3,567 research outputs found
Positioning Children’s Voice in Clinical Trials Research: A New Model for Planning, Collaboration, and Reflection
Following the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, there has been considerable growth in research with children about health and services that affect them. Creative methods to engage with children have also been developed. One area where progress has been slower is the inclusion of children’s perspectives in qualitative research in the context of clinical trials or feasibility studies. Addressing this gap, this article discusses experiences of, and reflections on, the process of researching children’s views as part of a clinical feasibility study. The article considers what worked well and highlights remaining dilemmas. A new continuum of children’s engagement in research is presented, designed to assist researchers to make explicit the contingent demands on their research, and to suggest a range of techniques from within the broader fields of health, childhood studies, and education research that could be used to forward qualitative research in clinical contexts
Supermarkets’ governance of the agri-food supply chain: Is the ‘corporate-environmental’ food regime evident in Australia?
This article investigates the extent to which the purported greening of food retailing and consumption in Australia is consistent with the development of a corporate-environmental food regime. Recent developments in food regime theory, particularly the concept of an emerging third food regime (the so-called ‘corporate-environmental food regime’), provide a useful organizing framework for understanding recent agri-restructuring trends. We find that, while a globally based, third food regime is becoming more apparent, the attributes that relate to corporate retail-driven greening of the supply chain are less evident within Australia’s domestic market than in its EU counterparts. However, there is some evidence that Australia’s export market is subject to some degree of ‘greening at a distance’ due to private regulations imposed by supermarkets overseas. We argue that while broader agri-restructuring trends may be evident at an international level, elements of greening specific to national contexts are important for determining the trajectory of any third food regime
The Non-homogeneous Poisson Process for Fast Radio Burst Rates
This paper presents the non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) for modeling
the rate of fast radio bursts (FRBs) and other infrequently observed
astronomical events. The NHPP, well-known in statistics, can model changes in
the rate as a function of both astronomical features and the details of an
observing campaign. This is particularly helpful for rare events like FRBs
because the NHPP can combine information across surveys, making the most of all
available information. The goal of the paper is two-fold. First, it is intended
to be a tutorial on the use of the NHPP. Second, we build an NHPP model that
incorporates beam patterns and a power law flux distribution for the rate of
FRBs. Using information from 12 surveys including 15 detections, we find an
all-sky FRB rate of 586.88 events per sky per day above a flux of 1 Jy (95\%
CI: 271.86, 923.72) and a flux power-law index of 0.91 (95\% CI: 0.57, 1.25).
Our rate is lower than other published rates, but consistent with the rate
given in Champion et al. 2016.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure
The Impact Of Ethnic Background On Perceptions Of Homeownership
This study sought to address this issue by measuring factors like responsible financial performance, financial knowledge, product expertise, and purchase intentions to determine if ethnic background significantly impacted one’s progression towards homeownership. This study sampled college students since the majority of these students currently do not own a home and have lower personal incomes
Latent protein trees
Unbiased, label-free proteomics is becoming a powerful technique for
measuring protein expression in almost any biological sample. The output of
these measurements after preprocessing is a collection of features and their
associated intensities for each sample. Subsets of features within the data are
from the same peptide, subsets of peptides are from the same protein, and
subsets of proteins are in the same biological pathways, therefore, there is
the potential for very complex and informative correlational structure inherent
in these data. Recent attempts to utilize this data often focus on the
identification of single features that are associated with a particular
phenotype that is relevant to the experiment. However, to date, there have been
no published approaches that directly model what we know to be multiple
different levels of correlation structure. Here we present a hierarchical
Bayesian model which is specifically designed to model such correlation
structure in unbiased, label-free proteomics. This model utilizes partial
identification information from peptide sequencing and database lookup as well
as the observed correlation in the data to appropriately compress features into
latent proteins and to estimate their correlation structure. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of the model using artificial/benchmark data and in the context
of a series of proteomics measurements of blood plasma from a collection of
volunteers who were infected with two different strains of viral influenza.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS639 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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TCR Convergence in Individuals Treated With Immune Checkpoint Inhibition for Cancer.
Tumor antigen-driven selection may expand T cells having T cell receptors (TCRs) of shared antigen specificity but different amino acid or nucleotide sequence in a process known as TCR convergence. Substitution sequencing errors introduced by TCRβ (TCRB) repertoire sequencing may create artifacts resembling TCR convergence. Given the anticipated differences in substitution error rates across different next-generation sequencing platforms, the choice of platform could be consequential. To test this, we performed TCRB sequencing on the same peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from individuals with cancer receiving anti-CTLA-4 or anti-PD-1 using an Illumina-based approach (Sequenta) and an Ion Torrent-based approach (Oncomine TCRB-LR). While both approaches found similar TCR diversity, clonality, and clonal overlap, we found that Illumina-based sequencing resulted in higher TCR convergence than with the Ion Torrent approach. To build upon this initial observation we conducted a systematic comparison of Illumina-based TCRB sequencing assays, including those employing molecular barcodes, with the Oncomine assay, revealing differences in the frequency of convergent events, purportedly artifactual rearrangements, and sensitivity of detection. Finally, we applied the Ion Torrent-based approach to evaluate clonality and convergence in a cohort of individuals receiving anti-CTLA-4 blockade for cancer. We found that clonality and convergence independently predicted response and could be combined to improve the accuracy of a logistic regression classifier. These results demonstrate the importance of the sequencing platform in assessing TCRB convergence
Massive disk formation in the tidal disruption of a neutron star by a nearly extremal black hole
Black hole-neutron star (BHNS) binaries are important sources of
gravitational waves for second-generation interferometers, and BHNS mergers are
also a proposed engine for short, hard gamma-ray bursts. The behavior of both
the spacetime (and thus the emitted gravitational waves) and the neutron star
matter in a BHNS merger depend strongly and nonlinearly on the black hole's
spin. While there is a significant possibility that astrophysical black holes
could have spins that are nearly extremal (i.e. near the theoretical maximum),
to date fully relativistic simulations of BHNS binaries have included
black-hole spins only up to =0.9, which corresponds to the black hole
having approximately half as much rotational energy as possible, given the
black hole's mass. In this paper, we present a new simulation of a BHNS binary
with a mass ratio and black-hole spin =0.97, the highest simulated
to date. We find that the black hole's large spin leads to the most massive
accretion disk and the largest tidal tail outflow of any fully relativistic
BHNS simulations to date, even exceeding the results implied by extrapolating
results from simulations with lower black-hole spin. The disk appears to be
remarkably stable. We also find that the high black-hole spin persists until
shortly before the time of merger; afterwards, both merger and accretion spin
down the black hole.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
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