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Cognitive dysfunction in aging is a major biomedical challenge. Whether treatment with klotho, a longevity factor, could enhance cognition in human-relevant models such as in nonhuman primates is unknown and represents a major knowledge gap in the path to therapeutics. We validated the rhesus form of the klotho protein in mice showing it increased synaptic plasticity and cognition. We then found that a single administration of low-dose, but not high-dose, klotho enhanced memory in aged nonhuman primates. Systemic low-dose klotho treatment may prove therapeutic in aging humans.

The nuclear factor I/X (NFIX) gene encodes a ubiquitously expressed transcription factor whose mutations lead to two allelic disorders characterized by developmental, skeletal, and neural abnormalities, namely, Malan syndrome (MAL) and Marshall–Smith syndrome (MSS). NFIX mutations associated with MAL mainly cluster in exon 2 and are cleared by nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) leading to NFIX haploinsufficiency, whereas NFIX mutations associated with MSS are clustered in exons 6–10 and escape NMD and result in the production of dominant-negative mutant NFIX proteins. Thus, different NFIX mutations have distinct consequences on NFIX expression. To elucidate the in vivo effects of MSS-associated NFIX exon 7 mutations, we used CRISPR-Cas9 to generate mouse models with exon 7 deletions that comprised: a frameshift deletion of two nucleotides (Nfix Del2); in-frame deletion of 24 nucleotides (Nfix Del24); and deletion of 140 nucleotides (Nfix Del140). Nfix+/Del2, Nfix+/Del24, Nfix+/Del140, NfixDel24/Del24, and NfixDel140/Del140 mice were viable, normal, and fertile, with no skeletal abnormalities, but NfixDel2/Del2 mice had significantly reduced viability (p < 0.002) and died at 2–3 weeks of age. Nfix Del2 was not cleared by NMD, and NfixDel2/Del2 mice, when compared to Nfix+/+ and Nfix+/Del2 mice, had: growth retardation; short stature with kyphosis; reduced skull length; marked porosity of the vertebrae with decreased vertebral and femoral bone mineral content; and reduced caudal vertebrae height and femur length. Plasma biochemistry analysis revealed NfixDel2/Del2 mice to have increased total alkaline phosphatase activity but decreased C-terminal telopeptide and procollagen-type-1-N-terminal propeptide concentrations compared to Nfix+/+ and Nfix+/Del2 mice. NfixDel2/Del2 mice were also found to have enlarged cerebral cortices and ventricular areas but smaller dentate gyrus compared to Nfix+/+ mice. Thus, NfixDel2/Del2 mice provide a model for studying the in vivo effects o

This manual was developed to assist basic skills instructors in vocational programs in Missouri in defining their role and responsibilities. The manual contains basic information that should serve as a guide to basic skills instructors as they work with students with disabilities and or disadvantages in vocational education programs. Following an overview of the role of the basic skills instructor and of the legislation that affects that role, the guide identifies the following six areas of responsibilities for basic skills instructors: identification and assessment; teaching, tutoring, and testing; materials to use in basic skills programs; recordkeeping techniques; meetings and contacts; and counseling, transition, and employment. Each area is followed by a list of issues that may arise, along with helpful responses to those issues. Sample forms and examples are included, and additional resources are listed for each area. In addition, the guide contains a section on postsecondary education, a glossary, and a list of 11 references. (KC)

Sentiment analysis allows for the subjective information contained within a piece of media to be classified. This subjective information is particularly relevant in the finance domain as opinions and speculation may influence investment decisions and, consequently, affect asset prices. State-of-the-art sentiment classification methods in machine learning use contextual word representations from pre-trained BERT language models and several papers have fine-tuned BERT for the sentiment classification of financial texts. However, these preceding studies have not considered extensive real-world data sets or provided a robust assessment of whether the sentiment scores derived from BERT predict asset prices. This paper addresses these limitations by fine-tuning BERT to analyse the sentiment across an extensive set of news articles published by the Wall Street Journal. The analysis also extends beyond financial news stories, assessing the sentiment in economic and national news articles. An econometric evaluation of the sentiment scores shows that financial news sentiment is statistically significant in predicting daily market returns, while longer-term economic news sentiment predicts monthly returns.

To create a more inclusive workplace, enterprises are actively investing in identifying and eliminating unconscious bias (e.g., gender, race, age, disability, elitism and religion) across their various functions. We propose a deep learning model with a transfer learning based language model to learn from manually tagged documents for automatically identifying bias in enterprise content. We first pretrain a deep learning-based language-model using Wikipedia, then fine tune the model with a large unlabelled data set related with various types of enterprise content. Finally, a linear layer followed by softmax layer is added at the end of the language model and the model is trained on a labelled bias dataset consisting of enterprise content. The trained model is thoroughly evaluated on independent datasets to ensure a general application. We present the proposed method and its deployment detail in a real-world application.

