Brain stem encephalitic lesions and schizophrenia

Three cases with schizophrenic/schizophreniform psychosis are described. Encephalitic-type lesions were found in the brain stem on histological study, in all cases. The possible relationship of the encephalitic lesions to the development of schizophrenia is discussed. Further research on a larger scale is suggested.S. Afr. Med. J., 48, 1491 (1974)

PENGARUH ISLAMIC SOCIAL REPORTING (ISR) TERHADAP KINERJA KEUANGAN PADA BANK UMUM SYARIAH DI INDONESIA

Meningkatkan kinerja keuangan perusahaan dapat dilakukan dengan berbagai cara salah satunya adalah dengan melakukan pengungkapan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat pengaruh pengungkapan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan yang berdasarkan syariat Islam terhadap kinerja keuangan. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif dengan jumlah sampel 8 dari 11 Bank Umum Syariah di Indonesia yang diambil dengan menggunakan purposive sample. Proses pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan cara mendownload laporan keuangan tahunan bank umum syariah sehingga dari laporan keuangan tahunan tersebut dapat diperoleh informasi pengungkapan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan berdasarkan Islamic Social Reporting (ISR) yang terdiri dari 38 item yang diukur dengan melihat perbandingan antara jumlah item yang diungkapkan dengan jumlah item Islamic Social Reporting, adapun kinerja keuangan dilihat dari nilai Return on Asset (ROA) dan Return On Equity (ROE) masing-masing perusahaan. Analisis jalur digunakan untuk melihat hubungan langsung pengungkapan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan berdasarkan Islamic Social Reporting terhadap kinerja keuangan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa perbankan syariah di Indonesia belum menerapkan pelaporan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan berdasarkan konsep Islam dimana hasil tertingginya adalah 84%. Analisis jalur menunjukkan pengungkapan tanggung jawab sosial perusahaan menggunakan ISR berpengaruh langsung terhadap kinerja keuangan (

Environmental Exposures and Invasive Meningococcal Disease: An Evaluation of Effects on Varying Time Scales

Invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) is an important cause of meningitis and bacteremia worldwide. Seasonal variation in IMD incidence has long been recognized, but mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon remain poorly understood. The authors sought to evaluate the effect of environmental factors on IMD risk in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a major urban center. Associations between monthly weather patterns and IMD incidence were evaluated using multivariable Poisson regression models controlling for seasonal oscillation. Short-term weather effects were identified using a case-crossover approach. Both study designs control for seasonal factors that might otherwise confound the relation between environment and IMD. Incidence displayed significant wintertime seasonality (for oscillation, P < 0.001), and Poisson regression identified elevated monthly risk with increasing relative humidity (per 1% increase, incidence rate ratio = 1.04, 95% confidence interval: 1.004, 1.08). Case-crossover methods identified an inverse relation between ultraviolet B radiation index 1–4 days prior to onset and disease risk (odds ratio = 0.54, 95% confidence interval: 0.34, 0.85). Extended periods of high humidity and acute changes in ambient ultraviolet B radiation predict IMD occurrence in Philadelphia. The latter effect may be due to decreased pathogen survival or virulence and may explain the wintertime seasonality of IMD in temperate regions of North America

Let the sun shine in: effects of ultraviolet radiation on invasive pneumococcal disease risk in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

