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If deleterious mutations near a fitness maximum in a spatially distributed population are sufficiently frequent or detrimental, the population can undergo a fitness collapse, similarly to the Muller's ratchet effect in well-mixed…

Recent and influential critiques of standardized testing have noted the existence of non-trivial numbers of successful scientists who received low scores on the GRE. Here we use computer simulations to show that the prevalence of such…

Beauty standards shape self-perception and health through social comparison and objectification, while exposure to idealized imagery exacerbates body-image concerns. Media and fashion are central arbiters of these ideals, yet long-term,…

In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…

Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…

A variety of fairness constraints have been proposed in the literature to mitigate group-level statistical bias. Their impacts have been largely evaluated for different groups of populations corresponding to a set of sensitive attributes,…

Growth is a multi-layered phenomenon in human societies, composed of socioeconomic and demographic change at many different scales. Yet, standard macroeconomic indicators average over most of these processes, blurring the spatial and…

Education is a key driver of social and economic mobility, yet disparities in attainment persist, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Existing indicators, such as mean years of schooling for adults aged 25 and older…

In many studies, dimension reduction methods are used to profile participant characteristics. For example, nutrition epidemiologists often use latent class models to characterize dietary patterns. One challenge with such approaches is…

We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…

We propose an alternative delayed population growth difference equation model based on a modification of the Beverton-Holt recurrence, assuming a delay only in the growth contribution that takes into account that those individuals that die…

The phenomenon of model-wise double descent, where the test error peaks and then reduces as the model size increases, is an interesting topic that has attracted the attention of researchers due to the striking observed gap between theory…

The fitness landscape metaphor plays a central role on the modeling of optimizing principles in many research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology, where it was first introduced, to management research. Here we consider the ensemble of…

Rapid increases in food supplies have reduced global hunger, while rising burdens of diet-related disease have made poor diet quality the leading cause of death and disability around the world. Today's "double burden" of undernourishment in…

Many major works in social science employ matching to make causal conclusions, but different matches on the same data may produce different treatment effect estimates, even when they achieve similar balance or minimize the same loss…

Recommender algorithms performance is often associated with the availability of sufficient historical rating data. Unfortunately, when it comes to children, this data is seldom available. In this paper, we report on an initial analysis…

Selective mortality and fertility issues are persistent challenges in estimating the fetal origin effect, with attempts to address these issues being notably scarce. Evidence further suggests that selective mortality is more pronounced in…

School value-added models are widely applied to study, monitor, and hold schools to account for school differences in student learning. The traditional model is a mixed-effects linear regression of student current achievement on student…

Stability is a key ingredient of protein fitness and its modification through targeted mutations has applications in various fields such as protein engineering, drug design and deleterious variant interpretation. Many studies have been…

Many applications of machine learning methods involve an iterative protocol in which data are collected, a model is trained, and then outputs of that model are used to choose what data to consider next. For example, one data-driven approach…