Evaluation of the risk of death for very low-birthweight babies and comparation between neonatal intensive care units: application of ROC curves

In general, the neonatal rates of mortality are considered the most important measure for the evaluation of health services and the development of society. Babies with very low birthweight (<1500g at birth) contribute significantly to the increase of the mortality and morbidity rates.This study aims to compare, in the same set of babies, 4 different indexes of clinical seriousness; these indexes quantify the risk of death for babies with very low birthweight. The study was conducted on 169 new-borns with birthweight under 1500g, admitted to the Neonatology Unit of the Hospital Garcia de Orta in Portugal, between January 1992 and July 1995. The data were collected retrospectively on the same set of new-horns to permit the comparison of the different indexes. To compare Neonatal Intensive Care Units, we use another set of new-borns. These data (234 new-borns with very low birthweight) were collected in 4 different Portuguese hospitals (H-1, H-2, H-3 and H-4) during 1995.The 4 indexes studied were: CRIB (Clinical Risk Index for Babies), TISS (Neonatal Therapeutical Intervention Score System), SNAP (Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology) and SNAP-PE (Score for Neonatal Acute Physiology-Perinatal Extension). Also, included in the study was the variable WEIGHT (birthweight) because it is an important index to evaluate the initial risk of death.The selection of the best diagnostic test was based on the Receiver Operating Characteristic (RDC) curves. The results, based on the ROC curves, allow the conclusion that CRIB is the best index for evaluating the risk of neonatal death, and that hospital H-4 has better performance in terms of neonatal intensive care

Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members

Gang violence is a major problem in the United States accounting for a large fraction of homicides and other violent crime. In this paper, we study the problem of early identification of violent gang members. Our approach relies on modified centrality measures that take into account additional data of the individuals in the social network of co-arrestees which together with other arrest metadata provide a rich set of features for a classification algorithm. We show our approach obtains high precision and recall (0.89 and 0.78 respectively) in the case where the entire network is known and out-performs current approaches used by law-enforcement to the problem in the case where the network is discovered overtime by virtue of new arrests - mimicking real-world law-enforcement operations. Operational issues are also discussed as we are preparing to leverage this method in an operational environment.Comment: SIGKDD 201

Triplectic Quantization of W2 gravity

The role of one loop order corrections in the triplectic quantization is discussed in the case of W2 theory. This model illustrates the presence of anomalies and Wess Zumino terms in this quantization scheme where extended BRST invariance is represented in a completely anticanonical form.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

An evaluation of comfort afforded by hearing protection devices

This paper focused on the comfort afforded by 3 models of hearing protection devices. Devices were selected and, after being tested in a real occupational context, evaluated using a questionnaire regarding different comfort indexes. In this way, it was possible to compare the “performance” of the hearing protectors regarding the comfort indexes, and to determine which one, globally, has afforded the greatest comfort. Since that it is not likely that all the indexes contribute in the same way to the global comfort sensation, each worker was asked to score the importance of each index evaluated before. This enabled to order the indexes by the importance they have on the global comfort feeling. It is hopped that this study contributes to a greater efficacy of the hearing conservation programs implemented through the use of hearing protection

Telecommunications-Related Services: Market Access, Deeper Integration and the WTO

Liberalization and regulatory reform of telecom markets has emerged as a high profile policy issue. This paper analyzes how the multilateral system under the World Trade Organization can help developing countries in promoting their own information infrastructures. We focus on a specific ?regime? issue that has attracted increasing attention in recent years: the extent to which the WTO should pursue a ?deeper integration? agenda, using telecommunications and activities that rely heavily on telecommunications as a specific case.Die Liberalisierung und Reform der Telekommunikationsmärkte ist zu einem wichtigen politischen Thema geworden. Dieser Beitrag analysiert, wie das multilaterale System - unter der Welthandelsorganisation - Entwicklungsländern bei der Förderung ihrer eigenen Informations-Infrastruktur helfen kann. Wir konzentrieren uns auf eine spezifische ?Regime?-Frage, die in den letzten Jahren zunehmend Aufmerksamkeit erregt hat: In welchem Maße die WTO ein Programm der ?tieferen Integration? verfolgen sollte, das Telekommunikation als spezifischen Fall betrachtet

Discovery of optical pulsations in V2116 Ophiuchi/GX 1+4

We report the detection of pulsations with $\sim 124$ s period in V2116 Oph, the optical counterpart of the low-mass X-ray binary GX 1+4. The pulsations are sinusoidal with modulation amplitude of up to 4% in blue light and were observed in ten different observing sessions during 1996 April-August using a CCD photometer at the 1.6-m and 0.6-m telescopes of Laborat\'orio Nacional de Astrof\'{\i}sica, in Brazil. The pulsations were also observed with the $UBVRI$ fast photometer. With only one exception the observed optical periods are consistent with those observed by the BATSE instrument on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory at the same epoch. There is a definite correlation between the observability of pulsations and the optical brightness of the system: V2116~Oph had $R$ magnitude in the range $15.3-15.5$ when the pulsed signal was detected, and $R = 16.0-17.7$ when no pulsations were present. The discovery makes GX 1+4 only the third of $\sim 35$ accretion-powered X-ray pulsars to be firmly detected as a pulsating source in the optical. The presence of flickering and pulsations in V2116 Oph adds strong evidence for an accretion disk scenario in this system. The absolute magnitude of the pulsed component on 1996 May 27 is estimated to be $M_V \sim -1.5$. The implied dimensions for the emitting region are 1.1 R_{\sun}, 3.2 R_{\sun}, and 7.0 R_{\sun}, for black-body spectral distributions with $T = 10^5$ K, $2 \times 10^4$ K, and $1 \times 10^4$ K, respectively.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures in PostScript, latex, accepted for publication on the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Configurational temperature control for atomic and molecular systems

A new configurational temperature thermostat suitable for molecules with holonomic constraints is derived. This thermostat has a simple set of motion equations, can generate the canonical ensemble in both position and momentum space, acts homogeneously through the spatial coordinates, and does not intrinsically violate the constraints. Our new configurational thermostat is closely related to the kinetic temperature Nosé-Hoover thermostat with feedback coupled to the position variables via a term proportional to the net molecular force. We validate the thermostat by comparing equilibrium static and dynamic quantities for a fluid of n-decane molecules under configurational and kinetic temperature control. Practical aspects concerning the implementation of the new thermostat in a molecular dynamics code and the potential applications are discussed