岡山県の集落社会の構造変化

Rural communities in Okayama Prefecture, like those throughout Japan and the remainder of the industrialized world, have undergone rapid economic and social changes in the post-war period. Both policy makers and scholars who are interested in social change in rural areas need to develop an understanding of what those changes have been, what they might be leading to and what the impacts of those changes have been on communities and the people who live there, if they are to effectively promote the social health of these communities. This paper is the first in a series of articles which will carry out such an investigation using the hamlet communities of Okayama Prefecture as the primary data base. This first paper, through an analysis of data on these communities collected by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry will present findings which will delineate the main structural changes which these hamlets underwent in the 1960 to 1980 period. Basically, it will be shown that the two most important factors explaining the evolution of the current structure of these communities are their size and their proximity to major urban areas. While the effects of rapid industrialization have led to a decrease in the importance of agriculture throughout all of the hamlets of the prefecture, the new form into which a hamlet has evolved depends in large measure on its physical location within the prefecture, and its size, as measured by the number of houses and area of cultivated land

International Union of Immunological Societies: 2017 Primary Immunodeficiency Diseases Committee Report on Inborn Errors of Immunity

Beginning in 1970, a committee was constituted under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) to catalog primary immunodeficiencies. Twenty years later, the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS) took the remit of this committee. The current report details the categorization and listing of 354 (as of February 2017) inborn errors of immunity. The growth and increasing complexity of the field have been impressive, encompassing an increasing variety of conditions, and the classification described here will serve as a critical reference for immunologists and researchers worldwide

An explorative qualitative study to determine the footwear needs of workers in standing environments

Background: Many work places require standing for prolonged periods of time and are potentially damaging to health, with links to musculoskeletal disorders and acute trauma from workplace accidents. Footwear provides the only interaction between the body and the ground and therefore a potential means to impact musculoskeletal disorders. However, there is very limited research into the necessary design and development of footwear based on both the physical environmental constraints and the personal preference of the workers. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore workers needs for footwear in the ‘standing’ workplace in relation to MSD, symptoms, comfort and design. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants from demanding work environments that require standing for high proportions of the working day. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the results and gain an exploratory understanding into the footwear needs of these workers. Results: Interviews revealed the environmental demands and a very high percentage of musculoskeletal disorders, including day to day discomfort and chronic problems. It was identified that when designing work footwear for standing environments, the functionality of the shoe for the environment must be addressed, the sensations and symptoms of the workers taken into account to encourage adherence and the decision influencers should be met to encourage initial footwear choice. Meeting all these criteria could encourage the use of footwear with the correct safety features and comfort. Development of the correct footwear and increased education regarding foot health and footwear choice could help to reduce or improve the effect of the high number of musculoskeletal disorders repeatedly recorded in jobs that require prolonged periods of standing. Conclusion: This study provides a unique insight into the footwear needs of some workers in environments that require prolonged standing. This user based enquiry has provided information which is important to workplace footwear design

A common variant near TGFBR3 is associated with primary open angle glaucoma

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Primary open angle glaucoma (POAG), a major cause of blindness worldwide, is a complex disease with a significant genetic contribution.We performed Exome Array (Illumina) analysis on 3504 POAG cases and 9746 controls with replication of the most significant findings in 9173 POAG cases and 26 780 controls across 18 collections of Asian, African and European descent. Apart from confirming strong evidence of association at CDKN2B-AS1 (rs2157719 [G], odds ratio [OR] = 0.71, P = 2.81 × 10−33), we observed one SNP showing significant association to POAG (CDC7–TGFBR3 rs1192415, ORG-allele = 1.13, Pmeta = 1.60 × 10−8). This particular SNP has previously been shown to be strongly associated with optic disc area and vertical cup-to-disc ratio, which are regarded as glaucoma-related quantitative traits. Our study now extends this by directly implicating it in POAG disease pathogenesis

