Environmental Risk Factors for Chronic Pancreatitis and Pancreatic Cancer

Chronic pancreatitis has long been thought to be mainly associated with immoderate alcohol consumption. The observation that only ∼10% of heavy drinkers develop chronic pancreatitis not only suggests that other environmental factors, such as tobacco smoke, are potent additional risk factors, but also that the genetic component of pancreatitis is more common than previously presumed. Either disease-causing or protective traits have been indentified for mutations in different trypsinogen genes, the gene for the trypsin inhibitor SPINK1, chymotrypsinogen C, and the cystic fibrosis transmembane conductance regulator (CFTR). Other factors that have been proposed to contribute to pancreatitis are obesity, diets high in animal protein and fat, as well as antioxidant deficiencies. For the development of pancreatic cancer, preexisting chronic pancreatitis, more prominently hereditary pancreatitis, is a risk factor. The data on environmental risk factors for pancreatic cancer are, with the notable exception of tobacco smoke, either sparse, unconfirmed or controversial. Obesity appears to increase the risk of pancreatic cancer in the West but not in Japan. Diets high in processed or red meat, diets low in fruits and vegetables, phytochemicals such as lycopene and flavonols, have been proposed and refuted as risk or protective factors in different trials. The best established and single most important risk factor for cancer as well as pancreatitis and the one to clearly avoid is tobacco smoke

Vergleichen unter den Bedingungen von Konflikt und Konkurrenz

Albert M, Engelschalt J, Epple A, et al. Vergleichen unter den Bedingungen von Konflikt und Konkurrenz. Praktiken des Vergleichens. Working Paper des SFB 1288. Vol 1. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld, SFB 1288; 2019.Was ist das Spezifische an Vergleichen bzw. Vergleichspraktiken, die unter den Bedingungen von Konflikt und/oder Konkurrenz durchgeführt werden? Im vorliegenden Working Paper wird dieses Spezifische anhand von soziologisch inspirierten Überlegungen zu den Grundbegrifflichkeiten des Konflikts bzw. der Konkurrenz als einer besonderen Art der Formung sozialer Beziehungen herausgearbeitet. Zunächst werden die Begriffe von Konkurrenz und direkten gewalttätigen Konflikten vor dem Hintergrund unterschiedlicher disziplinärer Forschungskontexte bestimmt. Ausgehend von einer Soziologie der Konkurrenz geht es dabei um sozial- und geschichtswissenschaftliche Diskussionen um gewalttätige Konflikte. Zentral sind die begriffliche Schärfung unterschiedlicher kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen und das Gewalthandeln in Konfliktsituationen, die nicht als Krieg bezeichnet werden können. Anschließend werden die vielschichtigen Wechselbeziehungen sowohl zwischen gewalttätigen Konflikten und Konkurrenz als auch zwischen Konflikten, Konkurrenzen und Vergleichspraktiken aus der Sicht der unterschiedlichen Forschungsprojekte des Projektbereichs A des SFB 1288 dargestellt.**Ergänzender Hinweis zu den Creative Commons Lizenzen**"Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material.

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Strategieentwicklung für ein pro-aktives Verkehrsmanagement

Das Papier stellt eine pro-aktive Vorgehensweise zur Erstellung von Strategien für die Bewältigung von geplanten und generischen Ereignisse im Straßenverkehrsnetz vor

Preparation of Digital Maps for Traffic Simulation; Part 1: Approach and Algorithms

Traffic simulations are an accepted tool for investigations on road traffic and used widely within the traffic science community. Modern computer systems are fast enough to model and simulate traffic within large areas at a microscopic scale regarding each vehicle, replacing macroscopic simulations in most cases. Although microscopic traffic simulations offer better quality than macroscopic ones, they also need additional data to describe the modelled road networks. A street’s lanes are modelled explicitly within microscopic simulations and in most cases also the connections between their lanes over junctions. If one wants to model large areas, the best source to get the description about their road network is the usage of digital maps. Unfortunately, most of these are used for routing purposes and do not contain the fine-grained information mentioned above that is needed by microscopic simulations. This document describes an algorithm for the computation of the needed information from simple road networks

Attempting to calibrate a large-scale tra�ffic flow simulator

This contribution demonstrates how to perform calibration and validation for the open source tra�ffic flow micro-simulation SUMO [1]. Preliminary results for a real-world scenario are presented. This serves as an example how a black box model can be calibrated and validated without knowing and accessing the inner workings of the simulation model. Here, "black box" is from the view-point of an tra�ffic analyst, which is a valid view for many researchers despite SUMO being an open source program

The "Simulation of Urban MObility" package: An open source traffic simulation

SUMO is the acronym for "Simulation of Urban MObility", an open source project concerned with the development and usage of a traffic simulation. The project is a part of our scientific work concerned with the verification of different microscopic models of traffic, and their comparison ([1]). Further, the traffic science community often involves ideas where each of them needs a traffic simulation to be validated. Over the time, many more or less sophisticated simulations have been developed to do this job. They mostly stay unknown. This approach is not only very inefficient as a traffic simulation has many things to regard; also, the results are often not replicable or at least hard to compare. When a common platform is supplied, such problems should not occur. Within this publication, we would like to introduce our package to the public in the hope to gain some further interest

WSN-based passenger localization in severe NLOS environments using SDP

In this work we use wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to estimate positions for automated passenger registration with the purpose of an electronic ticketing application in public transport systems. The network is capable of measuring distances between the network's sensor nodes by phase-of-arrival (POA) ranging. In our application, the requirements regarding position accuracy are very demanding, due to the ranging biases caused by severe non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments, i.e. highly reflective radio propagation. Hence, we suggest semidefinite programming (SDP) as a robust optimization algorithm for the localization process and apply a NLOS mitigation technique from literature to a modified cost function that may help to meet these requirements. Finally the proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art positioning techniques. Testing with simulated and real measured data shows that the proposed SDP estimator outperforms the other positioning algorithms substantially, particularly in realistic NLOS environments