BACKGROUND: Streptococcus pneumoniae is a common cause of community acquired pneumonia and bacteremia. Excess wintertime mortality related to pneumonia has been noted for over a century, but the seasonality of invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) has been described relatively recently and is poorly understood. Improved understanding of environmental influence on disease seasonality has taken on new urgency due to global climate change. METHODS: We evaluated 602 cases of IPD reported in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, from 2002 to 2007. Poisson regression models incorporating seasonal smoothers were used to identify associations between weekly weather patterns and case counts. Associations between acute (dayto- day) environmental fluctuations and IPD occurrence were evaluated using a case-crossover approach. Effect modification across age and sex strata was explored, and meta-regression models were created using stratum-specific estimates for effect. RESULTS: IPD incidence was greatest in the wintertime, and spectral decomposition revealed a peak at 51.0 weeks, consistent with annual periodicity. After adjustment for seasonality, yearly increases in reporting, and temperature, weekly incidence was found to be associated with clear-sky UV index (IRR per unit increase in index: 0.70 [95% CI 0.54-0.91]). The effect of UV index was highest among young strata and decreased with age. At shorter time scales, only an association with increases in ambient sulphur oxides was linked to disease risk (OR for highest tertile of exposure 0.75, 95% CI 0.60 to 0.93). CONCLUSION: We confirmed the wintertime predominance of IPD in a major urban center. The major predictor of IPD in Philadelphia is extended periods of low UV radiation, which may explain observed wintertime seasonality. The mechanism of action of diminished light exposure on disease occurrence may be due to direct effects on pathogen survival or host immune function via altered 1,25-(OH)2-vitamin-D metabolism. These findings may suggest less diminution in future IPD risk with climate change than would be expected if wintertime seasonality was driven by temperature

Non-Zero Sum Games for Reactive Synthesis

In this invited contribution, we summarize new solution concepts useful for the synthesis of reactive systems that we have introduced in several recent publications. These solution concepts are developed in the context of non-zero sum games played on graphs. They are part of the contributions obtained in the inVEST project funded by the European Research Council.Comment: LATA'16 invited pape

A Short Counterexample Property for Safety and Liveness Verification of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms

Distributed algorithms have many mission-critical applications ranging from embedded systems and replicated databases to cloud computing. Due to asynchronous communication, process faults, or network failures, these algorithms are difficult to design and verify. Many algorithms achieve fault tolerance by using threshold guards that, for instance, ensure that a process waits until it has received an acknowledgment from a majority of its peers. Consequently, domain-specific languages for fault-tolerant distributed systems offer language support for threshold guards. We introduce an automated method for model checking of safety and liveness of threshold-guarded distributed algorithms in systems where the number of processes and the fraction of faulty processes are parameters. Our method is based on a short counterexample property: if a distributed algorithm violates a temporal specification (in a fragment of LTL), then there is a counterexample whose length is bounded and independent of the parameters. We prove this property by (i) characterizing executions depending on the structure of the temporal formula, and (ii) using commutativity of transitions to accelerate and shorten executions. We extended the ByMC toolset (Byzantine Model Checker) with our technique, and verified liveness and safety of 10 prominent fault-tolerant distributed algorithms, most of which were out of reach for existing techniques.Comment: 16 pages, 11 pages appendi

An Insight into Life at Geometric Zagora Provided by the Animal Bones

This thesis is a study of the animal bone distribution at the Geometric period settlement of Zagora (ca. 850-700 BC), on the island of Andros. The animal bones were excavated during the 1967-74 University of Sydney excavations and analysed in 1977 by a specialist who compiled a report of her findings. The report is currently in preparation for publication and is the primary source for this thesis. The data it provided was limited but enough could be extracted to identify patterns that permitted a tentative reconstruction of social life and the economy at Zagora. There is a paucity of excavated settlements from the Greek EIA and few of these have published faunal material, an essential element in reconstructing past lifeways. Those preserved settlements from which animal bones have been published are not extensive with good domestic contexts but usually sites of minimal extent. Hence, it has not been possible to conduct an analysis of the spatial distribution of animal bones from such a settlement. Zagora, being an extensive settlement containing mainly domestic structures, is therefore unique and the animal bone report provided the opportunity for such a study to be undertaken. A number of analyses were performed using both statistical and non-statistical methods. Through these it was discovered that there is a relationship between the animal size and the size of the architectural unit within which it was found. Similarly, there appeared to be a relationship between larger architecture and the presence of fish, postulated as being a pelagic species. The patterns observed were interpreted as evidence of ‘special’ meals with a larger than usual number of diners in attendance and hence the need for a larger space to host them. Using the animal bones’ distribution and architectural evidence it is proposed that feasting was an important event at Zagora, conducted at the household level to possibly reinforce bonds of kinship and friendship. The evidence also suggests that the H area could have been inhabited by people of better means than elsewhere in the settlement, particularly by the hypaethral sanctuary. Ideally the animal bones would have been studied in conjunction with associated artefacts, but this was not possible and so this would be something desirable to be performed in the near future. With 21st century excavation techniques, the future Zagora excavations should provide greater granularity in the faunal information obtained from the settlement to allow better precision in subsequent analyses

