935 research outputs found
Evidence for the classical integrability of the complete AdS(4) x CP(3) superstring
We construct a zero-curvature Lax connection in a sub-sector of the
superstring theory on AdS(4) x CP(3) which is not described by the
OSp(6|4)/U(3) x SO(1,3) supercoset sigma-model. In this sub-sector worldsheet
fermions associated to eight broken supersymmetries of the type IIA background
are physical fields. As such, the prescription for the construction of the Lax
connection based on the Z_4-automorphism of the isometry superalgebra OSp(6|4)
does not do the job. So, to construct the Lax connection we have used an
alternative method which nevertheless relies on the isometry of the target
superspace and kappa-symmetry of the Green-Schwarz superstring.Comment: 1+26 pages; v2: minor typos corrected, acknowledgements adde
Interpreting ambiguous ‘trace’ results in Schistosoma mansoni CCA Tests: Estimating sensitivity and specificity of ambiguous results with no gold standard
Background The development of new diagnostics is an important tool in the fight against disease. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is used to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of tests in the absence of a gold standard. The main field diagnostic for Schistosoma mansoni infection, Kato-Katz (KK), is not very sensitive at low infection intensities. A point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) test has been shown to be more sensitive than KK. However, CCA can return an ambiguous ‘trace’ result between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and much debate has focused on interpretation of traces results. Methodology/Principle findings We show how LCA can be extended to include ambiguous trace results and analyse S. mansoni studies from both Côte d’Ivoire (CdI) and Uganda. We compare the diagnostic performance of KK and CCA and the observed results by each test to the estimated infection prevalence in the population. Prevalence by KK was higher in CdI (13.4%) than in Uganda (6.1%), but prevalence by CCA was similar between countries, both when trace was assumed to be negative (CCAtn: 11.7% in CdI and 9.7% in Uganda) and positive (CCAtp: 20.1% in CdI and 22.5% in Uganda). The estimated sensitivity of CCA was more consistent between countries than the estimated sensitivity of KK, and estimated infection prevalence did not significantly differ between CdI (20.5%) and Uganda (19.1%). The prevalence by CCA with trace as positive did not differ significantly from estimates of infection prevalence in either country, whereas both KK and CCA with trace as negative significantly underestimated infection prevalence in both countries. Conclusions Incorporation of ambiguous results into an LCA enables the effect of different treatment thresholds to be directly assessed and is applicable in many fields. Our results showed that CCA with trace as positive most accurately estimated infection prevalence
Imputation Rules to Improve the Education Variable in the IAB Employment Subsample
The education variable in the IAB employment subsample has two shortcomings: missing values and inconsistencies with the reporting rule. We propose several deductive imputation procedures to improve the variable. They mainly use the multiple education information available in the data because the employees' education is reported at least once a year. We compare the improved data from the different procedures and the original data in typical applications in labor economics: educational composition of employment, wage inequality, and wage regression. We find, that correcting the education variable: (i) shows the educational attainment of the male labor force to be higher than measured with the original data, (ii) gives different values for some measures of wage inequality, and (iii) does not change the estimates in wage regressions much
Multi-parallel qPCR provides increased sensitivity and diagnostic breadth for gastrointestinal parasites of humans: field-based inferences on the impact of mass deworming
BACKGROUND: Although chronic morbidity in humans from soil transmitted helminth (STH) infections can be reduced by anthelmintic treatment, inconsistent diagnostic tools make it difficult to reliably measure the impact of deworming programs and often miss light helminth infections. METHODS: Cryopreserved stool samples from 796 people (aged 2-81 years) in four villages in Bungoma County, western Kenya, were assessed using multi-parallel qPCR for 8 parasites and compared to point-of-contact assessments of the same stools by the 2-stool 2-slide Kato-Katz (KK) method. All subjects were treated with albendazole and all Ascaris lumbricoides expelled post-treatment were collected. Three months later, samples from 633 of these people were re-assessed by both qPCR and KK, re-treated