Two-armed Bandits with Delayed Responses

1 online resource (PDF, 27 pages

Strategies for the Two-armed Bandit Problem with Delayed Responses

1 online resource (PDF, 19 pages

Gittins Procedure for Bandits with Delayed Reponses

1 online resource (PDF, 24 pages

The Evolution of Bat Vestibular Systems in the Face of Potential Antagonistic Selection Pressures for Flight and Echolocation

PMCID: PMC3634842This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Costs and Consequences: Hepatitis C Seroprevalence in the Military and Its Impact on Potential Screening Strategies

UNLABELLED: Knowledge of the contemporary epidemiology of hepatitis C viral (HCV) infection among military personnel can inform potential Department of Defense screening policy. HCV infection status at the time of accession and following deployment was determined by evaluating reposed serum from 10,000 service members recently deployed to combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the period 2007-2010. A cost model was developed from the perspective of the Department of Defense for a military applicant screening program. Return on investment was based on comparison between screening program costs and potential treatment costs avoided. The prevalence of HCV antibody-positive and chronic HCV infection at accession among younger recently deployed military personnel born after 1965 was 0.98/1000 (95% confidence interval 0.45-1.85) and 0.43/1000 (95% confidence interval 0.12-1.11), respectively. Among these, service-related incidence was low; 64% of infections were present at the time of accession. With no screening, the cost to the Department of Defense of treating the estimated 93 cases of chronic HCV cases from a single year\u27s accession cohort was $9.3 million. Screening with the HCV antibody test followed by the nucleic acid test for confirmation yielded a net annual savings and a$3.1 million dollar advantage over not screening. CONCLUSIONS: Applicant screening will reduce chronic HCV infection in the force, result in a small system costs savings, and decrease the threat of transfusion-transmitted HCV infection in the battlefield blood supply and may lead to earlier diagnosis and linkage to care; initiation of an applicant screening program will require ongoing evaluation that considers changes in the treatment cost and practice landscape, screening options, and the epidemiology of HCV in the applicant/accession and overall force populations

Hepatitis B Seroprevalence in the U.S. Military and its Impact on Potential Screening Strategies

INTRODUCTION: Knowledge of the contemporary epidemiology of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection among military personnel can inform potential Department of Defense (DoD) screening policy and infection and disease control strategies. MATERIALS AND METHODS: HBV infection status at accession and following deployment was determined by evaluating reposed serum from 10,000 service members recently deployed to combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the period from 2007 to 2010. A cost model was developed from the perspective of the Department of Defense for a program to integrate HBV infection screening of applicants for military service into the existing screening program of screening new accessions for vaccine-preventable infections. RESULTS: The prevalence of chronic HBV infection at accession was 2.3/1,000 (95% CI: 1.4, 3.2); most cases (16/21, 76%) identified after deployment were present at accession. There were 110 military service-related HBV infections identified. Screening accessions who are identified as HBV susceptible with HBV surface antigen followed by HBV surface antigen neutralization for confirmation offered no cost advantage over not screening and resulted in a net annual increase in cost of $5.78 million. However, screening would exclude as many as 514 HBV cases each year from accession. CONCLUSIONS: Screening for HBV infection at service entry would potentially reduce chronic HBV infection in the force, decrease the threat of transfusion-transmitted HBV infection in the battlefield blood supply, and lead to earlier diagnosis and linkage to care; however, applicant screening is not cost saving. Service-related incident infections indicate a durable threat, the need for improved laboratory-based surveillance tools, and mandate review of immunization policy and practice

Accelerated FoxP2 Evolution in Echolocating Bats

FOXP2 is a transcription factor implicated in the development and neural control of orofacial coordination, particularly with respect to vocalisation. Observations that orthologues show almost no variation across vertebrates yet differ by two amino acids between humans and chimpanzees have led to speculation that recent evolutionary changes might relate to the emergence of language. Echolocating bats face especially challenging sensorimotor demands, using vocal signals for orientation and often for prey capture. To determine whether mutations in the FoxP2 gene could be associated with echolocation, we sequenced FoxP2 from echolocating and non-echolocating bats as well as a range of other mammal species. We found that contrary to previous reports, FoxP2 is not highly conserved across all nonhuman mammals but is extremely diverse in echolocating bats. We detected divergent selection (a change in selective pressure) at FoxP2 between bats with contrasting sonar systems, suggesting the intriguing possibility of a role for FoxP2 in the evolution and development of echolocation. We speculate that observed accelerated evolution of FoxP2 in bats supports a previously proposed function in sensorimotor coordination

MYC is a major determinant of mitotic cell fate

Taxol and other antimitotic agents are frontline chemotherapy agents but the mechanisms responsible for patient benefit remain unclear. Following a genome-wide siRNA screen, we identified the oncogenic transcription factor Myc as a taxol sensitizer. Using time-lapse imaging to correlate mitotic behavior with cell fate, we show that Myc sensitizes cells to mitotic blockers and agents that accelerate mitotic progression. Myc achieves this by upregulating a cluster of redundant pro-apoptotic BH3-only proteins and suppressing pro-survival Bcl-xL. Gene expression analysis of breast cancers indicates that taxane responses correlate positively with Myc and negatively with Bcl-xL. Accordingly, pharmacological inhibition of Bcl-xL restores apoptosis in Myc-deficient cells. These results open up opportunities for biomarkers and combination therapies that could enhance traditional and second-generation antimitotic agents

Transformation Algorithms for Data Streams

Next generation data processing systems must deal with very high data ingest rates and massive volumes of data. Such conditions are typically encountered in the Intelligence Community (IC) where analysts must search through huge volumes of data in order to gather evidence to support or refute their hypotheses. Their effort is made all the more difficult given that the data appears as unstructured text that is written in multiple languages using characters that have different encodings. Human Analysts have not been able to keep pace with reading the data and a large amount of data is discarded even though it might contain key information. The goal of our project is to assess the feasibility of incrementally replacing humans with automation in key areas of information processing. These areas include document ingest, content categorization, language translation, and context-andtemporally -based information retrieval