When nearly 200 people in India were killed in terrorist attacks late last month, the carnage received saturation media coverage around the globe. When nearly 600 people in Zimbabwe died in a cholera outbreak a week ago, the international response was far more muted.

Let's say the FBI hears a senior elected official on a tapped telephone line demanding kickbacks in exchange for favors and shaking down donors for campaign contributions in exchange for plum contracts.

WASHINGTON — Latinos and immigrants are at least twice as likely to lack health insurance coverage as the overall population in three central Kansas City metro counties, a new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) study reveals. In fact, they are four times as likely to be uninsured in Johnson County, Kansas. 

If you’ve browsed your Twitter or Facebook page feeds in the last week, you have probably noticed that we changed…

Privacy isn't dead, but face surveillance technology might kill it, says civil rights advocate Kade Crockford. In an eye-opening talk, Kade outlines the startling reasons why this invasive technology -- powered by often-flawed facial recognition databases that track people without their knowledge -- poses unprecedented threats to your fundamental rights. Learn what can be done to ban government use before it's too late.

As in several other states dependent on tax revenue from natural resources, Wyoming legislators are looking for ways to make millions of dollars in education budget cuts.

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

Utah science teacher Skipper Coates asked her students to complete the following sentence: "What my parents don't know about social media is..."

Rhode Island may become the first state to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards. The state board will vote later today.

Organizational effectiveness -- Measurement.

Feminism and art.

Death -- Psychological aspects.

Paris : A. Parent, 1874.

Londres : Paris, 1851.

Paris : O. Doin, 1890.

London : Caxton Pub. Co, 1908-1909.

Paris : V. Masson, 1867.

London : Macmillan, 1893.

London : Macmillan, 1878.

London : H. Renshaw, 1849.

Paris : Société d’éditions scientifiques, 1901.

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

Could they lose one or more of Murray, Jarry, and DeSmith?

Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 33, Number 4, 685--685.

Heat waves resulting from prolonged extreme temperatures pose a significant risk to human health globally. Given the limitations of observations of extreme temperature, climate models are often used to characterize extreme temperature globally, from which one can derive quantities like return values to summarize the magnitude of a low probability event for an arbitrary geographic location. However, while these derived quantities are useful on their own, it is also often important to apply a spatial statistical model to such data in order to, e.g., understand how the spatial dependence properties of the return values vary over space and emulate the climate model for generating additional spatial fields with corresponding statistical properties. For these objectives, when modeling global data it is critical to use a nonstationary covariance function. Furthermore, given that the output of modern global climate models can be on the order of $mathcal{O}(10^4)$, it is important to utilize approximate Gaussian process methods to enable inference. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of methodology introduced in Risser and Turek (2020) to conduct a nonstationary and fully Bayesian analysis of a large data set of 20-year return values derived from an ensemble of global climate model runs with over 50,000 spatial locations. This analysis uses the freely available BayesNSGP software package for R.

We introduce an optimized physics-informed neural network (PINN) trained to solve the problem of identifying and characterizing a surface breaking crack in a metal plate. PINNs are neural networks that can combine data and physics in the learning process by adding the residuals of a system of Partial Differential Equations to the loss function. Our PINN is supervised with realistic ultrasonic surface acoustic wave data acquired at a frequency of 5 MHz. The ultrasonic surface wave data is represented as a surface deformation on the top surface of a metal plate, measured by using the method of laser vibrometry. The PINN is physically informed by the acoustic wave equation and its convergence is sped up using adaptive activation functions. The adaptive activation function uses a scalable hyperparameter in the activation function, which is optimized to achieve best performance of the network as it changes dynamically the topology of the loss function involved in the optimization process. The usage of adaptive activation function significantly improves the convergence, notably observed in the current study. We use PINNs to estimate the speed of sound of the metal plate, which we do with an error of 1\%, and then, by allowing the speed of sound to be space dependent, we identify and characterize the crack as the positions where the speed of sound has decreased. Our study also shows the effect of sub-sampling of the data on the sensitivity of sound speed estimates. More broadly, the resulting model shows a promising deep neural network model for ill-posed inverse problems.

Manifold optimization appears in a wide variety of computational problems in the applied sciences. In recent statistical methodologies such as sufficient dimension reduction and regression envelopes, estimation relies on the optimization of likelihood functions over spaces of matrices such as the Stiefel or Grassmann manifolds. Recently, Huang, Absil, Gallivan, and Hand (2016) have introduced the library ROPTLIB, which provides a framework and state of the art algorithms to optimize real-valued objective functions over commonly used matrix-valued Riemannian manifolds. This article presents ManifoldOptim, an R package that wraps the C++ library ROPTLIB. ManifoldOptim enables users to access functionality in ROPTLIB through R so that optimization problems can easily be constructed, solved, and integrated into larger R codes. Computationally intensive problems can be programmed with Rcpp and RcppArmadillo, and otherwise accessed through R. We illustrate the practical use of ManifoldOptim through several motivating examples involving dimension reduction and envelope methods in regression.

Zhenguo Gao, Pang Du, Ran Jin, John L. Robertson.

Source: The Annals of Applied Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 143--159.

Abstract:
Liver procurement experiments with surface-temperature monitoring motivated Gao et al. ( J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 114 (2019) 773–781) to develop a variance change-point detection method under a smoothly-changing mean trend. However, the spotwise change points yielded from their method do not offer immediate information to surgeons since an organ is often transplanted as a whole or in part. We develop a new practical method that can analyze a defined portion of the organ surface at a time. It also provides a novel addition to the developing field of functional data monitoring. Furthermore, numerical challenge emerges for simultaneously modeling the variance functions of 2D locations and the mean function of location and time. The respective sample sizes in the scales of 10,000 and 1,000,000 for modeling these functions make standard spline estimation too costly to be useful. We introduce a multistage subsampling strategy with steps educated by quickly-computable preliminary statistical measures. Extensive simulations show that the new method can efficiently reduce the computational cost and provide reasonable parameter estimates. Application of the new method to our liver surface temperature monitoring data shows its effectiveness in providing accurate status change information for a selected portion of the organ in the experiment.

Nancy Kanwisher
Jun 1, 1997; 17:4302-4311
Articles

Nancy Kanwisher
Jun 1, 1997; 17:4302-4311
Articles

French translation of Press Release about BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens giving a speech on "Money in the digital age: what role for central banks?" (6 February 2018)

Microsoft has introduced a slew of new products, including the Surface Go 2, the Surface Book 3, Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds. Both the Surface Go 2 and the Surface Book 3 come in consumer and corporate versions. "The two products are very different," noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "The Go 2 is a high-value product -- the Surface Book 3 high innovation."

Two sites preserve around 50 footprints, a discovery that highlights the richness of prehistoric life on the island

A new theory suggests the hot, harsh planet’s interior could have contained volatiles like water

The impact that created Pluto’s 'heart' may have rippled through its ocean and damaged its rear

Doctors and nurses are attaching smiling photos of themselves to the outside of their protective gear to maintain connections with patients

The solitary species is hard to spot on camera, and they're the only canine that lives in the Amazon rainforest

In New York City, a desperate need among healthcare workers has pushed to the forefront the question: Is homemade equipment safe to use?

The N.W.T. and Nunavut Workers’ Safety and Compensation Commission says it filed multiple charges in the Nunavut Court of Justice under the Nunavut Safety Act on May 1.