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Background: Paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera (L.) L'Hér. ex Vent) is a dioecious tree native to East Asia and mainland Southeast-Asia, introduced prehistorically to Polynesia as a source of bark fiber by Austronesian-speaking voyagers. In Oceania, trees are coppiced and harvested for production of bark-cloth, so flowering is generally unknown. A survey of botanical records of paper mulberry revealed a distributional disjunction: the tree is apparently absent in Borneo and the Philippines. A subsequent study of chloroplast haplotypes linked paper mulberry of Remote Oceania directly to a population in southern Taiwan, distinct from known populations in mainland Southeast-Asia. Methodology: We describe the optimization and use of a DNA marker designed to identify sex in paper mulberry. We used this marker to determine the sex distribution in selected localities across Asia, Near and Remote Oceania. We also characterized all samples using the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer sequence (ITS) in order to relate results to a previous survey of ITS diversity. Results: In Near and Remote Oceania, contemporary paper mulberry plants are all female with the exception of Hawaii, where plants of both sexes are found. In its natural range in Asia, male and female plants are found, as expected. Male plants in Hawaii display an East Asian ITS genotype, consistent with modern introduction, while females in Remote Oceania share a distinctive variant. Conclusions: Most paper mulberry plants now present in the Pacific appear to be descended from female clones introduced prehistorically. In Hawaii, the presence of male and female plants is thought to reflect a dual origin, one a prehistoric female introduction and the other a modern male introduction by Japanese/Chinese immigrants. If only female clones were dispersed from a source-region in Taiwan, this may explain the absence of botanical records and breeding populations in the Philippines and Borneo, and Remote Oceania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The management of comorbidity and multimorbidity poses major challenges to health services around the world. Analysis of scientific research in comorbidity and multimorbidity is limited in the biomedical literature. This study aimed to map global scientific research in comorbidity and multimorbidity to understand the maturity and growth of the area during the past decades. Methods and findings: This was a cross-sectional analysis of the Web of Science. Searches were run from inception until November 8, 2016. We included research articles or reviews with no restrictions by language or publication date. Data abstraction was done by one researcher. A process of standardization was conducted by two researchers to unify different terms and grammatical variants and to remove typographical, transcription, and/or indexing errors. All potential discrepancies were resolved via discussion. Descriptive analyses were conducted (including the number of papers, citations, signatures, most prolific authors, countries, journals and keywords). Network analyses of collaborations between countries and co-words were presented. During the period 1970–2016, 85994 papers (64.0% in 2010–2016) were published in 3500 journals. There was wide diversity in the specialty of the journals, with psychiatry (16558 papers; 19.3%), surgery (9570 papers; 11.1%), clinical neurology (9275 papers; 10.8%), and general and internal medicine (7622 papers; 8.9%) the most common. PLOS One (1223 papers; 1.4%), the Journal of Affective Disorders (1154 papers; 1.3%), the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (727 papers; 0.8%), the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (634 papers; 0.7%) and Obesity Surgery (588 papers; 0.7%) published the largest number of papers. 168 countries were involved in the production of papers. The global productivity ranking was headed by the United States (37624 papers), followed by the United Kingdom (7355 papers), Germany (6899 papers) and Canada (5706 papers). Twenty authors who published 100 or more papers were identified; the most prolific authors were affiliated with Harvard Medical School, State University of New York Upstate Medical University, National Taiwan Normal University and China Medical University. The 50 most cited papers (“citation classics” with at least 1000 citations) were published in 20 journals, led by JAMA Psychiatry (11 papers) and JAMA (10 papers). The most cited papers provided contributions focusing on methodological aspects (e.g. Charlson Comorbidity Index, Elixhauser Comorbidity Index, APACHE prognostic system), but also important studies on chronic diseases (e.g. epidemiology of mental disorders and its correlates by the U.S. National Comorbidity Survey, Fried’s frailty phenotype or the management of obesity). Conclusions: Ours is the first analysis of global scientific research in comorbidity and multimorbidity. Scientific production in the field is increasing worldwide with research leadership of Western countries, most notably, the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotes abound regarding the decline of basic research in industrial and governmental settings, but very little empirical evidence exists about the phenomenon. This article provides a systematic and historical analysis of the contribution of various institutional sectors to knowledge production at the world and country levels across the past four decades. It highlights a dramatic decline in the diffusion of basic research by industrial and governmental sectors across all countries—with a corresponding increase in the share from universities—as well as an increase of partnerships between universities and other sectors. Results also shows an increase in the relative share of industries in applied research, as measured through patents. Such divergence in university and