Search

We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID-19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes toward the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

I introduce a diagram for describing and analyzing single-winner elections in which voters rank the candidates—a class of voting systems including positional methods (e.g. plurality, Borda count, anti-plurality), Condorcet methods, and instant-runoff voting (i.e. ranked-choice voting or the alternative vote). The diagram shows how the outcome of an election depends on each candidate’s share of top rankings as a function of the voting system and the pattern of lower rankings. Using as examples two Brexit polls, a mayoral election in San Francisco, and the US’s first instant-runoff congressional election (all since 2018), I show how the diagram can concisely present preferences and results under different voting systems, identify Condorcet cycles, highlight system properties such as join-inconsistency and the no-show paradox, and illuminate strategic voting incentives.

Significance President Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen; millions of Americans apparently believed him. We assess the most prominent statistical claims offered by Trump and his allies as evidence of election fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines switching votes from Trump to Biden, suspiciously high turnout in Democratic strongholds, and the supposedly inexplicable failure of Biden to win “bellwether counties.” We use a combination of statistical reasoning and original data analysis to assess these claims. We hope our analysis contributes to public discussion about the integrity of the 2020 election and broader challenges of election security and election administration., After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.

The convention in the news media is to announce a recession if a country experiences two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We exploit the arbitrary threshold implied by this practice to identify the economic impact of recession announcements through a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). Estimation results show that news of a recession leads to a discontinuous fall in consumer confidence, consumption growth and final estimates of GDP growth in a panel of countries. The effect is large, robust and statistically significant.

Objectives Care planning should define care at the end of life in advance. At a later stage, when patients are no longer able to do this themselves, it should serve as a guideline for health care. The aim of this article is to give a first insight into the discussions around this social instrument. Study design The study design was comparing the arguments of proponents and critics. Methods This is a critical discourse analysis. Results A discussion of proponents and critics shows how closely this social instrument is interwoven with the areas of biopolitics, economics and governmentality. Conclusions Further research should address the question of what quality assurance can look like.

The deconvolution of low-resolution time-of-flight data has numerous advantages, including the ability to extract additional information from the experimental data. We augment the well-known Lucy-Richardson deconvolution algorithm using various Bayesian prior distributions and show that a prior of second-differences of the signal outperforms the standard Lucy-Richardson algorithm, accelerating the rate of convergence by more than a factor of four, while preserving the peak amplitude ratios of a similar fraction of the total peaks. A novel stopping criterion and boosting mechanism are implemented to ensure that these methods converge to a similar final entropy and local minima are avoided. Improvement by a factor of two in mass resolution allows more accurate quantification of the spectra. The general method is demonstrated in this paper through the deconvolution of fragmentation peaks of the 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid matrix and the benzyltriphenylphosphonium thermometer ion, following femtosecond ultraviolet laser desorption.

Strategic voting is an important explanation for aggregate political phenomena, but we know little about how strategic voting varies across types of voters. Are richer voters more strategic than poorer voters? Does strategic behavior vary with age, education, gender, or political leaning? The answers may be important for assessing how well an electoral system represents different preferences in society. We introduce a new approach to measuring and comparing strategic voting across voters that can be broadly applied, given appropriate survey data. In recent British elections, we find that older voters vote more strategically than younger voters and that richer voters vote more strategically than poorer voters, even as strategic behavior varies little across the education level. The differences in strategic voting by age and income are smaller than observed differences in turnout by age and income, but they tend to exacerbate these better-known inequalities in political participation.

Das Zika-Virus ist ein Arbovirus aus der Familie der Flaviviren, welches durch die Stechmucke Aedes aegyptii ubertragen wird, aber auch durch die Asiatische Tigermucke Aedes albopticus. Die bisher groste beobachtete Zika-Virus-Epidemie findet momentan in Nord- und Sudamerika, in der Karibik, im Suden der USA und in Sudostasien statt. Meistens verlauft die Infektion als unspezifische, akute, fiebrige Erkrankung. Neurologische Manifestationen bestehen in der Hauptsache in einer Mikrozephalie bei Neugeborenen und einem Guillain-Barre-Syndrom, aber auch andere, seltenere Manifestationen sind in der Zwischenzeit bekannt geworden, wie eine Meningoenzephalitis und eine Myelitis. Es liegt daher nahe, dass das Zika-Virus, ahnlich wie andere Flaviviren, neuropathogene Eigenschaften aufweist. Insbesondere der drastische Anstieg der Mikrozephaliefalle in Brasilien hat grose Forschungsaktivitaten induziert. Das Virus wird perinatal ubertragen und kann im Fruchtwasser, in der Plazenta und im Gehirngewebe des Neugeborenen nachgewiesen werden. Eine Impfung oder eine kausale Therapie existierten bislang nicht. Der signifikante Anstieg des durch das Zika-Virus induzierten Guillain-Barre-Syndroms wurde schon wahrend fruherer Ausbruche beobachtet. In der Zwischenzeit haben sich wissenschaftlich klare Verbindungen zwischen einer Zika-Virus-Infektion und diesen neurologischen Manifestationen gezeigt. Durch Langzeitstudien und Tiermodelle kann erreicht werden, die Pathomechanismen dieser Erkrankung besser zu verstehen.

