1,283 research outputs found
Cardiovascular disease and air pollution in Scotland: no association or insufficient data and study design?
<p><b>Background:</b>
Coronary heart disease and stroke are leading causes of mortality and ill health in Scotland, and clear associations have been found in previous studies between air pollution and cardiovascular disease. This study aimed to use routinely available data to examine whether there is any evidence of an association between short-term exposure to particulate matter (measured as PM10, particles less than 10 micrograms per cubic metre) and hospital admissions due to cardiovascular disease, in the two largest cities in Scotland during the years 2000 to 2006.</p>
<p><b>Methods:</b> The study utilised an ecological time series design, and the analysis was based on overdispersed Poisson log-linear models.</p>
<p><b>Results:</b> No consistent associations were found between PM10 concentrations and cardiovascular hospital admissions in either of the cities studied, as all of the estimated relative risks were close to one, and all but one of the associated 95% confidence intervals contained the null risk of one.</p>
<p><b>Conclusions:</b> This study suggests that in small cities, where air quality is relatively good, then either PM10 concentrations have no effect on cardiovascular ill health, or that the routinely available data and the corresponding study design are not sufficient to detect an association.</p>
Atomistic study on the pressure dependence of the melting point of NdFe12
We investigated, using molecular dynamics, how pressure affects the melting point of the recently theorised and epitaxially grown structure NdFe12. We modified Morse potentials using experimental constants and a genetic algorithm code, before running two-phase solid-liquid coexistence simulations of NdFe12 at various temperatures and pressures. The refitting of the Morse potentials allowed us to significantly improve the accuracy in predicting the melting temperature of the constituent elements
Human behavior in Prisoner's Dilemma experiments suppresses network reciprocity
During the last few years, much research has been devoted to strategic
interactions on complex networks. In this context, the Prisoner's Dilemma has
become a paradigmatic model, and it has been established that imitative
evolutionary dynamics lead to very different outcomes depending on the details
of the network. We here report that when one takes into account the real
behavior of people observed in the experiments, both at the mean-field level
and on utterly different networks the observed level of cooperation is the
same. We thus show that when human subjects interact in an heterogeneous mix
including cooperators, defectors and moody conditional cooperators, the
structure of the population does not promote or inhibit cooperation with
respect to a well mixed population.Comment: 5 Pages including 4 figures. Submitted for publicatio
3D N=6 Gauged Supergravity: Admissible Gauge Groups, Vacua and RG Flows
We study N=6 gauged supergravity in three dimensions with scalar manifolds
for in great details. We
classify some admissible non-compact gauge groups which can be consistently
gauged and preserve all supersymmetries. We give the explicit form of the
embedding tensors for these gauge groups as well as study their scalar
potentials on the full scalar manifold for each value of along with
the corresponding vacua. Furthermore, the potentials for the compact gauge
groups, for ,
identified previously in the literature are partially studied on a submanifold
of the full scalar manifold. This submanifold is invariant under a certain
subgroup of the corresponding gauge group. We find a number of supersymmetric
AdS vacua in the case of compact gauge groups. We then consider holographic RG
flow solutions in the compact gauge groups and
for the k=4 case. The solutions
involving one active scalar can be found analytically and describe operator
flows driven by a relevant operator of dimension 3/2. For non-compact gauge
groups, we find all types of vacua namely AdS, Minkowski and dS, but there is
no possibility of RG flows in the AdS/CFT sense for all gauge groups considered
here.Comment: 43 pages, no figures references added, typoes corrected and more
information adde
Mass-Gaps and Spin Chains for (Super) Membranes
We present a method for computing the non-perturbative mass-gap in the theory
of Bosonic membranes in flat background spacetimes with or without background
fluxes. The computation of mass-gaps is carried out using a matrix
regularization of the membrane Hamiltonians. The mass gap is shown to be
naturally organized as an expansion in a 'hidden' parameter, which turns out to
be : d being the related to the dimensionality of the background
space. We then proceed to develop a large perturbation theory for the
membrane/matrix-model Hamiltonians around the quantum/mass corrected effective
potential. The same parameter that controls the perturbation theory for the
mass gap is also shown to control the Hamiltonian perturbation theory around
the effective potential. The large perturbation theory is then translated
into the language of quantum spin chains and the one loop spectra of various
Bosonic matrix models are computed by applying the Bethe ansatz to the one-loop
effective Hamiltonians for membranes in flat space times. Apart from membranes
in flat spacetimes, the recently proposed matrix models (hep-th/0607005) for
non-critical membranes in plane wave type spacetimes are also analyzed within
the paradigm of quantum spin chains and the Bosonic sectors of all the models
proposed in (hep-th/0607005) are diagonalized at the one-loop level.Comment: 36 Page
Gradient Representations and Affine Structures in AE(n)
We study the indefinite Kac-Moody algebras AE(n), arising in the reduction of
Einstein's theory from (n+1) space-time dimensions to one (time) dimension, and
their distinguished maximal regular subalgebras sl(n) and affine A_{n-2}^{(1)}.
