Health, psychosocial factors and retirement intentions among Finnish physicians

Background Early retirement among physicians is a worldwide problem and all efforts to try to minimize it are of importance.

Socioeconomic position, co-occurrence of behavior-related risk factors, and coronary heart disease: the Finnish public sector study

Objectives. We examined the associations between socioeconomic position, co-occurrence of behavior-related risk factors, and the effect of these factors on the relative and absolute socioeconomic gradients in coronary heart disease.

IQ-motif selectivity in human IQGAP2 and IQGAP3: binding of calmodulin and myosin essential light chain

The IQGAP [IQ-motif-containing GAP (GTPase-activating protein)] family members are eukaryotic proteins that act at the interface between cellular signalling and the cytoskeleton. As such they collect numerous inputs from a variety of signalling pathways. A key binding partner is the calcium-sensing protein CaM (calmodulin). This protein binds mainly through a series of IQ-motifs which are located towards the middle of the primary sequence of the IQGAPs. In some IQGAPs, these motifs also provide binding sites for CaM-like proteins such as myosin essential light chain and S100B. Using synthetic peptides and native gel electrophoresis, the binding properties of the IQ-motifs from human IQGAP2 and IQGAP3 have been mapped. The second and third IQ-motifs in IQGAP2 and all four of the IQ-motifs of IQGAP3 interacted with CaM in the presence of calcium ions. However, there were differences in the type of interaction: while some IQ-motifs were able to form complexes with CaM which were stable under the conditions of the experiment, others formed more transient interactions. The first IQ-motifs from IQGAP2 and IQGAP3 formed transient interactions with CaM in the absence of calcium and the first motif from IQGAP3 formed a transient interaction with the myosin essential light chain MIc1sa. None of these IQ-motifs interacted with S100B. Molecular modelling suggested that all of the IQ-motifs, except the first one from IQGAP2 formed alpha-helices in solution. These results extend our knowledge of the selectivity of IQ-motifs for CaM and related proteins.

Changing Climate, Human Evolution, and the Revival of Environmental Determinism

The role of climatic change in determining the shape of human evolution,
a theme that came to prominence during the early years of the twentieth
century, has resurfaced with renewed vigor. The author examines the rise and
resurgence of the modern history of the idea that hominid evolutionary pathways
have been triggered by climatic causes to illustrate the continuing vitality of environmental determinism and to highlight some continuities between early-twentieth century and contemporary archaeoanthropology.

Rao-blackwellized particle filter for human appearance and position tracking

In human motion analysis, the joint estimation of appearance, body pose and location parameters is not always tractable due to its huge computational cost. In this paper, we propose a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter for addressing the problem of human pose estimation and tracking. The advantage of the proposed approach is that Rao-Blackwellization allows the state variables to be splitted into two sets, being one of them analytically calculated from the posterior probability of the remaining ones. This procedure reduces the dimensionality of the Particle Filter, thus requiring fewer particles to achieve a similar tracking performance. In this manner, location and size over the image are obtained stochastically using colour and motion clues, whereas body pose is solved analytically applying learned human Point Distribution Models.