Previous research suggests that female politicians face higher standards in public life, perhaps in part because female voters expect more from female politicians than from male politicians. Most of this research is based on observational evidence. We assess the relationship between accountability and gender using a novel survey vignette experiment fielded in the United Kingdom in which voters choose between a hypothetical incumbent (who could be male or female, corrupt or noncorrupt) and another candidate. We do not find that female politicians face significantly greater punishment for misconduct. However, the effect of politician gender on punishment varies by voter gender, with female voters in particular more likely to punish female politicians for misconduct. Our findings have implications for research on how descriptive representation affects electoral accountability and on why corruption tends to correlate negatively with women’s representation.

Empirical studies of incumbency effects continue to accumulate, but progress in explaining these findings is modest. I introduce a simple framework that clarifies how differences in candidate characteristics (i.e. quality) could account for empirical findings of incumbency effects based on regression discontinuity designs (RDD). The key observation is that although RDD ensures that marginal winners and losers of close elections are comparable, the candidates who compete in the next election may differ for many reasons, of which \scare-off" (the tendency of incumbents to deter strong challengers) is just one. Using a simple model, I show that quality differences between marginal incumbent-party candidates and their opponents may persist even when in- cumbency is irrelevant to voters, incumbent retirement is random, and all new candidates are drawn from the same candidate pool. I conclude by showing how quality differences can help explain puzzling findings in prior empirical work.

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold-based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence from France, Germany, and Italy, we highlight two common pitfalls that arise in exploiting population-based policies (compound treatment and sorting), and we provide guidance for detecting and addressing these pitfalls. Even when these problems are present, population-threshold RDD may be the best available research design for studying the effects of certain policies and political institutions.

Undocumented Border Crosser (UBC) deaths in Arizona are a major issue faced by medicolegal authorities. Currently, the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner (MCOME) is in possession of over two hundred unidentified individuals, more than half of whom are presumed to be UBCs. The primary goal of this study was to address the growing number of UBC deaths in Maricopa County in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of this important anthropological issue within the state of Arizona. Of the 107 total UBC cases evaluated for the study, the majority were male and age estimates for all individuals were between 15 to 60 years old. Modeled after the recording system established by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, the biographic and geographic data for these cases were entered into a new UBC database at MCOME and later added to the online Map of Migrant Mortality.

We consider estimating the marginal likelihood in settings with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. We propose estimating the predictive distributions in a sequential factorization of the marginal likelihood in such settings by using stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. This approach is far more efficient than traditional marginal likelihood estimation techniques such as nested sampling and annealed importance sampling due to its use of mini-batches to approximate the likelihood. Stability of the estimates is provided by an adaptive annealing schedule. The resulting stochastic gradient annealed importance sampling (SGAIS) technique, which is the key contribution of our paper, enables us to estimate the marginal likelihood of a number of models considerably faster than traditional approaches, with no noticeable loss of accuracy. An important benefit of our approach is that the marginal likelihood is calculated in an online fashion as data becomes available, allowing the estimates to be used for applications such as online weighted model combination.

Which parties benefit from open-list (as opposed to closed-list) proportional representation elections? This article shows that a move from closed-list to open-list competition is likely to be more favorable to parties with more internal disagreement on salient issues; this is because voters who might have voted for a unified party under closed lists may be drawn to specific candidates within internally divided parties under open lists. The study provides experimental evidence of this phenomenon in a hypothetical European Parliament election in the UK, in which using an open-list ballot would shift support from UKIP (the Eurosceptic party) to Eurosceptic candidates of the Conservative Party. The findings suggest that open-list ballots could restrict support for parties that primarily mobilize on a single issue.

