Cigarette smoking is a serious risk factor for cancer, cardiovascular, and pulmonary diseases. Current methods of monitoring of cigarette smoking habits rely on various forms of self-report that are prone to errors and underreporting. This paper presents a first step in the development of a methodology for accurate and objective ...

The goal of any parentage analysis is to identify as many parent-offspring relationships as possible, while minimizing incorrect assignments. Existing methods can achieve these ends, but they require additional information in the form of demographic data, thousands of markers and/or estimates of genotyping error rates. For many non-model systems, it ...

PURPOSE: The aims of the study were to evaluate the orthogonality of acculturation for Latinos. DESIGN: Regression analyses were used to examine acculturation in two Latino samples (N = 77; N = 40). In a third study (N = 673), confirmatory factor analyses compared unidimensional and bidimensional models. Method: Acculturation ...

REASONS FOR PERFORMING STUDY: The pathogenesis of osteochondrosis (OC) and palmar/plantar first phalanx osteochondral fragments (POFs) is multifactorial, but specific knowledge of heritability is limited. OBJECTIVES: To improve the precision of heritability estimates and to estimate the genetic correlation between tarsocrural OC and POFs in Standardbred trotters. Further aims were ...

Screening for emotional and behavioral risk has become more prevalent with young children; however, not much is known about the latent structure for many of the brief instruments currently being used to assess children. Information concerning the latent structure of an instrument is necessary to support use of the scoring ...

The drug purchase task is a frequently used instrument for measuring the relative reinforcing efficacy (RRE) of a substance, a central concept in psychopharmacological research. Although a purchase task instrument, such as the cigarette purchase task (CPT), provides a comprehensive and inexpensive way to assess various aspects of a drug's ...

There has been considerable discussion in recent years on the evolution of the tandemly repeated multigene families, since some organisms show a concerted model whereas others show a birth-and-death model. This controversial subject extends to several species of fish. In this study, three species of the Sparidae family (Pagrus pagrus, ...

In this study, the cumulative margin of exposure (MOE) was estimated for a group of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) using reduction of hepatic vitamin A as a mode-of-action relevant toxicological endpoint. The MOE was defined as the ratio between a reference dose, derived using the benchmark dose (BMD) approach, and the ...

In many industries, a national accident investigation board conducts investigations following major accidents. For safety improvements to be achieved, however, it is essential that the recommendations presented in these investigations are followed by necessary actions. In this paper, challenges related to implementation of recommendations from accident investigations are studied. The ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Socioeconomic variables are associated with mortality and morbidity in a variety of diseases at both the individual and neighborhood level. Investigating whether low socioeconomic status populations are exposed to higher air pollution has been an important objective for the scientific community during the last decade. The goal of ...

This study explored the relationships between maternal modelling of eating behaviours with reported symptoms of maternal eating psychopathology, anxiety and depression. Mothers (N = 264) with a child aged 1.5 to 8 years completed three self-report measures designed to assess modelling of eating behaviours, eating psychopathology and levels of anxiety and depression. The ...

Population sex ratio is an important metric for wildlife management and conservation, but estimates can be difficult to obtain, particularly for sexually monomorphic species or for species that differ in detection probability between the sexes. Noninvasive genetic sampling (NGS) using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has become a common method for ...

Post mortem interval estimation is crucial in forensic sciences for both positive identification and reconstruction of perimortem events. However, reliable dating of skeletonized remains poses a scientific challenge since human remains decomposition involves a set of complex and highly variable processes. Many of the difficulties in determining post mortem interval ...

A warmer climate may increase the risk of attacks by insect pests on agricultural crops, and questions on how to adapt management practice have created a need for impact models. Phenological models driven by climate data can be used for assessing the potential distribution and voltinism of different insect species, ...

Thyroid hormones produced by the thyroid gland help regulation of the body's metabolism. A variety of methods have been proposed in the literature for thyroid disease classification. As far as we know, clustering techniques have not been used in thyroid diseases data set so far. This paper proposes a comparison ...

The Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ) is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring self-reported driving behaviors. Despite the popularity of the DBQ, the applicability of the DBQ in different driver groups has remained mostly unexamined. The present study measured aberrant driving behavior using the original DBQ (Reason, J.T., ...