Classification is a fundamental task in machine learning, and the principled design and evaluation of classifiers is vital to create effective classification systems and to characterise their strengths and limitations in different contexts. Binary classifiers have a range of well-known measures to summarise performance, but characterising the performance of multinomial classifiers (systems that classify instances into one of many classes) is an open problem. While confusion matrices can summarise the empirical performance of multinomial classifiers, they are challenging to interpret at a glance—challenges compounded when classes are imbalanced. We present a way to decompose multinomial confusion matrices into components that represent the prior and posterior probabilities of correctly classifying each class, and the intrinsic ability of the classifier to discriminate each class: the Bayes factor or likelihood ratio of a positive (or negative) outcome. This approach uses the odds formulation of Bayes’ rule and leads to compact, informative visualisations of confusion matrices, able to accommodate far more classes than existing methods. We call this method confusR and demonstrate its utility on 2-, 17-, and 379-class confusion matrices. We describe how confusR could be used in the formative assessment of classification systems, investigation of algorithmic fairness, and algorithmic auditing.

With the recent developments in digitisation, there are increasing number of documents available online. There are several information extraction tools that are available to extract information from digitised documents. However, identifying precise answers to a given query is often a challenging task especially if the data source where the relevant information resides is unknown. This situation becomes more complex when the data source is available in multiple formats such as PDF, table and html. In this paper, we propose a novel data extraction system to discover relevant and focused information from diverse unstructured data sources based on text mining approaches. We perform a qualitative analysis to evaluate the proposed system and its suitability and adaptability using cotton industry.

In the mining industry, many reports are generated in the project management process. These past documents are a great resource of knowledge for future success. However, it would be a tedious and challenging task to retrieve the necessary information if the documents are unorganized and unstructured. Document clustering is a powerful approach to cope with the problem, and many methods have been introduced in past studies. Nonetheless, there is no silver bullet that can perform the best for any types of documents. Thus, exploratory studies are required to apply the clustering methods for new datasets. In this study, we will investigate multiple topic modelling (TM) methods. The objectives are finding the appropriate approach for the mining project reports using the dataset of the Geological Survey of Queensland, Department of Resources, Queensland Government, and understanding the contents to get the idea of how to organise them. Three TM methods, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and Nonnegative Tensor Factorization (NTF) are compared statistically and qualitatively. After the evaluation, we conclude that the LDA performs the best for the dataset; however, the possibility remains that the other methods could be adopted with some improvements.

Due to the rapid developments in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and increasing trend in the number of vehicles on road, abundant of road traffic data is generated and available. Understanding spatio-temporal traffic patterns from this data is crucial and has been effectively helping in traffic plannings, road constructions, etc. However, understanding traffic patterns during COVID-19 pandemic is quite challenging and important as there is a huge difference in-terms of people's and vehicle's travel behavioural patterns. In this paper, a case study is conducted to understand the variations in spatio-temporal traffic patterns during COVID-19. We apply nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to elicit patterns. The NMF model outputs are analysed based on the spatio-temporal pattern behaviours observed during the year 2019 and 2020, which is before pandemic and during pandemic situations respectively, in Great Britain. The outputs of the analysed spatio-temporal traffic pattern variation behaviours will be useful in the fields of traffic management in Intelligent Transportation System and management in various stages of pandemic or unavoidable scenarios in-relation to road traffic.

Spam detection in online social networks (OSNs) have become an immensely challenging task with the nature and the use of online social networks. The spammers tend to change their behaviors over time which is commonly known as the spam drift in Online Social networks. The most popular spam combatting approaches, such as classification will grew mere unsuccessful when the drift is present since old labels cannot be used to train the new classifiers. This paper presents the comprehensive results of an approach developed to identify the drift by using a set of datasets. It introduces a set of real time user interest-based features which can be used for spam drift detection in OSNs. The paper presents a hierarchical test-based drift detection approach for spam drift learning overtime, where it learns features in an unsupervised manner. The feature similarity differences, KL divergence and the Peer Acceptability of a user is then used to detect and validate the drifted content of spam users in the real time. The system automatically updates the learning model and relabeled the users with new predicted label for classification with the new knowledge acquired through drift detection. The results are encouraging. The error rate of the classifiers with drift detection is below 1%.

Matching lists of addresses is an increasingly common task executed by business and governments alike. However, due to security issues, this task cannot always be performed using cloud computing. Moreover, addresses can arrive with spelling errors that can cause non-matches or ‘false negatives’ to occur. Our proposed framework, PostMatch, provides a locally-executed method for address-matching that combines the open-source ‘Libpostal’ address-parsing library with our ‘postparse’ post-processor code and machine-learning. PostMatch provides improved parsing accuracy compared with Libpostal alone, approaching 96.9%. The matching process features the Jaro-Winkler edit distance algorithm together with XGBoost machine-learning to achieve very high accuracy on public data. PostMatch is open-source (GPL3 licensed) and available as R script code on Github.

