Three Studies on the Value and Risk of Higher Education.

We first examine US funding for and results of higher education in the context of eleven countries in Western Europe. We study differences in effect of population size, economy, and spending on new enrollment. We find GDP is a better predictor of enrollment changes than spending on higher education or population. We use the relationship between GDP and enrollment as a mechanism for studying the differences in spending effectiveness between countries. We find that European reforms, such as increased school autonomy and student loans/grants, cause no differences in enrollment. Enrollment is higher in countries where proportionately more educational funding comes from private sources. We further focus on the US higher education market. Using a two-stage least squares model, we build a macroeconomic model of supply and demand for US higher education as measured by enrollment. We find that college education benefits (e.g. relative earnings and employment levels), credit factors (e.g. student loan amounts and household debt), and financial aid shift demand. Higher tuition prices increase appeal of higher education but credit constraints put a barrier on demand growth. Tuition prices and debt levels are correlated, suggesting that students respond to higher tuition prices by borrowing. School's operating costs, government aid, and tuition and non-tuition revenue drive supply. Schools can use tuition prices to signal quality, and relative demand side price in-elasticity allows them to raise prices. Finally, we narrow in on individuals. We compare post-college income across differing groups of student ability, school quality, and major choice. We condition on intrinsic student ability based on the quality of the top school to which a student was admitted. We find that attendance at an elite institution increases post-college income. For students not admitted to an elite school, income is primarily driven by student ability and major choice. Students majoring in engineering and business earn higher salaries than students focusing on humanities and arts even after adjusting for ability. School quality plays a key role in the college attendance and school choice decisions, even though we do not find a significant effect of these decisions on post-college earnings in most cases.PhDIndustrial & Operations EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102325/1/katley_1.pd

The Characterization of Twenty Sequenced Human Genomes

We present the analysis of twenty human genomes to evaluate the prospects for identifying rare functional variants that contribute to a phenotype of interest. We sequenced at high coverage ten “case” genomes from individuals with severe hemophilia A and ten “control” genomes. We summarize the number of genetic variants emerging from a study of this magnitude, and provide a proof of concept for the identification of rare and highly-penetrant functional variants by confirming that the cause of hemophilia A is easily recognizable in this data set. We also show that the number of novel single nucleotide variants (SNVs) discovered per genome seems to stabilize at about 144,000 new variants per genome, after the first 15 individuals have been sequenced. Finally, we find that, on average, each genome carries 165 homozygous protein-truncating or stop loss variants in genes representing a diverse set of pathways

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Developing a Test-bed for Distributed Search by Mobile Sensors

Abstract-- The goal of this Systems and Information Engineering Capstone project is to develop a physical test-bed in order to analyze the efficiency of swarmbased distributed search algorithms. This test-bed demonstrates a distributed search system using actual moving search agents and target detection. The goal of this test-bed is to provide a tool that can be used in future research to better understand swarm-based distributed search by mobile sensors. I

The flavanone homoeriodictyol increases SGLT-1-mediated glucose uptake but decreases serotonin release in differentiated Caco-2 cells

Flavanoids and related polyphenols, among them hesperitin, have been shown to modulate cellular glucose transport by targeting SGLT-1 and GLUT-2 transport proteins. We aimed to investigate whether homoeriodictyol, which is structurally related to hesperitin, affects glucose uptake in differentiated Caco-2 cells as a model for the intestinal barrier. The results revealed that, in contrast to other polyphenols, the flavanon homoeriodictyol promotes glucose uptake by 29.0 ± 3.83% at a concentration of 100 μM. The glucose uptake stimulating effect was sensitive to phloridzin, but not to phloretin, indicating an involvement of the sodium-coupled glucose transporter SGLT-1, but not of sodium-independent glucose transporters (GLUT). In addition, in contrast to the increased extracellular serotonin levels by stimulation with 500 mM D-(+)-glucose, treatment with 100 μM homoeriodictyol decreased serotonin release by -48.8 ± 7.57% in Caco-2 cells via a phloridzin-sensitive signaling pathway. Extracellular serotonin levels were also reduced by -57.1 ± 5.43% after application of 0.01 μM homoeriodictyol to human neural SH-SY5Y cells. In conclusion, we demonstrate that homoeriodictyol affects both the glucose metabolism and the serotonin system in Caco-2 cells via a SGLT-1-meditated pathway. Furthermore, the results presented here support the usage of Caco-2 cells as a model for peripheral serotonin release. Further investigations may address the value of homoeriodictyol in the treatment of anorexia and malnutrition through the targeting of SGLT-1.status: publishe

Evaluation of Unsaturated Alkanoic Acid Amides as Maskers of Epigallocatechin Gallate Astringency

Some foods, beverages, and food ingredients show characteristic long-lasting aftertastes. The sweet, lingering taste of high intensity sweeteners or the astringency of tea catechins are typical examples. Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), the most abundant catechin in green tea, causes a long-lasting astringency and bitterness. These sensations are mostly perceived as aversive and are only accepted in a few foods (e.g., tea and red wine). For the evaluation of the aftertaste of such constituents over a certain period of time, Intensity Variation Descriptive Methodology (IVDM) was used. The approach allows the measurement of different descriptors in parallel in one panel session. IVDM was evaluated concerning the inter- and intraindividual differences of panelists for bitterness and astringency of EGCG. Subsequently, the test method was used as a screening tool for the identification of potential modality-selective masking compounds. In particular, the intensity of the astringency of EGCG (750 mg kg^–1) could be significantly lowered by 18–33% during the time course by adding the trigeminal-active compound <i>trans</i>-pellitorine (2<i>E</i>,4<i>E</i>-decadienoic acid <i>N</i>-isobutyl amide <b>1</b>, 5 mg kg^–1) without significantly affecting bitterness perception. Further, structurally related compounds were evaluated on EGCG to gain evidence for possible structure–activity relationships. A more polar derivative of <b>1</b>, (2<i>S</i>)-2-[[(2<i>E</i>,4<i>E</i>)-deca-2,4-dienoyl]­amino]­propanoic acid <b>9</b>, was also able to reduce the astringency of EGCG similar to <i>trans</i>-pellitorine but without showing the strong tingling effect