Evolution of metabolic rates of multicellular organisms is hypothesized to reflect the evolution of their cell architecture. This is likely to stem from a tight link between the sizes of cells and nuclei, which are expected to be inversely related to cell metabolism. Here, we analysed basal metabolic rate (BMR), internal organ masses and the cell/nucleus size in different tissues of laboratory ...

Summary:Many fundamental questions in evolutionary biology entail estimating rates of lineage diversification (speciation – extinction). We develop a flexible Bayesian framework for specifying an effectively infinite array of diversification models—where rates are constant, vary continuously, or change episodically through time—and implement numerical methods to estimate parameters of these mod...

Long-term exposure to low temperatures during adult maturation might decrease fertility after cold recovery as a consequence of carry-over effects on reproductive tissues. This pattern should be more pronounced in tropical than in temperate species as protective mechanisms against chilling injuries are expected to be more effective in the latter. We initially determined the lower thermal thresh...

As in many clades of flowering plants, the Quamoclit clade of morning glories (Ipomoea subgenus Quamoclit) exhibits unequal proportions of different flower colors, with pigmented species outnumbering unpigmented species by nearly a factor of 7. We examined three possible macroevolutionary explanations for this pattern: (1) asymmetric transition rates between pigmented and unpigmented flowers; (...

OBJECTIVE To study if repeated cold-exposure increases metabolic rate and/or brown adipose tissue (BAT) volume in humans when compared with avoiding to freeze. DESIGN Randomized, open, parallel-group trial. METHODS Healthy non-selected participants were randomized to achieve cold-exposure 1hour/day, or to avoid any sense of feeling cold, for 6weeks. Metabolic rate (MR) was measured by indir...

Bagging and boosting are two general techniques for building predictors based on small samples from a dataset. We show that boosting can be parallelized, and then present performance results for parallelized bagging and boosting using OC1 decision trees and two standard datasets. The main results are that sample sizes limit achievable accuracy, regardless of computational time spent; that paral...

Piazzesi and Swanson (2006) argues that the monthly excess returns on federal funds futures contracts are significantly positive on average; predictable using business cycle and financial market indicators; and that futures rates need significant adjustment for these excess returns. This paper shows that intermeeting moves of the federal funds rate by the FOMC can explain much of the variation ...

Under calorie restriction (CR) animals need to lower energy demands. Whether this involves a reduction in cellular metabolism is an issue of contention. We exposed C57BL/6 mice to graded CR for 3 months, measured BMR and dissected out 20 body compartments. From a separate age-matched group (n=57), we built 7 predictive models for BMR. Unadjusted BMR declined with severity of restriction. Compar...

Decision tree induction has been has been widely studied and applied. In safety applications, such as determining whether a chemical process is safe, or whether a person has a medical condition, the cost of misclassification in one of the classes is significantly higher than the other class. Several authors have tackled this problem by developing cost-sensitive decision tree learning algorithms...