Exploring a possible correlation between the human oral microbiome and body mass index

Obesity is a growing health problem in America affecting more than a third of Americans25 and is quickly becoming a global health crisis34. Recently there has been much interest in the possible link between the human gut microbiome and obesity as fecal transplants may serve as a potential therapeutic treatment. However, not much research has been done looking at a potential association with the human oral microbiome and obesity. In this thesis, I examined 976 individuals previously sequenced for their oral microbiome. Each sample was classified as underweight, normal, overweight, or obese, according to their BMI. I measured the microbial diversity of each sample and compared the relative diversity of each class through alpha and beta diversity. Alpha diversity measures the microbial diversity within an individual while beta diversity measures the microbial diversity between individuals. I also investigated whether there was a clear association between monozygotic twins who were discoordinate in phenotype. While phyla-level changes were detected in the different weight class, overall the oral microbiome does not appear to be associated with human weight

The Effects of Religion on Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Research shows that religion has numerous effects on how people behave and act, so the goal of this study is to expand the body of knowledge about religion and see if it affects workplace behavior, specifically organizational citizenship behavior. Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is discretionary individual behavior that is not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system and promotes the effective functioning of the organization. This study seeks to understand if religion, broken down further into internal and external religiosity, has any effects on how people behave at work. Further, if religion does have an effect on workplace behavior, this study seeks to understand what kind of effects, whether positive or negative, it is having and which of the various dimensions of OCB it is specifically affecting. Surveying over 150 employees, our findings indicate that internal religiosity have mostly positive effects on OCB while external religiosity mainly displayed negative effects. Further research is needed to understand why internal and external religiosity had, in general, opposite effects. Nevertheless, the results of this study seem to show that religion does have an effect on workplace behavior

HI-deficient galaxies in intermediate density environments

Observations show that spiral galaxies in galaxy clusters tend to have on average less neutral hydrogen (HI) than galaxies of the same type and size in the field. There is accumulating evidence that such HI-deficient galaxies are also relatively frequent in galaxy groups. An important question is, which mechanisms are responsible for the gas deficiency in galaxy groups. To gain a better understanding of how environment affects the gas content of galaxies, we identified a sample of six HI-deficient galaxies from the HI Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS) using HI-optical scaling relations. One of the galaxies is located in the outskirts of the Fornax cluster, four are in loose galaxy groups and one is in a galaxy triplet. We present new high resolution HI observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) of these galaxies. We discuss the possible cause of HI-deficiency in these galaxies based on HI observations and various multi-wavelength data. We find that the galaxies have truncated HI disks, lopsided gas distribution and some show asymmetries in their stellar disks. We conclude that both ram pressure stripping and tidal interactions are important gas removal mechanisms in low density environments.Comment: Accepted to MNRAS, 17 pages, 10 figures, 7 table

NVIDIA Tensor Core Programmability, Performance & Precision

The NVIDIA Volta GPU microarchitecture introduces a specialized unit, called "Tensor Core" that performs one matrix-multiply-and-accumulate on 4x4 matrices per clock cycle. The NVIDIA Tesla V100 accelerator, featuring the Volta microarchitecture, provides 640 Tensor Cores with a theoretical peak performance of 125 Tflops/s in mixed precision. In this paper, we investigate current approaches to program NVIDIA Tensor Cores, their performances and the precision loss due to computation in mixed precision. Currently, NVIDIA provides three different ways of programming matrix-multiply-and-accumulate on Tensor Cores: the CUDA Warp Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) API, CUTLASS, a templated library based on WMMA, and cuBLAS GEMM. After experimenting with different approaches, we found that NVIDIA Tensor Cores can deliver up to 83 Tflops/s in mixed precision on a Tesla V100 GPU, seven and three times the performance in single and half precision respectively. A WMMA implementation of batched GEMM reaches a performance of 4 Tflops/s. While precision loss due to matrix multiplication with half precision input might be critical in many HPC applications, it can be considerably reduced at the cost of increased computation. Our results indicate that HPC applications using matrix multiplications can strongly benefit from using of NVIDIA Tensor Cores.Comment: This paper has been accepted by the Eighth International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems (AsHES) 201

Intracystic papillary carcinoma of the breast in a 21-year old premenopausal Nigerian woman: a case report

