145 results
Search Results
2. Dynamics in the Fitness-Income plane: Brazilian states vs World countries.
- Author
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Operti, Felipe G., Pugliese, Emanuele, Jr.Andrade, José S., Pietronero, Luciano, and Gabrielli, Andrea
- Subjects
ALGORITHMS ,PHYSICAL fitness ,GROSS domestic product ,ECONOMICS - Abstract
In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness, to calculate the Fitness of subnational entities and we apply it to the states of Brazil. In the last decade, several indices were introduced to measure the competitiveness of countries by looking at the complexity of their export basket. Tacchella et al (2012) developed a non-monetary metric called Fitness. In this paper, after an overview about Brazil as a whole and the comparison with the other BRIC countries, we introduce a new methodology based on the Fitness algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness. Combining the results with the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP
p ), we look at the dynamics of the Brazilian states in the Fitness-Income plane. Two regimes are distinguishable: one with high predictability and the other with low predictability, showing a deep analogy with the heterogeneous dynamics of the World countries. Furthermore, we compare the ranking of the Brazilian states according to the Exogenous Fitness with the ranking obtained through two other techniques, namely Endogenous Fitness and Economic Complexity Index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. Economic development and wage inequality: A complex system analysis.
- Author
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Sbardella, Angelica, Pugliese, Emanuele, and Pietronero, Luciano
- Subjects
MATHEMATICAL models of economic development ,MATHEMATICAL models of income distribution ,MONETARY systems ,KUZNETS curve ,COMPLEXITY (Philosophy) ,ECONOMICS - Abstract
Adapting methods from complex system analysis, this paper analyzes the features of the complex relationship between wage inequality and the development and industrialization of a country. Development is understood as a combination of a monetary index, GDP per capita, and a recently introduced measure of a country’s economic complexity: Fitness. Initially the paper looks at wage inequality on a global scale, over the time period 1990–2008. Our empirical results show that globally the movement of wage inequality along with the ongoing industrialization of countries has followed a longitudinally persistent pattern comparable to the one theorized by Kuznets in the fifties: countries with an average level of development suffer the highest levels of wage inequality. Next, the study narrows its focus on wage inequality within the United States. By using data on wages and employment in the approximately 3100 US counties over the time interval 1990–2014, it generalizes the Fitness-Complexity metric for geographic units and industrial sectors, and then investigates wage inequality between NAICS industries. The empirical time and scale dependencies are consistent with a relation between wage inequality and development driven by institutional factors comparing countries, and by change in the structural compositions of sectors in a homogeneous institutional environment, such as the counties of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
4. An empirical analysis of post-work grocery shopping activity duration using modified accelerated failure time model to differentiate time-dependent and time-independent covariates.
- Author
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Wang, Ke, Ye, Xin, and Ma, Jie
- Subjects
GROCERY shopping ,CONTINUOUS time models ,PROPORTIONAL hazards models ,DATA extraction ,POPULATION biology - Abstract
In this paper, the accelerated failure time (AFT) model is modified to analyze post-work grocery shopping activity duration. Much previous shopping duration analysis was conducted using the proportional hazard (PH) modeling approach. Once the proportionality assumption was violated, the traditional accelerated failure time (TAFT) model was usually selected as an alternative modeling approach. However, a TAFT model only has covariates with non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard overtime while a PH model only accommodates covariates with proportional and time-independent effects. Neither of them considers the possibility that some of covariates may have proportional and time-independent effects and some may have non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard value in one model. To address this issue, the paper generalizes the TAFT model and develops a modified accelerated failure time (MAFT) model to accommodate both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for activity duration analysis. Checking on the proportionality assumption indicates that the assumption is not valid in the post-work grocery shopping activity data extracted from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). Both TAFT and MAFT models are developed for comparisons and analysis. The empirical and statistical results show that there do exist two different types of covariates affecting shopping activity duration, including covariates only with proportional and time-independent effects (i.e. working duration, commute travel time) and those with non-proportional and time-dependent effects. The MAFT model can capture the subtleties in various types of covariate effects and help better understand how those covariates affect activity duration overtime. This paper also shows the importance to develop a flexible duration model with both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for accurately evaluating travel demand management (TDM) policies, like flexible work hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Education of staff in preschool aged classrooms in child care centers and child outcomes: A meta-analysis and systematic review.
- Author
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Falenchuk, Olesya, Perlman, Michal, McMullen, Evelyn, Fletcher, Brooke, and Shah, Prakesh S.
- Subjects
META-analysis ,MATHEMATICAL statistics ,SITUATED learning theory ,CLASSROOM management ,FLOATING teachers - Abstract
Staff education is considered key to quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. However, findings about associations between staff education and children’s outcomes have been inconsistent. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of associations between ECEC staff education and child outcomes. Searches of Medline, PsycINFO, and ERIC, websites of large datasets and reference sections of all retrieved articles were conducted. Eligible studies provided a statistical link between staff education and child outcomes for preschool-aged children in ECEC programs. Titles, abstracts and paper reviews as well as all data extraction were conducted by two independent raters. Of the 823 studies reviewed for eligibility, 39 met our inclusion criteria. Research in this area is observational in nature and subject to the inherent biases of that research design. Results from our systematic review were hampered by heterogeneity in how staff education was defined, variability in whose education was measured and the child outcomes that were assessed. However, overall the qualitative summary indicates that associations between staff education and childhood outcomes are non-existent to very borderline positive. In our meta-analysis of more homogeneous studies we identified certain positive, albeit very weak, associations between staff education and children’s language outcomes (specifically, vocabulary and letter word identification) and no significant association with a mathematics outcome (WJ Applied Problems). Thus, our findings suggest that within the range of education levels found in the existing literature, education is not a key driver of child outcomes. However, since we only explored levels of education that were reported in the literature, our findings cannot be used to argue for lowering education standards in ECEC settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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6. Reliable Facility Location Problem with Facility Protection.
- Author
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Tang, Luohao, Zhu, Cheng, Lin, Zaili, Shi, Jianmai, and Zhang, Weiming
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LOCATION problems (Programming) ,FACILITY location problems ,INTEGER programming ,LAGRANGIAN functions ,APPLIED mathematics - Abstract
This paper studies a reliable facility location problem with facility protection that aims to hedge against random facility disruptions by both strategically protecting some facilities and using backup facilities for the demands. An Integer Programming model is proposed for this problem, in which the failure probabilities of facilities are site-specific. A solution approach combining Lagrangian Relaxation and local search is proposed and is demonstrated to be both effective and efficient based on computational experiments on random numerical examples with 49, 88, 150 and 263 nodes in the network. A real case study for a 100-city network in Hunan province, China, is presented, based on which the properties of the model are discussed and some managerial insights are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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7. Using Tensor Completion Method to Achieving Better Coverage of Traffic State Estimation from Sparse Floating Car Data.
- Author
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Ran, Bin, Song, Li, Zhang, Jian, Cheng, Yang, and Tan, Huachun
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TRAFFIC engineering ,ESTIMATION theory ,PROBLEM solving ,STATISTICAL correlation ,MISSING data (Statistics) - Abstract
Traffic state estimation from the floating car system is a challenging problem. The low penetration rate and random distribution make available floating car samples usually cover part space and time points of the road networks. To obtain a wide range of traffic state from the floating car system, many methods have been proposed to estimate the traffic state for the uncovered links. However, these methods cannot provide traffic state of the entire road networks. In this paper, the traffic state estimation is transformed to solve a missing data imputation problem, and the tensor completion framework is proposed to estimate missing traffic state. A tensor is constructed to model traffic state in which observed entries are directly derived from floating car system and unobserved traffic states are modeled as missing entries of constructed tensor. The constructed traffic state tensor can represent spatial and temporal correlations of traffic data and encode the multi-way properties of traffic state. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it can fully mine and utilize the multi-dimensional inherent correlations of traffic state. We tested the proposed approach on a well calibrated simulation network. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach yield reliable traffic state estimation from very sparse floating car data, particularly when dealing with the floating car penetration rate is below 1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
8. Reviewer social class influences responses to online evaluations of an organization.
- Author
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Horwitz, Suzanne and Kovács, Balázs
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SOCIAL classes ,EXPERIMENTAL design ,SOCIAL influence ,SOCIAL psychology ,SOCIOLOGY - Abstract
This paper examines social class-based differences in influence in online review contexts. We explore four mechanisms for how a review writer’s social class may affect readers’ evaluations of the organization. First, we argue that, via a “contagion” process, organizations reviewed by higher-class individuals will be evaluated more positively than organizations reviewed by lower-class individuals. Second, we expect that higher-class reviewers will be seen as more knowledgeable; thus, their opinions will be more influential in shaping others’ opinions. Third, we expect that reviewers will be seen more influential when they review organizations that match their social class. Fourth, we expect people to be more influenced by those who share their own class background. A large-scale observational study of reviews (N = 1,234,665) from finds support for the contagion, the organization-reviewer social class matching, and the reviewer-participant social matching hypotheses, but disconfirms the hypothesis that higher-class reviewers are always treated as having more expertise. Two experimental studies (N = 354 and N = 638) demonstrate that reviewer class plays a causal role in both a contagion process and in an assumption of higher-class knowledge process, but do not provide evidence for the reviewer-participant social matching hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. Capturing the influence of geopolitical ties from Wikipedia with reduced Google matrix.
- Author
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El Zant, Samer, Jaffrès-Runser, Katia, and Shepelyansky, Dima L.