Unexpected hospital readmissions are problematic to both hospitals and patients. Prediction of patients’ readmission becomes an important task. Recurrent neural networks (RNN) and the attention mechanisms have been proposed to learn temporal relationships between patient’ admissions for readmission prediction. Existing works demonstrate that incorporating medical ontologies can be beneficial to prediction tasks. However, it ignores the importance of semantic information of medical codes which can be found in the codes’ descriptions. Therefore, we propose a model called Code Description Attention Model (CDAM), which adopts codes’ descriptions into readmission prediction model via RNN and the attention mechanisms to explore the semantic information about medical codes. Experimental results show that CDAM improves not only the performance of readmission prediction but also the quality of codes’ embeddings.

A synoptic overview of scientific methods applied in bone and associated research fields across species has yet to be published. Experts from the EU Cost Action GEMSTONE (“GEnomics of MusculoSkeletal Traits translational Network”) Working Group 2 present an overview of the routine techniques as well as clinical and research approaches employed to characterize bone phenotypes in humans and selected animal models (mice and zebrafish) of health and disease. The goal is consolidation of knowledge and a map for future research. This expert paper provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art technologies to investigate bone properties in humans and animals – including their strengths and weaknesses. New research methodologies are outlined and future strategies are discussed to combine phenotypic with rapidly developing –omics data in order to advance musculoskeletal research and move towards “personalised medicine”.

Osteocytes are master regulators of the skeleton. We mapped the transcriptome of osteocytes from different skeletal sites, across age and sexes in mice to reveal genes and molecular programs that control this complex cellular-network. We define an osteocyte transcriptome signature of 1239 genes that distinguishes osteocytes from other cells. 77% have no previously known role in the skeleton and are enriched for genes regulating neuronal network formation, suggesting this programme is important in osteocyte communication. We evaluated 19 skeletal parameters in 733 knockout mouse lines and reveal 26 osteocyte transcriptome signature genes that control bone structure and function. We showed osteocyte transcriptome signature genes are enriched for human orthologs that cause monogenic skeletal disorders (P = 2.4 × 10−22) and are associated with the polygenic diseases osteoporosis (P = 1.8 × 10−13) and osteoarthritis (P = 1.6 × 10−7). Thus, we reveal the molecular landscape that regulates osteocyte network formation and function and establish the importance of osteocytes in human skeletal disease.

Introduction: This study investigated the ecology of Petalophyllum ralfsii in an oceanic dune system, including relationships with grazing livestock, hydrology and habitat restoration. Methods: The study site was two large slacks at Newborough Warren, NW Wales, UK. In areas of one slack, there are 6-yr-old ‘restoration scrapes’, where vegetation was stripped to restore early successional habitat. Since 2001, both slacks have had continuous conservation grazing, primarily by ponies. Locations of P. ralfsii were recorded using high-precision GPS. Vegetation was recorded by relevés and hydrology investigated from dipwell data. Results: Petalophyllum ralfsii was recorded at 1322 locations, mostly along pony trails, but also in sparsely vegetated depressions and restoration scrapes. The most frequent associates were Carex flacca, Didymodon tophaceus, Equisetum variegatum and Ptychostomum pseudotriquetrum. Wetter locations could be flooded for prolonged periods in some winters. Drier locations did not flood at all during the five winters of the study. Within occupied 5 × 5 m grid cells, vertical range of locations was no more than 16 cm. Locations in restoration scrapes are confined to areas where the water table is relatively high. Conclusions: Livestock grazing had a major positive impact on P. ralfsii. Trampling along pony trails provided competitive release and, due to greater soil bulk density, prolonged water availability at the surface. Ponies likely provided directed dispersal into suitable microhabitats via transport of diaspores on their hooves. Restoration scrapes have been colonised by P. ralfsii, but the population is small, likely related, at least in part, to water availability.

The genetic landscape of diseases associated with changes in bone mineral density (BMD), such as osteoporosis, is only partially understood. Here, we explored data from 3,823 mutant mouse strains for BMD, a measure that is frequently altered in a range of bone pathologies, including osteoporosis. A total of 200 genes were found to significantly affect BMD. This pool of BMD genes comprised 141 genes with previously unknown functions in bone biology and was complementary to pools derived from recent human studies. Nineteen of the 141 genes also caused skeletal abnormalities. Examination of the BMD genes in osteoclasts and osteoblasts underscored BMD pathways, including vesicle transport, in these cells and together with in silico bone turnover studies resulted in the prioritization of candidate genes for further investigation. Overall, the results add novel pathophysiological and molecular insight into bone health and disease.