industry research activities may hinder industries’ ability to translate basic knowledge into technological innovation, and could lead to a growing misalignment between doctoral training and future job expectations. Industries and universities must rethink strategies for partnerships and publishing to maximize scientific progress and to ensure the greatest gains for society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National contributions to science are influenced by a number of factors, including economic capacity, national scientific priorities, science policy, and institutional settings and cultures. Nations do not have equal opportunities to access the global scientific market, and therefore, often seek out international partners with complementary resources and expertise. This study aims at investigating national collaboration strategies, with a focus on research leadership—measured through corresponding authorship—and its relationship with scientific impact. Results show that countries with higher R&D investments are more scientifically independent, and confirm that international collaboration is positively related to citation impact. However, leadership in international collaboration is inversely related with a countries’ share of international collaboration and there is a very little relationship between citation impact and international leadership. For instance, most countries—and particularly those that have fewer resources—have higher scientific impact when they are not leading. This suggests that, despite increasing global participation in science, most international collaborations are asymmetrical, and that the research system remains structured around a few dominate nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (GDPp), 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]

The use of elasticities of substitution between inputs is a standard method for addressing the effect of a change in the mix of inputs used for production from a technical or cost standpoint. Most estimation methods use parametric production or cost functions or frontiers to estimate these elasticities. A potentially useful nonparametric alternative is data envelopment analysis (DEA). The purpose of this paper is to derive elasticities of input substitution for both technical and cost frontiers using DEA, extending the use of this approach in the field of economics and associated fields. The paper provides derivations for both Hicksian (production and cost frontier) and Morishima (cost frontier) elasticities of input substitution, as well as a parsimonious method for estimating them using DEA. The derivations are presented using an agricultural example form Kansas, USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to produce timely and accurate flu forecasts in the United States can significantly impact public health. Augmenting forecasts with internet data has shown promise for improving forecast accuracy and timeliness in controlled settings, but results in practice are less convincing, as models augmented with internet data have not consistently outperformed models without internet data. In this paper, we perform a controlled experiment, taking into account data backfill, to improve clarity on the benefits and limitations of augmenting an already good flu forecasting model with internet-based nowcasts. Our results show that a good flu forecasting model can benefit from the augmentation of internet-based nowcasts in practice for all considered public health-relevant forecasting targets. The degree of forecast improvement due to nowcasting, however, is uneven across forecasting targets, with short-term forecasting targets seeing the largest improvements and seasonal targets such as the peak timing and intensity seeing relatively marginal improvements. The uneven forecasting improvements across targets hold even when “perfect” nowcasts are used. These findings suggest that further improvements to flu forecasting, particularly seasonal targets, will need to derive from other, non-nowcasting approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New democracies go to great lengths to implement institutional protections of the electoral process. However, in this paper we present evidence that shows that even in the United States—where the secret ballot has been in place for generations—doubts about the secrecy of the voting process are surprisingly prevalent. Many say that their cast ballot can be matched to their name or that others could observe their vote choices while they were voting. We find that people who have not previously voted are particularly likely to harbor doubts about the secrecy of voters’ ballots. Those who vote by mail in the privacy of their own homes also feel that others are able to discover their vote choices. Taken together, these findings suggest an important divergence between public perceptions about and the institutional status of the secret ballot in the United States, a divergence that may affect patterns of voting behavior and political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

