140–200ms, 220–280ms, and 350–500ms after stimulus onset.

Does Changing Vertical Disparity Induce Horizontal Head Movement?

Theoretically, one can estimate the direction of an object that is relative to the head using vertical disparity if the distance from the head to the object is known. However, several reports describe vertical disparity as having little or no effect on the perception of visual direction. It has been suggested, however, that the visual processes involved in action are different from those involved in perception, and the effect of visual disparity on action has not been investigated in previous studies. This study investigated the influence of vertical disparity on the stability of head direction as a motor response to visual information. We presented a stimulus consisting of horizontal lines with vertical size-disparity oscillation, and examined whether the stimulus affected the subject’s head movement. The results showed that the head movement in the condition of vertical size-disparity oscillation was not significantly different from that in the condition of no disparity oscillation. Our results suggest that, despite theoretical validity, vertical disparity is not used for controlling head movement.

The Value of Cash Holdings, Corporate Governance and Ownership Disparity: Evidence from Korean Conglomerates

This study examines the impacts of business group affiliation, ownership disparity, and corporate governance on cash holdings and the value of excess cash of firms, using business group data from Korea, where such organizations are called “chaebols.” We find that Korean chaebol-affiliated firms have lower (higher) cash holdings (value of excess cash) compared to non-chaebol-affiliated firms; however, ownership disparity increases (decreases) cash holdings (value of excess cash) in chaebol firms. Furthermore, corporate governance enhances the value of excess cash and alleviates the negative effect of the ownership disparity in cash value for chaebol firms.

What's so difficult with adopting imagined perspectives?

Research on spatial cognition suggests that transformation processes and/or spatial conflicts may influence performance on mental perspective-taking tasks. However, conflicting findings have complicated our understanding about the processes involved in perspective-taking, particularly those giving rise to angular disparity effects, whereby performance worsens as the imagined perspective adopted deviates from one's actual perspective. Based on data from experiments involving mental perspective-taking in immediate and remote spatial layouts, we propose here a novel account for the difficulty with perspective-taking. According to this account, the main difficulty lies in maintaining an imagined perspective in working memory, especially in the presence of salient sensorimotor information.

Interdisciplinarity and impact: distinct effects of variety, balance, and disparity.

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today’s challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increase at an increasing rate with variety, (2) decrease with balance, and (3) increase at a decreasing rate with disparity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity also affects the process of citation accumulation: (1) although variety and disparity have positive effects on long-term citations, they have negative effects on short-term (3-year) citations, and (2) although balance has a negative effect on long-term citations, its negative effect is insignificant in the short run. These findings have important implications for interdisciplinary research and science policy.

Research on burst pressure for thin-walled elbow and spherical shell made of strength differential materials

This paper derived the computational formulae of burst pressure for thin-walled elbows and thin-walled spherical shells with arbitrary curvatures, using the finite deformation theory and the unified strength theory, and considering the intermediate principal stress, the strength disparity effect of materials and the strain-hardening effect. The quantitative relationship between the burst pressure of thin-walled elbows and thin-walled spherical shells was obtained as well. Additionally, this study analysed how the strain-hardening index, the thickness/radius ratio, the curvatures of elbows, the strength disparity effect of materials and the intermediate principal stress affected the burst pressure of thin-walled elbows and thin-walled spherical shells and the burst pressure ratio. The deduced formulae provide the solution for burst pressure with different yield criteria, which is of wide applications and guidance for security design and integrity assessment of thin-walled pressure vessels.

Identification of susceptibility loci in hereditary prostate cancer families using copy number variation and linkage analysis.

232 Background: Family history is one of the most significant predictor of prostate cancer risk. With approximately 10% of prostate cancer cases attributable to inheritable genetic factors. However, disease gene identification for prostate cancer has been extremely challenging due to both disease and genetic heterogeneity. Therefore, the goal of this study was to employ an array of genetic tools in order to characterize germline variants in seven high-risk families with prostate cancer. Methods: To overcome the effects of ethnic disparity, genetic heterogeneity, incomplete penetrance, and missing heritability, we utilized a comprehensive approach that combines both array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) analysis and linkage analysis to identify genetic components of prostate cancer. Seven prostate cancer cases were studied using aCGH to search for germ-line copy number variants (CNVs) associated with hereditary prostate cancer. The study subjects were from 7 large, high-risk, clinically homogenous families with European ancestry from Southern Louisiana. Genotyping for linkage analyses was done using Illumina Infinium II SNP HumanLinkage-12 panel. Results: Three novel regions of CNVs were identified: 16q23, 11q22, and 2q22 in all 7 prostate cancer cases from high-risk families. Both model-based and model-free linkage analyses were performed on 4 of the most informative families (≥5 prostate cancer patients per family). Suggestive evidence of linkage was obtained at 2q14 (HLOD score of 1.94). Using aCGH, a 68 kb duplication was observed in this region in all 7 hereditary prostate cancer cases. Conclusions: These genetic findings, which were identified in multiple large, well-characterized families, provide new insight into hereditary prostate cancer. A combination of future fine mapping of the 2q14 region in a larger cohort of patients, confirmation of these novel CNVs in additional subjects, and use of next-generation sequencing approaches to search for potential disease-associated genetic alterations are needed to provide further characterization of these prostate cancer associated susceptibility loci.