We propose that Bayesian variable selection for linear parametrizations with Gaussian iid likelihoods should be based on the spherical symmetry of the diagonalized parameter space. Our r-prior results in closed forms for the evidence for four examples, including the hyper-g prior and the Zellner–Siow prior, which are shown to be special cases. Scenarios of a single-variable dispersion parameter and of fixed dispersion are studied, and asymptotic forms comparable to the traditional information criteria are derived. A simulation exercise shows that model comparison based on our r-prior gives good results comparable to or better than current model comparison schemes.

This article considers the emergence of an informal institution vital to the functioning of Westminster polities: that the Shadow Cabinet is a ‘government in waiting’. It compares the evidence for two theoretical accounts of its timing: a ‘procedural’ theory wherein the Shadow Cabinet is a solution to internal organizational issues in the House of Commons prior to widespread working-class voting, and a ‘competition’ theory that predicts that suffrage extension acts as a key stimulus for Shadow Cabinet organization. Gathering a dataset of almost a million utterances in parliament between the First and Fourth Reform Acts, the study provides a novel method of identifying Shadow Cabinet members using the surges in term use from their speeches. It finds that the ‘competition’ hypothesis is the most plausible version of events, and that the opposition responded to the new ‘party-orientated electorate’ by strategically reorganizing in a way that mimicked the cabinet’s structure.

Zika virus is an arbovirus from the family of flaviviruses, which is transmitted by the mosquito Aedes aegyptii and also by the Asian mosquito Aedes albopticus. The largest observed Zika virus epidemic is currently taking place in North and South America, in the Caribbean, southern USA and Southeast Asia. In most cases the infection is an unspecific, acute, febrile disease. Neurological manifestations consist mainly of microcephaly in newborns and Guillain-Barré syndrome but other rare manifestations have also become known in the meantime, such as meningoencephalitis and myelitis. Therefore, the Zika virus, similar to other flaviviruses, has neuropathogenic properties. In particular, the drastic increase in microcephaly cases in Brazil has induced great research activities. The virus is transmitted perinatally and can be detected in the amniotic fluid, placenta and brain tissue of the newborn. Vaccination or a causal therapy does not yet exist. The significant increase in Guillain-Barré syndrome induced by the Zika virus was observed during earlier outbreaks. In the meantime, scientifically clear connections between a Zika virus infection and these neurological manifestations have been shown. Long-term studies and animal models should be used for a better understanding of the pathomechanisms of this disease.

The effect of a hypoxia-inducible VEGF-expressing on wound healing in an ischaemic hind leg rat model was evaluated in this study. 180 Wistar rats were assigned randomly to three groups. After ligation of the femoral artery, group 1 received pRTP801-VEGF165, group 2 untransfected fibroblasts, group 3 saline; injection was into the subcutaneous tissue, proximal and distal to the artery ligation. Biopsy specimens were obtained on days 3, 5, 7, 14 after implementation. VEGF transgene expression, vessel architecture, the amount and total area of vessel formation were investigated. Results showed a significantly higher level of VEGF protein expression in group 1 compared to group 2 (P≤0.001) throughout the investigational period. Group 1 exhibited a significant growth of CD31-positive blood vessels in the subcutaneous tissue on day 14 compared to groups 2 and 3 (P≤0.001) (group 1, 62.20±1.92; group 2, 20.60±1.67; group 3, 12.40±1.14). Alpha-SMA-positive staining also showed significant vessel growth in group 1 on day 5 (group 1, 27.00±1.87; group 2, 7.20±1.48; group 3, 10.00±1.73). These results were confirmed in the distal muscle tissue. No significant results were obtained for the proximal muscle tissue. The subcutaneous application of pRTP801-VEGF165 showed a long-lasting effect, with an increased expression of VEGF over the entire observation period. It appears that the use of fibroblasts transfected with VEGF is a promising way to increase early angiogenesis in ischaemic tissue.

Why do voters support corrupt politicians? One reason is that voters care about both corruption and partisan control of government; the more voters care about which party wins, the less they can deter individual wrongdoing. I highlight this tradeoff in the 2009 UK expenses scandal, showing that electoral accountability was less effective in constituencies where the partisan stakes of the local contest were higher: not only did corrupt MPs in these constituencies suffer smaller punishments, but these MPs were also more likely to be implicated in the scandal in the first place. The findings point to an under-appreciated consequence of partisanship (and underlying causes such as strong party systems and polarization at the elite or mass level) for the electoral control of politicians.