There is compelling evidence supporting the critical role of high-quality coaching practice in supporting talented youth athletes through and beyond the talent pathway. The purpose of this study was to explore the coaching philosophies of ex-talent pathway athletes and how the meaning and purpose of their coaching in a talent pathway was influenced by their previous pathway experience. Nine participants were purposefully sampled based on their prior involvement as a youth athlete in a talent pathway and current involvement coaching in a talent pathway. The participants identified how their pathway experience influenced their coaching philosophy and applied coaching practice. Specifically, the participants described how their own youth sport experience influenced their current coaching practice through the formation of a developmental coaching philosophy, through their applied coaching practice orientated towards supporting individual development, and by using their previous pathway experience to support coaching success. These findings suggest that the philosophy underpinning talent pathway coaches’ practice was influenced by their own pathway experience, and the purpose of their practice was orientated to positively impact youth development for and beyond sport. Thus, talent pathways in sport have the capability to be recognised as positively influencing the developmental experiences of future coaching practitioners.

Introduction: This study investigated the ecology of Petalophyllum ralfsii in an oceanic dune system, including relationships with grazing livestock, hydrology and habitat restoration. Methods: The study site was two large slacks at Newborough Warren, NW Wales, UK. In areas of one slack, there are 6-yr-old ‘restoration scrapes’, where vegetation was stripped to restore early successional habitat. Since 2001, both slacks have had continuous conservation grazing, primarily by ponies. Locations of P. ralfsii were recorded using high-precision GPS. Vegetation was recorded by relevés and hydrology investigated from dipwell data. Results: Petalophyllum ralfsii was recorded at 1322 locations, mostly along pony trails, but also in sparsely vegetated depressions and restoration scrapes. The most frequent associates were Carex flacca, Didymodon tophaceus, Equisetum variegatum and Ptychostomum pseudotriquetrum. Wetter locations could be flooded for prolonged periods in some winters. Drier locations did not flood at all during the five winters of the study. Within occupied 5 × 5 m grid cells, vertical range of locations was no more than 16 cm. Locations in restoration scrapes are confined to areas where the water table is relatively high. Conclusions: Livestock grazing had a major positive impact on P. ralfsii. Trampling along pony trails provided competitive release and, due to greater soil bulk density, prolonged water availability at the surface. Ponies likely provided directed dispersal into suitable microhabitats via transport of diaspores on their hooves. Restoration scrapes have been colonised by P. ralfsii, but the population is small, likely related, at least in part, to water availability.

The experiences of youth athletes on specialized talent development pathways has received considerable attention in both the media and literature. Despite the low conversion of pathway entrants into senior athletes, the experiences of deselected athletes have received less attention. The purpose of this study therefore was to explore the talent pathway experiences of youth athletes who were deselected from a pathway and to consider how those experiences influenced their life post deselection. Ten participants were purposefully sampled based on their prior involvement in a formalized and selective talent programme. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted, and data was analyzed via a thematic analysis. Participants identified constructs of the talent development environment, psychobehavioral skills for future development and personal responsibility for future development as facilitators for future success beyond the talent pathway. Specifically, environmental constructs, such as high performance support systems and expectations of professionalism positively contributed toward the acquisition of transferable psychobehavioral skills, such as a determination to be successful, a confidence to back oneself and social maturity. Youth athletes reported feeling empowered to take personal responsibility for development, through attributes such as a commitment to be the best they can be and an intrinsic motivation to succeed. These findings suggest positive experiences, built around the development of transferable skills and behaviors, can accrue from being on the talent pathway. As such, the talent pathway can be a successful foundation for both success in that sport and as a facilitator of success beyond sport.

Data replication is ubiquitous in a large organization where multiple IT systems need to share information for their operation. This function is usually fulfilled by an enterprise replicating software that is dependent on the configuration that the IT administrator sets. The setup specifies the tables and routes, but it may not be optimum to meet the workload, leading to replication’s lag and bottlenecks. This paper proposes an approach to solving the configuration optimization problem for the data replication software with the simulated-annealing based heuristic. Empirical results show that the configuration setting enables the replicating software to perform at least 5 times better than the baseline configuration set achieved by this approach.

Topic modelling is the state of the art technique for understanding, organizing, and extracting information from text collections. Traditional topic modeling approaches apply probabilistic techniques to generate the list of topics from collections. Nevertheless, human understands, summarizes and discovers the topics based on the meaning of the content. Hence, the quality of the topic models can be improved by grasping the meaning from the content. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify sets of meaningful terms based on ontology, called Semantic-based Patterns, which represent the content of a collection of documents. A set of related semantic-based patterns can be used to represent a latent topic in the collection. The proposed Topic Representation using Semantic-based Patterns aims to generate semantically meaningful patterns based on ontology rather than term co-occurrence as what existing topic modelling methods do. The semantically meaningful patterns were evaluated by applying the information filtering to semantic-based topic representation. The semantic based patterns were used as features for information filtering and were evaluated by comparing against popular information filtering baseline systems. Topic quality was evaluated in terms of topic coherence and perplexity. The experimental results verified that the quality of the proposed patterns was better than features used in baseline systems for information filtering. Further, the quality of topic representation outperforms the generated topics of other topic modeling approaches.

