Sam Wang is a pioneer in using statistical methods to analyze U.S. presidential election polls. In this election season interview with Neuron, he discusses diagnosing partisan gerrymandering, his research on the cerebellum, and how he analyzes polls with high accuracy.

In bacteria, sulfur metabolism is regulated in part by seven known families of riboswitches that bind S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAM). Direct binding of SAM to these mRNA regulatory elements governs a downstream secondary structural switch that communicates with the transcriptional and/or translational expression machinery. The most widely distributed SAM-binding riboswitches belong to the SAM cl...

S-adenosylmethionine (SAM), the unique methyl donor in DNA methylation, has been shown to lower lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced expression of the proinflammatory cytokine TNF-α and increase the expression of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 in macrophages. The aim of this study was to assess whether epigenetic mechanisms mediate the anti-inflammatory effects of SAM. Human monocytic THP1 ce...

The effects of hypophysectomy and dexamethasone administration on S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) levels in the adrenal, liver, pineal, and various brain regions were examined to determine the central and peripheral relationships between SAM and glucocorticoids in vivo. A simple and sensitive radioenzymatic assay was developed to measure tissue SAM concentrations following removal of its demethylate...

S-adenosyl methionine (SAM) is a ubiquitous methyl donor that was reported to have chemo- protective activity against liver cancer, however the molecular footprint of SAM is unknown. We show here that SAM selectively inhibits growth, transformation and invasiveness of hepatocellular carcinoma cell lines but not normal primary liver cells. Analysis of the transcriptome of SAM treated and untreat...

S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) minimizes alcohol hepatotoxicity; however, the molecular mechanisms responsible for SAM hepatoprotection remain unknown. Herein, we use proteomics to determine whether the hepatoprotective action of SAM against early-stage alcoholic liver disease is linked to alterations in the mitochondrial proteome. For this, male rats were fed control or ethanol-containing liquid d...

Analogy-based Story Generation (ASG) is a relatively under-explored approach for story generation and computational narrative. In this paper, we present the SAM (Story Analogies through Mapping) algorithm as our attempt to expand the scope and complexity of stories generated by ASG. Comparing with existing work and our prior work, there are two main contributions of SAM: it employs 1) analogica...

Pascal’s mechanical calculator and Babbage’s Analytic Engine set the stage for a great deal of modern computing machinery. Modern versions of these concepts were finally realized in von Neumann’s architecture in about 1950. However, the science of computing does not depend on physical implementations of these ideas, but rather on virtual machines—that is, abstractions that perform computations ...