- Subjects
SOCIOCULTURAL factors ,GEOPOLITICS ,POWER (Social sciences) ,MARKOV processes - Abstract
Interactions between countries originate from diverse aspects such as geographic proximity, trade, socio-cultural habits, language, religions, etc. Geopolitics studies the influence of a country’s geographic space on its political power and its relationships with other countries. This work reveals the potential of Wikipedia mining for geopolitical study. Actually, Wikipedia offers solid knowledge and strong correlations among countries by linking web pages together for different types of information (e.g. economical, historical, political, and many others). The major finding of this paper is to show that meaningful results on the influence of country ties can be extracted from the hyperlinked structure of Wikipedia. We leverage a novel stochastic matrix representation of Markov chains of complex directed networks called the reduced Google matrix theory. For a selected small size set of nodes, the reduced Google matrix concentrates direct and indirect links of the million-node sized Wikipedia network into a small Perron-Frobenius matrix keeping the PageRank probabilities of the global Wikipedia network. We perform a novel sensitivity analysis that leverages this reduced Google matrix to characterize the influence of relationships between countries from the global network. We apply this analysis to two chosen sets of countries (i.e. the set of 27 European Union countries and a set of 40 top worldwide countries). We show that with our sensitivity analysis we can exhibit easily very meaningful information on geopolitics from five different Wikipedia editions (English, Arabic, Russian, French and German). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
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10. Value of sample information in dynamic, structurally uncertain resource systems.
- Author
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Williams, Byron K. and Johnson, Fred A.
- Subjects
INFORMATION resources management ,INFORMATION retrieval ,CONSERVATION of natural resources ,INFORMATION resources ,T cells - Abstract
Few if any natural resource systems are completely understood and fully observed. Instead, there almost always is uncertainty about the way a system works and its status at any given time, which can limit effective management. A natural approach to uncertainty is to allocate time and effort to the collection of additional data, on the reasonable assumption that more information will facilitate better understanding and lead to better management. But the collection of more data, either through observation or investigation, requires time and effort that often can be put to other conservation activities. An important question is whether the use of limited resources to improve understanding is justified by the resulting potential for improved management. In this paper we address directly a change in value from new information collected through investigation. We frame the value of information in terms of learning through the management process itself, as well as learning through investigations that are external to the management process but add to our base of understanding. We provide a conceptual framework and metrics for this issue, and illustrate them with examples involving Florida scrub-jays (Aphelocoma coerulescens). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
11. A semi-nonparametric Poisson regression model for analyzing motor vehicle crash data.
- Author
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Ye, Xin, Wang, Ke, Zou, Yajie, and Lord, Dominique
- Subjects
POISSON algebras ,REGRESSION analysis ,TRAFFIC accidents ,TRAFFIC safety ,NEGATIVE binomial distribution - Abstract
This paper develops a semi-nonparametric Poisson regression model to analyze motor vehicle crash frequency data collected from rural multilane highway segments in California, US. Motor vehicle crash frequency on rural highway is a topic of interest in the area of transportation safety due to higher driving speeds and the resultant severity level. Unlike the traditional Negative Binomial (NB) model, the semi-nonparametric Poisson regression model can accommodate an unobserved heterogeneity following a highly flexible semi-nonparametric (SNP) distribution. Simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the SNP distribution can well mimic a large family of distributions, including normal distributions, log-gamma distributions, bimodal and trimodal distributions. Empirical estimation results show that such flexibility offered by the SNP distribution can greatly improve model precision and the overall goodness-of-fit. The semi-nonparametric distribution can provide a better understanding of crash data structure through its ability to capture potential multimodality in the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity. When estimated coefficients in empirical models are compared, SNP and NB models are found to have a substantially different coefficient for the dummy variable indicating the lane width. The SNP model with better statistical performance suggests that the NB model overestimates the effect of lane width on crash frequency reduction by 83.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
12. Time series smoother for effect detection.
- Author
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You, Cheng, Lin, Dennis K. J., and Young, S. Stanley
- Subjects
STATISTICAL smoothing ,ENVIRONMENTAL health ,EPIDEMIOLOGICAL research ,AIR quality ,SEASONAL variations of diseases ,MORTALITY risk factors - Abstract
In environmental epidemiology, it is often encountered that multiple time series data with a long-term trend, including seasonality, cannot be fully adjusted by the observed covariates. The long-term trend is difficult to separate from abnormal short-term signals of interest. This paper addresses how to estimate the long-term trend in order to recover short-term signals. Our case study demonstrates that the current spline smoothing methods can result in significant positive and negative cross-correlations from the same dataset, depending on how the smoothing parameters are chosen. To circumvent this dilemma, three classes of time series smoothers are proposed to detrend time series data. These smoothers do not require fine tuning of parameters and can be applied to recover short-term signals. The properties of these smoothers are shown with both a case study using a factorial design and a simulation study using datasets generated from the original dataset. General guidelines are provided on how to discover short-term signals from time series with a long-term trend. The benefit of this research is that a problem is identified and characteristics of possible solutions are determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
13. Accurate and fast path computation on large urban road networks: A general approach.
- Author
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Song, Qing, Li, Meng, and Li, Xiaolei
- Subjects
TRANSPORTATION ,TRAFFIC engineering ,ROADS ,NAVIGATION ,ALGORITHMS - Abstract
Accurate and fast path computation is essential for applications such as onboard navigation systems and traffic network routing. While a number of heuristic algorithms have been developed in the past few years for faster path queries, the accuracy of them are always far below satisfying. In this paper, we first develop an agglomerative graph partitioning method for generating high balanced traverse distance partitions, and we constitute a three-level graph model based on the graph partition scheme for structuring the urban road network. Then, we propose a new hierarchical path computation algorithm, which benefits from the hierarchical graph model and utilizes a region pruning strategy to significantly reduce the search space without compromising the accuracy. Finally, we present a detailed experimental evaluation on the real urban road network of New York City, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to generate optimal fast paths and to facilitate real-time routing applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
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14. Impact of residential displacement on healthcare access and mental health among original residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City.
- Author
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Lim, Sungwoo, Chan, Pui Ying, Walters, Sarah, Culp, Gretchen, Huynh, Mary, and Gould, L. Hannah
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MENTAL health ,INVOLUNTARY relocation ,MEDICAL care ,HEALTH & social status ,HOSPITAL care - Abstract
Objectives: As gentrification continues in New York City as well as other urban areas, residents of lower socioeconomic status maybe at higher risk for residential displacement. Yet, there have been few quantitative assessments of the health impacts of displacement. The objective of this paper is to assess the association between displacement and healthcare access and mental health among the original residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City. Methods: We used 2 data sources: 1) 2005–2014 American Community Surveys to identify gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City, and 2) 2006–2014 Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System. Our cohort included 12,882 residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in 2006 who had records of emergency department visits or hospitalization at least once every 2 years in 2006–2014. Rates of emergency department visits and hospitalizations post-baseline were compared between residents who were displaced and those who remained. Results: During 2006–2014, 23% were displaced. Compared with those who remained, displaced residents were more likely to make emergency department visits and experience hospitalizations, mainly due to mental health (Rate Ratio = 1.8, 95% confidence interval = 1.5, 2.2), after controlling for baseline demographics, health status, healthcare utilization, residential movement, and the neighborhood of residence in 2006. Conclusions: These findings suggest negative impacts of displacement on healthcare access and mental health, particularly among adults living in urban areas and with a history of frequent emergency department visits or hospitalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
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15. A multi-paradigm framework to assess the impacts of climate change on end-use energy demand.
- Author
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Nateghi, Roshanak and Mukherjee, Sayanti
- Subjects
MULTIPARADIGM programming (Computer science) ,CLIMATE change ,ENERGY economics ,HYDRONICS ,SPACE heaters - Abstract
Projecting the long-term trends in energy demand is an increasingly complex endeavor due to the uncertain emerging changes in factors such as climate and policy. The existing energy-economy paradigms used to characterize the long-term trends in the energy sector do not adequately account for climate variability and change. In this paper, we propose a multi-paradigm framework for estimating the climate sensitivity of end-use energy demand that can easily be integrated with the existing energy-economy models. To illustrate the applicability of our proposed framework, we used the energy demand and climate data in the state of Indiana to train a Bayesian predictive model. We then leveraged the end-use demand trends as well as downscaled future climate scenarios to generate probabilistic estimates of the future end-use demand for space cooling, space heating and water heating, at the individual household and building level, in the residential and commercial sectors. Our results indicated that the residential load is much more sensitive to climate variability and change than the commercial load. Moreover, since the largest fraction of the residential energy demand in Indiana is attributed to heating, future warming scenarios could lead to reduced end-use demand due to lower space heating and water heating needs. In the commercial sector, the overall energy demand is expected to increase under the future warming scenarios. This is because the increased cooling load during hotter summer months will likely outpace the reduced heating load during the more temperate winter months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
16. An efficient General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) enabled algorithm for dynamic transit accessibility analysis.
