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Background Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (Y-SNPs) are useful markers for reconstructing male lineages, haplogroup determinations, and paternity identifications. Since Y chromosome lacks recombination, the haplogroups of this series show a greater extent of diverse genome-specific geographical distributions and these haplogroups have been found to play a major role in forensic investigations and population genetics. Materials and methods The present study is aimed at determining the Y chromosomal phylogeny of two southeast coastal Indian tribal populations (Porja and Savara; N = 217), using a set of 15 bi-allelic markers on the non-recombining region of Y chromosome, representing two Austro-Asiatic (AA) language speaking populations. Results and conclusions The phylogenetic analysis revealed four paternal haplogroups, viz., H1*-M52, H1a*-M82, O2a*-M95, and R2-M124, with high frequency (84.79%) represented by the Austro-Asiatic-specific haplogroup O2a* (M95), confirming to the fact of O2a* haplogroup being the paternal signature of AA language family of Southeast Asians.

Aggregate advertising—presenting a single ad to large groups of individuals through traditional media such as television and print—presents a unique challenge to measuring efficacy because treatment and outcome are observed from two disparate sources (interaction and revenue realization). In this work, we propose a Bayesian model to estimate the impact of an ad on observable web metrics that are readily available in many modern analytics suites. The proposed model controls for three sources of possible confounding: the time, geography, and content of the advertisement. The proposed model is easily applicable to a wide variety of problems and readily generates error bounds for the estimates. We evaluate our approach on a real dataset for a set of TV ads for an advertiser.

We present an interactive user interface that allows digital marketing professionals to have real time access to insights from a back-end AI that predicts potential click-through rates of composed content based on similar past campaigns. We wanted to investigate the extent to which digital marketing professionals would find our system usable and useful and whether or not the advice our system generated would create content that had higher click through rates than content developed without the system's advice. Our framework decomposes aspects of prior campaigns into features including image quality, memorability, and placement; and text readability, formality and sentiment. We show our algorithm has high predictive value on a historical test set (AUC .80); that digital marketing professionals give the system an overall high satisfaction rating and that, using the advice of the AI agent, we can generate content that creates up to 22% click-through rate lift on a 700 A/B preference tasks given to master workers on AMT.

The suddenly and unexpectedly originated COVID-19 pandemic has divulged a radical transformation in society, economy of a nation, normal performances of human life but at the same time it has unlocked the ventilation to nature and environment which has fetched a fresh air propel towards it.

Many users communicate with chatbots and AI assistants in order to help them with various tasks. A key component of the assistant is the ability to understand and answer a user's natural language questions for question-answering (QA). Because data can be usually stored in a structured manner, an essential step involves turning a natural language question into its corresponding query language. However, in order to train most natural language-to-query-language state-of-the-art models, a large amount of training data is needed first. In most domains, this data is not available and collecting such datasets for various domains can be tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a novel method for accelerating the training dataset collection for developing the natural language-to-query-language machine learning models. Our system allows one to generate conversational multi-term data, where multiple turns define a dialogue session, enabling one to better utilize chatbot interfaces. We train two current state-of-the-art NL-to-QL models, on both an SQL and SPARQL-based datasets in order to showcase the adaptability and efficacy of our created data., Comment: Accepted at ACL-NLI 2020

Mitochondria is an intracellular double-membraned organelle that exists inside each nucleated cell of mammals. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is a tiny 16.6 kilobase (kb) dsDNA circle coding 13 critical respirational chain components. The displacement loop (D-Loop) of mtDNA or control region is a noncoding region with 1.1 kb size that controls molecule transcription and replication. The D-Loop includes three short regions with a highly variable population sequence relative to the rest of the genome: a hypervariable HVS-I, HVS-II, and a HVS-III. mtDNA is strongly preserved, and it is recombined with what would be similar copies of itself when it is recombined. However, the mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA is tenfold greater than the DNA of the nucleus. This property makes the creation of species extremely useful in the matrilineal line for several generations and utilized in several forensic investigations. Therefore, mitochondrial DNA profiling is one of the most important tools in maternal dispute and child swapping cases.

SNP is the abbreviation for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) which occurs at particular site in the genome as variant of single nucleotide. These variations are represented in different population and individuals to some considerable degree. The presence of SNPs is ubiquitous not only in human genome but also among some plants and microorganisms like bacteria. The popularity of SNPs among forensic researchers has been fascinated due to their capable advantages in parentage testing. SNPs have low mutation rates and are very capable in the identification and examination of degraded samples with small amplicons. SNPs provide valuable information on geographical origin and individual identification of unknown humans, plants and microorganisms samples.