A generally accepted and validated laboratory model for smoking-associated pulmonary tumorigenesis would be useful for both basic and applied research applications, such as the development of early diagnostic endpoints or the evaluation of modified risk tobacco products, respectively. The A/J mouse is susceptible for developing both spontaneous and induced lung ...

Population viability analysis (PVA) is widely used to assess the extinction risk of threatened species and to evaluate different management strategies. However, conventional PVA neglects important biotic interactions and therefore can fail to identify important threatening processes. We designed a new PVA approach that includes species interactions explicitly by networking ...

SUMMARY Aggregated distributions among individual hosts are a defining feature of metazoan parasite populations. Heterogeneity among host individuals in exposure to parasites or in susceptibility to infection is thought to be the main factor generating aggregation, with properties of parasites themselves explaining some of the variability in aggregation levels observed ...

Considerable variation exists not only in the kinds of transposable elements (TEs) occurring within the genomes of different species, but also in their abundance and distribution. Noting a similarity to the assortment of organisms among ecosystems, some researchers have called for an ecological approach to the study of transposon dynamics. ...

Granger causality is a useful concept for studying causal relations in networks. However, numerical problems occur when applying the corresponding methodology to high-dimensional time series showing co-movement, e.g. EEG recordings or economic data. In order to deal with these shortcomings, we propose a novel method for the causal analysis of ...

Most previous studies have failed to replicate the original factor structure of the 26-item version of the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) among community samples of adolescents. The main objective of the present series of four studies (n = 2178) was to revisit the factor structure of this instrument among mixed gender community ...

SUMMARY The range of hosts used by a parasite is influenced by macro-evolutionary processes (host switching, host-parasite co-evolution), as well as 'encounter filters' and 'compatibility filters' at the micro-evolutionary level driven by host/parasite ecology and physiology. Host specialization is hypothesized to result in trade-offs with aspects of parasite life history ...

The purpose of the present study was to examine the construct validity of the Hungarian language version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS). A sample of 653 healthcare professionals (420 physicians and 233 nurses and nursing assistants) completed the MBI-HSS. A series of confirmatory factor analyses showed that ...

The evolution of cooperation is a persistent problem for evolutionary biologists. In particular, understanding of the factors that promote the expression of helping behaviour in cooperatively breeding species remains weak, presumably because of the diverse nature of ecological and demographic drivers that promote sociality. In this study, we use data ...

High-dimensionality of data and the small sample size problem are two significant limitations for applying subspace methods which are favored by face recognition. In this paper, a new linear dimension reduction method called locally uncorrelated discriminant projections (LUDP) is proposed, which addresses the two problems from a new aspect. More ...

Several market research studies have shown that consumers are primarily concerned with the provenance of the food they eat. Among the available identification methods, only DNA-based techniques appear able to completely prevent frauds. In this study, a new method to discriminate among different bovine breeds and assign new individuals to ...

A mathematical model is described for estimating changes in plasma 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) levels throughout the year as a consequence of varying the oral intake of vitamin D and the behaviour outdoors of white British adults resident in different regions of the UK. The model yields seasonal and geographical patterns ...

At present, most estuarine ecological risk studies are based on terrestrial ecosystem models, which ignore spatial heterogeneity. The Daliao River estuary has representative characteristics of many estuaries in China, and we used this estuary as the study area to formulate an estuarine ecological risk evaluation model. Targeting the estuary's special ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Population inference is an important problem in genetics used to remove population stratification in genome-wide association studies and to detect migration patterns or shared ancestry. An individual's genotype can be modeled as a probabilistic function of ancestral population memberships, Q, and the allele frequencies in those populations, P. ...

Understanding the influence of external information at a lower level of awareness during the processes of route selection could be a key factor to predict user's movements within complex buildings, avoiding wayfinding problems and improving egress in emergency situations. This study aims to verify whether corridor intersection configuration attributes, such ...

Business Intelligence (BI) has caused extensive concerns and widespread use in gathering, processing and analyzing data and providing enterprise users the methodology to make decisions. Different from traditional BI architecture, this paper proposes a new BI architecture, Top-Down Scalable BI architecture with defining mechanism for enterprise decision making solutions and ...

Knowing the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of new mutations is important for several topics in evolutionary genetics. Existing computational methods to infer the DFE from DNA polymorphism data have frequently assumed that the DFE can be approximated by a unimodal distribution, such as a lognormal or a gamma distribution. ...

