The Estimation of Germ Line De Novo Mutation Rates of Extended Sets of Y-STR Haplotypes to Aid in the Differentiation of Male Biological Relatives in Criminal Investigations

An important forensic application for Y-chromosome short tandem repeats (Y-STRs) is the identification of male DNA. Since the Y-chromosome is non-recombining and most Y-STRs have slippage mutation rates on the order of 1x10-3 or lower, Y-STR commercial multiplex systems do not yet allow personal individualization. This is problematic in criminal investigations where the persons of interest include males of the same paternal line. In order to obtain discrimination among paternal male relatives, it would be necessary to use a larger number of Y-STRs or a selection of Y-loci with higher slippage mutations with the hope of encountering a germline meiotic mutation. In this study, Y-STR loci from three multiplexes were examined: an ultra-high discrimination multiplex of 14 non-core loci; Promega\u27s PowerPlex® Y23; and a rapidly mutating 13-locus panel (mutation rates above 1x10-2). Taking the three multiplexes together provides a unique 40-locus Y-STR panel (the Masker Set ), a powerful tool to separate closely related males. The loci were examined for discriminative slippage mutations in pairs of paternally related South Brazilian males: 99 grandfather-grandson, 103 uncle-nephew, and 140 brothers. The goal of this study was to analyze the Masker Set loci by: describing the characteristics and frequency of germ-line mutations; noting differences in mutation rates between and within loci; determining repeat gain and loss rates; and identifying the most informative loci to differentiate male relatives. Using the Masker Set , pairs of male relatives were distinguished by at least one mutation 53% of the time for grandfather-grandson, 62% for uncle-nephew, and 54% for brothers. The most discriminating Y-STR loci were: DYF387S1, DYF404S1, DYS526B, DYS389II, DYS449, DYS547, DYF399S1, DYS458, DYS576, DYF403S1A, DYS508, DYS612, DYS403S1B, DYS518, and DYS627

Growth, Maturation, and Weight Status: Insights from a Longitudinal Cohort of Nebraska Youth

Pediatric obesity continues to be a major public health concern in the United States, with well-known short-term and long-term consequences. In efforts to combat pediatric obesity and identify children at high-risk for potential health problems, physicians and health professionals widely practice screening and classifying weight status using age-and-sex-specific body mass index (BMI) percentiles. However, some studies suggest the use of BMI for establishing weight status in relation to health risk in youth is problematic, especially during the period of the adolescent growth spurt. More importantly, maturation-related misclassification may result in overestimations of overweight prevalence among early-maturing youth, and underestimations of overweight prevalence among later-maturing youth. Longitudinal data from 646 youth whose body mass and stature were measured from ages 8-14 during school health screenings were used for analysis. Age-and-sex specific BMI percentiles were calculated, and weight status was determined based on CDC growth charts. Height velocities (i.e. growth rates) were calculated to determine somatic maturity (biological age) based on age at peak height velocity. Overall, growth in stature, body mass, and BMI was described amongst weight status categories, while weight categorization was compared using standard procedures versus an approach adjusted for maturation. As expected, children get taller and heavier with age, and significant differences in growth rate exist according to weight classification. Overall, 8.5% of children were re-classified into a lower weight category, with 22 (30.6%) overweight or obese boys and 14 (20.3%) overweight or obese girls reclassified into a lower weight category when adjusting for maturation. Children grow and mature at different rates, and while the overall effects of maturational adjustment are relatively small, it should be considered when assessing adolescents in particular. Weight status assessments should be modified during the age range when maturational events occur

Low Income Home Owner Profiles Project. Survey of Metro Area Mortgage Loan Originators.

Supported by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota

Hyperion: Building the largest in-memory search tree

Indexes are essential in data management systems to increase the speed of data retrievals. Widespread data structures to provide fast and memory-efficient indexes are prefix tries. Implementations like Judy, ART, or HOT optimize their internal alignments for cache and vector unit efficiency. While these measures usually improve the performance substantially, they can have a negative impact on memory efficiency. In this paper we present Hyperion, a trie-based main-memory key-value store achieving extreme space efficiency. In contrast to other data structures, Hyperion does not depend on CPU vector units, but scans the data structure linearly. Combined with a custom memory allocator, Hyperion accomplishes a remarkable data density while achieving a competitive point query and an exceptional range query performance. Hyperion can significantly reduce the index memory footprint, while being at least two times better concerning the performance to memory ratio compared to the best implemented alternative strategies for randomized string data sets

Non-ohmic critical fluctuation conductivity of layered superconductors in magnetic field

