New England Genetics Collaborative Results of the Stakeholder Survey for Project Year Four

Stakeholder feedback offers a range of critical and helpful insights into the potential next steps for the collaborative as it carriers on activities for Project Year Five and plans for a new grant application. To facilitate this feedback, the NEGC conducts an annual survey of its stakeholders to identify concerns, document how the project is doing, and solicit suggestions for improvement. One hundred forty-one email invitations were sent out between October and November 2011 to stakeholders of the New England Genetic Collaborative (NEGC). Of these, one opted out and 63 provided responses (45% response rate). Since the 2009 report, there was improvement in two important areas. When asked whether they had a clear understanding of the NEGC\u27s mission, 73% agreed (vs. 60% in 2009). Concerning whether the NEGC had made substantive and clear progress in achieving its mission, 72% agreed (vs. 47% in 2009). Feedback on the project\u27s evaluation reports was generally positive with 67% to 70% of respondents indicating that each of the reports helped them understand the progress and challenges of the initiative (vs. 60% to 75% in 2009). Feedback from the Advisory Council was high this year, with 13 members participating. Most participants (\u3e75%) felt that there was a good spirit of cooperation, that meetings were well run, that the RCC provided excellent support and responded effectively to questions, and that the Advisory Council was achieving its main objectives. Project recommendations highlight the need for continuing to strengthen communication efforts of the NEGC, identifying new collaboration opportunities for members of the Advisory Committee, making effective use of potential stakeholder contributions, improving consumer/family representation in regional change, pursuing sustainable initiatives, addressing multiple barriers to care for families, and improving access to NEGC resources. Results are separated into: context of the report (p.2), survey results (p.3), and recommended areas for followup (p.9)

On multidimensional item response theory -- a coordinate free approach

A coordinate system free definition of complex structure multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) for dichotomously scored items is presented. The point of view taken emphasizes the possibilities and subtleties of understanding MIRT as a multidimensional extension of the ``classical'' unidimensional item response theory models. The main theorem of the paper is that every monotonic MIRT model looks the same; they are all trivial extensions of univariate item response theory.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS016 in the Electronic Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Reconstruction of complete interval tournaments

Let $a, b$ and $n$ be nonnegative integers $(b \geq a, \ b > 0, \ n \geq 1)$, $\mathcal{G}_n(a,b)$ be a multigraph on $n$ vertices in which any pair of vertices is connected with at least $a$ and at most $b$ edges and \textbf{v =} $(v_1, v_2, ..., v_n)$ be a vector containing $n$ nonnegative integers. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such orientation of the edges of $\mathcal{G}_n(a,b)$, that the resulted out-degree vector equals to \textbf{v}. We describe a reconstruction algorithm. In worst case checking of \textbf{v} requires $\Theta(n)$ time and the reconstruction algorithm works in $O(bn^3)$ time. Theorems of H. G. Landau (1953) and J. W. Moon (1963) on the score sequences of tournaments are special cases $b = a = 1$ resp. $b = a \geq 1$ of our result

Abelian sandpiles: an overview and results on certain transitive graphs

We review the Majumdar-Dhar bijection between recurrent states of the Abelian sandpile model and spanning trees. We generalize earlier results of Athreya and Jarai on the infinite volume limit of the stationary distribution of the sandpile model on Z^d, d >= 2, to a large class of graphs. This includes: (i) graphs on which the wired spanning forest is connected and has one end; (ii) transitive graphs with volume growth at least c n^5 on which all bounded harmonic functions are constant. We also extend a result of Maes, Redig and Saada on the stationary distribution of sandpiles on infinite regular trees, to arbitrary exhaustions.Comment: 44 pages. Version 2 incorporates some smaller changes. To appear in Markov Processes and Related Fields in the proceedings of the meeting: Inhomogeneous Random Systems, Stochastic Geometry and Statistical Mechanics, Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, 27 January 201

Environmental Liquid Effluents, A Novel Approach For Treatment Of Industrial Waste Water

Nutrient enrichment or eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems can cause an increase in algae and aquatic plants, loss of component species, and loss of ecosystem function. For these reasons, numerous studies were focused on nitrogen and phosphorus removal from wastewater streams. Most of these studies were based on biological processes and different combinations of anaerobic, aerobic, and anoxic zones such as Bardenpho, A2O, UCT, and their modifications. Hence phosphate recovery from sewage is in synergy with reducing other environmental impacts and making it a long term economic resource. The aim of the novel treatment process is to highlight on studies investigated for the nutrient removal performance using Chorella-vulgaris at different nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations. The effect of ammonia nitrogen and phosphorus concentration on removal of these nutrients from synthetic wastewater by algae Chorella-vulgaris in batch cultivation have been investigated in this study and kinetic coefficients were determined. It is observed that an effluent may contain specific nutrients valuable for recovery and this observation may lead to the idea or understanding of treating an effluent from industrial source as a useful resource instead of the general idea of treating the effluent as waste products, and in the same process losing money in terms of expenses on chemicals and energy. Treatment and discharge of effluents into the receiving streams should not be an issue that will be considered as usual because there are specified standards required by the legislation, in terms of the quality and characteristic of the effluent before it is discharged into the waterways