HB 316 - Voting System

The Act authorizes and requires a new voting system be used in all elections, provides for auditing procedures, provides for updates to the voter list maintenance laws, and specifies additional revisions to election processes

Association between osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease: systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: To examine for a possible relationship between osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Design: A systematic review and meta-analysis Methods: Published and unpublished literature from: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, the Cochrane Library, OpenGrey and clinical trial registers. Search to 22nd November 2014. Cohort, case-control, randomised and non-randomised controlled trial papers reporting the prevalence of CVD in osteoarthritis were included. Results: Fifteen studies with 32,278,744 individuals were eligible. Pooled prevalence for overall CVD pathology in people with osteoarthritis was 38.4% (95% Confidence interval (CI): 37.2% to 39.6%). Individuals with osteoarthritis were almost three times as likely to have heart failure (Relative Risk (RR): 2.80; 95% CI: 2.25 to 3.49) or ischaemic heart disease (RR: 1.78; 95% CI: 1.18 to 2.69) compared to matched non-osteoarthritis cohorts. No significant difference was detected between the two groups for the risk of experiencing myocardial infarction or stroke. There was a three-fold decrease in the risk of experiencing a transient ischaemic attack in the osteoarthritis cohort compared to the non-osteoarthritis group. Conclusions: Prevalence of CVD in patients with OA is significant. There was an observed increased risk of incident heart failure and ischaemic heart disease in people with OA compared to matched controls. However the relationship between OA and CVD is not straight-forward and there is a need to better understand the potential common pathways linking pathophysiological mechanisms

On predicting abundance from occupancy

Author Posting. © University of Chicago, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of University of Chicago for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in American Naturalist 176 (2010): 96-98, doi:10.1086/653077.There is growing interest in predicting the abundance of a species in a region from the occupancy of cells in a uniform grid overlaid on the region. When the number of individuals in each cell follows a negative binomial distribution, prediction is in general not possible from the number of unoccupied cells alone. A prediction method based on the number of unoccupied cells and the number containing a single individual is described and shown to work well on simulated and real data

Propagation of Pericentral Necrosis During Acetaminophen-Induced Liver Injury: Evidence for Early Interhepatocyte Communication and Information Exchange.

Acetaminophen (APAP)-induced liver injury is clinically significant, and APAP overdose in mice often serves as a model for drug-induced liver injury in humans. By specifying that APAP metabolism, reactive metabolite formation, glutathione depletion, and mitigation of mitochondrial damage within individual hepatocytes are functions of intralobular location, an earlier virtual model mechanism provided the first concrete multiattribute explanation for how and why early necrosis occurs close to the central vein (CV). However, two characteristic features could not be simulated consistently: necrosis occurring first adjacent to the CV, and subsequent necrosis occurring primarily adjacent to hepatocytes that have already initiated necrosis. We sought parsimonious model mechanism enhancements that would manage spatiotemporal heterogeneity sufficiently to enable meeting two new target attributes and conducted virtual experiments to explore different ideas for model mechanism improvement at intrahepatocyte and multihepatocyte levels. For the latter, evidence supports intercellular communication via exosomes, gap junctions, and connexin hemichannels playing essential roles in the toxic effects of chemicals, including facilitating or counteracting cell death processes. Logic requiring hepatocytes to obtain current information about whether downstream and lateral neighbors have triggered necrosis enabled virtual hepatocytes to achieve both new target attributes. A virtual hepatocyte that is glutathione-depleted uses that information to determine if it will initiate necrosis. When a less-stressed hepatocyte is flanked by at least two neighbors that have triggered necrosis, it too will initiate necrosis. We hypothesize that the resulting intercellular communication-enabled model mechanism is analogous to the actual explanation for APAP-induced hepatotoxicity at comparable levels of granularity

Comparative analysis of knowledge representation and reasoning requirements across a range of life sciences textbooks.

