178 research outputs found

    Wrap-up: What We Have Learned

    Get PDF
    We\u27re excited that so many producers have been willing to spend the day talking about these issues with us. I learned today that there are many more ways to grow a pig than I have previously appreciated. We\u27re going to hear some wrap-up from LeRoy Stoltenberg and David Topel. LeRoy is on the family farm; he\u27s from Scott County. He says that traveling is a major part of his job as IPP A President. He\u27s served in a number of capacities for the IPP A. He and his wife Alice operate a farrow to finish swine operation that produces 1800 head a year, and he produces 160 of com and 60 acres of soybeans. He\u27s no stranger to the technologies we\u27ve talked about today. He\u27s used some of them for several years

    Doxorubicin-Induced Elevated Oxidative Stress and Neurochemical Alterations in Brain and Cognitive Decline: Protection by MESNA and Insights into Mechanisms of Chemotherapy-Induced Cognitive Impairment ( Chemobrain )

    Get PDF
    Chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment (CICI) is now widely recognized as a real and too common complication of cancer chemotherapy experienced by an ever-growing number of cancer survivors. Previously, we reported that doxorubicin (Dox), a prototypical reactive oxygen species (ROS)-producing anti-cancer drug, results in oxidation of plasma proteins, including apolipoprotein A-I (ApoA-I) leading to tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)-mediated oxidative stress in plasma and brain. We also reported that co-administration of the antioxidant drug, 2-mercaptoethane sulfonate sodium (MESNA), prevents Dox-induced protein oxidation and subsequent TNF-α elevation in plasma. In this study, we measured oxidative stress in both brain and plasma of Dox-treated mice both with and without MESNA. MESNA ameliorated Dox-induced oxidative protein damage in plasma, confirming our prior studies, and in a new finding led to decreased oxidative stress in brain. This study also provides further functional and biochemical evidence of the mechanisms of CICI. Using novel object recognition (NOR), we demonstrated the Dox administration resulted in memory deficits, an effect that was rescued by MESNA. Using hydrogen magnetic resonance imaging spectroscopy (H1-MRS) techniques, we demonstrated that Dox administration led to a dramatic decrease in choline-containing compounds assessed by (Cho)/creatine ratios in the hippocampus in mice. To better elucidate a potential mechanism for this MRS observation, we tested the activities of the phospholipase enzymes known to act on phosphatidylcholine (PtdCho), a key component of phospholipid membranes and a source of choline for the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine (ACh). The activities of both phosphatidylcholine-specific phospholipase C (PC-PLC) and phospholipase D were severely diminished following Dox administration. The activity of PC-PLC was preserved when MESNA was co-administered with Dox; however, PLD activity was not protected. This study is the first to demonstrate the protective effects of MESNA on Dox-related protein oxidation, cognitive decline, phosphocholine (PCho) levels, and PC-PLC activity in brain and suggests novel potential therapeutic targets and strategies to mitigate CICI

    Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration for Survivability

    Get PDF
    Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration for Survivability is a system design and analysis methodology that incorporates survivability considerations into the tradespace exploration process (i.e., a solution-generating and decision-making framework that applies decision theory to model-based design). During the concept generation phase of tradespace exploration, the methodology applies seventeen empirically validated survivability design principles spanning susceptibility reduction, vulnerability reduction, and resilience enhancement. During subsequent concept evaluation, the methodology adds value-based survivability metrics to traditional architectural evaluation criteria of mission utility and lifecycle cost. Applied to a satellite radar mission, the methodology allowed operational survivability to be statistically evaluated across representative distributions of naturally occurring disturbances in the space environment and for survivability to be incorporated as a decision factor earlier in the design process. Constellations in the illustrative example are shown to be the most survivable, mitigating disturbances architecturally, rather than through additive features.Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Systems Engineering Advancement Research Initiative (SEAri))Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program on Emerging Technologie

    Reliable, resilient and sustainable urban drainage systems: an analysis of robustness under deep uncertainty (article)

    Get PDF
    This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via the DOI in this record.The dataset associated with this article is available in ORE at: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.563Reliability, resilience and sustainability are key goals of any urban drainage system. However, only a few studies have recently focused on measuring, operationalizing and comparing such concepts in a world of deep uncertainty. In this study, these key concepts are defined and quantified for a number of gray, green and hybrid strategies, aimed at improving the capacity issues of an existing integrated urban wastewater system. These interventions are investigated by means of a regret-based approach, which evaluates the robustness (that is the ability to perform well under deep uncertainty conditions) of each strategy in terms of the three qualities through integration of multiple objectives (i.e. sewer flooding, river water quality, combined sewer overflows, river flooding, greenhouse gas emissions, cost and acceptability) across four different future scenarios. The results indicate that strategies found to be robust in terms of sustainability were typically also robust for resilience and reliability across future scenarios. However, strategies found to be robust in terms of their resilience and, in particular, for reliability did not guarantee robustness for sustainability. Conventional gray infrastructure strategies were found to lack robustness in terms of sustainability due to their unbalanced economic, environmental and social performance. Such limitations were overcome, however, by implementing hybrid solutions that combine green retrofits and gray rehabilitation solutions.This study was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through STREAM (EP/G037094/1) with Northumbrian Water Limited, BRIM (EP/N010329/1) and the final author’s fellowship Safe & SuRe (EP/K006924/1)

    Resolving conflicts between statistical methods by probability combination: Application to empirical Bayes analyses of genomic data

    Get PDF
    In the typical analysis of a data set, a single method is selected for statistical reporting even when equally applicable methods yield very different results. Examples of equally applicable methods can correspond to those of different ancillary statistics in frequentist inference and of different prior distributions in Bayesian inference. More broadly, choices are made between parametric and nonparametric methods and between frequentist and Bayesian methods. Rather than choosing a single method, it can be safer, in a game-theoretic sense, to combine those that are equally appropriate in light of the available information. Since methods of combining subjectively assessed probability distributions are not objective enough for that purpose, this paper introduces a method of distribution combination that does not require any assignment of distribution weights. It does so by formalizing a hedging strategy in terms of a game between three players: nature, a statistician combining distributions, and a statistician refusing to combine distributions. The optimal move of the first statistician reduces to the solution of a simpler problem of selecting an estimating distribution that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler loss maximized over the plausible distributions to be combined. The resulting combined distribution is a linear combination of the most extreme of the distributions to be combined that are scientifically plausible. The optimal weights are close enough to each other that no extreme distribution dominates the others. The new methodology is illustrated by combining conflicting empirical Bayes methodologies in the context of gene expression data analysis
    • …
    corecore