- Author
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Fayyaz S., S. Kiavash, Liu, Xiaoyue Cathy, and Zhang, Guohui
- Subjects
METROPOLITAN areas ,PUBLIC transit ,TRAVEL time (Traffic engineering) ,POPULATION density ,POPULATION biology - Abstract
The social functions of urbanized areas are highly dependent on and supported by the convenient access to public transportation systems, particularly for the less privileged populations who have restrained auto ownership. To accurately evaluate the public transit accessibility, it is critical to capture the spatiotemporal variation of transit services. This can be achieved by measuring the shortest paths or minimum travel time between origin-destination (OD) pairs at each time-of-day (e.g. every minute). In recent years, General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data has been gaining popularity for between-station travel time estimation due to its interoperability in spatiotemporal analytics. Many software packages, such as ArcGIS, have developed toolbox to enable the travel time estimation with GTFS. They perform reasonably well in calculating travel time between OD pairs for a specific time-of-day (e.g. 8:00 AM), yet can become computational inefficient and unpractical with the increase of data dimensions (e.g. all times-of-day and large network). In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm that is computationally elegant and mathematically efficient to address this issue. An open-source toolbox written in C++ is developed to implement the algorithm. We implemented the algorithm on City of St. George’s transit network to showcase the accessibility analysis enabled by the toolbox. The experimental evidence shows significant reduction on computational time. The proposed algorithm and toolbox presented is easily transferable to other transit networks to allow transit agencies and researchers perform high resolution transit performance analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
17. Frequencies of decision making and monitoring in adaptive resource management.
- Author
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Williams, Byron K. and Johnson, Fred A.
- Subjects
ADAPTIVE natural resource management ,ENVIRONMENTAL monitoring ,ENVIRONMENTAL impact analysis ,DECISION making ,ACQUISITION of data - Abstract
Adaptive management involves learning-oriented decision making in the presence of uncertainty about the responses of a resource system to management. It is implemented through an iterative sequence of decision making, monitoring and assessment of system responses, and incorporating what is learned into future decision making. Decision making at each point is informed by a value or objective function, for example total harvest anticipated over some time frame. The value function expresses the value associated with decisions, and it is influenced by system status as updated through monitoring. Often, decision making follows shortly after a monitoring event. However, it is certainly possible for the cadence of decision making to differ from that of monitoring. In this paper we consider different combinations of annual and biennial decision making, along with annual and biennial monitoring. With biennial decision making decisions are changed only every other year; with biennial monitoring field data are collected only every other year. Different cadences of decision making combine with annual and biennial monitoring to define 4 scenarios. Under each scenario we describe optimal valuations for active and passive adaptive decision making. We highlight patterns in valuation among scenarios, depending on the occurrence of monitoring and decision making events. Differences between years are tied to the fact that every other year a new decision can be made no matter what the scenario, and state information is available to inform that decision. In the subsequent year, however, in 3 of the 4 scenarios either a decision is repeated or monitoring does not occur (or both). There are substantive differences in optimal values among the scenarios, as well as the optimal policies producing those values. Especially noteworthy is the influence of monitoring cadence on valuation in some years. We highlight patterns in policy and valuation among the scenarios, and discuss management implications and extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
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18. A Bayesian spatio-temporal model for forecasting Anaplasma species seroprevalence in domestic dogs within the contiguous United States.
- Author
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Liu, Yan, Watson, Stella C., Gettings, Jenna R., Lund, Robert B., Nordone, Shila K., Yabsley, Michael J., and McMahan, Christopher S.
- Subjects
ANAPLASMA ,SEROPREVALENCE ,BAYESIAN analysis ,BACTERIA classification ,LABORATORY dogs - Abstract
This paper forecasts the 2016 canine Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence in the United States from eight climate, geographic and societal factors. The forecast’s construction and an assessment of its performance are described. The forecast is based on a spatial-temporal conditional autoregressive model fitted to over 11 million Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence test results for dogs conducted in the 48 contiguous United States during 2011–2015. The forecast uses county-level data on eight predictive factors, including annual temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, county elevation, forestation coverage, surface water coverage, population density and median household income. Non-static factors are extrapolated into the forthcoming year with various statistical methods. The fitted model and factor extrapolations are used to estimate next year’s regional prevalence. The correlation between the observed and model-estimated county-by-county Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence for the five-year period 2011–2015 is 0.902, demonstrating reasonable model accuracy. The weighted correlation (accounting for different sample sizes) between 2015 observed and forecasted county-by-county Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence is 0.987, exhibiting that the proposed approach can be used to accurately forecast Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence. The forecast presented herein can a priori alert veterinarians to areas expected to see Anaplasma spp. seroprevalence beyond the accepted endemic range. The proposed methods may prove useful for forecasting other diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
19. Windowed persistent homology: A topological signal processing algorithm applied to clinical obesity data.
- Author
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Biwer, Craig, Rothberg, Amy, IglayReger, Heidi, Derksen, Harm, Burant, Charles F., and Najarian, Kayvan
- Subjects
OBESITY ,HOMOLOGY theory ,SIGNAL processing ,ALGORITHMS ,WEIGHT loss ,WEIGHT gain - Abstract
Overweight and obesity are highly prevalent in the population of the United States, affecting roughly 2/3 of Americans. These diseases, along with their associated conditions, are a major burden on the healthcare industry in terms of both dollars spent and effort expended. Volitional weight loss is attempted by many, but weight regain is common. The ability to predict which patients will lose weight and successfully maintain the loss versus those prone to regain weight would help ease this burden by allowing clinicians the ability to skip treatments likely to be ineffective. In this paper we introduce a new windowed approach to the persistent homology signal processing algorithm that, when paired with a modified, semimetric version of the Hausdorff distance, can differentiate the two groups where other commonly used methods fail. The novel approach is tested on accelerometer data gathered from an ongoing study at the University of Michigan. While most standard approaches to signal processing show no difference between the two groups, windowed persistent homology and the modified Hausdorff semimetric show a clear separation. This has significant implications for clinical decision making and patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
20. Relay discovery and selection for large-scale P2P streaming.
- Author
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Zhang, Chengwei, Wang, Angela Yunxian, and Hei, Xiaojun
- Subjects
PEER-to-peer architecture (Computer networks) ,ERROR analysis in mathematics ,ESTIMATION theory ,HASHING ,NUMERICAL analysis - Abstract
In peer-to-peer networks, application relays have been commonly used to provide various networking services. The service performance often improves significantly if a relay is selected appropriately based on its network location. In this paper, we studied the location-aware relay discovery and selection problem for large-scale P2P streaming networks. In these large-scale and dynamic overlays, it incurs significant communication and computation cost to discover a sufficiently large relay candidate set and further to select one relay with good performance. The network location can be measured directly or indirectly with the tradeoffs between timeliness, overhead and accuracy. Based on a measurement study and the associated error analysis, we demonstrate that indirect measurements, such as King and Internet Coordinate Systems (ICS), can only achieve a coarse estimation of peers’ network location and those methods based on pure indirect measurements cannot lead to a good relay selection. We also demonstrate that there exists significant error amplification of the commonly used “best-out-of-K” selection methodology using three RTT data sets publicly available. We propose a two-phase approach to achieve efficient relay discovery and accurate relay selection. Indirect measurements are used to narrow down a small number of high-quality relay candidates and the final relay selection is refined based on direct probing. This two-phase approach enjoys an efficient implementation using the Distributed-Hash-Table (DHT). When the DHT is constructed, the node keys carry the location information and they are generated scalably using indirect measurements, such as the ICS coordinates. The relay discovery is achieved efficiently utilizing the DHT-based search. We evaluated various aspects of this DHT-based approach, including the DHT indexing procedure, key generation under peer churn and message costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
21. A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of a Measure of Staff/Child Interaction Quality (the Classroom Assessment Scoring System) in Early Childhood Education and Care Settings and Child Outcomes.
- Author
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Perlman, Michal, Falenchuk, Olesya, Fletcher, Brooke, McMullen, Evelyn, Beyene, Joseph, and Shah, Prakesh S.
- Subjects
CHILD care ,CHILD psychology ,SOCIAL interaction ,SYSTEMATIC reviews ,META-analysis - Abstract
The quality of staff/child interactions as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programs is thought to be important for children’s outcomes. The CLASS is made of three domains that assess Emotional Support, Classroom Organization and Instructional Support. It is a relatively new measure that is being used increasingly for research, quality monitoring/accountability and other applied purposes. Our objective was to evaluate the association between the CLASS and child outcomes. Searches of Medline, PsycINFO, ERIC, websites of large datasets and reference sections of all retrieved articles were conducted up to July 3, 2015. Studies that measured association between the CLASS and child outcomes for preschool-aged children who attended ECEC programs were included after screening by two independent reviewers. Searches and data extraction were conducted by two independent reviewers. Thirty-five studies were systematically reviewed of which 19 provided data for meta-analyses. Most studies had moderate to high risk of bias. Of the 14 meta-analyses we conducted, associations between Classroom Organization and Pencil Tapping and between Instructional Support and SSRS Social Skills were significant with pooled correlations of .06 and .09 respectively. All associations were in the expected direction. In the systematic review, significant correlations were reported mainly from one large dataset. Substantial heterogeneity in use of the CLASS, its dimensions, child outcomes and statistical measures was identified. Greater consistency in study methodology is urgently needed. Given the multitude of factors that impact child development it is encouraging that our analyses revealed some, although small, associations between the CLASS and children’s outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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- View/download PDF
22. Mean Recency Period for Estimation of HIV-1 Incidence with the BED-Capture EIA and Bio-Rad Avidity in Persons Diagnosed in the United States with Subtype B.
- Author
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Hanson, Debra L., Song, Ruiguang, Masciotra, Silvina, Hernandez, Angela, Dobbs, Trudy L., Parekh, Bharat S., Owen, S. Michele, and Green, Timothy A.
