Viewing Cancer Through the Lens of Corruption: Using Behavioral Ecology to Understand Cancer

All biological systems depend on signals for coordination: signals which pass information among agents that run the gamut from cells to organisms. However, their very importance makes signals vulnerable to subversion. How can a receiver know whether a signal is honest or deceptive? In other words, are signals necessarily a reliable indicator of agent quality or need? By drawing parallels to ecological phenomena ranging from begging by nestlings to social insects, we investigate the role of signal degradation in cancer. We thus think of cancer as a form of corruption, in which cells command huge resource investment through relatively cheap signals, just as relatively small bribes can leverage large profits. We discuss various mechanisms which prevent deceptive signaling in the natural world and within tissues. We show how cancers evolve ways to escape these controls and relate these back to evasion mechanisms in ecology. We next introduce two related concepts, co-option and collusion, and show how they play critical roles in ecology and cancer. Drawing on public policy, we propose new approaches to view treatment based on taxation, changing the incentive structure, and the recognition of corrupted signaling networks.

Case Report: Women, Be Aware that Your Vocal Charisma can Dwindle in Remote Meetings

Remote meetings via Zoom, Skype, or Teams limit the range and richness of nonverbal communication signals. Not just because of the typically sub-optimal light, posture, and gaze conditions, but also because of the reduced speaker visibility. Consequently, the speaker’s voice becomes immensely important, especially when it comes to being persuasive and conveying charismatic attributes. However, to offer a reliable service and limit the transmission bandwidth, remote meeting tools heavily rely on signal compression. It has never been analyzed how this compression affects a speaker’s persuasive and overall charismatic impact. Our study addresses this gap for the audio signal. A perception experiment was carried out in which listeners rated short stimulus utterances with systematically varied compression rates and techniques. The scalar ratings concerned a set of charismatic speaker attributes. Results show that the applied audio compression significantly influences the assessment of a speaker’s charismatic impact and that, particularly female speakers seem to be systematically disadvantaged by audio compression rates and techniques. Their charismatic impact decreases over a larger range of different codecs; and this decrease is additionally also more strongly pronounced than for male speakers. We discuss these findings with respect to two possible explanations. The first explanation is signal-based: audio compression codecs could be generally optimized for male speech and, thus, degrade female speech more (particularly in terms of charisma-associated features). Alternatively, the explanation is in the ears of the listeners who are less forgiving of signal degradation when rating female speakers’ charisma.

Dictionary adaptation and variational mode decomposition for gyroscope signal enhancement

The paper proposes an approach to signal denoising based on a combination of Variational Mode Decomposition with the Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage Algorithm. In our research, we found that the proposed approach gives a great improvement of denoising gyroscopic signals. In turn, the results for the synthetic signals are not straightforward. For the bumps synthetic signals, the proposed algorithm gives the best results for different levels of signal degradation. While for the Doppler and blocks synthetic signals the reference methods give better results. However, for heavisine test signal the proposed algorithm gives better results in almost all cases. A weak point of the presented algorithm is its time complexity. The proposed approach is based on the Split Augmented Lagrangian Shrinkage Algorithm, which is the iterative optimization method since the time of computation strongly depends on the number of iterations. The presented results show that the proposed approach gives a great improvement in signal denoising and it is a promising direction of future research.

Radioactive Target Detection Using Statistical Method

Radioactive materials are extremely dangerous as it threatens the earth survival. They contaminate the environment with a lot of damages. Nowadays revealing radioactive material become an important topic for public health, national security, and environmental services. This paper discusses a statistical method to detect and identify an unobserved radioactive source, where the counts of radiation particles received by those detectors are spatially distributed of Poisson distribution. Also, each count composed of a signal and a background. This paper provides a numerical method to estimate the strength and location of unobserved radioactive source based on the physical law of signal degradation with distance. Based on these estimates, a likelihood ratio statistic is used to test the existence of the source. Simulation results show that the proposed statistical method is efficient for revealing the unobserved radioactive source

Analysis of 4G mobile network coverage in UTeM technology campus

<p><span>This paper proposes an analysis of the coverage performance of 4G cellular services in UTeM Technology Campus. The performance of the cellular services is presented as the network’s coverage profile which is based on the received signal strength indicator (RSSI). The area under study is virtually divided into 64 grid points where the average RSSI measurements are captured by using an open source software namely G-Mon. The measured values are mapped into the network coverage profile which represents the signal reception quality at each of the grid points. A statistical analysis called Two-Way ANOVA is performed to investigate the correlation of the performance of 4G cellular services in UTeM Technology Campus with the mobile phone brands and service operators. Based on the analysis, it is found that the signal reception in outdoor areas are better than that of indoor areas. In addition, the analysis shows that the propagation loss and signal degradation are two factors that contribute to the 4G services’ performance in UTeM Technology Campus. </span></p>