BackgroundUsing knowledge representation for biomedical projects is now commonplace. In previous work, we represented the knowledge found in a college-level biology textbook in a fashion useful for answering questions. We showed that embedding the knowledge representation and question-answering abilities in an electronic textbook helped to engage student interest and improve learning. A natural question that arises from this success, and this paper's primary focus, is whether a similar approach is applicable across a range of life science textbooks. To answer that question, we considered four different textbooks, ranging from a below-introductory college biology text to an advanced, graduate-level neuroscience textbook. For these textbooks, we investigated the following questions: (1) To what extent is knowledge shared between the different textbooks? (2) To what extent can the same upper ontology be used to represent the knowledge found in different textbooks? (3) To what extent can the questions of interest for a range of textbooks be answered by using the same reasoning mechanisms?ResultsOur existing modeling and reasoning methods apply especially well both to a textbook that is comparable in level to the text studied in our previous work (i.e., an introductory-level text) and to a textbook at a lower level, suggesting potential for a high degree of portability. Even for the overlapping knowledge found across the textbooks, the level of detail covered in each textbook was different, which requires that the representations must be customized for each textbook. We also found that for advanced textbooks, representing models and scientific reasoning processes was particularly important.ConclusionsWith some additional work, our representation methodology would be applicable to a range of textbooks. The requirements for knowledge representation are common across textbooks, suggesting that a shared semantic infrastructure for the life sciences is feasible. Because our representation overlaps heavily with those already being used for biomedical ontologies, this work suggests a natural pathway to include such representations as part of the life sciences curriculum at different grade levels

Dietary patterns obtained through principal components analysis: The effect of input variable quantification

Principal components analysis (PCA) is a popular method for deriving dietary patterns. A number of decisions must be made throughout the analytic process, including how to quantify the input variables of the PCA. The present study aims to compare the effect of using different input variables on the patterns extracted using PCA on 3-d diet diary data collected from 7473 children, aged 10 years, in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Four options were examined: weight consumed of each food group (g/d), energy-adjusted weight, percentage contribution to energy of each food group and binary intake (consumed/not consumed). Four separate PCA were performed, one for each intake measurement. Three or four dietary patterns were obtained from each analysis, with at least one component that described 'more healthy' and 'less healthy' diets and one component that described a diet with high consumption of meat, potatoes and vegetables. There were no obvious differences between the patterns derived using percentage energy as a measurement and adjusting weight for total energy intake, compared to those derived using gram weights. Using binary input variables yielded a component that loaded positively on reduced fat and reduced sugar foods. The present results suggest that food intakes quantified by gram weights or as binary variables both resulted in meaningful dietary patterns and each method has distinct advantages: weight takes into account the amount of each food consumed and binary intake appears to describe general food preferences, which are potentially easier to modify and useful in public health settings. © 2012 The Authors

Leading, educating, and inspiring LIS professionals to embrace accessibility for a resilient future

The COVID years (2020-2021) have put the issues of disability and accessibility in the spotlight. Social interactions, employment, studies, and day-to-day activities for some people with disabilities have become increasingly more challenging than before; and yet, others have found opportunity and even relief in working from home, having a chance to avoid the grueling commute and inaccessible physical environments, often associated with workplaces. The pandemic and remote engagements have thus highlighted disparities within the disabled community itself: those with comfortable living conditions, information literacy skills, and stable internet access fared exceedingly better than individuals lacking these conditions. People with disabilities in all LIS constituent groups have been affected: students, librarians, library users, faculty, and academic staff. This has shown the need for building resilience and intensifying discussion on the importance of accessibility. This session will bring together over a dozen educators from American and Canadian LIS programs and include five presentations accompanied by hands-on interactive activities. After a brief introduction (5 min), each group of presenters will introduce their topics (30-35 min) and then engage the audience in a series of activities that they have prepared (40 min). Participants will reconvene for the general discussion (10-15 min). Cahill, Adkins, and Bushman will review the ways in which LIS courses in youth services address programs for young children with disabilities. Following the talk, they will facilitate the collaborative scrutiny of syllabi from LIS youth services courses. They will encourage participants to collectively come up with solutions, changes, and improvements and show their alignments with ALA Core Competences and COA Standards for Accreditation. Copeland, Mallary, and Thompson will focus on the training of LIS professionals that helps them embrace accessibility by using scenarios for inclusive hiring practices. They will offer a lesson plan for preparing future LIS managers and leaders for the equitable handling of job interviews, inclusive job advertising, and onboarding after hiring. Participants will learn to design training scenarios related to teaching students about inclusive communicative practices. Focusing on the potential of libraries to provide “non-pharmacological interventions” that improve the lives of people living with dementia and their care partners, Dickey will help participants explore the ways to prepare LIS students for supporting these user groups. Participants will brainstorm practical suggestions for fostering accessibility when people with dementia are concerned and discover resources for leadership and advocacy. Hill and Wong will zero in on everyday choices made by LIS educators in their course design that can improve accessibility in learning, including policies, learning materials, and considerations of diversity in establishing “norms.” Participants will leave with a checklist of practices for accessibility audit in their courses. Farmer will take up the topic of collaboration with disability support service providers (DSSP). Building off the lived experiences of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), participants will learn several strategies for successful collaboration with DSSP. The SIG session will end with the general discussion of how the aforementioned aspects are affected during world health emergencies and what it means for the future of accessibility

