A genome-wide association study for celiac disease identifies risk variants in the region harboring IL2 and IL21

We tested 310,605 SNPs for association in 778 individuals with celiac disease and 1,422 controls. Outside the HLA region, the most significant finding (rs13119723; P = 2.0 x 10(-7)) was in the KIAA1109-TENR-IL2-IL21 linkage disequilibrium block. We independently confirmed association in two further collections (strongest association at rs6822844, 24 kb 5' of IL21; meta-analysis P = 1.3 x 10(-14), odds ratio = 0.63), suggesting that genetic variation in this region predisposes to celiac disease.     

Association scan of 14,500 nonsynonymous SNPs in four diseases identifies autoimmunity variants

We have genotyped 14,436 nonsynonymous SNPs (nsSNPs) and 897 major histocompatibility complex (MHC) tag SNPs from 1,000 independent cases of ankylosing spondylitis (AS), autoimmune thyroid disease (AITD), multiple sclerosis (MS) and breast cancer (BC). Comparing these data against a common control dataset derived from 1,500 randomly selected healthy British individuals, we report initial association and independent replication in a North American sample of two new loci related to ankylosing spondylitis, ARTS1 and IL23R, and confirmation of the previously reported association of AITD with TSHR and FCRL3. These findings, enabled in part by increased statistical power resulting from the expansion of the control reference group to include individuals from the other disease groups, highlight notable new possibilities for autoimmune regulation and suggest that IL23R may be a common susceptibility factor for the major 'seronegative' diseases.     

Optimal maintenance and replacement of extraction machinery

This paper considers a problem of optimal preventive maintenance and replacement schedule of equipment devoted to extracting resources from known deposits. Typical examples are oil drills, mine shovels, etc. At most one replacement of the existing machinery by a new one is allowed. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem subject to the state constraint that the remaining deposit at any given time is nonnegative. We show that the optimal preventive maintenance, production rates, and the replacement and salvage times of the existing machinery and the new one, if required, can be obtained by solving sequentially a series of free-end-point optimal control problems. Moreover, an algorithm based on this result is developed and used to solve two illustrative examples.     

从人工生命到人工社会--复杂社会系统研究的现状和展望

介绍了人工社会研究工作的内容、方法及其思想基础，并对其应用和未来趋势进行展望。文中简述了社会学研究的历史阶段、主要问题和困难，人工生命和人工社会方法的有效性，并着重描述了Epstein和Axtell的工作，以及相应的涌现方法在复杂社会系统研究中的中心作用。本文还讨论了目前对人工社会方法的各种批判意见及其回应。     

Immigration, emigration and the ageing of the overseas-born population in the United Kingdom

This article uses data from the 1971 and 2001 Censuses, the 1999-2003 Labour Force Survey and the 1977 to 2002 International Passenger Survey to investigate the migration processes contributing to the age structure and ageing of the UK's overseas-born population. Overall almost half of recent decades' immigrants to the UK emigrate again within five years of arrival, but with large variation by overseas country of birth. Between half and two thirds of the immigrants born in the continental European Union, North America and Oceania emigrate again within five years, while 15 per cent of those born in the Indian subcontinent do so. Significant cumulative emigration more than five years after arrival is seen among earlier immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean Commonwealth and Europe. Large country-of-origin variations in the ratio of pension-age population to working-age population primarily reflect the country composition of immigration streams 30 or more years before.     

Simultaneous care for parents and care for children among mid-life British women and men

This article investigates care provided to parents and parents-in-law by mid-life adults with dependent children at home. Data from the General Household Survey are used first to estimate the prevalence of this 'two-way' care over the past decade, and second to develop forecasts of two-way care for a generation of women who have just finished their childbearing years. Having a higher education qualification is associated with later ages both of caring for parents and of having children at home. Increasingly late first childbearing, however, points towards a potentially greater caring 'squeeze' for higher-qualified women, with a little over 1 in 10 at age 45 projected to be caring for a parent while still having a child under 18 in the household.