On 5th December 2012, a scientific article reviewing a change in the feeding behaviour of the European catfish, one of the largest freshwater fish, was published in the American scientific journal, PLOS ONE, an open access journal, which also allows the mass publication of pictures and videos. Within a few days following the publication of this article, it was relayed by numerous web sites and generated a media craze. In this paper, we analyse the circulation of this scientific information in the sphere of Web-based media during the two months following its publication, by revealing the citation mechanisms of the original article and the logic of the Internet users participating in its diffusion. In addition, since the circulation of its informational content travelled beyond linguistic and geographical boundaries, we chose to compare the citation modalities and intertextual relationships of documents in the three countries where the article spread the most widely, namely: France, the United States and Great Britain. Even though our study shows that the media circulation of scientific papers operates in a traditional way, the intertextual analysis underlines the grand variety of participants (such as journalists, non-scientists, fishermen, technology enthusiasts and Internet users) involved in the diffusion of this information, each of them mobilizing different intertextual strategies, according to their various targets. They all transformed, reformulated and appropriated the scientific information according to their own, unique interests. This study also emphasizes the importance of journalistic websites as opinion relays. They were the first diffusers involved in spreading the information but this role was rarely acknowledged by the Internet users - through citations, for example. In contrast, we observed that amateurs’ communities (communities of practices and communities of interest of fishermen or of buzz fans), which only became involved in a second temporal phase of the spreading, preferred to build up their credibility through citations of the original article. Finally, this research helps to rethink the mechanisms of the circulation of scientific information in the Web-based media, highlighting both the variety and the inventiveness of the interactions between the academic and public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although substantial attention has focused on efforts by the new Administration to block environmental policies, climate politics have been contentious in the US since well before the election of Donald Trump. In this paper, we extend previous work on empirical examinations of echo chambers in US climate politics using new data collected on the federal climate policy network in summer 2016. We test for the similarity and differences at two points in time in homophily and echo chambers using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to compare new findings from 2016 to previous work on data from 2010. We show that echo chambers continue to play a significant role in the network of information exchange among policy elites working on the issue of climate change. In contrast to previous findings where echo chambers centered on a binding international commitment to emission reductions, we find that the pre-existing echo chambers have almost completely disappeared and new structures have formed around one of the main components of the Obama Administration’s national climate policy: the Clean Power Plan. These results provide empirical evidence that science communication and policymaking at the elite level shift in relation to the policy instruments under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates age variations in foreign-born vs. native-born mortality ratios in an international comparative perspective, with the purpose of gaining insight into the mechanisms underlying the so-called migrant mortality advantage. We examine the four main explanations that have been proposed in the literature for the migrant mortality advantage (i.e., in-migration selection effects, out-migration selection effects, cultural effects, and data artifacts), and formulate expectations as to whether they should generate an increase, a decrease, or no change in relative mortality over the life course. Using data from France, the US and the UK for periods around 2010, we then examine typical age patterns of foreign-born vs. native-born mortality ratios in light of this theoretical framework. We find that these mortality ratios vary greatly by age, with important similarities across migrant groups and host countries. The most systematic age pattern we find is a U-shape pattern: at the aggregate level, migrants often experience excess mortality at young ages, then exhibit a large advantage at adult ages (with the largest advantage around age 45), and finally experience mortality convergence with natives at older ages. The explanation most consistent with this pattern is the “in-migration selection effects” explanation. By contrast, the “out-migration selection effects” explanation is poorly supported by the observed patterns. Our age disaggregation also shows that migrants at mid-adult ages experience mortality advantages that are often far greater than typically documented in this literature. Overall, these results reinforce the notion that migrants are a highly-selected population exhibiting mortality patterns that poorly reflect their living conditions in host countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordability in the developed world, as compared to the developing world, more work is needed in developed countries to understand the extent of this issue in terms of the number of households and persons impacted. To address this need, this paper assesses potential affordability issues for households in the United States using the U.S. EPA’s 4.5% affordability criteria for combined water and wastewater services. Analytical results from this paper highlight high-risk and at-risk households for water poverty or unaffordable water services. Many of these households are clustered in pockets of water poverty within counties, which is a concern for individual utility providers servicing a large proportion of customers with a financial inability to pay for water services. Results also highlight that while water rates remain comparatively affordable for many U.S. households, this trend will not continue in the future. If water rates rise at projected amounts over the next five years, conservative projections estimate that the percentage of U.S. households who will find water bills unaffordable could triple from 11.9% to 35.6%. This is a concern due to the cascading economic impacts associated with widespread affordability issues; these issues mean that utility providers could have fewer customers over which