- Subjects
HIV infections ,DISEASE incidence ,BIOMARKERS ,SEROCONVERSION ,DISEASE duration - Abstract
HIV incidence estimates are used to monitor HIV-1 infection in the United States. Use of laboratory biomarkers that distinguish recent from longstanding infection to quantify HIV incidence rely on having accurate knowledge of the average time that individuals spend in a transient state of recent infection between seroconversion and reaching a specified biomarker cutoff value. This paper describes five estimation procedures from two general statistical approaches, a survival time approach and an approach that fits binomial models of the probability of being classified as recently infected, as a function of time since seroconversion. We compare these procedures for estimating the mean duration of recent infection (MDRI) for two biomarkers used by the U.S. National HIV Surveillance System for determination of HIV incidence, the Aware BED EIA HIV-1 incidence test (BED) and the avidity-based, modified Bio-Rad HIV-1/HIV-2 plus O ELISA (BRAI) assay. Collectively, 953 specimens from 220 HIV-1 subtype B seroconverters, taken from 5 cohorts, were tested with a biomarker assay. Estimates of MDRI using the non-parametric survival approach were 198.4 days (SD 13.0) for BED and 239.6 days (SD 13.9) for BRAI using cutoff values of 0.8 normalized optical density and 30%, respectively. The probability of remaining in the recent state as a function of time since seroconversion, based upon this revised statistical approach, can be applied in the calculation of annual incidence in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
23. Model Development for Risk Assessment of Driving on Freeway under Rainy Weather Conditions.
- Author
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Cai, Xiaonan, Wang, Chen, Chen, Shengdi, and Lu, Jian
- Subjects
RISK assessment ,AUTOMOBILE driving in rain ,PERFORMANCE evaluation ,QUESTIONNAIRES ,COMPARATIVE studies - Abstract
Rainy weather conditions could result in significantly negative impacts on driving on freeways. However, due to lack of enough historical data and monitoring facilities, many regions are not able to establish reliable risk assessment models to identify such impacts. Given the situation, this paper provides an alternative solution where the procedure of risk assessment is developed based on drivers’ subjective questionnaire and its performance is validated by using actual crash data. First, an ordered logit model was developed, based on questionnaire data collected from Freeway G15 in China, to estimate the relationship between drivers’ perceived risk and factors, including vehicle type, rain intensity, traffic volume, and location. Then, weighted driving risk for different conditions was obtained by the model, and further divided into four levels of early warning (specified by colors) using a rank order cluster analysis. After that, a risk matrix was established to determine which warning color should be disseminated to drivers, given a specific condition. Finally, to validate the proposed procedure, actual crash data from Freeway G15 were compared with the safety prediction based on the risk matrix. The results show that the risk matrix obtained in the study is able to predict driving risk consistent with actual safety implications, under rainy weather conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
24. Mapping technological innovation dynamics in artificial intelligence domains: Evidence from a global patent analysis
- Author
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Na Liu, Philip Shapira, Xiaoxu Yue, and Jiancheng Guan
- Subjects
Computer and Information Sciences ,China ,Technology ,Asia ,Science ,Social Sciences ,Technology/methods ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Machine Learning ,Geographical Locations ,Patents as Topic ,Machine Learning Algorithms ,Automation ,Japan ,Inventions ,Artificial Intelligence ,Support Vector Machines ,Humans ,Patents ,Language Acquisition ,Multidisciplinary ,Models, Statistical ,Applied Mathematics ,Simulation and Modeling ,Linguistics ,Automation/methods ,United States ,Intellectual Property ,Models, Organizational ,Physical Sciences ,People and Places ,North America ,Medicine ,Law and Legal Sciences ,Commercial Law ,Diffusion of Innovation ,Mathematics ,Algorithms ,Research Article - Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a technology at the center of many political, economic, and societal debates. This paper formulates a new AI patent search strategy and applies this to provide a landscape analysis of AI innovation dynamics and technology evolution. The paper uses patent analyses, network analyses, and source path link count algorithms to examine AI spatial and temporal trends, cooperation features, cross-organization knowledge flow and technological routes. Results indicate a growing yet concentrated, non-collaborative and multi-path development and protection profile for AI patenting, with cross-organization knowledge flows based mainly on interorganizational knowledge citation links.
- Published
- 2021
25. Water affordability and human right to water implications in California
- Author
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Jessica J. Goddard, Isha Ray, Carolina Balazs, and Thet Wai, Khin
- Subjects
Sanitation ,Natural resource economics ,Social Sciences ,California ,Geographical locations ,Open Science ,Open Data ,Natural Resources ,Medicine and Health Sciences ,Public and Occupational Health ,Statistical Data ,Multidisciplinary ,Statistics ,Open data ,Research Design ,Scale (social sciences) ,Physical Sciences ,Costs and Cost Analysis ,Income ,Water Resources ,Medicine ,Engineering and Technology ,Environmental Health ,Social equality ,Research Article ,Census ,Environmental Engineering ,Water Management ,Human Rights ,General Science & Technology ,Science Policy ,Science ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Clinical Research ,Water Supply ,Humans ,Poverty ,Median income ,Survey Research ,Ecology and Environmental Sciences ,United States ,Water resources ,Health Care ,Philosophy ,North America ,Water quality ,Business ,People and places ,Mathematics - Abstract
Water affordability is central to water access but remains a challenge to measure. California enshrined the human right to safe and affordable water in 2012 but the question remains: how should water affordability be measured across the state? This paper contributes to this question in three steps. First, we identify key dimensions of water affordability measures (including scale, volume of water needed to meet ‘basic’ needs, and affordability criteria) and a cross-cutting theme (social equity). Second, using these dimensions, we develop three affordability ratios measured at the water system scale for households with median, poverty level, and deep poverty (i.e., half the poverty level) incomes and estimate the corresponding percentage of households at these income levels. Using multiple measures conveys a fuller picture of affordability given the known limitations of specific affordability measures. Third, we analyze our results disaggregated by a key characteristic of water system vulnerability–water system size. We find that water is relatively affordable for median income households. However, we identify high unaffordability for households in poverty in a large fraction of water systems. We identify several scenarios with different policy implications for the human right to water, such as very small systems with high water bills and low-income households within large water systems. We also characterize how data gaps complicate theoretical ideals and present barriers in human right to water monitoring efforts. This paper presents a systematic approach to measuring affordability and represents the first statewide assessment of water affordability within California’s community water systems.
- Published
- 2020
26. Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation
- Author
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Lee Hachadoorian, Christian Haas, Peter Miller, Steven O. Kimbrough, and Frederic H. Murphy
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Social Sciences ,Public administration ,Elections ,Geographical locations ,American Community Survey ,Sociology ,Electoral district ,050602 political science & public administration ,Heuristics ,media_common ,050502 law ,education.field_of_study ,Schools ,Multidisciplinary ,Applied Mathematics ,Simulation and Modeling ,05 social sciences ,Politics ,Arizona ,0506 political science ,Redistricting ,Research Design ,Physical Sciences ,Medicine ,Polity ,Algorithms ,Research Article ,Optimization ,Census ,Science ,Political Science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Population ,Gerrymandering ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Education ,Political science ,Humans ,education ,0505 law ,Survey Research ,Descriptive statistics ,Pennsylvania ,Deliberation ,United States ,North America ,People and places ,Mathematics - Abstract
Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation.
- Published
- 2020
27. A leader-follower model for discrete competitive facility location problem under the partially proportional rule with a threshold
- Author
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Wuyang Yu
- Subjects
0209 industrial biotechnology ,Computer science ,0211 other engineering and technologies ,Social Sciences ,02 engineering and technology ,Geographical locations ,020901 industrial engineering & automation ,Cognition ,Mississippi ,Chain (algebraic topology) ,Psychology ,Market share ,Workplace ,021103 operations research ,Multidisciplinary ,Economic Competition ,Applied Mathematics ,Simulation and Modeling ,Commerce ,Facility location problem ,Models, Economic ,Physical Sciences ,Florida ,Medicine ,Leader follower ,Algorithms ,Research Article ,Mathematical optimization ,Current (mathematics) ,Science ,Decision Making ,New York ,Models, Psychological ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Ranking Algorithms ,Humans ,Cognitive Psychology ,Biology and Life Sciences ,Consumer Behavior ,Pennsylvania ,Louisiana ,United States ,Leadership ,Ranking ,North America ,Cognitive Science ,People and places ,Mathematics ,Neuroscience - Abstract
When consumers are faced with the choice of competitive chain facilities that offer exclusive services, current rules do not properly describe the behavior pattern of these consumers. To eliminate the gap between the current rules and this kind of customers behavior pattern, the partially proportional rule with a threshold is proposed in this paper. A leader-follower model for discrete competitive facility location problem is established under the partially proportional rule with a threshold. Combining with the greedy strategy and the 2-opt strategy, a heuristical algorithm (GFA) is designed to solve the follower's problem. By embedding the algorithm (GFA), an improved ranking-based algorithm (IRGA) is proposed to solve the leader-follower model. Numerical tests show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can solve the leader-follower model for discrete competitive facility location problem effectively. The effects of different parameters on the market share captured by the leader firm and the follower firm are analyzed in detail using a quasi-real example. An interesting finding is that in some cases the leader firm does not have a first-mover advantage.
