The Effect of Absolute and Relative Deprivation on Homicides in Brazil

This paper investigates the effect of absolute deprivation (proxy unemployment) and relative deprivation (proxy income inequality) on homicide levels in Brazil. A database from the Brazilian Information System about Mortality and Census of the year 2000 and 2010 was used to estimate negative binomial models of homicide levels controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, and geographic factors. Findings show that unemployment and income inequality affect homicides levels and that the effect of the former is more pronounced compared to the latter. Moreover, the combination of income inequality and unemployment exacerbates the overall effect of deprivation on homicide levels.

Comprehensive and scalable quantification of splicing differences with MntJULiP

Alternative splicing of mRNA is an essential gene regulatory mechanism with important roles in development and disease. We present MntJULiP, a method for comprehensive and accurate quantification of splicing differences between two or more conditions. MntJULiP implements novel Dirichlet-multinomial and zero-inflated negative binomial models within a Bayesian framework to detect both changes in splicing ratios and in absolute splicing levels of introns with high accuracy, and can find classes of variation overlooked by reference tools. Additionally, a mixture model allows multiple conditions to be compared simultaneously. Highly scalable, it processed hundreds of GTEx samples in <1 hour to reveal splicing constituents of tissue differentiation.