El "IMACO": un índice mensual líder de la actividad económica en Colombia

En este trabajo se describe la construcción de un nuevo indicador mensual líder de la actividad económica en Colombia (IMACO). El procedimiento se basa en un algoritmo de búsqueda heurístico que identifica siete variables líderes del nivel de actividad, que anticipan los movimientos del PIB con cinco meses de adelanto y una correlación del 93%. Asimismo, el IMACO tiene otras propiedades predictivas deseables: anticipa los puntos de quiebre del ciclo económico colombiano sin arrojar señales falsas, y minimiza los errores de pronóstico sobre el crecimiento del PIB. Dada su simplicidad y bajo costo computacional, el IMACO provee una herramienta para el seguimiento continuo de la coyuntura y el diseño de la política económica, que puede ser replicado tanto para otros agregados macroeconómicos en Colombia así como en otros países de la región.Índice líder, ciclo económico, componentes principales. Classification JEL: E23, E27, E37.

Desarrollo integral de las competencias genéricas mediante mapas competenciales

Los planes de estudio del EEES deben diseñarse a partir de las competencias de la titulación, tanto específicas como genéricas. La universidad española tiene una amplia experiencia en trabajar y evaluar las competencias específicas, pero las competencias genéricas suponen un nuevo reto que es preciso abordar. En este trabajo se hace una propuesta sobre cómo trabajar y evaluar, de forma global, las competencias genéricas en una titulación de Grado. La propuesta se está implantando en los estudios de Grado en Ingeniería Informática de la Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona. En lugar de establecer diversos niveles de competencia y asignar cada uno de estos niveles a distintas asignaturas, como suele hacerse con las competencias específicas usando la taxonomía de Bloom, se propone definir cada competencia genérica en términos de dimensiones. Cada una de las dimensiones (aspectos de la competencia) se define en términos de objetivos a tres niveles, y son los objetivos de un determinado nivel de cada dimensión lo que se encarga a las asignaturas. De esta forma, una misma asignatura puede trabajar distintas dimensiones de una competencia genérica, cada una de ellas a un nivel diferente. Diferentes competencias pueden compartir un subconjunto de dimensiones. Evitar repetir el trabajo de estas dimensiones en diferentes asignaturas cuando no es estrictamente necesario permite optimizar el trabajo realizado y favorece que los estudiantes adquieran las competencias genéricas definidas por la titulación.In the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), curriculum design needs to be based on the particular degree programme competencies, including both domain-specific and generic competencies. Although Spanish universities already have a wide experience in developing and assessing domain-specific competencies, generic competencies pose a new challenge that we need to face. The present work proposes a model to globally develop and assess generic competencies in the Bachelor’s Degree in Informatics Engineering at Barcelona School of Informatics. A common procedure to develop domain-specific competencies consists in setting different competency levels (based on Bloom’s taxonomy) and then assigning them to the corresponding subjects or courses in the programme. Instead, in order to develop generic competencies into a comprehensive integrated experience, we propose a definition of each competency in terms of dimensions (or competency aspects), which are further defined according to three-level objectives. These objectives are integrated into the subjects that are considered suitable for this purpose. Thus, one subject may integrate dimensions belonging to different competencies at different levels, which contributes to an integral educational experience. In the process of designing our global map of competency dimensions, we have found that some competencies may share some subset of those dimensions, which calls for workload optimization. This global map allows us to refine the process of assigning competency objectives to subjects, and although recurrent practice may be appropriate in the development of competencies in general, we can avoid redundancy when necessary. Thus, this procedure helps us to integrate objectives into the corresponding subjects most effectively, helping students develop the generic competencies defined in the degree programme

Impact of late presentation of HIV infection on short-, mid- and long-term mortality and causes of death in a multicenter national cohort: 2004–2013

SummaryObjectivesTo analyze the impact of late presentation (LP) on overall mortality and causes of death and describe LP trends and risk factors (2004–2013).MethodsCox models and logistic regression were used to analyze data from a nation-wide cohort in Spain. LP is defined as being diagnosed when CD4 < 350 cells/ml or AIDS.ResultsOf 7165 new HIV diagnoses, 46.9% (CI95%:45.7–48.0) were LP, 240 patients died.First-year mortality was the highest (aHRLP.vs.nLP = 10.3[CI95%:5.5–19.3]); between 1 and 4 years post-diagnosis, aHRLP.vs.nLP = 1.9(1.2–3.0); and >4 years, aHRLP.vs.nLP = 1.5(0.7–3.1).First-year's main cause of death was HIV/AIDS (73%); and malignancies among those surviving >4 years (32%). HIV/AIDS-related deaths were more likely in LP (59.2% vs. 25.0%; p < 0.001). LP declined from 55.9% (2004–05) to 39.4% (2012–13), and reduced in 46.1% in men who have sex with men (MSM) and 37.6% in heterosexual men, but increased in 22.6% in heterosexual women.Factors associated with LP: sex (ORMEN.vs.WOMEN = 1.4[1.2–1.7]); age (OR31–40.vs.<30 = 1.6[1.4–1.8], OR41–50.vs.<30 = 2.2[1.8–2.6], OR>50.vs.<30 = 3.6[2.9–4.4]); behavior (ORInjectedDrugUse.vs.MSM = 2.8[2.0–3.8]; ORHeterosexual.vs.MSM = 2.2[1.7–3.0]); education (ORPrimaryEducation.vs.University = 1.5[1.1–2.0], ORLowerSecondary.vs.University = 1.3[1.1–1.5]); and geographical origin (ORSub-Saharan.vs.Spain = 1.6[1.3–2.0], ORLatin-American.vs.Spain = 1.4[1.2–1.8]).ConclusionsLP is associated with higher mortality, especially short-term- and HIV/AIDS-related mortality. Mid-term-, but not long-term mortality, remained also higher in LP than nLP. LP decreased in MSM and heterosexual men, not in heterosexual women. The groups most affected by LP are low educated, non-Spanish and heterosexual women

