New Developments at NASA's Instrument Synthesis and Analysis Laboratory

NASA's Instrument Synthesis and Analysis Laboratory (ISAL) has developed new methods to provide an instrument study in one week's engineering time. The final product is recorded in oral presentations, models and the analyses which underlie the models

On Convergence of Development Costs and Cost Models for Complex Spaceflight Instrument Electronics

Development costs of a few recent spaceflight instrument electrical and electronics subsystems have diverged from respective heritage cost model predictions. The cost models used are Grass Roots, Price-H and Parametric Model. These cost models originated in the military and industry around 1970 and were successfully adopted and patched by NASA on a mission-by-mission basis for years. However, the complexity of new instruments recently changed rapidly by orders of magnitude. This is most obvious in the complexity of representative spaceflight instrument electronics' data system. It is now required to perform intermediate processing of digitized data apart from conventional processing of science phenomenon signals from multiple detectors. This involves on-board instrument formatting of computational operands from row data for example, images), multi-million operations per second on large volumes of data in reconfigurable hardware (in addition to processing on a general purpose imbedded or standalone instrument flight computer), as well as making decisions for on-board system adaptation and resource reconfiguration. The instrument data system is now tasked to perform more functions, such as forming packets and instrument-level data compression of more than one data stream, which are traditionally performed by the spacecraft command and data handling system. It is furthermore required that the electronics box for new complex instruments is developed for one-digit watt power consumption, small size and that it is light-weight, and delivers super-computing capabilities. The conflict between the actual development cost of newer complex instruments and its electronics components' heritage cost model predictions seems to be irreconcilable. This conflict and an approach to its resolution are addressed in this paper by determining the complexity parameters, complexity index, and their use in enhanced cost model

New Developments at NASA's Instrument Synthesis & Analysis Laboratory (ISAL)

This viewgraph document reviews the work of NASA's Instrument Synthesis and Analysis Laboratory (ISAL). The work of the ISAL has substantially reduced the time required to develop an instrument concept. The document reviews the design process in detail and planned interaction with the end user of the instrument

Multivariate methods and software for association mapping in dose¿response genome¿wide association studies

Abstract Background The large sample sizes, freedom of ethical restrictions and ease of repeated measurements make cytotoxicity assays of immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines a powerful new in vitro method in pharmacogenomics research. However, previous studies may have over‐simplified the complex differences in dose‐response profiles between genotypes, resulting in a loss of power. Methods The current study investigates four previously studied methods, plus one new method based on a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) design. A simulation study was performed using differences in cancer drug response between genotypes for biologically meaningful loci. These loci also showed significance in separate genome‐wide association studies. This manuscript builds upon a previous study, where differences in dose‐response curves between genotypes were constructed using the hill slope equation. Conclusion Overall, MANOVA was found to be the most powerful method for detecting real signals, and was also the most robust method for detection using alternatives generated with the previous simulation study. This method is also attractive because test statistics follow their expected distributions under the null hypothesis for both simulated and real data. The success of this method inspired the creation of the software program MAGWAS. MAGWAS is a computationally efficient, user‐friendly, open source software tool that works on most platforms and performs GWASs for individuals having multivariate responses using standard file formats

National Standards for Diabetes Self-Management Education

Diabetes self-management education (DSME) is a critical element of care for all people with diabetes and is necessary in order to improve patient outcomes. The National Standards for DSME are designed to define quality diabetes self-management education and to assist diabetes educators in a variety of settings to provide evidence-based education. Because of the dynamic nature of health care and diabetes-related research, these Standards are reviewed and revised approximately every 5 years by key organizations and federal agencies within the diabetes education community. A Task Force was jointly convened by the American Association of Diabetes Educators and the American Diabetes Association in the summer of 2006. Additional organizations that were represented included the American Dietetic Association, the Veteran's Health Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Indian Health Service, and the American Pharmaceutical Association. Members of the Task Force included a person with diabetes; several health services researchers/behaviorists, registered nurses, and registered dietitians; and a pharmacist. The Task Force was charged with reviewing the current DSME standards for their appropriateness, relevance, and scientific basis. The Standards were then reviewed and revised based on the available evidence and expert consensus. The committee convened on 31 March 2006 and 9 September 2006, and the Standards were approved 25 March 2007

Genome-wide association and pharmacological profiling of 29 anticancer agents using lymphoblastoid cell lines

Association mapping with lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) is a promising approach in pharmacogenomics research, and in the current study we utilize this model to perform association mapping for 29 chemotherapy drugs