Interpolation in non-positively curved K\"ahler manifolds

We extend to any simply connected K\"ahler manifold with non-positive sectional curvature some conditions for interpolation in $\mathbb{C}$ and in the unit disk given by Berndtsson, Ortega-Cerd\`a and Seip. The main tool is a comparison theorem for the Hessian in K\"ahler geometry due to Greene, Wu and Siu, Yau.Comment: 9 pages, Late

Qualidade de Vida e Atitudes dos Idosos Face à Velhice

A problemática do envelhecimento tem assumido, nos últimos anos, uma crescente importância na consciência coletiva da população, tornando-se cada vez mais importante compreender a população idosa e a sua realidade. Posto isto, foi realizado um estudo quantitativo e correlacional, que teve como objectivo avaliar a qualidade de vida e atitudes face à velhice de idosos, bem como a relação entre estas e as variáveis sociodemográficas e familiares. Foram inquiridos 100 idosos, com mais de 65 anos e sem deficit cognitivo . Para a recolha de dados utilizou-se uma entrevista estruturada, constituída dados sóciodemográficos do idoso, WHOQOL-AGE (Caballero, Miret, Power, Chatterji, Tobiasz-Adamczyk, Koskinen, Leonardi, Olaya, Haro &Ayuso-Mateos, 2013) e o AAQ ( Laidlaw, Power, Schmidt and the WHOQOL-OLD Group, 2007). Dos resultados destacamos os seguintes: A amostra é constituída por 52% de idosos do sexo masculino tendo uma média de idades de 74,7 (DP=6,8). È no fator Perdas Psicossociais e no Desenvolvimento Psicológico que os idosos têm uma melhor atitude face ao envelhecimento. É no item “Tem dinheiro suficiente para satisfazer as suas necessidades?” que os idosos apresentam uma menor qualidade de vida. Não ter doença diagnosticada e ser do sexo masculino permitem ter melhores atitudes face ao envelhecimento. A Qualidade de Vida está relacionada com a idade, com o estado de saúde e com a intensidade de preocupação da família. Constatou-se que os idosos que não estão institucionalizados apresentam uma melhor qualidade de vida e uma melhor atitude face à velhice. Quem não precisa de ajudas técnicas para se movimentar apresenta uma melhor qualidade de vida. Diferenças nas atitudes face ao envelhecimento consoante a residência onde habita são significativas nas mudanças físicas e no desenvolvimento psicológico sendo que os idosos que não vivem em lares têm uma atitude mais positiva em ambos os fatores. / Over the past few years the issue of aging has played a growing importance in the population`s collective consciousness becoming increasingly important to understand the elderly population and this reality. Therefore a quantitative correlational study was performed to assess the quality of life of seniors and their attitudes towards old age, and the relationship between these and the socio-demographic and family factors. 100 seniors with more than 65 years and without cognitive deficit were surveyed. For data collection we used a structured interview consisting of sociodemographic data of the elderly, WHOQOL-AGE (Caballero Miret Power Chatterji Tobiasz-Adamczyk Koskinen Leonardi Olaya Ayuso-Mateos & Haro 2013) and AAQ (Laidlaw Power Schmidt and the WHOQOL-OLD Group 2007). We highlight: The sample is composed of 52% of males with a mean age of 74.7 (SD = 6.8). It is in the factor Psychosocial Losses and Psychological Development that elderly people have a better attitude towards aging. It is in the item "Do you have enough money to meet your needs?" that seniors show less quality of life. Not having illness and being male allows having better attitudes towards aging. Quality of Life is related to age, health condition and the intensity of family concerns. It was observed that the elderly who are not institutionalized have a better quality of life and a better attitude towards old age. Who does not need assistive devices to move around has a better quality of life. Differences in attitudes towards aging, according to residency, are significant in physical changes and psychological development, thus verifying that elderly who do not live in nursing homes have a more positive attitude in both factors

