Chinyere joined her husband Ikemefuna's family after his death as part of an Igbo custom in Nigeria.
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Friday, August 2, 2019
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Model predicts cognitive decline due to Alzheimer’s, up to two years out
A new model developed at MIT can help predict if patients at risk for Alzheimer’s disease will experience clinically significant cognitive decline due to the disease, by predicting their cognition test scores up to two years in the future.
The model could be used to improve the selection of candidate drugs and participant cohorts for clinical trials, which have been notoriously unsuccessful thus far. It would also let patients know they may experience rapid cognitive decline in the coming months and years, so they and their loved ones can prepare.
Pharmaceutical firms over the past two decades have injected hundreds of billions of dollars into Alzheimer’s research. Yet the field has been plagued with failure: Between 1998 and 2017, there were 146 unsuccessful attempts to develop drugs to treat or prevent the disease, according to a 2018 report from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In that time, only four new medicines were approved, and only to treat symptoms. More than 90 drug candidates are currently in development.
Studies suggest greater success in bringing drugs to market could come down to recruiting candidates who are in the disease’s early stages, before symptoms are evident, which is when treatment is most effective. In a paper to be presented next week at the Machine Learning for Health Care conference, MIT Media Lab researchers describe a machine-learning model that can help clinicians zero in on that specific cohort of participants.
They first trained a “population” model on an entire dataset that included clinically significant cognitive test scores and other biometric data from Alzheimer’s patients, and also healthy individuals, collected between biannual doctor’s visits. From the data, the model learns patterns that can help predict how the patients will score on cognitive tests taken between visits. In new participants, a second model, personalized for each patient, continuously updates score predictions based on newly recorded data, such as information collected during the most recent visits.
Experiments indicate accurate predictions can be made looking ahead six, 12, 18, and 24 months. Clinicians could thus use the model to help select at-risk participants for clinical trials, who are likely to demonstrate rapid cognitive decline, possibly even before other clinical symptoms emerge. Treating such patients early on may help clinicians better track which antidementia medicines are and aren’t working.
“Accurate prediction of cognitive decline from six to 24 months is critical to designing clinical trials,” says Oggi Rudovic, a Media Lab researcher. “Being able to accurately predict future cognitive changes can reduce the number of visits the participant has to make, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Apart from helping develop a useful drug, the goal is to help reduce the costs of clinical trials to make them more affordable and done on larger scales.”
Joining Rudovic on the paper are: Yuria Utsumi, an undergraduate student, and Kelly Peterson, a graduate student, both in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Ricardo Guerrero and Daniel Rueckert, both of Imperial College London; and Rosalind Picard, a professor of media arts and sciences and director of affective computing research in the Media Lab.
Population to personalization
For their work, the researchers leveraged the world’s largest Alzheimer’s disease clinical trial dataset, called Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The dataset contains data from around 1,700 participants, with and without Alzheimer’s, recorded during semiannual doctor’s visits over 10 years.
Data includes their AD Assessment Scale-cognition sub-scale (ADAS-Cog13) scores, the most widely used cognitive metric for clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease drugs. The test assesses memory, language, and orientation on a scale of increasing severity up to 85 points. The dataset also includes MRI scans, demographic and genetic information, and cerebrospinal fluid measurements.
In all, the researchers trained and tested their model on a sub-cohort of 100 participants, who made more than 10 visits and had less than 85 percent missing data, each with more than 600 computable features. Of those participants, 48 were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But data are sparse, with different combinations of features missing for most of the participants.
To tackle that, the researchers used the data to train a population model powered by a “nonparametric” probability framework, called Gaussian Processes (GPs), which has flexible parameters to fit various probability distributions and to process uncertainties in data. This technique measures similarities between variables, such as patient data points, to predict a value for an unseen data point — such as a cognitive score. The output also contains an estimate for how certain it is about the prediction. The model works robustly even when analyzing datasets with missing values or lots of noise from different data-collecting formats.
But, in evaluating the model on new patients from a held-out portion of participants, the researchers found the model’s predictions weren’t as accurate as they could be. So, they personalized the population model for each new patient. The system would then progressively fill in data gaps with each new patient visit and update the ADAS-Cog13 score prediction accordingly, by continuously updating the previously unknown distributions of the GPs. After about four visits, the personalized models significantly reduced the error rate in predictions. It also outperformed various traditional machine-learning approaches used for clinical data.
Learning how to learn
But the researchers found the personalized models’ results were still suboptimal. To fix that, they invented a novel “metalearning” scheme that learns to automatically choose which type of model, population or personalized, works best for any given participant at any given time, depending on the data being analyzed. Metalearning has been used before for computer vision and machine translation tasks to learn new skills or adapt to new environments rapidly with a few training examples. But this is the first time it’s been applied to tracking cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s patients, where limited data is a main challenge, Rudovic says.
