When Mommy or Daddy is Gay: Developing Constitutional Standards for Custody Decisions

Divorce can be one of the most traumatic and stressful experiences a person will undergo in his or her lifetime. When the trauma of divorce is intensified by a battle over custody of one\u27s children, the process becomes even more difficult. When someone involved in that process is at the same time dealing with issues of same-sex orientation, perhaps for the first time, it is easy to see why gay, lesbian, or bisexual individuals involved in a dissolution of marriage may experience extreme pressure, since the issue of their sexual orientation could become a critical issue in the court proceedings. When gay and lesbian parents are forced to make the choice between their children and their partners, or when courts make that choice for them by imposing draconian restrictions based on myths about how homosexuality impacts child-rearing, the impact of divorce is particularly heartbreaking

TGF-β Sustains Tumor Progression through Biochemical and Mechanical Signal Transduction.

Transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) signaling transduces immunosuppressive biochemical and mechanical signals in the tumor microenvironment. In addition to canonical SMAD transcription factor signaling, TGF-β can promote tumor growth and survival by inhibiting proinflammatory signaling and extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling. In this article, we review how TGF-β activated kinase 1 (TAK1) activation lies at the intersection of proinflammatory signaling by immune receptors and anti-inflammatory signaling by TGF-β receptors. Additionally, we discuss the role of TGF-β in the mechanobiology of cancer. Understanding how TGF-β dampens proinflammatory responses and induces pro-survival mechanical signals throughout cancer development is critical for designing therapeutics that inhibit tumor progression while bolstering the immune response

Comparing Machine Learning Methods for Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects by Combining Data from Multiple Randomized Controlled Trials

Individualized treatment decisions can improve health outcomes, but using data to make these decisions in a reliable, precise, and generalizable way is challenging with a single dataset. Leveraging multiple randomized controlled trials allows for the combination of datasets with unconfounded treatment assignment to improve the power to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects. This paper discusses several non-parametric approaches for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects using data from multiple trials. We extend single-study methods to a scenario with multiple trials and explore their performance through a simulation study, with data generation scenarios that have differing levels of cross-trial heterogeneity. The simulations demonstrate that methods that directly allow for heterogeneity of the treatment effect across trials perform better than methods that do not, and that the choice of single-study method matters based on the functional form of the treatment effect. Finally, we discuss which methods perform well in each setting and then apply them to four randomized controlled trials to examine effect heterogeneity of treatments for major depressive disorder

Methods for Integrating Trials and Non-Experimental Data to Examine Treatment Effect Heterogeneity

Estimating treatment effects conditional on observed covariates can improve the ability to tailor treatments to particular individuals. Doing so effectively requires dealing with potential confounding, and also enough data to adequately estimate effect moderation. A recent influx of work has looked into estimating treatment effect heterogeneity using data from multiple randomized controlled trials and/or observational datasets. With many new methods available for assessing treatment effect heterogeneity using multiple studies, it is important to understand which methods are best used in which setting, how the methods compare to one another, and what needs to be done to continue progress in this field. This paper reviews these methods broken down by data setting: aggregate-level data, federated learning, and individual participant-level data. We define the conditional average treatment effect and discuss differences between parametric and nonparametric estimators, and we list key assumptions, both those that are required within a single study and those that are necessary for data combination. After describing existing approaches, we compare and contrast them and reveal open areas for future research. This review demonstrates that there are many possible approaches for estimating treatment effect heterogeneity through the combination of datasets, but that there is substantial work to be done to compare these methods through case studies and simulations, extend them to different settings, and refine them to account for various challenges present in real data

An effective scalable SQL engine for NoSQL databases

NoSQL databases were initially devised to support a few concrete extreme scale applications. Since the specificity and scale of the target systems justified the investment of manually crafting application code their limited query and indexing capabilities were not a major im- pediment. However, with a considerable number of mature alternatives now available there is an increasing willingness to use NoSQL databases in a wider and more diverse spectrum of applications and, to most of them, hand-crafted query code is not an enticing trade-off. In this paper we address this shortcoming of current NoSQL databases with an effective approach for executing SQL queries while preserving their scalability and schema flexibility. We show how a full-fledged SQL engine can be integrated atop of HBase leading to an ANSI SQL compli- ant database. Under a standard TPC-C workload our prototype scales linearly with the number of nodes in the system and outperforms a NoSQL TPC-C implementation optimized for HBase.(undefined