with albendazole and the expelled worms collected. RESULTS: Baseline prevalence by qPCR (n = 796) was 17 % for A. lumbricoides, 18 % for Necator americanus, 41 % for Giardia lamblia and 15% for Entamoeba histolytica. The prevalence was <1% for Trichuris trichiura, Ancylostoma duodenale, Strongyloides stercoralis and Cryptosporidium parvum. The sensitivity of qPCR was 98% for A. lumbricoides and N. americanus, whereas KK sensitivity was 70% and 32%, respectively. Furthermore, qPCR detected infections with T. trichiura and S. stercoralis that were missed by KK, and infections with G. lamblia and E. histolytica that cannot be detected by KK. Infection intensities measured by qPCR and by KK were correlated for A. lumbricoides (r = 0.83, p < 0.0001) and N. americanus (r = 0.55, p < 0.0001). The number of A. lumbricoides worms expelled was correlated (p < 0.0001) with both the KK (r = 0.63) and qPCR intensity measurements (r = 0.60). CONCLUSIONS: KK may be an inadequate tool for stool-based surveillance in areas where hookworm or Strongyloides are common or where intensity of helminth infection is low after repeated rounds of chemotherapy. Because deworming programs need to distinguish between populations where parasitic infection is controlled and those where further treatment is required, multi-parallel qPCR (or similar high throughput molecular diagnostics) may provide new and important diagnostic information
Sensitivity and Specificity of Multiple Kato-Katz Thick Smears and a Circulating Cathodic Antigen Test for Schistosoma mansoni Diagnosis Pre- and Post-repeated-Praziquantel Treatment
Two Kato-Katz thick smears (Kato-Katzs) from a single stool are currently recommended for diagnosing Schistosoma mansoni infections to map areas for intervention. This ‘gold standard’ has low sensitivity at low infection intensities. The urine point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen test (POC-CCA) is potentially more sensitive but how accurately they detect S. mansoni after repeated praziquantel treatments, their suitability for measuring drug efficacy and their correlation with egg counts remain to be fully understood. We compared the accuracies of one to six Kato-Katzs and one POC-CCA for the diagnosis of S. mansoni in primary-school children who have received zero to ten praziquantel treatments. We determined the impact each diagnostic approach may have on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and drug-efficacy findings
Randomized clinical trial of surgery versus conservative therapy for carpal tunnel syndrome [ISRCTN84286481]
BACKGROUND: Conservative treatment remains the standard of care for treating mild to moderate carpal tunnel syndrome despite a small number of well-controlled studies and limited objective evidence to support current treatment options. There is an increasing interest in the usefulness of wrist magnetic resonance imaging could play in predicting who will benefit for various treatments. METHOD AND DESIGN: Two hundred patients with mild to moderate symptoms will be recruited over 3 1/2 years from neurological surgery, primary care, electrodiagnostic clinics. We will exclude patients with clinical or electrodiagnostic evidence of denervation or thenar muscle atrophy. We will randomly assign patients to either a well-defined conservative care protocol or surgery. The conservative care treatment will include visits with a hand therapist, exercises, a self-care booklet, work modification/ activity restriction, B6 therapy, ultrasound and possible steroid injections. The surgical care would be left up to the surgeon (endoscopic vs. open) with usual and customary follow-up. All patients will receive a wrist MRI at baseline. Patients will be contacted at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months after randomization to complete the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Assessment Questionnaire (CTSAQ). In addition, we will compare disability (activity and work days lost) and general well being as measured by the SF-36 version II. We will control for demographics and use psychological measures (SCL-90 somatization and depression scales) as well as EDS and MRI predictors of outcomes. DISCUSSION: We have designed a randomized controlled trial which will assess the effectiveness of surgery for patients with mild to moderate carpal tunnel syndrome. An important secondary goal is to study the ability of MRI to predict patient outcomes
Uncertainty quantification for kinetic models in socio-economic and life sciences
Kinetic equations play a major rule in modeling large systems of interacting
particles. Recently the legacy of classical kinetic theory found novel
applications in socio-economic and life sciences, where processes characterized
by large groups of agents exhibit spontaneous emergence of social structures.
