Improving support for older people looking after someone with advanced cancer

The briefing paper is about the findings and recommendations from a research project conducted at the University of Nottingham, with funding awarded by Macmillan Cancer Support. The project was set up to study the experiences and main support needs of older carers looking after someone with advanced cancer and to facilitate the active involvement of carers in the research process. Looking after someone with advanced cancer approaching the end of their life has a substantial and enduring impact on older carers. Various factors contribute to the diverse quality and impact of end of life care experiences for both the person with advanced cancer and their caregiver. These include factors relating to the care giver and care recipient, such as the communication style and quality of relationship between them; the availability, provision and quality of informal support, and the duration of the end of life care phase. They also include factors external to the care giver and care recipient such as the availability, provision and quality of formal health and social care services for both the care giver and the person with advanced cancer. The study participants main support needs and recommendations for improving support for older carers are provided

Older Carers and Involvement in Research

The briefing paper describes the views, experiences, motivations and plans of six older carers who decided to stay involved in research following their participation in a one year project and some research training at the University of Nottingham funded by Macmillan Cancer Support. The project was set up to study the experiences and main support needs of older carers looking after someone with advanced cancer and was designed to also encourage and facilitate the active involvement of carers in the research proces

Today was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers

What is a good workday for a software developer? What is a typical workday? We seek to answer these two questions to learn how to make good days typical. Concretely, answering these questions will help to optimize development processes and select tools that increase job satisfaction and productivity. Our work adds to a large body of research on how software developers spend their time. We report the results from 5971 responses of professional developers at Microsoft, who reflected about what made their workdays good and typical, and self-reported about how they spent their time on various activities at work. We developed conceptual frameworks to help define and characterize developer workdays from two new perspectives: good and typical. Our analysis confirms some findings in previous work, including the fact that developers actually spend little time on development and developers' aversion for meetings and interruptions. It also discovered new findings, such as that only 1.7% of survey responses mentioned emails as a reason for a bad workday, and that meetings and interruptions are only unproductive during development phases; during phases of planning, specification and release, they are common and constructive. One key finding is the importance of agency, developers' control over their workday and whether it goes as planned or is disrupted by external factors. We present actionable recommendations for researchers and managers to prioritize process and tool improvements that make good workdays typical. For instance, in light of our finding on the importance of agency, we recommend that, where possible, managers empower developers to choose their tools and tasks

To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript

JavaScript is growing explosively and is now used in large mature projects even outside the web domain. JavaScript is also a dynamically typed language for which static type systems, notably Facebook's Flow and Microsoft's TypeScript, have been written. What benefits do these static type systems provide? Leveraging JavaScript project histories, we select a fixed bug and check out the code just prior to the fix. We manually add type annotations to the buggy code and test whether Flow and TypeScript report an error on the buggy code, thereby possibly prompting a developer to fix the bug before its public release. We then report the proportion of bugs on which these type systems reported an error. Evaluating static type systems against public bugs, which have survived testing and review, is conservative: it understates their effectiveness at detecting bugs during private development, not to mention their other benefits such as facilitating code search/completion and serving as documentation. Despite this uneven playing field, our central finding is that both static type systems find an important percentage of public bugs: both Flow 0.30 and TypeScript 2.0 successfully detect 15%!

Deep learning type inference

Dynamically typed languages such as JavaScript and Python are increasingly popular, yet static typing has not been totally eclipsed: Python now supports type annotations and languages like TypeScript offer a middle-ground for JavaScript: a strict superset of JavaScript, to which it transpiles, coupled with a type system that permits partially typed programs. However, static typing has a cost: adding annotations, reading the added syntax, and wrestling with the type system to fix type errors. Type inference can ease the transition to more statically typed code and unlock the benefits of richer compile-time information, but is limited in languages like JavaScript as it cannot soundly handle duck-typing or runtime evaluation via eval. We propose DeepTyper, a deep learning model that understands which types naturally occur in certain contexts and relations and can provide type suggestions, which can often be verified by the type checker, even if it could not infer the type initially. DeepTyper, leverages an automatically aligned corpus of tokens and types to accurately predict thousands of variable and function type annotations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that context is key in accurately assigning these types and introduce a technique to reduce overfitting on local cues while highlighting the need for further improvements. Finally, we show that our model can interact with a compiler to provide more than 4,000 additional type annotations with over 95% precision that could not be inferred without the aid of DeepTyper

Mining Semantic Loop Idioms

To write code, developers stitch together patterns, like API protocols or data structure traversals. Discovering these patterns can identify inconsistencies in code or opportunities to replace these patterns with an API or a language construct. We present coiling, a technique for automatically mining code for semantic idioms: surprisingly probable, semantic patterns. We specialize coiling for loop idioms, semantic idioms of loops. First, we show that automatically identifiable patterns exist, in great numbers, with a largescale empirical study of loops over 25MLOC. We find that most loops in this corpus are simple and predictable: 90 percent have fewer than 15LOC and 90 percent have no nesting and very simple control. Encouraged by this result, we then mine loop idioms over a second, buildable corpus. Over this corpus, we show that only 50 loop idioms cover 50 percent of the concrete loops. Our framework opens the door to data-driven tool and language design, discovering opportunities to introduce new API calls and language constructs. Loop idioms show that LINQ would benefit from an Enumerate operator. This can be confirmed by the exitence of a StackOverflow question with 542k views that requests precisely this feature