Thermal fluctuation conductivity for a layered superconductor in perpendicular magnetic field is treated in the frame of the self-consistent Hartree approximation for an arbitrarily strong in-plane electric field. The simultaneous application of the two fields results in a slightly stronger suppression of the superconducting fluctuations, compared to the case when the fields are applied individually.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Smart Grid-aware scheduling in data centres

© 2016 In several countries the expansion and establishment of renewable energies result in widely scattered and often weather-dependent energy production, decoupled from energy demand. Large, fossil-fuelled power plants are gradually replaced by many small power stations that transform wind, solar and water power into electrical power. This leads to changes in the historically evolved power grid that favours top-down energy distribution from a backbone of large power plants to widespread consumers. Now, with the increase of energy production in lower layers of the grid, there is also a bottom-up flow of the grid infrastructure compromising its stability. In order to locally adapt the energy demand to the production, some countries have started to establish Smart Grids to incentivise customers to consume energy when it is generated. This paper investigates how data centres can benefit from variable energy prices in Smart Grids. In view of their low average utilisation, data centre providers can schedule the workload dependent on the energy price. We consider a scenario for a data centre in Paderborn, Germany, hosting a large share of interruptible and migratable computing jobs. We suggest and compare two scheduling strategies for minimising energy costs. The first one merely uses current values from the Smart Meter to place the jobs, while the other one also estimates the future energy price in the grid based on weather forecasts. In spite of the complexity of the prediction problem and the inaccuracy of the weather data, both strategies perform well and have a strong positive effect on the utilisation of renewable energy and on the reduction of energy costs. This work improves and extends the paper of the same title published on the SustainIT conference (Mäsker et al., 2015). While that paper puts more emphasis on the utilisation of green energy, the new algorithms find a better balance between energy costs and turnaround time. We slightly alter the scenario using a more realistic multi-queue batch system and improve the scheduling algorithms which can be tuned to prioritise turnaround time or green energy utilisation

The pseudogap state in superconductors: Extended Hartree approach to time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau Theory

It is well known that conventional pairing fluctuation theory at the Hartree level leads to a normal state pseudogap in the fermionic spectrum. Our goal is to extend this Hartree approximated scheme to arrive at a generalized mean field theory of pseudogapped superconductors for all temperatures $T$. While an equivalent approach to the pseudogap has been derived elsewhere using a more formal Green's function decoupling scheme, in this paper we re-interpret this mean field theory and BCS theory as well, and demonstrate how they naturally relate to ideal Bose gas condensation. Here we recast the Hartree approximated Ginzburg-Landau self consistent equations in a T-matrix form. This recasting makes it possible to consider arbitrarily strong attractive coupling, where bosonic degrees of freedom appear at $T^*$ considerably above $T_c$. The implications for transport both above and below $T_c$ are discussed. Below $T_c$ we find two types of contributions. Those associated with fermionic excitations have the usual BCS functional form. That they depend on the magnitude of the excitation gap, nevertheless, leads to rather atypical transport properties in the strong coupling limit, where this gap (as distinct from the order parameter) is virtually $T$-independent. In addition, there are bosonic terms arising from non-condensed pairs whose transport properties are shown here to be reasonably well described by an effective time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, REVTeX4, submitted to PRB; clarification of the diagrammatic technique added, one figure update

Critical fluctuation conductivity in layered superconductors in strong electric field

The paraconductivity, originating from critical superconducting order-parameter fluctuations in the vicinity of the critical temperature in a layered superconductor is calculated in the frame of the self-consistent Hartree approximation, for an arbitrarily strong electric field and zero magnetic field. The paraconductivity diverges less steep towards the critical temperature in the Hartree approximation than in the Gaussian one and it shows a distinctly enhanced variation with the electric field. Our results indicate that high electric fields can be effectively used to suppress order-parameter fluctuations in high-temperature superconductors.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Ginzburg-Landau theory of phase transitions in quasi-one-dimensional systems

A wide range of quasi-one-dimensional materials, consisting of weakly coupled chains, undergo three-dimensional phase transitions that can be described by a complex order parameter. A Ginzburg-Landau theory is derived for such a transition. It is shown that intrachain fluctuations in the order parameter play a crucial role and must be treated exactly. The effect of these fluctuations is determined by a single dimensionless parameter. The three-dimensional transition temperature, the associated specific heat jump, coherence lengths, and width of the critical region, are computed assuming that the single chain Ginzburg-Landau coefficients are independent of temperature. The width of the critical region, estimated from the Ginzburg criterion, is virtually parameter independent, being about 5-8 per cent of the transition temperature. To appear in {\it Physical Review B,} March 1, 1995.Comment: 15 pages, RevTeX, 5 figures in uuencoded compressed tar file