Shortchanging America's Health: A State-by-State Look at How Federal Public Health Dollars Are Spent

Examines the allocation of federal health funds to emphasize that the U.S. is falling short on achieving federally established goals for reducing disease and improving health. Calls for a proactive approach, focusing on prevention of illness and injury

A corpus of images and text in online news

In recent years, several datasets have been released that include images and text, giving impulse to new methods that combine natural language processing and computer vision. However, there is a need for datasets of images in their natural textual context. The ION corpus contains 300K news articles published between August 2014 - 2015 in five online newspapers from two countries. The 1-year coverage over multiple publishers ensures a broad scope in terms of topics, image quality and editorial viewpoints. The corpus consists of JSON-LD files with the following data about each article: the original URL of the article on the news publisher’s website, the date of publication, the headline of the article, the URL of the image displayed with the article (if any), and the caption of that image. Neither the article text nor the images themselves are included in the corpus. Instead, the images are distributed as high-dimensional feature vectors extracted from a Convolutional Neural Network, anticipating their use in computer vision tasks. The article text is represented as a list of automatically generated entity and topic annotations in the form of Wikipedia/DBpedia pages. This facilitates the selection of subsets of the corpus for separate analysis or evaluation

From Citywide to Neighborhood-Based: Two Decades of Learning, Prioritization, and Strategic Action to Build the Skillman Foundation’s Youth-Development Systems

· This article explores the Skillman Foundation’s shift in its approach to fulfilling its mission to improve the lives of children and youth and to making grants – moving from a traditional grantmaker to a place-based investor and change-maker. · Three aspects of Skillman’s approach have directly shaped the evolution of its youth-development investments: recognizing Detroit’s economic, social, political, and environmental challenges; articulating overarching goals to provide direction and setting priorities for the scope and focus of its programmatic work; and using rapid learning to inform strategic decisions and social-innovation practices designed to tackle deeply entrenched problems. · This article reflects on the foundation’s evolution over two decades of learning, prioritization, and strategic action in its efforts to build and sustain outcome-focused youth-development systems

Inbreeding effects on immune response in free-living song sparrows (Melospiza melodia)

The consequences of inbreeding for host immunity to parasitic infection have broad implications for the evolutionary and dynamical impacts of parasites on populations where inbreeding occurs. To rigorously assess the magnitude and the prevalence of inbreeding effects on immunity, multiple components of host immune response should be related to inbreeding coefficient (f) in free-living individuals. We used a pedigreed, free-living population of song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) to test whether individual responses to widely used experimental immune challenges varied consistently with f. The patagial swelling response to phytohaemagglutinin declined markedly with f in both females and males in both 2002 and 2003, although overall inbreeding depression was greater in males. The primary antibody response to tetanus toxoid declined with f in females but not in males in both 2004 and 2005. Primary antibody responses to diphtheria toxoid were low but tended to decline with f in 2004. Overall inbreeding depression did not solely reflect particularly strong immune responses in outbred offspring of immigrant–native pairings or weak responses in highly inbred individuals. These data indicate substantial and apparently sex-specific inbreeding effects on immune response, implying that inbred hosts may be relatively susceptible to parasitic infection to differing degrees in males and females

Miniaturized data loggers and computer programming improve seabird risk and damage assessments for marine oil spills in Atlantic Canada

Obtaining useful information on marine birds that can aid in oil spill (and other hydrocarbon release) risk and damage assessments in offshore environments is challenging. Technological innovations in miniaturization have allowed archival data loggers to be deployed successfully on marine birds vulnerable to hydrocarbons on water. A number of species, including murres (both Common, Uria aalge, and Thick-billed, U. lomvia) have been tracked using geolocation devices in eastern Canada, increasing our knowledge of the seasonality and colony-specific nature of their susceptibility to oil on water in offshore hydrocarbon production areas and major shipping lanes. Archival data tags are starting to resolve questions around behaviour of vulnerable seabirds at small spatial scales relevant to oil spill impact modelling, specifically to determine the duration and frequency at which birds fly at sea. Advances in data capture methods using voice activated software have eased the burden on seabird observers who are collecting increasingly more detailed information on seabirds during ship-board and aerial transects. Computer programs that integrate seabird density and bird behaviour have been constructed, all with a goal of creating more credible seabird oil spill risk and damage assessments. In this paper, we discuss how each of these technological and computing innovations can help define critical inputs into seabird risk and damage assessments, and when combined, can provide a more realistic understanding of the impacts to seabirds from any hydrocarbon release

Nerve Growth Factor Pathobiology During The Progression Of Alzheimer\u27s Disease

