The Role of Functional, Social, and Mobility Dynamics in Facilitating Older African Americans Participation in Clinical Research

Purpose: Older African Americans experience disproportionately higher incidence of morbidity and mortality related to chronic and infectious diseases, yet are significantly underrepresented in clinical research compared to other racial and ethnic groups. This study aimed to understand the extent to which social support, transportation access, and physical impediments function as barriers or facilitators to clinical trial recruitment of older African Americans. Methods: Participants (N=221) were recruited from six African American churches in Atlanta and surveyed on various influences on clinical trial participation

The Impact of Message Sequencing in the New Product Introduction Process: Boosting Message Retention and its Impact on Product Attitude

This study focused on providing a more nuanced understanding of the message retention-attitude (cognition-affect) relationship in new product introductions. Using advertising and publicity as independent and combined promotional tools, this study aims to determine an effective approach to strengthen the retention-attitude relationship as well as the level of new product information retention and, through it, the attitude toward the product. To that end, a two-phase experiment was conducted involving 423 participants. The results revealed that publicity, compared to advertising, in general, was a more effective strategy in boosting retention and that the publicity-publicity sequence strategy was the most effective in boosting the attitude toward the product as its consistent message content and format produced both direct and mediated effects of message retention on the product attitude

How to Stay Curious while avoiding Noisy TVs using Aleatoric Uncertainty Estimation

When extrinsic rewards are sparse, artificial agents struggle to explore an environment. Curiosity, implemented as an intrinsic reward for prediction errors, can improve exploration but it is known to fail when faced with action-dependent noise sources (‘noisy TVs’). In an attempt to make exploring agents robust to noisy TVs, we present a simple solution: aleatoric mapping agents (AMAs). AMAs are a novel form of curiosity that explicitly ascertain which state transitions of the environment are unpredictable, even if those dynamics are induced by the actions of the agent. This is achieved by generating separate forward predictions for the mean and aleatoric uncertainty of future states, with the aim of reducing intrinsic rewards for those transitions that are unpredictable. We demonstrate that in a range of environments AMAs are able to circumvent actiondependent stochastic traps that immobilise conventional curiosity driven agents. Furthermore, we demonstrate empirically that other common exploration approaches—previously thought to be immune to agent-induced randomness—can be trapped by stochastic dynamics. Code to reproduce our experiments is provided

Detection rate of actionable mutations in diverse cancers using a biopsy-free (blood) circulating tumor cell DNA assay.

Analysis of cell-free DNA using next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a powerful tool for the detection/monitoring of alterations present in circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). Plasma extracted from 171 patients with a variety of cancers was analyzed for ctDNA (54 genes and copy number variants (CNVs) in three genes (EGFR, ERBB2 and MET)). The most represented cancers were lung (23%), breast (23%), and glioblastoma (19%). Ninety-nine patients (58%) had at least one detectable alteration. The most frequent alterations were TP53 (29.8%), followed by EGFR (17.5%), MET (10.5%), PIK3CA (7%), and NOTCH1 (5.8%). In contrast, of 222 healthy volunteers, only one had an aberration (TP53). Ninety patients with non-brain tumors had a discernible aberration (65% of 138 patients; in 70% of non-brain tumor patients with an alteration, the anomaly was potentially actionable). Interestingly, nine of 33 patients (27%) with glioblastoma had an alteration (6/33 (18%) potentially actionable). Overall, sixty-nine patients had potentially actionable alterations (40% of total; 69.7% of patients (69/99) with alterations); 68 patients (40% of total; 69% of patients with alterations), by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug. In summary, 65% of diverse cancers (as well as 27% of glioblastomas) had detectable ctDNA aberration(s), with the majority theoretically actionable by an approved agent

A possible Reinterpretation of Einstein's Equations

In this paper, we first review Huei's formulation in which it is shown that the linearized Einstein equations can be written in the same form as the Maxwell equations. We eliminate some imperfections like the scalar potential which is ill linked to the electric-type field, the Lorentz-type force which is obtained with a time independence restriction and the undesired factor 4 which appears in the magnetic-type part. Second, from these results and in the light of a recent work by C.C. Barros, we propose an extension of the equivalence principle and we suggest a new interpretation for Einstein's equations by showing that the electromagnetic Maxwell equations can be derived from a new version of Einstein's ones.Comment: 11 pages, no figure

The role of functional, social, and mobility dynamics in facilitating older African Americans participation in clinical research

Purpose: Older African Americans experience disproportionately higher incidence of morbidity and mortality related to chronic and infectious diseases, yet are significantly underrepresented in clinical research compared to other racial and ethnic groups. This study aimed to understand the extent to which social support, transportation access, and physical impediments function as barriers or facilitators to clinical trial recruitment of older African Americans. Methods: Participants (N=221) were recruited from six African American churches in Atlanta and surveyed on various influences on clinical trial participation

Characterizing model errors in chemical transport modeling of methane: impact of model resolution in versions v9-02 of GEOS-Chem and v35j of its adjoint model

The GEOS-Chem simulation of atmospheric CH$_{4}$ was evaluated against observations from the Thermal and Near Infrared Sensor for Carbon Observations Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TANSO-FTS) on the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE-FTS), and the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON). We focused on the model simulations at the 4°×5° and 2°×2.5° horizontal resolutions for the period of February–May 2010. Compared to the GOSAT, TCCON, and ACE-FTS data, we found that the 2°×2.5° model produced a better simulation of CH$_{4}$, with smaller biases and a higher correlation to the independent data. We found large resolution-dependent differences such as a latitude-dependent XCH$_{4}$ bias, with higher column abundances of CH$_{4}$ at high latitudes and lower abundances at low latitudes at the 4°×5° resolution than at 2°×2.5°. We also found large differences in CH$_{4}$ column abundances between the two resolutions over major source regions such as China. These differences resulted in up to 30 % differences in inferred regional CH$_{4}$ emission estimates from the two model resolutions. We performed several experiments using 222Rn, 7Be, and CH$_{4}$ to determine the origins of the resolution-dependent errors. The results suggested that the major source of the latitude-dependent errors is excessive mixing in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, including mixing at the edge of the polar vortex, which is pronounced at the 4°×5° resolution. At the coarser resolution, there is weakened vertical transport in the troposphere at midlatitudes to high latitudes due to the loss of sub-grid tracer eddy mass flux in the storm track regions. The vertical air mass fluxes are calculated in the model from the degraded coarse-resolution wind fields and the model does not conserve the air mass flux between model resolutions; as a result, the low resolution does not fully capture the vertical transport. This produces significant localized discrepancies, such as much greater CH$_{4}$ abundances in the lower troposphere over China at 4°×5° than at 2°×2.5°. Although we found that the CH$_{4}$ simulation is significantly better at 2°×2.5° than at 4°×5°, biases may still be present at 2°×2.5° resolution. Their importance, particularly in regards to inverse modeling of CH$_{4}$ emissions, should be evaluated in future studies using online transport in the native general circulation model as a benchmark simulation