Controlo químico de infestantes

Uma planta é considerada infestante quando nasce espontaneamente num local e momento indesejados, podendo interferir negativamente com a cultura instalada. As infestantes competem com as culturas para o espaço, a luz, água e nutrientes, podendo atrasar e prejudicar as operações de colheita, depreciar o produto final e assegurarem a reinfestação nas culturas seguintes. Dado o modo de propagação diferenciado das diversas espécies de infestantes, com as anuais a propagarem-se por semente e as perenes ou vivazes a assegurarem a sua propagação através de órgãos vegetativos (rizomas, bolbos, tubérculos, etc.), assim, também o seu controlo quer químico, quer mecânico terá que ser diferenciado, ou seja, para controlar infestantes anuais será suficiente destruir a sua parte aérea, enquanto para controlar infestantes perenes teremos que destruir os seus órgãos reprodutivos. O controlo de infestantes poderá ser químico, através da utilização de herbicidas, ou mecânico pela utilização de alfaias agrícolas, tais como a charrua de aivecas, a charrua de discos, a grade de discos, o escarificador e a fresa. Quando a técnica utilizada na instalação das culturas é a sementeira directa, o controlo das infestantes terá que ser obrigatoriamente químico, enquanto se o recurso à mobilização do solo for a técnica mais utilizada (sistema de mobilização tradicional ou sistema de mobilização reduzida), o controlo das infestantes tanto poderá ser químico como mecânico. Neste trabalho iremos abordar apenas, o controlo químico de infestantes

Angioscopic Evaluation of Thrombi in the Culprit Coronary Lesions in Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction

The purpose of this study was to evaluate intracoronary thrombi in the culprit lesions in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) by angioscopy, and to compare them with clinical and angiographic features. We angioscopically observed the culprit coronary lesions in 66 patients with AMI (55 males and 11 females, 63.9±15.4 years old) just before interventional therapy. Thrombi were observed in 42 of 66 lesions (64%), namely, red thrombi in 16, mixed thrombi in 15, white thrombi in 11. In patients with complete obstruction (TIMI grade 0 and I), red thrombi were more frequently observed than mixed or white thrombi. On the other hand, in patients with incomplete obstruction (TIMI grade II and III), white thrombi were more frequently observed than the others. Angiographically, haziness and filling defect were significantly more frequently observed in patients with red thrombi than the others (p<0.05). The distance from proximal side branch to thrombi tended to be longer in patients with red thrombi than the others. The time from onset of AMI tended to be longer in patients with white thrombi than the others. These results suggest that blood flow may be an important determinant of thrombi characterization

Electronic health record nested pragmatic randomized controlled trial of a reminder system for serum lithium level monitoring in patients with mood disorder: KONOTORI study protocol

Background: The weaknesses of classical explanatory randomized controlled trials (RCTs) include limited generalizability, high cost, and time burden. Pragmatic RCTs nested within electronic health records (EHRs) can be useful to overcome such limitations. Serum lithium monitoring has often been underutilized in real-world practice in Japan. This trial aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the EHR-nested reminder system for serum lithium level monitoring in the maintenance of therapeutic lithium concentration and in the improvement of the quality of care for patients on lithium maintenance therapy. Methods: The Kyoto Toyooka nested controlled trial of reminders (KONOTORI trial) is an EHR-nested, parallel-group, superiority, stratified, permuted block-randomized controlled trial. Screening, random allocation, reminder output, and outcome collection will be conducted automatically by the EHR-nested trial program. Patients with a mood disorder taking lithium carbonate for maintenance therapy will be randomly allocated to the two-step reminder system for serum lithium monitoring or to usual care. The primary outcome is the achievement of therapeutic serum lithium concentration between 0.4 and 1.0 mEq/L at 18 months after informed consent. Discussion: The KONOTORI trial uses EHRs to enable the efficient conduct of a pragmatic trial of the reminder system for lithium monitoring. This may contribute to improved quality of care for patients on lithium maintenance therapy. Trial registration: University Hospital Medical Information Network (UMIN) Clinical Trials Registry, UMIN000033633. Registered on 3 July 2018

Enhancing reasoning capabilities of LLMs via principled synthetic logic corpus

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving a wide range of tasks, yet they have struggled with reasoning. To address this, we propose Additional Logic Training (ALT), which aims to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities by program-generated logical reasoning samples. We first establish principles for designing high-quality samples by integrating symbolic logic theory and previous empirical insights. Then, based on these principles, we construct a synthetic corpus named Formal Logic Deduction Diverse (FLD×2), comprising numerous samples of multi-step deduction with unknown facts, diverse reasoning rules, diverse linguistic expressions, and challenging distractors. Finally, we empirically show that ALT on FLD×2 substantially enhances the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3.1-70B. Improvements include gains of up to 30 points on logical reasoning benchmarks, up to 10 points on math and coding benchmarks, and 5 points on the benchmark suite BBH