Adverse socioeconomic conditions in childhood and cause specific adult mortality: prospective observational study

<b>Objective:</b> To investigate the association between social circumstances in childhood and mortality from various causes of death in adulthood. Design: Prospective observational study. Setting: 27 workplaces in the west of Scotland. <b>Subjects:</b> 5645 men aged 35-64 years at the time of examination. <b>Main outcome measures:</b> Death from various causes. <b>Results:</b> Men whose fathers had manual occupations when they were children were more likely as adults to have manual jobs and be living in deprived areas. Gradients in mortality from coronary heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, stomach cancer, and respiratory disease were seen (all P<0.05), generally increasing from men whose fathers had professional and managerial occupations (social class I and II) to those whose fathers had semiskilled and unskilled manual occupations (social class IV and V). Relative rates of mortality adjusted for age for men with fathers in manual versus non-manual occupations were 1.52 (95% confidence interval 1.24 to 1.87) for coronary heart disease, 1.83 (1.13 to 2.94) for stroke, 1.65 (1.12 to 2.43) for lung cancer, 2.06 (0.93 to 4.57) for stomach cancer, and 2.01 (1.17 to 3.48) for respiratory disease. Mortality from other cancers and accidental and violent death showed no association with fathers' social class. Adjustment for adult socioeconomic circumstances and risk factors did not alter results for mortality from stroke and stomach cancer, attenuated the increased risk of coronary heart disease and respiratory disease, and essentially eliminated the association with lung cancer. <b>Conclusions:</b> Adverse socioeconomic circumstances in childhood have a specific influence on mortality from stroke and stomach cancer in adulthood, which is not due to the continuity of social disadvantage throughout life. Deprivation in childhood influences risk of mortality from coronary heart disease and respiratory disease in adulthood, although an additive influence of adulthood circumstances is seen in these cases. Mortality from lung cancer, other cancer, and accidents and violence is predominantly influenced by risk factors that are related to social circumstances in adulthood

A Community Education and Intervention Program for Level Crossing Risk Management in Australia

This project aims to design, implement and evaluate a community road safety program using an intervention and control community methodology. It is a 3-year national project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Railway Engineering and Technologies in Australia. With level crossing accidents constituting a significant proportion of death and injury associated with rail operations the need to conduct research in level crossing safety is warranted. To date, there has been little research conducted in Australia that evaluates community road safety programs targeting level crossing safety as well as identifying impediments towards the development of safe level crossing behaviour

Some social and physical correlates of intergenerational social mobility: evidence from the west of Scotland Collaborative Study

Mainstream sociological studies of intergenerational social mobility have emphasised social factors such as education and the material and cultural resources of the family of origin as the main influences on the chances and direction of social mobility. Medical sociology in contrast has been more interested in its physical correlates such as height and health status. Data from the West of Scotland Collaborative study allow an examination of the relationship between social mobility and both social and physical factors. Height, education and material circumstances in the family of origin, indexed as the number of siblings, were each independently associated with the chances of both upward and downward social mobility in this dataset. In each case the net effect of this social mobility was to constrain the social distribution of these variables. Any role which these factors may play in indirect health selection, it is argued, cannot account for social class differences in adult health

Carboxyhaemoglobin concentration, smoking habit, and mortality in 25 years in the Renfrew/Paisley prospective cohort study

Objective: To investigate how carboxyhaemoglobin concentration is related to smoking habit and to assess whether carboxyhaemoglobin concentration is related to mortality. Design: Prospective cohort study. Setting: Residents of the towns of Renfrew and Paisley in Scotland. Participants: The whole Renfrew/Paisley study, conducted between 1972 and 1976, consisted of 7048 men and 8354 women aged 45–64 years. This study was based on 3372 men and 4192 women who were screened after the measurement of carboxyhaemoglobin concentration was introduced about halfway through the study. Main outcome measures: Deaths from coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer, and all causes in 25 years after screening. Results: Carboxyhaemoglobin concentration was related to self reported smoking and for each smoking category was higher in participants who reported inhaling than in those who reported not inhaling. Carboxyhaemoglobin concentration was positively related to all causes of mortality analysed (relative rates associated with a 1 SD (2.93) increase in carboxyhaemoglobin for all causes, CHD, stroke, COPD, and lung cancer were 1.26 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.19 to 1.34), 1.19 (95% CI 1.13 to 1.26), 1.19 (95% CI 1.13 to 1.26), 1.64 (95% CI 1.47 to 1.84), and 1.69 (95% CI 1.60 to 1.79), respectively). Adjustment for self reported cigarette smoking attenuated the associations but they remained relatively strong. Conclusions: Self reported smoking data were validated by the objective measure of carboxyhaemoglobin concentration. Since carboxyhaemoglobin concentration remained associated with mortality after adjustment for smoking, carboxyhaemoglobin seems to capture more of the risk associated with smoking tobacco than does self reported tobacco consumption alone. Analysing mortality by self reported cigarette smoking underestimates the strength of association between smoking and mortality