- Published
- 2019
28. A personalized channel recommendation and scheduling system considering both section video clips and full video clips
- Author
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SeungGwan Lee and Daeho Lee
- Subjects
Computer science ,Section (typography) ,Video Recording ,Social Sciences ,lcsh:Medicine ,02 engineering and technology ,computer.software_genre ,Geographical locations ,Machine Learning ,Database and Informatics Methods ,Learning and Memory ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Data Mining ,Psychology ,Computer Networks ,CLIPS ,lcsh:Science ,Statistical Data ,computer.programming_language ,Multidisciplinary ,Multimedia ,Applied Mathematics ,Simulation and Modeling ,IPTV ,Scheduling system ,Physical Sciences ,Information Retrieval ,020201 artificial intelligence & image processing ,Information Technology ,Algorithms ,Statistics (Mathematics) ,Research Article ,Communication channel ,Computer and Information Sciences ,Schedule ,Minnesota ,Broadcasting ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Computer Communication Networks ,Artificial Intelligence ,Learning ,Humans ,Internet ,business.industry ,Communications Media ,lcsh:R ,Cognitive Psychology ,Biology and Life Sciences ,020207 software engineering ,Models, Theoretical ,United States ,North America ,Cognitive Science ,lcsh:Q ,People and places ,business ,computer ,Mathematics ,Neuroscience - Abstract
With the convergence of various broadcasting systems, the amount of content available in mobile terminals including IPTV has significantly increased. In this paper, we propose a system that enables users to schedule programs considering both section video clips and full video clips based on the user detection method with similar preference. And, since the system constituting the contents can be classified according to the program, the proposed method can store a program desired by the user, and thus create and schedule a kind of individual channel. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a higher prediction accuracy; this is accomplished by comparing existing channel recommendation methods with the program recommendation methods proposed in this paper.
- Published
- 2018
29. Practices of research data curation in institutional repositories: A qualitative view from repository staff
- Author
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Besiki Stvilia and Dong Joon Lee
- Subjects
Computer and Information Sciences ,Research Facilities ,Knowledge management ,Sociotechnical system ,Science Policy ,Best practice ,Data management ,Libraries ,lcsh:Medicine ,02 engineering and technology ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Information Centers ,Graduates ,Librarians ,020204 information systems ,Political science ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,lcsh:Science ,Data Curation ,Data Management ,Statistical Data ,Multidisciplinary ,Data curation ,business.industry ,Research ,Workaround ,05 social sciences ,lcsh:R ,Software Development ,Academies and Institutes ,Software Engineering ,United States ,Metadata ,Professions ,Research Design ,People and Places ,Physical Sciences ,Educational Status ,Engineering and Technology ,Population Groupings ,Science policy ,lcsh:Q ,0509 other social sciences ,050904 information & library sciences ,business ,Mathematics ,Statistics (Mathematics) ,Research Article ,Qualitative research - Abstract
The importance of managing research data has been emphasized by the government, funding agencies, and scholarly communities. Increased access to research data increases the impact and efficiency of scientific activities and funding. Thus, many research institutions have established or plan to establish research data curation services as part of their Institutional Repositories (IRs). However, in order to design effective research data curation services in IRs, and to build active research data providers and user communities around those IRs, it is essential to study current data curation practices and provide rich descriptions of the sociotechnical factors and relationships shaping those practices. Based on 13 interviews with 15 IR staff members from 13 large research universities in the United States, this paper provides a rich, qualitative description of research data curation and use practices in IRs. In particular, the paper identifies data curation and use activities in IRs, as well as their structures, roles played, skills needed, contradictions and problems present, solutions sought, and workarounds applied. The paper can inform the development of best practice guides, infrastructure and service templates, as well as education in research data curation in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools.
- Published
- 2017
30. An empirical analysis of post-work grocery shopping activity duration using modified accelerated failure time model to differentiate time-dependent and time-independent covariates
- Author
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Jie Ma, Ke Wang, and Xin Ye
- Subjects
Time Factors ,Economics ,Test Statistics ,lcsh:Medicine ,Social Sciences ,Transportation ,010501 environmental sciences ,Accelerated failure time model ,01 natural sciences ,Geographical locations ,Mathematical and Statistical Techniques ,Econometrics ,lcsh:Science ,Mathematics ,Family Characteristics ,Travel ,Multidisciplinary ,Geography ,Statistical Models ,Statistics ,05 social sciences ,Overtime ,Texas ,Physical Sciences ,Engineering and Technology ,Probability distribution ,Shopping (activity) ,Research Article ,Statistical Distributions ,Employment ,Biometry ,Human Geography ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Population Metrics ,0502 economics and business ,Covariate ,Statistical Methods ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Statistical hypothesis testing ,Population Density ,050210 logistics & transportation ,Models, Statistical ,Population Biology ,lcsh:R ,Biology and Life Sciences ,Statistical model ,Probability Theory ,United States ,Labor Economics ,North America ,Earth Sciences ,Human Mobility ,lcsh:Q ,People and places ,Grocery shopping - Abstract
In this paper, the accelerated failure time (AFT) model is modified to analyze post-work grocery shopping activity duration. Much previous shopping duration analysis was conducted using the proportional hazard (PH) modeling approach. Once the proportionality assumption was violated, the traditional accelerated failure time (TAFT) model was usually selected as an alternative modeling approach. However, a TAFT model only has covariates with non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard overtime while a PH model only accommodates covariates with proportional and time-independent effects. Neither of them considers the possibility that some of covariates may have proportional and time-independent effects and some may have non-proportional and time-dependent effects on the hazard value in one model. To address this issue, the paper generalizes the TAFT model and develops a modified accelerated failure time (MAFT) model to accommodate both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for activity duration analysis. Checking on the proportionality assumption indicates that the assumption is not valid in the post-work grocery shopping activity data extracted from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). Both TAFT and MAFT models are developed for comparisons and analysis. The empirical and statistical results show that there do exist two different types of covariates affecting shopping activity duration, including covariates only with proportional and time-independent effects (i.e. working duration, commute travel time) and those with non-proportional and time-dependent effects. The MAFT model can capture the subtleties in various types of covariate effects and help better understand how those covariates affect activity duration overtime. This paper also shows the importance to develop a flexible duration model with both time-dependent and time-independent covariates for accurately evaluating travel demand management (TDM) policies, like flexible work hours.
- Published
- 2018
31. Dynamics in the Fitness-Income plane: Brazilian states vs World countries
- Author
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Luciano Pietronero, Andrea Gabrielli, Emanuele Pugliese, José S. Andrade, Felipe G. Operti, Operti, F. G., Pugliese, E., Andrade, J. S., Pietronero, L., and Gabrielli, A.
- Subjects
Economic Complexity ,Complex Systems ,Dinamical Systems ,010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,Economics ,lcsh:Medicine ,Social Sciences ,01 natural sciences ,Geographical locations ,Gross domestic product ,Russia ,Spectrum Analysis Techniques ,Mathematical and Statistical Techniques ,Econometrics ,Per capita ,050207 economics ,lcsh:Science ,Multidisciplinary ,Applied Mathematics ,Simulation and Modeling ,05 social sciences ,Absorption Spectroscopy ,BRIC ,Europe ,Physical Sciences ,Metric (mathematics) ,Income ,Algorithms ,Statistics (Mathematics) ,Brazil ,Human ,Research Article ,Asia ,Gross Domestic Product ,India ,Developing country ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Developing Countrie ,Life Expectancy ,0502 economics and business ,Humans ,Statistical Methods ,Predictability ,Developing Countries ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,lcsh:R ,Correction ,South America ,United States ,Socioeconomic Factors ,Ranking ,Economic complexity index ,North America ,People and Places ,lcsh:Q ,Mathematics ,Forecasting - Abstract
In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness, to calculate the Fitness of subnational entities and we apply it to the states of Brazil. In the last decade, several indices were introduced to measure the competitiveness of countries by looking at the complexity of their export basket. Tacchella et al (2012) developed a non-monetary metric called Fitness. In this paper, after an overview about Brazil as a whole and the comparison with the other BRIC countries, we introduce a new methodology based on the Fitness algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness. Combining the results with the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP(p)), we look at the dynamics of the Brazilian states in the Fitness-Income plane. Two regimes are distinguishable: one with high predictability and the other with low predictability, showing a deep analogy with the heterogeneous dynamics of the World countries. Furthermore, we compare the ranking of the Brazilian states according to the Exogenous Fitness with the ranking obtained through two other techniques, namely Endogenous Fitness and Economic Complexity Index.
- Published
- 2018
32. Prognostic value of preoperative hydronephrosis in patients with bladder cancer undergoing radical cystectomy: A meta-analysis.
- Author
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Zhu, Zhaowei, Zhao, Jia, Li, Yinghui, Pang, Chen, Zhu, Zhanwei, and Zhang, Xuepei
- Subjects
BLADDER cancer ,META-analysis ,HYDRONEPHROSIS ,CYSTECTOMY ,CANCER patients - Abstract
Background: Hydronephrosis is a common finding in patients with bladder cancer. The aim of the study was to appraise the prognostic value of preoperative hydronephrosis in bladder cancer patients undergoing radical cystectomy. Methods: We conducted a literature search using PubMed and Embase databases in Aug 2018. Summary hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using fixed-effect or random-effects models. The primary endpoint was overall survival (OS). Secondary endpoints were cancer-specific survival (CSS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS). Results: Overall, 13 studies published between 2008 and 2018 including 4,820 patients were selected for the meta-analysis. The age of bladder cancer patients ranged from 27 to 90.4 years, and the overall proportion of males was 72.5%. Preoperative hydronephrosis was reported in 27.4% of patients. The pooled HR was statistically significant for OS (HR, 1.36; 95% CI [1.20–1.55]) and CSS (HR, 1.64; 95% CI [1.33–2.02]), with no heterogeneity among the enrolled studies. Patients with bilateral hydronephrosis showed a poorer CSS compared to those with no hydronephrosis (HR 5.43, 95% CI [3.14–9.40]). However, there was no difference in CSS between no hydronephrosis and unilateral hydronephrosis groups (HR 1.35, 95% CI [0.84–2.14]). Despite a tendency towards poorer RFS (HR, 1.27; 95% CI [0.96–1.96]), the results demonstrated no significant association between presence of preoperative hydronephrosis and RFS after radical cystectomy. Conclusion: This meta-analysis indicates that preoperative hydronephrosis is significantly associated with poorer OS and CSS after radical cystectomy for patients with bladder cancer. Preoperative hydronephrosis has a stronger effect on CSS in patients with bilateral hydronephrosis. The presence of preoperative hydronephrosis not only predicts prognosis, but may also help to identify patients who benefit the most from neoadjuvant chemotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
