The CREF stock fund is earning 50: how well has the first equity variable served investors?

The College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF) will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2002. It was the first variable annuity to focus its investments on common stock equalities, designed to help investors overcome problems of inflation. A study of it history show: When used in combination with a traditional annuity, such as TIAA, CREF has been an effective vehible for developing additional retirement dollars at a reasonable risk level. Being evenly invested in TIAA and CREF over a 25 to 35 year working lifetime, one can expect the CREF account to have 10% to 30% more assets at the data of retirement. Those intending to have a long career of 36 year or more and having higher risk tolerances should consider contributing all of their retirement to CREF. The CREF fund has served its participants well, based on the long history analyzed in this study. If one believes that financially history, long term, can repeat itself in the coming century, use of this fund to overcome

Metabolic Pathways Enhancement Confers Poor Prognosis in p53 Exon Mutant Hepatocellular Carcinoma.

RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq), the most commonly used sequencing application tool, is not only a method for measuring gene expression but also an excellent media to detect important structural variants such as single nucleotide variants (SNVs), insertion/deletion (Indels), or fusion transcripts. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) contains genomic data from a variety of cancer types and also provides the raw data generated by TCGA consortium. p53 is among the top 10 somatic mutations associated with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The aim of the present study was to analyze concordant different gene profiles and the priori defined set of genes based on p53 mutation status in HCC using RNA-Seq data. In the study, expression profile of 11 799 genes on 42 paired tumor and adjacent normal tissues was collected, processed, and further stratified by the mutated versus normal p53 expression. Furthermore, we used a knowledge-based approach Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) to compare between normal and p53 mutation gene expression profiles. The statistical significance (nominal P value) of the enrichment score (ES) genes was calculated. The ranked gene list that reflects differential expression between p53 wild-type and mutant genotypes was then mapped to metabolic process by KEGG, an encyclopedia of genes and genomes to assign functional meanings. These approaches enable us to identify pathways and potential target gene/pathways that are highly expressed in p53 mutated HCC. Our analysis revealed 2 genes, the hexokinase 2 (HK2) and Enolase 1 (ENO1), were conspicuous of red pixel in the heatmap. To further explore the role of these genes in HCC, the overall survival plots by Kaplan-Meier method were performed for HK2 and ENO1 that revealed high HK2 and ENO1 expression in patients with HCC have poor prognosis. These results suggested that these glycolysis genes are associated with mutated-p53 in HCC that may contribute to poor prognosis. In this proof-of-concept study, we proposed an approach for identifying novel potential therapeutic targets in human HCC with mutated p53. These approaches can take advantage of the massive next-generation sequencing (NGS) data generated worldwide and make more out of it by exploring new potential therapeutic targets

A Language and Hardware Independent Approach to Quantum-Classical Computing

Heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) systems offer novel architectures which accelerate specific workloads through judicious use of specialized coprocessors. A promising architectural approach for future scientific computations is provided by heterogeneous HPC systems integrating quantum processing units (QPUs). To this end, we present XACC (eXtreme-scale ACCelerator) --- a programming model and software framework that enables quantum acceleration within standard or HPC software workflows. XACC follows a coprocessor machine model that is independent of the underlying quantum computing hardware, thereby enabling quantum programs to be defined and executed on a variety of QPUs types through a unified application programming interface. Moreover, XACC defines a polymorphic low-level intermediate representation, and an extensible compiler frontend that enables language independent quantum programming, thus promoting integration and interoperability across the quantum programming landscape. In this work we define the software architecture enabling our hardware and language independent approach, and demonstrate its usefulness across a range of quantum computing models through illustrative examples involving the compilation and execution of gate and annealing-based quantum programs

A Framework for Migration of Networked Intercommunication Processes

No abstract available

Living Like A Monk: Motivations and Experiences of International Participants in Templestay

