Dry law and homicides: evidence from the São Paulo metropolitan area

Over the last 15 years, several Latin American cities have adopted dry laws, which restrain the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants during specific hours of the week. Bogotá, in 1991, was the first. Several more have followed suit, or are likely to do so in the near future. Policy makers and the general press have argued that these measures reduce crime. In this paper, we use a particular feature of the adoption of laws in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) to estimate the effect of dry laws on the ultimate form of violent crime: murder. Between March 2001 and August 2004, 16 out of the 39 municipalities of the SPMA have adopted, at different dates, dry laws. By comparing the dynamics of homicide between adopting and non-adopting cities, we estimate that dry laws reduce homicides by at least 10%, with an even higher effect in high crime cities. Results are robust to inclusion of a large set of controls, to propensity score matching, to outliers, and to correction possible spillover effects from adopting to non-adopting cities.Dry Law, Alcohol, Crime, Difference-in-Difference

Retrosternal Percutaneous Tracheostomy: An Approach for Predictably Impossible Classic Tracheostomy

Percutaneous tracheostomy is a routine procedure in intensive care units. In cases of very low position of the larynx, cervical spine deformation, morbid obesity, or neck tumor, performance of the classic tracheostomy is inapplicable. Retrosternal approach to tracheostomy in such 20 patients is herein reported. After preoperative neck computerized tomography to define the neck anatomy, a small suprasternal incision followed by a short retrosternal tissue dissection to expose the trachea was done; the trachea was then catheterized at the level of the 2nd ring in the usual tracheostomy manner. The immediate and late (≥6 months) outcomes were similar to that of the standard tracheostomy. Thus, percutaneous retrosternal tracheostomy is safe in patients with abnormal positioning of the trachea or neck constitution. It is a bedside applicable technique, that, however, requires caution to avoid hazardous vascular complications

Effects of response instructions on faking a situational judgment test

A situational judgment test (SJT) and a Big 5 personality test were administered to 203 participants under instructions to respond honestly and to fake good using a withinsubjects design. Participants indicated both the best and worst response (i.e., Knowledge) and the most likely and least likely response (i.e., Behavioral Tendency) to each situation. Faking effect size for the SJT Behavioral Tendency response format was (d 5 .34) when participants responded first under honest instructions and (d 5 .15) when they responded first under faking instructions. Those for the Big 5 dimensions ranged from d 5 .26 to d 5 1.0. For the Knowledge response format results were inconsistent. Honest condition Knowledge SJT scores were more highly correlated with cognitive ability (r 5.56) than were Behavioral Tendency SJT scores (r 5.38). Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed

BLOOM+1: Adding Language Support to BLOOM for Zero-Shot Prompting

The BLOOM model is a large publicly available multilingual language model, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To extend the benefits of BLOOM to other languages without incurring prohibitively large costs, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM to new languages not seen during pretraining. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages in a resource-constrained setting. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, we find that adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling

An intervention program to reduce the number of hospitalizations of elderly patients in a primary care clinic

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The elderly population consumes a large share of medical resources in the western world. A significant portion of the expense is related to hospitalizations.</p> <p>Objectives</p> <p>To evaluate an intervention program designed to reduce the number of hospitalization of elderly patients by a more optimal allocation of resources in primary care.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A multidimensional intervention program was conducted that included the re-engineering of existing work processes with a focus on the management of patient problems, improving communication with outside agencies, and the establishment of a system to monitor quality of healthcare parameters. Data on the number of hospitalizations and their cost were compared before and after implementation of the intervention program.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>As a result of the intervention the mean expenditure per elderly patient was reduced by 22.5%. The adjusted number of hospitalizations/1,000 declined from 15.1 to 10.7 (29.3%). The number of adjusted hospitalization days dropped from 132 to 82 (37.9%) and the mean hospitalization stay declined from 8.2 to 6.7 days (17.9%). The adjusted hospitalization cost ($/1,000 patients) dropped from$32,574 to $18,624 (42.8%). The overall clinic expense, for all age groups, dropped by 9.9%.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Implementation of the intervention program in a single primary care clinic led to a reduction in hospitalizations for the elderly patient population and to a more optimal allocation of healthcare resources.</p

Diagnostics and treatment challenges of Ph-like acute lymphoblastic leukemia: a description of 3 clinical cases

B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is a diverse group of malignant blood disorders both with regard to the biological properties of the tumor and to therapeutic approaches. Immunophenotyping, molecular genetic techniques, whole-genome sequencing characterize B-ALL as a very diverse group for sensitivity to chemotherapy and prognosis. We present three clinical cases of patients with B-ALL and expected good response to standard therapy, in whom standard protocol treatment failured: refractoriness, persistence of minimal residual disease (MRD), and progression (MRD increase). The remission in these patients was achieved after chemotherapy change to immunological targeted therapy. Nowadays a unified therapeutic approach to all primary patients of the B-ALL is considered generally outdated. Great efforts are carrying out to develop molecular genetic classifications. The molecular dissection of subtypes of B-ALL goes on, and new protocols for selective treatment with targeting are clearly outlined for each subtype of B-ALL