Timing of College Enrollment and Family Formation Decisions

The level of progression of an individual's educational or labor market career is a potentially important factor for family formation decisions. We address this issue by considering the effects of a particular college admission system on family formation. We show that the admission system affects mainly the timing of college enrollment and not the college-going decision. As such, we consider a specific type of career interruption and its consequences for relationship formation and fertility decisions. Specifically, we employ a regression discontinuity design based on the college admission system to estimate the effect of being above the admission requirement in the year of application on later family formation decisions. We find that the admission system has substantial effects on the timing of family formation and, specifically, that the timing of college enrollment is an important determinant hereof. This suggests that career interruptions such as delays in the educational system can have large effects on family decision-making

ICONGETM v1.0 – flexible NUOPC-driven two-way coupling via ESMF exchange grids between the unstructured-grid atmosphere model ICON and the structured-grid coastal ocean model GETM

Two-way model coupling is important for representing the mutual interactions and feedbacks between atmosphere and ocean dynamics. This work presents the development of the two-way coupled model system ICONGETM, consisting of the atmosphere model ICON and the ocean model GETM. ICONGETM is built on the latest NUOPC coupling software with flexible data exchange and conservative interpolation via ESMF exchange grids. With ICON providing a state-of-the-art kernel for numerical weather prediction on an unstructured mesh and GETM being an established coastal ocean model, ICONGETM is especially suited for high-resolution studies. For demonstration purposes the newly developed model system has been applied to a coastal upwelling scenario in the central Baltic Sea

Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults.

New neurons continue to be generated in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of the adult mammalian hippocampus. This process has been linked to learning and memory, stress and exercise, and is thought to be altered in neurological disease. In humans, some studies have suggested that hundreds of new neurons are added to the adult dentate gyrus every day, whereas other studies find many fewer putative new neurons. Despite these discrepancies, it is generally believed that the adult human hippocampus continues to generate new neurons. Here we show that a defined population of progenitor cells does not coalesce in the subgranular zone during human fetal or postnatal development. We also find that the number of proliferating progenitors and young neurons in the dentate gyrus declines sharply during the first year of life and only a few isolated young neurons are observed by 7 and 13 years of age. In adult patients with epilepsy and healthy adults (18-77 years; n = 17 post-mortem samples from controls; n = 12 surgical resection samples from patients with epilepsy), young neurons were not detected in the dentate gyrus. In the monkey (Macaca mulatta) hippocampus, proliferation of neurons in the subgranular zone was found in early postnatal life, but this diminished during juvenile development as neurogenesis decreased. We conclude that recruitment of young neurons to the primate hippocampus decreases rapidly during the first years of life, and that neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus does not continue, or is extremely rare, in adult humans. The early decline in hippocampal neurogenesis raises questions about how the function of the dentate gyrus differs between humans and other species in which adult hippocampal neurogenesis is preserved

Do citations and readership identify seminal publications?

This work presents a new approach for analysing the ability of existing research metrics to identify research which has strongly influenced future developments. More specifically, we focus on the ability of citation counts and Mendeley reader counts to distinguish between publications regarded as seminal and publications regarded as literature reviews by field experts. The main motivation behind our research is to gain a better understanding of whether and how well the existing research metrics relate to research quality. For this experiment we have created a new dataset which we call TrueImpactDataset and which contains two types of publications, seminal papers and literature reviews. Using the dataset, we conduct a set of experiments to study how citation and reader counts perform in distinguishing these publication types, following the intuition that causing a change in a field signifies research quality. Our research shows that citation counts work better than a random baseline (by a margin of 10%) in distinguishing important seminal research papers from literature reviews while Mendeley reader counts do not work better than the baseline