33. Methods to include persons living with HIV not receiving HIV care in the Medical Monitoring Project.
- Author
-
Wei, Stanley C., Messina, Lauren, Hood, Julia, Hughes, Alison, Jaenicke, Thomas, Johnson, Kendra, Mena, Leandro, Scheer, Susan, Udeagu, Chi-Chi, Wohl, Amy, Robertson, McKaylee, Prejean, Joseph, Chen, Mi, Tang, Tian, Bertolli, Jeanne, Johnson, Christopher H., and Skarbinski, Jacek
- Subjects
PUBLIC health surveillance ,PATIENT monitoring ,MEDICAL care ,HIV ,HIV infection transmission ,MEDICAL history taking - Abstract
The Medical Monitoring Project (MMP) is an HIV surveillance system that provides national estimates of HIV-related behaviors and clinical outcomes. When first implemented, MMP excluded persons living with HIV not receiving HIV care. This analysis will describe new case-surveillance-based methods to identify and recruit persons living with HIV who are out of care and at elevated risk for mortality and ongoing HIV transmission. Stratified random samples of all persons living with HIV were selected from the National HIV Surveillance System in five public health jurisdictions from 2012–2014. Sampled persons were located and contacted through seven different data sources and five methods of contact to collect interviews and medical record abstractions. Data were weighted for non-response and case reporting delay. The modified sampling methodology yielded 1159 interviews (adjusted response rate, 44.5%) and matching medical record abstractions for 1087 (93.8%). Of persons with both interview and medical record data, 264 (24.3%) would not have been included using prior MMP methods. Significant predictors were identified for successful contact (e.g., retention in care, adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR] 5.02; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] 1.98–12.73), interview (e.g. moving out of jurisdiction, aOR 0.24; 95% CI: 0.12–0.46) and case reporting delay (e.g. rural residence, aOR 3.18; 95% CI: 2.09–4.85). Case-surveillance-based sampling resulted in a comparable response rate to existing MMP methods while providing information on an important new population. These methods have since been adopted by the nationally representative MMP surveillance system, offering a model for public health program, research and surveillance endeavors seeking inclusion of all persons living with HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
34. Spatiotemporal downscaling of global population and income scenarios for the United States.
- Author
-
Wear, David N. and Prestemon, Jeffrey P.
- Subjects
ECONOMICS ,NATURAL resources ,DOWNSCALING (Climatology) ,INCOME ,POPULATION forecasting ,PER capita - Abstract
Downscaled climate projections need to be linked to downscaled projections of population and economic growth to fully develop implications for land, natural resources, and ecosystems for future scenarios. We develop an empirical spatiotemporal approach for jointly projecting population and income at the county scale in the United States that is consistent with neoclassical economic growth theory and overlapping labor markets and that accounts for labor migration and spatial spillovers. Downscaled projections generated for the five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways used to support global scenario analysis generally show growth focused around relatively few centers especially in the southeast and western regions, with some areas in the Midwest and northeast experiencing population declines. Results are consistent with economic growth theory and with historical trends in population change and convergence of per capita personal income across US counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
35. Global and country-specific mainstreaminess measures: Definitions, analysis, and usage for improving personalized music recommendation systems.
- Author
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Bauer, Christine and Schedl, Markus
- Abstract
Relevance: Popularity-based approaches are widely adopted in music recommendation systems, both in industry and research. These approaches recommend to the target user what is currently popular among all users of the system. However, as the popularity distribution of music items typically is a long-tail distribution, popularity-based approaches to music recommendation fall short in satisfying listeners that have specialized music preferences far away from the global music mainstream. Addressing this gap, the contribution of this article is three-fold. Definition of mainstreaminess measures: First, we provide several quantitative measures describing the proximity of a user’s music preference to the music mainstream. Assuming that there is a difference between the global music mainstream and a country-specific one, we define the measures at two levels: relating a listener’s music preferences to the global music preferences of all users, or relating them to music preferences of the user’s country. To quantify such music preferences, we define a music item’s popularity in terms of artist playcounts (APC) and artist listener counts (ALC). Moreover, we adopt a distribution-based and a rank-based approach as means to decrease bias towards the head of the long-tail distribution. This eventually results in a framework of 6 measures to quantify music mainstream. Differences between countries with respect to music mainstream: Second, we perform in-depth quantitative and qualitative studies of music mainstream in that we (i) analyze differences between countries in terms of their level of mainstreaminess, (ii) uncover both positive and negative outliers (substantially higher and lower country-specific popularity, respectively, compared to the global mainstream), analyzing these with a mixed-methods approach, and (iii) investigate differences between countries in terms of listening preferences related to popular music artists. We conduct our studies and experiments using the standardized LFM-1b dataset, from which we analyze about 800,000,000 listening events shared by about 53,000 users (from 47 countries) of the music streaming platform Last.fm. We show that there are substantial country-specific differences in listeners’ music consumption behavior with respect to the most popular artists listened to. Rating prediction experiments: Third, we demonstrate the applicability of our study results to improve music recommendation systems. To this end, we conduct rating prediction experiments in which we tailor recommendations to a user’s level of preference for the music mainstream using the proposed 6 mainstreaminess measures: defined by a distribution-based or rank-based approach, defined on a global level or on a country level (for the user’s country), and for APC or ALC. Our approach roughly equals a hybrid recommendation approach in which a demographic filtering strategy is implemented before collaborative filtering is performed. Results suggest that, in terms of rating prediction accuracy, each of the presented mainstreaminess definitions has its merits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
36. Uncertainty analysis of species distribution models.
- Author
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Chen, Xi, Dimitrov, Nedialko B., and Meyers, Lauren Ancel
- Subjects
SPECIES distribution ,AEDES aegypti ,MAXIMUM entropy method ,POISSON processes ,DATA distribution ,POINT processes ,UNCERTAINTY - Abstract
The maximum entropy model, a commonly used species distribution model (SDM) normally combines observations of the species occurrence with environmental information to predict the geographic distributions of animal or plant species. However, it only produces point estimates for the probability of species existence. To understand the uncertainty of the point estimates, we analytically derived the variance of the outputs of the maximum entropy model from the variance of the input. We applied the analytic method to obtain the standard deviation of dengue importation probability and Aedes aegypti suitability. Dengue occurrence data and Aedes aegypti mosquito abundance data, combined with demographic and environmental data, were applied to obtain point estimates and the corresponding variance. To address the issue of not having the true distributions for comparison, we compared and contrasted the performance of the analytical expression with the bootstrap method and Poisson point process model which proved of equivalence of maximum entropy model with the assumption of independent point locations. Both Dengue importation probability and Aedes aegypti mosquito suitability examples show that the methods generate comparatively the same results and the analytic method we introduced is dramatically faster than the bootstrap method and directly apply to maximum entropy model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
37. Understanding urbanization: A study of census and satellite-derived urban classes in the United States, 1990-2010.
- Author
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Balk, Deborah, Leyk, Stefan, Jones, Bryan, Montgomery, Mark R., and Clark, Anastasia
- Subjects
URBANIZATION ,HUMAN settlements ,URBAN geography ,SOCIAL change ,URBAN ecology (Sociology) - Abstract
Most of future population growth will take place in the world’s cities and towns. Yet, there is no well-established, consistent way to measure either urban land or people. Even census-based urban concepts and measures undergo frequent revision, impeding rigorous comparisons over time and place. This study presents a new spatial approach to derive consistent urban proxies for the US. It compares census-designated urban blocks with proxies for land-based classifications of built-up areas derived from time-series of the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) for 1990–2010. This comparison provides a new way to understand urban structure and its changes: Most land that is more than 50% built-up, and people living on such land, are officially classified as urban. However, 30% of the census-designated urban population and land is located in less built-up areas that can be characterized as mainly suburban and peri-urban in nature. Such insights are important starting points for a new urban research program: creating globally and temporally consistent proxies to guide modelling of urban change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
38. Sex differences in post-stroke aphasia rates are caused by age. A meta-analysis and database query.
- Author
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Wallentin, Mikkel
- Subjects
STROKE ,APHASIA ,QUERY languages (Computer science) ,META-analysis - Abstract
Background: Studies have suggested that aphasia rates are different in men and women following stroke. One hypothesis says that men have more lateralized language function than women. Given unilateral stroke, this would lead to a prediction of men having higher aphasia rates than women. Another line of observations suggest that women are more severely affected by stroke, which could lead to a higher aphasia rate among women. An additional potential confounding variable could be age, given that women are typically older at the time of stroke. Methods & procedures: This study consists of two parts. First, a meta-analysis of the available reports of aphasia rates in the two sexes was conducted. A comprehensive literature search yielded 25 studies with sufficient information about both aphasia and gender. These studies included a total of 48,362 stroke patients for which aphasia rates were calculated. Second, data were extracted from an American health database (with 1,967,038 stroke patients), in order to include age and stroke severity into a regression analysis of sex differences in aphasia rates. Outcomes & results: Both analyses revealed significantly larger aphasia rates in women than in men (1.1–1.14 ratio). This speaks against the idea that men should be more lateralized in their language function. When age and stroke severity were included as covariates, sex failed to explain any aphasia rate sex difference above and beyond that which is explained by age differences at time of stroke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
39. Social identity mediates the positive effect of globalization on individual cooperation: Results from international experiments.