Toward an internally consistent astronomical distance scale

Accurate astronomical distance determination is crucial for all fields in astrophysics, from Galactic to cosmological scales. Despite, or perhaps because of, significant efforts to determine accurate distances, using a wide range of methods, tracers, and techniques, an internally consistent astronomical distance framework has not yet been established. We review current efforts to homogenize the Local Group's distance framework, with particular emphasis on the potential of RR Lyrae stars as distance indicators, and attempt to extend this in an internally consistent manner to cosmological distances. Calibration based on Type Ia supernovae and distance determinations based on gravitational lensing represent particularly promising approaches. We provide a positive outlook to improvements to the status quo expected from future surveys, missions, and facilities. Astronomical distance determination has clearly reached maturity and near-consistency.Comment: Review article, 59 pages (4 figures); Space Science Reviews, in press (chapter 8 of a special collection resulting from the May 2016 ISSI-BJ workshop on Astronomical Distance Determination in the Space Age

Role of the IRS-1 and/or -2 in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance in Dahl salt-sensitive (S) rats

Insulin resistance is a common finding in hypertensive humans and animal models. The Dahl salt-sensitive (S) rat is an ideal model of genetically predetermined insulin resistance and salt-sensitive hypertension. Along the insulin signaling pathway, the insulin receptor substrates 1 and 2 (IRS-1 and -2) are important mediators of insulin signaling. IRS-1 and/or IRS-2 genetic variant(s) and/or enhanced serine phosphorylation correlate with insulin resistance. The present commentary was designed to highlight the significance of IRS-1 and/or -2 in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance. An emphasis will be given to the putative role of IRS-1 and/or -2 genetic variant(s) and serine phosphorylation in precipitating insulin resistance

Comprehensive Rare Variant Analysis via Whole-Genome Sequencing to Determine the Molecular Pathology of Inherited Retinal Disease

Inherited retinal disease is a common cause of visual impairment and represents a highly heterogeneous group of conditions. Here, we present findings from a cohort of 722 individuals with inherited retinal disease, who have had whole-genome sequencing (n = 605), whole-exome sequencing (n = 72), or both (n = 45) performed, as part of the NIHR-BioResource Rare Diseases research study. We identified pathogenic variants (single-nucleotide variants, indels, or structural variants) for 404/722 (56%) individuals. Whole-genome sequencing gives unprecedented power to detect three categories of pathogenic variants in particular: structural variants, variants in GC-rich regions, which have significantly improved coverage compared to whole-exome sequencing, and variants in non-coding regulatory regions. In addition to previously reported pathogenic regulatory variants, we have identified a previously unreported pathogenic intronic variant in $\textit{CHM}$ in two males with choroideremia. We have also identified 19 genes not previously known to be associated with inherited retinal disease, which harbor biallelic predicted protein-truncating variants in unsolved cases. Whole-genome sequencing is an increasingly important comprehensive method with which to investigate the genetic causes of inherited retinal disease.This work was supported by The National Institute for Health Research England (NIHR) for the NIHR BioResource – Rare Diseases project (grant number RG65966). The Moorfields Eye Hospital cohort of patients and clinical and imaging data were ascertained and collected with the support of grants from the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital, National Health Service Foundation Trust, and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital Special Trustees, Moorfields Eye Charity, the Foundation Fighting Blindness (USA), and Retinitis Pigmentosa Fighting Blindness. M.M. is a recipient of an FFB Career Development Award. E.M. is supported by UCLH/UCL NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. F.L.R. and D.G. are supported by Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social histor

Eyes Only: Navigating Hypertext with Gaze

Abstract. Eye gaze tracking is an obvious candidate for a future input device, perhaps even for everyday computing. The hard problems with gaze-controlled interfaces are inaccuracy and inadvertent clicking. We attempt to mitigate these problems in the context of a gaze-controlled web browser. Four click alternatives (Dwell, Single Confirm, Multiple Confirm and Radial Confirm) were implemented along with a fifth mouse-controlled version for comparison. Two alternatives make use of additional buttons that confirm a selection made previously by dwell, hence improving accuracy. Our results indicate that the Multiple Confirm alternative performed best among the gaze-based alternatives; it makes use of multiple confirmation buttons when letting the user choose between different options. When compared to the mouse, the clicking times were worse but the accuracy was indistinguishable. User feedback also indicates that, although mouse was considered best, Multiple Confirm was not perceived as slow and generated excitement. This indicates that the Multiple Confirm click alternative has potential as an interaction method for gaze interfaces