This study investigates whether some speech recognition (SR) errors are easier to detect and what patterns can be identified from those errors. Specifically, SR errors were examined from both nonlinguistic and linguistic perspectives. The analyses of non-linguistic properties revealed that high error ratios and consecutive errors lowered the ease of error detection. The analyses of linguistic p...

A general collective decision problem is analysed. It consists in many issues that are interconnected in two ways: by mutual constraints and by connections of relevance. The goal is to decide on the issues by respecting the mutual constraints and by aggregating in accordance with an informational constraint given by the relevance connections. Whether such aggregation is possible in a non-degene...

During recent years workers in several countries have isolated a number of "new" viruses from upper respiratory infections. For some of these viruses claims have been made that they cause common colds. Before accepting such claims it is well to be sure of two things: i) that the viruses can be recovered with reasonable frequency from typical common colds in adults; and ii) that they will reprod...

Women obtain more than half of U.S. undergraduate degrees in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, yet they earn less than 20% of computer science, engineering, and physics undergraduate degrees (National Science Foundation, 2014a). Gender differences in interest in computer science, engineering, and physics appear even before college. Why are women represented in some science, technology, engin...

I propose a new axiom on the aggregation of individual yes/no judgments on propositions into collective judgments: each collective judgment depends only on people’s judgments on relevant propositions. This contrasts with classical independence: each collective judgment depends only on people’s judgments on the current proposition. I generalize the premise-based and sequential-priority rules to ...

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) save lives in routine clinical practice every day, as they are the key element in transplantation-based therapies for hematologic malignancies. The success of clinical stem cell transplantation critically relies on the ability of stem cells to reconstitute the hematopoietic system for many decades after the administration of the powerful chemotherapy and/or irrad...

Grain boundaries (GBs) are often the preferred sites for void nucleation in ductile metals. However, it has been observed that all boundaries do not contribute equally to this process. We present a mechanistic rationale for the role of GBs in damage nucleation in copper, along with a quantitative map for predicting preferred void nucleation at GBs based on molecular dynamics simulations in copp...

Synopsis These two studies, one from the Czech Republic (N = 150) and the other multinational (the International Carotid Stenting Study [ICSS]; N = 1,700), compared CEA with carotid artery stenting. The investigators used comparable methods (concealed allocation, only outcome assessors were blinded) and recruited adults with carotid stenosis. The Czech researchers evaluated patients with at lea...

Determining how biological traits are related to the ability of groups of organisms to become economically damaging when established outside of their native ranges is a major goal of population biology, and important in the management of invasive species. Little is known about why some taxonomic groups are more likely to become pests than others among plants. We investigated traits that discrim...