We report the case of a 21-year-old Nigerian woman who presented to us with features of intracystic papillary carcinoma, a rare form of breast cancer usually seen in postmenopausal women in their sixth to eighth decades of life. To the best of our knowledge, there has been only one other case report of this lesion occurring in women in their second decade of life

The Media Inequality, Uncanny Mountain, and the Singularity is Far from Near: Iwaa and Sophia Robot versus a Real Human Being

Design of Artificial Intelligence and robotics habitually assumes that adding more humanlike features improves the user experience, mainly kept in check by suspicion of uncanny effects. Three strands of theorizing are brought together for the first time and empirically put to the test: Media Equation (and in its wake, Computers Are Social Actors), Uncanny Valley theory, and as an extreme of human-likeness assumptions, the Singularity. We measured the user experience of real-life visitors of a number of seminars who were checked in either by Smart Dynamics' Iwaa, Hanson's Sophia robot, Sophia's on-screen avatar, or a human assistant. Results showed that human-likeness was not in appearance or behavior but in attributed qualities of being alive. Media Equation, Singularity, and Uncanny hypotheses were not confirmed. We discuss the imprecision in theorizing about human-likeness and rather opt for machines that 'function adequately.

Well-being and ill-being on campus

Enquiries into the low mental health of university students are exposing the relative merits of competing theoretical and empirical models. The debate is important because the models used to characterise the problem imply alternative causations, consequences, and possible interventions. The purpose of our study is to highlight the value of recognising the presence of both well-being and ill-being within individual students (the dual continua model) as opposed to viewing their well-being and ill-being as opposite ends of a single continuum of mental health (the bipolar model). Using a baseline survey completed by 1,581 first year undergraduate students who enrolled in a New Zealand university at the beginning of 2019, we document the inverse correlation between their scores on the WHO-5 measure of psychological well-being and the PHQ-9 measure of psychological distress or ill-being. Contrary to the assumption of the bipolar model we find their inverse correlation is not strong and that many students are located off the diagonal, some reporting both high well-being and high ill-being over the two-week reference period and many more recording low scores on both screening instruments. We represent this heterogeneity in terms of six clusters of students based on a latent profile analysis of their two scores. We also find that students’ well-being and ill-being respond differently to variations in their physical and financial health both in cross-section and over time, confirming that well-being and ill-being can also be functionally independent. The results are important both diagnostically and in terms of the interventions they suggest

An HI study of the collisional ring galaxy NGC 922

We present new atomic hydrogen (HI) observations of the collisional ring galaxy NGC 922 obtained using the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Our observations reveal for the first time the vast extent of the HI disc of this galaxy. The HI morphology and kinematics of NGC 922 show that this galaxy is not the product of a simple drop-through interaction, but has a more complex interaction history. The integrated HI flux density of NGC 922 from our observations is 24.7 Jy km s$^{-1}$, which is within the error of the flux value obtained using the $64$-m Parkes radio telescope. This flux density translates to a total HI mass of $1.1*10^{10}$ M$_{\circ}$ and corresponds to an HI to total mass fraction (M$_{HI}$/M$_{tot}$) of approximately $0.11$. The gaseous structures of NGC 922 are more extended to the north and include an HI tail that has a projected physical length of $8$ kpc. Gas warps are also evident in the velocity field of NGC 922 and are more prominent on the approaching and the western side of the disc. In comparison with a large sample of star-forming galaxies in the local Universe, NGC 922 possesses a high gas fraction relative to galaxies with a similar stellar mass of ~$10^{10.4}$ M$_{\circ}$, and exhibits a high specific star formation rate.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, published in MNRA

Multi-GPU Acceleration of the iPIC3D Implicit Particle-in-Cell Code

iPIC3D is a widely used massively parallel Particle-in-Cell code for the simulation of space plasmas. However, its current implementation does not support execution on multiple GPUs. In this paper, we describe the porting of iPIC3D particle mover to GPUs and the optimization steps to increase the performance and parallel scaling on multiple GPUs. We analyze the strong scaling of the mover on two GPU clusters and evaluate its performance and acceleration. The optimized GPU version which uses pinned memory and asynchronous data prefetching outperform their corresponding CPU versions by 5-10x on two different systems equipped with NVIDIA K80 and V100 GPUs.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICCS 201