Templestay has transformed the perception and traditional role of Buddhist monasteries into a hybrid form of leisure and recreational dwelling that transcends religious boundaries. We identify four domains of motivational variables including learning, self-growth, being with nature, and relaxation. Based on data from 299 international participants in Templestay, empirical tests of the hypotheses revealed that motivational domains such as self-growth, nature, and learning exhibited significant differences based on the various socio-demographic backgrounds of international participants. Strategies are suggested for crafting Templestay as a cultural and monastic experience as well as segmenting and targeting international participants based on their needs

Angiotensin II directly regulates intestinal epithelial NHE3 in Caco2BBE cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Angiotensin II (AII) effects on intestinal Na⁺transport may be multifactorial. To determine if AII might have a direct effect on intestinal epithelial Na⁺transport, we investigated its actions on Na⁺transport in human intestinal epithelial Caco2BBE cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>AII increased apical (brush border) sodium-hydrogen exchanger (NHE)-3, but not NHE2, activity within one hour. Similarly, only apical membrane NHE3 abundance increased at 1–2 hours without any change in total NHE3 protein abundance. From 4–48 hours, AII stimulated progressively larger increases in apical NHE3 activity and surface abundance, which was associated with increases in NHE3 protein expression. At 4–24 hours, NHE3 mRNA increases over baseline expression, suggesting increased gene transcription. This was supported by AII induced increases in rat NHE3 gene promoter-reporter activity. AII induction of NHE3 was blocked by the AII type I receptor antagonist losartan. Acute changes in AII-induced increases in NHE3 exocytosis were blocked by a phospholipase C inhibitor, an arachidonic acid cytochrome P450 epoxygenase inhibitor, as well as phosphatidylinositol 3 kinase (PI3K) inhibitors and Akt inhibitor, partially blocked by a metalloproteinase inhibitor and an EGF (epidermal growth factor) receptor kinase inhibitor, but not affected by an inhibitor of MEK-1 (MAPKK-1, mitogen activated protein kinase kinase-1).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We conclude that angiotensin II has a direct role in regulating intestinal fluid and electrolyte absorption which may contribute to its overall effects in regulation systemic volume and blood pressure. AII activates several key signaling pathways that induce acute and chronic changes in NHE3 membrane trafficking and gene transcription.</p

WinoQueer: A Community-in-the-Loop Benchmark for Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias in Large Language Models

We present WinoQueer: a benchmark specifically designed to measure whether large language models (LLMs) encode biases that are harmful to the LGBTQ+ community. The benchmark is community-sourced, via application of a novel method that generates a bias benchmark from a community survey. We apply our benchmark to several popular LLMs and find that off-the-shelf models generally do exhibit considerable anti-queer bias. Finally, we show that LLM bias against a marginalized community can be somewhat mitigated by finetuning on data written about or by members of that community, and that social media text written by community members is more effective than news text written about the community by non-members. Our method for community-in-the-loop benchmark development provides a blueprint for future researchers to develop community-driven, harms-grounded LLM benchmarks for other marginalized communities.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 (main conference). Camera-ready versio

Automated Adaptive Intrusion Containment in Systems of Interacting Services

Large scale distributed systems typically have interactions among different services that create an avenue for propagation of a failure from one service to another. The failures being considered may be the result of natural failures or malicious activity, collectively called disruptions. To make these systems tolerant to failures it is necessary to contain the spread of the occurrence automatically once it is detected. The objective is to allow certain parts of the system to continue to provide partial functionality in the system in the face of failures. Real world situations impose several constraints on the design of such a disruption tolerant system of which we consider the following - the alarms may have type I or type II errors; it may not be possible to change the service itself even though the interaction may be changed; attacks may use steps that are not anticipated a priori; and there may be bursts of concurrent alarms. We present the design and implementation of a system named ADEPTS as the realization of such a disruption tolerant system. ADEPTS uses a directed graph representation to model the spread of the failure through the system, presents algorithms for determining appropriate responses and monitoring their effectiveness, and quantifies the effect of disruptions through a high level survivability metric. ADEPTS is demonstrated on a real e-commerce testbed with actual attack patterns injected into it