Unexpected ring‑opening of 2,3‑dihydropyridines

The reaction of 2,3-dihydropyridines with sulfonyl halides surprisingly yielded open chain dienes with sulfonylimine structure. The products were specific out of several possible isomers and, therefore, a separation of isomers was not necessary. All new compounds were characterized using FT-IR spectroscopy, HRMS, and NMR spectroscopy. A bicyclic by-product from the reaction of a 2,3-dihydropyridine with mesyl chloride was isolated and its structure elucidated using a single X-ray crystal analysis. Some biological activities, like antimicrobial and cytotoxic properties were investigated

Scalable data management in distributed information systems

[EN] In the era of cloud computing and huge information systems, distributed applications should manage dynamic workloads; i.e., the amount of client requests per time unit may vary frequently and servers should rapidly adapt their computing efforts to those workloads. Cloud systems provide a solid basis for this kind of applications but most of the traditional relational database systems are unprepared to scale up with this kind of distributed systems. This paper surveys different techniques being used in modern SQL, NoSQL and NewSQL systems in order to increase the scalability and adaptability in the management of persistent data. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.This work has been supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193Pallardó Lozoya, MR.; Esparza Peidro, J.; García Escriva, JR.; Decker, H.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2011). Scalable data management in distributed information systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 7046:208-217. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25126-9_31S2082177046Helland, P.: Life beyond distributed transactions: an apostate’s opinion. In: 3rd Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 132–141 (2007)Finkelstein, S., Jacobs, D., Brendle, R.: Principles for inconsistency. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Chang, F., Dean, J., Ghemawat, S., Hsieh, W.C., Wallach, D.A., Burrows, M., Chandra, T., Fikes, A., Gruber, R.: Bigtable: A distributed storage system for structured data. In: 7th Symp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Implem. (OSDI), pp. 205–218. USENIX Assoc., Seattle (2006)Cooper, B.F., Baldeschwieler, E., Fonseca, R., Kistler, J.J., Narayan, P.P.S., Neerdaels, C., Negrin, T., Ramakrishnan, R., Silberstein, A., Srivastava, U., Stata, R.: Building a cloud for Yahoo! IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 32, 36–43 (2009)DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, G., Lakshman, A., Pilchin, A., Sivasubramanian, S., Vosshall, P., Vogels, W.: Dynamo: Amazon’s highly available key-value store. In: 21st ACM Symp. on Operat. Syst. Princ. (SOSP), Stevenson, Washington, USA, pp. 205–220 (2007)Stonebraker, M., Madden, S., Abadi, D.J., Harizopoulos, S., Hachem, N., Helland, P.: The end of an architectural era (it’s time for a complete rewrite). In: 33rd Intnl. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), pp. 1150–1160. ACM Press, Vienna (2007)Lomet, D.B., Fekete, A., Weikum, G., Zwilling, M.J.: Unbundling transaction services in the cloud. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Campbell, D.G., Kakivaya, G., Ellis, N.: Extreme scale with full SQL language support in Microsoft SQL Azure. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 1021–1024. ACM, New York (2010)Levandoski, J.J., Lomet, D., Mokbel, M.F., Zhao, K.K.: Deuteronomy: Transaction support for cloud data. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 123–133 (2011)Helland, P., Campbell, D.: Building on quicksand. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Muñoz-Escoí, F.D., García-Escrivá, J.R., Pallardó-Lozoya, M.R., Esparza-Peidro, J.: Managing scalable persistent data. Technical Report ITI-SIDI-2011/003, Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain (2011)Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., Antony, S., Das, S.: Data management challenges in cloud computing infrastructures. In: 6th Intnl. Wshop. on Databases in Networked Information Systems (DNIS), Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, pp. 1–10 (2010)Stonebraker, M.: The case for shared nothing. IEEE Database Eng. Bull. 9, 4–9 (1986)Alonso, G., Kossmann, D., Roscoe, T.: SwissBox: An architecture for data processing appliances. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 32–37 (2011)Baker, J., Bond, C., Corbett, J.C., Furman, J.J., Khorlin, A., Larson, J., Léon, J.M., Li, Y., Lloyd, A., Yushprakh, V.: Megastore: Providing scalable, highly available storage for interactive services. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 223–234 (2011)Curino, C., Jones, E.P.C., Popa, R.A., Malviya, N., Wu, E., Madden, S., Balakrishnan, H., Zeldovich, N.: Relational cloud: A database-as-a-service for the cloud. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 235–240 (2011)Das, S., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A.: ElasTraS: An elastic transactional data store in the cloud. CoRR abs/1008.3751 (2010)Vogels, W.: Eventually consistent. Commun. ACM 52, 40–44 (2009)Breitbart, Y., Korth, H.F.: Replication and consistency: being lazy helps sometimes. In: 16th ACM Symp. on Princ. of Database Syst., PODS 1997, pp. 173–184. ACM, New York (1997)Brantner, M., Florescu, D., Graf, D.A., Kossmann, D., Kraska, T.: Building a database on S3. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 251–264. ACM Press, Vancouver (2008)Lakshman, A., Malik, P.: Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system. Operating Systems Review 44, 35–40 (2010)Burrows, M.: The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems. In: 7th Symp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Implem. (OSDI), pp. 335–350. USENIX Assoc., Seattle (2006)Junqueira, F.P., Reed, B.: The life and times of a ZooKeeper. In: 28th Annual ACM Symp. on Princ. of Distrib. Comp. (PODC), p. 4. ACM Press, Calgary (2009)MacCormick, J., Murphy, N., Najork, M., Thekkath, C.A., Zhou, L.: Boxwood: Abstractions as the foundation for storage infrastructure. In: 6th Simp. on Operat. Syst. Design and Impl. (OSDI), pp. 105–120. USENIX Assoc., San Francisco (2004)Stonebraker, M., Cattell, R.: Ten rules for scalable performance in ”simple operation” datastores. Commun. ACM 54, 72–80 (2011)Amazon Web Services LLC: Amazon SimpleDB (2011), http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/Lamport, L.: The part-time parliament. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 16, 133–169 (1998)Bernstein, P.A., Reid, C.W., Das, S.: Hyder - a transactional record manager for shared flash. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 9–20 (2011)Bonnet, P., Bouganim, L.: Flash device support for database management. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 1–8 (2011)Microsoft Corp.: Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud services platform (2011), http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/VoltDB, Inc.: VoltDB technical overview: Next generation open-source SQL database with ACID for fast-scaling OLTP applications (2010), Downloadable from: http://voltdb.com/_pdf/VoltDBTechnicalOverviewWhitePaper.pd

Genotoxic potential of Cotinus coggygria Scop. (Anacardiaceae) stem extract in vivo

The intention was to evaluate the possible in vivo genotoxic potential in different cell-types, of a methanol extract obtained from the plant stem of Cotinus coggygria Scop., using the sex-linked recessive lethal (or SLRL) test and alkaline comet assay. The SLRL test, revealed the genotoxic effect of this extract in postmeiotic and premeiotic germ-cell lines. The comet assay was carried out on rat liver and bone marrow at 24 and 72 h after intraperitoneal administration. For genotoxic evaluation, three concentrations of the extract were tested, viz., 500, 1000 and 2000 mg/kg body weight (bw), based on the solubility limit of the extract in saline. Comet tail moment and total scores in the group treated with 500 mg/kg bw, 24 and 72 h after treatment, were not significantly different from the control group, whereas in the groups of animals, under the same conditions, but with 1000 and 2000 mg/kg bw of the extract, scores were statistically so. A slight decrease in the comet score and tail moment observed in all the doses in the 72 h treatment, gave to understand that DNA damage induced by Cotinus coggygria extract decreased with time. The results of both tests revealed the genotoxic effect of Cotinus coggygria under our experimental conditions