The current review summarizes the pathobiology of nerve growth factor (NGF) and its cognate receptors during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Both transcript and protein data indicate that cholinotrophic neuronal dysfunction is related to an imbalance between TrkA-mediated survival signaling and the NGF precursor (proNGF)/p75NTR-mediated pro-apoptotic signaling, which may be related to alteration in the metabolism of NGF. Data indicate a spatiotemporal pattern of degeneration related to the evolution of tau pathology within cholinotrophic neuronal subgroups located within the nucleus basalis of Meynert (nbM). Despite these degenerative events the cholinotrophic system is capable of cellular resilience and/or plasticity during the prodromal and later stages of the disease. In addition to neurotrophin dysfunction, studies indicate alterations in epigenetically regulated proteins occur within cholinotrophic nbM neurons during the progression of AD, suggesting a mechanism that may underlie changes in transcript expression. Findings that increased cerebrospinal fluid levels of proNGF mark the onset of MCI and the transition to AD suggests that this proneurotrophin is a potential disease biomarker. Novel therapeutics to treat NGF dysfunction include NGF gene therapy and the development of small molecule agonists for the cognate prosurvival NGF receptor TrkA and antagonists against the pan-neurotrophin p75NTR death receptor for the treatment of AD

screening for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy in everyday practice

Abstract Transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) is a life-threatening, progressive, infiltrative disease caused by the deposition of transthyretin amyloid fibrils in the heart, and can often be overlooked as a common cause of heart failure. Delayed diagnosis due to lack of disease awareness and misdiagnosis results in a poorer prognosis. Early accurate diagnosis is therefore key to improving patient outcomes, particularly in the context of both the recent approval of tafamidis in some countries (including the United States) for the treatment of ATTR-CM, and of other promising therapies under development. With the availability of scintigraphy as an inexpensive, noninvasive diagnostic tool, the rationale to screen for ATTR-CM in high-risk populations of patients is increasingly warranted. Here the authors propose a framework of clinical scenarios in which screening for ATTR-CM is recommended, as well as diagnostic "red flags" that can assist in its diagnosis among the wider population of patients with heart failure

Ortho-semantic learning of novel words: An event-related potential study of grade 3 children

Introduction: As children become independent readers, they regularly encounter new words whose meanings they must infer from context, and whose spellings must be learned for future recognition. The self-teaching hypothesis proposes orthographic learning skills are critical in the transition to fluent reading, while the lexical quality hypothesis further emphasizes the importance of semantics. Event-related potential (ERP) studies of reading development have focused on effects related to the N170 component—print tuning (letters vs. symbols) and lexical tuning (real words vs. consonant strings)—as well as the N400 reflecting semantic processing, but have not investigated the relationship of these components to word learning during independent reading. Methods: In this study, children in grade 3 independently read short stories that introduced novel words, then completed a lexical decision task from which ERPs were derived. Results: Like real words, newly-learned novel words evoked a lexical tuning effect, indicating rapid establishment of orthographic representations. Both real and novel words elicited significantly smaller N400s than pseudowords, suggesting that semantic representations of the novel words were established. Further, N170 print tuning predicted accuracy on identifying the spellings of the novel words, while the N400 effect for novel words was associated with reading comprehension. Discussion: Exposure to novel words during self-directed reading rapidly establishes neural markers of orthographic and semantic processing. Furthermore, the ability to rapidly filter letter strings from symbols is predictive of orthographic learning, while rapid establishment of semantic representations of novel words is associated with stronger reading comprehension

Restriction landmark genomic scanning (RLGS) spot identification by second generation virtual RLGS in multiple genomes with multiple enzyme combinations.

BackgroundRestriction landmark genomic scanning (RLGS) is one of the most successfully applied methods for the identification of aberrant CpG island hypermethylation in cancer, as well as the identification of tissue specific methylation of CpG islands. However, a limitation to the utility of this method has been the ability to assign specific genomic sequences to RLGS spots, a process commonly referred to as "RLGS spot cloning."ResultsWe report the development of a virtual RLGS method (vRLGS) that allows for RLGS spot identification in any sequenced genome and with any enzyme combination. We report significant improvements in predicting DNA fragment migration patterns by incorporating sequence information into the migration models, and demonstrate a median Euclidian distance between actual and predicted spot migration of 0.18 centimeters for the most complex human RLGS pattern. We report the confirmed identification of 795 human and 530 mouse RLGS spots for the most commonly used enzyme combinations. We also developed a method to filter the virtual spots to reduce the number of extra spots seen on a virtual profile for both the mouse and human genomes. We demonstrate use of this filter to simplify spot cloning and to assist in the identification of spots exhibiting tissue-specific methylation.ConclusionThe new vRLGS system reported here is highly robust for the identification of novel RLGS spots. The migration models developed are not specific to the genome being studied or the enzyme combination being used, making this tool broadly applicable. The identification of hundreds of mouse and human RLGS spot loci confirms the strong bias of RLGS studies to focus on CpG islands and provides a valuable resource to rapidly study their methylation