Low back pain in Hispanic residential carpenters

Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of lost work time and has been recognized as America’s number one workplace safety challenge. Low back pain is occurring at epidemic proportions among construction workers, and minority populations have been under-investigated for risk of back injury. This project investigated the multiple potential risk factors for occupational LBP among Hispanic residential carpenters

Review: A Publication of LMDA, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, volume 17, issue 1

Contents include: Editor\u27s Page: A Note from New LMDA President, Brian Quirt; Think Dramaturgically, Act Locally! A Conference Overview; I Was Mugged at My First LMDA Conference; First-Timer Fragments; Conference Photos; Introducing the Lessing (and Joe and Michael); A Message Faxed from Romania; Acceptance Speech, Michael Lupu; Producing The Belle\u27s Stratagem; Dramaturging Justice: The Exonerated Project at the Alley Theatre; Past President Liz Engeleman: Some Appreciations; The Toronto Mini-Conference (reprinted from the LMDA Canada newsletter); Gateway to the Americas, The LMDA Delegation, A Report from Mexico; Imag[in]ing Poverty: Creative Critical Dramaturgy for Suzan-Lori Parks\u27s In the Blood; Hester, La Negrita in Iowa City, Staging Spells and Homelessness in Suzan-Lori Parks\u27s In the Blood; The Future of Theatre is...(a creative contest); Seventh Annual Call for LMDA Residency Proposals. Issue editors: D.J. Hopkins, Madeleine Oldham, Carlenne Lacostahttps://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/lmdareview/1034/thumbnail.jp

The relationship between moral judgment and cooperation in children with high-functioning autism.

This study investigated moral judgment in children with high-functioning autism and their cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game with partners of different moralities. Thirty-eight 6- to 12-year-old high-functioning autistic (HFA) children and 31 typically developing (TD) children were recruited. Children were asked to judge story protagonists' morality. After making this moral judgment correctly, they were asked to play with the morally nice and the morally naughty child in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Results showed that both HFA and TD children made correct moral judgments, and that HFA children might even have more rigid criteria for what constitutes morally naughty acts. HFA children's cooperation did not differ depending on the morality of the interaction partner, while TD children showed higher cooperation when interacting with the morally nice than the morally naughty child did. Thus, partner's morality did influence TD children's but not HFA children's subsequent cooperation

Kovesi and the Formal and Material Elements of Concepts

Published in Philosophia, December 2011, Volume 39, Issue 4, pp 699-720. doi: 10.1007/s11406-011-9305-x</p

Effects of Anacetrapib in Patients with Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease

BACKGROUND: Patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease remain at high risk for cardiovascular events despite effective statin-based treatment of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels. The inhibition of cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) by anacetrapib reduces LDL cholesterol levels and increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels. However, trials of other CETP inhibitors have shown neutral or adverse effects on cardiovascular outcomes. METHODS: We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial involving 30,449 adults with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive atorvastatin therapy and who had a mean LDL cholesterol level of 61 mg per deciliter (1.58 mmol per liter), a mean non-HDL cholesterol level of 92 mg per deciliter (2.38 mmol per liter), and a mean HDL cholesterol level of 40 mg per deciliter (1.03 mmol per liter). The patients were assigned to receive either 100 mg of anacetrapib once daily (15,225 patients) or matching placebo (15,224 patients). The primary outcome was the first major coronary event, a composite of coronary death, myocardial infarction, or coronary revascularization. RESULTS: During the median follow-up period of 4.1 years, the primary outcome occurred in significantly fewer patients in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (1640 of 15,225 patients [10.8%] vs. 1803 of 15,224 patients [11.8%]; rate ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval, 0.85 to 0.97; P=0.004). The relative difference in risk was similar across multiple prespecified subgroups. At the trial midpoint, the mean level of HDL cholesterol was higher by 43 mg per deciliter (1.12 mmol per liter) in the anacetrapib group than in the placebo group (a relative difference of 104%), and the mean level of non-HDL cholesterol was lower by 17 mg per deciliter (0.44 mmol per liter), a relative difference of -18%. There were no significant between-group differences in the risk of death, cancer, or other serious adverse events. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with atherosclerotic vascular disease who were receiving intensive statin therapy, the use of anacetrapib resulted in a lower incidence of major coronary events than the use of placebo. (Funded by Merck and others; Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN48678192 ; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01252953 ; and EudraCT number, 2010-023467-18 .)

Cluster-based analysis improves predictive validity of spike-triggered receptive field estimates.

Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) characterization is a central goal of auditory physiology. STRFs are often approximated by the spike-triggered average (STA), which reflects the average stimulus preceding a spike. In many cases, the raw STA is subjected to a threshold defined by gain values expected by chance. However, such correction methods have not been universally adopted, and the consequences of specific gain-thresholding approaches have not been investigated systematically. Here, we evaluate two classes of statistical correction techniques, using the resulting STRF estimates to predict responses to a novel validation stimulus. The first, more traditional technique eliminated STRF pixels (time-frequency bins) with gain values expected by chance. This correction method yielded significant increases in prediction accuracy, including when the threshold setting was optimized for each unit. The second technique was a two-step thresholding procedure wherein clusters of contiguous pixels surviving an initial gain threshold were then subjected to a cluster mass threshold based on summed pixel values. This approach significantly improved upon even the best gain-thresholding techniques. Additional analyses suggested that allowing threshold settings to vary independently for excitatory and inhibitory subfields of the STRF resulted in only marginal additional gains, at best. In summary, augmenting reverse correlation techniques with principled statistical correction choices increased prediction accuracy by over 80% for multi-unit STRFs and by over 40% for single-unit STRFs, furthering the interpretational relevance of the recovered spectrotemporal filters for auditory systems analysis

Cluster-based analysis improves predictive validity of spike-triggered receptive field estimates

<div><p>Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) characterization is a central goal of auditory physiology. STRFs are often approximated by the spike-triggered average (STA), which reflects the average stimulus preceding a spike. In many cases, the raw STA is subjected to a threshold defined by gain values expected by chance. However, such correction methods have not been universally adopted, and the consequences of specific gain-thresholding approaches have not been investigated systematically. Here, we evaluate two classes of statistical correction techniques, using the resulting STRF estimates to predict responses to a novel validation stimulus. The first, more traditional technique eliminated STRF pixels (time-frequency bins) with gain values expected by chance. This correction method yielded significant increases in prediction accuracy, including when the threshold setting was optimized for each unit. The second technique was a two-step thresholding procedure wherein clusters of contiguous pixels surviving an initial gain threshold were then subjected to a cluster mass threshold based on summed pixel values. This approach significantly improved upon even the best gain-thresholding techniques. Additional analyses suggested that allowing threshold settings to vary independently for excitatory and inhibitory subfields of the STRF resulted in only marginal additional gains, at best. In summary, augmenting reverse correlation techniques with principled statistical correction choices increased prediction accuracy by over 80% for multi-unit STRFs and by over 40% for single-unit STRFs, furthering the interpretational relevance of the recovered spectrotemporal filters for auditory systems analysis.</p></div

Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) estimation and validation procedures.

<p><b>(A)</b> Units were first probed with a 30-min dynamic moving ripple (DMR), a synthetic broadband stimulus sharing many features with natural sounds including local spectrotemporal correlations. <b>(B)</b> Responses elicited by a novel 30-s DMR segment (50 repetitions) were used for subsequent validation and testing. <b>(C)</b> STRFs were estimated by calculating the spike-triggered average (STA). Response predictions were obtained by convolution of the STRF and validation spectrogram, with the output nonlinearity modeled by half-wave rectification. <b>(D)</b> STRF validity was assessed by calculating the correlation coefficient between predictions and neuronal responses obtained with the trial-averaged peristimulus time histogram (PSTH). <b>(E)</b> Null STAs computed with circularly-shifted spike times were used to generate a sample of gain values expected by chance. A normal distribution fit to these values was used to determine gain value cutoffs corresponding to a logarithmically-spaced range of significance levels from <i>p</i> < 10⁰ to <i>p</i> < 10⁻⁹. <b>(F)</b> Similarly, null STAs subjected to a gain threshold were used to generate a sample of cluster mass values expected by chance, and a gamma distribution fit to these values was used to identify cluster mass cutoffs corresponding to the same range of significance levels. <b>(G)</b> The corrected STA was defined by pixels (clusters) exceeding a specified significance level.</p

Summary of STRF gain thresholding results.

<p><b>(A)</b> Mean ± SEM prediction accuracy at each gain threshold (<i>p</i>_gain) minus prediction accuracy obtained with the raw STA (MU: <i>r</i> = 0.176, SU: <i>r</i> = 0.210). <b>(B)</b> Histograms of gain thresholds that yielded the highest prediction accuracy. <b>(C–D)</b> Cumulative distribution functions of prediction accuracy obtained with raw STAs, STRFs corrected with a fixed <i>p</i>_gain setting (<i>p</i>_gain < 0.01 applied uniformly across units), and STRFs corrected at the best <i>p</i>_gain settings (identified on an individual-unit basis through cross-validation). Inset bar plots represent mean +SEM prediction accuracy. For both data types, accuracy for each gain thresholding approach (fixed <i>p</i>_gain and best <i>p</i>_gain) was significantly higher than the raw STA, but these approaches significantly did not differ from each other (Wilcoxon signed-rank tests). <b>(E)</b> Scatter plots of prediction accuracy for individual units at best <i>p</i>_gain versus raw (left) and fixed <i>p</i>_gain (right). Note that prediction accuracy may be higher for the fixed <i>p</i>_gain setting than best <i>p</i>_gain setting. This is because best <i>p</i>_gain settings determined by the validation dataset may not maximize prediction accuracy for the test dataset (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0183914#sec002" target="_blank">Methods</a> for additional details). Red markers indicate the means. <b>(F)</b> Mean ±SEM prediction accuracy as a function of the temporal bin size for the PSTHs and predictions using the same correction approaches and color schemes as in <b>(C–D)</b>.</p