Hoodie: A Lighting and Cinematography Project

Hoodie is a short film about a paranoid student. The film screening will be followed by a discussion on the development of the project and what things were learned before, during, and after production

The Pre-Production Stage of a Film

My partner and I will discuss the importance of pre-production in making a film and how the proposal and pitch are crucial in getting a film green-lit for production

Latent rank change detection for analysis of splice-junction microarrays with nonlinear effects

Alternative splicing of gene transcripts greatly expands the functional capacity of the genome, and certain splice isoforms may indicate specific disease states such as cancer. Splice junction microarrays interrogate thousands of splice junctions, but data analysis is difficult and error prone because of the increased complexity compared to differential gene expression analysis. We present Rank Change Detection (RCD) as a method to identify differential splicing events based upon a straightforward probabilistic model comparing the over- or underrepresentation of two or more competing isoforms. RCD has advantages over commonly used methods because it is robust to false positive errors due to nonlinear trends in microarray measurements. Further, RCD does not depend on prior knowledge of splice isoforms, yet it takes advantage of the inherent structure of mutually exclusive junctions, and it is conceptually generalizable to other types of splicing arrays or RNA-Seq. RCD specifically identifies the biologically important cases when a splice junction becomes more or less prevalent compared to other mutually exclusive junctions. The example data is from different cell lines of glioblastoma tumors assayed with Agilent microarrays.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS389 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Which Is the Most Cost-efficient Alternative, a New Build or the Rehabilitation of a Cultural Heritage Site?

Given the choice between the rehabilitation of a cultural heritage site and a new build, recent history in Norway shows that the new build is often chosen, with the justification of cost efficiency. This paper compares approaches to cultural heritage sites from a property development and a protection of cultural heritage point of view to test this judgment. These two professional fields overlap and need to cooperate. Thus, a closer look at their similarities and differences should provide valuable insights. This paper applies a case-study method to a large country estate building at a NATO air base in need of office space. The building has legal protection at the national level. Costs are calculated for three scenarios for new offices: rehabilitation of the protected building, a new build, and renting. All alternatives include legally mandated maintenance of the protected building, as the same public body carries out both tasks. Of the three alternatives, the new build and renting were the most expensive over a thirty-year time span. Rehabilitation was the most economical. These findings indicate that owners of protected buildings should investigate possibilities to activate such buildings, due to not only their cultural heritage values, but also their economic potential

Post-Traumatic Outcomes among Survivors of the Earthquake in Central Italy of August 24, 2016. A Study on PTSD Risk and Vulnerability Factors

Central Italy suffered from the earthquake of 2016 resulting in great damage to the community. The purpose of the present study was to determine the long-term traumatic outcomes among the population. A preliminary study aimed at obtaining the Italian translation of the first 16 item of HTQ IV part [1] which was administered, 20 months after the disaster, at 281 survivors. In backward stepwise logistic regressions models, we estimated among the respondent’s characteristics and event-related variables the best predictors of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) revealed a HTQ five-factors solution as best model, with satisfactory indexes of fit. HTQ held a positive correlation with both the SQD-P (r =.65, p <.05) and SQD-D subscales (r =.47, p <.05). ROC analysis suggested an area of.951 (95% CI =.917–.985) for the PTSD prediction. Basing on sensibility (.963) and specificity (.189), the best cut-off of 2.0 allowed discriminating for PTSD positive cases. After 20 months of the earthquake, the estimate prevalence of PTSD among the survivors is of 21.71% with a consistent and graded association between exposure variables and vulnerability factors (gender, age, exposure to death and home damage) and PTSD symptoms