POSIWID and determinism in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Services Research GroupWhen designing to influence behaviour for social or environmental benefit, does designers' intent matter? Or are the effects on behaviour more important, regardless of the intent involved? This brief paper explores -- in the context of design for behaviour change -- some treatments of design, intentionality, purpose and responsibility from a variety of fields, including Stafford Beer's "The purpose of a system is what it does" and Maurice Broady's perspective on determinism. The paper attempts to extract useful implications for designers working on behaviour-related problems, in terms of analytical or reflective questions to ask during the design process

A Versatile System for USER Cloning-Based Assembly of Expression Vectors for Mammalian Cell Engineering

A new versatile mammalian vector system for protein production, cell biology analyses, and cell factory engineering was developed. The vector system applies the ligation-free uracil-excision based technique--USER cloning--to rapidly construct mammalian expression vectors of multiple DNA fragments and with maximum flexibility, both for choice of vector backbone and cargo. The vector system includes a set of basic vectors and a toolbox containing a multitude of DNA building blocks including promoters, terminators, selectable marker- and reporter genes, and sequences encoding an internal ribosome entry site, cellular localization signals and epitope- and purification tags. Building blocks in the toolbox can be easily combined as they contain defined and tested Flexible Assembly Sequence Tags, FASTs. USER cloning with FASTs allows rapid swaps of gene, promoter or selection marker in existing plasmids and simple construction of vectors encoding proteins, which are fused to fluorescence-, purification-, localization-, or epitope tags. The mammalian expression vector assembly platform currently allows for the assembly of up to seven fragments in a single cloning step with correct directionality and with a cloning efficiency above 90%. The functionality of basic vectors for FAST assembly was tested and validated by transient expression of fluorescent model proteins in CHO, U-2-OS and HEK293 cell lines. In this test, we included many of the most common vector elements for heterologous gene expression in mammalian cells, in addition the system is fully extendable by other users. The vector system is designed to facilitate high-throughput genome-scale studies of mammalian cells, such as the newly sequenced CHO cell lines, through the ability to rapidly generate high-fidelity assembly of customizable gene expression vectors

An epidemiological model for prediction of endometrial cancer risk in Europe

Endometrial cancer (EC) is the fourth most frequent cancer in women in Europe, and as its incidence is increasing, prevention strategies gain further pertinence. Risk prediction models can be a useful tool for identifying women likely to benefit from targeted prevention measures. On the basis of data from 201,811 women (mostly aged 30–65 years) including 855 incident EC cases from eight countries in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort, a model to predict EC was developed. A step-wise model selection process was used to select confirmed predictive epidemiologic risk factors. Piece-wise constant hazard rates in 5-year age-intervals were estimated in a cause-specific competing risks model, five-fold-cross-validation was applied for internal validation. Risk factors included in the risk prediction model were body-mass index (BMI), menopausal status, age at menarche and at menopause, oral contraceptive use, overall and by different BMI categories and overall duration of use, parity, age at first full-term pregnancy, duration of menopausal hormone therapy and smoking status (specific for pre, peri- and post-menopausal women). These variables improved the discriminating capacity to predict risk over 5 years from 71 % for a model based on age alone to 77 % (overall C statistic), and the model was well-calibrated (ratio of expected to observed cases = 0.99). Our model could be used for the identification of women at increased risk of EC in Western Europe. To achieve an EC-risk model with general validity, a large-scale cohort-consortium approach would be needed to assess and adjust for population variation

<em>Aspergillus nidulans</em> Synthesize Insect Juvenile Hormones upon Expression of a Heterologous Regulatory Protein and in Response to Grazing by <em>Drosophila melanogaster</em> Larvae.