The scheme essentially simulates how the different models perform on a given task — such as predicting an ADAS-Cog13 score — and learns the best fit. During each visit of a new patient, the scheme assigns the appropriate model, based on the previous data. With patients with noisy, sparse data during early visits, for instance, population models make more accurate predictions. When patients start with more data or collect more through subsequent visits, however, personalized models perform better.
This helped reduce the error rate for predictions by a further 50 percent. “We couldn’t find a single model or fixed combination of models that could give us the best prediction,” Rudovic says. “So, we wanted to learn how to learn with this metalearning scheme. It’s like a model on top of a model that acts as a selector, trained using metaknowledge to decide which model is better to deploy.”
Next, the researchers are hoping to partner with pharmaceutical firms to implement the model into real-world Alzheimer’s clinical trials. Rudovic says the model can also be generalized to predict various metrics for Alzheimer’s and other diseases.
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Gayle King to be Featured Speaker at Jopwell Conference in NYC
Jopwell, a career advancement platform for black, Latinx and Native American students and professionals, is launching Jopwell Talks, a conference the company is holding in New York City. CBS This Morning anchor, Gayle King, is slated to speak at the event.
CEO and co-founder of Jopwell, Porter Brawell says the event is to help students and professionals “thrive in their careers and beyond.”
“Creating moments for our community to connect in-person is an important part of that mission and has been a priority for us from day one,” he further stated via a press release. “We are so excited to build on the success of the smaller-scale events we’ve hosted over the years to host our first summit. We are looking forward to bringing together hundreds of members of our community for an inspirational day of conversation and connection.”
Gayle King is an incredible “get” for Jopwell and speaks to the startup’s weight in the tech and career spaces. King is hot property–she recently negotiated a contract at CBS worth $11 million. Well-known as Oprah’s BFF, King is one of the most powerful women in media. Her fame reached new heights after her interview with Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly)–after she maintained professionalism and calmness while Kelly launched into a tirade about sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Gayle King and R. Kelly (Photo Credit: CBS News)
Other speakers at Jopwell’s event will include Michael Lomax, president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund; Antonio Lucio, global chief marketing officer at Facebook; and Miguel McKelvey, co-founder and chief culture officer at The We Company.
In 2016, Jopwell raised $3.25 million in seed funding. Its investors included Magic Johnson Enterprises, Andreessen Horowitz, Kapor Capital, Omidyar Network, and Valar Ventures .
“Jopwell is in high demand because it fills a critical need,” said Earvin “Magic” Johnson, chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises at the time of the fundraising. Johnson said that the Jopwell founders “created Jopwell to give employers access to the best candidates from historically underrepresented minority groups” and “I believe in their vision and am excited to work with them.”
Jopwell Talks will take place at the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesday, October 15 and will focus on diversity and inclusion, mentorship, personal branding and other career-oriented topics.
For additional information on the summit, click here.
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Sentenced to life in prison at 16, Cyntoia Brown will be released next week
Cyntoia Brown will leave the Tennessee Prison for Women next week after serving 15 years of a life sentence for the 2004 murder of a Nashville real estate agent when she was 16.
Earlier this year, then-Gov. Bill Haslam took the rare step of commuting her sentence, paving the way for her Aug. 7 release.
Brown is now a 31-year-old woman who shot a man who picked her up reportedly for sex.
Brown’s story has served to rally celebrities and lawmakers, juvenile justice reformers and critics of Tennessee’s harsh life sentences for teens, those working to expose child sex trafficking and others highlighting racial inequities in the justice system.
Netflix has acquired the rights to the Cyntoia Brown’s story, the company announced on last month.
The feature will draw from Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story, the Daniel H. Birmandocumentary, and Birman will serve as director of the Netflix film, according to Rolling Out.
The post Sentenced to life in prison at 16, Cyntoia Brown will be released next week appeared first on theGrio.
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Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd secures $300k sex toy line deal
Sex sells, and Love and Hip Hop star Karlie Redd has sold her private parts to the highest bidder.
Redd has reportedly secured a huge deal with Doc Johnson to create her own sex toy line, complete with a mold of her butt and vagina for a gadget called a “stroker.”
—Karlie Redd reveals her real age and shares fertility journey after being dumped by fiance, Mo Fayne—
By the name, you can imagine what the sex toy can do.
There’s no shame in Karlie’s game and she secured a $300,000 as the company’s brand ambassador for the sex toy line.
