The Clinical Utility of a Precision Medicine Blood Test Incorporating Age, Sex, and Gene Expression for Evaluating Women with Stable Symptoms Suggestive of Obstructive Coronary Artery Disease: Analysis from the PRESET Registry.

Background: Evaluating women with symptoms suggestive of coronary artery disease (CAD) remains challenging. A blood-based precision medicine test yielding an age/sex/gene expression score (ASGES) has shown clinical validity in the diagnosis of obstructive CAD. We assessed the effect of the ASGES on the management of women with suspected obstructive CAD in a community-based registry. Materials and Methods: The prospective PRESET (A Registry to Evaluate Patterns of Care Associated with the Use of Corus® CAD in Real World Clinical Care Settings) Registry (NCT01677156) enrolled 566 patients presenting with symptoms suggestive of stable obstructive CAD from 21 United States primary care practices from 2012 to 2014. Demographics, clinical characteristics, and referrals to cardiology or further functional and/or anatomical cardiac studies after ASGES testing were collected for this subgroup analysis of women from the PRESET Registry. Patients were followed for 1-year post-ASGES testing. Results: This study cohort included 288 women with a median age 57 years. The median body mass index was 29.2, with hyperlipidemia and hypertension present in 48% and 43% of patients, respectively. Median ASGES was 8.5 (range 1-40), with 218 (76%) patients having low (≤15) ASGES. Clinicians referred 9% (20/218) low ASGES versus 44% (31/70) elevated ASGES women for further cardiac evaluation (odds ratio 0.14, p < 0.0001, adjusted for patient demographics and clinical covariates). Across the score range, higher ASGES were associated with a higher likelihood of posttest cardiac referral. At 1-year follow-up, low ASGES women experienced fewer major adverse cardiac events than elevated ASGES women (1.3% vs. 4.2% respectively, p = 0.16). Conclusions: Incorporation of ASGES into the diagnostic workup demonstrated clinical utility by helping clinicians identify women less likely to benefit from further cardiac evaluation

Aircraft/island/ship/satellite intercomparison: Preliminary results from July 16, 1987

The First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE) objective of validating and improving satellite algorithms for inferring cloud properties from satellite radiances was one of the central motivating factors in the design of the specific field experimental strategies used in the July, 1987 marine stratocumulus intensive field observations (IFO). The in situ measuring platforms were deployed to take maximum advantage of redundant measurements (for intercomparison of the in situ sensors) and to provide optimal coverage within satellite images. One of the most ambitious of these strategies was the attempt to coordinate measurements from San Nicolas Island (SNI), the R/V Pt. Sur, the meteorological aircraft, and the satellites. For the most part, this attempt was frustrated by flight restrictions in the vicinity of SNI. The exception was the mission of July 16, 1987, which achieved remarkable success in the coordination of the platforms. This presentation concerns operations conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Electra and how data from the Electra can be integrated with and compared to data from the Pt. Sur, SNI, and the satellites. The focus is on the large-scale, integrated picture of the conditions on July 16 from the perspective of the Electra's flight operations

Towards hate speech detection in low-resource languages: Comparing ASR to acoustic word embeddings on Wolof and Swahili

We consider hate speech detection through keyword spotting on radio broadcasts. One approach is to build an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for the target low-resource language. We compare this to using acoustic word embedding (AWE) models that map speech segments to a space where matching words have similar vectors. We specifically use a multilingual AWE model trained on labelled data from well-resourced languages to spot keywords in data in the unseen target language. In contrast to ASR, the AWE approach only requires a few keyword exemplars. In controlled experiments on Wolof and Swahili where training and test data are from the same domain, an ASR model trained on just five minutes of data outperforms the AWE approach. But in an in-the-wild test on Swahili radio broadcasts with actual hate speech keywords, the AWE model (using one minute of template data) is more robust, giving similar performance to an ASR system trained on 30 hours of labelled data.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

Forage Quality and Performance of Yearlings Grazing Switchgrass Strains Selected for Differing Digestibility

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a native, perennial warm-season grass commonly used as summer pasture. Three strains of switchgrass with different in vitro DM disappearance (IVDMD) values were evaluated with yearling cattle (Bos taurus) in three replicated grazing trials All strains were similar in genetic background, maturity and yield potential. \u27Trailblazer\u27 (high-IVDMD) resulted in higher (P \u3c .05) ADG than \u27Pathfinder\u27 and \u27low-IVDMD\u27. Available forage of Trailblazer had higher IVDMD than Pathfinder and low-IVDMD. The IVDMD differences among strains were similar throughout the season; IVDMD declined between .3 and .5 percentage units per day. Forage availability, CP, NDF and ADF, permanganate lignin and ash were similar among strains. This study documents that plant breeders can select switchgrass plants for higher IVDMD and that strains consisting of progeny of these plants can result in higher animal gains than strains consisting of progeny of unselected or low-IVDMD plants with similar genetic background, forage yield, maturity, morphology and chemical composition

Foraging Quality and Performance of Yearlings Grazing Switchgrass Strains Selected for Differing Digestibility