to spread the large fixed costs of water service. Unaffordable water bills also impact customers for whom water services are affordable via higher water rates to recover the costs of services that go unpaid by lower income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence in the United States of large-scale “megaregions” centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with “common sense” interpretations of geographic coherence. The results provide a new perspective on the functional economic geography of the United States from a megaregion perspective, and shed light on the old geographic problem of the division of space into areal units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This paper presents global research trends involving highly cited articles on ecosystem services from 1981 to 2017 based on a bibliometric analysis of such articles from the SCI-E and SSCI databases of the Web of Science. The analysis revealed that there were 132 highly cited articles, most of which were published between 2005 and 2014. Based on author keywords, the term ecosystem services was strongly linked to biodiversity. The top three journals in terms of total number of highly cited articles published were Ecological Economics, PNAS, and Ecological Indicators. Despite ranking sixth overall, Science ranked first in both impact factor and total citations per article. The US, UK, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden were the top five most productive and cooperative countries in the world based on total number of highly cited articles and co-authorship network, respectively. The US was highly connected to Canada, the Netherlands, China and the UK. Stockholm University and Stanford University were the most productive institutions in Europe and North America, respectively. Stanford University is associated with many scholars in the field of ecosystem services research because of the InVEST model. Robert Costanza was the most prolific and highly cited author, the latter being largely due to the first valuation of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital, he and his co-authors published in 1997 in Nature. Terrestrial, urban, and forest ecosystems were the top types of ecosystems assessed. Regulating and provisioning services were the major ecosystem services studied. Quantitative and qualitative assessments were the main research focus. Most of these highly cited studies on ecosystem services are done on areas geographically located in North America and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a major health priority worldwide and the majority of people with diabetes live with multimorbidity (MM) (the co-occurrence of ≥2 chronic conditions). The aim of this systematic review was to explore the association between MM and all-cause mortality and glycaemic outcomes in people with T2D. Methods: The search strategy centred on: T2D, MM, comorbidity, mortality and glycaemia. Databases searched: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL Complete, The Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS. Restrictions included: English language, quantitative empirical studies. Two reviewers independently carried out: abstract and full text screening, data extraction, and quality appraisal. Disagreements adjudicated by a third reviewer. Results: Of the 4882 papers identified; 41 met inclusion criteria. The outcome was all-cause mortality in 16 studies, glycaemia in 24 studies and both outcomes in one study. There were 28 longitudinal cohort studies and 13 cross-sectional studies, with the number of participants ranging from 96–892,223. Included studies were conducted in high or upper-middle-income countries. Fifteen of 17 studies showed a statistically significant association between increasing MM and higher mortality. Ten of 14 studies showed no significant associations between MM and HbA1c. Four of 14 studies found higher levels of MM associated with higher HbA1c. Increasing MM was significantly associated with hypoglycaemia in 9/10 studies. There was no significant association between MM and fasting glucose (one study). No studies explored effects on glycaemic variability. Conclusions: This review demonstrates that MM in T2D is associated with higher mortality and hypoglycaemia, whilst evidence regarding the association with other measures of glycaemic control is mixed. The current single disease focused approach to management of T2D seems inappropriate. Our findings highlight the need for clinical guidelines to support a holistic approach to the complex care needs of those with T2D and MM, accounting for the various conditions that people with T2D may be living with. Systematic review registration: International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews CRD42017079500 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

PubMed is a free search engine for biomedical literature accessed by millions of users from around the world each day. With the rapid growth of biomedical literature—about two articles are added every minute on average—finding and retrieving the most relevant papers for a given query is increasingly challenging. We present Best Match, a new relevance search algorithm for PubMed that leverages the intelligence of our users and cutting-edge machine-learning technology as an alternative to the traditional date sort order. The Best Match algorithm is trained with past user searches with dozens of relevance-ranking signals (factors), the most important being the past usage of an article, publication date, relevance score, and type of article. This new algorithm demonstrates state-of-the-art retrieval performance in benchmarking experiments as well as an improved user experience in real-world testing (over 20% increase in user click-through rate). Since its deployment in June 2017, we have observed a significant increase (60%) in PubMed searches with relevance sort order: it now assists millions of PubMed