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the U.K.’s multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that U.K. voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems.

We compute the Bayesian Evidence for models considered in the main analysis of Planck cosmic microwave background data. By utilising carefully-defined nearest-neighbour distances in parameter space, we reuse the Monte Carlo Markov Chains already produced for parameter inference to compute Bayes factors $B$ for many different model-dataset combinations. Standard 6-parameter flat $\Lambda$CDM model is favoured over all other models considered, with curvature being mildly favoured only when CMB lensing is not included. Many alternative models are strongly disfavoured by the data, including primordial correlated isocurvature models ($\ln B=-7.8$), non-zero scalar-to-tensor ratio ($\ln B=-4.3$), running of the spectral index ($\ln B = -4.7$), curvature ($\ln B=-3.6$), non-standard numbers of neutrinos ($\ln B=-3.1$), non-standard neutrino masses ($\ln B=-3.2$), non-standard lensing potential ($\ln B=-4.6$), evolving dark energy ($\ln B=-3.2$), sterile neutrinos ($\ln B=-6.9$), and extra sterile neutrinos with a non-zero scalar-to-tensor ratio ($\ln B=-10.8$). Other models are less strongly disfavoured with respect to flat $\Lambda$CDM. As with all analyses based on Bayesian Evidence, the final numbers depend on the widths of the parameter priors. We adopt the priors used in the Planck analysis, while performing a prior sensitivity analysis. Our quantitative conclusion is that extensions beyond the standard cosmological model are disfavoured by Planck data. Only when newer Hubble constant measurements are included does $\Lambda$CDM become disfavoured, and only mildly, compared with a dynamical dark energy model ($\ln B\sim +2$)., Comment: 5 pages. Accepted for publication in PRL. Effect of inclusion of recent H0 measurements is added

One of the big challenges in astrophysics is the comparison of complex simulations to observations. As many codes do not directly generate observables (e.g. hydrodynamic simulations), the last step in the modelling process is often a radiative-transfer treatment. For this step, the community relies increasingly on Monte Carlo radiative transfer due to the ease of implementation and scalability with computing power. We consider simulations in which the number of photon packets is Poisson distributed, while the weight assigned to a single photon packet follows any distribution of choice. We show how to estimate the statistical uncertainty of the sum of weights in each bin from the output of a single radiative-transfer simulation. Our Bayesian approach produces a posterior distribution that is valid for any number of packets in a bin, even zero packets, and is easy to implement in practice. Our analytic results for large number of packets show that we generalise existing methods that are valid only in limiting cases. The statistical problem considered here appears in identical form in a wide range of Monte Carlo simulations including particle physics and importance sampling. It is particularly powerful in extracting information when the available data are sparse or quantities are small., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Match affiliations and abstract with journal version

We consider the relationship between a Member of Parliament's electoral environment and his strategic choice of legislative activities between the First and Fourth Reform Acts in Britain. We argue that voters and party institutions put cross-cutting pressures on members during this time, and that legislators calibrated their behavior in accordance with the marginality of their seat. We gather a massive new dataset documenting MPs� biographical information, electoral records, roll calls, and speeches. The extent of MPs� speech making and voting (our measures of legislative activity) vary with electoral security in ways consistent with our theoretical priors for Westminster systems.

This article considers the historical development of a characteristic crucial for the functioning and normative appeal of Westminster systems: cohesive legislative parties. It gathers the universe of the 20,000 parliamentary divisions that took place between 1836 and 1910 in the British House of Commons, construct a voting record for every Member of Parliament (MP) serving during this time, and conducts analysis that aims to both describe and explain the development of cohesive party voting. In line with previous work, it shows that – with the exception of a chaotic period in the 1840s and 1850s – median discipline was always high and increased throughout the century. The study uses novel methods to demonstrate that much of the rise in cohesion results from the elimination of a rebellious ‘left tail’ from the 1860s onwards, rather than central tendency shifts. In explaining the aggregate trends, the article uses panel data techniques and notes that there is scant evidence for ‘replacement’ explanations that involve new members behaving in more disciplined ways than those leaving the chamber. It offers evidence that more loyal MPs were more likely to obtain ministerial posts, and speculates that this and other ‘inducement’-based accounts offer more promising explanations of increasingly cohesive parties.