A group of mainly Cretaceous areoligeracean dinoflagellate cyst genera, which we call the ‘Cyclonephelium group’, has proved difficult to classify. The group comprises Aptea, Canningia, Canninginopsis, Cassidium, Cauveridinium, Cerbia, Circulodinium, Cyclonephelium, Doidyx, Senoniasphaera and Tenua. As a group, they also converge morphologically with ceratiaceans. Cyclonephelium-group taxa show considerable morphological diversity and gradation. However, the most important criteria for discriminating dinoflagellate cyst-based genera – tabulation and archaeopyle type – are uniform among areoligeraceans and ceratiaceans and so are not useful in this case. Any subdivision of the Cyclonephelium group will break apparently natural continuities; nevertheless, any resolution must involve a hierarchy of morphological criteria. In developing a ‘best-fit’ hierarchy of morphological criteria for the Cyclonephelium group and its separation from ceratiaceans, we consider historical concepts, morphological variation, illustrations in the literature (especially of types) and taxonomic stability. We conclude that the most pragmatic distinguishing feature of ceratiaceans in contrast to the Cyclonephelium group (and areoligeraceans in general) is that the former possess a lateral horn or distinct prominence on the inner body or wall. The hierarchy we favour within the Cyclonephelium group (in decreasing importance) is: (i) wall structure; (ii) whether the ornament is linear or free standing; and (iii) the distribution of the ornament. As a consequence, we propose one new genus (Trimuridinium), one new species (Aptea cassis), two new names (Canningia glomerata for Senoniasphaera rotundata and Circulodinium vectensis for Pseudoceratium distinctum), 49 new combinations and one new status. We emend the descriptions/diagnoses of Aptea, Circulodinium, Cyclonephelium, Pseudoceratium, Senoniasphaera, Tenua and Tenua hystrix. Cyclonephelium-group taxa predominate in neritic marine palaeoenvir

Bone mineral density (BMD) assessed by DXA is used to evaluate bone health. In children, total body (TB) measurements are commonly used; in older individuals, BMD at the lumbar spine (LS) and femoral neck (FN) is used to diagnose osteoporosis. To date, genetic variants in more than 60 loci have been identified as associated with BMD. To investigate the genetic determinants of TB-BMD variation along the life course and test for age-specific effects, we performed a meta-analysis of 30 genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of TB-BMD including 66,628 individuals overall and divided across five age strata, each spanning 15 years. We identified variants associated with TB-BMD at 80 loci, of which 36 have not been previously identified; overall, they explain approximately 10% of the TB-BMD variance when combining all age groups and influence the risk of fracture. Pathway and enrichment analysis of the association signals showed clustering within gene sets implicated in the regulation of cell growth and SMAD proteins, overexpressed in the musculoskeletal system, and enriched in enhancer and promoter regions. These findings reveal TB-BMD as a relevant trait for genetic studies of osteoporosis, enabling the identification of variants and pathways influencing different bone compartments. Only variants in ESR1 and close proximity to RANKL showed a clear effect dependency on age. This most likely indicates that the majority of genetic variants identified influence BMD early in life and that their effect can be captured throughout the life course.

With population aging, prevalence of low bone mineral density (BMD) and associated fracture risk are increased. To determine whether low circulating thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels within the normal range are causally related to BMD, we conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study. Furthermore, we tested whether common genetic variants in the TSH receptor (TSHR) gene and genetic variants influencing expression of TSHR (expression quantitative trait loci [eQTLs]) are associated with BMD. For both analyses, we used summary-level data of genomewide association studies (GWASs) investigating BMD of the femoral neck (n = 32,735) and the lumbar spine (n = 28,498) in cohorts of European ancestry from the Genetic Factors of Osteoporosis (GEFOS) Consortium. For the MR study, we selected 20 genetic variants that were previously identified for circulating TSH levels in a GWAS meta-analysis (n = 26,420). All independent genetic instruments for TSH were combined in analyses for both femoral neck and lumbar spine BMD. In these studies, we found no evidence that a genetically determined 1-standard deviation (SD) decrease in circulating TSH concentration was associated with femoral neck BMD (0.003 SD decrease in BMD per SD decrease of TSH; 95% CI, -0.053 to 0.048; p = 0.92) or lumbar spine BMD (0.010 SD decrease in BMD per SD decrease of TSH; 95% CI, -0.069 to 0.049; p = 0.73). A total of 706 common genetic variants have been mapped to the TSHR locus and expression loci for TSHR. However, none of these genetic variants were associated with BMD at the femoral neck or lumbar spine. In conclusion, we found no evidence for a causal effect of circulating TSH on BMD, nor did we find any association between genetic variation at the TSHR locus or expression thereof and BMD. © 2018 The Authors. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research Published by WileyPeriodicals, Inc.

