Efficacy of Interactive Internet-Based Education in Structural Timber Design

While traditional teaching methods (e.g., real-time, synchronous lectures) have proven effective for training future engineers, the Internet provides an avenue to reinforce the material and augment student learning, comprehension, and retention of material. This paper presents the integration and assessment of a library of interactive instructional modules specifically for a senior-level undergraduate elective course in civil engineering. An ongoing, comprehensive assessment process was implemented in the fall 1999 semester. The results of this quantitative assessment indicate that the use of well designed and pedagogically sound Internet-based supplemental modules provide students with a better understanding of course material. However, when Internet-based content does not promote critical thinking, little increase in the student performance and understanding of the material is realized. Interactive Web-based instruction should not be viewed as a “replacement” to traditional instruction, but rather a tool that provides a broader and more dynamic environment for students with a variety of learning styles

Division I College Athletes’ Self-Perception: Investigating the Impact of Race and Discrimination

Self-perception is the level of competency at which individuals evaluate themselves in certain areas or domains (Marsh & Shavelson, 1985). An individual’s self-perceptions contribute to their global self-worth and even predicts performance (Cuellar, 2014; Harter & Neemann, 2012). This study measures self-perception scores, as well as experiences with racial discrimination, of 306 NCAA Division I college athletes using the Self-Perception Profile for College Students (Harter & Neemann, 2012). Scores are compared across race. Findings suggest that White college athletes have significantly higher self-perception scores than college athletes of color - with recent discrimination (within the last year) as a significant predictor of multiple areas of self-perception. The implications of this study suggest that faculty and other campus stakeholders should pursue positive relationships with the college athletes they encounter. Positive relationships between college athletes and faculty may help raise college athlete self-perceptions, and in turn, performance in a variety of areas

Use of the gamma method for self-contained gene-set analysis of SNP data

Gene-set analysis (GSA) evaluates the overall evidence of association between a phenotype and all genotyped single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a set of genes, as opposed to testing for association between a phenotype and each SNP individually. We propose using the Gamma Method (GM) to combine gene-level P-values for assessing the significance of GS association. We performed simulations to compare the GM with several other self-contained GSA strategies, including both one-step and two-step GSA approaches, in a variety of scenarios. We denote a ‘one-step' GSA approach to be one in which all SNPs in a GS are used to derive a test of GS association without consideration of gene-level effects, and a ‘two-step' approach to be one in which all genotyped SNPs in a gene are first used to evaluate association of the phenotype with all measured variation in the gene and then the gene-level tests of association are aggregated to assess the GS association with the phenotype. The simulations suggest that, overall, two-step methods provide higher power than one-step approaches and that combining gene-level P-values using the GM with a soft truncation threshold between 0.05 and 0.20 is a powerful approach for conducting GSA, relative to the competing approaches assessed. We also applied all of the considered GSA methods to data from a pharmacogenomic study of cisplatin, and obtained evidence suggesting that the glutathione metabolism GS is associated with cisplatin drug response

Identifying rare variants using a Bayesian regression approach

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have made it possible to generate large amounts of sequence data with rare variants in a cost-effective way. Statistical methods that test variants individually are underpowered to detect rare variants, so it is desirable to perform association analysis of rare variants by combining the information from all variants. In this study, we use a Bayesian regression method to model all variants simultaneously to identify rare variants in a data set from Genetic Analysis Workshop 17. We studied the association between the quantitative risk traits Q1, Q2, and Q4 and the single-nucleotide polymorphisms and identified several positive single-nucleotide polymorphisms for traits Q1 and Q2. However, the model also generated several apparent false positives and missed many true positives, suggesting that there is room for improvement in this model

ABCB1 (MDR1) polymorphisms and ovarian cancer progression and survival: A comprehensive analysis from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium and The Cancer Genome Atlas

