12,808 research outputs found
Religious Identity Formation Among Adolescents: The Role of Religious Secondary Schools
The purpose of this article is to examine the role religious secondary schools play in the religious identity formation of adolescents. Although several research studies have found a correlation between enrollment in private religious schools and adolescents’ religious identity formation, the researchers of these studies have only speculated about which specific characteristics of religious schools are responsible for this formation in the lives of adolescents. Through a review of the literature, the present article identifies several characteristics of religious secondary schools that may contribute to the process of religious identity formation: a community of religious peers, the presence of religious adults, and an exposure to religious instruction. Implications for Christian secondary school practitioners are also discussed
Public Capital Spillovers and Growth: A Foray Downunder
We extend the deterministic growth model of Glomm and Ravikumar (1994) to a stochastic endogenous growth model which nests both exogenous and endogenous growth factors. By introducing simple shocks to production technology, private capital and public capital investment, we can derive testable time series properties of the analytical model. The hypothesis of strict endogenous growth due to public capital spillovers cannot be statistically rejected for our Australian data set. We find further short-run evidence of public capital contributing to permanent increases in the levels of per capita income and private capital.
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Epigenomic regulation of heart failure: integrating histone marks, long noncoding RNAs, and chromatin architecture.
Epigenetic processes are known to have powerful roles in organ development across biology. It has recently been found that some of the chromatin modulatory machinery essential for proper development plays a previously unappreciated role in the pathogenesis of cardiac disease in adults. Investigations using genetic and pharmacologic gain- and loss-of-function approaches have interrogated the function of distinct epigenetic regulators, while the increased deployment of the suite of next-generation sequencing technologies have fundamentally altered our understanding of the genomic targets of these chromatin modifiers. Here, we review recent developments in basic and translational research that have provided tantalizing clues that may be used to unlock the therapeutic potential of the epigenome in heart failure. Additionally, we provide a hypothesis to explain how signal-induced crosstalk between histone tail modifications and long non-coding RNAs triggers chromatin architectural remodeling and culminates in cardiac hypertrophy and fibrosis
Statistical methods for tissue array images - algorithmic scoring and co-training
Recent advances in tissue microarray technology have allowed
immunohistochemistry to become a powerful medium-to-high throughput analysis
tool, particularly for the validation of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers.
However, as study size grows, the manual evaluation of these assays becomes a
prohibitive limitation; it vastly reduces throughput and greatly increases
variability and expense. We propose an algorithm - Tissue Array Co-Occurrence
Matrix Analysis (TACOMA) - for quantifying cellular phenotypes based on
textural regularity summarized by local inter-pixel relationships. The
algorithm can be easily trained for any staining pattern, is absent of
sensitive tuning parameters and has the ability to report salient pixels in an
image that contribute to its score. Pathologists' input via informative
training patches is an important aspect of the algorithm that allows the
training for any specific marker or cell type. With co-training, the error rate
of TACOMA can be reduced substantially for a very small training sample (e.g.,
with size 30). We give theoretical insights into the success of co-training via
thinning of the feature set in a high-dimensional setting when there is
"sufficient" redundancy among the features. TACOMA is flexible, transparent and
provides a scoring process that can be evaluated with clarity and confidence.
In a study based on an estrogen receptor (ER) marker, we show that TACOMA is
comparable to, or outperforms, pathologists' performance in terms of accuracy
and repeatability.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS543 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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