Further thoughts on precision

Background: There has been much discussion amongst automated software defect prediction researchers regarding use of the precision and false positive rate classifier performance metrics. Aim: To demonstrate and explain why failing to report precision when using data with highly imbalanced class distributions may provide an overly optimistic view of classifier performance. Method: Well documented examples of how dependent class distribution affects the suitability of performance measures. Conclusions: When using data where the minority class represents less than around 5 to 10 percent of data points in total, failing to report precision may be a critical mistake. Furthermore, deriving the precision values omitted from studies can reveal valuable insight into true classifier performancePeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Infrared spectrum and stability of a π-type hydrogen-bonded complex between the OH and C2H2 reactants

A hydrogen-bonded complex between the hydroxyl radical and acetylene has been stabilized in the reactant channel well leading to the addition reaction and characterized by infrared action spectroscopy in the OH overtone region. Analysis of the rotational band structure associated with the a-type transition observed at 6885.53(1) cm−1 (origin) reveals a T-shaped structure with a 3.327(5) Å separation between the centers of mass of the monomer constituents. The OH (v = 1) product states populated following vibrational predissociation show that dissociation proceeds by two mechanisms: intramolecular vibrational to rotational energy transfer and intermolecular vibrational energy transfer. The highest observed OH product state establishes an upper limit of 956 cm−1 for the stability of the π-type hydrogen-bonded complex. The experimental results are in good accord with the intermolecular distance and well depth at the T-shaped minimum energy configuration obtained from complementary ab initio calculations, which were carried out at the restricted coupled cluster singles, doubles, noniterative triples level of theory with extrapolation to the complete basis set limit

Integrated track maintenance for the PMHT via the hysteresis model

Copyright © 2007 IEEEUnlike other tracking algorithms the probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracker (PMHT) assumes that the true source of each measurement is an independent realisation of a random process. Given knowledge of the prior probability of this assignment variable, data association is performed independently for each measurement. When the assignment prior is unknown, it can be estimated provided that it is either time independent, or fixed over the batch. This paper presents a new extension of the PMHT, which incorporates a randomly evolving Bayesian hyperparameter for the assignment process. This extension is referred to as the PMHT with hysteresis. The state of the hyperparameter reflects each model's contribution to the mixture, and thus can be used to quantify the significance of mixture components. The paper demonstrates how this can be used as a method for automated track maintenance in clutter. The performance benefit gained over the standard PMHT is demonstrated using simulations and real sensor dataSamuel J. Davey; Douglas A. Gra

Intensive care in labour: a preliminary appraisal

This is a preliminary investigation into the value, function and practicability of an intensive care labour unit for highrisk cases. All the equipment necessary can be mounted on two standard theatre trolleys which can be moved to the patient's bedside, but there is no place at present for this equipment outside a teaching unit. The investigation reports on continuous foetal heart monitoring of 36 patients and simultaneous foetal scalp pH estimations on 16 of them. A high proportion of babies with low Apgar scores showed one of two (or both) characteristic foetal heart patterns during labour: (a) the well-known type 2 dip, (b) a steppe pattern not previously described as such. The latter is of importance because it is impossible to detect using only clinical methods.There was poor correlation between foetal pH values and Apgar rating, and between foetal pH values and monitor patterns. Moreover, the pH values of foetal scalp blood and foetal umbilical arterial and venous blood samples bore varying relations to one another. However, for practical purposes, a foetal scalp blood of pH less than 7·20 when associated with a maternofoetal pH difference of 0·250 or more should be regarded with anxiety. The place and value of intensive care are discussed

Dynamic Load and Storage Integration

Modern technology combined with the desire to minimize the size and weight of a ship’s power system are leading to renewed interest in more electric or all electric ships. An important characteristic of the emerging ship power system is an increasing level of load variability, with some future pulsed loads requiring peak power in excess of the available steady– state power. This inevitably leads to the need for some additional energy storage beyond that inherent in the fuel. With the current and evolving technology, it appears that storage will be in the form of batteries, rotating machines, and capacitors. All of these are in use on ships today and all have enjoyed significant technological improvements over the last decade. Moreover all are expected to be further enhanced by today’s materials research. A key benefit of storage is that, when it can be justified for a given load, it can have additional beneficial uses such as ride-through capability to restart a gas turbine if there is an unanticipated power loss; alternatively, storage can be used to stabilize the power grid when switching large loads. Knowing when to stage gas turbine utilization versus energy storage is a key subject in this paper. The clear need for storage has raised the opportunity to design a comprehensive storage system, sometimes called an energy magazine, that can combine intermittent generation as well as any or all of the other storage technologies to provide a smaller, lighter and better performing system than would individual storage solutions for each potential application.Center for Electromechanic