A toy model for nucleus-sized crowding confinement

We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to understand the spatial distribution of a polymer molecule confined within a rigid spherical capsule under crowding conditions, via a bead-spring chain model. To adjust the crowding level, the polymer is mixed with spherical crowders. As the interior of the capsule becomes more crowded, chain monomers tend to move to the capsule boundary under the penalty of conformational entropy. By incorporating some attraction between monomers and crowders, the polymer chain moves away from the capsule boundary. The interplay, between the conformational entropy, DNA-protein interaction, and molecular crowding induced depletion force between the chain and capsule boundary, may be essential to elucidate the heterogeneous chromatin structure in nuclei. Furthermore, the effects of chain length and size disparity between the monomers and the crowders are also investigated preliminarily.

Object fear: The national dissociation of race and racism in the era of Obama

This paper furthers the use of psychoanalysis as a lens for reading the contemporary political and social world and explores the ongoing reproduction of the racial unconscious in the United States. In applying a psychoanalytic lens to interpersonal violence and legal and political discourse during Obama’s presidency, we attempt to explore how internal fear of blackness prevents America and psychoanalysis from accessing non-destructive relational psychological spaces. We argue that the violent responses to racial blackness and power are not second-hand effects of racial and economic disparity, but rather intimate parts of our psychodynamics that involve an intersubjective process we term “object fear.” We discuss relational theories that help us negotiate object fear as a location for often ignored racialized group and dyadic psychodynamics, looking at specific examples of object fear, interpersonal violence and the limits of relational psychoanalysis to address these types of object relations. We end by turning to a series of recent Supreme Court decisions to look at the ways in which object fear has been triggered at this historical moment in relation to the presence of a black president and the threat to the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.

Unified Solution of Burst Pressure for Defect-Free Thin Walled Elbows

In order to study the mechanical properties of defect-free thin walled elbows (TWE), and evaluate impacts of the intermediate principal stress effect, tension/compression ratio, and strain-hardening of materials into logical consideration, this research, in the framework of finite deformation theory, derived the computational formula of burst pressure for defect-free TWE according to unified strength theory (UST). In addition, influences of various factors on burst pressure were analyzed, which include strength disparity (SD) effect of materials, intermediate principal stress, curvature influence coefficient, strain-hardening exponent, yield to tensile (Y/T) and thickness/radius ratio. The results show that the greater the tension/compression ratio is, the higher the burst pressure is. The influence of the SD effect of materials is more obvious with the increase of elbow curvature and intermediate principal stress. The intermediate principal stress effect can bring the self-bearing capacities and strength potential of materials into a full play, which can achieve certain economic benefits for projects. Moreover, the burst pressure of defect-free TWE increases with the growth of yield ratio and thickness/radius ratio, while decreases with the rise of curvature influence coefficient and strain-hardening exponent. It is also concluded that the Tresca-based and Mohr–Coulomb-based solutions of TWE are the lower bounds of the burst pressure, the twin shear stress (TSS)-based solution is the upper bound of the burst pressure, and the solutions based on the other yield criteria are between the above two. The unified solution in this paper is suitable for all kinds of isotropous materials which have the SD effect and intermediate principal stress effect. As the deduced formula has unified various burst pressure expressions proposed on the basis of different yield criteria for elbows of any curvature (including straight pipelines), and has established the quantitative relationships among them, its applicability is broader. Therefore, the unified solution is of great significance in security design and integrity assessment of defect-free TWE.

Differences in mandibular disparity between extant and extinct species of metatherian and placental carnivore clades

There are a number of studies relating to skull morphology differences within the carnivoran clades of both placentals and metatherians. It is difficult to compare these studies because of differences in taxonomic sampling, for example some include fossil taxa while others include non-carnivoran placentals. As a consequence, we studied mandible morphology in a broad range of both extant and extinct carnivorous species, including Carnivora, Marsupialia and Sparassodonta to test for differences between these clades. We used geometric morphometrics and two disparity indexes, the variance and Procrustes distances mean. When including fossil species, we found no significant differences for both disparities in some analyses, except after the exclusion of the sabretooth morphotype. This can be explained by the extreme morphology of this morphotype, which increases the variance and reduces the disparity effect of the other species in the analyses. Using Procrustes distances, we found significant differences in disparity distances between Carnivora and Metatheria for most of the analyses. We also found significant differences using the variance index in some analyses. The mandibular disparity in Carnivora is greater than in carnivorous metatherian mammals for most of the cases and this can be related with differences in evolutionary history and constraints of both groups. The pattern found in the mandible is similar to that found in the face of the skull but was not observed in the braincase, due to differences in skull function and mandible function.

The Effects of the Binocular Disparity and Stimulated Visual Field upon the Consequent Degrees of Depth.

The Effects of the Binocular Disparity and Stimulated Visual Field upon the Consequent Degrees of Depth.

Conjoint Effects of Spatial Proximity and Binocular Disparity in Perceptual Grouping.

Conjoint Effects of Spatial Proximity and Binocular Disparity in Perceptual Grouping.