Bonding is an integral part of orthodontic treatment. Orthodontic bonding could be accomplished without the use of primer, it might be possible to reduce the risk of occupational exposure to primer and will save time. So it is very important to know whether primer is required or not.The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the shear bond strength (SBS) of metallic and ceramic brackets bonded with and without primer application and to check for residual adhesive post debonding.A total of 100 extracted human premolar teeth were divided into 2 main groups A and B which were further subdivided into: Group A1 - metallic brackets bonded with primer; Group A2 - ceramic brackets bonded with primer; Group B1 - metallic brackets bonded without primer; group B2 - ceramic brackets bonded without primer. The SBS of these brackets was measured.The SBS of group A2 was significantly higher than the other groups, group A1 was the second highest, group B3 was the third highest and group B4 was the least significant. The adhesive remnant index was lowest on failure of ceramic brackets bonded with primer.SBS of ceramic brackets bonded without primer is superior to SBS of metallic bracket bonded without primer and metallic brackets bonded with primer was superior than metallic bonded without primer.

We report here the first ever global study on genetic polymorphism using a Verifiler Plus

Email messages have been an important mode of communication, not only for work, but also for social interactions and marketing. When messages have time sensitive information, it becomes relevant for the sender to know what is the expected time within which the email will be read by the recipient. In this paper we use a survival analysis framework to predict the time to open an email once it has been received. We use the Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) model that offers a way to combine various features that might affect the event of opening an email. As an extension, we also apply a mixture model (MM) approach to CoxPH that distinguishes between recipients, based on a latent state of how prone to opening the messages each individual is. We compare our approach with standard classification and regression models. While the classification model provides predictions on the likelihood of an email being opened, the regression model provides prediction of the real-valued time to open. The use of survival analysis based methods allows us to jointly model both the open event as well as the time-to-open. We experimented on a large real-world dataset of marketing emails sent in a 3-month time duration. The mixture model achieves the best accuracy on our data where a high proportion of email messages go unopened., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, WSDM'18, February 5-9, 2018, Marina Del Rey, CA, USA, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3159683

DNA, the operating element of the genes, brings the coded notes of inheritance in every single surviving thing: animals, plants, bacteria, and other microorganisms. Within human beings, the information-bringing DNA arises in each cell having nucleus, including cells surrounding hair roots, spermatozoa, white blood corpuscles, and salivary cells. These would be the cells of utmost significance in forensic investigations. DNA testing has countless prospective advantages for civil and criminal justice; in spite of this, because of the likelihood for its mishandling or abuse, vital issues have been mentioned about trustworthiness, authenticity, and privacy. The methods of DNA testing are results of the innovation in molecular biology that is generating an increase of knowledge about human genetics. The greatly personal and complex info that can be developed by DNA testing involves firm and meticulous knowledge of genetic basis of testing methods.

We report here the first ever global study on genetic polymorphism using a Verifiler PlusTM autosomal STR multiplex system. The study evaluated genetic characteristics of 23 autosomal STRs in 200 unrelated residents of Guna district of Madhya Pradesh, India. Allele frequencies and forensic parameters are reported. Population comparison analysis was also performed using NJ tree and PCA plot. Penta E marker showed highest power of discrimination (0.938) among all 23 studied markers. The study also presents the first ever global forensic assessment in Indian population on D6S1043 marker (PD 0.937). The results demonstrated that all the 23 markers were highly polymorphic and the Verifiler PlusTM kit is suitable for forensic purposes in Indian population.

Engagement of consumers has become increasingly important for online marketers. When a potential consumer arrives on its online platform and interacts with it, two important and interrelated questions arise. One whether the consumer is engaged in the session or has completed the session. Two, upon completion of a session whether the consumer will return to the site. Real time answers to both these questions benefit the marketer directly by facilitating more effective retargeting, determination of which is a significant problem in online commerce. We address this problem of retargeting by using automated predictive models. Our model allows a marketer to decide in a real time manner whether a click is the last click of the session. Then the model identifies real time the consumer's propensity to return when the session actually ends. This propensity is used to decide whether and whom to retarget with a message. Tests of our model on real data from internet e-commerce sites perform well. The proposed approach is a considerable improvement over the current approach of having to wait for a pre-specified amount of time after a click, in order to identify the end of the session.

