Association of Chromosome 9p21 with Subsequent Coronary Heart Disease events:A GENIUS-CHD study of individual participant data

BACKGROUND:Genetic variation at chromosome 9p21 is a recognized risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD). However, its effect on disease progression and subsequent events is unclear, raising questions about its value for stratification of residual risk. METHODS:A variant at chromosome 9p21 (rs1333049) was tested for association with subsequent events during follow-up in 103,357 Europeans with established CHD at baseline from the GENIUS-CHD Consortium (73.1% male, mean age 62.9 years). The primary outcome, subsequent CHD death or myocardial infarction (CHD death/MI), occurred in 13,040 of the 93,115 participants with available outcome data. Effect estimates were compared to case/control risk obtained from CARDIoGRAMPlusC4D including 47,222 CHD cases and 122,264 controls free of CHD. RESULTS:Meta-analyses revealed no significant association between chromosome 9p21 and the primary outcome of CHD death/MI among those with established CHD at baseline (GENIUS-CHD OR 1.02; 95% CI 0.99-1.05). This contrasted with a strong association in CARDIoGRAMPlusC4D OR 1.20; 95% CI 1.18-1.22; p for interaction Conclusions: In contrast to studies comparing individuals with CHD to disease free controls, we found no clear association between genetic variation at chromosome 9p21 and risk of subsequent acute CHD events when all individuals had CHD at baseline. However, the association with subsequent revascularization may support the postulated mechanism of chromosome 9p21 for promoting atheroma development

Quantum Spacetime Phenomenology

I review the current status of phenomenological programs inspired by quantum-spacetime research. I stress in particular the significance of results establishing that certain data analyses provide sensitivity to effects introduced genuinely at the Planck scale. And my main focus is on phenomenological programs that managed to affect the directions taken by studies of quantum-spacetime theories.Comment: 125 pages, LaTex. This V2 is updated and more detailed than the V1, particularly for quantum-spacetime phenomenology. The main text of this V2 is about 25% more than the main text of the V1. Reference list roughly double

Asymptotically optimal open-loop load balancing

In many distributed computing systems, stochastically arriving jobs need to be assigned to servers with the objective of minimizing waiting times. Many existing dispatching algorithms are basically included in the SQ(d) framework: Upon arrival of a job, d≥2 servers are contacted uniformly at random to retrieve their state and then the job is routed to a server in the best observed state. One practical issue in this type of algorithm is that server states may not be observable, depending on the underlying architecture. In this paper, we investigate the assignment problem in the open-loop setting where no feedback information can flow dynamically from the queues back to the controller, i.e., the queues are unobservable. This is an intractable problem, and unless particular cases are considered, the structure of an optimal policy is not known. Under mild assumptions and in a heavy-traffic many-server limiting regime, our main result proves the optimality of a subset of deterministic and periodic policies within a wide set of (open-loop) policies that can be randomized or deterministic and can be dependent on the arrival process at the controller. The limiting value of the scaled stationary mean waiting time achieved by any policy in our subset provides a simple approximation for the optimal system performance

I Principi Contabili per le Pubbliche Amministrazioni: statuizione, riconoscimento e applicazione nel contesto italiano e internazionale

Negli ultimi anni il tema della modernizzazione della contabilità e della finanza pubblica è stato al centro del dibattito economico, politico e istituzionale. In tale campo possono oggi identificarsi alcuni problemi e tendenze di fondo: l’affermarsi del concetto di performance anche nel mondo pubblico; il frequente passaggio dalla contabilità finanziaria, che caratterizza tradizionalmente il settore delle Pubbliche Amministrazioni, a una contabilità economico-patrimoniale; la crescente importanza in chiave europea del sistema di contabilità nazionale (SEC 95) e il suo complesso rapporto con la contabilità pubblica; la necessaria ricerca di coerenza tra i bilanci e i dati finanziari dei vari livelli del settore pubblico; i processi nazionali e internazionali di standardizzazione delle regole dei sistemi contabili pubblici (cfr. l’International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board – IPSASB); l’affacciarsi di nuovi strumenti di monitoraggio della finanza pubblica (cfr. il SIOPE) e di nuovi approcci al controllo contabile e amministrativo. Ideale prosecuzione del Convegno Internazionale organizzato dal Ciramap a Ferrara nel 2003, e con la presenza di significative personalità istituzionali italiane ed estere, il Convegno di Roma si candida quale un’occasione significativa per avviare una riflessione ad ampio spettro sui nuovi ruoli della contabilità nelle Pubbliche Amministrazioni, sulle sue regole, sulle forme innovative di management e governance che ne scaturiscono, in un’ottica interna e internazionale