355 research outputs found
The contradictory Chinese media in the name of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”
No full textFor the past 30 years, the Chinese communication system has experienced tremendous changes, which have brought it from the ultimate "propaganda machine" to a striking contradictory mix of capitalist neoliberalism and socialist authoritarian ideological indoctrination. Since the central hypothesis of my research focuses on the fact that socialist Chinese media are undergoing capitalist neoliberal operations, the American communication system, a very typical capitalist neoliberal corporate media system, is contextualized. The thesis intends to explore the current Chinese communication system, media phenomena, and media practices that have manifested contradictions. I also attempt to find out the underlying drive to propel the historical transformation of the Chinese media. I will employ political economy of communication to theorize and ground my research. In order to lend further support to my argument, I will delineate a case study: Xinwen Lianbo, a national news program on China Central Television (CCTV). Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) will be used to investigate the TV news discourse- 'Xinwen Lianbo'
Statistical issues in protein microarray analysis
No full textProtein microarrays have emerged as a technology that has led to a new era of proteomics. Although protein microarray experiments allow the simultaneous study of hundreds or thousands of proteins in a high-throughput fashion, they also have a variety of experimental and statistical issues that need to be addressed. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop statistical methods to address the design and analysis issues, e.g., the selection of functionally consistent proteins and the identification of differentially expressed proteins. Since protein structures are usually not as stable as DNA molecules, the selection of functionally consistent proteins is an essential preliminary step in the fabrication of protein microarrays, Toward this end, a novel semi-nonparametric mixture model is proposed to classify functionally consistent proteins and functionally inconsistent proteins. The expression of functionally consistent proteins is then assessed under experimental conditions using microarray technology. Identifying differentially expressed proteins across different experimental conditions is the motivation for many protein microarray experiments. The many statistical approaches for identifying differentially expressed proteins range from parametric to nonparametric. Parametric methods often require strong distributional assumptions from the data, and while nonparametric methods are robust they may not be powerful. To balance the tradeoff between parametric and nonparametric approaches, a novel semi-nonparametric method for detecting differentially expressed proteins is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate the power of the semi-nonparametric approach as significantly higher than the nonparametric empirical Bayes approach while requiring minimal distributional assumptions
A Semi-Nonparametric Mixture Model for Selecting Functionally Consistent Proteins.
No full textBackground
High-throughput technologies have led to a new era of proteomics. Although protein microarray experiments are becoming more common place there are a variety of experimental and statistical issues that have yet to be addressed, and that will carry over to new high-throughput technologies unless they are investigated. One of the largest of these challenges is the selection of functionally consistent proteins. Results
We present a novel semi-nonparametric mixture model for classifying proteins as consistent or inconsistent while controlling the false discovery rate and the false non-discovery rate. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to current methods via simulation under a variety of experimental conditions. Conclusions
We provide a statistical method for selecting functionally consistent proteins in the context of protein microarray experiments, but the proposed semi-nonparametric mixture model method can certainly be generalized to solve other mixture data problems. The main advantage of this approach is that it provides the posterior probability of consistency for each protein
Towards dynamic integration and scheduling of scientific applications
No full textInternational audienc
A framework for dynamic deployment of scientific applications based on WSRF
No full textInternational audienc
Technical Note: Is radiation important for the high amplitude variability of the MOC in the North Atlantic?
