Surveying Persons with Disabilities: A Source Guide (Version 1)

As a collaborator with the Cornell Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. has been working on a project that identifies the strengths and limitations in existing disability data collection in both content and data collection methodology. The intended outcomes of this project include expanding and synthesizing knowledge of best practices and the extent existing data use those practices, informing the development of data enhancement options, and contributing to a more informed use of existing data. In an effort to provide the public with an up-to-date and easily accessible source of research on the methodological issues associated with surveying persons with disabilities, MPR has prepared a Source Guide of material related to this topic. The Source Guide contains 150 abstracts, summaries, and references, followed by a Subject Index, which cross references the sources from the Reference List under various subjects. The Source Guide is viewed as a “living document,” and will be periodically updated

Pressure effects on the thermal stability of SiC fibers

Commercially available polymer derived SiC fibers were treated at temperatures from 1000 to 2200 C in vacuum and argon gas pressure of 1 and 1360 atm. Effects of gas pressure on the thermal stability of the fibers were determined through property comparison between the pressure treated fibers and vacuum treated fibers. Investigation of the thermal stability included studies of the fiber microstructure, weight loss, grain growth, and tensile strength. The 1360 atm argon gas treatment was found to shift the onset of fiber weight loss from 1200 to above 1500 C. Grain growth and tensile strength degradation were correlated with weight loss and were thus also inhibited by high pressure treatments. Additional heat treatment in 1 atm argon of the fibers initially treated at 1360 atm argon caused further weight loss and tensile strength degradation, thus indicating that high pressure inert gas conditions would be effective only in delaying fiber strength degradation. However, if the high gas pressure could be maintained throughout composite fabrication, then the composites could be processed at higher temperatures

Analysis of Mutator activity in embryogenic callus cultures and regenerated plants of Zea mays L.

Activity of the Mutator transposable element system in maize was assessed in tissue cultures and regenerated plants by Southern analysis of Mu-element modification status and genomic position. Examination of embryogenic callus cultures established from the F[subscript]1\u27s of crosses between active Mutator stock and maize inbreds A188 and H99 determined that the in planta parameters for Mutator activity were maintained in an in vitro environment. Subclonal populations from callus lines were used to demonstrate that Mu elements from active Mutator lines can remain transpositionally active in tissue culture systems. Novel Mu-homologous restriction fragments occurred in 38% of the subpopulations containing unmodified Mu elements, but not in control cultures containing modified Mu elements. The high mutagenic potential of Mutator should prove useful for in vitro mutagenesis, selection, and transposon tagging schemes, and should serve to enhance the generation of useful somaclonal variants in regenerated plants;Investigation of Mutator activity in regenerated plants demonstrated the maintenance of Mutator activity in progeny of plants regenerated from an active Mutator callus line. Activity was detected genetically by the segregation for new mutant phenotypes and molecularly by the appearance of Mu-homologous restriction fragments novel to the regenerant progeny. Segregation for new seedling mutations in third- and fourth-generation regenerant progeny of a callus culture derived from an inactive (Mu-loss) line suggests that a low-level reactivation of Mutator activity occurred in these progeny plants;Possible tissue- or development-specific influences on Mu-element excision were also explored. Embryogenic and endosperm cultures were established from maize lines in which Mu elements were known to have inserted at particular endosperm and aleurone reporter loci (wx-Mum1 and bz-Mum8). Somatic instability was demonstrated phenotypically at both mutant loci in endosperm callus tissues, indicating that excision occurs in endosperm (and aleurone) in vitro as well as in planta. Southern analysis of wx-Mum1 and bz-Mum8 embryogenic lines produced no evidence of Mu-element excision from either locus. Further studies involving tissue comparisons detected differences in Mu-element modification and genomic position in various tissues of H99/Mu[superscript]2 regenerated plants. Absence of Mu-homologous restriction fragments in a particular tissue relative to other tissues of the same plant implied that Mu-element excision occurred. Together, these findings provide preliminary evidence that Mu-element excision may be subject to tissue-specific influence or regulation

Affine Registration of label maps in Label Space

Two key aspects of coupled multi-object shape\ud analysis and atlas generation are the choice of representation\ud and subsequent registration methods used to align the sample\ud set. For example, a typical brain image can be labeled into\ud three structures: grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal\ud fluid. Many manipulations such as interpolation, transformation,\ud smoothing, or registration need to be performed on these images\ud before they can be used in further analysis. Current techniques\ud for such analysis tend to trade off performance between the two\ud tasks, performing well for one task but developing problems when\ud used for the other.\ud This article proposes to use a representation that is both\ud flexible and well suited for both tasks. We propose to map object\ud labels to vertices of a regular simplex, e.g. the unit interval for\ud two labels, a triangle for three labels, a tetrahedron for four\ud labels, etc. This representation, which is routinely used in fuzzy\ud classification, is ideally suited for representing and registering\ud multiple shapes. On closer examination, this representation\ud reveals several desirable properties: algebraic operations may\ud be done directly, label uncertainty is expressed as a weighted\ud mixture of labels (probabilistic interpretation), interpolation is\ud unbiased toward any label or the background, and registration\ud may be performed directly.\ud We demonstrate these properties by using label space in a gradient\ud descent based registration scheme to obtain a probabilistic\ud atlas. While straightforward, this iterative method is very slow,\ud could get stuck in local minima, and depends heavily on the initial\ud conditions. To address these issues, two fast methods are proposed\ud which serve as coarse registration schemes following which the\ud iterative descent method can be used to refine the results. Further,\ud we derive an analytical formulation for direct computation of the\ud "group mean" from the parameters of pairwise registration of all\ud the images in the sample set. We show results on richly labeled\ud 2D and 3D data sets

P3‐290: Measuring transitions into dementia and cognitive impairment: Evaluating the efficacy of longitudinal survey data in the public domain

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/152605/1/alzjjalz2012051513.pd

Stereochemical assignment of the protein-protein interaction inhibitor JBIR-22 by total synthesis

The authors acknowledge the EPSRC and Cancer Research UK (CRUK Grant No. C21383/A6950) for funding this research.Recent reports have highlighted the biological activity associated with a sub-family of the tetramic acid class of natural products. Despite the fact that members of this sub-family act as protein-protein interaction inhibitors of relevance to proteasome assembly, no synthetic work has been reported. This may be because this sub-family contains an unnatural 4,4-disubstitued glutamic acid, the synthesis of which provides a key challenge. Here we describe a highly stereoselective route to a masked form of this unnatural amino acid. This enabled the synthesis of two of the possible diastereomers of JBIR-22 and allowed its relative and absolute stereochemistry to be assigned.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

What effect do inhaled steroids have on delaying the progression of COPD?

The annual rate of decline in forced expiratory volume for 1 second (FEV1) has been researchers' gold standard as an objective measure for progression of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) do not consistently have a statistically significant impact on FEV1 decline, and thus on the progression of COPD (strength of recommendation [SOR]: B, 2 conflicting meta-analyses and numerous conflicting randomized controlled trials). In those studies that did show improvements in FEV1 decline, the change does not appear to be clinically significant (7.7 to 9.0 mL/year). These findings do not take into account the potential impact of ICS on such patient oriented outcomes as exacerbation rates, quality of life, outpatient visits, hospitalization, and mortality