Moist, high-altitude grasslands of eastern South African harbour rich avian diversity and endemism. This area is also threatened by increasingly intensive agriculture and land conversion for energy production. This conflict is particularly evident at Ingula, an...
Background Electrochemical signals play an important role in cell communication and behavior. Electrically charged ions transported across cell membranes maintain an electrochemical imbalance that gives rise to bioelectric signaling, called membrane potential or...
One reason for the widespread success of random forests (RFs) is their ability to analyze most datasets without preprocessing. For example, in contrast to many other statistical methods and machine learning approaches, no recoding such as dummy coding is required...
Biological color may be adaptive or incidental, seasonal or permanent, species- or population-specific, or modified for breeding, defense or camouflage. Although color is a hugely informative aspect of biology, quantitative color comparisons are notoriously difficult....
Clinical studies/trials are experiments or observations on human subjects considered by the scientific community the most appropriate instrument to answer specific research questions on interventions on health outcomes. The time-line of the observations might be...
Objective In evidence synthesis practice, dealing with binary rare adverse events (AEs) is a challenging problem. The pooled estimates for rare AEs through traditional inverse variance (IV), Mantel-Haenszel (MH), and Yusuf-Peto (Peto) methods are suboptimal, as...
Background P-curve has been proposed as a statistical test of evidential value. The distributions of sets of statistically significant p-values are tested for skewness. P-curves of true effects are right-skewed, with greater density at lower p-values than higher...
The recent ‘replication crisis’ in psychology has focused attention on ways of increasing methodological rigor within the behavioral sciences. Part of this work has involved promoting ‘Registered Reports’, wherein journals peer review papers prior to data collection...
Background Epidemiological surveillance of HIV infection in Japan involves two technical problems for directly applying a classical backcalculation method, i.e., (i) all AIDS cases are not counted over time and (ii) people diagnosed with HIV have received antiretroviral...
Background Researches on artificial livers greatly contribute to the clinical treatments for liver failure. This study aimed to evaluate the research output of artificial livers and citations from 2004 to 2017 through a bibliometric analysis. Methods A list of...
The way people behave in traffic is not always optimal from the road safety perspective: drivers exceed speed limits, misjudge speeds or distances, tailgate other road users or fail to perceive them. Such behaviors are commonly investigated using self-report-based...
Modern scientific studies from many diverse areas of research abound with multiple hypothesis testing concerns. The false discovery rate (FDR) is one of the most commonly used approaches for measuring and controlling error rates when performing multiple tests....
In the last decades diseases have changed coral communities’ structure and function in reefs worldwide. Studies conducted to evaluate the effect of diseases on corals frequently use modified adaptations of sampling designs that were developed to study ecological...
Predicting and simplifying which pathogens may spill over from animals to humans is a major priority in infectious disease biology. Many efforts to determine which viruses are at risk of spillover use a subset of viral traits to find trait-based associations with...
Background Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a highly infectious disease that has produced over 25,000 cases in the past 50 years. While many past outbreaks resulted in relatively few cases, the 2014 outbreak in West Africa was the most deadly occurrence of EVD to date,...
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