The utility of unmanned probes in lunar exploration

Utility of unmanned probes of Ranger or Surveyor class in Apollo exploration program - Lunar scientific exploratio

Levels of Marital Conflict Model: A Guide to Assessment and Intervention in Troubled Marriages

Also PCMA Working Paper #4.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51106/1/338.pd

Patients as researchers - innovative experiences in UK National Health Service research

Consumer involvement is an established priority in UK health and social care service development and research. To date, little has been published describing the process of consumer involvement and assessing ‘consumers’ contributions to research. This paper provides a practical account of the effective incorporation of consumers into a research team, and outlines the extent to which they can enhance the research cycle; from project development and conduct, through data analysis and interpretation, to dissemination. Salient points are illustrated using the example of their collaboration in a research project. Of particular note were consumers’ contributions to the development of an ethically enhanced, more robust project design, and enriched data interpretation, which may not have resulted had consumers not been an integral part of the research team

Transcription factor binding site prediction with multivariate gene expression data

Multi-sample microarray experiments have become a standard experimental method for studying biological systems. A frequent goal in such studies is to unravel the regulatory relationships between genes. During the last few years, regression models have been proposed for the de novo discovery of cis-acting regulatory sequences using gene expression data. However, when applied to multi-sample experiments, existing regression based methods model each individual sample separately. To better capture the dynamic relationships in multi-sample microarray experiments, we propose a flexible method for the joint modeling of promoter sequence and multivariate expression data. In higher order eukaryotic genomes expression regulation usually involves combinatorial interaction between several transcription factors. Experiments have shown that spacing between transcription factor binding sites can significantly affect their strength in activating gene expression. We propose an adaptive model building procedure to capture such spacing dependent cis-acting regulatory modules. We apply our methods to the analysis of microarray time-course experiments in yeast and in Arabidopsis. These experiments exhibit very different dynamic temporal relationships. For both data sets, we have found all of the well-known cis-acting regulatory elements in the related context, as well as being able to predict novel elements.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10.1214/07-AOAS142 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Detecting high level story elements from low level data

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-58).The problem addressed here is yet another artificial intelligence problem that is easily solved by young children yet challenges even sophisticated computer programs. This thesis's canonical example is a scene featuring two entities drinking. In one scene, a cat drinks from a faucet. In the other, a human drinks from a glass. Even young humans can identify that the two images are similar in that they both involve drinking. However, low-level analysis of the scene will find many more differences than similarities in the case cited above. In my research examines ways to detect high-level story elements such as drinking from low-level data such as that which might be produced from analyzing pictures and videos directly. I present a system that accepts as input a collection of high-level events represented in transition space. I analyze, then select the affinity propagation clustering algorithm to group the events using only their low-level representations. To this end, I present a novel algorithm for determining how similar any two points in transition space are. Due to the lack of vision systems capable of providing a varied dataset, I create a system which translates English language descriptions of high-level events and produces a specially formatted transition space file. To support my hypotheses, I presents the results of two experiments using the system described in this thesis. The first experiment uses English language files and the second uses data produced from a set of experimental videos. Using the English language files the system was able to detect groups corresponding to flying and walking among others out of a total set of 16 events.by Erek R. Speed.M.Eng

A Variant in a MicroRNA complementary site in the 3' UTR of the KIT oncogene increases risk of acral melanoma.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small ∼22nt single stranded RNAs that negatively regulate protein expression by binding to partially complementary sequences in the 3' untranslated region (3' UTRs) of target gene messenger RNAs (mRNA). Recently, mutations have been identified in both miRNAs and target genes that disrupt regulatory relationships, contribute to oncogenesis and serve as biomarkers for cancer risk. KIT, an established oncogene with a multifaceted role in melanogenesis and melanoma pathogenesis, has recently been shown to be upregulated in some melanomas, and is also a target of the miRNA miR-221. Here, we describe a genetic variant in the 3' UTR of the KIT oncogene that correlates with a greater than fourfold increased risk of acral melanoma. This KIT variant results in a mismatch in the seed region of a miR-221 complementary site and reporter data suggests that this mismatch can result in increased expression of the KIT oncogene. Consistent with the hypothesis that this is a functional variant, KIT mRNA and protein levels are both increased in the majority of samples harboring the KIT variant. This work identifies a novel genetic marker for increased heritable risk of melanoma