Relative value to surgical patients and anesthesia providers of selected anesthesia related outcomes

BACKGROUND: Anesthesia side effects are almost inevitable in most situations. In order to optimize the anesthetic experience from the patient's viewpoint, it makes intuitive sense to attempt to avoid the side effects that the patient fears the most. METHODS: We obtained rankings and quantitative estimates of the relative importance of nine experiences that commonly occur after anesthesia and surgery from 109 patients prior to their surgery and from 30 anesthesiologists. RESULTS: Pain was the most important thing to avoid, and subjects allocated a median of $25 of an imaginary$100 to avoiding it. Next came vomiting ($20), nausea ($10), urinary retention ($5), myalgia ($2) and pruritus ($2). Avoiding blood transfusion, an awake anesthetic technique or postoperative somnolence was not given value by the group as a whole. Anesthesiologists valued perioperative experiences in the same way as patients. CONCLUSIONS: Our results are comparable with those of previous studies in the area, and suggest that patients can prioritize the perioperative experiences they wish to avoid during their perioperative care. Such data, if obtained in the appropriate fashion, would enable anesthetic techniques to be compared using decision analysis

Predicting the public health benefit of vaccinating cattle against Escherichia coli O157

Identifying the major sources of risk in disease transmission is key to designing effective controls. However, understanding of transmission dynamics across species boundaries is typically poor, making the design and evaluation of controls particularly challenging for zoonotic pathogens. One such global pathogen is Escherichia coli O157, which causes a serious and sometimes fatal gastrointestinal illness. Cattle are the main reservoir for E. coli O157, and vaccines for cattle now exist. However, adoption of vaccines is being delayed by conflicting responsibilities of veterinary and public health agencies, economic drivers, and because clinical trials cannot easily test interventions across species boundaries, lack of information on the public health benefits. Here, we examine transmission risk across the cattle–human species boundary and show three key results. First, supershedding of the pathogen by cattle is associated with the genetic marker stx2. Second, by quantifying the link between shedding density in cattle and human risk, we show that only the relatively rare supershedding events contribute significantly to human risk. Third, we show that this finding has profound consequences for the public health benefits of the cattle vaccine. A naïve evaluation based on efficacy in cattle would suggest a 50% reduction in risk; however, because the vaccine targets the major source of human risk, we predict a reduction in human cases of nearly 85%. By accounting for nonlinearities in transmission across the human–animal interface, we show that adoption of these vaccines by the livestock industry could prevent substantial numbers of human E. coli O157 cases

The impact of relative position and returns on sacrifice and reciprocity: an experimental study using individual decisions

We present a comprehensive experimental design that makes it possible to characterize other-regarding preferences and their relationship to the decision maker’s relative position. Participants are faced with a large number of decisions involving variations in the trade-offs between own and other’s payoffs, as well as in other potentially important factors like the decision maker’s relative position. We find that: (1) choices are responsive to the cost of helping and hurting others; (2) The weight a decision maker places on others’ monetary payoffs depends on whether the decision maker is in an advantageous or disadvantageous relative position; and (3) We find no evidence of reciprocity of the type linked to menu-dependence. The results of a mixture-model estimation show considerable heterogeneity in subjects’ motivations and confirm the absence of reciprocal motives. Pure selfish behavior is the most frequently observed behavior. Among the subjects exhibiting social preferences, social-welfare maximization is the most frequent, followed by inequality-aversion and by competitiveness