Background and Purpose—Genomewide DNA linkage analysis identified a susceptibility locus for intracranial aneurysm (IA) on chromosome 19q13 in the Finnish population, a region including the kallikrein gene cluster. We investigated the association of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the kallikrein gene cluster with IA in the Finnish population.Methods—We genotyped 18 haplotype-tagging SNPs spanning a 244 kbp region in the kallikrein gene cluster for 266 Finnish IA cases and 290 Finnish control subjects. In a second phase, we genotyped 2 SNPs (rs1722561 and rs1701946) in an additional set of 102 Finnish IA cases and 102 Finnish control subjects; and in a third phase, we genotyped these 2 SNPs in 156 Russian IA cases and 186 Russian control subjects. Both single-marker and haplotype-based tests of association were performed.Results—In phase I, SNPs rs1722561 and rs1701946 were significantly associated with IA in the Finnish population for single locus models (rs1722561:P=0.0395; rs1701946:P=0.0253). A 2-SNP haplotype block (rs1722561–rs1701946) identified in phase I was also associated with IA in the expanded Finnish (phase II) data set (asymptoticP=0.012; empiricalP=0.019). In the Finnish and Russian combined data set (phase III) with 524 cases and 578 control subjects, the same 2 SNPs (OR: 1.35, 95% CI: 1.14, 1.60;P=0.0005 for rs1722561 and OR: 1.32, 95% CI: 1.12, 1.57;P=0.0011 for rs1701946) were significantly associated with IA. These SNPs are located in the intronic region ofKLK8, although linkage disequilibrium could extend from rs268912–rs2250066, a ≈76-kbp region that includes KLK5–KLK10.Conclusions—Polymorphisms within the kallikrein gene cluster are associated with IA suggesting that the kallikreins are important candidate genes for IA.

Online social media is all pervasive in this digitally connected world. It provides a great platform to share information and news, and have public discussions on these topics. These interactions happen on owned-sites as well as on earned social media. But it is reasonable to hypothesize that the communities on the various platforms will engage differently. We explore this hypothesis using data collected from a blog as well as their Facebook page. We observe significant differences between the blog and Facebook as two mediums. First, we see how the topic of the post leads to differences in how posts are received on the two mediums. We next characterize the distribution of the time to comments, displaying how blog and Facebook differ. Finally, we describe how the sentiment of posts and popular entities differ across mediums. In conclusion, reactions across the two mediums are so diverse that it calls for different strategies across different social mediums, we provide our recommendations towards this goal.

Objective: p Values are inaccurate for model-free linkage analysis using the conditional logistic model if we assume that the LOD score is asymptotically distributed as a simple mixture of chi-square distributions. When analyzing affected relative pairs alone, permuting the allele sharing of relative pairs does not lead to a useful permutation distribution. As an alternative, we have developed regression prediction models that provide more accurate p values. Methods: Let Eα be the empirical p value, which is the proportion of statistical tests whose LOD score under the null hypothesis exceeds a threshold determined by α, the nominal single test significance value. We used simulated data to obtain values of Eα and compared them with α. We also developed a regression model, based on sample size, number of covariates in the model, α and marker density, to derive predicted p values for both single-point and multipoint analyses. To evaluate our predictions we used another set of simulated data, comparing the Eα for these data with those obtained by using the prediction model, referred to as predicted p values (Pα). Results: Under almost all circumstances the values of Pα were closer to the Eα than were the values of α. Conclusion: The regression models suggested by our analysis provide more accurate alternative p values for model-free linkage analysis when using the conditional logistic model.