By restoring the immunological function the modern antiretroviral treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) infection has considerably lowered the incidence of opportunistic infections. As opposed to the classical manifestations of HIV-induced immunosuppression the incidence and prevalence of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) has not noticeably decreased and HAND continues to be relevant in daily clinical practice. At present, HAND occurs in earlier stages of HIV infection, and the clinical course differs from that before the introduction of combination antiretroviral treatment (cART). The predominant clinical manifestation is a subcortical dementia with deficits in the domains attention, concentration and memory. Signs of central motor pathway lesions have become less frequent and less prominent. Prior to the advent of cART the cerebral dysfunction could at least partially be explained by the viral load and by virus-associated histopathological findings. In patients with at least partially successfully treated infections, this relationship no longer exists, but a plethora of poorly understood immunological and probably toxic phenomena are under discussion.This consensus paper summarizes the progress made in the last 12 years in the field of HAND and provides suggestions for the diagnostic and therapeutic management.

Guarding the Guardians: Legislative Self-Policing and Electoral Corruption in Victorian Britain

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is a valuable tool for identifying electoral effects, but this design is only effective when relevant actors do not have precise control over election results. Several recent papers contend that such precise control is possible in large elections, pointing out that the incumbent party is more likely to win very close elections in the United States House of Representatives in recent periods. In this article, we examine whether similar patterns occur in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S. and national or local elections in nine other countries. No other case exhibits this pattern. We also cast doubt on suggested explanations for incumbent success in close House races. We conclude that the assumptions behind the RD design are likely to be met in a wide variety of electoral settings and offer a set of best practices for RD researchers going forward.

Many studies find that voter turnout is higher in proportional representation (PR) elections than in plurality elections, but because the two systems differ in multiple ways and are used in different contexts it is difficult to know precisely why. I focus on municipal elections in France, where cities above a certain population threshold are required to use a PR system while those below use a type of plurality rule; this setting allows me to compare political outcomes across electoral systems while holding fixed a large set of social and political features. I find that the PR system noticeably increases turnout compared with plurality. I provide evidence suggesting that it does so in part by encouraging turnout in lopsided races and in part by inducing entry of new candidates. The findings highlight the importance of electoral proportionality in explaining cross-national differences in voter turnout.

Recent research suggests that, public perceptions notwithstanding, members of Congress are rather mediocre investors. Why do the consummate political insiders fail to profit as investors? We consider various explanations that pertain to members' political relationships to public firms. We show that members of Congress invest disproportionately in local firms and campaign contributors, which suggests that overall underperformance cannot be explained by the absence of political considerations in members' portfolio decisions. These connected investments (and particularly local investments) generally outperform members' other investments, which suggests that poor performance is not explained by an excessive political skew in members' portfolios. It appears that members of Congress earn poor investing returns primarily because their non-connected investments perform poorly, perhaps due to the usual failings of individual investors; a combination of political and financial considerations may explain why they do not make more extensive use of their political advantages as investors.

Despite the widely accepted theoretical prediction that high district magnitudes should yield less proportional results in plurality systems, empirical evidence is surprisingly mixed. We argue that these mixed results are ultimately due to a lack of clarity about the counterfactual being considered. We use a simple model to show that an increase in district magnitude reduces expected proportionality in a plurality system only if it is accompanied by a reduction in the number of districts. This conditional prediction helps to explain the diversity of existing findings and is consistent with our own analysis of both U.S. congressional delegations and local councils in Britain.

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy strong agenda-setting powers but are accountable to an inquisitorial opposition. This article provides insights into the origins of this arrangement from the British House of Commons, drawing primarily on a new data set of a half million parliamentary speeches. We show that, according to a novel measure we develop, government ministers became more responsive to opposition members of parliament in the same period that the government's agenda power was most conclusively strengthened—roughly, the two decades culminating in Balfour's “railway timetable” of 1902. We argue that this increase in responsiveness helps to explain why opposition members of parliament acceded to reductions in their procedural power. We thus highlight a link between government strength and opposition scrutiny in the historical development of the Westminster system.

Given the effects of policy on financial markets, political insiders should be capable of enriching themselves through savvy investing. Consistent with this view, two widely cited studies claim that members of both the House and Senate show uncanny timing in trading stocks, fueling the public perception that corrupt “insider trading” is widespread in Congress. We call this consensus into question. First, we reinterpret existing studies of congressional stock trading between 1985 and 2001 and conduct our own analysis of trades in the 2004–2008 period, concluding that in neither period do members of Congress trade with an information advantage. Second, we conduct the first analysis of members’ portfolio holdings, showing that between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund. Our research suggests that, if there is unethical investing behavior in Congress, it is far more limited than previous research implies.

