Life in the Uncanny Valley: Workplace Issues for Knowledge Workers on the Autism Spectrum

Many journal articles about autism spectrum disorders have been published. The definition of “high-functioning autism” used in these papers may need to be reconsidered, as a segment of the population may be more skilled than has been historically thought. A percentage of people on the autism spectrum work in a high-paying professional capacity, in industries such as computer technology and health care. Their intellectual capacities allow them to successfully perform the portions of their jobs that require deep technical knowledge. However, they struggle with the cognitive and social issues associated with the autism spectrum, such as: concrete thinking; literal information processing; contextual misunderstanding; and social misunderstandings. This qualitative study examines the issues encountered by high-functioning people on the autism spectrum who are in the top quartile of American wage earners. It also recounts the reaction of the participants to a major employment lawsuit filed by a knowledge worker with Asperger’s. In addition, the subjects describe what they believe are the strengths that they bring to the workplace that they do not perceive in people who are not on the autism spectrum. The electronic version of this dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Integrating protein-protein interactions and text mining for protein function prediction

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Functional annotation of proteins remains a challenging task. Currently the scientific literature serves as the main source for yet uncurated functional annotations, but curation work is slow and expensive. Automatic techniques that support this work are still lacking reliability. We developed a method to identify conserved protein interaction graphs and to predict missing protein functions from orthologs in these graphs. To enhance the precision of the results, we furthermore implemented a procedure that validates all predictions based on findings reported in the literature.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using this procedure, more than 80% of the GO annotations for proteins with highly conserved orthologs that are available in UniProtKb/Swiss-Prot could be verified automatically. For a subset of proteins we predicted new GO annotations that were not available in UniProtKb/Swiss-Prot. All predictions were correct (100% precision) according to the verifications from a trained curator.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our method of integrating CCSs and literature mining is thus a highly reliable approach to predict GO annotations for weakly characterized proteins with orthologs.</p

Biobarometer Schweiz: Wovon die Kaufentscheidung für Biolebensmittel abhängt

Kaufentscheidungen beeinflussen massgeblich die Nachfrage nach Biolebensmitteln. In der Studie «Biobarometer Schweiz» wurden Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten im November 2015 mit einer standardisierten Befragung zu ihrem Kaufverhalten befragt. Ziel der Befragung war es zu untersuchen, von welchen Faktoren die Kaufentscheidung für Biolebensmittel abhängt, und zu ermitteln, welche Aspekte in der Kommunikation gegenüber den Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten relevant sind. Die Studie hat gezeigt, dass die Schweizer Biokonsumierenden signifikant häufiger weiblich sind, ein höheres Bildungsniveau haben und mehrheitlich in der Deutschschweiz leben. Die Konsumenten, die häufig Bioprodukte kaufen, bezeichnen sich als umweltbewusst, achten auf eine gesunde Ernährung und auf einen geringen Fleischkonsum. Neben ernährungsspezifischen Motiven haben für sie vor allem altruistische Kaufmotive einen hohen Stellenwert, zudem die Naturbelassenheit der Bioprodukte sowie die Vermeidung von Pestizidrückständen in Lebensmitteln. Dagegen nimmt die Bedeutung von Geschmack und Aroma beim Lebensmitteleinkauf im Vergleich zu den anderen Kaufmotiven innerhalb der jeweiligen Käufergruppe mit abnehmendem Biokonsum zu. Neben dem Genussaspekt von Biolebensmitteln sollten vor allem Aspekte wie Natürlichkeit und Umweltverträglichkeit im Vordergrund der Kommunikation stehen. Das Biobarometer Schweiz wird zukünftig in regelmässigen Abständen durchgeführt, sodass sich Veränderungen von Konsumtrends ableiten lassen

Stability of sub-surface oxygen at Rh(111)

Using density-functional theory (DFT) we investigate the incorporation of oxygen directly below the Rh(111) surface. We show that oxygen incorporation will only commence after nearly completion of a dense O adlayer (\theta_tot = 1.0 monolayer) with O in the fcc on-surface sites. The experimentally suggested octahedral sub-surface site occupancy, inducing a site-switch of the on-surface species from fcc to hcp sites, is indeed found to be a rather low energy structure. Our results indicate that at even higher coverages oxygen incorporation is followed by oxygen agglomeration in two-dimensional sub-surface islands directly below the first metal layer. Inside these islands, the metastable hcp/octahedral (on-surface/sub-surface) site combination will undergo a barrierless displacement, introducing a stacking fault of the first metal layer with respect to the underlying substrate and leading to a stable fcc/tetrahedral site occupation. We suggest that these elementary steps, namely, oxygen incorporation, aggregation into sub-surface islands and destabilization of the metal surface may be more general and precede the formation of a surface oxide at close-packed late transition metal surfaces.Comment: 9 pages including 9 figure files. Submitted to Phys. Rev. B. Related publications can be found at http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm

A realistic assessment of methods for extracting gene/protein interactions from free text