searches each week. In this work, we hope to increase the awareness and transparency of this new relevance sort option for PubMed users, enabling them to retrieve information more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Turtle shell rattles are percussion instruments used by Indigenous peoples of the Americas in ceremonial contexts to keep rhythm. Archaeological investigations in the southeastern United States produced several complete and partial Eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina) shell rattles from mortuary contexts dating from the Archaic (ca. 8000–1000 BC) through Mississippian periods (ca. AD 800–1500). Fragmentary turtle remains, some identified as Eastern box turtle, are frequently recovered from non-mortuary contexts. Traditionally, these fragmentary remains are attributed to food waste. Given the archaeological and ethnographic evidence for turtle shell rattles, we need to consider how fragmentary remains might fit into the chaîne opératoire of rattle production. This paper presents the results of an experimental study designed to identify one such chaîne opératoire of rattle production. During this experiment, the data on taphonomic processes such as manufacturing marks, use-wear, and breakage patterns, were recorded. We then tested the taphonomic findings from the experimental study and an object trait list we compiled from known rattle specimens and documentary sources with archaeological turtle remains recovered from non-mortuary contexts at two Mississippian period (ca. AD 1000–1450) sites in Middle Tennessee. Historic indigenous groups are known to have, and still do into the present-day, make and use turtle shell rattles in the region. Ultimately, we determined that “food refuse” should not be the default interpretation of fragmentary box turtle remains, and instead the taphonomic history and contextual associations must be considered in full. The experimental process of crafting turtle shell rattles enhances our understanding of an ancient musical instrument and the success rate of identifying musical artifacts and distinguishing between other modified turtle remains in the archaeological record. This study expands our knowledge of ancient music in North America and prompts re-analysis of curated turtle remains in museums for rattle-related modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that women continue to be underrepresented in publication output in the sciences. This is true even in female-rich fields such as archaeology. Since most gender-related publication studies rely on data from peer-reviewed journals, it would be instructive, though challenging, to also track publication output in non-refereed and professional or industry venues, which tend to be more accessible to those working in extra-academic settings. This comparison is important in fields such as archaeology in which the vast majority (approximately 90%) of practitioners in the USA work for private sector cultural resource management firms and federal and state agencies. To understand the dynamics of who publishes where, we compiled a new dataset tracking over 40 years of peer-reviewed versus non-peer-reviewed publications that publish articles on the archaeology of California (an American Indian cultural area including southwest Oregon, most of the state of California, and Baja Mexico) and the Great Basin culture area (spanning eight western USA states). Historic gender differences in the publishing output of authors identified as men versus those identified as women were revealed by articles published between 1974 and 2016 in two refereed journals, the Journal of California Anthropology/ Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology and California Archaeology, and in one un-refereed venue, the Society for California Archaeology Proceedings. Although multiple independent measures indicate that women are contributing and active members of the discipline, publishing records yield more variable results. Specifically, while women have historic and increasingly robust levels of participation in the non-peer-reviewed Proceedings, they remain vastly underrepresented in the two peer-reviewed journals, which are widely regarded as more prestigious and influential. We argue that this “peer review gap” is influenced by variation in the costs (largely time investment) and benefits of publication for people working in different professional roles (e.g., agency professionals, private/cultural resource management firm personnel, tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty, etc.). We also argue that these cost and benefit variations may ultimately influence the decisions of people of all genders and backgrounds, but, because of the current structure of our discipline—including the fact that women and minorities lag in positions where costly peer-reviewed publication is a rewarded and supported activity—overwhelmingly affect these groups. We recognize that non-refereed publications such as Proceedings provide an important means of bridging the peer review gap and give voice to individuals from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