We show how to use multilevel modeling and post-stratification to estimate legislative outcomes under counterfactual representation schemes that, for example, boost the representation of women or translate votes into seats differently. We apply this technique to two research questions: (1) Would the U.S. Congress be less polarized if state delegations were formed according to the principle of party proportional representation? (2) Would there have been stronger support for legalizing same-sex marriage in the U.K. House of Commons if Parliament more closely reflected the population in gender and age?

Endometriosis is characterized by growth of endometrial tissue at ectopic locations. Down-regulation of microRNA miR-200b is observed in endometriosis and malignant disease, driving tumour cells towards an invasive state by enhancing epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). miR-200b up-regulation may inhibit EMT and invasive growth in endometriosis. To study its functional impact on the immortalized endometriotic cell line 12Z, the stromal cell line ST-T1b, and primary endometriotic stroma cells, a transient transfection approach with microRNA precursors was employed. Expression of bioinformatically predicted targets of miR-200b was analysed by qPCR. The cellular phenotype was monitored by Matrigel invasion assays, digital-holographic video microscopy and flow cytometry. qPCR revealed significant down-regulation of ZEB1 (P < 0.05) and ZEB2 (P < 0.01) and an increase in E-cadherin (P < 0.01). miR-200b overexpression decreased invasiveness (P < 0.0001) and cell motility (P < 0.05). In contrast, cell proliferation (P < 0.0001) and the stemness-associated side population phenotype (P < 0.01) were enhanced following miR-200b transfection. These properties were possibly due to up-regulation of the pluripotency-associated transcription factor KLF4 (P < 0.05) and require attention when considering therapeutic strategies. In conclusion, up-regulation of miR-200b reverts EMT, emerging as a potential therapeutic approach to inhibit endometriotic cell motility and invasiveness. (C) 2016 Reproductive Healthcare Ltd. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Das idiopathische Parkinson-Syndrom ist eine klinische Diagnose. Moderne bildgebende und nuklearmedizinische Verfahren erlauben jedoch inzwischen eine sehr fruhe Diagnose und eine zusatzliche Sicherheit in der Differenzialdiagnose zwischen atypischen Parkinson-Syndromen und dem idiopathischen Parkinson-Syndrom. Die medikamentose Therapie in der Fruhphase des idiopathischen Parkinson-Syndroms sollte neben der Therapie der Symptome v. a. den Versuch der Modifikation des Krankheitsverlaufs mit einbeziehen. Gerade nach Auftreten von ersten Fluktuationen wird dagegen die kontinuierliche dopaminerge Stimulation in der Therapie immer wichtiger. Sobald die konservativen Optionen ausgeschopft sind, sind durch die Apomorphin- und die Duodopa-Therapie Optionen mit Pumpen gegeben. Die Tiefe Hirnstimulation im Ncl. subthalamicus hat sich jedoch insbesondere bei jungeren Patienten mit einem idiopathischen Parkinson-Syndrom als oft sehr erfolgreiche Therapieoption herausgestellt. Gerade bei der Tiefen Hirnstimulation ist die individuelle Abschatzung von Risiken und Moglichkeiten von entscheidender Bedeutung.

In the context of data modeling and comparisons between different fit models, Bayesian analysis calls that model best which has the largest evidence, the prior-weighted integral over model parameters of the likelihood function. Evidence calculations automatically take into account both the usual chi-squared measure and an Occam factor which quantifies the price for adding extra parameters. Applying Bayesian analysis to projections onto azimuth of 2D angular correlations from 200 GeV AuAu collisions, we consider typical model choices including Fourier series and a Gaussian plus combinations of individual cosine components. We find that models including a Gaussian component are consistently preferred over pure Fourier-series parametrizations, sometimes strongly so. For 0-5% central collisions the Gaussian-plus-dipole model performs better than Fourier Series models or any other combination of Gaussian-plus-multipoles., 6 pages, 4 figures. Proceedings of the XLV International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics, Wildbad Kreuth, 5-9 October 2015

Edgeworth series are often considered the same as Gram-Charlier series in systematic expansions of nongaussian probability distributions. Testing direct approximations of the probability itself as well as of cumulants in coordinate space as functions of measured cumulants in momentum space, we show how the former far outperforms the latter.