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a native, perennial warm-season grass commonly used as summer pasture. Three strains of switchgrass with different in vitro DM disappearance (IVDMD) values were evaluated with yearling cattle (Bos taurus) in three replicated grazing trials. All strains were similar in genetic background, maturity and yield potential. \u27Trailblazer\u27 (high-IVDMD) resulted in higher (P \u3c .05) ADG than \u27Pathfinder\u27 and \u27low-IVDMD\u27. Available forage of Trailblazer had higher IVDMD than Pathfinder and low-IVDMD. The IVDMD differences among strains were similar throughout the season; IVDMD declined between 0.3 and 0.5 percentage units per day. Forage availability, CP, NDF and ADF, permanganate lignin and ash were similar among strains. This study documents that plant breeders can select switchgrass plants for higher IVDMD and that strains consisting of progeny of these plants can result in higher animal gains than strains consisting of progeny of unselected or low-IVDMD plants with similar genetic background, forage yield, maturity, morphology and chemical composition

Forage Quality and Performance of Yearlings Grazing Switchgrass Strains Selected for Differing Digestibility

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a native, perennial warm-season grass commonly used as summer pasture. Three strains of switchgrass with different in vitro DM disappearance (IVDMD) values were evaluated with yearling cattle (Bos taurus) in three replicated grazing trials All strains were similar in genetic background, maturity and yield potential. \u27Trailblazer\u27 (high-IVDMD) resulted in higher (P \u3c .05) ADG than \u27Pathfinder\u27 and \u27low-IVDMD\u27. Available forage of Trailblazer had higher IVDMD than Pathfinder and low-IVDMD. The IVDMD differences among strains were similar throughout the season; IVDMD declined between .3 and .5 percentage units per day. Forage availability, CP, NDF and ADF, permanganate lignin and ash were similar among strains. This study documents that plant breeders can select switchgrass plants for higher IVDMD and that strains consisting of progeny of these plants can result in higher animal gains than strains consisting of progeny of unselected or low-IVDMD plants with similar genetic background, forage yield, maturity, morphology and chemical composition

Foraging Quality and Performance of Yearlings Grazing Switchgrass Strains Selected for Differing Digestibility

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) is a native, perennial warm-season grass commonly used as summer pasture. Three strains of switchgrass with different in vitro DM disappearance (IVDMD) values were evaluated with yearling cattle (Bos taurus) in three replicated grazing trials. All strains were similar in genetic background, maturity and yield potential. \u27Trailblazer\u27 (high-IVDMD) resulted in higher (P \u3c .05) ADG than \u27Pathfinder\u27 and \u27low-IVDMD\u27. Available forage of Trailblazer had higher IVDMD than Pathfinder and low-IVDMD. The IVDMD differences among strains were similar throughout the season; IVDMD declined between 0.3 and 0.5 percentage units per day. Forage availability, CP, NDF and ADF, permanganate lignin and ash were similar among strains. This study documents that plant breeders can select switchgrass plants for higher IVDMD and that strains consisting of progeny of these plants can result in higher animal gains than strains consisting of progeny of unselected or low-IVDMD plants with similar genetic background, forage yield, maturity, morphology and chemical composition

Identification of novel clostridium perfringens type E strains that carry an iota toxin plasmid with a functional enterotoxin gene

Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin (CPE) is a major virulence factor for human gastrointestinal diseases, such as food poisoning and antibiotic associated diarrhea. The CPE-encoding gene (cpe) can be chromosomal or plasmid-borne. Recent development of conventional PCR cpe-genotyping assays makes it possible to identify cpe location (chromosomal or plasmid) in type A isolates. Initial studies for developing cpe genotyping assays indicated that all cpe-positive strains isolated from sickened patients were typable by cpe-genotypes, but surveys of C. perfringens environmental strains or strains from feces of healthy people suggested that this assay might not be useful for some cpe-carrying type A isolates. In the current study, a pulsed-field gel electrophoresis Southern blot assay showed that four cpe-genotype untypable isolates carried their cpe gene on a plasmid of ~65 kb. Complete sequence analysis of the ~65 kb variant cpe-carrying plasmid revealed no intact IS elements and a disrupted cytosine methyltransferase (dcm) gene. More importantly, this plasmid contains a conjugative transfer region, a variant cpe gene and variant iota toxin genes. The toxin genes encoded by this plasmid are expressed based upon the results of RT-PCR assays. The ~65 kb plasmid is closely related to the pCPF4969 cpe plasmid of type A isolates. MLST analyses indicated these isolates belong to a unique cluster of C. perfringens. Overall, these isolates carrying a variant functional cpe gene and iota toxin genes represent unique type E strains. © 2011 Miyamoto et al

Amenability of groups and GG-sets

This text surveys classical and recent results in the field of amenability of groups, from a combinatorial standpoint. It has served as the support of courses at the University of G\"ottingen and the \'Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure. The goals of the text are (1) to be as self-contained as possible, so as to serve as a good introduction for newcomers to the field; (2) to stress the use of combinatorial tools, in collaboration with functional analysis, probability etc., with discrete groups in focus; (3) to consider from the beginning the more general notion of amenable actions; (4) to describe recent classes of examples, and in particular groups acting on Cantor sets and topological full groups