Graham A Williams Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science, School of Law, Policing, and Forensics, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK Abstract: Textiles damage analysis is an invaluable tool in forensic investigations and can be used to help resolve cases of stabbings, shootings, and sexual assaults. It also has the potential to resolve arson attacks and “acid attacks”. Here, the literature is explored in order to review research relating to blunt force damage, stab and slash cuts, the phenomenon of falsification of evidence in sexual assaults, projectiles damage, and the effect of decomposition upon textiles damage, among others. It is clear that there is a paucity of research in the area, but where the research has been carried out, it has been informative and impactful. However, there are areas that need further work, including a better understanding of normal wear and tear, and the potential for chemicals to cause textiles damage. One area that is in a significant need of further work is the development of a robust interpretational framework. Keywords: forensic textile damage, clothing damage analysis, fabric damage, stab cuts, decomposition, interpretation, sexual assaults

This guide was developed to define the role and responsibilities of basic skills instructors in Missouri. The manual contains basic information that should serve as a guide to basic skills instructors as they work with disadvantaged and handicapped students in vocational education programs. It attempts to identify the major concerns of basic skills instructors as determined by a needs survey completed in October 1987. The guide identifies six areas of responsibility for basic skills instructors: identification and assessment; teaching, tutoring, and testing; materials to use in basic skills programs; recordkeeping techniques; meetings and contacts; and counseling, transition, and employment. An overview of each area is followed by a list of questions that might arise along with answers to those questions. Additional resources are listed for each area in order to provide specific information and quick references. In addition, a section on postsecondary education includes information that may meet the needs of that population. A glossary and list of 13 references conclude the manual. (KC)

Aims Bacteria are considered one of the major driving forces of the mammalian decomposition process and have only recently been recognised as forensic tools. At this point, little is known about their potential use as ‘post-mortem clocks’. This study aimed to establish the proof of concept for using bacterial identification as post-mortem interval (PMI) indicators, using a multi-omics approach. Methods and results Pieces of pork were placed in the University’s outdoor facility and surface swabs were taken at regular intervals up to 60 days. Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) of the 16S rDNA was used to identify bacterial taxa. It succeeded in detecting two out of three key contributors involved in decomposition and represents the first study to reveal Vibrionaceae as abundant on decomposing pork. However, a high fraction of present bacterial taxa could not be identified by T-RFLP. Proteomic analyses were also performed at selected time points, and they partially succeeded in the identification of precise strains, subspecies and species of bacteria that colonized the body after different PMIs. Conclusion T-RFLP is incapable of reliably and fully identifying bacterial taxa, whereas proteomics could help in the identification of specific strains of bacteria. Nevertheless, microbial identification by next generation sequencing might be used as PMI clock in future investigations and in conjunction with information provided by forensic entomologists. Significance and impact of the study To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to find a cheaper and easily accessible, culture-independent alternative to high-throughput techniques to establish a ‘microbial clock’, in combination with proteomic strategies to address this issue.

Context: Hyperthyroidism is associated with increased fracture risk, but it is not clear if lower TSH and higher free thyroxine (FT4) in euthyroid individuals are associated with fracture risk.Objective: To evaluate the association of TSH and FT4 with incident fractures in euthyroid individuals.Design: Individual participant data analysis.Setting: Thirteen prospective cohort studies with baseline examinations between 1981 and 2002.Participants: Adults with baseline TSH 0.45-4.49 mIU/L.Main Outcome Measures: Primary outcome was incident hip fracture. Secondary outcomes were any, non-vertebral, and vertebral fractures. Results were presented as hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) adjusted for age and sex. For clinical relevance, we studied TSH according to five categories: 0.45-0.99mIU/L; 1.00-1.49mIU/L; 1.50-2.49mIU/L; 2.50-3.49mIU/L; 3.50-4.49mIU/L (reference). FT4 was assessed as study-specific standard deviation increase, because assays varied between cohorts.Results: During 659,059 person-years, 2,565/56,835 participants had hip fracture (4.5%; 12 studies with data on hip fracture). The pooled adjusted HR (95% CI) for hip fracture was 1.25 (1.05-1.49) for TSH 0.45-0.99mIU/L, 1.19 (1.01-1.41) for TSH 1.00-1.49mIU/L, 1.09 (0.93-1.28) for TSH 1.50-2.49mIU/L, and 1.12 (0.94-1.33) for TSH 2.50-3.49mIU/L (P for trend = 0.004). Hip fracture was also associated with FT4 (HR [95%CI] 1.22 [1.11-1.35] per one standard deviation increase in FT4). FT4 only was associated with any and non-vertebral fracture. Results remained similar in sensitivity analyses.Conclusions: Among euthyroid adults, lower TSH and higher FT4 are associated with an increased risk of hip fracture. These findings may help refine the definition of optimal ranges of thyroid function tests.

