Predictive models for the exponential growth rate (EGR) and germination, outgrowth, and lag times (GOL) of Bacillus stearothermophilus previously developed in our laboratory were expanded to include higher salt (1.5%) formulations. The expanded models were validated in 7 military meals-ready-to-eat incubated at temperatures from 45 °C to 60 °C, and tryptic soy broth incubated from 37.5 °C to 70...

Real world protocols often involve human choices that depend on incentives, including when they fail and require fail-safe or fail-deadly mechanisms. We look at three example systems (the EMV protocol, consensus in cryptocurrencies, and Tor) in this context, paying particular attention to the role that incentives play in fail-safe and faildeadly situations. We argue that incentives should expli...

The pandemic has presented doctors with legal and ethical challenges around how to treat patients in overstretched health services. Clare Dyer examines some of the key questions

International collaboration in science continues to grow at a remarkable rate, but little agreement exists about dynamics of growth and organization at the discipline level. Some suggest that disciplines differ in their collaborative tendencies, reflecting their epistemic culture. This study examines collaborative patterns in six previously studied specialties to add new data and conduct analys...

We propose a simple unsupervised approach to detecting non-compositional components in multiword expressions based on Wiktionary. The approach makes use of the definitions, synonyms and translations in Wiktionary, and is applicable to any type of MWE in any language, assuming the MWE is contained in Wiktionary. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves higher F-score than state-o...

This work looks at a temporal aspect of multiword expressions (MWEs), namely that the behaviour of a given n-gram and its status as a MWE change over time. We propose a model in which context words have particular probabilities given a usage choice for an n-gram, and those usage choices have time dependent probabilities, and we put forward an expectationmaximisation technique for estimating the...

The Politicians’ Wage Gap: Insights from German Members of Parliament Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians’ wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG which is statistically and economic...

Creativity is the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities. Following a study on the genetic contribution to working in a creative profession, based on polygenic score analysis, we report the total heritability of this trait in a large sample of adult twins and their siblings registered with the Netherlands Twin Register. Data from 6755 twins and 1817 siblings wer...

This paper presents mwetoolkit+sem: an extension of the mwetoolkit that estimates semantic compositionality scores for multiword expressions (MWEs) based on word embeddings. First, we describe our implementation of vector-space operations working on distributional vectors. The compositionality score is based on the cosine distance between the MWE vector and the composition of the vectors of its...