Predictors of Colorectal Cancer Screening in Two Underserved U.S. Populations: A Parallel Analysis

BackgroundDespite declining colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality rates in the U.S., significant geographic and racial disparities in CRC death rates remain. Differences in guideline-concordant CRC screening rates may explain some of these disparities. We aim to assess individual and neighborhood-level predictors of guideline-concordant CRC screening within two cohorts of individuals located within CRC mortality geographic hotspot regions in the U.S.MethodsA total of 36,901 participants from the Southern Community Cohort Study and 4,491 participants from the Ohio Appalachia CRC screening study were included in this study. Self-reported date of last CRC screening was used to determine if the participant was within guidelines for screening. Logistic regression models were utilized to determine the association of individual-level predictors, neighborhood deprivation, and residence in hotspot regions on the odds of being within guidelines for CRC screening.ResultsLower household income, lack of health insurance, and being a smoker were each associated with lower odds of being within guidelines for CRC screening in both cohorts. Area-level associations were less evident, although up to 15% lower guideline adherence was associated with residence in neighborhoods of greater deprivation and in the Lower Mississippi Delta, one of the identified CRC mortality hotspots.ConclusionThese results reveal the adverse effects of lower area-level and individual socioeconomic status on adherence to CRC guideline screening

Pairwise selection assembly for sequence-independent construction of long-length DNA

The engineering of biological components has been facilitated by de novo synthesis of gene-length DNA. Biological engineering at the level of pathways and genomes, however, requires a scalable and cost-effective assembly of DNA molecules that are longer than ∼10 kb, and this remains a challenge. Here we present the development of pairwise selection assembly (PSA), a process that involves hierarchical construction of long-length DNA through the use of a standard set of components and operations. In PSA, activation tags at the termini of assembly sub-fragments are reused throughout the assembly process to activate vector-encoded selectable markers. Marker activation enables stringent selection for a correctly assembled product in vivo, often obviating the need for clonal isolation. Importantly, construction via PSA is sequence-independent, and does not require primary sequence modification (e.g. the addition or removal of restriction sites). The utility of PSA is demonstrated in the construction of a completely synthetic 91-kb chromosome arm from Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Rethinking Measures of Democracy and Welfare State Universalism: Lessons from Subnational Research

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare unversalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building

The DBCLS BioHackathon: standardization and interoperability for bioinformatics web services and workflows. The DBCLS BioHackathon Consortium*

Web services have become a key technology for bioinformatics, since life science databases are globally decentralized and the exponential increase in the amount of available data demands for efficient systems without the need to transfer entire databases for every step of an analysis. However, various incompatibilities among database resources and analysis services make it difficult to connect and integrate these into interoperable workflows. To resolve this situation, we invited domain specialists from web service providers, client software developers, Open Bio* projects, the BioMoby project and researchers of emerging areas where a standard exchange data format is not well established, for an intensive collaboration entitled the BioHackathon 2008. The meeting was hosted by the Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) and Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) and was held in Tokyo from February 11th to 15th, 2008. In this report we highlight the work accomplished and the common issues arisen from this event, including the standardization of data exchange formats and services in the emerging fields of glycoinformatics, biological interaction networks, text mining, and phyloinformatics. In addition, common shared object development based on BioSQL, as well as technical challenges in large data management, asynchronous services, and security are discussed. Consequently, we improved interoperability of web services in several fields, however, further cooperation among major database centers and continued collaborative efforts between service providers and software developers are still necessary for an effective advance in bioinformatics web service technologies

Liberalization, globalization and the dynamics of democracy in India

In the closing decades of the twentieth century there has been an almost complete intellectual triumph of the twin principles of marketization (understood here as referring to the liberalization of domestic markets and freer international mobility of goods, services, financial capital and perhaps, more arguably, labour) and democratization . A paradigm shift of this extent and magnitude would not have occurred in the absence of some broad consensus among policymakers and (sections of) intellectuals around the globe on the desirability of such a change. There seems to be a two-fold causal nexus between marketization and democracy. The first is more direct, stemming from the fact of both systems sharing certain values and attitudes in common. But there is also a second more indirect chain from marketization to democracy, which is predicated via three sub-chains (i) from marketization to growth, (ii) from growth to overall material development welfare and (iii) from material development to social welfare and democracy. We examine each of these sub-links in detail with a view to obtaining a greater understanding of the hypothesized role of free markets in promoting democracies. In the later part of the paper we examine the socio-economic outcomes governing the quality of democracy in a specifically Indian context