We consider contraction of convex hypersurfaces by convex speeds, homogeneous of degree one in the principal curvatures, that are not necessarily smooth. We show how to approximate such a speed by a sequence of smooth speeds for which behaviour is well known. By obtaining speed and curvature pinching estimates for the flows by the approximating speeds, independent of the smoothing parameter, we may pass to the limit to deduce that the flow by the nonsmooth speed converges to a point in finite time that, under a suitable rescaling, is round in the C^2 sense, with the convergence being exponential.

A collaborative exercise on DNA methylation based body fluid identification was conducted by seven laboratories. For this project, a multiplex methylation SNaPshot reaction composed of seven CpG markers was used for the identification of four body fluids, including blood, saliva, semen, and vaginal fluid. A total of 30 specimens were prepared and distributed to participating laboratories after thorough testing. The required experiments included four increasingly complex tasks: (1) CE of a purified single-base extension reaction product, (2) multiplex PCR and multiplex single-base extension reaction of bisulfite-modified DNA, (3) bisulfite conversion of genomic DNA, and (4) extraction of genomic DNA from body fluid samples. In tasks 2, 3 and 4, one or more mixtures were analyzed, and specimens containing both known and unknown body fluid sources were used. Six of the laboratories generated consistent body fluid typing results for specimens of bisulfite-converted DNA and genomic DNA. One laboratory failed to set up appropriate conditions for capillary analysis of reference single-base extension products. In general, variation in the values obtained for DNA methylation analysis between laboratories increased with the complexity of the required experiments. However, all laboratories concurred on the interpretation of the DNA methylation profiles produced. Although the establishment of interpretational guidelines on DNA methylation based body fluid identification has yet to be performed, this study supports the addition of DNA methylation profiling to forensic body fluid typing.

The Jurassic to Neogene (Miocene) dinoflagellate cyst genus Sentusidinium has a relatively simple overall morphology. This genus, together with Batiacasphaera, Kallosphaeridium and Pentafidia, comprises the Sentusidinium complex. This is distinct from the superficially similar laterally asymmetrical and subspheroidal/lenticular Cyclonephelium complex. The genus Sentusidinium is an acavate, subcircular, proximate to proximochorate, sexiform gonyaulacacean genus with an apical archaeopyle and typically low relief ornamentation. Since the erection of Sentusidinium in 1978, three similar genera have been established, which we consider to be taxonomic junior synonyms of that genus: Barbatacysta, Escharisphaeridia and Pilosidinium. However, we deem the Early Cretaceous to Miocene genera Batiacasphaera, Kallosphaeridium and Pentafidia are deemed to be separate from Sentusidinium. We refine the definition of the Early Cretaceous to Miocene genus Batiacasphaera to circumscribe cysts with a reticulate to rugulate autophragm and an apical archaeopyle with a free operculum. By contrast, Kallosphaeridium has a ventrally attached apical archaeopyle with five plates that can be interpreted as type (4A1I)@ or type (5A)@; it also has a small operculum relative to the overall cyst diameter. The six accepted Kallosphaeridium species are confined to the Palaeogene. The Australian genus Pentafidia is unusual in appearing to only have five precingular plates; this comprises two species from the Jurassic–Cretaceous transition of Western Australia. Therefore, we emend Sentusidinium to restrict it to acavate, proximate or proximochorate dinoflagellate cysts with an autophragm devoid of, or covered with, highly variable, non-linear ornamentation and a type (tA) apical archaeopyle. Occasionally the elements of ornamentation may be connected, but rarely is a cingulum indicated, and the tabulation is never clearly evident. A kalyptra may be occasionally present. The operculum is free. Following

ImportanceAssociations between subclinical thyroid dysfunction and fractures are unclear and clinical trials are lacking.ObjectiveTo assess the association of subclinical thyroid dysfunction with hip, nonspine, spine, or any fractures.Data sources and study selectionThe databases of MEDLINE and EMBASE (inception to March 26, 2015) were searched without language restrictions for prospective cohort studies with thyroid function data and subsequent fractures.Data extractionIndividual participant data were obtained from 13 prospective cohorts in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Levels of thyroid function were defined as euthyroidism (thyroid-stimulating hormone [TSH], 0.45-4.49 mIU/L), subclinical hyperthyroidism (TSH <0.45 mIU/L), and subclinical hypothyroidism (TSH ≥4.50-19.99 mIU/L) with normal thyroxine concentrations.Main outcome and measuresThe primary outcome was hip fracture. Any fractures, nonspine fractures, and clinical spine fractures were secondary outcomes.ResultsAmong 70,298 participants, 4092 (5.8%) had subclinical hypothyroidism and 2219 (3.2%) had subclinical hyperthyroidism. During 762,401 person-years of follow-up, hip fracture occurred in 2975 participants (4.6%; 12 studies), any fracture in 2528 participants (9.0%; 8 studies), nonspine fracture in 2018 participants (8.4%; 8 studies), and spine fracture in 296 participants (1.3%; 6 studies). In age- and sex-adjusted analyses, the hazard ratio (HR) for subclinical hyperthyroidism vs euthyroidism was 1.36 for hip fracture (95% CI, 1.13-1.64; 146 events in 2082 participants vs 2534 in 56,471); for any fracture, HR was 1.28 (95% CI, 1.06-1.53; 121 events in 888 participants vs 2203 in 25,901); for nonspine fracture, HR was 1.16 (95% CI, 0.95-1.41; 107 events in 946 participants vs 1745 in 21,722); and for spine fracture, HR was 1.51 (95% CI, 0.93-2.45; 17 events in 732 participants vs 255 in 20,328). Lower TSH was associated with higher fracture rates: for TSH of less than 0.10 mIU/L

