Applying the Cox Model to Study Online Gambling Behavior

Although a key objective of Internet gambling service providers is player retention, there is a concomitant need to reduce the social costs of gambling. Our study shows how habit and prospect theories help build an integrative framework for decision support in regulated Internet gambling environments. To illustrate the practical implication of this framework, we applied the Cox model with time-dependent covariates on real gambling data collected from 4,222 users of a gambling website. The results help establish the positive association of key indicators such as the prior outcomes on the activity lifespan of an Internet gambler and the moderating effect of gambling frequency on the positive association between prior outcomes and gambling lifespan. This research is expected to contribute to the literatures on IT adoption and diffusion in general, and IT-based addictive behavior in particular

A Color-Pair Based Approach for Accurate Color Harmony Estimation

Harmonious color combinations can stimulate positive user emotional responses. However, a widely open research question is: how can we establish a robust and accurate color harmony measure for the public and professional designers to identify the harmony level of a color theme or color set. Building upon the key discovery that color pairs play an important role in harmony estimation, in this paper we present a novel color-pair based estimation model to accurately measure the color harmony. It first takes a two-layer maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based method to compute an initial prediction of color harmony by statistically modeling the pair-wise color preferences from existing datasets. Then, the initial scores are refined through a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) with a variety of color features extracted in different color spaces, so that an accurate harmony estimation can be obtained at the end. Our extensive experiments, including performance comparisons of harmony estimation applications, show the advantages of our method in comparison with the state of the art methods

Discovering multiple transcripts of human hepatocytes using massively parallel signature sequencing (MPSS)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The liver is the largest human internal organ – it is composed of multiple cell types and plays a vital role in fulfilling the body's metabolic needs and maintaining homeostasis. Of these cell types the hepatocytes, which account for three-quarters of the liver's volume, perform its main functions. To discover the molecular basis of hepatocyte function, we employed Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) to determine the transcriptomic profile of adult human hepatocytes obtained by laser capture microdissection (LCM).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>10,279 UniGene clusters, representing 7,475 known genes, were detected in human hepatocytes. In addition, 1,819 unique MPSS signatures matching the antisense strand of 1,605 non-redundant UniGene clusters (such as <it>APOC1</it>, <it>APOC2</it>, <it>APOB </it>and <it>APOH</it>) were highly expressed in hepatocytes.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Apart from a large number of protein-coding genes, some of the antisense transcripts expressed in hepatocytes could play important roles in transcriptional interference via a <it>cis</it>-/<it>trans</it>-regulation mechanism. Our result provided a comprehensively transcriptomic atlas of human hepatocytes using MPSS technique, which could be served as an available resource for an in-depth understanding of human liver biology and diseases.</p

A Transgenic Mouse Model for DNA/RNA Gene Therapy of Human β Thalassemia

TheâIVS-2-654 C→T mutation accounts for approximately 20% of â thalassemia mutation in southern  China; it causes aberrant RNA splicing and leads to â thalassemia. To provide an animal model for testing  therapies for correcting splicing defects, we have produced two lines of transgenic mice with the human â  thalassemia mutant gene. The transgenic mice carrying this mutant gene show the same aberrant splicing  as their human counterparts and provide an animal model for testing therapies to correct splicing defects  at either the RNA or DNA level.

Enhanced Stem Cell Osteogenic Differentiation by Bioactive Glass Functionalized Graphene Oxide Substrates

An unmet need in engineered bone regeneration is to develop scaffolds capable of manipulating stem cells osteogenesis. Graphene oxide (GO) has been widely used as a biomaterial for various biomedical applications. However, it remains challenging to functionalize GO as ideal platform for specifically directing stem cell osteogenesis. Herein, we report facile functionalization of GO with dopamine and subsequent bioactive glass (BG) to enhance stem cell adhesion, spreading, and osteogenic differentiation. On the basis of graphene, we obtained dopamine functionalized graphene oxide/bioactive glass (DGO/BG) hybrid scaffolds containing different content of DGO by loading BG nanoparticles on graphene oxide surface using sol-gel method. To enhance the dispersion stability and facilitate subsequent nucleation of BG in GO, firstly, dopamine (DA) was used to modify GO. Then, the modified GO was functionalized with bioactive glass (BG) using sol-gel method. The adhesion, spreading, and osteoinductive effects of DGO/BG scaffold on rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (rBMSCs) were evaluated. DGO/BG hybrid scaffolds with different content of DGO could influence rBMSCs’ behavior. The highest expression level of osteogenic markers suggests that the DGO/BG hybrid scaffolds have great potential or elicit desired bone reparative outcome