Results and Implications: The June "Top-Two" Primary & California's 2012 Legislative Races

This report summarizes some basic results of California’s June 2012 “Top-Two” primary. It focuses on legislative offices with multiple districts within the state: California State Assembly, California State Senate, and United States House of Representatives.James Irvine Foundatio

PREDICTING MUSIC GENRE PREFERENCES BASED ON ONLINE COMMENTS

Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) states that individuals adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors. This adaptation is called “convergence.” In this work we explore the convergence of writing styles of users of the online music distribution plat- form SoundCloud.com. In order to evaluate our system we created a corpus of over 38,000 comments retrieved from SoundCloud in April 2014. The corpus represents comments from 8 distinct musical genres: Classical, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Country, Metal, Folk, and World. Our corpus contains: short comments, frequent misspellings, little sentence struc- ture, hashtags, emoticons, and URLs. We adapt techniques used by researchers analyzing other short web-text corpora in order to deal with these problems. We use a supervised machine learning approach to classify the genre of comments in our corpus. We examine the effects of different feature sets and supervised machine learning algorithms on classification accuracy. In total we ran 180 experiments in which we varied: number of genres, feature set composition, and machine learning algorithm. In experiments with all 8 genres we achieve up to 40% accuracy using either a Naive Bayes classifier or C4.5 based classifier with a feature set consisting of 1262 token unigrams and bigrams. This represents a 3 time improvement over chance levels

Asymmetric thymocyte death underlies the CD4:CD8 T-cell ratio in the adaptive immune system

It has long been recognized that the T-cell compartment has more CD4 helper than CD8 cytotoxic T cells, and this is most evident looking at T-cell development in the thymus. However, it remains unknown how thymocyte development so favors CD4 lineage development. To identify the basis of this asymmetry, we analyzed development of synchronized cohorts of thymocytes in vivo and estimated rates of thymocyte death and differentiation throughout development, inferring lineage-specific efficiencies of selection. Our analysis suggested that roughly equal numbers of cells of each lineage enter selection and found that, overall, a remarkable ∼75% of cells that start selection fail to complete the process. Importantly it revealed that class I-restricted thymocytes are specifically susceptible to apoptosis at the earliest stage of selection. The importance of differential apoptosis was confirmed by placing thymocytes under apoptotic stress, resulting in preferential death of class I-restricted thymocytes. Thus, asymmetric death during selection is the key determinant of the CD4:CD8 ratio in which T cells are generated by thymopoiesis

Making Voting Easier: Convenience Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election

In this study we analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election. We use a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows us to overcome limitations of previous studies. Our analysis provides a number of insights into some of the important debates about convenience voting. Among other things, we find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications; although we do find voter attributes that lead to the choice of some particular convenience voting mode. Results like these have important implications for future moves towards convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns.Pew Charitable Trust

High Linoleic Acid in the Food Supply Worldwide-What are the Consequences?

The macronutrient composition of food supply in China has altered dramatically in the past 70 years. Fat (oil) has increased more than 4.2-times while the carbohydrate content has declined by 34%. Vegetable oils are the major component of the fat intake and since these oils are rich in linoleic acid, there has been a significant rise in the consumption of this fatty acid (as much as a 4-fold rise). Linoleic acid has essential functions in the body in skin and as a precursor of prostaglandins and related compounds. The current intakes of linoleic acid are well in excess of the minimum requirements. In this review, the effects of a food supply rich in linoleic acid on pain in arthritis and headache, non-alcoholic fatty liver and neural function are explored, with emphasis on lipid mediators derived from linoleic acid and other long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. The current world food systems have created an imbalance of dietary linoleic acid in relation to n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, and an imbalance in the lipid mediators derived from these polyunsaturated fatty acids which may be contributing to sub-optimal health status

Suppressive actions of eicosapentaenoic acid on lipid droplet formation in 3T3-L1 adipocytes