Background: The automated extraction of gene and/or protein interactions from the literature is one of the most important targets of biomedical text mining research. In this paper we present a realistic evaluation of gene/protein interaction mining relevant to potential non-specialist users. Hence we have specifically avoided methods that are complex to install or require reimplementation, and we coupled our chosen extraction methods with a state-of-the-art biomedical named entity tagger. Results: Our results show: that performance across different evaluation corpora is extremely variable; that the use of tagged (as opposed to gold standard) gene and protein names has a significant impact on performance, with a drop in F-score of over 20 percentage points being commonplace; and that a simple keyword-based benchmark algorithm when coupled with a named entity tagger outperforms two of the tools most widely used to extract gene/protein interactions. Conclusion: In terms of availability, ease of use and performance, the potential non-specialist user community interested in automatically extracting gene and/or protein interactions from free text is poorly served by current tools and systems. The public release of extraction tools that are easy to install and use, and that achieve state-of-art levels of performance should be treated as a high priority by the biomedical text mining community

Domus I and Dymaxion: Two Concept Designs for Lunar Habitats

Two concept designs for lunar habitats are explored and developed in this monograph based on human factors/environment-behavior considerations. Attention is given to initial operating configuration design requirements, different technological options and 12 different habitat concepts. Domus 1 is a pressurized self-supporting membrane structure (PSSMS) proposed by Chow and Lin. Dymaxion is a dome structure based on the work of Buckminster Fuller. The master plan, construction sequencing, technical subsystems and interior configuration of both of these concepts are presented.https://dc.uwm.edu/caupr_mono/1041/thumbnail.jp

SYMBIOmatics: Synergies in Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics – exploring current scientific literature for emerging topics

Background: The SYMBIOmatics Specific Support Action (SSA) is "an information gathering and dissemination activity" that seeks "to identify synergies between the bioinformatics and the medical informatics" domain to improve collaborative progress between both domains (ref. to http://www.symbiomatics.org). As part of the project experts in both research fields will be identified and approached through a survey. To provide input to the survey, the scientific literature was analysed to extract topics relevant to both medical informatics and bioinformatics. Results: This paper presents results ofa systematic analysis of the scientific literature from medical informatics research and bioinformatics research. In the analysis pairs of words (bigrams) from the leading bioinformatics and medical informatics journals have been used as indication of existing and emerging technologies and topics over the period 2000-2005 ("recent") and 1990-1990 ("past"). We identified emerging topics that were equally important to bioinformatics and medical informatics in recent years such as microarray experiments, ontologies, open source, text mining and support vector machines. Emerging topics that evolved only in bioinformatics were system biology, protein interaction networks and statistical methods for microarray analyses, whereas emerging topics in medical informatics were grid technology and tissue microarrays. Conclusion: We conclude that although both fields have their own specific domains of interest, they share common technological developments that tend to be initiated by new developments in biotechnology and computer science

Literature-based discovery of diabetes- and ROS-related targets

Abstract Background Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are known mediators of cellular damage in multiple diseases including diabetic complications. Despite its importance, no comprehensive database is currently available for the genes associated with ROS. Methods We present ROS- and diabetes-related targets (genes/proteins) collected from the biomedical literature through a text mining technology. A web-based literature mining tool, SciMiner, was applied to 1,154 biomedical papers indexed with diabetes and ROS by PubMed to identify relevant targets. Over-represented targets in the ROS-diabetes literature were obtained through comparisons against randomly selected literature. The expression levels of nine genes, selected from the top ranked ROS-diabetes set, were measured in the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) of diabetic and non-diabetic DBA/2J mice in order to evaluate the biological relevance of literature-derived targets in the pathogenesis of diabetic neuropathy. Results SciMiner identified 1,026 ROS- and diabetes-related targets from the 1,154 biomedical papers (http://jdrf.neurology.med.umich.edu/ROSDiabetes/). Fifty-three targets were significantly over-represented in the ROS-diabetes literature compared to randomly selected literature. These over-represented targets included well-known members of the oxidative stress response including catalase, the NADPH oxidase family, and the superoxide dismutase family of proteins. Eight of the nine selected genes exhibited significant differential expression between diabetic and non-diabetic mice. For six genes, the direction of expression change in diabetes paralleled enhanced oxidative stress in the DRG. Conclusions Literature mining compiled ROS-diabetes related targets from the biomedical literature and led us to evaluate the biological relevance of selected targets in the pathogenesis of diabetic neuropathy.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/1/1755-8794-3-49.xmlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/2/1755-8794-3-49-S7.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/3/1755-8794-3-49-S10.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/4/1755-8794-3-49-S8.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/5/1755-8794-3-49-S3.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/6/1755-8794-3-49-S1.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/7/1755-8794-3-49-S4.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/8/1755-8794-3-49-S2.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/9/1755-8794-3-49-S12.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/10/1755-8794-3-49-S11.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/11/1755-8794-3-49-S9.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/12/1755-8794-3-49-S5.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/13/1755-8794-3-49-S6.XLShttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78315/14/1755-8794-3-49.pdfPeer Reviewe

Identification of Incident CKD Stage 3 in Research Studies

In epidemiologic research, incident chronic kidney disease (CKD) is commonly determined by laboratory tests performed at planned study visits. Given the morbidity and mortality associated with CKD, persons with incident disease may be less likely to attend scheduled visits, affecting observed associations. The objective of this study was to quantify loss-to-follow-up by CKD status, and to determine whether supplementation with diagnostic code data improves capture of incident CKD

Association of Dietary Protein Consumption With Incident Silent Cerebral Infarcts and Stroke: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study

The effect of dietary protein on the risk of stroke has shown inconsistent results. We aimed to evaluate the relationship of dietary protein sources with the risk of stroke and silent cerebral infarcts in a large community based cohort