Effects of Restaurant Tax and Price Increases: Implications for Managers, Policy Makers, and Lobbyists

Legislation has been proposed in Kentucky that would authorize city legislative bodies to levy a tax on restaurant meals of no more than 3%, regardless of the size of the city. The bill has garnered attention from Kentucky Travel Industry Association, the Kentucky Restaurant Association, and local tourism and restaurant organizations and associations that oppose the tax. The Kentucky League of Cities, an organization that represents the interests of city governments, supports the tax. The purpose of this research was to examine how a change in the tax rate on restaurant meals would affect restaurant demand. Effects of changes in restaurant demand were tested using the following independent variables: type of restaurant, menu offering, frequency, expense, and location. Self-administered online surveys were distributed to adult residents in Kentucky, which yielded a sample size of 1,263 individuals. Paired sample t test was applied to make comparison between scenario 1 (current) and scenario 2 (3%) and scenario 1 (current) and scenario 3 (JND). Findings showed that demand patterns in each class of city would be affected by increases in taxes and prices

Impact of path diversity on multi-homed and overlay networks

Multi-homed and overlay networks are two widely stud-ied approaches aimed at leveraging the inherent redun-dancy of the Internet’s underlying routing infrastructure to enhance end-to-end application performance and availabil-ity. However, the effectiveness of these approaches depends on the natural diversity of redundant paths between two endhosts in terms of physical links, routing infrastructure, administrative control and geographical distribution. This paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of path diversity on multi-homed and overlay networks and highlights sev-eral inherent limitations of these architectures in exploit-ing the full potential redundancy of the Internet. We based our analysis on traceroutes and routing table data collected from several vantage points in the Internet including: look-ing glasses at ten major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), RouteViews servers from twenty ISPs, and more than fifty PlanetLab nodes globally distributed across the Internet. Our study motivates new research directions—constructing topology-aware multi-homing and overlay networks for bet-ter availability.

Acupuncture for Spasticity after Stroke: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

The aim of this systematic review was to determine how effective acupuncture or electroacupuncture (acupuncture with electrical stimulation) is in treating poststroke patients with spasticity. We searched publications in Medline, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library in English, 19 accredited journals in Korean, and the China Integrated Knowledge Resources Database in Chinese through to July 30, 2013. We included randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with no language restrictions that compared the effects of acupuncture or electroacupuncture with usual care or placebo acupuncture. The two investigators assessed the risk of bias and statistical analyses were performed. Three RCTs in English, 1 in Korean, and 1 in Chinese were included. Assessments were performed primarily with the Modified Ashworth Scale (MAS). Meta-analysis showed that acupuncture or electroacupuncture significantly decreased spasticity after stroke. A subgroup analysis showed that acupuncture significantly decreased wrist, knee, and elbow spasticity in poststroke patients. Heterogeneity could be explained by the differences in control, acupoints, and the duration after stroke occurrence. In conclusion, acupuncture could be effective in decreasing spasticity after stroke, but long-term studies are needed to determine the longevity of treatment effects

Can We Utilize Pre-trained Language Models within Causal Discovery Algorithms?

Scaling laws have allowed Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) into the field of causal reasoning. Causal reasoning of PLM relies solely on text-based descriptions, in contrast to causal discovery which aims to determine the causal relationships between variables utilizing data. Recently, there has been current research regarding a method that mimics causal discovery by aggregating the outcomes of repetitive causal reasoning, achieved through specifically designed prompts. It highlights the usefulness of PLMs in discovering cause and effect, which is often limited by a lack of data, especially when dealing with multiple variables. Conversely, the characteristics of PLMs which are that PLMs do not analyze data and they are highly dependent on prompt design leads to a crucial limitation for directly using PLMs in causal discovery. Accordingly, PLM-based causal reasoning deeply depends on the prompt design and carries out the risk of overconfidence and false predictions in determining causal relationships. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the aforementioned limitations of PLM-based causal reasoning through experiments on physics-inspired synthetic data. Then, we propose a new framework that integrates prior knowledge obtained from PLM with a causal discovery algorithm. This is accomplished by initializing an adjacency matrix for causal discovery and incorporating regularization using prior knowledge. Our proposed framework not only demonstrates improved performance through the integration of PLM and causal discovery but also suggests how to leverage PLM-extracted prior knowledge with existing causal discovery algorithms

Three-dimensional CT angiography of the canine hepatic vasculature

Eight Beagle dogs were anesthetized and were imaged using a single channel helical CT scanner. The contrast medium used in this study was iohexol (300 mg I/ml) and doses were 0.5 ml/kg for a cine scan, 3 ml/kg for an enhanced scan. The flow rate for contrast material administration was 2 ml/sec for all scans. This study was divided into three steps, with unenhanced, cine and enhanced scans. The enhanced scan was subdivided into the arterial phase and the venous phase. All of the enhanced scans were reconstructed in 1 mm intervals and the scans were interpreted by the use of reformatted images, a cross sectional histogram, maximum intensity projection and shaded surface display. For the cine scans, optimal times were a 9-sec delay time post IV injection in the arterial phase, and an 18-sec delay time post IV injection in the venous phase. A nine-sec delay time was acceptable for the imaging of the canine hepatic arteries by CT angiography. After completion of arterial phase scanning, venous structures of the liver were well visualized as seen on the venous phase

An Application of a Service-oriented System to Support ArrayAnnotation in Custom Chip Design for Epigenomic Analysis

We present the implementation of an application using caGrid, which is the service-oriented Grid software infrastructure of the NCI cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIGTM), to support design and analysis of custom microarray experiments in the study of epigenetic alterations in cancer. The design and execution of these experiments requires synthesis of information from multiple data types and datasets. In our implementation, each data source is implemented as a caGrid Data Service, and analytical resources are wrapped as caGrid Analytical Services. This service-based implementation has several advantages. A backend resource can be modified or upgraded, without needing to change other components in the application. A remote resource can be added easily, since resources are not required to be collected in a centralized infrastructure

Outbreak and control of haemorrhagic pneumonia due to Streptococcus equi subspecies zooepidemicus in dogs

This work was supported by the Brain Korea 21 Program for Veterinary Science and the Korea Research Foundation (KRF- 2004-005-E00077)

A Case of Acute Q Fever with Severe Acute Cholestatic Hepatitis

Minimal hepatic dysfunction can be common in acute Q fever, but severe acute cholestatic hepatitis is rarely reported. We report on a 55-year-old male with acute Q fever and severe acute cholestatic hepatitis. He complained of fever, jaundice, ascites, and restlessness on admission. A liver biopsy revealed the presence of compact fibrin-ring granulomas. Serologic titers for C. burnetii IgM and IgG were 2048:1 and 1024:1, respectively. C. burnetii DNA was detected by a nested polymerase chain reaction on the liver tissue