Para-infectious brain injury in COVID-19 persists at follow-up despite attenuated cytokine and autoantibody responses

To understand neurological complications of COVID-19 better both acutely and for recovery, we measured markers of brain injury, inflammatory mediators, and autoantibodies in 203 hospitalised participants; 111 with acute sera (1–11 days post-admission) and 92 convalescent sera (56 with COVID-19-associated neurological diagnoses). Here we show that compared to 60 uninfected controls, tTau, GFAP, NfL, and UCH-L1 are increased with COVID-19 infection at acute timepoints and NfL and GFAP are significantly higher in participants with neurological complications. Inflammatory mediators (IL-6, IL-12p40, HGF, M-CSF, CCL2, and IL-1RA) are associated with both altered consciousness and markers of brain injury. Autoantibodies are more common in COVID-19 than controls and some (including against MYL7, UCH-L1, and GRIN3B) are more frequent with altered consciousness. Additionally, convalescent participants with neurological complications show elevated GFAP and NfL, unrelated to attenuated systemic inflammatory mediators and to autoantibody responses. Overall, neurological complications of COVID-19 are associated with evidence of neuroglial injury in both acute and late disease and these correlate with dysregulated innate and adaptive immune responses acutely

Open Access Economics Journals and the Market for Reproducible Economic Research

Most economics journals take no substantive measures to ensure that the results they publish are replicable. To make the data and code available so that published results can be checked requires an archive. Top economics journals have been adopting mandatory data+code archives in the past few years. The movement toward mandatory data+code archives has yet to reach the open access journals. This is paradoxical; given their emphasis on making articles readily available; one would think that open access journals also would want to make data and code readily available. Open access economics journals should adopt mandatory data+code archives en masse. Doing so will give them a competitive advantage with respect to traditional economics journals.archives; code; data; replication

Microsoft Excel's 'Not The Wichmann-Hill' random number generators

Microsoft attempted to implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG in Excel 2003 and failed; it did not just produce numbers between zero and unity, it would also produce negative numbers. Microsoft issued a patch that allegedly fixed the problem so that the patched Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 now implement the Wichmann-Hill RNG, as least according to Microsoft. We show that whatever RNG it is that Microsoft has implemented in these versions of Excel, it is not the Wichmann-Hill RNG. Microsoft has now failed twice to implement the dozen lines of code that define the Wichmann-Hill RNG.

Better Confidence Intervals: The Double Bootstrap with No Pivot

The double bootstrap is an important advance in confidence interval generation because it converges faster than the already popular single bootstrap. Yet the usual double bootstrap requires a stable pivot that is not always available, e.g., when estimating flexibilities or substitution elasticities. A recently developed double bootstrap does not require a pivot. A Monte Carlo analysis with the Waugh data finds the double bootstrap achieves nominal coverage whereas the single bootstrap does not. A useful artifice dramatically decreases the computational time of the double bootstrap. Copyright 1998, Oxford University Press.