Background : Lipid droplet (LD) formation and size regulation reflects both lipid influx and efflux, and is central in the regulation of adipocyte metabolism, including adipokine secretion. The length and degree of dietary fatty acid (FA) unsaturation is implicated in LD formation and regulation in adipocytes. The aims of this study were to establish the impact of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA; C20:5n-3) in comparison to SFA (STA; stearic acid, C18:0) and MUFA (OLA; oleic acid, C18:1n-9) on 3T3-L1 adipocyte LD formation, regulation of genes central to LD function and adipokine responsiveness. Cells were supplemented with 100 &mu;M FA during 7-day differentiation.Results : EPA markedly reduced LD size and total lipid accumulation, suppressing PPAR&gamma;, Cidea and D9D/SCD1 genes, distinct from other treatments. These changes were independent of alterations of lipolytic genes, as both EPA and STA similarly elevated LPL and HSL gene expressions. In response to acute lipopolysaccharide exposure, EPA-differentiated adipocytes had distinct improvement in inflammatory response shown by reduction in monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 and interleukin-6 and elevation in adiponectin and leptin gene expressions.Conclusions : This study demonstrates that EPA differentially modulates adipogenesis and lipid accumulation to suppress LD formation and size. This may be due to suppressed gene expression of key proteins closely associated with LD function. Further analysis is required to determine if EPA exerts a similar influence on LD formation and regulation in-vivo.<br /

Comment on “Effects of Arsenite during Fetal Development on Energy Metabolism and Susceptibility to Diet-Induced Fatty Liver Diseases in Male Mice” and “Mechanisms Underlying Latent Disease Risk Associated with Early-Life Arsenic Exposure: Current Trends and Scientific Gaps”

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Closed form parametric solutions of nonlinear Abel-type and Riccati-type spacecraft relative motion

17 USC 105 interim-entered record; under review.The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2020.10.009In comparison to the conventional approach of using Cartesian coordinates to describe spacecraft relative motion, the relative orbit description using Keplerian orbital elements provides a better visualization of the relative motion due to the benefit of having only one term (anomaly) that changes with time out of the six orbital elements leading to the reduction of the number of terms to be tracked from six, as in the case of Hill coordinates, to one. In this paper, under certain assumptions and transformations, the spacecraft relative equations of motion, in terms of orbital element differences, is approximated into the nonlinear first kind Abel-type and Riccati-type differential equations. Furthermore, we present methodologies for the formulation of the close form analytical solutions of the approximated equations. As shown by the numerical simulations, the closed form solutions and the nonlinear equations are in conformity with Riccati-type equations having higher errors than the Abel-type equations. This shows that the Abel-type equation, a third order polynomial, approximated the relative motion better than the Riccati-type equation, a second order polynomial. The resulting new analytical solutions gave better insight into the relative motion dynamics and can be used for the analysis of spacecraft formation flying, proximity and rendezvous operations.Aerospace Engineering Department of Auburn Universit

Chemistry and health of olive oil phenolics

The Mediterranean diet is associated with a lower incidence of atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancer. The apparent health benefits have been partially attributed to the dietary consumption of virgin olive oil by Mediterranean populations. Most recent interest has focused on the biologically active phenolic compounds naturally present in virgin olive oils. Studies (human, animal, in vivo and in vitro) have shown that olive oil phenolics have positive effects on certain physiological parameters, such as plasma lipoproteins, oxidative damage, inflammatory markers, platelet and cellular function, and antimicrobial activity. Presumably, regular dietary consumption of virgin olive oil containing phenolic compounds manifests in health benefits associated with a Mediterranean diet. This paper summarizes current knowledge on the physiological effects of olive oil phenolics. Moreover, a number of factors have the ability to affect phenolic concentrations in virgin olive oil, so it is of great importance to understand these factors in order to preserve the essential health promoting benefits of olive oil phenolic compounds.<br /