Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a terminal neurodegenerative disorder affecting an individual’s motor neurons. With a high prevalence affecting people in the United States of America, the progressive disease affects the lives of many. Once a patient is diagnosed, a short survival rate is to be expected. Importance for healthcare workers should be to focus on proper diagnosis, therapeutic communication, and palliative care. The pathophysiology is still under investigation; however, there have been breakthroughs regarding genetic alterations within the Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase gene (SOD1) and a large repeat on the C9ORF72 gene. By examining the signs and symptoms, doing the appropriate testing for diagnosis, and creating a therapeutic environment to discuss the goals of care with the patients, the quality of life for patient’s diagnosed with ALS will be maximized

Can Consciousness be Lowered?

You\u27ve been working as part of the women\u27s movement since 1968. It\u27s changed your life and the lives of the people you have touched. The job you have probably didn\u27t have a name ten years ago. You\u27re a women\u27s studies coordinator, a rape and domestic violence counselor, an affirmative action officer. You are more involved in women\u27s issues than ever before. You wake up planning strategies and go to sleep drafting rationales. You subscribe to more journals—in spite of inflation—not only to support them, but to buoy yourself up. But something is wrong. There is a new sound in the air. The sound of the seventies wasn\u27t the Beatles or the BeeGees, not Carly Simon or Holly Near. Not even Margie Adam or Cris Williamson. The sound of the seventies was—the click. Do you remember how it went? Those castanets of connection? The air was full of them. Not all the same length. Not all the same pitch. But each one immediately recognizable and a cause for rejoicing. The privilege of having the door held open costs approximately $4,000 a year. Most women are only one man away from welfare. The click was the sound of connection, of someone leaping beyond the isolation of the personal to the potency of political analysis, of someone moving from depression to anger, the sound (magnified perhaps) of someone hugging herself or her sister. I understand; therefore I am. Ready. The problem that had no name was finding its tongue. The clicks were exhilarating. No sooner did you hear one within yourself than you recognized it as the sound you had been hearing all around you. With a leap of imagination, you were part of a symphony

Der gleitende Übergang in den Ruhestand - eine Pensionierungsform der Zukunft?

"Der gleitende Übergang in den Ruhestand stellt eine Alternative zur üblichen einstufigen Pensionierung dar. Statt wie bei jener abrupt von einem auf den anderen Tag aus dem Berufsleben auszuscheiden, erfolgt beim gleitenden Übergang das Überwechseln in die nachberufliche Lebensphase über einen längeren Zeitraum durch eine allmähliche Verminderung der Arbeitszeit und ggf. anderer Arbeitkomponenten, z.B. bestimmter Belastungsarten. Die Untersuchung stützt die spontane Vermutung, daß der gleitende Übergang, der in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland nur in wenigen Betrieben, in einigen anderen europäischen Ländern jedoch häufig verwirklicht ist, besser als die einstufige Pensionierung für die Älteren eine altersentsprechende Arbeitssituation und günstige Voraussetzungen für die Anpassung an den Ruhestand zu gewährleisten vermag. Für die Betriebe kann er zwar - je nach Ausgestaltung - eine zusätzliche Kostenbelastung soweie organisatorische Erschwernisse (z.B. Einrichtung von Teilzeitarbeitssystemen) bedeuten, er erhöht jedoch die Flexibilität der Personalplanung und ermöglicht die bessere Nutzung der Leistungsfähigkeit älterer Mitarbeiter. Wichtig erscheint insbesondere der mit dem gleitenden Übergang verbundene Vorteil, daß er vergleichsweise rasch und flexibel Arbeitsmarktungleichgewichte partiell glätten und bei Arbeitsmarktveränderungen unerwünschte Strukturen partiell kompensieren kann. Insgesamt, so die hier vertretene These, wird die Bedeutung dieser Pensionierungsform in Zukunft zunehmen." (Autorenreferat)gleitender Ruhestand, Pensionierung - Modell

Doodle Doo Doo

Contains advertisements and/or short musical examples of pieces being sold by publisher.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/6794/thumbnail.jp

Comparing Flashover Heat Release Rate Within Different Materials

Fire model systems hold great value in helping figure out what happened during a fire, how a fire could have been prevented, or how a hypothetical fire would behave. This is important in both reconstructing a fire and preventing fires in buildings. Spreadsheet models calculate mathematical solutions for inputted conditions including the type of material ignited. This study examines the Fire Dynamics Tools (FDTs) (Stroup et al., 2013) spreadsheet model (Chapter 13) that tests the minimum heat release rate (HRR) within compartments for flashover. Flashover is the most dangerous phase of a fire in which surfaces exposed to thermal radiation read ignition temperature. The smaller the HRR, the faster flashover will occur. This model determines how quickly flashover will occur in different settings. Using this model, it was hypothesized that flashover would occur faster in a smaller compartment made of brick than one made of concrete. To test this hypothesis, the width of the compartment was changer between 1-40m, keeping the rest of the parameters of the compartment constant. This was repeated for both brick and concrete. The model has three methods of calculation providing varying output values. It was found that for both rooms of brick and concrete, the larger the width the slower flashover occurs with a room made of brick reaching flashover faster. Additionally, one method, Babrauskas, did not show any change in HRR when the width of the compartment was changed, demonstrating a limit to this model

Chromosomal loci that influence oral nicotine consumption in C57BL/6J × C3H/HeJ F 2 intercross mice

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73087/1/j.1601-183X.2006.00266.x.pd