IMPORTANCE: Associations between subclinical thyroid dysfunction and fractures are unclear and clinical trials are lacking.OBJECTIVE: To assess the association of subclinical thyroid dysfunction with hip, nonspine, spine, or any fractures.DATA SOURCES AND STUDY SELECTION: The databases of MEDLINE and EMBASE (inception to March 26, 2015) were searched without language restrictions for prospective cohort studies with thyroid function data and subsequent fractures.DATA EXTRACTION: Individual participant data were obtained from 13 prospective cohorts in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Levels of thyroid function were defined as euthyroidism (thyroid-stimulating hormone [TSH], 0.45-4.49 mIU/L), subclinical hyperthyroidism (TSH <0.45 mIU/L), and subclinical hypothyroidism (TSH ≥4.50-19.99 mIU/L) with normal thyroxine concentrations.MAIN OUTCOME AND MEASURES: The primary outcome was hip fracture. Any fractures, nonspine fractures, and clinical spine fractures were secondary outcomes.RESULTS: Among 70,298 participants, 4092 (5.8%) had subclinical hypothyroidism and 2219 (3.2%) had subclinical hyperthyroidism. During 762,401 person-years of follow-up, hip fracture occurred in 2975 participants (4.6%; 12 studies), any fracture in 2528 participants (9.0%; 8 studies), nonspine fracture in 2018 participants (8.4%; 8 studies), and spine fracture in 296 participants (1.3%; 6 studies). In age- and sex-adjusted analyses, the hazard ratio (HR) for subclinical hyperthyroidism vs euthyroidism was 1.36 for hip fracture (95% CI, 1.13-1.64; 146 events in 2082 participants vs 2534 in 56,471); for any fracture, HR was 1.28 (95% CI, 1.06-1.53; 121 events in 888 participants vs 2203 in 25,901); for nonspine fracture, HR was 1.16 (95% CI, 0.95-1.41; 107 events in 946 participants vs 1745 in 21,722); and for spine fracture, HR was 1.51 (95% CI, 0.93-2.45; 17 events in 732 participants vs 255 in 20,328). Lower TSH was associated with highe

This paper is concerned with the variation and standard deviation of recurrence times in discrete dynamical systems.

We consider contraction of convex hypersurfaces by convex speeds, homogeneous of degree one in the principal curvatures, that are not necessarily smooth. We show how to approximate such a speed by a sequence of smooth speeds for which behaviour is well known. By obtaining speed and curvature pinching estimates for the flows by the approximating speeds, independent of the smoothing parameter, we may pass to the limit to deduce that the flow by the nonsmooth speed converges to a point in finite time that, under a suitable rescaling, is round in the C² sense, with the convergence being exponential.

Inspired by earlier results on the quasilinear mean curvature flow, and recent investigations of fully nonlinear curvature flow of closed hypersurfaces which are not convex, we consider contraction of axially symmetric hypersurfaces by convex, degree-one homogeneous fully nonlinear functions of curvature. With a natural class of Neumann boundary conditions, we show that evolving hypersurfaces exist for a finite maximal time. The maximal time is characterised by a curvature singularity at either boundary. Some results continue to hold in the cases of mixed Neumann-Dirichlet boundary conditions and more general curvature-dependent speeds.

Abrupt lateral changes in thrust geometry occur in many mountain-building fold-and-thrust belts. Whilst many works have dealt with palinspastic reconstructions and transport-direction-parallel balanced cross-sections, far fewer show a full three-dimensional architecture, or examine how these lateral variations in thrust architecture can be linked via so-called ‘transverse zones’ that demarcate different segments of the thrust belt. When identified, these transverse zones are commonly thought to be related to kinematic responses to irregularities generated across pre-existing, sometimes re-activated, sub-décollement basement faults, contrasts in pre-thrusting cover strata deformation across basement faults, development of duplex structures/antiformal stacks, and/or along-strike variations in mechanical stratigraphy. In many cases however the causative structure is concealed, either by distal parts of the thrust belt or by the foreland basin and so must be deduced from the overall structural architecture (Krabbendam & Leslie, 2010).