Well-known examples are the formation of clusters in opinion dynamics, the
appearance of inequalities in wealth distributions, flocking and milling
behaviors in swarming models, synchronization phenomena in biological systems
and lane formation in pedestrian traffic. The construction of kinetic models
describing the above processes, however, has to face the difficulty of the lack
of fundamental principles since physical forces are replaced by empirical
social forces. These empirical forces are typically constructed with the aim to
reproduce qualitatively the observed system behaviors, like the emergence of
social structures, and are at best known in terms of statistical information of
the modeling parameters. For this reason the presence of random inputs
characterizing the parameters uncertainty should be considered as an essential
feature in the modeling process. In this survey we introduce several examples
of such kinetic models, that are mathematically described by nonlinear Vlasov
and Fokker--Planck equations, and present different numerical approaches for
uncertainty quantification which preserve the main features of the kinetic
solution.Comment: To appear in "Uncertainty Quantification for Hyperbolic and Kinetic
Equations
Mass-Matching in Higgsless
Modern extra-dimensional Higgsless scenarios rely on a mass-matching between
fermionic and bosonic KK resonances to evade constraints from precision
electroweak measurements. After analyzing all of the Tevatron and LEP bounds on
these so-called Cured Higgsless scenarios, we study their LHC signatures and
explore how to identify the mass-matching mechanism, the key to their
viability. We find singly and pair produced fermionic resonances show up as
clean signals with 2 or 4 leptons and 2 hard jets, while neutral and charged
bosonic resonances are visible in the dilepton and leptonic WZ channels,
respectively. A measurement of the resonance masses from these channels shows
the matching necessary to achieve . Moreover, a large single
production of KK-fermion resonances is a clear indication of compositeness of
SM quarks. Discovery reach is below 10 fb of luminosity for resonances
in the 700 GeV range.Comment: 28 pages, 18 figure
Mass and Angular Momentum in General Relativity
We present an introduction to mass and angular momentum in General
Relativity. After briefly reviewing energy-momentum for matter fields, first in
the flat Minkowski case (Special Relativity) and then in curved spacetimes with
or without symmetries, we focus on the discussion of energy-momentum for the
gravitational field. We illustrate the difficulties rooted in the Equivalence
Principle for defining a local energy-momentum density for the gravitational
field. This leads to the understanding of gravitational energy-momentum and
angular momentum as non-local observables that make sense, at best, for
extended domains of spacetime. After introducing Komar quantities associated
with spacetime symmetries, it is shown how total energy-momentum can be
unambiguously defined for isolated systems, providing fundamental tests for the
internal consistency of General Relativity as well as setting the conceptual
basis for the understanding of energy loss by gravitational radiation. Finally,
several attempts to formulate quasi-local notions of mass and angular momentum
associated with extended but finite spacetime domains are presented, together
with some illustrations of the relations between total and quasi-local
quantities in the particular context of black hole spacetimes. This article is
not intended to be a rigorous and exhaustive review of the subject, but rather
an invitation to the topic for non-experts. In this sense we follow essentially
the expositions in Szabados 2004, Gourgoulhon 2007, Poisson 2004 and Wald 84,
and refer the reader interested in further developments to the existing
literature, in particular to the excellent and comprehensive review by Szabados
(2004).Comment: 41 pages. Notes based on the lecture given at the C.N.R.S. "School on
Mass" (June 2008) in Orleans, France. To appear as proceedings in the book
"Mass and Motion in General Relativity", eds. L. Blanchet, A. Spallicci and
B. Whiting. Some comments and references added
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