A power-law distribution for tenure lengths of sports managers

We show that the tenure lengths for managers of sport teams follow a power law distribution with an exponent between 2 and 3. We develop a simple theoretical model which replicates this result. The model demonstrates that the empirical phenomenon can be understood as the macroscopic outcome of pairwise interactions among managers in a league, threshold effects in managerial performance evaluation, competitive market forces, and luck at the microscopic level

The pill questionnaire in a nondemented Parkinson's disease population

We assessed the Pill Questionnaire as a screen for mild cognitive impairment in nondemented Parkinson's disease patients. The relationship between ability to remember medications for Parkinson's disease in the Pill Questionnaire, mild cognitive impairment, and deficits on neuropsychological tests performed 2–3 weeks later blind to Pill Questionnaire results was assessed in movement disorders clinic patients. In 109 subjects, inaccurate medication reporting on the Pill Questionnaire was associated with lower scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, Scales for Outcomes in Parkinson's Disease–Cognition and with deficits in memory, attention, executive function‐inhibitory control, processing speed, visuospatial function, and language. Inaccurate medication reporting was also associated with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.4 (95% CI, 0.91–5.88; P = .06) for mild cognitive impairment, with a specificity of 80% and sensitivity of 41%. The Pill Questionnaire is neither sensitive nor specific enough to be used as the sole screening or diagnostic tool for mild cognitive impairment. However, inaccurate medication reporting is associated with deficits spanning many cognitive domains and should alert a clinician to a higher likelihood of cognitive impairment. © 2012 Movement Disorder SocietyPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93736/1/25124_ftp.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93736/2/MDS_25124_sm_SuppTables.pd

Back to the future:re-establishing guinea pig in vivo asthma models

Research using animal models of asthma is currently dominated by mouse models. This has been driven by the comprehensive knowledge on inflammatory and immune reactions in mice, as well as tools to produce genetically modified mice. Many of the identified therapeutic targets influencing airway hyper-responsiveness and inflammation in mouse models, have however been disappointing when tested clinically in asthma. It is therefore a great need for new animal models that more closely resemble human asthma. The guinea pig has for decades been used in asthma research and a comprehensive table of different protocols for asthma models is presented. The studies have primarily been focused on the pharmacological aspects of the disease, where the guinea pig undoubtedly is superior to mice. Further reasons are the anatomical and physiological similarities between human and guinea pig airways compared with that of the mouse, especially with respect to airway branching, neurophysiology, pulmonary circulation and smooth muscle distribution, as well as mast cell localization and mediator secretion. Lack of reagents and specific molecular tools to study inflammatory and immunological reactions in the guinea pig has however greatly diminished its use in asthma research. The aim in this position paper is to review and summarize what we know about different aspects of the use of guinea pig in vivo models for asthma research. The associated aim is to highlight the unmet needs that have to be addressed in the future

Scintillation Properties of Eu2+-Activated Barium Fluoroiodide

The scintillation properties of powders and single-crystals of BaFI doped with Eu2+ are presented. Single crystals were grown by the vertical Bridgman technique. Under optical and X-ray excitation, the samples exhibit a narrow E2+ 5d-4f transition emission centered at 405 nm. The scintillation light output is estimated to be 55,000+-5,000 photons/MeV at 662 keV with 85percent of the light decaying within 600 ns. An energyresolution of 8.5percent full width at half maximum (FWHM) has been achieved using this scintillator for 662 keV excitation (137Cs source) at room temperature

Neptune to the Common-wealth of England (1652): the republican Britannia and the continuity of interests

In the seventeenth century, John Kerrigan reminds us, “models of empire did not always turn on monarchy”. In this essay, I trace a vision of “Neptune’s empire” shared by royalists and republicans, binding English national interest to British overseas expansion. I take as my text a poem entitled “Neptune to the Common-wealth of England”, prefixed to Marchamont Nedham’s 1652 English translation of Mare Clausum (1635), John Selden’s response to Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo Grotius. This minor work is read alongside some equally obscure and more familiar texts in order to point up the ways in which it speaks to persistent cultural and political interests. I trace the afterlife of this verse, its critical reception and its unique status as a fragment that exemplifies the crossover between colonial republic and imperial monarchy at a crucial moment in British history, a moment that, with Brexit, remains resonant

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The National Early Warning Score and its subcomponents recorded within ±24 hours of emergency medical admission are poor predictors of hospital-acquired acute kidney injury

YesBackground: Hospital-acquired Acute Kidney Injury (H-AKI) is a common cause of avoidable morbidity and mortality. Aim: To determine if the patients’ vital signs data as defined by a National Early Warning Score (NEWS), can predict H-AKI following emergency admission to hospital. Methods: Analyses of emergency admissions to York hospital over 24-months with NEWS data. We report the area under the curve (AUC) for logistic regression models that used the index NEWS (model A0), plus age and sex (A1), plus subcomponents of NEWS (A2) and two-way interactions (A3). Likewise for maximum NEWS (models B0,B1,B2,B3). Results: 4.05% (1361/33608) of emergency admissions had H-AKI. Models using the index NEWS had the lower AUCs (0.59 to 0.68) than models using the maximum NEWS AUCs (0.75 to 0.77). The maximum NEWS model (B3) was more sensitivity than the index NEWS model (A0) (67.60% vs 19.84%) but identified twice as many cases as being at risk of H-AKI (9581 vs 4099) at a NEWS of 5. Conclusions: The index NEWS is a poor predictor of H-AKI. The maximum NEWS is a better predictor but seems unfeasible because it is only knowable in retrospect and is associated with a substantial increase in workload albeit with improved sensitivity.The Health Foundatio