Calcium supplements with or without vitamin D and risk of cardiovascular events : reanalysis of the Women's Health Initiative limited access dataset and meta-analysis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Quality of reports of investigations of research integrity by academic institutions

Acknowledgements: We thank Mari Imamura for help with translating documents written in Japanese. Funding: No specific funding was received for this work. The Health Services Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Sharing experiences of computer aided assessment underpinned by computer algebra: Who uses what

THE ISSUE The conference theme of “motivating” students is relevant to Computer Aided Assessment, CAA. Well-timed, instructional questions, marked instantly with feedback on errors, and, after due dates, model solutions, really do help the students. Their motivation derives at least partly, and for some mostly, from the relatively small amount of “marks”/credit from submitting their answers on time. THE APPROACH Greg and Grant have a paper in UniServe 2006 describing various CAA systems. The approach now is steady development. Greg has 13 years running the maple-underpinned AiM system at Curtin. Guest logins are at http://aim01.curtin.edu.au/ Grant's first authoring for a CAA system was calmaeth at UWA in 1999, then AiM in 2001-02 at Birmingham, then various systems -- calmaeth, AiM, mapleTA and mathxl -- at UWA, before working with Greg at Curtin. CAA is no longer "innovation". Competent management of systems that work is worthwhile too. Watching for what else is available is appropriate should technical developments make a change desirable. Participants in the Exchange will report what is in use at their university, and we will all learn who is using what and where. mapleTA used to be inferior to AiM in not recognizing equivalent correct answers to some problems, and many will want to know/test that this aspect of mapleTA has improved. Greater integration with MLEs, Managed Learning Environments, as in stack under moodle is also worthwhile. Authoring in the different systems is a topic to be discussed. No system is going to last for ever

Calcium supplements and cancer risk : a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Effect of calcium supplements on risk of myocardial infarction and cardiovascular events : meta-analysis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Rounding, but not randomization method, non-normality, or correlation, affected baseline P-value distributions in randomized trials

Corrigendum: The authors regret that during the final manuscript sub-mission we provided an incorrect high resolution version ofFigure 7. We mistakenly provided a second copy of Appendix Figure 8 rather than the correct figure, which we havenow provided. We would like to apologise for any inconve-nience caused. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (2020) Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge the contribution of Professor Thomas Lumley who provided expert guidance in using the area under the curve of the cumulative distribution function of the baseline p-values for these analyses No specific funding was received for this study. MB receives salary support from the Health Research Council of New Zealand. The Health Services Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates.The funders had no role in the study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data; writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publicationPeer reviewedPostprin

Identical summary statistics were uncommon in randomized trials and cohort studies

Acknowledgments We thank Dorit Naot and Susannah O'Sullivan for providing the animal raw data used in the simulations. Funding This research received no specific funding. MB is a recipient of an HRC Clinical Practitioners Fellowship. The Health Services Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The authors are independent of the HRC. The HRC had no role in design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.Peer reviewedPostprin

SIG-DB: leveraging homomorphic encryption to Securely Interrogate privately held Genomic DataBases

Genomic data are becoming increasingly valuable as we develop methods to utilize the information at scale and gain a greater understanding of how genetic information relates to biological function. Advances in synthetic biology and the decreased cost of sequencing are increasing the amount of privately held genomic data. As the quantity and value of private genomic data grows, so does the incentive to acquire and protect such data, which creates a need to store and process these data securely. We present an algorithm for the Secure Interrogation of Genomic DataBases (SIG-DB). The SIG-DB algorithm enables databases of genomic sequences to be searched with an encrypted query sequence without revealing the query sequence to the Database Owner or any of the database sequences to the Querier. SIG-DB is the first application of its kind to take advantage of locality-sensitive hashing and homomorphic encryption to allow generalized sequence-to-sequence comparisons of genomic data.Comment: 38 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, 1 supplemental table, 7 supplemental figure

Vertex-primitive groups and graphs of order twice the product of two distinct odd primes

A non-Cayley number is an integer n for which there exists a vertex-transitive graph on n vertices which is not a Cayley graph. In this paper, we complete the determination of the non-Cayley numbers of the form 2pq, where p, q are distinct odd primes. Earlier work of Miller and the second author had dealt with all such numbers corresponding to vertex-transitive graphs admitting an imprimitive subgroup of automorphisms. This paper deals with the primitive case. First the primitive permutation groups of degree 2pq are classified. This depends on the finite simple group classification. Then each of these groups G is examined to determine whether there are any non-Cayley graphs which admit G as a vertex-primitive subgroup of automorphisms, and admit no imprimitive subgroups. The outcome is that 2pq is a non-Cayley number, where

Bridging separate communities : the aspirations and experiences of minority ethnic RE teachers in England

This article takes as its starting point concerns about community separation that arose in 2001, following outbreaks of violence in English urban centres, and again in 2014, following the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ case. Despite a series of reports which have highlighted the need to address ‘separation’, promote ‘meaningful contact’ between those who differ in terms of ethnicity and worldview and identify teachers of religious education (RE) as key players, researchers have paid no attention to teachers of RE from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds. The article draws on a qualitative study of teachers from Hindu, Muslim and Sikh backgrounds to explore their concerns about pupils’ perceptions of separation and the ways in which they attempted to address these in white majority and Muslim majority schools. Communication research and studies based on social capital theory are used to suggest that the teachers used ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ strategies as means of encouraging pupils to explore their perceptions of separation, engage in a mediated form of meaningful contact with ‘the Other’ and expand their thinking. The conclusion calls for further research in to the strategies reported and for policy makers to support the recruitment, training and career development of minority ethnic teachers of RE