Lowest-order cumulants provide important information on the shape of the emission source in femtoscopy. For the simple case of noninteracting identical particles, we show how the fourth-order source cumulant can be determined from measured cumulants in momentum space. The textbook Gram-Charlier series is found to be highly inaccurate, while the related Edgeworth series provides increasingly accurate estimates. Ordering of terms compatible with the Central Limit Theorem appears to play a crucial role even for nongaussian distributions., 11 pages, 2 figures

Prenatal diagnosis of inguinal hernia is rare and easily confused with other entities, including masses of the scrotum, abdominal wall, and perineum. Pathologic processes of the scrotum rarely result in enlargement beyond 7 cm. Peristalsis can help to indentify bowel within the mass, suggestive of hernia or omphalocele rather than hydroceles or tumors that contain no bowel. Torsions have a double-ring appearance with no testicular blood flow, whereas hydroceles have visible testicles within a fluid-filled scrotum. Doppler evaluation may be helpful, as hernias typically have minimal vascularity, unlike tumors and teratomas, which are vascular with a widely variable appearance. The authors present the sonographic features of a late-presenting fetal mass that was clinically indistinguishable from omphalocele other than its skin thickness and was larger than typically reported for hernias. Skin thickness and subcapsular fluid are useful adjuncts in distinguishing inguinoscrotal hernia from omphalocele in late gestation.

Background: While homozygous mutations in the PINK1 gene cause recessively inherited early-onset Parkinson disease (PD), heterozygous mutations have been suggested as a susceptibility factor. Methods: To evaluate this hypothesis, 4 homozygous PINK1 patients with PD and 10 asymptomatic carriers of a single heterozygous mutation from a large German family (family W) were included in this study. Clinical follow-up of the heterozygous mutation carriers 3 years after the initial visit included a detailed videotaped neurologic examination using the Unified Parkinson9s Disease Rating Scale III protocol and smell and color discrimination testing. At follow-up, PET with 18-fluorodopa (FDOPA) of 13 family members was obtained in order to evaluate the clinical phenotype in light of nigostriatal dopaminergic functioning. The clinical and PET data were compared to those of healthy controls. Results: While there was mild worsening of clinical signs in previously affected heterozygous mutation carriers upon follow-up, 3 additional individuals had newly developed signs of possible PD. Hyposmia was found in 7 of the heterozygous mutation carriers, diminished color discrimination in 4. The homozygous mutation carriers who were all definitely affected with PD showed a severe, 60% decrease of caudate and putaminal FDOPA uptake; heterozygous offspring also had a significant 20% putaminal FDOPA uptake reduction compared to controls. Conclusions: Our findings strengthen the hypothesis that heterozygous PINK1 mutations act as a susceptibility factor to develop at least subtle Parkinson disease motor and nonmotor signs, as supported by the finding of a reduced striatal dopaminergic FDOPA uptake not only in homozygous but also, albeit to a lesser extent, in heterozygous mutation carriers.

Die Photostimulation als Provokationsmasnahme im Elektroenzephalogramm (EEG) fuhrt meist zur Erregbarkeitssteigerung bei primar generalisierten Epilepsien. Eine Erhohung der Sensitivitat des EEG durch Photostimulation bei fokalen Anfallen ist eine Raritat. Es wird uber einen Patienten mit postenzephalitischer symptomatischer Temporallappenepilepsie, der nach Photostimulation reproduzierbar komplex-fokale Anfalle entwickelte, berichtet.

Many recent studies show that firms profit from connections to influential politicians, but less is known about how much politicians financially benefit from wielding political influence. We estimate the returns to serving in Parliament, using original data on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. Applying both matching and a regression discontinuity design to compare Members of Parliament (MPs) with parliamentary candidates who narrowly lost, we find that serving in office almost doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs, but had no discernible financial benefits for Labour MPs. Conservative MPs profited from office largely through lucrative outside employment they acquired as a result of their political positions; we show that gaining a seat in Parliament more than tripled the probability that a Conservative politician would later serve as a director of a publicly traded firm—enough to account for a sizable portion of the wealth differential. We suggest that Labour MPs did not profit from office largely because trade unions collectively exerted sufficient control over the party and its MPs to prevent members from selling their services to other clients., Harvard University. Institute for Quantitative Social Science