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Investigating the Global and Local in Wangchuck Centennial National Park: A Case for the Bhutanese Conservation Actors In-Between
Bhutan is world famous for its approach to both environmental conservation and development, despite being classified as âleast developedâ by the World Bank as recently as 2016. As Bhutan continues to develop, it has increasingly encountered the colloquially known, but statistically unproven phenomena: that development standards and conservation goals are often in conflict with the needs of rural communities. In the case of such ideological, cultural and economic clashes, this article argues for the necessity of âmiddle-actorsâ such as native Bhutanese civil servants, as they are able to navigate the cultural and economic zone âin-betweenâ the international and the local in ways that others cannot
Rendering Supply Chains Research and Its (Dis)contents
Supply chains are fundamental to contemporary forms of capitalist production and circulation, but rarely make themselves known unless they stop working. This âanti-paperâ documents the beginnings of a project grappling with the possibilities and limitations surrounding digital renderings of supply chains and related research online in a way that goes beyond the spectacle of breakage. It is an âanti-paperâ in that it documents process and learnings over findings, results, or other finalised outputs. Section one introduces the project and the wider context it was born from and into, while section two reviews the existing landscape of digital projects surrounding supply chains and our attempt to develop some heuristics for thinking through their underlying epistemological, informational, and design assumptions, and how approaches to digital supply chain renderings differ along these lines, with possibilities and constraints entailed by each. Section three documents the dilemmas faced so far in our own project, and section four concludes by reflecting on maintenance as a research ethos and its relevance to learning about supply chains
Towards Openness Beyond Open Access: User Journeys through 3 Open AI Collaboratives
Open Artificial Intelligence (Open source AI) collaboratives offer
alternative pathways for how AI can be developed beyond well-resourced
technology companies and who can be a part of the process. To understand how
and why they work and what additionality they bring to the landscape, we focus
on three such communities, each focused on a different kind of activity around
AI: building models (BigScience workshop), tools and ways of working (The
Turing Way), and ecosystems (Mozilla Festival's Building Trustworthy AI Working
Group). First, we document the community structures that facilitate these
distributed, volunteer-led teams, comparing the collaboration styles that drive
each group towards their specific goals. Through interviews with community
leaders, we map user journeys for how members discover, join, contribute, and
participate. Ultimately, this paper aims to highlight the diversity of AI work
and workers that have come forth through these collaborations and how they
offer a broader practice of openness to the AI space.Comment: Presented at the 2022 NeurIPS Workshop on Broadening Research
Collaborations in M
Associations of common breast cancer susceptibility alleles with risk of breast cancer subtypes in BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Persistent Organic Pollutant Exposure Leads to Insulin Resistance Syndrome
International audienceBackground: the incidence of the insulin resistance syndrome has increased at an alarming rate worldwide, creating a serious challenge to public health care in the 21st century. Recently, epide-miological studies have associated the prevalence of type 2 diabetes with elevated body burdens of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). However, experimental evidence demonstrating a causal link between POPs and the development of insulin resistance is lacking. Objective: We investigated whether exposure to POPs contributes to insulin resistance and meta-bolic disorders. Methods: Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed for 28 days to lipophilic POPs through the con-sumption of a high-fat diet containing either refined or crude fish oil obtained from farmed Atlantic salmon. In addition, differentiated adipocytes were exposed to several POP mixtures that mimicked the relative abundance of organic pollutants present in crude salmon oil. We measured body weight, whole-body insulin sensitivity, POP accumulation, lipid and glucose homeostasis, and gene expres-sion and we performed micro array analysis. Results: Adult male rats exposed to crude, but not refined, salmon oil developed insulin resis-tance, abdominal obesity, and hepatosteatosis. The contribution of POPs to insulin resistance was confirmed in cultured adipocytes where POPs, especially organochlorine pesticides, led to robust inhibition of insulin action. Moreover, POPs induced down-regulation of insulin-induced gene-1 (Insig-1) and Lpin1, two master regulators of lipid homeostasis. Conclusion: Our findings provide evidence that exposure to POPs commonly present in food chains leads to insulin resistance and associated metabolic disorder
The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) presents the first spectroscopic
data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This ninth data
release (DR9) of the SDSS project includes 535,995 new galaxy spectra (median
z=0.52), 102,100 new quasar spectra (median z=2.32), and 90,897 new stellar
spectra, along with the data presented in previous data releases. These spectra
were obtained with the new BOSS spectrograph and were taken between 2009
December and 2011 July. In addition, the stellar parameters pipeline, which
determines radial velocities, surface temperatures, surface gravities, and
metallicities of stars, has been updated and refined with improvements in
temperature estimates for stars with T_eff<5000 K and in metallicity estimates
for stars with [Fe/H]>-0.5. DR9 includes new stellar parameters for all stars
presented in DR8, including stars from SDSS-I and II, as well as those observed
as part of the SDSS-III Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and
Exploration-2 (SEGUE-2).
The astrometry error introduced in the DR8 imaging catalogs has been
corrected in the DR9 data products. The next data release for SDSS-III will be
in Summer 2013, which will present the first data from the Apache Point
Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) along with another year of
data from BOSS, followed by the final SDSS-III data release in December 2014.Comment: 9 figures; 2 tables. Submitted to ApJS. DR9 is available at
http://www.sdss3.org/dr
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the
scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a
larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys
of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as
i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7.
Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000
quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15<z<3.5.
Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale
three-dimensional clustering of the Lyman alpha forest and a strong detection
from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive
galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield
measurements of the angular diameter distance D_A to an accuracy of 1.0% at
redshifts z=0.3 and z=0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the
same redshifts. Forecasts for Lyman alpha forest constraints predict a
measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate
D_A(z) and H^{-1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z~2.5 when the survey
is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic
targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of
BOSS.Comment: 49 pages, 16 figures, accepted by A
Pan-cancer Alterations of the MYC Oncogene and Its Proximal Network across the Cancer Genome Atlas
Although theMYConcogene has been implicated incancer, a systematic assessment of alterations ofMYC, related transcription factors, and co-regulatoryproteins, forming the proximal MYC network (PMN),across human cancers is lacking. Using computa-tional approaches, we define genomic and proteo-mic features associated with MYC and the PMNacross the 33 cancers of The Cancer Genome Atlas.Pan-cancer, 28% of all samples had at least one ofthe MYC paralogs amplified. In contrast, the MYCantagonists MGA and MNT were the most frequentlymutated or deleted members, proposing a roleas tumor suppressors.MYCalterations were mutu-ally exclusive withPIK3CA,PTEN,APC,orBRAFalterations, suggesting that MYC is a distinct onco-genic driver. Expression analysis revealed MYC-associated pathways in tumor subtypes, such asimmune response and growth factor signaling; chro-matin, translation, and DNA replication/repair wereconserved pan-cancer. This analysis reveals insightsinto MYC biology and is a reference for biomarkersand therapeutics for cancers with alterations ofMYC or the PMN
Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts
Genomic, Pathway Network, and Immunologic Features Distinguishing Squamous Carcinomas
This integrated, multiplatform PanCancer Atlas study co-mapped and identified distinguishing
molecular features of squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) from five sites associated with smokin
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