Adaptive homodyne measurement of optical phase

We present an experimental demonstration of the power of real-time feedback in quantum metrology, confirming a theoretical prediction by Wiseman regarding the superior performance of an adaptive homodyne technique for single-shot measurement of optical phase. For phase measurements performed on weak coherent states with no prior knowledge of the signal phase, we show that the variance of adaptive homodyne estimation approaches closer to the fundamental quantum uncertainty limit than any previously demonstrated technique. Our results underscore the importance of real-time feedback for reaching quantum performance limits in coherent telecommunication, precision measurement and information processing.Comment: RevTex4, color PDF figures (separate files), submitted to PR

Elastic constants of 3-, 4- and 6-connected chiral and anti-chiral honeycombs subject to uniaxial in-plane loading

Finite Element models are developed for the in-plane linear elastic constants of a family of honeycombs comprising arrays of cylinders connected by ligaments. Honeycombs having cylinders with 3, 4 and 6 ligaments attached to them are considered, with two possible configurations explored for each of the 3- (trichiral and anti-trichiral) and 4- (tetrachiral and anti-tetrachiral) connected systems. Honeycombs for each configuration have been manufactured using rapid prototyping and subsequently characterised for mechanical properties through in-plane uniaxial loading to verify the models. An interesting consequence of the family of 'chiral' honeycombs presented here is the ability to produce negative Poisson's ratio (auxetic) response. The deformation mechanisms responsible for auxetic functionality in such honeycombs are discussed

A Chandra X-ray Study of Cygnus A - II. The Nucleus

We report Chandra ACIS and quasi-simultaneous RXTE observations of the nearby, powerful radio galaxy Cygnus A, with the present paper focusing on the properties of the active nucleus. In the Chandra observation, the hard (> a few keV) X-ray emission is spatially unresolved with a size \approxlt 1 arcsec (1.5 kpc, H_0 = 50 km s^-1 Mpc^-1) and coincides with the radio and near infrared nuclei. In contrast, the soft (< 2 keV) emission exhibits a bi-polar nebulosity that aligns with the optical bi-polar continuum and emission-line structures and approximately with the radio jet. In particular, the soft X-ray emission corresponds very well with the [O III] \lambda 5007 and H\alpha + [N II] \lambda\lambda 6548, 6583 nebulosity imaged with HST. At the location of the nucleus there is only weak soft X-ray emission, an effect that may be intrinsic or result from a dust lane that crosses the nucleus perpendicular to the source axis. The spectra of the various X-ray components have been obtained by simultaneous fits to the 6 detectors. The compact nucleus is detected to 100 keV and is well described by a heavily absorbed power law spectrum with \Gamma_h = 1.52^{+0.12}_{-0.12} (similar to other narrow line radio galaxies) and equivalent hydrogen column N_H (nuc) = 2.0^{+0.1}_{-0.2} \times 10^{23} cm^-2. (Abstract truncated).Comment: To be published in the Astrophysical Journal, v564 January 1, 2002 issue; 34 pages, 11 figures (1 color