4,945 research outputs found
Community environment, cognitive impairment and dementia in later life: results from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study
Background: Few studies have investigated the impact of the community environment, as distinct from area deprivation, on cognition in later life. This study explores cross-sectional associations between cognitive impairment and dementia and environmental features at the community level in older people. Method: The postcodes of the 2424 participants in the year-10 interview of the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study in England were mapped into small area level geographical units (Lower-layer Super Output Areas) and linked to environmental data in government statistics. Multilevel logistic regression was conducted to investigate associations between cognitive impairment (defined as MMSE3 in GMS-AGECAT) and community level measurements including area deprivation, natural environment, land use mix and crime. Sensitivity analyses tested the impact of people moving residence within the last two years. Results: Higher levels of area deprivation and crime were not significantly associated with cognitive impairment and dementia after accounting for individual level factors. Living in areas with high land use mix was significantly associated with a nearly 60% reduced odds of dementia (OR: 0.4; 95% CI: 0.2, 0.8) after adjusting for individual level factors and area deprivation, but there was no linear trend for cognitive impairment. Increased odds of dementia (OR: 2.2, 95% CI: 1.2, 4.2) and cognitive impairment (OR: 1.4, 95% CI: 1.0, 2.0) were found in the highest quartile of natural environment availability. Findings were robust to exclusion of the recently relocated. Conclusion: Features of land use have complex associations with cognitive impairment and dementia. Further investigations should focus on environmental influences on cognition to inform health and social policies
Community environment, cognitive impairment and dementia in later life: results from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study
Background: Few studies have investigated the impact of the community environment, as distinct from area deprivation, on cognition in later life. This study explores cross-sectional associations between cognitive impairment and dementia and environmental features at the community level in older people. Method: The postcodes of the 2424 participants in the year-10 interview of the Cognitive Function and Ageing Study in England were mapped into small area level geographical units (Lower-layer Super Output Areas) and linked to environmental data in government statistics. Multilevel logistic regression was conducted to investigate associations between cognitive impairment (defined as MMSE3 in GMS-AGECAT) and community level measurements including area deprivation, natural environment, land use mix and crime. Sensitivity analyses tested the impact of people moving residence within the last two years. Results: Higher levels of area deprivation and crime were not significantly associated with cognitive impairment and dementia after accounting for individual level factors. Living in areas with high land use mix was significantly associated with a nearly 60% reduced odds of dementia (OR: 0.4; 95% CI: 0.2, 0.8) after adjusting for individual level factors and area deprivation, but there was no linear trend for cognitive impairment. Increased odds of dementia (OR: 2.2, 95% CI: 1.2, 4.2) and cognitive impairment (OR: 1.4, 95% CI: 1.0, 2.0) were found in the highest quartile of natural environment availability. Findings were robust to exclusion of the recently relocated. Conclusion: Features of land use have complex associations with cognitive impairment and dementia. Further investigations should focus on environmental influences on cognition to inform health and social policies
Distance measures in gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology
We present quantities which characterize the sensitivity of
gravitational-wave observatories to sources at cosmological distances. In
particular, we introduce and generalize the horizon, range, response, and reach
distances. These quantities incorporate a number of important effects,
including cosmologically well-defined distances and volumes, cosmological
redshift, cosmological time dilation, and rate density evolution. In addition,
these quantities incorporate unique aspects of gravitational wave detectors,
such as the variable sky sensitivity of the detectors and the scaling of the
sensitivity with inverse distance. An online calculator
(https://users.rcc.uchicago.edu/~dholz/gwc/) and python notebook
(https://github.com/hsinyuc/distancetool) to determine GW distances are
available. We provide answers to the question: "How far can gravitational-wave
detectors hear?
Toward Robust Manufacturing Scheduling: Stochastic Job-Shop Scheduling
Manufacturing plays a significant role in promoting economic development,
production, exports, and job creation, which ultimately contribute to improving
the quality of life. The presence of manufacturing defects is, however,
inevitable leading to products being discarded, i.e. scrapped. In some cases,
defective products can be repaired through rework. Scrap and rework cause a
longer completion time, which can contribute to the order being shipped late.
In addition, complex manufacturing scheduling becomes much more challenging
when the above uncertainties are present. Motivated by the presence of
uncertainties as well as combinatorial complexity, this paper addresses the
challenge illustrated through a case study of stochastic job-shop scheduling
problems arising within low-volume high-variety manufacturing. To ensure
on-time delivery, high-quality solutions are required, and near-optimal
solutions must be obtained within strict time constraints to ensure smooth
operations on the job-shop floor. To efficiently solve the stochastic job-shop
scheduling (JSS) problem, a recently-developed Surrogate "Level-Based"
Lagrangian Relaxation is used to reduce computational effort while efficiently
exploiting the geometric convergence potential inherent to Polyak's step-sizing
formula thereby leading to fast convergence. Numerical testing demonstrates
that the new method is more than two orders of magnitude faster as compared to
commercial solvers
Local Periodicity-Based Beat Tracking for Expressive Classical Piano Music
To model the periodicity of beats, state-of-the-art beat tracking systems use
"post-processing trackers" (PPTs) that rely on several empirically determined
global assumptions for tempo transition, which work well for music with a
steady tempo. For expressive classical music, however, these assumptions can be
too rigid. With two large datasets of Western classical piano music, namely the
Aligned Scores and Performances (ASAP) dataset and a dataset of Chopin's
Mazurkas (Maz-5), we report on experiments showing the failure of existing PPTs
to cope with local tempo changes, thus calling for new methods. In this paper,
we propose a new local periodicity-based PPT, called predominant local
pulse-based dynamic programming (PLPDP) tracking, that allows for more flexible
tempo transitions. Specifically, the new PPT incorporates a method called
"predominant local pulses" (PLP) in combination with a dynamic programming (DP)
component to jointly consider the locally detected periodicity and beat
activation strength at each time instant. Accordingly, PLPDP accounts for the
local periodicity, rather than relying on a global tempo assumption. Compared
to existing PPTs, PLPDP particularly enhances the recall values at the cost of
a lower precision, resulting in an overall improvement of F1-score for beat
tracking in ASAP (from 0.473 to 0.493) and Maz-5 (from 0.595 to 0.838).Comment: Accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language
Processing (July 2023
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O-GlcNAc modification blocks the aggregation and toxicity of the protein α-synuclein associated with Parkinson's disease.
Several aggregation-prone proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases can be modified by O-linked N-acetyl-glucosamine (O-GlcNAc) in vivo. One of these proteins, α-synuclein, is a toxic aggregating protein associated with synucleinopathies, including Parkinson's disease. However, the effect of O-GlcNAcylation on α-synuclein is not clear. Here, we use synthetic protein chemistry to generate both unmodified α-synuclein and α-synuclein bearing a site-specific O-GlcNAc modification at the physiologically relevant threonine residue 72. We show that this single modification has a notable and substoichiometric inhibitory effect on α-synuclein aggregation, while not affecting the membrane binding or bending properties of α-synuclein. O-GlcNAcylation is also shown to affect the phosphorylation of α-synuclein in vitro and block the toxicity of α-synuclein that was exogenously added to cells in culture. These results suggest that increasing O-GlcNAcylation may slow the progression of synucleinopathies and further support a general function for O-GlcNAc in preventing protein aggregation
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