Essays in Public Finance

Chapter one presents a novel approach for analyzing spatially differentiated impacts of a variety of large, geographically anchored entertainment attractions, including professional sports venues, convention centers, destination retail, and mega-events. Public investments in such projects are often justified based on the potential to stimulate economic growth. The literature, however, fails to substantiate the existence of net aggregate benefits which are typically evaluated at the MSA level. I extend the literature by developing a spatial panel estimation approach which considers differential impacts across geographic locations as well as industry types. I demonstrate the method by investigating the relocation of the National Basketball Association Seattle team (Supersonics) to Oklahoma City (OKC Thunder). The franchise impacts are measured in terms of establishment-level sales using a unique micro dataset, the National Establishment Times series (NETs). The results highlight spatially differentiated impacts across the metro area: the franchise relocation attracted retail sales to the downtown area of OKC but may have decreased sales outside of downtown. Chapter two designs and implements a field experiment in Norman, Oklahoma to analyze the effect of norm-based messages on residential water use. The analysis finds evidence that the conservation message and the peer comparison messages encourage water conservation. The estimated response to receiving a social comparison message is a 5 to 8.7% reduction in monthly water consumption. I find notable heterogeneity in response to social messages. Customers who consume more water than the median water utility user respond more to social messages than those who use less than median. The findings suggest that social messages can be a cost effective option for municipalities looking to reduce residential water use through non-pecuniary mechanisms. Chapter three investigates approaches for estimating water demand and responses to water rate changes. Water utility pricing generally involves different rates for different levels of consumption. Such block rate structures complicate demand estimation. I challenge the long standing implicit assumption that a city’s demand can be represented by a single city-wide (or region-wide) demand curve in the presence of rate block pricing schemes. We employ the longest and most detailed panel dataset of household level water consumption, weather records, and housing characteristics available in empirical studies. This allows us to estimate demand curves for separate user groups in an increasing block rate scheme. We analyze two water utility rate changes implemented in Norman, Oklahoma and find downward sloping demand curves in all but one case. I estimate price elasticity to be between -0.13 and -0.53. Our estimates suggest that, in general, the more water a customer consumes, the more price sensitive she is

A neural network based model effectively predicts enhancers from clinical ATAC-seq samples.

Enhancers are cis-acting sequences that regulate transcription rates of their target genes in a cell-specific manner and harbor disease-associated sequence variants in cognate cell types. Many complex diseases are associated with enhancer malfunction, necessitating the discovery and study of enhancers from clinical samples. Assay for Transposase Accessible Chromatin (ATAC-seq) technology can interrogate chromatin accessibility from small cell numbers and facilitate studying enhancers in pathologies. However, on average, ~35% of open chromatin regions (OCRs) from ATAC-seq samples map to enhancers. We developed a neural network-based model, Predicting Enhancers from ATAC-Seq data (PEAS), to effectively infer enhancers from clinical ATAC-seq samples by extracting ATAC-seq data features and integrating these with sequence-related features (e.g., GC ratio). PEAS recapitulated ChromHMM-defined enhancers in CD14+ monocytes, CD4+ T cells, GM12878, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, and pancreatic islets. PEAS models trained on these 5 cell types effectively predicted enhancers in four cell types that are not used in model training (EndoC-βH1, naïve CD8+ T, MCF7, and K562 cells). Finally, PEAS inferred individual-specific enhancers from 19 islet ATAC-seq samples and revealed variability in enhancer activity across individuals, including those driven by genetic differences. PEAS is an easy-to-use tool developed to study enhancers in pathologies by taking advantage of the increasing number of clinical epigenomes

BiFET: sequencing Bias-free transcription factor Footprint Enrichment Test.

Transcription factor (TF) footprinting uncovers putative protein-DNA binding via combined analyses of chromatin accessibility patterns and their underlying TF sequence motifs. TF footprints are frequently used to identify TFs that regulate activities of cell/condition-specific genomic regions (target loci) in comparison to control regions (background loci) using standard enrichment tests. However, there is a strong association between the chromatin accessibility level and the GC content of a locus and the number and types of TF footprints that can be detected at this site. Traditional enrichment tests (e.g. hypergeometric) do not account for this bias and inflate false positive associations. Therefore, we developed a novel post-processing method, Bias-free Footprint Enrichment Test (BiFET), that corrects for the biases arising from the differences in chromatin accessibility levels and GC contents between target and background loci in footprint enrichment analyses. We applied BiFET on TF footprint calls obtained from EndoC-βH1 ATAC-seq samples using three different algorithms (CENTIPEDE, HINT-BC and PIQ) and showed BiFET\u27s ability to increase power and reduce false positive rate when compared to hypergeometric test. Furthermore, we used BiFET to study TF footprints from human PBMC and pancreatic islet ATAC-seq samples to show its utility to identify putative TFs associated with cell-type-specific loci

A new graph-based clustering method with application to single-cell RNA-seq data from human pancreatic islets.

Traditional bulk RNA-sequencing of human pancreatic islets mainly reflects transcriptional response of major cell types. Single-cell RNA sequencing technology enables transcriptional characterization of individual cells, and thus makes it possible to detect cell types and subtypes. To tackle the heterogeneity of single-cell RNA-seq data, powerful and appropriate clustering is required to facilitate the discovery of cell types. In this paper, we propose a new clustering framework based on a graph-based model with various types of dissimilarity measures. We take the compositional nature of single-cell RNA-seq data into account and employ log-ratio transformations. The practical merit of the proposed method is demonstrated through the application to the centered log-ratio-transformed single-cell RNA-seq data for human pancreatic islets. The practical merit is also demonstrated through comparisons with existing single-cell clustering methods. The R-package for the proposed method can be found at https://github.com/Zhang-Data-Science-Research-Lab/LrSClust