Change Point Estimation in Monitoring Survival Time

Precise identification of the time when a change in a hospital outcome has occurred enables clinical experts to search for a potential special cause more effectively. In this paper, we develop change point estimation methods for survival time of a clinical procedure in the presence of patient mix in a Bayesian framework. We apply Bayesian hierarchical models to formulate the change point where there exists a step change in the mean survival time of patients who underwent cardiac surgery. The data are right censored since the monitoring is conducted over a limited follow-up period. We capture the effect of risk factors prior to the surgery using a Weibull accelerated failure time regression model. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is used to obtain posterior distributions of the change point parameters including location and magnitude of changes and also corresponding probabilistic intervals and inferences. The performance of the Bayesian estimator is investigated through simulations and the result shows that precise estimates can be obtained when they are used in conjunction with the risk-adjusted survival time CUSUM control charts for different magnitude scenarios. The proposed estimator shows a better performance where a longer follow-up period, censoring time, is applied. In comparison with the alternative built-in CUSUM estimator, more accurate and precise estimates are obtained by the Bayesian estimator. These superiorities are enhanced when probability quantification, flexibility and generalizability of the Bayesian change point detection model are also considered

FEBUKO and MODMEP: Field measurements and modelling of aerosol and cloud multiphase processes

An overview of the two FEBUKO aerosol–cloud interaction field experiments in the Thüringer Wald (Germany) in October 2001 and 2002 and the corresponding modelling project MODMEP is given. Experimentally, a variety of measurement methods were deployed to probe the gas phase, particles and cloud droplets at three sites upwind, downwind and within an orographic cloud with special emphasis on the budgets and interconversions of organic gas and particle phase constituents. Out of a total of 14 sampling periods within 30 cloud events three events (EI, EII and EIII) are selected for detailed analysis. At various occasions an impact of the cloud process on particle chemical composition such as on the organic compounds content, sulphate and nitrate and also on particle size distributions and particle mass is observed. Moreover, direct phase transfer of polar organic compound from the gas phase is found to be very important for the understanding of cloudwater composition. For the modelling side, a main result of the MODMEP project is the development of a cloud model, which combines a complex multiphase chemistry with detailed microphysics. Both components are described in a fine-resolved particle/drop spectrum. New numerical methods are developed for an efficient solution of the entire complex model. A further development of the CAPRAM mechanism has lead to a more detailed description of tropospheric aqueous phase organic chemistry. In parallel, effective tools for the reduction of highly complex reaction schemes are provided. Techniques are provided and tested which allow the description of complex multiphase chemistry and of detailed microphysics in multidimensional chemistry-transport models

OsWRKY IIa Transcription Factors Modulate Rice Innate Immunity

WRKY transcription factors regulate diverse plant processes including responses to biotic stresses. Our previous studies indicate that OsWRKY62, an OsWRKY IIa subfamily member, functions as a negative regulator of the rice defense against Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. Here, we report that a large inverted repeat construct designed to knock down the expression of the four OsWRKY IIa subfamily members (OsWRKY62, OsWRKY28, OsWRKY71, and OsWRKY76) leads to overexpression of all four genes and disease resistance in some transgenic plants. These phenotypes are stably inherited as reflected by progeny analysis. A pathogenesis-related gene, PR10, is up-regulated in plants overexpressing the OsWRKY IIa genes. These results suggest that OsWRKY IIa proteins interact functionally to modulate plant innate immunity

Copy number elevation of 22q11.2 genes arrests the developmental maturation of working memory capacity and adult hippocampal neurogenesis

Working memory capacity, a critical component of executive function, expands developmentally from childhood through adulthood. Anomalies in this developmental process are seen in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia and intellectual disabilities (ID), implicating this atypical process in the trajectory of developmental neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the cellular and neuronal substrates underlying this process are not understood. Duplication and triplication of copy number variants of 22q11.2 are consistently and robustly associated with cognitive deficits of ASD and ID in humans, and overexpression of small 22q11.2 segments recapitulates dimensional aspects of developmental neuropsychiatric disorders in mice. We capitalized on these two lines of evidence to delve into the cellular substrates for this atypical development of working memory. Using a region- and cell-type-selective gene expression approach, we demonstrated that copy number elevations of catechol-O-methyl-transferase (COMT) or Tbx1, two genes encoded in the two small 22q11.2 segments, in adult neural stem/progenitor cells in the hippocampus prevents the developmental maturation of working memory capacity in mice. Moreover, copy number elevations of COMT or Tbx1 reduced the proliferation of adult neural stem/progenitor cells in a cell-autonomous manner in vitro and migration of their progenies in the hippocampus granular layer in vivo. Our data provide evidence for the novel hypothesis that copy number elevations of these 22q11.2 genes alter the developmental trajectory of working memory capacity via suboptimal adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus.Peer reviewe