Fresh News; The Farmers' Market Newsletter, Winter-Spring 2002

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship

Disseny i implementació d'un marc de treball (framework) de presentació per aplicacions J2EE

Disseny d'un framework per a la capa de presentació en projectes Java Empresarials J2EE.

Disseny i implementació d'un framework de persistència

El present PFC requereix l'anàlisi i desenvolupament d'un conjunt de components que simplifiquin i agilitzin el desenvolupament de la capa de persistència en aplicacions multicapa en entorn JEE.

Disseny i implementació d'un framework de presentació per al desenvolupament d'aplicacions J2EE

El projecte de fi de carrera se centra en el disseny d'un marc de treball per a la capa de presentació pel desenvolupament d'aplicacions en tecnologia J2EE.

Desenvolupament J2EE de framework de capa de presentació

El present document proposa un framework de presentació de disseny i implementació propis desenvolupat amb J2EE.

Gender inequality in health among elderly people in a combined framework of socioeconomic position, family characteristics and social support

This study analyses gender inequalities in health among elderly people in Catalonia (Spain) by adopting a conceptual framework that globally considers three dimensions of health determinants : socio-economic position, family characteristics and social support. Data came from the 2006 Catalonian Health Survey. For the purposes of this study a sub-sample of people aged 65–85 years with no paid job was selected (1,113 men and 1,484 women). The health outcomes analysed were self-perceived health status, poor mental health status and long-standing limiting illness. Multiple logistic regression models separated by sex were fitted and a hierarchical model was fitted in three steps. Health status among elderly women was poorer than among the men for the three outcomes analysed. Whereas living with disabled people was positively related to the three health outcomes and confidant social support was negatively associated with all of them in both sexes, there were gender differences in other social determinants of health. Our results emphasise the importance of using an integrated approach for the analysis of health inequalities among elderly people, simultaneously considering socio-economic position, family characteristics and social support, as well as different health indicators, in order fully to understand the social determinants of the health status of older men and women.

International Update Spring 2005

International Events, Education Events, and Exporting Opportunities

Iowa African-American Journal, Spring 2004, Vol. 9, no. 1

Newsletter for the Iowa Commission on the Status of African-Americans

Iowa Aviation Bulletin, Spring 2005

Quarterly newsletter published by the Iowa Department of Transportation's Office of Aviation that contains information of interest to aviation-related persons and organizations.

Knowledge management for systems biology a general and visually driven framework applied to translational medicine

Background: To enhance our understanding of complex biological systems like diseases we need to put all of the available data into context and use this to detect relations, pattern and rules which allow predictive hypotheses to be defined. Life science has become a data rich science with information about the behaviour of millions of entities like genes, chemical compounds, diseases, cell types and organs, which are organised in many different databases and/or spread throughout the literature. Existing knowledge such as genotype - phenotype relations or signal transduction pathways must be semantically integrated and dynamically organised into structured networks that are connected with clinical and experimental data. Different approaches to this challenge exist but so far none has proven entirely satisfactory. Results: To address this challenge we previously developed a generic knowledge management framework, BioXM™, which allows the dynamic, graphic generation of domain specific knowledge representation models based on specific objects and their relations supporting annotations and ontologies. Here we demonstrate the utility of BioXM for knowledge management in systems biology as part of the EU FP6 BioBridge project on translational approaches to chronic diseases. From clinical and experimental data, text-mining results and public databases we generate a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) knowledge base and demonstrate its use by mining specific molecular networks together with integrated clinical and experimental data. Conclusions: We generate the first semantically integrated COPD specific public knowledge base and find that for the integration of clinical and experimental data with pre-existing knowledge the configuration based set-up enabled by BioXM reduced implementation time and effort for the knowledge base compared to similar systems implemented as classical software development projects. The knowledgebase enables the retrieval of sub-networks including protein-protein interaction, pathway, gene - disease and gene - compound data which are used for subsequent data analysis, modelling and simulation. Pre-structured queries and reports enhance usability; establishing their use in everyday clinical settings requires further simplification with a browser based interface which is currently under development.

Iowa Railroad Ties Newsletter, Spring 2005

Quarterly newsletter prepared by the Iowa Department of Transportation's Office of Rail Transportation.

Convention-cadre pour la lutte antitabac: un instrument puissant de santé publique. [The Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC): a powerful public health instrument].

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) isa global and comprehensive legal framework for reducing demand for tobacco (e.g. price measures; ban on smoking in enclosed places; contents of tobacco products; packaging and labeling; advertising, promotion and sponsorship; liability, tobacco cessation, etc.) and supply (e.g. illicit trade; sales to/by minors, etc.). Adopted in 2003, the FCTC has been ratified by 174 countries so far. Switzerland has signed the treaty in 2004 but ratification will necessitate the implementation of stronger tobacco control measures at the national level. The FCTC is a priority of any strategy to reduce noncommunicable diseases in populations. Broad implementation of the FCTC has the potential to prevent a substantial proportion of the billion of tobacco-related deaths expected in the 21st

Autumnal vs spring hatching in the fairy shrimp Siphonophanes grubii (Dybowski) (Crustacea, Anostraca): diversified bet-hedging strategy ?

Polyphenisms, as opposed to polymorphism, refers to coexistence of several distinct phenotypes having a common genotype. Polyphenism can be selected for in unpredictable environments. Here we document and anlyse a case of siphenism in the north-European fairy shrinp Siphonophanes grubii (Dybowski), in relation to the temporary and unpredictable nature of its habitat. The active part of this species'life cycle usually consists of a single, short-lived, spring cohort. Here we report field observations on autumnal hatching and on a long-lived, overwintering cohort; we show that the winter cohort runs the risk of total failure, due to the pond freezing entirely or drying up during winter. If, however, environmental conditions allow winter survival, animals reach a larger size, reproduce for a longer time, and display higher fecundity, than do animals from the spring cohort. Laboratory experiments support the theory that these differences are purely phenotypic and dependent on temperatur. Using an analytical model adapted from Cohen (1966), we propose that the coexistence of both a winter and a spring cohort in the same ponds can be interpreted as a diversified bet-hedging strategy.

Monitoring of illicit pill distribution networks using an image collection exploration framework

This paper proposes a novel approach for the analysis of illicit tablets based on their visual characteristics. In particular, the paper concentrates on the problem of ecstasy pill seizure profiling and monitoring. The presented method extracts the visual information from pill images and builds a representation of it, i.e. it builds a pill profile based on the pill visual appearance. Different visual features are used to build different image similarity measures, which are the basis for a pill monitoring strategy based on both discriminative and clustering models. The discriminative model permits to infer whether two pills come from the same seizure, while the clustering models groups of pills that share similar visual characteristics. The resulting clustering structure allows to perform a visual identification of the relationships between different seizures. The proposed approach was evaluated using a data set of 621 Ecstasy pill pictures. The results demonstrate that this is a feasible and cost effective method for performing pill profiling and monitoring.

Responsive Management Report, Winter/Spring 2001

Newsletter produced by Iowa Department of Natural Resources.