- Author
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Grimalda, Gianluca, Buchan, Nancy, and Brewer, Marilynn
- Subjects
GROUP identity ,SOCIAL networks ,REGIONAL identity (Psychology) ,STATISTICAL correlation ,QUESTIONNAIRES - Abstract
Globalization is defined for individuals as their connectivity in global networks. Social identity is conceptualized as attachment and identification with a group. We measure individual involvement with global networks and local, national, and global social identity through a questionnaire. Propensity to cooperate is measured in experiments involving local and global others. Firstly, we analyze possible determinants of global social identity. Overall, attachment to global identity is significantly lower than national and local identity, but there is a significant positive correlation between global social identity and an index of individual global connectivity. Secondly, we find a significant mediating effect of global social identity between individual global connectivity and propensity to cooperate at the global level. This is consistent with a cosmopolitan hypothesis of how participation in global networks reshapes social identity: Increased participation in global networks increases global social identity and this in turn increases propensity to cooperate with others. We also show that this model receives more support than alternative models substituting either propensity to associate with others or general generosity for individual global connectivity. We further demonstrate that more globalized individuals do not reduce contributions to local accounts while increasing contributions to global accounts, but rather are overall more generous. Finally, we find that the effect of global social identity on cooperation is significantly stronger in countries at a relatively low stage of globalization, compared to more globalized countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
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40. Spatial variation in western corn rootworm (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) susceptibility to Cry3 toxins in Nebraska.
- Author
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Reinders, Jordan D., Hitt, Brianna D., Stroup, Walter W., French, B. Wade, and Meinke, Lance J.
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WESTERN corn rootworm ,SPATIAL variation ,BEETLES ,CHRYSOMELIDAE ,GENE flow ,INSECTS - Abstract
Repeated use of field corn (Zea mays L.) hybrids expressing the Cry3Bb1 and mCry3A traits in Nebraska has selected for field-evolved resistance in some western corn rootworm (WCR; Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte) populations. Therefore, this study was conducted to characterize spatial variation in local WCR susceptibility to Cry3Bb1 and mCry3A traits in Keith and Buffalo counties, Nebraska, and determine the relationship between past management practices and current WCR susceptibility. Adult WCR populations were collected from sampling grids during 2015 and 2016 and single-plant larval bioassays conducted with F
1 progeny documented significant variation in WCR susceptibility to Cry3Bb1 and mCry3A on different spatial scales in both sampling grids. At the local level, results revealed that neighboring cornfields may support WCR populations with very different susceptibility levels, indicating that gene flow of resistant alleles from high trait survival sites is not inundating large areas. A field history index, comprised of additive and weighted variables including past WCR management tactics and agronomic practices, was developed to quantify relative selection pressure in individual fields. The field history index-Cry3 trait survivorship relationship from year 1 data was highly predictive of year 2 Cry3 trait survivorship when year 2 field history indices were inserted into the year 1 base model. Sensitivity analyses indicated years of trait use and associated selection pressure at the local level were the key drivers of WCR susceptibility to Cry3 traits in this system. Retrospective case histories from this study will inform development of optimal resistance management programs and increase understanding of plant-insect interactions that may occur when transgenic corn is deployed in the landscape. Results from this study also support current recommendations to slow or mitigate the evolution of resistance by using a multi-tactic approach to manage WCR densities in individual fields within an integrated pest management framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
41. Gender, power, and violence: A systematic review of measures and their association with male perpetration of IPV.
- Author
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McCarthy, Katharine J., Mehta, Ruchi, and Haberland, Nicole A.
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INTIMATE partner violence ,VIOLENCE against women ,INTERPERSONAL relations ,COUPLES ,DATING violence - Abstract
Introduction: Harmful gender norms, views on the acceptability of violence against women, and power inequities in relationships have been explored as key drivers of male perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet such antecedents have been inconsistently measured in the empirical literature. This systematic review aimed to identify which measures of gender inequitable norms, views, relations and practices are currently being used in the field, and which are most closely tied with male IPV perpetration. Methods: We searched five electronic databases to identify studies published between 2000 and 2015 that reported the association between such gender inequities and male perpetration of IPV. Identified scales were categorized by content area and level of generality, as well as other attributes, and we compared the consistency of scale performance across each category. Results: Twenty-three studies were identified, employing 64 measures. Scales were categorized into three main thematic areas: views on gender roles/norms, acceptance of violence against women, and gender-related inequities in relationship power and control. We also classified whether the scale was oriented to respondents’ own views, or what they believed others do or think. While overall, measures were positively associated with IPV perpetration in 45% of cases, this finding varied by scale type. Measures inclusive of acceptance of violence against women or beliefs about men’s sexual entitlement, followed by scales that measured respondents’ views on gender roles/norms, were most consistently associated with IPV perpetration. Measures of relationship power showed less consistent associations. We found few scales that measured peer or community norms. Conclusion: Validated scales that encompass views on the acceptance of violence against women, and scales inclusive of beliefs about men’s sexual entitlement, may be particularly promising for unpacking pathways to IPV perpetration, targeting interventions, and monitoring progress in IPV prevention efforts. A number of gaps in the literature are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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- 2018
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42. Global treatment costs of breast cancer by stage: A systematic review.
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Sun, Li, Legood, Rosa, dos-Santos-Silva, Isabel, Gaiha, Shivani Mathur, and Sadique, Zia
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BREAST cancer treatment ,BREAST cancer patients ,GENETICS of breast cancer ,BREAST cancer diagnosis ,HIGH-income countries - Abstract
Background: Published evidence on treatment costs of breast cancer varies widely in methodology and a global systematic review is lacking. Objectives: This study aimed to conduct a systematic review to compare treatment costs of breast cancer by stage at diagnosis across countries at different levels of socio-economic development, and to identify key methodological differences in costing approaches. Data sources: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and NHS Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED) before April 2018. Eligibility criteria: Studies were eligible if they reported treatment costs of breast cancer by stage at diagnosis using patient level data, in any language. Study appraisal and synthesis methods: Study characteristics and treatment costs by stage were summarised. Study quality was assessed using the Drummond Checklist, and detailed methodological differences were further compared. Results: Twenty studies were included, 15 from high-income countries and five from low- and middle-income countries. Eleven studies used the FIGO staging system, and the mean treatment costs of breast cancer at Stage II, III and IV were 32%, 95%, and 109% higher than Stage I. Five studies categorised stage as in situ, local, regional and distant. The mean treatment costs of regional and distant breast cancer were 41% and 165% higher than local breast cancer. Overall, the quality of studies ranged from 50% (lowest quality) to 84% (highest). Most studies used regression frameworks but the choice of regression model was rarely justified. Few studies described key methodological issues including skewness, zero values, censored data, missing data, and the inclusion of control groups to estimate disease-attributable costs. Conclusions: Treatment costs of breast cancer generally increased with the advancement of the disease stage at diagnosis. Methodological issues should be better handled and properly described in future costing studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
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43. Nature as a living presence: Drawings by Tupinambá and New York Children.
- Author
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Profice, Christiana
- Subjects
ELECTRONIC equipment ,NATURE & psychology ,CHILD psychology ,CHILDREN ,PROBLEM solving - Abstract
Child–nature interaction has undergone drastic changes in modern history, from a free outdoor childhood to a confined daily life connected to electronic devices, with negative consequences to development and well-being. Any resulting lack of connection to the natural environment can hamper involvement in solving environmental problems. This research attempted to assess children’s perceptions of nature, as well as their feelings and values. Six- to 14-year-old children from the Tupinambá group (n = 91), an indigenous society in Brazil, and from New York (n = 54) drew pictures of nature and answered five questions about their drawings, feelings, and values in regard to natural environments. Quantitative (descriptive) and qualitative (content) analyses of the drawings were carried out, and their liveness and animism were estimated. The answers given by children to the questions about nature were organized into emerging categories from the data. The Tupinambá children’s drawings were generally livelier than those of the New York children. However, the difference failed to reach statistical significance among the younger children, and the difference only approached significance among the older children. The drawings of the Tupinambá contained more animism, depicting non-humans and non-animals with facial expressions, than those of the New Yorkers. Compared with the New Yorkers, the Tupinambá children more often included human constructions such as roads and houses in their drawings. The indigenous children more often saw human and non-human elements as integrated compared with the nonindigenous children. The study reinforces theoretical tendencies about the environmental perception of children in relation to the natural environment and highlights peculiarities of the participating groups, indicating relevant questions for future investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
44. The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States: Estimates based on demographic modeling with data from 1990 to 2016.
- Author
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Fazel-Zarandi, Mohammad M., Feinstein, Jonathan S., and Kaplan, Edward H.
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DEMOGRAPHIC change ,SENSORY perception ,EMIGRATION & immigration ,POPULATION ,GOVERNMENT policy - Abstract
We apply standard demographic principles of inflows and outflows to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the best available data, including some that have only recently become available. Our analysis covers the years 1990 to 2016. We develop an estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants based on parameter values that tend to underestimate undocumented immigrant inflows and overstate outflows; we also show the probability distribution for the number of undocumented immigrants based on simulating our model over parameter value ranges. Our conservative estimate is 16.7 million for 2016, nearly fifty percent higher than the most prominent current estimate of 11.3 million, which is based on survey data and thus different sources and methods. The mean estimate based on our simulation analysis is 22.1 million, essentially double the current widely accepted estimate. Our model predicts a similar trajectory of growth in the number of undocumented immigrants over the years of our analysis, but at a higher level. While our analysis delivers different results, we note that it is based on many assumptions. The most critical of these concern border apprehension rates and voluntary emigration rates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. These rates are uncertain, especially in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, which is when—both based on our modeling and the very different survey data approach—the number of undocumented immigrants increases most significantly. Our results, while based on a number of assumptions and uncertainties, could help frame debates about policies whose consequences depend on the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
45. Outcomes of early NIH-funded investigators: Experience of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
- Author
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Haggerty, Patricia A. and Fenton, Matthew J.