Background Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) are characterized by histologic signs of chronic inflammation, destructive remodeling of extracellular matrix, and depletion of vascular smooth muscle cells. We investigated the process of extracellular matrix remodeling by performing a genetic association study with polymorphisms in the genes for matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs), and structural extracellular matrix molecules in AAA. Our hypothesis was that genetic variations in one or more of these genes contribute to greater or lesser activity of these gene products, and thereby contribute to susceptibility for developing AAAs. Methods DNA samples from 812 unrelated white subject (AAA, n=387; controls, n=425) were genotyped for 14 polymorphisms in 13 different candidate genes: MMP1(nt-1607), MMP2(nt-955), MMP3(nt-1612), MMP9(nt-1562), MMP10(nt+180), MMP12(nt-82), MMP13(nt-77), TIMP1(nt+434), TIMP1(rs2070584), TIMP2(rs2009196), TIMP3(nt-1296), TGFB1(nt-509), ELN(nt+422), and COL3A1(nt+581). Odds ratios and P values adjusted for gender and country of origin using logistic regression and stratified by family history of AAA were calculated to test for association between genotype and disease status. Haplotype analysis was carried out for the two TIMP1 polymorphisms in male subjects. Results Analyses with one polymorphism per test without interactions showed an association with the two TIMP1 gene polymorphisms (nt+434, P = .0047; rs2070584, P = .015) in male subjects without a family history of AAA. The association remained significant when analyzing TIMP1 haplotypes (χ 2 P = .014 and empirical P = .009). In addition, we found a significant interaction between the polymorphism and gender for MMP10 ( P = .037) in cases without a family history of AAA, as well as between the polymorphism and country of origin for ELN ( P = .0169) and TIMP3 ( P = .0023) in cases with a family history of AAA. Conclusions These findings suggest that genetic variations in TIMP1, TIMP3, MMP10, and ELN genes may contribute to the pathogenesis of AAAs. Further work is needed to confirm the findings in an independent set of samples and to study the functional role of these variants in AAA. It is noteworthy that contrary to a previous study, we did not find an association between the MMP9 (nt-1562) polymorphism and AAA, suggesting genetic heterogeneity of the disease. Clinical Relevance Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) are an important cardiovascular disease, but the genetic and environmental risk factors, which contribute to individual's risk to develop an aneurysm, are poorly understood. Histologically, AAAs are characterized by signs of chronic inflammation, destructive remodeling of the extracellular matrix, and depletion of vascular smooth muscle cells. We hypothesized that genes involved in these events could harbor changes that make individuals more susceptible to developing aneurysms. This study identified significant genetic associations between DNA sequence changes in tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase 1 (TIMP1), TIMP3, matrix metalloproteinase 10 (MMP10) and elastin (ELN) genes, and AAA. The results will require confirmation using an independent set of samples. After replication it is possible that these sequence changes in combination with other risk factors could be used in the future to identify individuals who are at increased risk for developing an AAA.

Highly polymorphic nature of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) at the level of population having precise variants of mtDNA influences function mitochondria. Promising confirmation that mechanism at mitochondrial are vital to commonly occurred human diseases, it is believable that variants of mtDNA became a factor to the “missing heritability” of various multifaceted traits. mtDNA genes plays a essential task of oxidative phosphorylation, the alike genetic variants likely to modify the chance of developing a number of diverse disorders, but to date this has not been shown and explained in systematic manner. Numerous facts suggest that mitochondria plays key role in ageing-associated neurodegenerative disorders. Furthermore, haplogroups of mitochondria are related to several aspects of medicine, from habitual ageing to diseases, together with neurodegeneration. Mitochondrial genome polymorphisms might cause troubled generation of energy and leads to formation of large amount of reactive oxygen species, having capability of either susceptibility or shielding role in multiple diseases. In the present review, we emphasize the function of the mitochondrial haplogroups in the pathogenetic rise cause of diseases.

Plants and their parts as naturally contain huge number of biologically active chemicals. From these biologically found chemicals some have been traced out for very much useful for treating different human and animal diseases (eg. Digitoxin, Colchines and Atropine). Although some chemical constituents of plants produces adverse health effects. The chemical substances present in plants are quite different in nature. There are a huge number of different categories of toxicologically considerable plant chemical constituents. Some of the reported plants may also be used as therapeutic purposes also. Among these thousand numbers of plants present in the environment, few are only reported to cause acute, life threatening when ingested orally or by other means. These constituents include alkaloids, proteins, glycosides and resins. The present article focuses on collecting the facts regarding poisonous plants, toxic constituents and their chemical tests for Forensic examinations. The article describes about the various poisonous chemical constituents of the plants. Scattered literature and in depth knowledge of the plants chemical constituents, analysis methods of poisonous chemical constituents have been collected from different sources to make this review useful to all specialists of different disciplines. In this effort commonly used poisonous plants are included with their chemical constituents which are used as weapon of crime.

In the mouth of human and animals a watery substance produces called saliva which is thick, colorless opalescent fluid secreted by salivary glands. In humans saliva is composed of 99.5% of water, 0.5% consists of electrolytes, WBCs, epithelial cells, enzymes, lysozymes, and mucus and antimicrobial agents. In the present study saliva stains and tobacco chewed saliva stains on different fabrics viz. silk, polyester, linen, jute, cotton, georgette, sarton were examined using starch Iodine test. The saliva samples with and without tobacco chewed samples taken in different clothes and examined with starch Iodine test. The starch Iodine test was found to give Positive results for saliva stains and tobacco chewed saliva stains on different fabrics, and it was also found that the stains on different fabrics gives positive results for saliva even after washing with water, but none of the fabrics gave positive results for saliva after washing with detergents. The ability of a fabric to retain stains of saliva after washing depends not only upon the chemistry and manufacturing of the fabrics but also upon the time of immersion of the fabric with water and detergent and also the method adapted to remove the stain from the fabrics. It is thus concluded that the enzyme present in saliva stick/adhere the fabrics which is generally not removed even after immersing in water and gives positive results where as the use of detergents on different fabrics removes the stains completely and fails to give result for saliva stains.