Pathway and network analysis of more than 2500 whole cancer genomes

The catalog of cancer driver mutations in protein-coding genes has greatly expanded in the past decade. However, non-coding cancer driver mutations are less well-characterized and only a handful of recurrent non-coding mutations, most notably TERT promoter mutations, have been reported. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2658 cancer across 38 tumor types, we perform multi-faceted pathway and network analyses of non-coding mutations across 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumor types compiled by the ICGC/TCGA PCAWG project that was motivated by the success of pathway and network analyses in prioritizing rare mutations in protein-coding genes. While few non-coding genomic elements are recurrently mutated in this cohort, we identify 93 genes harboring non-coding mutations that cluster into several modules of interacting proteins. Among these are promoter mutations associated with reduced mRNA expression in TP53, TLE4, and TCF4. We find that biological processes had variable proportions of coding and non-coding mutations, with chromatin remodeling and proliferation pathways altered primarily by coding mutations, while developmental pathways, including Wnt and Notch, altered by both coding and non-coding mutations. RNA splicing is primarily altered by non-coding mutations in this cohort, and samples containing non-coding mutations in well-known RNA splicing factors exhibit similar gene expression signatures as samples with coding mutations in these genes. These analyses contribute a new repertoire of possible cancer genes and mechanisms that are altered by non-coding mutations and offer insights into additional cancer vulnerabilities that can be investigated for potential therapeutic treatments

Pathway and network analysis of more than 2500 whole cancer genomes.

The catalog of cancer driver mutations in protein-coding genes has greatly expanded in the past decade. However, non-coding cancer driver mutations are less well-characterized and only a handful of recurrent non-coding mutations, most notably TERT promoter mutations, have been reported. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2658 cancer across 38 tumor types, we perform multi-faceted pathway and network analyses of non-coding mutations across 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumor types compiled by the ICGC/TCGA PCAWG project that was motivated by the success of pathway and network analyses in prioritizing rare mutations in protein-coding genes. While few non-coding genomic elements are recurrently mutated in this cohort, we identify 93 genes harboring non-coding mutations that cluster into several modules of interacting proteins. Among these are promoter mutations associated with reduced mRNA expression in TP53, TLE4, and TCF4. We find that biological processes had variable proportions of coding and non-coding mutations, with chromatin remodeling and proliferation pathways altered primarily by coding mutations, while developmental pathways, including Wnt and Notch, altered by both coding and non-coding mutations. RNA splicing is primarily altered by non-coding mutations in this cohort, and samples containing non-coding mutations in well-known RNA splicing factors exhibit similar gene expression signatures as samples with coding mutations in these genes. These analyses contribute a new repertoire of possible cancer genes and mechanisms that are altered by non-coding mutations and offer insights into additional cancer vulnerabilities that can be investigated for potential therapeutic treatments

Proceedings of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology and Champalimaud Foundation Ocular Oncogenesis and Oncology Conference

Ophthalmic researc

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Analyses of non-coding somatic drivers in 2,658 cancer whole genomes.

The discovery of drivers of cancer has traditionally focused on protein-coding genes1-4. Here we present analyses of driver point mutations and structural variants in non-coding regions across 2,658 genomes from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium5 of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). For point mutations, we developed a statistically rigorous strategy for combining significance levels from multiple methods of driver discovery that overcomes the limitations of individual methods. For structural variants, we present two methods of driver discovery, and identify regions that are significantly affected by recurrent breakpoints and recurrent somatic juxtapositions. Our analyses confirm previously reported drivers6,7, raise doubts about others and identify novel candidates, including point mutations in the 5' region of TP53, in the 3' untranslated regions of NFKBIZ and TOB1, focal deletions in BRD4 and rearrangements in the loci of AKR1C genes. We show that although point mutations and structural variants that drive cancer are less frequent in non-coding genes and regulatory sequences than in protein-coding genes, additional examples of these drivers will be found as more cancer genomes become available