This study provides a first, comprehensive, diagnostic use of DNA barcodes for the Canadian fauna of noctuoids or "owlet" moths (Lepidoptera: Noctuoidea) based on vouchered records for 1,541 species (99.1% species coverage), and more than 30,000 sequences. When viewed from a Canada-wide perspective, DNA barcodes unambiguously discriminate 90% of the noctuoid species recognized through prior tax...

S ynergistic divergence is a well-established clinical condition in which abduction arises on attempted adduction, leading to simultaneous abduction of both eyes on lateral gaze. Synergistic divergence can occur as an extreme form of Duane syndrome, where most if not all oculomotor nerve branch fibers originally directed to the medial rectus muscle innervate the lateral rectus muscle. Synergist...

Abstract We discuss an alternative to relative entropy as a measure of distance between mixed quantum states. The proposed quantity is an extension to the realm of quantum theory of the JensenShannon divergence (JSD) between probability distributions. The JSD has several interesting properties. It arises in information theory and, unlike the Kullback-Leibler divergence, it is symmetric, always ...

An open problem for Distributed Information Retrieval is how to represent large document repositories (known as resources) efficiently. To facilitate resource selection, estimated descriptions of each resource are required, especially when faced with non-cooperative distributed environments[1]. Accurate and efficient Resource description estimation is required as this can have an affect on reso...

Optimization based on k-step contrastive divergence (CD) has become a common way to train restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). The k-step CD is a biased estimator of the log-likelihood gradient relying on Gibbs sampling. We derive a new upper bound for this bias. Its magnitude depends on k, the number of variables in the RBM, and the maximum change in energy that can be produced by changing a ...

Mate choice is mediated by a range of sensory cues, and assortative mating based on these cues can drive reproductive isolation among diverging populations. A specific feature of mormyrid fish, the electric organ discharge (EOD), is used for electrolocation and intraspecific communication. We hypothesized that the EOD also facilitates assortative mating and ultimately promotes prezygotic reprod...

BACKGROUND Local natural laboratories, designated by us as the "Evolution Canyon" model, are excellent tools to study regional and global ecological dynamics across life. They present abiotic and biotic contrasts locally, permitting the pursuit of observations and experiments across diverse taxa sharing sharp microecological subdivisions. Higher solar radiation received by the "African savannah...