Aspects of Augustana and Swedish America: Essays in honor of Dr. Conrad Bergendoff on his 100th Year

Table of Contents: Introduction -- Emmet E. Eklund / The Mosaic of Augustana’s Swedish Lutheran Origins -- Maria Erling / Molding Ministers to Fit Congregations: Religious Leadership Among New England’s Swedes -- H. Arnold Barton / Conrad Bergendoff and the Swedish-American Church Language Controversy of the 1920s -- Elder M. Lindahl / The Troublesome Language Question -- Ann Boaden / Weighing the Stars and Hearing the Word: Conrad Bergendoff’s Idea of Christian Higher Education at Augustana College and Theological Seminary -- Mark A. Granquist / Conrad Bergendoff and the LCA Merger of 1962 -- Dag Blanck / North Stars and Vasa Orders: On the Relationship Between Sweden and Swedish American -- Bernhard Erling / The Fourth R--Religious Education in Sweden and the USA -- Judith Belan / Bibliography of the Published Writings of Dr. Conrad Bergendoff, 1963-1995https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/ahsbooks/1016/thumbnail.jp

Superfast solution of linear convolutional Volterra equations using QTT approximation

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Applied and Computational Mathematics, 260, 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.cam.2013.10.025This article address a linear fractional differential equation and develop effective solution methods using algorithms for the inversion of triangular Toeplitz matrices and the recently proposed QTT format. The inverses of such matrices can be computed by the divide and conquer and modified Bini’s algorithms, for which we present the versions with the QTT approximation. We also present an efficient formula for the shift of vectors given in QTT format, which is used in the divide and conquer algorithm. As a result, we reduce the complexity of inversion from the fast Fourier level O(nlogn) to the speed of superfast Fourier transform, i.e., O(log^2n). The results of the paper are illustrated by numerical examples.During this work D. V. Savostyanov and E. E. Tyrtyshnikov were supported by the Leverhulme Trust to visit, stay and work at the University of Chester, as the Visiting Research Fellow and the Visiting Professor, respectively. Their work was also supported in part by RFBR grants 11-01-00549, 12-01-91333-nnio-a, 13-01-12061, and Russian Federation Government Contracts 14.740.11.0345, 14.740.11.1067, 16.740.12.0727

Quantification of T- and B-cell immune receptor distribution diversity characterizes immune cell infiltration and lymphocyte heterogeneity in clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Immune-modulating systemic therapies are often used to treat advanced cancer such as metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). Used alone, sequence-based biomarkers neither accurately capture patient dynamics nor the tumor immune microenvironment. To better understand the tumor ecology of this immune microenvironment, we quantified tumor infiltration across two distinct ccRCC patient tumor cohorts using complementarity determining region-3 (CDR3) sequence recovery counts in tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and a generalized diversity index (GDI) for CDR3 sequence distributions. GDI can be understood as a curve over a continuum of diversity scales which allows sensitive characterization of distributions to capture sample richness, evenness, and subsampling uncertainty, along with other important metrics that characterize tumor heterogeneity. For example, richness quantified the total unique sequence count, while evenness quantified similarities across sequence frequencies. Significant differences in receptor sequence diversity across gender and race revealed that patients with larger and more clinically aggressive tumors had increased richness of recovered tumoral CDR3 sequences, specifically in those from T-cell receptor alpha and B-cell immunoglobulin lambda light chain. The GDI inflection point (IP) allowed for a novel and robust measure of distribution evenness. High IP values associated with improved overall survival, suggesting that normal-like sequence distributions lead to better outcomes. These results propose a new quantitative tool that can be used to better characterize patient-specific differences related to immune cell infiltration, and to identify unique characteristics of tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte heterogeneity in ccRCC and other malignancies

Referrals and Management Strategies for Pediatric Obesity—DocStyles Survey 2017

Background: Childhood obesity care management options can be delivered in community-, clinic-, and hospital-settings. The referral practices of clinicians to these various settings have not previously been characterized beyond the local level. This study describes the management strategies and referral practices of clinicians caring for pediatric patients with obesity and associated clinician characteristics in a geographically diverse sample.Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the DocStyles 2017 panel-based survey of 891 clinicians who see pediatric patients. We used multivariable logistic regression to estimate associations between the demographic and practice characteristics of clinicians and types of referrals for the purposes of pediatric weight management.Results: About half of surveyed clinicians (54%) referred <25% of their pediatric patients with obesity for the purposes of weight management. Only 15% referred most (≥75%) of their pediatric patients with obesity for weight management. Referral types included clinical referrals, behavioral referrals, and weight management program (WMP) referrals. Within these categories, the percentage referrals ranged from 19% for behavioral/mental health professionals to 72% for registered dieticians. Among the significant associations, female clinicians had higher odds of referral to community and clinical WMP; practices in the Northeast had higher odds of referral to subspecialists, dieticians, mental health professionals, and clinical WMP; and clinics having ≥15 well child visits per week were associated with higher odds of referral to subspecialists, mental health professionals, and health educators. Not having an affiliation with teaching hospitals and serving low-income patients were associated with lower odds of referral to mental health professionals, and community and clinical WMP. Compared to pediatricians, family practitioners, internists, and nurse practitioners had higher odds of providing referrals to mental health professionals and to health educators.Conclusion: This study helps characterize the current landscape of referral practices and management strategies of clinicians who care for pediatric patients with obesity. Our data provide insight into the clinician, clinical practice, and reported patient characteristics associated with childhood obesity referral types. Understanding referral patterns and management strategies may help improve care for children with obesity and their families

Anti-müllerian hormone is not associated with cardiometabolic risk factors in adolescent females

<p>Objectives: Epidemiological evidence for associations of Anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) with cardiometabolic risk factors is lacking. Existing evidence comes from small studies in select adult populations, and findings are conflicting. We aimed to assess whether AMH is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors in a general population of adolescent females.</p> <p>Methods: AMH, fasting insulin, glucose, HDLc, LDLc, triglycerides and C-reactive protein (CRP) were measured at a mean age 15.5 years in 1,308 female participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Multivariable linear regression was used to examine associations of AMH with these cardiometabolic outcomes.</p> <p>Results: AMH values ranged from 0.16–35.84 ng/ml and median AMH was 3.57 ng/ml (IQR: 2.41, 5.49). For females classified as post-pubertal (n = 848) at the time of assessment median (IQR) AMH was 3.81 ng/ml (2.55, 5.82) compared with 3.25 ng/ml (2.23, 5.05) in those classed as early pubertal (n = 460, P≤0.001). After adjusting for birth weight, gestational age, pubertal stage, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, adiposity and use of hormonal contraceptives, there were no associations with any of the cardiometabolic outcomes. For example fasting insulin changed by 0% per doubling of AMH (95%CI: −3%,+2%) p = 0.70, with identical results if HOMA-IR was used. Results were similar after additional adjustment for smoking, physical activity and age at menarche, after exclusion of 3% of females with the highest AMH values, after excluding those that had not started menarche and after excluding those using hormonal contraceptives.</p> <p>Conclusion: Our results suggest that in healthy adolescent females, AMH is not associated with cardiometabolic risk factors.</p&gt