According to TMZ, the vagina and butt molds of Redd took 6 hours to create and will cost about $70 to buy.
KD McNair, Redd’s rep sais she’s also aiming to become a “sexpert” and is gearing up to launch a blog, offering advice on lovemaking and relationships.
Redd’s apparently still got it and recently the LHHA veteran revealed her real age for the first time after years of fans speculating about how old she is.
“I’ve never been afraid to tell my age…I just don’t know what the obsession is with it. Maybe it’s because we look young and beautiful,” she said during a recent appearance on The Real, before confirming she is 45.
—Host A.J. Calloway exiting ‘Extra’ after sex assault allegations—
Earlier this year, Redd reportedly dumped by her fiance, Maurice “Mo” Fayne, after he received an Instagram Live video of her flirting with rapper, Money Bagg Yo.
Well it seems like money bags is surely what she’s after.
The post Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd secures $300k sex toy line deal appeared first on theGrio.
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Meghan Markle teams up to create fashions for women in search of jobs
The Duchess of Sussex is joining forces with a fashionable friend to bring designs for working women.
—Meghan Markle pens personal letter about son Archie for British Vogue issue—
Meghan Markle is teaming with her friend, fashion designer, Misha Nonoo, to create a women’s workwear clothing line that sets to launch in September.
Markle who recently made history as the first guest editor of British Vogue revealed in the groundbreaking issue that she is collaborating with Nonoo and the line with benefit her Smartworks charity, to help women in need look the part when seeking out jobs, PEOPLE reports.
“When you walk into a Smart Works space you’re met with racks of clothing and an array of bags and shoes,” Markle wrote in Vogue. “Sometimes, however, it can be a potpourri of mismatched sizes and colors, not always the right stylistic choices or range of sizes.”
“To help with this, I asked Marks & Spencer, John Lewis & Partners, Jigsaw and my friends, the designer Mischa Nonoo, if they were willing to design a capsule collection of more classic options for a workwear wardrobe,” she added. “Taking the idea further, many of the brands agreed to use the one-for-one model: for each item purchased by a customer, one is donated to the charity. Not only does this allow us to be part of each other’s story, it reminds us we are in it together.”
Smartworks offers high-quality clothes and one-to-one interview preparation to long-term unemployed women. Markle has become a patron of the organization.
—Meghan Markle criticized over her ‘Women She Admires’ choices for Vogue — and who she didn’t pick—
“The reason why I was drawn to Smart Works is that it reframed the idea of charity as community…..it’s a network of women supporting and empowering other women in their professional pursuits,” wrote Meghan.
The post Meghan Markle teams up to create fashions for women in search of jobs appeared first on theGrio.
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Tristan Thompson addresses cheating rumors
Tristan Thompson is finally speaking out about the rumors that he cheated on his ex when he got involved with Khloe Kardashian.
—Jordyn Woods seen out and about partying with Khloé Kardashian’s ex James Harden—
It’s a subject that Khloe herself has had to take to Twitter to address after Thompson’s baby momma, Jordan Craig came out in June in court documents claiming that Thompson allegedly cheated on her with the reality star while she was pregnant.
Thompson denied the rumors and took to social media to address them, PEOPLE reports.
“I have spent the last few months training for my upcoming NBA season and making sure that I am in the best shape possible,” the Cleveland Cavaliers player wrote in a tweet Wednesday.
“I have not been on vacations at all this summer and the current rumors spreading are 100% false,” he added.
I have spent the last few months training for my upcoming nba season and making sure that I am in the best shape possible. I have not been on vacations at all this summer and the current rumors spreading are 100% false.
— Tristan Thompson (@RealTristan13) July 31, 2019
Thompson also sent a tweet to set the record straight about his status when he met Khloe, saying:
“Also, when I met Khloe I was SINGLE,” Thompson said.
“The negative comments that are constantly being directed towards her are unnecessary. She does not deserve all this backlash for my wrong doings.”
“Both Khloé and Jordan have been nothing but great mothers to my kids,” Thompson added.
Also, when I met Khloe I was SINGLE. The negative comments that are constantly being directed towards her are unnecessary. She does not deserve all this backlash for my wrong doings. Both Khloè and Jordan have been nothing but great mothers to my kids.
— Tristan Thompson (@RealTristan13) July 31, 2019
Thompson’s statements however contradicts what Craig said in her petition for child support in November 2018 when she claimed he dated Khloe while she was pregnant
“Every day several articles were published worldwide mocking my new unfortunate reality and my pregnancy would now become one of the most popular gossip headlines due to the woman Tristan was now publicly dating during my pregnancy,” Craig said in the documents.
She said the drama caused her to have “complications” and she had to be put on bed rest.