No full textInternational audienceRadiation is of fundamental importance to climate modeling and it is customary to assume that it is also important for the variability of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation and the meridional overturning cell (MOC). Numerous articles follow this scenario and incorporate radiation into the calculation. Using relatively old heat-flux maps based on measurements taken in the nineteen sixties, Sandal and Nof (2007) recently suggested that, even though the radiation terms are of the same order as the other heat-flux terms, they are not important for the variability of the NADW and the MOC. They proposed that only sensible and latent heat fluxes are important for the long-term variability of the convection, i.e., for processes such as Heinrich events, which supposedly correspond to turning convection on-and-off in the Atlantic. Here, we place this suggestion on a firmer ground by presenting new and accurate up-to-date heat flux maps that also suggest that the radiation is of no major consequence to the NADW variability. Also, we attribute the relative importance of sensible and latent heat fluxes and the contrasting negligible role of radiation to the fact that the latent and sensible heat fluxes are primarily proportional to the difference between the sea surface and the air temperature whereas the radiation is primarily proportional to the sea surface temperature, i.e., radiation is approximately independent of the atmospheric temperature. Due the small heat capacity ratio of air/water (1/4), the difference between the ocean temperature and the air temperature varies dramatically between the state of active and inactive MOC, whereas the ocean temperature by itself varies very modestly between a state of active and inactive convection
Genetic variants in thyroid cancer distant metastases
No full textThyroid carcinoma is the most rapidly increasing solid tumor in the United States; although there has been a great emphasis on the analysis of primary tumors, predictors of both late-stage progression and response to therapy are more poorly defined due in part to the scarcity of progressive metastatic tissues. Therapeutic evidence of mixed responses in metastatic lesions and the limited available genomic data suggest that distant metastases in thyroid cancer are heterogeneous, driven by known oncogenes and other pathways that also might be therapeutic targets. We analyzed the genomes of a small number of rare surgically resected metastatic thyroid cancer lesions along with paired normal and primary tumor samples when available, in an effort to better characterize progressive distant metastases. The findings confirm the presence of mutations to known tumor drivers (BRAF and RAS) in metastatic samples. The results also identified the co-occurrence in predicted functional variants to the DNA damage repair (DDR) genes ATM and ERCC4 in metastatic lesions that did not show alterations of the MAPK pathway.
We examined the exomes of 19 samples (including 5 paired normal tissues) from 11 follicular cell-derived thyroid cancer patients with surgically resected distant metastases by custom exomeSeq (Supplementary Materials and Methods, see section on supplementary data given at the end of this article). Tumors with different histopathologies were included and were confirmed by an expert thyroid pathologist (PW). All patients were treated with TSH suppression, eight of them received I-131 therapy and none of them received chemotherapy or kinase inhibitors. Overall, 19,299 unique variants in the 682 genes and genomic regions were identified by an exomeSeq custom panel. We sought to identify rare, conserved, exonic variants that were likely to have functional effects. Thus, we focused on 1742 exonic variants in exons of sequenced genes. We excluded synonymous variants and ..
Towards dynamic integration, scheduling and rescheduling of scientific applications
No full textInternational audienceThe evolution of grid computing generates new requirements for distributed application development and deployment. There is no standard way of registering these applications, describing their input parameters and output results and monitoring their progress in the Grid environment. The Web Services Architecture (WSA) is an ideal technology to integrate legacy applications into the Grid. Adopting this service-oriented architecture, a model is implemented to achieve the dynamic deployment, scheduling and rescheduling of scientific applications. The model treats all components (Resource Service and Service Scheduler) as WSRF-compliant services which support the applications integration with underlying native platform facilities and facilitate the construction of the hierarchical scheduling system
Service scheduling and rescheduling in an applications integration framework
No full textInternational audienc
An On-Chip Self-Characterization of a Digital-to-Time Converter by Embedding it in a First-Order ΔΣ Loop
No full textTo characterize an on-chip programmable delay in a low-cost and high-resolution manner, a built-in self-test based on a first-order ΔΣ time-to-digital converter with self-calibration is proposed and implemented in TSMC 28-nm CMOS. The system is self-contained, and only one digital clock is needed for the measurements. A system self-calibration algorithm is proposed to calibrate nonlinearities of the analog circuitry. The operation is robust over PVT variations since the delay information is normalized to the input clock period. To verify the proposed idea, two different digital-to-time converters performing the on-chip delay are measured and analyzed at 50-MHz clocking frequency with 0.65-ps standard time deviation per measurement.Electronic
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