Clemson University

About: Clemson University is a education organization based out in Clemson, South Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Control theory. The organization has 20556 authors who have published 42518 publications receiving 1170779 citations. The organization is also known as: Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina.

Gender, Age, and Crime/Deviance: A Challenge to Self-Control Theory

Abstract: Focusing on gender and age variations and using various measures of self-control and of crime/deviance, the authors' provide additional evidence concerning the strongest implications of self-control theory—that self-control interprets the main demo-graphic facts about crime/deviance and is of approximately equal import for all sub-categories of individuals. On one hand, the results are strongly supportive of the theory, showing that some measures of self-control not only predict misbehavior but they interpret the associations between gender and age and measures of crime/deviance. On the other hand, self-control does not appear to predict misbehavior equally well among various subcategories of individuals, particularly not for age groups, even failing to predict misbehavior at all for some groupings. Moreover, sup-port for the strongest claims of the theory are not robust, varying depending on how self-control and crime/deviance are measured.

Rice Transposable Elements: A Survey of 73,000 Sequence-Tagged-Connectors

Abstract: Transposable elements (TEs) are ubiquitous in all organisms (Burge and Howe 1989; Xiong and Eickbush 1990). In plants, TEs are classified into two main classes (Flavell et al. 1994). Retrotransposons comprise Class I and transpose via an RNA intermediate. Class I TEs include retrotransposons with long terminal repeats (LTRs) such as Ty1/Copia-like and Ty3/Gypsy-like, as well as non-LTR retrotransposons. The class II TEs transpose via a DNA intermediate and in plants have been found mainly in maize. Class II TEs include Ac/Ds, En/Spm, and Mutator (Federoff 1989). MITEs, that is, miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements, such as maize Tourist and Stowaway, fall into a newly described third class of TEs (Bureau and Wessler 1992, 1994a,b, 1996). The mechanism of transposition of MITEs is still unclear, although they have received considerable attention recently due to their high copy numbers and tendency to be associated with genes in maize (Wessler et al. 1995; Zhang et al. 2000). Rice (Oryza sativa) is the main staple food for more than half of the world's population and is of great economic importance. Among the cereal grasses, rice has the smallest genome size (430 Mb) and, as revealed by comparative mapping, has substantial conservation of synteny with other cereal crops such as maize, sorghum, and wheat (Gale and Devos 1998). Consequently, rice is an ideal representative for cereal genomics studies and is the focus of an international effort to completely sequence its genome. Although numerous TEs have been reported in rice, no comprehensive investigation has been carried out on a genome-wide scale, because the majority of rice TEs were uncovered by chance or by limited assays using conserved regions such as reverse transcriptase of retrotransposons (Hirochika et al. 1992; Motohashi et al. 1996; Kumekawa et al. 1999). As part of the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project (IRGSP), a rice BAC library was constructed from a partial HindIII digest of the genome of the rice variety Nipponbare (Budiman 1999), and the ends of BAC clone inserts have been sequenced. BAC end sequences will serve as sequence-tagged-connectors (STCs) for selecting minimum overlapping clones for genome sequencing (Venter et al. 1996). The generation of >73,000 Nipponbare STCs also provides an opportunity to preview TE content and distribution in rice genome. The current STC library contains ∼48 Mb of rice genomic DNA after vector removal, with an average sequence read of 707 nucleotides. With an average insert of 128.5 kb, the CUGI rice BAC library is expected to cover ∼10 rice genome equivalents. Preliminary efforts to confirm the coverage of the library based strictly on sequence comparison of the STCs to finished rice BACs have shown that the estimated coverage is ∼10.4 genome equivalents (data not shown). Assuming that the HindIII sites are evenly distributed, our 73,000 STCs should be distributed one STC every 9 kb across the 430-Mb rice genome. TEs are one of the major sources of repetitive sequences in cereal plants and have been a concern of the IRGSP as a potential source of problems in completing the rice genome sequence. Here, we report the TE content of the STC database and show that the rice genome probably contains a small fraction of TEs in comparison with other cereal genomes, such as maize. The small amount of TEs confirms rice as a well-chosen model crop genome. We note the discovery of several potentially novel TEs, and we investigate the location of TE–STCs on the current physical map of the CUGI rice BAC library. We find that the TEs appear to be randomly distributed with respect to potential genes, identified by similarity to rice ESTs.

A New Method for Measuring Meal Intake in Humans via Automated Wrist Motion Tracking

Abstract: Measuring the energy intake (kcal) of a person in day-to-day life is difficult. The best laboratory tool achieves 95 % accuracy on average, while tools used in daily living typically achieve 60–80 % accuracy. This paper describes a new method for measuring intake via automated tracking of wrist motion. Our method uses a watch-like device with a micro-electro-mechanical gyroscope to detect and record when an individual has taken a bite of food. Two tests of the accuracy of our device in counting bites found that our method has 94 % sensitivity in a controlled meal setting and 86 % sensitivity in an uncontrolled meal setting, with one false positive per every 5 bites in both settings. Preliminary data from daily living indicates that bites measured by the device are positively related to caloric intake illustrating the potential of the device to monitor energy intake. Future research should seek to further explore the relationship between bites taken and kilocalories consumed to validate the device as an automated measure of energy intake.