Structural variations in human genomes, such as deletions, play an important role in cancer development. Next-Generation Sequencing technologies have been central in providing ways to detect such variations. Methods like paired-end mapping allow to simultaneously analyze data from several samples in order to, e.g., distinguish tumor from patient specific variations. ...

BACKGROUND: Identifying the genetic variants that contribute to disease susceptibilities is important both for developing methodologies and for studying complex diseases in molecular biology. It has been demonstrated that the spectrum of minor allelic frequencies (MAFs) of risk genetic variants ranges from common to rare. Although association studies are shifting ...

BACKGROUND: Little national evidence is available on spatial disparities in distributions of parks and green spaces in the USA. PURPOSE: This study examines ecological associations of spatial access to parks and green spaces with percentages of black, Hispanic, and low-income residents across the urban-rural continuum in the conterminous USA. METHODS: ...

A major problem for inferring species trees from gene trees is that evolutionary processes can sometimes favour gene tree topologies that conflict with an underlying species tree. In the case of incomplete lineage sorting, this phenomenon has recently been well-studied, and some elegant solutions for species tree reconstruction have been ...

BACKGROUND: There is an emerging perspective that it is not sufficient to just assess skin exposure to physical and chemical stressors in workplaces, but that it is also important to assess the condition, i.e. skin barrier function of the exposed skin at the time of exposure. The workplace environment, representing ...

Adaptive dynamics theory has been devised to account for feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes. Doing so opens new dimensions to and raises new challenges about evolutionary rescue. Adaptive dynamics theory predicts that successive trait substitutions driven by eco-evolutionary feedbacks can gradually erode population size or growth rate, thus potentially ...

The ability of a pathogen to cause an epidemic when introduced in a new host population often relies on its ability to adapt to this new environment. Here, we give a brief overview of recent theoretical and empirical studies of such evolutionary emergence of pathogens. We discuss the effects of ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: New technology has resulted in high-throughput screens for pairwise genetic interactions in yeast and other model organisms. For each pair in a collection of non-essential genes, an epistasis score is obtained, representing how much sicker (or healthier) the double-knockout organism will be compared to what would be expected ...

We report two methods for linkage disequilibrium mapping that involve incorporation of covariates through parametric modeling to utilize combined case-parent trios and unrelated case and/or control data. The proposed two combined methods were used to map the disease locus of hypertension in the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) gene with incorporation of ...

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data are routinely obtained by sequencing a region of interest in a small panel, constructing a chip with probes specific to sites found to vary in the panel, and using the chip to assay subsequent samples. The size of the chip is often reduced by removing ...

CONTEXT: Studies on the influence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on drug pharmacokinetics (PK) have usually been limited to the analysis of observed drug concentration or area under the concentration versus time curve. Nonlinear mixed effects models enable analysis of the entire curve, even for sparse data, but until recently, ...

Background: A chronic disease such as asthma is the result of a complex sequence of biological interactions involving multiple genes and pathways in response to a multitude of environmental exposures. However, methods to model jointly all factors are still evolving. Some of the current challenges include how to integrate knowledge ...

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common musculoskeletal disease, affecting millions of individuals worldwide. New treatment approaches require an understanding of the pathophysiology of OA and its biomechanical, inflammatory, genetic, and environmental risk factors. The purpose of animal models of OA is to reproduce the pattern and progression of degenerative damage ...

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Satisfaction with Food-related Life (SWFL) scale and its relation to the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) in southern Chile. METHODS: A survey was applied to a sample of 316 persons in the principal cities of southern Chile distributed with proportional attachment per ...

When faced with categorical predictors and a continuous response, the objective of an analysis often consists of two tasks: finding which factors are important and determining which levels of the factors differ significantly from one another. Often times, these tasks are done separately using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) followed by ...

PURPOSE: Multiple group analysis is used to determine whether the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) model developed by Wilson and Cleary (1995) is equivalent across racial categories. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, this study compares racial groups (African American vs. White; Hispanic ...

Oil transport has strongly increased in the Gulf of Finland over the years and risks of an oil accident occurring have rose. Thus, an effective oil combating strategy is needed. We developed a Bayesian Network (BN, Figures 2 and 3) to examine the recovery efficiency and optimal disposition of the ...