Identifying Population Health Data Resources Within a Large Data Repository

An overarching goal of ICPSR and its aging program, NACDA, is to build data resources that support the exploration and improvement of population health as part of the aging lifecourse. NACDA and ICPSR maintain one of the nation’s largest curated data collections containing linkable multi-level variables across multiple time periods. By providing value-added tools to support the use of these resources NACDA will increase the potential applications of existing and new data acquisitions, allowing for the examination of changing biomedical, social and community effects on health over time. To illustrate the problem, consider, a simple search for the term “health” across the NACDA and broader ICPSR collections. This concept represents a broad capture query, and results in a list of 8,464 studies on the ICPSR website, not all of them containing data on health outcomes. In contrast, a more refined search of the phrase “health outcomes” results in a list of 465 studies and 131 bibliographic citations but returns no specific variables that could be used and analysis framework. This result is not surprising as these kinds of search phrases are much more likely to appear in publications or in study-level descriptive metadata, while a variable level return would require the term “health outcome” to reside in the actual variable name. Similarly, there are numerous studies without the phrase “health outcomes” that contain health data (e.g., Survey of Texas Adults, 2004, ICPSR 4297, available through NACDA).NIH/NIA U24 AG056918 and NIH/NIA U24AG056918 01S1Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145488/1/PAA 2018 Population Health.pdfDescription of PAA 2018 Population Health.pdf : PowerPoint Presentatio

Building on the Rich Metadata from Decades of Health Behavior Studies: The Potential for Common Data Elements (CDEs) to Enhance the Identification of Health Data Across Different Research Projects

Continued analyses of key datasets are extremely important to building understanding of the underlying causes of substance use and addiction, and multiply the benefits of our nation’s investment in this science. ICPSR and the National Addiction and HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP) disseminate data from hundreds of NIH-funded research studies, as well as data collected with support from other agencies and foundations, many with questions about health outcomes or status that are not easily discovered with current search protocols which can be either too narrow or too broad. With funding from NIDA, we are working to increase the use of these extant data for health research by making these variables easier to identify. This is of great benefit the research community, providing improved discoverability of relevant health concepts within and, more importantly, across the multiple studies maintained in our repositories.OBSSR/NIHhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145467/1/IASSIST2018_CDE_Poster.pdfDescription of IASSIST2018_CDE_Poster.pdf : Poster presentation at IASSIST & CARTO 2018 Annual Meetin

The intralumenal fragment pathway mediates ESCRT-independent surface transporter down-regulation

Surface receptor and transporter protein down-regulation is assumed to be exclusively mediated by the canonical multivesicular body (MVB) pathway and ESCRTs (Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport). However, few surface proteins are known to require ESCRTs for down-regulation, and reports of ESCRT-independent degradation are emerging, suggesting that alternative pathways exist. Here, using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model, we show that the hexose transporter Hxt3 does not require ESCRTs for down-regulation conferring resistance to 2-deoxyglucose. This is consistent with GFP-tagged Hxt3 bypassing ESCRT-mediated entry into intralumenal vesicles at endosomes. Instead, Hxt3-GFP accumulates on vacuolar lysosome membranes and is sorted into an area that, upon fusion, is internalized as an intralumenal fragment (ILF) and degraded. Moreover, heat stress or cycloheximide trigger degradation of Hxt3-GFP and other surface transporter proteins (Itr1, Aqr1) by this ESCRT-independent process. How this ILF pathway compares to the MVB pathway and potentially contributes to physiology is discussed

Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree: A commentary

As a point of reference I congratulate Simon Jenkins on tackling the issue of professionalism in coaching. As he points out coaching is not a profession, but this does not mean that coaching would not benefit from going through a professionalization process. As things stand I find that the stimulus article unpacks some critically important issues of professionalism, broadly within the context of golf coaching. However, I am not sure enough is made of understanding what professional (golf) coaching actually is nor how the development of a professional golf coach can be facilitated by a Master of Science Degree (M.Sc.). I will focus my commentary on these two issues

The need for fresh blood: understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens

YesThis article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life

Searches for Neutrinos from Gamma-Ray Bursts Using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are considered as promising sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) due to their large power output. Observing a neutrino flux from GRBs would offer evidence that GRBs are hadronic accelerators of UHECRs. Previous IceCube analyses, which primarily focused on neutrinos arriving in temporal coincidence with the prompt gamma-rays, found no significant neutrino excess. The four analyses presented in this paper extend the region of interest to 14 days before and after the prompt phase, including generic extended time windows and targeted precursor searches. GRBs were selected between 2011 May and 2018 October to align with the data set of candidate muon-neutrino events observed by IceCube. No evidence of correlation between neutrino events and GRBs was found in these analyses. Limits are set to constrain the contribution of the cosmic GRB population to the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux observed by IceCube. Prompt neutrino emission from GRBs is limited to ≲1% of the observed diffuse neutrino flux, and emission on timescales up to 104 s is constrained to 24% of the total diffuse flux.Peer Reviewe

A muon-track reconstruction exploiting stochastic losses for large-scale Cherenkov detectors

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. The main goal of IceCube is the detection of astrophysical neutrinos and the identification of their sources. High-energy muon neutrinos are observed via the secondary muons produced in charge current interactions with nuclei in the ice. Currently, the best performing muon track directional reconstruction is based on a maximum likelihood method using the arrival time distribution of Cherenkov photons registered by the experiment\u27s photomultipliers. A known systematic shortcoming of the prevailing method is to assume a continuous energy loss along the muon track. However at energies >1 TeV the light yield from muons is dominated by stochastic showers. This paper discusses a generalized ansatz where the expected arrival time distribution is parametrized by a stochastic muon energy loss pattern. This more realistic parametrization of the loss profile leads to an improvement of the muon angular resolution of up to 20% for through-going tracks and up to a factor 2 for starting tracks over existing algorithms. Additionally, the procedure to estimate the directional reconstruction uncertainty has been improved to be more robust against numerical errors