Secondary metabolites are known to serve a wide range of specialized functions including communication, developmental control and defense. Genome sequencing of several fungal model species revealed that the majority of predicted secondary metabolite related genes are silent in laboratory strains, indicating that fungal secondary metabolites remain an underexplored resource of bioactive molecules. In this study, we combine heterologous expression of regulatory proteins in Aspergillus nidulans with systematic variation of growth conditions and observe induced synthesis of insect juvenile hormone-III and methyl farnesoate. Both compounds are sesquiterpenes belonging to the juvenile hormone class. Juvenile hormones regulate developmental and metabolic processes in insects and crustaceans, but have not previously been reported as fungal metabolites. We found that feeding by Drosophila melanogaster larvae induced synthesis of juvenile hormone in A. nidulans indicating a possible role of juvenile hormone biosynthesis in affecting fungal-insect antagonisms

The Effect of Iron and Erythropoietin Treatment on the A1C of Patients With Diabetes and Chronic Kidney Disease

OBJECTIVE - To examine the effect of intravenous iron and erythropoietin-stimulating agents (ESAs) on glycemic control and A1C of patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease (CKD). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS- This was a prospective study of patients with type 2 diabetes and CKD stage IIIB or IV undergoing intravenous iron (group A) and/or ESA (group B). Full blood profiles were determined over the study period. Glycemic control was monitored using A1C, seven-point daily glucose three times weekly, and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). RESULTS - There were 15 patients in both group A and group B. Mean A1C (95% CI) values fell in both groups (7.40% [6.60-8.19] to 6.96% [6.27-7.25] , P < 0.01, with intravenous iron and 7.31% [6.42-8.54] to 6.63% [6.03-7.36] , P = 0.013, ESA). There was no change in mean blood glucose in group A (9.55 mmol/l [8.20-10.90] vs. 9.71 mmol/l [8.29-11.13] , P = 0.07) and in group B (8.72 mmol/l [7.31-10.12] vs. 8.78 mmol/l [7.47-9.99] , P=0.61) over the study period. Hemoglobin and hematocrit values significantly increased following both treatments. There was no linear relationship found between the change in A1C values and the rise of hemoglobin following either treatment. CONCLUSIONS - Both iron and ESA cause a significant fall in A1C values without a change to glycemic control in patients with diabetes and CKD. At the present time, regular capillary glucose measurements and the concurrent use of CGM remain the best alternative measurements of glycemic control in this patient group

Reproductive and hormone-related risk factors for epithelial ovarian cancer by histologic pathways, invasiveness and histologic subtypes: results from the EPIC cohort

Whether risk factors for epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) differ by subtype (i.e., dualistic pathway of carcinogenesis, histologic subtype) is not well understood; however, data to date suggest risk factor differences. We examined associations between reproductive and hormone-related risk factors for EOC by subtype in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) cohort. Among 334,126 women with data on reproductive and hormone-related risk factors (follow-up: 1992–2010), 1,245 incident cases of EOC with known histology and invasiveness were identified. Data on tumor histology, grade, and invasiveness, were available from cancer registries and pathology record review. We observed significant heterogeneity by the dualistic model (i.e., type I [low grade serous or endometrioid, mucinous, clear cell, malignant Brenner] vs. type II [high grade serous or endometrioid]) for full-term pregnancy (phet = 0.02). Full-term pregnancy was more strongly inversely associated with type I than type II tumors (ever vs. never: type I: relative risk (RR) 0.47 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.33–0.69]; type II, RR: 0.81 [0.61–1.06]). We observed no significant differences in risk in analyses by major histologic subtypes of invasive EOC (serous, mucinous, endometrioid, clear cell). None of the investigated factors were associated with borderline tumors. Established protective factors, including duration of oral contraceptive use and full term pregnancy, were consistently inversely associated with risk across histologic subtypes (e.g., ever full-term pregnancy: serous, RR: 0.73 [0.58–0.92]; mucinous, RR: 0.53 [0.30–0.95]; endometrioid, RR: 0.65 [0.40–1.06]; clear cell, RR: 0.34 [0.18–0.64]; phet = 0.16). These results suggest limited heterogeneity between reproductive and hormone-related risk factors and EOC subtypes

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations

Amortized Rejection Sampling in Universal Probabilistic Programming

Existing approaches to amortized inference in probabilistic programs with unbounded loops can produce estimators with infinite variance. An instance of this is importance sampling inference in programs that explicitly include rejection sampling as part of the user-programmed generative procedure. In this paper we develop a new and efficient amortized importance sampling estimator. We prove finite variance of our estimator and empirically demonstrate our method's correctness and efficiency compared to existing alternatives on generative programs containing rejection sampling loops and discuss how to implement our method in a generic probabilistic programming framework