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We present here the first visual interface for a Mexican Spanish Sign Language translator on its first development stage: sign-writing recognition. The software was developed for the unique characteristics of Mexican linguistics and was designed in order to use sentences or a sequence of signs in sign-writing system which are decoded by the program and converted into a series of images with movement that correspond to the Mexican sign language system. Using a lexical, syntactic and semantic algorithms plus free software such as APIs's from Java, video converter software, data base manager like MySQL, Postgres and SQlite, was possible to read and interpret the rich and complex Mexican language. Our application for visual interface showed to be capable of reading and reconstruct each sentence used for the interpreter and translate it into a high de finition video. The average time of video display vs number of sentences to interpret, probed to be in linear relation with an average time of two seconds per sentence. The software has over come the problem of homonym words frequently used in Spanish language and verb tense relation for each sentence, special symbols such as #, %, $, etc. are still not recognized into the software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a simple methodology to risk-stratify asthmatics is presented and validated. Such a model can be used to identify those high risk and more severely ill asthmatics who could benefit the most from case man agement and increased educational efforts. Using logis tic regression, the model was created to predict the probability of an asthma-related admission among all asthmatics who were members of a large HMO during calendar year 1994 (N = 54,573). The model used data from pharmacy, laboratory, and specialist claims, as well as encounter and demographic data available in U.S. Healthcare®'s administrative database. A member's prior asthma-specific utilization patterns, pharmaceutically determined severity of illness, and length of enrollment in the managed care organization had the most influence on the equation. A cross-validation of the model confirms how administrative data can be used to accurately risk- stratify those with a chronic disease. Finally, some ad ditional research possibilities associated with the iden tification of high risk subscribers using only administrative data are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of recent discussions about the possibility of translating the growth of Latin American economies in the last decade into a process of structural change, we intend to discuss the theoretical capacity of studies of Latin American development to provide a concrete, viable and current proposal in that direction. To do this we will research 1) the theoretical relationship between the Political Economy of the late XVIII and XIX century with the postwar Latin American Development Economics; 2) the theoretical relationship between the new development economics emerged in the early seventies with its predecessor and 3) the keys that can offer the redevelopment of Political Economy to understand the main economic processes of the XX and XXI centuries and rescue theoretical aspects that were circumvented and must have a prominent place in any current explanation of the problems of development. From the redevelopment of the object of Political Economy we will pretend to rescue the main problems of short, medium and long term that we understand must integrate discussions central on the future of Latin American development.

En el marco de los debates recientes acerca de la posibilidad de traducir el crecimiento de las economías latinoamericanas en la última década en un proceso de cambio estructural, nos proponemos discutir la capacidad teórica de los estudios del desarrollo latinoamericanos para ofrecer una propuesta concreta, viable y actualizada en ese sentido. Para ello investigaremos 1) la relación teórica entre la Economía Política de finales del siglo XVIII y XIX con la Economía del Desarrollo latinoamericana de la posguerra; 2) la relación teórica entre la nueva Economía del Desarrollo surgida a comienzos de los setenta con su antecesora de la posguerra y 3) las claves que puede ofrecernos el redesarrollo de la Economía Política para comprender los principales procesos económicos del siglo XX y XXI y rescatar aspectos teóricos centrales que fueron soslayados y deben ocupar un lugar relevante en cualquier explicación actual sobre los problemas del desarrollo. A partir del redesarrollo del objeto de la Economía Política pretenderemos rescatar los principales problemas del corto, mediano y largo plazo que entendemos deben integrar las discusiones centrales sobre el devenir del desarrollo latinoamericano.

Acute myeloid leukemia is characterized by uncontrolled proliferation of self-renewing myeloid progenitors accompanied by a differentiation arrest. PHF6 is a chromatin-binding protein mutated in myeloid leukemias, and its isolated loss increases mouse HSC self-renewal without malignant transformation. We report here that Phf6 knockout increases the aggressiveness of Hoxa9-driven AML over serial transplantation, and increases the frequency of leukemia initiating cells. We define the in vivo hierarchy of Hoxa9-driven AML and identify a population that we term the "LIC-e" (leukemia initiating cells enriched) population. We find that Phf6 loss expands the LIC-e population and skews its transcriptome to a more stem-like state; concordant transcriptome shifts are also observed on PHF6 knockout in a human AML cell line and in PHF6 mutant patient samples from the BEAT AML dataset. We demonstrate that LIC-e accumulation in Phf6 knockout AML occurs not due to effects on cell cycle or apoptosis, but due to an increase in the fraction of its progeny that retain LIC-e identity. Our work indicates that Phf6 loss increases AML self-renewal through context-specific effects on leukemia stem cells., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Envelope theorems provide a differential framework for determining how much a rational decision maker (DM) is willing to pay to alter the parameters of a strategic scenario. We generalize this framework to the case of a boundedly rational DM and arbitrary solution concepts. We focus on comparing and contrasting the case where DM's decision to pay to change the parameters is observed by all other players against the case where DM's decision is private information. We decompose DM's willingness to pay a given amount into a sum of three factors: (1) the direct effect a parameter change would have on DM's payoffs in the future strategic scenario, holding strategies of all players constant; (2) the effect due to DM changing its strategy as they react to a change in the game parameters, with the strategies of the other players in that scenario held constant; and (3) the effect there would be due to other players reacting to a the change in the game parameters (could they observe them), with the strategy of DM held constant. We illustrate these results with the quantal response equilibrium and the matching pennies game and discuss how the willingness to pay captures DM's anticipation of their future irrationality.

The aim was to evaluate the impact of a multifaceted set of medication management interventions offered by a community pharmacy on adherence, health care utilization, and costs within a commercial population. Patients initiating therapy within 16 drug classes from February 7, 2013, to October 6, 2013, were offered various adherence interventions by Walgreens pharmacy. Patients were linked deterministically to IMS medical and prescription databases for 6-month pre- and post-index data analysis. Walgreens patients (intervention) were matched to patients using other pharmacies (control) on drug class, index date, baseline demographics, clinical factors, utilization, and costs. Outcomes were evaluated at the intent-to-treat level using post-index differences and generalized estimating equations (GEE) regression model. Paired t tests (continuous variables) and McNemar's test (dichotomous variables) were used to determine the significance of estimated model coefficients at α = 0.05. The groups (n = 72,410 each) had similar age (47.1 vs. 45.7 years), sex (41.2% vs. 40.2% male), and disease burden (0.52 vs. 0.40 mean Charlson comorbidity index). In the 6-month post-index period, the intervention group had 3.0% greater medication adherence, 1.8% fewer hospital admissions, 2.7% fewer emergency room (ER) visits, and 0.53 fewer mean outpatient visits compared to the control group (all P < 0.0001). The intervention group incurred significantly lower GEE-adjusted pharmacy costs (-$92), outpatient costs (-$120), ER costs (-$38), and total health care costs (-$226.07) (all P < 0.0001), and higher inpatient costs ($86, P < 0.004) per patient. A multifaceted set of medication management interventions offered by a community pharmacy were associated with patients in a commercial population having significantly higher medication adherence and lower health care utilization and costs., Competing Interests: Author Disclosure Statement Drs. Akinbosoye, Taitel, Grana, and Hill, and Mr. Wade declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: All authors are either salaried employees of Walgreen Co. or paid research consultants for the study. The authors received the following financial support: This study was funded by Walgreen Co.