Networks in Nigeria: A pilot study on network characteristics and their relation with life satisfaction in a Nigerian sample

Social relationships are a central determinant of life satisfaction. The collectivity of individual social relationships form a social network. This study examines such networks in a Nigerian sample (N = 108). Network size, proportions of positive and negative relationships within those networks, and structural characteristics (e.g., network centrality) were assessed. Furthermore, network characteristics were examined concerning their association with life satisfaction. Results indicate differential relations of network characteristics with life satisfaction. Results are discussed in terms of (1) cross-cultural assessment of network characteristics, (2) life satisfaction as related to social structural characteristics, and (3) differential associations between network types and different aspects of life satisfaction

Quo vadis CPS? Brief answers to big questions

Research on complex problem solving (CPS) has reached a stage where certain standards have been achieved, whereas the future development is quite ambiguous. In this situation, the editors of the Journal of Dynamic Decision Making asked a number of representative authors to share their point of view with respect to seven questions about the relevance of (complex) problem solving as a research area, about the contribution of laboratory-based CPS research to solving real life problems, about the roles of knowledge, strategies, and intuition in CPS, and about the existence of expertise in CPS

Naturwissenschaften in der Erwachsenenbildung: was, wie und wozu vermitteln?

Vor dem Hintergrund einer seit mehr als zehn Jahren andauernden Debatte um Möglichkeiten für eine Verbesserung der naturwissenschaftlichen Bildung in Deutschland zielen die im Folgenden präsentierten Überlegungen darauf ab, den Beitrag der organisierten Erwachsenenbildung für eine Veränderung des Status Quo zu umreißen. Ausgegangen wird von der quantitativen Randständigkeit des Angebots, bevor der Blick auf didaktische Arrangements und Konzepte gerichtet wird. Diese werden auf der Grundlage einer empirischen Studie -mit Blick auf Ziele, Inhalte, Arbeitsformen und Adressaten naturwissenschaftlicher Angebote in der Erwachsenenbildung- analysiert und mit Vermittlungsangeboten in so genannten informellen Lernumgebungen, u.a. Medien, Science Centern, Museen, kontrastiert. Abschließend folgen Überlegungen zu den Konsequenzen, die sich aus der bestehenden Praxis für die verbreitete Forderung nach einer naturwissenschaftlichen Literalität ergeben, insbesondere im Blick auf Forschungsbedarfe in der Erwachsenenbildung

Progressive Multiple Sequence Alignments from Triplets

Motivation: The quality of progressive sequence alignments strongly depends on the accuracy of the individual pairwise alignment steps since gaps that are introduced at one step cannot be removed at later aggregation steps. Adjacent insertions and deletions necessarily appear in arbitrary order in pairwise alignments and hence form an unavoidable source of errors. Idea: Here we present a modified variant of progressive sequence alignments that addresses both issues. Instead of pairwise alignments we use exact dynamic programming to align sequence or profile triples. This avoids a large fractions of the ambiguities arising in pairwise alignments. In the subsequent aggregation steps we follow the logic of the Neighbor-Net algorithm, which constructs a phylogenetic network by step-wisely replacing triples by pairs instead of combining pairs to singletons. To this end the three-way alignments are subdivided into two partial alignments, at which stage all-gap columns are naturally removed. This alleviates the “once a gap, always a gap” problem of progressive alignment procedures. Results: The three-way Neighbor-Net based alignment program aln3nn is shown to compare favorably on both protein sequences and nucleic acids sequences to other progressive alignment tools. In the latter case one easily can include scoring terms that consider secondary structure features. Overall, the quality of resulting alignments in general exceeds that of clustalw or other multiple alignments tools even though our software does not included heuristics for context dependent (mis)match scores

Networks in Nigeria: A pilot study on network characteristics and their relation with life satisfaction in a Nigerian sample

Social relationships are a central determinant of life satisfaction. The collectivity of individual social relationships form a social network. This study examines such networks in a Nigerian sample (N = 108). Network size, proportions of positive and negative relationships within those networks, and structural characteristics (e.g., network centrality) were assessed. Furthermore, network characteristics were examined concerning their association with life satisfaction. Results indicate differential relations of network characteristics with life satisfaction. Results are discussed in terms of (1) cross-cultural assessment of network characteristics, (2) life satisfaction as related to social structural characteristics, and (3) differential associations between network types and different aspects of life satisfaction

Developmentally Driven Changes in Adipogenesis in Different Fat Depots Are Related to Obesity

Subcutaneous (sc) and visceral (vis) adipose tissue (AT) contribute to the variability in pathophysiological consequences of obesity and adverse fat distribution. To gain insights into the molecular mechanisms distinguishing vis and sc fat, we compared the transcriptome during differentiation of immortalized adipocytes from murine epididymal (epi) and inguinal (ing) AT. RNA was extracted on different days of adipogenesis (−2, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8) and analyzed using ClariomTM D mouse assays (Affymetrix) covering >214,900 transcripts in >66,100 genes. Transcript Time Course Analysis revealed 137 differentially expressed genes. The top genes with most divergent expression dynamics included developmental genes like Alx1, Lhx8, Irx1/2, Hoxc10, Hoxa5/10, and Tbx5/15. According to pathway analysis the majority of the genes were enriched in pathways related to AT development. Finally, in paired samples of human vis and sc AT (N = 63), several of these genes exhibited depot-specific variability in expression which correlated closely with body mass index and/or waist-to-hip ratio. In conclusion, intrinsically programmed differences in gene expression patterns during adipogenesis suggest that fat depot specific regulation of adipogenesis contributes to individual risk of obesity