United States-based biorepositories are on the cusp of substantial change in regulatory oversight at the same time that they are increasingly including samples and data from large populations, e.g. all patients in healthcare system. It is appropriate to engage stakeholders from these populations in new governance arrangements. We sought to describe community recommendations for biorepository governance and oversight using deliberative community engagement (DCE), a qualitative research method designed to elicit lay perspectives on complex technical issues. We asked for stakeholders to provide input on governance of large biorepositories at the University of California (UC), a public university. We defined state residents as stakeholders and recruited residents from two large metropolitan areas, Los Angeles (LA) and San Francisco (SF). In LA, we recruited English and Spanish speakers; in SF the DCE was conducted in English only. We recruited individuals who had completed the 2009 California Health Interview Survey and were willing to be re-contacted for future studies. Using stratified random sampling (by age, education, race/ethnicity), we contacted 162 potential deliberants of whom 53 agreed to participate and 51 completed the 4-day DCE in June (LA) and September-October (SF), 2013. Each DCE included discussion among deliberants facilitated by a trained staff and simultaneously-translated in LA. Deliberants also received a briefing book describing biorepository operations and regulation. During the final day of the DCE, deliberants voted on governance and oversight recommendations using an audience response system. This paper describes 23 recommendations (of 57 total) that address issues including: educating the public, sharing samples broadly, monitoring researcher behavior, using informative consent procedures, and involving community members in a transparent process of biobank governance. This project demonstrates the feasibility of obtaining meaningful input on biorepository governance from diverse lay stakeholders. Such input should be considered as research institutions respond to changes in biorepository regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Background: Parents' and grandparents' willingness to talk about children's body weights may be influenced by their own childhood experiences of body weight awareness and ‘weight talk’ in the family; however, little is known about how adults describe their recollected weight-related childhood experiences. Aims: This paper examines how parents and grandparents of preschoolers describe the emergence of their own body weight awareness in childhood or adolescence. The analysis highlights the sources that participants identify as having instigated their body weight awareness, the feelings and experiences participants associate with the experience of becoming aware of their body weights, and their framings of potential links between childhood experiences and attitudes and practices in adulthood. Methods: 49 participants (22 parents, 27 grandparents, 70% women, 60% with overweight/obesity) from sixteen low-income families of children aged 3–5 years (50% girls, 56% with overweight/obesity) in the Pacific Northwest were interviewed. The interviews were videotaped, transcribed, and analyzed qualitatively. Results: Twenty-five participants (51%) said they became aware of their body weights in childhood or adolescence. Fourteen participants said their body weight awareness emerged through comments made by others, with the majority citing parents or peers. No participant described the emergence of body weight awareness in positive terms. Four participants directly linked their own negative experiences to the decision not to discuss body weight with their preschoolers. All four cited critical comments from their parents as instigating their own body weight awareness in childhood. Conclusions: In most cases, participants associated their emergent awareness of body weight with overtly negative feelings or consequences; some participants said these negative experiences continued to affect them as adults. Since family-based childhood obesity interventions involve open discussion of children's body sizes, the results suggest that clinicians should reframe the discussion to deconstruct obesity stigma and emphasize inclusive, affirmative, and health-focused messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topics of climate change and renewable energy are often linked in policy discussions and scientific analysis, but public opinion on these topics exhibits both overlap and divergence. Although renewable energy has potentially broader acceptance than anthropogenic climate change, it can also face differently-based opposition. Analyses of US and regional surveys, including time series of repeated surveys in New Hampshire (2010–2018) and northeast Oregon (2011–2018), explore the social bases and trends of public views on both issues. Political divisions are prominent, although somewhat greater regarding climate change due to substantive differences and more partisan opposition. Regarding climate change and to a lesser extent renewable energy, political divisions tends to widen with education. There also are robust age and temporal effects: younger adults more often prioritize renewable energy development, and agree with scientists on the reality of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Across all age groups and both regional series, support for renewable energy and recognition of ACC have been gradually rising. Contrary to widespread speculation, these trends have not visibly responded to events such as the US hurricanes of 2012, 2017 or 2018. Together with age-cohort replacement and the potential for changes in age-group voting participation, however, the gradual trends suggest that public pressure for action on these issues could grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instabilities and long term shifts in seasons, whether induced by natural drivers or human activities, pose great disruptive threats to ecological, agricultural, and social systems. Here, we propose, measure, and explore two fundamental markers of location-sensitive seasonal variations: the Summer and Winter Teletherms—the on-average annual dates of the hottest and coldest days of the year. We analyse daily temperature extremes recorded at 1218 stations across the contiguous United States from 1853–2012, and observe large regional variation with the Summer Teletherm falling up to 90 days after the Summer Solstice, and 50 days for the Winter Teletherm after the Winter Solstice. We show that Teletherm temporal dynamics are substantive with clear and in some cases dramatic shifts reflective of system bifurcations. We also compare recorded daily