Background and Objectives: A blood distribution network orchestrates distribution of safe blood products to hospitals. Blood shortage and blood wastage are two important factors which may affect efficiency of blood distribution network. Service delivery time is another factor that refers to the time interval between blood request by a hospital and transfusing it to the patient....

Although science has become an increasingly collaborative endeavor over the last hundred years, only little attention has been devoted to supporting scientific communities. Our work focuses on scientific collaborations that revolve around complex science questions that require significant coordination to synthesize multi-disciplinary findings, enticing contributors to remain engaged for extende...

In this paper we argue that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality in online communities that support open collaboration. We build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity, prominent authors, and cumulativeness. We also formulate an...

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have b...

Yu et al. (2016) demonstrated that algorithms designed to find efficient routes in standard mazes can be integrated with the natural processes controlling rat navigation and spatial choices, and they pointed out the promise of such "cyborg intelligence" for biorobotic applications. Here, we briefly describe Yu et al.'s work, explore its relevance to the study of comparative cognition, and indic...

This article presents some opinions, views and advice that graduate students might consider in order to assess and improve their success as new scholars. Contrary to the famous motto ‘publish or perish,’ we argue that publishing academic research should be headed by intrinsic motivation for becoming a scholar and not by external pressures of social or professional requirements to produce schola...

Three synthetic datasets - of observation size 15,000, 155,000 and 1,555,000 participants, respectively - were created by simulating eleven cardiac and anthropometric variables from nine collection ages of the ALSAPC birth cohort study. The synthetic datasets retain similar data properties to the ALSPAC study data they are simulated from (co-variance matrices, as well as the mean and variance v...