Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a Web application that provides instant access to thousands of potential participants for survey-based psychology experiments, such as the acceptability judgment task used extensively in syntactic theory. Because AMT is a Web-based system, syntacticians may worry that the move out of the experimenter-controlled environment of the laboratory and onto the user-controlled environment of AMT could adversely affect the quality of the judgment data collected. This article reports a quantitative comparison of two identical acceptability judgment experiments, each with 176 participants (352 total): one conducted in the laboratory, and one conducted on AMT. Crucial indicators of data quality—such as participant rejection rates, statistical power, and the shape of the distributions of the judgments for each sentence type—are compared between the two samples. The results suggest that aside from slightly higher participant rejection rates, AMT data are almost indistinguishable from laboratory data

Motivational Factors Affecting Ticket to Work Utilization: A Pilot Investigation

Interventions that increase work participation by Social Security Administration beneficiaries and recipients are necessary to ensure the longevity of the disability benefits system and to improve the quality of life of people with severe disabilities. To be effective, these strategies must address motivational factors influencing return-to-work behavior such as perceived probability of successful return, utility of work, and personal cost of return-to-work efforts. This article presents the perceptions of 51 participants in the Social Security Ticket to Work program regarding their a) plans for returning to work within a year, b) current financial situation, and c) barriers to return-to-work efforts.</jats:p

Pleasant Bayou Operations Brazoria County, Texas

This project will demonstrate the Hybrid Cycle Concept for electricity generation using geopressured-geothermal resources. The test is scheduled to be a minimum of one year, which may be extended. The majority of the equipment came from the DOE facility at East Mesa, CA. The hybrid cycle has been designed for 10,800 BPD brine and 220,000 SCFD of gas. The power output will be about one megawatt, which will be sold to Houston Lighting and Power Company. An important research objective is to determine the size and ultimate production capability of the geopressured-geothermal reservoir. The long-term deliverability of these type reservoirs is a significant factor in determining the ultimate economic capability of these systems