temperature extremes with output from two regional climate models finding considerable though relatively unbiased error. Our work demonstrates that Teletherms are an intuitive, powerful, and statistically sound measure of local climate change, and that they pose detailed, stringent challenges for future theoretical and computational models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What types of refugees do Americans prefer for admission into the United States? Scholars have explored the immigrant characteristics that appeal to Americans and the characteristics that Europeans prioritize in asylum-seekers, but we currently do not know which refugee characteristics Americans prefer. We conduct a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of 1800 US adults, manipulating refugee attributes in pairs of Syrian refugee profiles, and ask respondents to rate each refugee's appeal. Our focus on Syrian refugees in a 2016 survey experiment allows us to speak to the concurrent refugee crisis on the eve of a polarizing election, while also identifying religious discrimination, holding constant the refugee's national origin. We find that Americans prefer Syrian refugees who are female, high-skilled, English-speaking, and Christian, suggesting they prioritize refugee integration into the U.S. labor and cultural markets. We find that the preference for female refugees is not driven by the desire to exclude Muslim male refugees, casting doubt that American preferences at the time were motivated by security concerns. Finally, we find that anti-Muslim bias in refugee preferences varies in magnitude across key subgroups, though it prevails across all sample demographics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opioid prescriptions for chronic pain and subsequent opioid-related complications have risen dramatically in the US. Recent data suggest that medical marijuana laws have been associated with lower state-level opioid overdose mortality. In a national survey, we examined the prevalence of substitution of marijuana for opioids among US adults taking opioids for pain.Using GfK’s KnowledgePanel, we conducted an Internet-based survey of a nationally representative sample of 16,280 adults in 2017 about individual perceptions and use of marijuana. We developed questions designed to assess the extent and reasons for substitution of marijuana for opioids. We examined opioid substitution among respondents with a history of ever using marijuana who used opioids in the past 12 months. There were 9,003 respondents, corresponding to a 55.3% response rate. The mean age was 48 years. Among the 5% (n = 486) who reported ever using marijuana and using opioids in the past year, 43% used opioids daily, and 23% reported current (past 30 day) marijuana use. Forty-one percent reported a decrease or cessation of opioid use due to marijuana use; 46% reported no change in opioid use; and 8% reported an increase in opioid use. We found that a substantial number of US adults reported that they substituted marijuana for opioids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted a survey about the 2014 FIFA World Cup that measured attitudes about FIFA, players, and officials in 18 languages with 4600 respondents from 29 countries. Sixty percent of respondents perceived FIFA officials as being dishonest, and people from countries with less institutional corruption and stronger rule of law perceived FIFA officials as being more corrupt and less competent running the tournament than people from countries with more corruption and weaker rule of law. In contrast, respondents evaluated players as skilled and honest and match officials as competent and honest. We discuss the implications of our findings for perceptions of corruption in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European and African descendants settled the continental US during the 17th-19th centuries, coming into contact with established Native American populations. The resulting admixture among these groups yielded a significant reservoir of Native American ancestry in the modern US population. We analyzed the patterns of Native American admixture seen for the three largest genetic ancestry groups in the US population: African descendants, Western European descendants, and Spanish descendants. The three groups show distinct Native American ancestry profiles, which are indicative of their historical patterns of migration and settlement across the country. Native American ancestry in the modern African descendant population does not coincide with local geography, instead forming a single group with origins in the southeastern US, consistent with the Great Migration of the early 20th century. Western European descendants show Native American ancestry that tracks their geographic origins across the US, indicative of ongoing contact during westward expansion, and Native American ancestry can resolve Spanish descendant individuals into distinct local groups formed by more recent migration from Mexico and Puerto Rico. We found an anomalous pattern of Native American ancestry from the US southwest, which most likely corresponds to the Nuevomexicano descendants of early Spanish settlers to the region. We addressed a number of controversies surrounding this population, including the extent of Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Nuevomexicanos are less admixed than nearby Mexican-American individuals, with more European and less Native American and African ancestry, and while they do show demonstrable Sephardic Jewish ancestry, the fraction is no greater than seen for other New World Spanish descendant populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We aimed to systematically review recidivism rates in individuals given community sentences internationally. We sought to explore sources of variation between these rates and how reporting practices may limit their comparability across jurisdictions. Finally, we aimed to