A Luminous and Isolated Gamma-Ray Flare from the Blazar B2 1215+30

B2 1215+30 is a BL-Lac-type blazar that was first detected at TeV energies by the MAGIC atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and subsequently confirmed by the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) observatory with data collected between 2009 and 2012. In 2014 February 08, VERITAS detected a large-amplitude flare from B2 1215+30 during routine monitoring observations of the blazar 1ES 1218+304, located in the same field of view. The TeV flux reached 2.4 times the Crab Nebula flux with a variability timescale of . Multiwavelength observations with Fermi-LAT, Swift, and the Tuorla Observatory revealed a correlated high GeV flux state and no significant optical counterpart to the flare, with a spectral energy distribution where the gamma-ray luminosity exceeds the synchrotron luminosity. When interpreted in the framework of a one-zone leptonic model, the observed emission implies a high degree of beaming, with Doppler factor , and an electron population with spectral index

A Search for Spectral Hysteresis and Energy-dependent Time Lags from X-Ray and TeV Gamma-Ray Observations of Mrk 421

Abstract Blazars are variable emitters across all wavelengths over a wide range of timescales, from months down to minutes. It is therefore essential to observe blazars simultaneously at different wavelengths, especially in the X-ray and gamma-ray bands, where the broadband spectral energy distributions usually peak. In this work, we report on three target-of-opportunity observations of Mrk 421, one of the brightest TeV blazars, triggered by a strong flaring event at TeV energies in 2014. These observations feature long, continuous, and simultaneous exposures with XMM-Newton (covering the X-ray and optical/ultraviolet bands) and VERITAS (covering the TeV gamma-ray band), along with contemporaneous observations from other gamma-ray facilities (MAGIC and Fermi-Large Area Telescope) and a number of radio and optical facilities. Although neither rapid flares nor significant X-ray/TeV correlation are detected, these observations reveal subtle changes in the X-ray spectrum of the source over the course of a few days. We search the simultaneous X-ray and TeV data for spectral hysteresis patterns and time delays, which could provide insight into the emission mechanisms and the source properties (e.g., the radius of the emitting region, the strength of the magnetic field, and related timescales). The observed broadband spectra are consistent with a one-zone synchrotron self-Compton model. We find that the power spectral density distribution at 4 × 10−4 Hz from the X-ray data can be described by a power-law model with an index value between 1.2 and 1.8, and do not find evidence for a steepening of the power spectral index (often associated with a characteristic length scale) compared to the previously reported values at lower frequencies

Chromatin and epigenetics: current biophysical views

Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing experiments and their theoretical descriptions have determined fast dynamics of the "chromatin and epigenetics" field, with new concepts appearing at high rate. This field includes but is not limited to the study of DNA-protein-RNA interactions, chromatin packing properties at different scales, regulation of gene expression and protein trafficking in the cell nucleus, binding site search in the crowded chromatin environment and modulation of physical interactions by covalent chemical modifications of the binding partners. The current special issue does not pretend for the full coverage of the field, but it rather aims to capture its development and provide a snapshot of the most recent concepts and approaches. Eighteen open-access articles comprising this issue provide a delicate balance between current theoretical and experimental biophysical approaches to uncover chromatin structure and understand epigenetic regulation, allowing free flow of new ideas and preliminary results

Metallothionein crypt-restricted immunopositivity indices (MTCRII) correlate with aberrant crypt foci (ACF) in mouse colon

Metallothionein (MT) crypt-restricted immunopositivity indices (MTCRII) are colonic crypt stem cell mutation markers that may be induced early and in abundance after mutagen treatment. Metallothionein is the endogenous reporter gene for MTCRII, but is not typically implicated in the classical pathway of colorectal tumorigenesis. Hence, the oncological relevance of MTCRII is unclear. This study tests the hypothesis that MTCRII induced by N-methyl-N-nitrosourea (MNU) and lambda carrageenan (λCgN) associate with aberrant crypt foci (ACF) in mouse colon. Undegraded λCgN and MNU were tested alone and in combination against MTCRII and ACF in Balb/c mice, at 20 weeks after the start of treatment. MTCRII were unaffected by λCgN alone. Combined λCgN/MNU treatments induced greater MTCRII (P<0.01) as well as greater number (P<0.001) and crypt multiplicity (P<0.01) of ACF than MNU alone. MTCRII were approximately 10-fold more numerous than ACF, although linear correlations were observed between these parameters (r=0.732; P<0.01). MTCRII are induced by λCgN/MNU interactions in sufficient numbers to provide statistical power from relatively small sample sizes and correlate with ACF formation. MTCRII could thus provide the basis for a novel medium-term murine bioassay relevant to early-stage colorectal tumorigenesis