6,966 research outputs found
The body in the library: adventures in realism
This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend
their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’
Public Health Laboratories: Unprepared and Overwhelmed
Addresses the role of public health labs within the public health system and their ability to respond to specific chemical weapon events. Provides recommendations for improving response to terrorism as well as more conventional threats
F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America, 2005
Examines national and state obesity rates and government policies. Challenges the research community to focus on major research questions to inform policy decisions, and policymakers to pursue actions to combat the obesity crisis
Large-scale structure and the redshift-distance relation
In efforts to demonstrate the linear Hubble law v = Hr from galaxy
observations, the underlying simplicity is often obscured by complexities
arising from magnitude-limited data. In this paper we point out a simple but
previously unremarked fact: that the shapes and orientations of structures in
redshift space contain in themselves independent information about the
cosmological redshift-distance relation.
The orientations of voids in the CfA slice support the Hubble law, giving a
redshift-distance power index p = 0.83 +/- 0.36 (void data from Slezak, de
Lapparent, & Bijoui 1993) or p = 0.99 +/- 0.38 (void data from Malik &
Subramanian 1997).Comment: 11 pages (AASTeX), 4 figures, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal
Letter
Supergeometry and Quantum Field Theory, or: What is a Classical Configuration?
We discuss of the conceptual difficulties connected with the
anticommutativity of classical fermion fields, and we argue that the "space" of
all classical configurations of a model with such fields should be described as
an infinite-dimensional supermanifold M.
We discuss the two main approaches to supermanifolds, and we examine the
reasons why many physicists tend to prefer the Rogers approach although the
Berezin-Kostant-Leites approach is the more fundamental one. We develop the
infinite-dimensional variant of the latter, and we show that the functionals on
classical configurations considered in a previous paper are nothing but
superfunctions on M. We present a programme for future mathematical work, which
applies to any classical field model with fermion fields. This programme is
(partially) implemented in successor papers.Comment: 46 pages, LateX2E+AMSLaTe
Interaction Between Low-Dose Aspirin and Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Can Compromise Aspirin\u27s Efficacy in Preventing Venous Thrombosis Following Total Joint Arthroplasty
The Anti-Coincidence Detector for the GLAST Large Area Telescope
This paper describes the design, fabrication and testing of the
Anti-Coincidence Detector (ACD) for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope
(GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT). The ACD is LAT first-level defense against
the charged cosmic ray background that outnumbers the gamma rays by 3-5 orders
of magnitude. The ACD covers the top and 4 sides of the LAT tracking detector,
requiring a total active area of ~8.3 square meters. The ACD detector utilizes
plastic scintillator tiles with wave-length shifting fiber readout. In order to
suppress self-veto by shower particles at high gamma-ray energies, the ACD is
segmented into 89 tiles of different sizes. The overall ACD efficiency for
detection of singly charged relativistic particles entering the tracking
detector from the top or sides of the LAT exceeds the required 0.9997.Comment: 33 pages, 19 figure
Motif Discovery through Predictive Modeling of Gene Regulation
We present MEDUSA, an integrative method for learning motif models of
transcription factor binding sites by incorporating promoter sequence and gene
expression data. We use a modern large-margin machine learning approach, based
on boosting, to enable feature selection from the high-dimensional search space
of candidate binding sequences while avoiding overfitting. At each iteration of
the algorithm, MEDUSA builds a motif model whose presence in the promoter
region of a gene, coupled with activity of a regulator in an experiment, is
predictive of differential expression. In this way, we learn motifs that are
functional and predictive of regulatory response rather than motifs that are
simply overrepresented in promoter sequences. Moreover, MEDUSA produces a model
of the transcriptional control logic that can predict the expression of any
gene in the organism, given the sequence of the promoter region of the target
gene and the expression state of a set of known or putative transcription
factors and signaling molecules. Each motif model is either a -length
sequence, a dimer, or a PSSM that is built by agglomerative probabilistic
clustering of sequences with similar boosting loss. By applying MEDUSA to a set
of environmental stress response expression data in yeast, we learn motifs
whose ability to predict differential expression of target genes outperforms
motifs from the TRANSFAC dataset and from a previously published candidate set
of PSSMs. We also show that MEDUSA retrieves many experimentally confirmed
binding sites associated with environmental stress response from the
literature.Comment: RECOMB 200
Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Body Mass Index: Comparative Analysis of Monozygotic Twins, Dizygotic Twins and Same-Age Unrelated Siblings
Background—Earlier studies have established that a substantial percentage of variance in obesity-related phenotypes is explained by genetic components. However, only one study has used both virtual twins (VTs) and biological twins and was able to simultaneously estimate additive genetic, non-additive genetic, shared environmental and unshared environmental components in body mass index (BMI). Our current goal was to re-estimate four components of variance in BMI, applying a more rigorous model to biological and virtual multiples with additional data. Virtual multiples share the same family environment, offering unique opportunities to estimate common environmental influence on phenotypes that cannot be separated from the non-additive genetic component using only biological multiples.
Methods—Data included 929 individuals from 164 monozygotic twin pairs, 156 dizygotic twin pairs, five triplet sets, one quadruplet set, 128 VT pairs, two virtual triplet sets and two virtual quadruplet sets. Virtual multiples consist of one biological child (or twins or triplets) plus one same-aged adoptee who are all raised together since infancy. We estimated the additive genetic, non-additive genetic, shared environmental and unshared random components in BMI using a linear mixed model. The analysis was adjusted for age, age2, age3, height, height2, height3, gender and race.
Results—Both non-additive genetic and common environmental contributions were significant in our model (P-values \u3c 0.0001). No significant additive genetic contribution was found. In all, 63.6% (95% confidence interval (CI) 51.8–75.3%) of the total variance of BMI was explained by a non-additive genetic component, 25.7% (95% CI 13.8–37.5%) by a common environmental component and the remaining 10.7% by an unshared component.
Conclusion—Our results suggest that genetic components play an essential role in BMI and that common environmental factors such as diet or exercise also affect BMI. This conclusion is consistent with our earlier study using a smaller sample and shows the utility of virtual multiples for separating non-additive genetic variance from common environmental variance
- …