adapt previously published guidelines on recidivism reporting to include community sentenced populations. Methods: We searched MEDLINE, PsycINFO, SAGE and Google Scholar for reports and studies of recidivism rates using non-specific and targeted searches for the 20 countries with the largest prison populations worldwide. We identified 28 studies with data from 19 countries. Of the 20 countries with the largest prison populations, only 2 reported recidivism rates for individuals given community sentences. Results: The most commonly reported recidivism information between countries was for 2-year reconviction, which ranged widely from 14% to 43% in men, and 9% to 35% in women. Explanations for recidivism rate variations between countries include when the follow-up period started and whether technical violations were taken into account. Conclusion: Recidivism rates in individuals receiving community sentences are typically lower in comparison to those reported in released prisoners, although these two populations differ in terms of their baseline characteristics. Direct comparisons of the recidivism rates in community sentenced cohorts across jurisdictions are currently not possible, but simple changes to existing reporting practices can facilitate these. We propose recommendations to improve reporting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Background: We undertook this study to assess the incremental cost per quality adjusted life year (QALY) gained with the use of pan-genotypic sofosbuvir (SOF) + velpatasvir (VEL) for HCV patients, as compared to the current treatment regimen under the universal free treatment scheme in Punjab state. Methodology: A Markov model depicting natural history of HCV was developed to simulate the progression of disease. Three scenarios were compared: I (Current Regimen)—use of SOF + daclatasvir (DCV) for non-cirrhotic patients and ledipasvir (LDV) or DCV with SOF ± ribavirin (RBV) according to the genotype for cirrhotic patients; II—use of SOF + DCV for non-cirrhotic patients and use of SOF+VEL for compensated cirrhotic patients (with RBV in decompensated cirrhosis patients) and III—use of SOF+VEL for both non-cirrhotic and compensated cirrhotic patients (with RBV in decompensated cirrhosis patients). The lifetime costs, life-years and QALYs were assessed for each scenario, using a societal perspective. All the future costs and health outcomes were discounted at an annual rate of 3%. Finally, the incremental cost per QALY gained was computed for each of scenario II and III, as compared to scenario I and for scenario III as compared to II. In addition, we evaluated the lifetime costs and QALYs among HCV patients for each of scenario I, II and III against the counterfactual of ‘no universal free treatment scheme’ scenario which involves patients purchasing care in routine setting of from public and private sector. Results: Each of the scenarios I, II and III dominate over the no universal free treatment scheme scenario, i.e. have greater QALYs and lesser costs. The use of SOF+VEL only for cirrhotic patients (scenario II) increases QALYs by 0.28 (0.03 to 0.71) per person, and decreases the cost by ₹ 5,946 (₹ 1,198 to ₹ 14,174) per patient, when compared to scenario I. Compared to scenario I, scenario III leads to an increase in QALYs by 0.44 (0.14 to 1.01) per person, and is cost-neutral. While the mean cost difference between scenario III and I is—₹ 2,676 per patient, it ranges from a cost saving of ₹ 14,835 to incurring an extra cost of ₹ 3,456 per patient. For scenario III as compared II, QALYs increase by 0.16 (0.03 to 0.36) per person as well as costs by ₹ 3,086 per patient which ranges from a cost saving of ₹ 1,264 to incurring an extra cost of ₹ 6,344. Shift to scenario II and III increases the program budget by 5.5% and 60% respectively. Conclusion: Overall, the use of SOF+VEL is highly recommended for the treatment of HCV infection. In comparison to the current practice (scenario I), scenario II is a dominant option. Scenario III is cost-effective as compared to scenario II at a threshold of one-time GDP per capita. If budget is an important constraint, velpatasvir should be given to HCV infected cirrhotic patients. However, if no budget constraint, universal use of velpatasvir for HCV treatment is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threatened species are increasingly dependent on conservation investments for persistence and recovery. Information that resource managers could use to evaluate investments–such as the public benefits arising from alternative conservation designs–is typically scarce because conservation benefits arise outside of conventional markets. Moreover, existing studies that measure the public benefits of conserving threatened species often do not measure the benefits from partial gains in species abundance that fall short of official recovery, or the benefits from achieving gains in species abundance that happen earlier in time. We report on a stated preference choice experiment designed to quantify the non-market benefits for conservation investments aimed at threatened Pacific Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) along the Oregon Coast (OC). Our results show that a program aimed at increasing numbers of returning salmon can generate sizable benefits of up to $518 million/y for an extra 100,000 returning fish, even if the species is not officially declared recovered. Moreover, while conservation investment strategies expected to achieve relatively rapid results are likely to have higher up-front costs, our results show that the public attaches substantial additional value of up to $277 million/y for achieving conservation goals quickly. Our results and approach can be used to price natural capital investments that lead to gains in returning salmon, and as inputs to evaluations of the benefits and costs from alternative conservation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]