Plant hormones are the chemicals that control plant growth. They play a crucial role in controlling the way in which plants grow and develop. Today, because the effects of plant growth regulators (PGRs) on plants are well known, they are used widely in agriculture. Whip super (Fenoxaprop-p-ethyl), Miraculan (Tricontanol), Lihocin (Chloromequat), Safal (Carbendazim) are some of the plant growth regulators which were examined for the present study. Thin layer chromatography analysis was performed to determine the retention factor of different plant growth hormones with different solvent system and spraying reagents at Department of Forensic Science, Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur, (C.G.). It was found that Methanol: Water (80: 20), Methanol: Water (60: 40), Benzene: Toluene (50: 50) and Toluene: Acetic Acid (90: 10) solvent system showed better potential in separating the components of Plant Growth Hormones. In spraying reagents O-Dianisidine and Ferric Chloride reagents showed excellent potential for developing spots of Plant Growth Hormones which will be usefull for routine examination of sample.

The introduction of chromatographic methods for the comparison of writing inks had a major impact on the detection of fraudulent documents. Subtle alterations to documents such as tax returns, wills, insurance claims and divorce settlements, can have significant financial implications. The detection of alterations or additions to a document and an assessment of when the document was written has therefore become a prime concern of document examiners and ink chemist. Thin Layer Chromatography is the most successful method for examination of ink. In this study ten different brands of ball point pens were taken to study the variations such as color, tint, and feathering, fluidity of ink and retention factor of ink. The results show variation with the passage of time which could be helpful in detection of forgery and could use as comparative study with the suspect sample. Thus, the changing parameters play an important document cases.

Clustering of related haplotypes in haplotype-based association mapping has the potential to improve power by reducing the degrees of freedom without sacrificing important information about the underlying genetic structure. We have modified a generalized linear model approach for association analysis by incorporating a density-based clustering algorithm to reduce the number of coefficients in the model. Using the GAW 15 Problem 3 simulated data, we show that our novel method can substantially enhance power to detect association with the binary rheumatoid arthritis (RA) phenotype at the HLA-DRB1 locus on chromosome 6. In contrast, clustering did not appreciably improve performance at locus D, perhaps a consequence of a rare susceptibility allele and of the overwhelming effect of HLA-DRB1/locus C, 5 cM distal. Optimization of parameters governing the clustering algorithm identified a set of parameters that delivered nearly ideal performance in a variety of situations. The cluster-based score test was valid over a wide range of haplotype diversity, and was robust to severe departures from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium encountered near HLA-DRB1 in RA case-control samples.

To the Editor: The use of data on self-reported race in health research has been highly debated.1,2 For example, Burchard et al. recently argued that important information on disease susceptibility...

The simultaneous testing of a large number of hypotheses in a genome scan, using individual thresholds for significance, inherently leads to inflated genome-wide false positive rates. There exist various approaches to approximating the correct genomewidep-values under various assumptions, either by way of asymptotics or simulations. We explore a philosophically different criterion, recently proposed in the literature, which controls the false discovery rate. The test statistics are assumed to arise from a mixture of distributions under the null and non-null hypotheses. We fit the mixture distribution using both a nonparametric approach and commingling analysis, and then apply the local false discovery rate to select cut-off points for regions to be declared interesting. Another criterion, the minimum total error, is also explored. Both criteria seem to be sensible alternatives to controlling the classical type I and type II error rates.

Roux-en-Y bypass surgery is the most common bariatric procedure currently performed in the United States for medically complicated obesity. Although this leads to a marked and sustained weight loss, we have identified an increasing number of patients with episodes of nephrolithiasis afterwards. We describe a case series of 60 patients seen at Mayo Clinic-Rochester that developed nephrolithiasis after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB), including a subset of 31 patients who had undergone metabolic evaluation in the Mayo Stone Clinic. The mean body mass index of the patients before procedure was 57 kg/m(2) with a mean decrease of 20 kg/m(2) at the time of the stone event, which averaged 2.2 years post-procedure. When analyzed, calcium oxalate stones were found in 19 and mixed calcium oxalate/uric acid stones in two patients. Hyperoxaluria was a prevalent factor even in patients without a prior history of nephrolithiasis, and usually presented more than 6 months after the procedure. Calcium oxalate supersaturation, however, was equally high in patients less than 6 months post-procedure due to lower urine volumes. In a small random sampling of patients undergoing this bypass procedure, hyperoxaluria was rare preoperatively but common 12 months after surgery. We conclude that hyperoxaluria is a potential complicating factor of RYGB surgery manifested as a risk for calcium oxalate stones.