<b>Objective</b> <i>ABCB1</i> encodes the multi-drug efflux pump P-glycoprotein (P-gp) and has been implicated in multi-drug resistance. We comprehensively evaluated this gene and flanking regions for an association with clinical outcome in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC).<p></p> <b>Methods</b> The best candidates from fine-mapping analysis of 21 <i>ABCB1</i> SNPs tagging C1236T (rs1128503), G2677T/A (rs2032582), and C3435T (rs1045642) were analysed in 4616 European invasive EOC patients from thirteen Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) studies and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Additionally we analysed 1,562 imputed SNPs around ABCB1 in patients receiving cytoreductive surgery and either ‘standard’ first-line paclitaxel–carboplatin chemotherapy (n = 1158) or any first-line chemotherapy regimen (n = 2867). We also evaluated ABCB1 expression in primary tumours from 143 EOC patients.<p></p> <b>Result</b> Fine-mapping revealed that rs1128503, rs2032582, and rs1045642 were the best candidates in optimally debulked patients. However, we observed no significant association between any SNP and either progression-free survival or overall survival in analysis of data from 14 studies. There was a marginal association between rs1128503 and overall survival in patients with nil residual disease (HR 0.88, 95% CI 0.77–1.01; p = 0.07). In contrast, <i>ABCB1</i> expression in the primary tumour may confer worse prognosis in patients with sub-optimally debulked tumours.<p></p> <b>Conclusion</b> Our study represents the largest analysis of <i>ABCB1</i> SNPs and EOC progression and survival to date, but has not identified additional signals, or validated reported associations with progression-free survival for rs1128503, rs2032582, and rs1045642. However, we cannot rule out the possibility of a subtle effect of rs1128503, or other SNPs linked to it, on overall survival.<p></p&gt

Perspectives on the scientific legacy of J. Philip Grime

Perhaps as much as any other scientist in the 20th century, J.P. Grime transformed the study of plant ecology and helped shepherd the field toward international prominence as a nexus of ideas related to global environmental change. Editors at the Journal of Ecology asked a group of senior plant ecologists to comment on Grime's scientific legacy. This commentary piece includes individual responses of 14 scientists from around the world attesting to Grime's foundational role in plant functional ecology, including his knack for sparking controversy, his unique approach to theory formulation involving clever experiments and standardized trait measurements of large numbers of species, and the continued impact of his work on ecological science and policy

Clinical characteristics of ovarian cancer classified by BRCA1, BRCA2, and RAD51C status.

We evaluated homologous recombination deficient (HRD) phenotypes in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) considering BRCA1, BRCA2, and RAD51C in a large well-annotated patient set. We evaluated EOC patients for germline deleterious mutations (n = 899), somatic mutations (n = 279) and epigenetic alterations (n = 482) in these genes using NGS and genome-wide methylation arrays. Deleterious germline mutations were identified in 32 (3.6%) patients for BRCA1, in 28 (3.1%) for BRCA2 and in 26 (2.9%) for RAD51C. Ten somatically sequenced patients had deleterious alterations, six (2.1%) in BRCA1 and four (1.4%) in BRCA2. Fifty two patients (10.8%) had methylated BRCA1 or RAD51C. HRD patients with germline or somatic alterations in any gene were more likely to be high grade serous, have an earlier diagnosis age and have ovarian and/or breast cancer family history. The HRD phenotype was most common in high grade serous EOC. Identification of EOC patients with an HRD phenotype may help tailor specific therapies.This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01-CA122443, P50-CA136393, P30-CA15083, and the Fred C. and Katherine B. Andersen Foundation. We thank Gary Kenney, M.D. for pathology review of tumor tissue. We thank Craig Luccarini, Caroline Baynes from University of Cambridge for assisting our sample sequencing

Meta-analysis of 8q24 for seven cancers reveals a locus between NOV and ENPP2 associated with cancer development.

BACKGROUND: Human chromosomal region 8q24 contains several genes which could be functionally related to cancer, including the proto-oncogene c-MYC. However, the abundance of associations around 128 Mb on chromosome 8 could mask the appearance of a weaker, but important, association elsewhere on 8q24. METHODS: In this study, we completed a meta-analysis of results from nine genome-wide association studies for seven types of solid-tumor cancers (breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian, colon, and glioma) to identify additional associations that were not apparent in any individual study. RESULTS: Fifteen SNPs in the 8q24 region had meta-analysis p-values < 1E-04. In particular, the region consisting of 120,576,000-120,627,000 bp contained 7 SNPs with p-values < 1.0E-4, including rs6993464 (p = 1.25E-07). This association lies in the region between two genes, NOV and ENPP2, which have been shown to play a role in tumor development and motility. An additional region consisting of 5 markers from 128,478,000 bp - 128,524,000 (around gene POU5F1B) had p-values < 1E-04, including rs6983267, which had the smallest p-value (p = 6.34E-08). This result replicates previous reports of association between rs6983267 and prostate and colon cancer. CONCLUSIONS: Further research in this area is warranted as these results demonstrate that the chromosomal region 8q24 may contain a locus that influences general cancer susceptibility between 120,576 and 120,630 kb.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are