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ALLERGIES ,COMMUNICABLE diseases ,MEDICAL economics ,COHORT analysis - Abstract
Survival of junior scientists in academic biomedical research is difficult in today’s highly competitive funding climate. National Institute of Health (NIH) data on first-time R01 grantees indicate the rate at which early investigators drop out from a NIH-supported research career is most rapid 4 to 5 years from the first R01 award. The factors associated with a high risk of dropping out, and whether these factors impact all junior investigators equally, are unclear. We identified a cohort of 1,496 investigators who received their first R01-equivalent (R01-e) awards from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between 2003 and 2010, and studied all their subsequent NIH grant applications through 2016. Ultimately, 57% of the cohort were successful in obtaining new R01-e funding, despite highly competitive conditions. Among those investigators who failed to compete successfully for new funding (43%), the average time to dropping out was 5 years. Investigators who successfully obtained new grants showed remarkable within-person consistency across multiple grant submission behaviors, including submitting more applications per year, more renewal applications, and more applications to multiple NIH Institutes. Funded investigators appeared to have two advantages over their unfunded peers at the outset: they had better scores on their first R01-e grants and they demonstrated an early ability to write applications that would be scored, not triaged. The cohort rapidly segregated into two very different groups on the basis of PI consistency in the quality and frequency of applications submitted after their first R01-e award. Lastly, we identified a number of specific demographic factors, intitutional characteristics, and grant submission behaviors that were associated with successful outcomes, and assessed their predictive value and relative importance for the likelihood of obtaining additional NIH funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
46. Silodosin versus tamsulosin for medical expulsive treatment of ureteral stones: A systematic review and meta-analysis.
- Author
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Hsu, Yuan-Pin, Hsu, Chin-Wang, Bai, Chyi-Huey, Cheng, Sheng-Wei, Chen, Kuan-Chou, and Chen, Chiehfeng
- Subjects
TAMSULOSIN ,KIDNEY stones ,REGRESSION analysis ,NEURODEGENERATION ,SENSITIVITY analysis - Abstract
Silodosin, a recently introduced selective α-blocker, has a much higher selectivity for the α-1A receptor. The efficacy and safety of silodosin compared to tamsulosin in medical expulsive therapy (MET) are controversial. The objective of this study was to assess the efficacy and safety of silodosin compared to tamsulosin for treating ureteral stones <10 mm in diameter. We systematically searched the PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, and Scopus databases from their inception to May 2018. We included randomized controlled studies (RCTs) and observational studies, which investigated stone expulsion rates using silodosin compared to tamsulosin. Data were synthesized using a random-effects model. Sixteen studies with 1824 patients were eligible for inclusion. Silodosin achieved significantly higher expulsion rates than tamsulosin (pooled risk difference (RD): 0.13, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.09 to 0.18, GRADE: high). A subgroup analyses showed that silodosin has a significantly higher expulsion rate on stone sizes of 5–10 mm than tamsulosin (pooled RD: 0.14, 95% CI: 0.06 to 0.22, I
2 = 0%). The superior effect was not observed on stone sizes <5 mm. A multivariate regression showed that the RD was negatively associated with the control expulsion rate after adjusting for age and gender (coefficient -0.658, p = 0.01). A sensitivity analysis showed that our findings were robust. Patients receiving silodosin also probably had a significantly shorter expulsion time (pooled mean difference (MD): -2.55 days, 95% CI: -4.06 to -1.04, I2 = 85%, GRADE: moderate) and may have fewer pain episodes (pooled MD: -0.3, 95% CI: -0.51 to -0.09, GRADE: low) but a higher incidence of retrograde ejaculation by 5% compared to those receiving tamsulosin. In conclusion, compared to tamsulosin, silodosin provided significantly better stone passage for patients with ureteral stones (particularly for sizes of 5~10 mm), shorter expulsion times, and fewer pain episodes but caused a higher incidence of retrograde ejaculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
47. Can lifestyle preferences help explain the persistent gender gap in academia? The “mothers work less” hypothesis supported for German but not for U.S. early career researchers.
- Author
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Sieverding, Monika, Eib, Constanze, Neubauer, Andreas B., and Stahl, Thomas
- Subjects
LIFESTYLES ,SAMPLING (Process) ,HYPOTHESIS ,WORKING hours ,CAREER development - Abstract
Do lifestyle preferences contribute to the remaining gender gap in higher positions in academia with highly qualified women—especially those with children—deliberately working fewer hours than men do? We tested the “mothers work less” hypothesis in two samples of early career researchers employed at universities in Germany (N = 202) and in the US (N = 197). Early career researchers in the US worked on average 6.3 hours more per week than researchers in Germany. In Germany, female early career researchers with children had drastically reduced work hours (around 8 hours per week) compared to male researchers with children and compared to female researchers without children, whereas we found no such effect for U.S. researchers. In addition, we asked how long respondents would ideally want to work (ideal work hours), and results revealed similar effects for ideal work hours. Results support the “mothers work less” hypothesis for German but not for U.S. early career researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
48. Distribution of item responses and total item scores for the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D): Data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA).
- Author
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Tomitaka, Shinichiro, Kawasaki, Yohei, Ide, Kazuki, Akutagawa, Maiko, Ono, Yutaka, and Furukawa, Toshiaki A.
- Subjects
MENTAL depression ,ITEM response theory ,EPIDEMIOLOGICAL research ,AGING ,PUBLIC health - Abstract
Background: Previous studies have shown that item responses and total scores on depression screening scales follow characteristic distribution patterns in the United States and Japanese general populations. However, the degree to which these findings, especially in terms of item responses, can be generalized to a European population is unknown. Thus, we analyzed the item responses and total score distribution for the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) in a representative Irish cohort from a large, recent study—the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Methods: We used CES-D data from the 2009–2011 TILDA (8504 individuals). Responses for the 16 depressive symptoms included “rarely,” “some of the time,” “occasionally,” and “all of the time.” Item response patterns and total score distribution across these 16 depressive symptom items were examined using graphical analyses and exponential regression modeling. Results: Lines for item responses followed the same pattern across the 16 items. These lines were characterized by intersections in the vicinity of a single point between “rarely” and “some of the time” and parallel patterns from “some of the time” to “all of the time” on a log-normal scale. Total scores for the 16 items exhibited an exponential pattern, except for at the lower end of the distribution. Conclusions: The present findings suggest that item responses and total scores on depression screening scales among the general population follow the same characteristic patterns across populations from multiple nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
49. Scaling properties of food flow networks.
- Author
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Konar, Megan, Lin, Xiaowen, Ruddell, Benjamin, and Sivapalan, Murugesu
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FOOD supply ,SUPPLY chains ,FOOD industry ,EXPONENTIAL functions ,GAMMA distributions - Abstract
Food flows underpin the complex food supply chains that are prevalent in our increasingly globalized world. Recently, much effort has been devoted to evaluating the resources (e.g. water, carbon, nutrients) embodied in food trade. Now, research is needed to understand the scientific principles of the food commodity flows that underpin these virtual resource transfers. How do food flows vary with spatial scale? To address this question, we present an empirical analysis of food commodity flow networks across the full spectrum of spatial scales: global, national, and village. We discover properties of both scale invariance and scale dependence in food flow networks. The statistical distribution of node connectivity and mass flux are consistent across scales. Node connectivity follows a generalized exponential distribution, while node mass flux follows a Gamma distribution across scales. Similarly, the relationship between node connectivity and mass flux follows a power law across scales. However, the parameters of the distributions change with spatial scale. Mean node connectivity and mass flux increase with increasing scale. A core group of nodes exists at all scales, but node centrality increases as the spatial scale decreases, indicating that some households are more critical to village food exchanges than countries are to global trade. Remarkably, the structural network properties of food flows are consistent across spatial scales, indicating that a universal mechanism may underpin food exchange systems. In future research, this understanding can be used to develop theoretical models of food flow networks and to model food flows at resolutions for which empirical information is not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
50. Earthquake prediction model using support vector regressor and hybrid neural networks.
- Author
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Asim, Khawaja M., Idris, Adnan, Iqbal, Talat, and Martínez-Álvarez, Francisco
- Subjects
EARTHQUAKE prediction ,SUPPORT vector machines ,PREDICTION models ,ARTIFICIAL neural networks ,CATASTROPHE theory (Mathematics) - Abstract
Earthquake prediction has been a challenging research area, where a future occurrence of the devastating catastrophe is predicted. In this work, sixty seismic features are computed through employing seismological concepts, such as Gutenberg-Richter law, seismic rate changes, foreshock frequency, seismic energy release, total recurrence time. Further, Maximum Relevance and Minimum Redundancy (mRMR) criteria is applied to extract the relevant features. A Support Vector Regressor (SVR) and Hybrid Neural Network (HNN) based classification system is built to obtain the earthquake predictions. HNN is a step wise combination of three different Neural Networks, supported by Enhanced Particle Swarm Optimization (EPSO), to offer weight optimization at each layer. The newly computed seismic features in combination with SVR-HNN prediction system is applied on Hindukush, Chile and Southern California regions. The obtained numerical results show improved prediction performance for all the considered regions, compared to previous prediction studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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