Parallel Cycles for the Emergy Evaluation of Information in Manufacturing, Culture, and Life

For environmental accounting, the incorporation of human cultural information is challenging. In 1987, Howard T. Odum published an emergy analysis of highways in Texas. The highways were conceived as typical environmental-industrial products; however, his analysis incorporated the unusual feature of evaluation of the information required. Information for highway use was in the production of highway maps, which was his principal object of information study. However, in addition, he also evaluated the information for the control of highway production in specification documents. His study addressed the creation of both information forms, and the evaluation of that information with emergy. In this paper, that analysis is re-examined considering a theoretical and methodological advancement in the study of material production with information control. That advancement is the modelling of two distinct forms of information that are required for any manufactured or information product. That modelling makes use of the ‘information cycle’, a systems design that assures the maintenance and perpetuation of information against Second Law depreciation of information carriers. The two information forms are labeled here the object information and the expression information. The object information is the template for the final product (the ‘design specs’ for a widget, the script of a play, or the DNA of an organism). The expression information in cultural production is the operating procedures, standards, and conventions for setting, venue, or factory that enable the object, while in life, the expression information is the programmed behavior of the organisms and organs of reproduction. Based on the ‘information cycle’, this paper uses Odum’s highways study to demonstrate a ‘parallel cycles’ model for the perpetuation of the two forms of information

Case-control association testing by graphical modeling for the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 mini-exome sequence data

We generalize recent work on graphical models for linkage disequilibrium to estimate the conditional independence structure between all variables for individuals in the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 unrelated individuals data set. Using a stepwise approach for computational efficiency and an extension of our previously described methods, we estimate a model that describes the relationships between the disease trait, all quantitative variables, all covariates, ethnic origin, and the loci most strongly associated with these variables. We performed our analysis for the first 50 replicate data sets. We found that our approach was able to describe the relationships between the outcomes and covariates and that it could correctly detect associations of disease with several loci and with a reasonable false-positive detection rate

The WHO report "Preventing Chronic Diseases: a vital investment” and us

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Herschel dust emission as a probe of starless cores mass: MCLD 123.5+24.9 of the Polaris Flare

We present newly processed archival Herschel images of molecular cloud MCLD 123.5+24.9 in the Polaris Flare. This cloud contains five starless cores. Using the spectral synthesis code Cloudy, we explore uncertainties in the derivation of column densities, hence, masses of molecular cores from Herschel data. We first consider several detailed grain models that predict far-IR grain opacities. Opacities predicted by the models differ by more than a factor of two, leading to uncertainties in derived column densities by the same factor. Then we consider uncertainties associated with the modified blackbody fitting process used by observers to estimate column densities. For high column density clouds (N(H) $\gg$ 10$^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$), this fitting technique can underestimate column densities by about a factor of three. Finally, we consider the virial stability of the five starless cores in MCLD 123.5+24.9. All of these cores appear to have strongly sub-virial masses, assuming, as we argue, that $^{13}$CO line data provide reliable estimates of velocity dispersions. Evidently, they are not self-gravitating, so it is no surprise that they are starless.Comment: ApJ, Accepted. Minor typographical errors corrected and figures 6 & 7 updated in v