The interplay between these two subalgebras is used, for n=3, to determine the
commutation relations of the `gradient generators' within AE(3). The low level
truncation of the geodesic sigma-model over the coset space AE(n)/K(AE(n)) is
shown to map to a suitably truncated version of the SL(n)/SO(n) non-linear
sigma-model resulting from the reduction Einstein's equations in (n+1)
dimensions to (1+1) dimensions. A further truncation to diagonal solutions can
be exploited to define a one-to-one correspondence between such solutions, and
null geodesic trajectories on the infinite-dimensional coset space H/K(H),
where H is the (extended) Heisenberg group, and K(H) its maximal compact
subgroup. We clarify the relation between H and the corresponding subgroup of
the Geroch group.Comment: 43 page
Estimating the incidence, prevalence and true cost of asthma in the UK: secondary analysis of national stand-alone and linked databases in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales-a study protocol.
INTRODUCTION: Asthma is now one of the most common long-term conditions in the UK. It is therefore important to develop a comprehensive appreciation of the healthcare and societal costs in order to inform decisions on care provision and planning. We plan to build on our earlier estimates of national prevalence and costs from asthma by filling the data gaps previously identified in relation to healthcare and broadening the field of enquiry to include societal costs. This work will provide the first UK-wide estimates of the costs of asthma. In the context of asthma for the UK and its member countries (ie, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), we seek to: (1) produce a detailed overview of estimates of incidence, prevalence and healthcare utilisation; (2) estimate health and societal costs; (3) identify any remaining information gaps and explore the feasibility of filling these and (4) provide insights into future research that has the potential to inform changes in policy leading to the provision of more cost-effective care.
METHODS AND ANALYSIS: Secondary analyses of data from national health surveys, primary care, prescribing, emergency care, hospital, mortality and administrative data sources will be undertaken to estimate prevalence, healthcare utilisation and outcomes from asthma. Data linkages and economic modelling will be undertaken in an attempt to populate data gaps and estimate costs. Separate prevalence and cost estimates will be calculated for each of the UK-member countries and these will then be aggregated to generate UK-wide estimates.
ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Approvals have been obtained from the NHS Scotland Information Services Division's Privacy Advisory Committee, the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage Collaboration Review System, the NHS South-East Scotland Research Ethics Service and The University of Edinburgh's Centre for Population Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee. We will produce a report for Asthma-UK, submit papers to peer-reviewed journals and construct an interactive map
Magnetization structure of a Bloch point singularity
Switching of magnetic vortex cores involves a topological transition
characterized by the presence of a magnetization singularity, a point where the
magnetization vanishes (Bloch point). We analytically derive the shape of the
Bloch point that is an extremum of the free energy with exchange, dipole and
the Landau terms for the determination of the local value of the magnetization
modulus.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Measuring playerâs behaviour change over time in public goods game
An important issue in public goods game is whether player's behaviour changes over time, and if so, how significant it is. In this game players can be classified into different groups according to the level of their participation in the public good. This problem can be considered as a concept drift problem by asking the amount of change that happens to the clusters of players over a sequence of game rounds. In this study we present a method for measuring changes in clusters with the same items over discrete time points using external clustering validation indices and area under the curve. External clustering indices were originally used to measure the difference between suggested clusters in terms of clustering algorithms and ground truth labels for items provided by experts. Instead of different cluster label comparison, we use these indices to compare between clusters of any two consecutive time points or between the first time point and the remaining time points to measure the difference between clusters through time points. In theory, any external clustering indices can be used to measure changes for any traditional (non-temporal) clustering algorithm, due to the fact that any time point alone is not carrying any temporal information. For the public goods game, our results indicate that the players are changing over time but the change is smooth and relatively constant between any two time points
Investing in Prevention or Paying for Recovery - Attitudes to Cyber Risk
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Broadly speaking an individual can invest time and effort to avoid becoming victim to a cyber attack and/or they can invest resource in recovering from any attack. We introduce a new game called the pre-vention and recovery game to study this trade-off. We report results from the experimental lab that allow us to categorize different approaches to risk taking. We show that many individuals appear relatively risk loving in that they invest in recovery rather than prevention. We find little difference in behavior between a gain and loss framing
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