div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/4d/d1/0009d14d.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/4d/d1/0009d14d_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_643405"//a/divbr/ div class="center"b Michael Hattaway "Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature" /bbr/ Wiley-Blackwell | 2006-01-09 | ISBN: 1405100443 | 264 pages | PDF | 1,5 MB /div

iCancer, Vol. 103, No. 8. (2005), pp. 1540-1550./ibr /br /African-American women have had a lower incidence, yet higher mortality rate from breast cancer compared with White-American women. African-American women also have had a higher risk for early-onset, high-grade, node-positive, and hormone receptor-negative disease. Similar features have characterized hereditary breast cancer, prompting speculation that risk factors could be genetically transmitted. Further evaluation of this theory required the study of breast cancer among women from sub-Saharan Africa because of their shared ancestry with African-American women.Publications from 1988 to 2004 of English-language literature on breast cancer in Africa were reviewed.Women from sub-Saharan Africa were found to have a low incidence of breast cancer. This was partly explained by a largely protective reproductive history, including late menarche, early menopause, high parity with prolonged breastfeeding, irregular menses, and fewer ovulatory cycles. The average age at diagnosis, however, was approximately 10 years younger than breast cancer patients of western nations, and disease stage distribution was shifted toward more advanced disease, which resulted in higher mortality rates. These features were found to be similar to data on breast cancer in African-American women. Mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been reported in African-American women, but the extent of the contribution of BRCA1 and BRCA2 to breast cancer burden in Africa was uncertain. Limited financial resources lead to suboptimal cancer data collection, as well as delayed diagnosis and treatment of many African breast cancer patients.Parallels between breast cancer burdens of African-American and sub-Saharan-African women were provocative, indicating the need for further exploration of possible genetically transmitted features related to estrogen metabolism and/or breast cancer risk. Cancer 2005. © 2005 American Cancer Society.

Despite sagging paperback sales in the publishing industry, romance novels -- and particularly a href="http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2008-04-01/onufrak-henlit"hen lit/a -- fiction featuring older female heroines -- are thriving. In 2006, according to Romance Writers of America, 26.4% of all books sold were romances, generating $1.37 billion in sales. In hen lit aka a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matron_literature"Matron literature/a, heroines typically are over-40, widowed grandmothers whose romance yearnings are secondary to family, work, and hobbies. br /

iMolecular phylogenetics and evolution, Vol. 36, No. 2. (August 2005), pp. 214-223./ibr /br /We describe a Bayesian approach to estimate phylogeny and ancestral genome arrangements on the basis of genome arrangement data using a model in which gene inversion is the sole mechanism of change. While we have described a similar method to estimate phylogenetic relationships in the statistics literature, the novel contribution of the present work is the description of a method to compute probability distributions of ancestral genome arrangements. We assess the robustness of posterior distributions to different specifications of prior distributions and provide an empirical means to selecting a prior distribution. We note that parsimony approaches to ancestral reconstruction in the literature focus on the development of computationally efficient algorithms for searching for optimal ancestral genome arrangements, but, unlike Bayesian approaches, do not include assessment of uncertainty in these estimates. We compare and contrast a Bayesian approach with a parsimony approach to infer phylogenies and ancestral arrangements from genome arrangement data by re-analyzing a number of previously published data sets.

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/ba/cd/0009cdba.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/ba/cd/0009cdba_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_642490" alt="Religion and Anthropology"//a/divbr/ div class="center"bBrian Morris, "Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction"/bbr/ Cambridge University Press (2005) | English | ISBN: 0521617790 | 363 pages | PDF | 1.84 MB/divbr/ This book provides a readable, comprehensive and critical introduction to the extensive anthropological literature on religion that has been produced over the past forty years. It focuses on well-known, substantive ethnographic studies, specifically those which have embraced the dual heritage of social anthropology.

Posted by Dennis Sellers

The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), which is the world’s largest collection of children’s literature available freely on the Internet, has released the ICDL for iPhone application.

Motivation: Most genotyping technologies for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers use standard clustering methods to ‘call’ the SNP genotypes. These methods are not always optimal in distinguishing the genotype clusters of a SNP because they do not take advantage of specific features of the genotype calling problem. In particular, when family data are available, pedigree information is ignored. Furthermore, prior information about the distribution of the measurements for each cluster can be used to choose an appropriate model-based clustering method and can significantly improve the genotype calls. One special genotyping problem that has never been discussed in the literature is that of genotyping of trisomic individuals, such as individuals with Down syndrome. Calling trisomic genotypes is a more complicated problem, and the addition of external information becomes very important.

Results: In this article, we discuss the impact of incorporating external information into clustering algorithms to call the genotypes for both disomic and trisomic data. We also propose two new methods to call genotypes using family data. One is a modification of the K-means method and uses the pedigree information by updating all members of a family together. The other is a likelihood-based method that combines the Gaussian or beta-mixture model with pedigree information. We compare the performance of these two methods and some other existing methods using simulation studies. We also compare the performance of these methods on a real dataset generated by the Illumina platform (www.illumina.com).

Availability: The R code for the family-based genotype calling methods (SNPCaller) is available to be downloaded from the following website: http://watson.hgen.pitt.edu/register.

Contact: liny@upmc.edu

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Motivation: Cell lines are used extensively in biomedical research, but the nomenclature describing cell lines has not been standardized. The problems are both linguistic and experimental. Many ambiguous cell line names appear in the published literature. Users of the same cell line may refer to it in different ways, and cell lines may mutate or become contaminated without the knowledge of the user. As a first step towards rationalizing this nomenclature, we created a cell line knowledgebase (CLKB) with a well-structured collection of names and descriptive data for cell lines cultured in vitro. The objectives of this work are: (i) to assist users in extracting useful information from biomedical text and (ii) to highlight the importance of standardizing cell line names in biomedical research. This CLKB contains a broad collection of cell line names compiled from ATCC, Hyper CLDB and MeSH. In addition to names, the knowledgebase specifies relationships between cell lines. We analyze the use of cell line names in biomedical text. Issues include ambiguous names, polymorphisms in the use of names and the fact that some cell line names are also common English words. Linguistic patterns associated with the occurrence of cell line names are analyzed. Applying these patterns to find additional cell line names in the literature identifies only a small number of additional names. Annotation of microarray gene expression studies is used as a test case. The CLKB facilitates data exploration and comparison of different cell lines in support of clinical and experimental research.

Availability: The web ontology file for this cell line collection can be downloaded at http://www.stateslab.org/data/celllineOntology/cellline.zip.

Contact: dstates@umich.edu

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/20/cc/0009cc20.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/20/cc/0009cc20_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_642080"//a/divbr/ div class="center"b Matthew Boyd Goldie “Middle English Literature: A Historical Sourcebook" /bbr/ Wiley-Blackwell | 2003-07-16 | ISBN: 0631231471 | 344 pages | PDF | 2,7 MB /div