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Distant Relationships (distant + relationships)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Life Sciences	40%

Selected Abstracts

Social Capital and the Interplay of Families and Schools

JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY, Issue 2 2004
Robert Crosnoe
Families and schools are two primary sources of social capital in the early life course. This study examines the degree to which these different contexts overlap to shape adolescent development. Multilevel modeling on nationally representative data (n = 11,927) revealed that emotionally distant relationships with parents were associated with declining academic achievement over 2 years of secondary schooling and that various aspects of the social environments of schools were associated with increasing academic achievement during this same period. Additionally, adolescents who had more social capital at home often benefited more from social capital at school. [source]

All in the family: Evaluation of the process and content of sisters' communication about BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic test results,

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF MEDICAL GENETICS, Issue 2 2002
Chanita Hughes
Abstract Despite the potential importance of family communication, little is known about the process and content of communicating BRCA1/2 test results to relatives. The objectives of this observational study were to describe the process and content of communicating BRCA1/2 test results to sisters, and to evaluate whether the proband's carrier status influenced communication outcomes. Participants were 43 women who were the first family member to have genetic testing (probands). Probands reported on communication outcomes for 81 sisters. Process and content variables were evaluated 1-month after receipt of BRCA1/2 test results using the Family Communication Questionnaire (FCQ). Overall, BRCA1/2 test results were communicated to 85% of sisters, and carriers communicated their results to significantly more sisters compared to uninformative (96% vs. 76%, FET,=,0.02). The most important reason for communicating results was to provide genetic risk information; however, compared to uninformatives, carriers communicated their results to significantly more sisters to obtain emotional support (74%) and to get advice about medical decisions (42%) (FET,=,0.001). Carriers also discussed the possibility of discrimination and recommendations for cancer management with significantly more sisters. Among sisters to whom BRCA1/2 test results were not communicated, the most important reason for not sharing test results was because of emotionally distant relationships. The results of this study suggest that probands are likely to quickly communicate their BRCA1/2 test results to relatives and that although needs for social support may motivate family communication, emotionally distant relationships may be a barrier to communication with relatives. © 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

In search for more accurate alignments in the twilight zone

PROTEIN SCIENCE, Issue 7 2002
Lukasz Jaroszewski
Abstract A major bottleneck in comparative modeling is the alignment quality; this is especially true for proteins whose distant relationships could be reliably recognized only by recent advances in fold recognition. The best algorithms excel in recognizing distant homologs but often produce incorrect alignments for over 50% of protein pairs in large fold-prediction benchmarks. The alignments obtained by sequence,sequence or sequence,structure matching algorithms differ significantly from the structural alignments. To study this problem, we developed a simplified method to explicitly enumerate all possible alignments for a pair of proteins. This allowed us to estimate the number of significantly different alignments for a given scoring method that score better than the structural alignment. Using several examples of distantly related proteins, we show that for standard sequence,sequence alignment methods, the number of significantly different alignments is usually large, often about 1010 alternatives. This distance decreases when the alignment method is improved, but the number is still too large for the brute force enumeration approach. More effective strategies were needed, so we evaluated and compared two well-known approaches for searching the space of suboptimal alignments. We combined their best features and produced a hybrid method, which yielded alignments that surpassed the original alignments for about 50% of protein pairs with minimal computational effort. [source]

Resident,caregiver relationships and thriving among nursing home residents,

RESEARCH IN NURSING & HEALTH, Issue 5 2005
Ådel Bergland
Abstract The purpose of this study was to describe nursing home residents' experiences and perceptions of relationships with caregivers and to explore their importance to thriving. Data were collected through field observations and open-ended interviews with 26 residents. Receiving appropriate care from kind caregivers made life easier for all residents but contributed to thriving only for some. One group of residents emphasized personal relationships to individual caregivers as essential to thriving. A second group reported that non-personal relationships contributed to thriving. A third group preferred distant relationships to the caregivers but reported thriving as well. Personal relationships to individual caregivers were not essential to thriving for all residents. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Res Nurs Health 28: 365,375, 2005. [source]

Phylogeny of Mysis (Crustacea, Mysida): history of continental invasions inferred from molecular and morphological data

CLADISTICS, Issue 6 2005
Asta Audzijonyt
We studied the phylogenetic history of opossum shrimps of the genus Mysis Latreille, 1802 (Crustacea: Mysida) using parsimony analyses of morphological characters, DNA sequence data from mitochondrial (16S, COI and CytB) and nuclear genes (ITS2, 18S), and eight allozyme loci. With these data we aimed to resolve a long-debated question of the origin of the non-marine (continental) taxa in the genus, i.e., "glacial relicts" in circumpolar postglacial lakes and "arctic immigrants" in the Caspian Sea. A simultaneous analysis of the data sets gave a single tree supporting monophyly of all continental species, as well as monophyly of the taxa from circumpolar lakes and from the Caspian Sea. A clade of three circumarctic marine species was sister group to the continental taxa, whereas Atlantic species had more distant relationships to the others. Small molecular differentiation among the morphologically diverse endemic species from the Caspian Sea suggested their recent speciation, while the phenotypically more uniform "glacial relict" species from circumpolar lakes (Mysis relicta group) showed deep molecular divergences. For the length-variable ITS2 region both direct optimization and a priori alignment procedures gave similar topologies, although the former approach provided a better overall resolution. In terms of partitioned Bremer support (PBS), mitochondrial protein coding genes provided the largest contribution (83%) to the total tree resolution. This estimate however, appears to be partly spurious, due to the concerted inheritance of mitochondrial characters and probable cases of introgression or ancestral polymorphism. © The Willi Hennig Society 2005. [source]