Increasingly, sophisticated methods are available for analyzing financial data and helping decision makers. In practice, the data that will be used can be full of errors. It is often the more sophisticated methods that seem to be particularly sensitive to the presence of bad values in the data. Therefore, it makes sense to deal with the bad data before the modeling takes place – improve the qua...

Research on bad news delivery reveals a reliable temporal delay in the onset of the bad news message from the sender to the receiver. An experiment utilized a false feedback test design to determine whether the delay is better accounted for by negative verbal message planning, functional communication potential, or both. Participant-senders (N = 138) delivered either scripted or unscripted good...

Human type 2 diabetes is associated with β-cell apoptosis, and human islets from diabetic donors are ∼80% deficient in PAK1 protein. Toward addressing linkage of PAK1 to β-cell survival, PAK1-siRNA targeted MIN6 pancreatic β-cells were found to exhibit increased caspase-3 cleavage, cytosolic cytochrome-C and the pro-apoptotic protein Bad. PAK1(+/-) heterozygous mouse islets recapitulated the up...

14-3-3 proteins are a family of multifunctional phosphoserine binding molecules that can serve as effectors of survival signaling. Understanding the molecular basis for the prosurvival effect of 14-3-3 may lead to the development of agents useful in the treatment of disorders involving dysregulated apoptosis. One target of 14-3-3 is the proapoptotic Bcl-2 family member Bad. Serine phosphorylati...

We show how randomly scrambling the output classes of various fractions of the training data may be used to improve predictive accuracy of a classification algorithm. We present a method for calculating the "noise sensitivity signature" of a learning algorithm which is based on scrambling the output classes. This signature can be used to indicate a good match between the complexity of the class...