Testing the Integrated Theory of Health Behaviour Change for Postpartum Weight Management

Aim.  This is a report of a correlational study to test the Integrated Theory of Health Behaviour Change within the context of postpartum weight self‐management including the impact of race/ethnicity and weight classification. Background.  Women experiencing childbirth face increasing challenges to manage their weight postpartum. Little is known about women’s weight self‐management during the complex physiological and psychosocial transition of the postpartum period. Methods.  Data were collected during the birth hospitalization and 4 months postbirth during 2005 and 2006. A quota sample of 250 postpartum women using two strata, race/ethnicity and prepregnant weight classification, were enrolled; 179 women completed the follow‐up survey. A survey questionnaire measured concepts from the Integrated Theory of Health Behaviour Change concepts, including knowledge and beliefs (self‐efficacy, outcome expectancy and goal congruence), self‐regulation skills and abilities, and social facilitation (social support and social influence) and the proximal outcome of weight retention. Factor analysis identified 5 factors consistent with the theoretical concepts that accounted for 47·1% of total survey variance. Results.  Model testing using path analysis explored the relationship among factors. The final model explained 25·7% of the variance in self regulation at 4 months, but did not explain weight retention. The contribution of select concepts to total variance was different for Caucasian and African American women, but not by weight classification. Conclusions.  Findings support use of theoretical concepts and relationships to understand postpartum weight self‐management. The different relationships among concepts in Caucasian and African American women should be considered in planning targeted postpartum weight self‐management interventions

PinAPL-Py: A comprehensive web-application for the analysis of CRISPR/Cas9 screens.

Large-scale genetic screens using CRISPR/Cas9 technology have emerged as a major tool for functional genomics. With its increased popularity, experimental biologists frequently acquire large sequencing datasets for which they often do not have an easy analysis option. While a few bioinformatic tools have been developed for this purpose, their utility is still hindered either due to limited functionality or the requirement of bioinformatic expertise. To make sequencing data analysis of CRISPR/Cas9 screens more accessible to a wide range of scientists, we developed a Platform-independent Analysis of Pooled Screens using Python (PinAPL-Py), which is operated as an intuitive web-service. PinAPL-Py implements state-of-the-art tools and statistical models, assembled in a comprehensive workflow covering sequence quality control, automated sgRNA sequence extraction, alignment, sgRNA enrichment/depletion analysis and gene ranking. The workflow is set up to use a variety of popular sgRNA libraries as well as custom libraries that can be easily uploaded. Various analysis options are offered, suitable to analyze a large variety of CRISPR/Cas9 screening experiments. Analysis output includes ranked lists of sgRNAs and genes, and publication-ready plots. PinAPL-Py helps to advance genome-wide screening efforts by combining comprehensive functionality with user-friendly implementation. PinAPL-Py is freely accessible at http://pinapl-py.ucsd.edu with instructions and test datasets

Gravitation Research

Contains research objectives and summary of research.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E)National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NGR 22-009-359)M.I.T. Cabot Solar Energy Fun

Fluctuations of the Magnetization in Thin Films due to Conduction Electrons

A detailed analysis of damping and noise due to a {\it sd}-interaction in a thin ferromagnetic film sandwiched between two large normal metal layers is carried out. The magnetization is shown to obey in general a non-local equation of motion which differs from the the Gilbert equation and is extended to the non-adiabatic regime. To lowest order in the exchange interaction and in the limit where the Gilbert equation applies, we show that the damping term is enhanced due to interfacial effects but it also shows oscillations as a function of the film thickness. The noise calculation is however carried out to all orders in the exchange coupling constant. The ellipticity of the precession of the magnetization is taken into account. The damping is shown to have a Gilbert form only in the adiabatic limit while the relaxation time becomes strongly dependent on the geometry of the thin film. It is also shown that the induced noise characteristic of sd-exchange is inherently colored in character and depends on the symmetry of the Hamiltonian of the magnetization in the film. We show that the sd-noise can be represented in terms of an external stochastic field which is white only in the adiabatic regime. The temperature is also renormalized by the spin accumulation in the system. For large intra-atomic exchange interactions, the Gilbert-Brown equation is no longer valid

Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions

This paper describes Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize timedomain waveforms from those spectrograms. Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of $4.53$ comparable to a MOS of $4.58$ for professionally recorded speech. To validate our design choices, we present ablation studies of key components of our system and evaluate the impact of using mel spectrograms as the input to WaveNet instead of linguistic, duration, and $F_0$ features. We further demonstrate that using a compact acoustic intermediate representation enables significant simplification of the WaveNet architecture.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201

Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis

A text-to-speech synthesis system typically consists of multiple stages, such as a text analysis frontend, an acoustic model and an audio synthesis module. Building these components often requires extensive domain expertise and may contain brittle design choices. In this paper, we present Tacotron, an end-to-end generative text-to-speech model that synthesizes speech directly from characters. Given pairs, the model can be trained completely from scratch with random initialization. We present several key techniques to make the sequence-to-sequence framework perform well for this challenging task. Tacotron achieves a 3.82 subjective 5-scale mean opinion score on US English, outperforming a production parametric system in terms of naturalness. In addition, since Tacotron generates speech at the frame level, it's substantially faster than sample-level autoregressive methods.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 2017. v2 changed paper title to be consistent with our conference submission (no content change other than typo fixes

Ectopic models for endochondral ossification: comparing pellet and alginate bead culture methods

Key aspects of native endochondral bone development and fracture healing can be mimicked in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) through standard in vitro chondrogenic induction. Exploiting this phenomenon has recently emerged as an attractive technique to engineer bone tissue, however, relatively little is known about the best conditions for doing so. The objective of the present study was to compare the bone-forming capacity and angiogenic induction of hypertrophic cell constructs containing human adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs) primed for chondrogenesis in two different culture systems: high-density pellets and alginate bead hydrogels. The hASC constructs were subjected to 4 weeks of identical chondrogenic induction in vitro, encapsulated in an agarose carrier, and then implanted subcutaneously in immune-compromised mice for 8 weeks to evaluate their endochondral potential. At the time of implantation, both pellets and beads expressed aggrecan and type II collagen, as well as alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and type X collagen. Interestingly, ASCs in pellets formed a matrix containing higher glycosaminoglycan and collagen contents than that in beads, and ALP activity per cell was higher in pellets. However, after 8 weeks in vivo, pellets and beads induced an equivalent volume of mineralized tissue and a comparable level of vascularization. Although osteocalcin and osteopontin-positive osteogenic tissue and new vascular growth was found within both types of constructs, all appeared to be better distributed throughout the hydrogel beads. The results of this ectopic model indicate that hydrogel culture may be an attractive alternative to cell pellets for bone tissue engineering via the endochondral pathway

Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma with Sarcomatoid Differentiation

Chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (chRCC) is one of the less common types of kidney cancer and generally portends a more favorable prognosis. RCC with sarcomatoid differentiation has a more aggressive clinical course with poor outcomes. Four cases of chRCC with varying degrees of sarcomatoid differentiation were retrospectively reviewed at our institution, and clinicopathologic data as well as clinical courses were reported. Patients with higher degrees of sarcomatoid differentiation and larger tumors at presentation generally had and worse overall survival. chRCC with sarcomatoid differentiation portends a poor prognosis with limited data on systemic treatment options for metastatic disease