In June after Craig’s reports surfaced, Khloe addresses the gossip saying that Tristan assured her he was single and had a pregnant ex.
“My truth is: I met Tristan because HE CHOSE to go on a blind date with me,” Kardashian said on her Instagram Stories previously. “A mutual friend set us up. After going on some dates, Tristan told me that he had an ex that was pregnant. Obviously, I was reluctant about us continuing to date or start a relationship.”
—Twitterverse drags Khloe Kardashian for ‘fat a**hole’ comment directed at Jordyn Woods—
But she said she believed his inner circle when they confirmed that his relationship with Craig was over.
People also found reason to tear into Khloe because she tried to blame Jordyn Woods, Kylie Jenner’s former bestie for tearing up her relationship with Thompson after they shared a kiss.
Hello pot. Meet kettle!
The post Tristan Thompson addresses cheating rumors appeared first on theGrio.
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CNN’s Lemon doesn’t back down after ‘dumb’ Trump criticism
CNN’s Don Lemon did not back down despite criticism from President Donald Trump, twice labeling presidential remarks as racist while he was moderating Wednesday’s Democratic debate.
Lemon, with partners Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, presided over a session with questions designed to highlight differences between the 10 candidates onstage, most of whom eagerly took the bait.
Tuesday night’s debate wasn’t a ratings triumph for CNN. The Nielsen company said just under 8.7 million people watched, a sharp drop from the 15.3 million who saw opening night of the first debate on NBC News last month.
Trump used Twitter on Wednesday to attack Lemon. After insulting Lemon’s intelligence, the president said the CNN anchor had insinuated that he was a racist, “when in fact I am ‘the least racist person in the world.'” Trump was apparently quoting himself.
Hours after the tweet was sent, Lemon asked Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet what he would do to bridge a racial divide that “has been stoked by the president’s racist rhetoric.”
In another question to former Housing Secretary Julián Castro, Lemon referred to Trump’s “racist tweets” about Baltimore. In an attack on Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings last weekend, Trump had referred to Cummings’ Baltimore district as a “rodent infected mess.”
It was even sharper terminology than Lemon had used the night before, when he said Trump “is pursuing an election strategy based in part on racial division.” In another question, Lemon referred to “the president’s bigotry.”
LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD defended Lemon, who is gay, in a Wednesday tweet that said Trump’s “continued attacks on the intelligence of prominent black Americans are abhorrent and telling.”
The ratings drop for the first debate wasn’t entirely unexpected, since the NBC News debate was the shown on both broadcast and cable networks and took place at a time fewer people were on vacation. Still, they led Trump to taunt CNN for “very low ratings.”
Besides the television viewership, CNN said an average of 516,000 people watched the debate via digital stream.
CNN faces a stiffer challenge in matching NBC for the second night. A month ago, the second of two nights on NBC reached 18.1 million people.
The post CNN’s Lemon doesn’t back down after ‘dumb’ Trump criticism appeared first on theGrio.
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Judge: Smollett special prosecutor will still be appointed
A judge told Jussie Smollett’s attorneys he’s not changing his mind about appointing a special prosecutor in the case against the actor and that he won’t let another judge replace him.
The losses that Cook County Judge Michael Toomin handed the attorneys Wednesday mean Smollett may not be clear of criminal charges alleging he staged an attack in January in Chicago that he described as racist and homophobic. Prosecutors dropped the charges against him in March, but a special prosecutor could charge him again.
Smollett’s attorneys have argued that Toomin should remove himself because he presumed Smollett guilty. Toomin said Wednesday that the special prosecutor’s opinion will be the only one that matters.
Toomin decided in June to appoint a special prosecutor to examine the dismissal of the charges but hasn’t said who it will be.
The post Judge: Smollett special prosecutor will still be appointed appeared first on theGrio.
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Host A.J. Calloway exiting ‘Extra’ after sex assault allegations
A.J. Calloway is leaving the syndicated entertainment news show “Extra” in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations.
Warner Brothers issued a statement on Wednesday saying the company has investigated the claims into Calloway’s conduct and he and the company “have mutually agreed to part ways.” The statement did not say when the agreement was made.
The company had investigated prior accusations against Calloway and found no suggestion of workplace misconduct. But the 44-year-old was suspended in February after Warner Brothers became aware of additional allegations.
At the time, Calloway’s lawyer said her client vehemently denied ever assaulting anyone and looked forward to clearing his name.
His lawyer has not replied to an email seeking comment.
Calloway had been with “Extra” since 2005.
The post Host A.J. Calloway exiting ‘Extra’ after sex assault allegations appeared first on theGrio.
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