Technical note: A comparison of editing criteria for lying-behaviour data derived from three-dimensional accelerometer devices on grazing dairy cows

fals

Serological Testing Versus Other Strategies for Diagnosis of Active Tuberculosis in India: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

This cost-effectiveness study shows that sputum smear microscopy is the most cost-effective test for active tuberculosis (TB) in India, and liquid culture plus microscopy is more cost-effective for TB diagnosis than serological tests

Alcohol-induced retrograde facilitation renders witnesses of crime less suggestible to misinformation

RATIONALE: Research has shown that alcohol can have both detrimental and facilitating effects on memory: intoxication can lead to poor memory for information encoded after alcohol consumption (anterograde amnesia) and may improve memory for information encoded before consumption (retrograde facilitation). This study examined whether alcohol consumed after witnessing a crime can render individuals less vulnerable to misleading post-event information (misinformation). METHOD: Participants watched a simulated crime video. Thereafter, one third of participants expected and received alcohol (alcohol group), one third did not expect but received alcohol (reverse placebo), and one third did not expect nor receive alcohol (control). After alcohol consumption, participants were exposed to misinformation embedded in a written narrative about the crime. The following day, participants completed a cued-recall questionnaire about the event. RESULTS: Control participants were more likely to report misinformation compared to the alcohol and reverse placebo group. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that we may oversimplify the effect alcohol has on suggestibility and that sometimes alcohol can have beneficial effects on eyewitness memory by protecting against misleading post-event information

Arsenic exposure and outcomes of antimonial treatment in visceral leishmaniasis patients in bihar, India:a retrospective cohort study

Funding: This work was supported by a Clinical PhD Fellowship to MRP (090665) and a Principal Research Fellowship to AHF (079838) from the Wellcome Trust (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Leading-effect vs. Risk-taking in Dynamic Tournaments: Evidence from a Real-life Randomized Experiment

Two 'order effects' may emerge in dynamic tournaments with information feedback. First, participants adjust effort across stages, which could advantage the leading participant who faces a larger 'effective prize' after an initial victory (leading-effect). Second, participants lagging behind may increase risk at the final stage as they have 'nothing to lose' (risk-taking). We use a randomized natural experiment in professional two-game soccer tournaments where the treatment (order of a stage-specific advantage) and team characteristics, e.g. ability, are independent. We develop an identification strategy to test for leading-effects controlling for risk-taking. We find no evidence of leading-effects and negligible risk-taking effects

Source localization of reaction-diffusion models for brain tumors

We propose a mathematically well-founded approach for locating the source (initial state) of density functions evolved within a nonlinear reaction-diffusion model. The reconstruction of the initial source is an ill-posed inverse problem since the solution is highly unstable with respect to measurement noise. To address this instability problem, we introduce a regularization procedure based on the nonlinear Landweber method for the stable determination of the source location. This amounts to solving a sequence of well-posed forward reaction-diffusion problems. The developed framework is general, and as a special instance we consider the problem of source localization of brain tumors. We show numerically that the source of the initial densities of tumor cells are reconstructed well on both imaging data consisting of simple and complex geometric structures

Stochastic Reaction-diffusion Equations Driven by Jump Processes

We establish the existence of weak martingale solutions to a class of second order parabolic stochastic partial differential equations. The equations are driven by multiplicative jump type noise, with a non-Lipschitz multiplicative functional. The drift in the equations contains a dissipative nonlinearity of polynomial growth.Comment: See journal reference for teh final published versio

Few-nucleon systems in translationally invariant harmonic oscillator basis

We present a translationally invariant formulation of the no-core shell model approach for few-nucleon systems. We discuss a general method of antisymmetrization of the harmonic-oscillator basis depending on Jacobi coordinates. The use of a translationally invariant basis allows us to employ larger model spaces than in traditional shell-model calculations. Moreover, in addition to two-body effective interactions, three- or higher-body effective interactions as well as real three-body interactions can be utilized. In the present study we apply the formalism to solve three and four nucleon systems interacting by the CD-Bonn nucleon-nucleon potential. Results of ground-state as well as excited-state energies, rms radii and magnetic moments are discussed. In addition, we compare charge form factor results obtained using the CD-Bonn and Argonne V8' NN potentials.Comment: 25 pages. RevTex. 13 Postscript figure

Wolbachia in the flesh: symbiont intensities in germ-line and somatic tissues challenge the conventional view of Wolbachia transmission routes

Symbionts can substantially affect the evolution and ecology of their hosts. The investigation of the tissue-specific distribution of symbionts (tissue tropism) can provide important insight into host-symbiont interactions. Among other things, it can help to discern the importance of specific transmission routes and potential phenotypic effects. The intracellular bacterial symbiont Wolbachia has been described as the greatest ever panzootic, due to the wide array of arthropods that it infects. Being primarily vertically transmitted, it is expected that the transmission of Wolbachia would be enhanced by focusing infection in the reproductive tissues. In social insect hosts, this tropism would logically extend to reproductive rather than sterile castes, since the latter constitute a dead-end for vertically transmission. Here, we show that Wolbachia are not focused on reproductive tissues of eusocial insects, and that non-reproductive tissues of queens and workers of the ant Acromyrmex echinatior, harbour substantial infections. In particular, the comparatively high intensities of Wolbachia in the haemolymph, fat body, and faeces, suggest potential for horizontal transmission via parasitoids and the faecal-oral route, or a role for Wolbachia modulating the immune response of this host. It may be that somatic tissues and castes are not the evolutionary dead-end for Wolbachia that is commonly thought

No neurocognitive advantage for immediate antiretroviral treatment in adults with greater than 500 CD4+ T-cell counts

OBJECTIVE: To compare the effect of immediate versus deferred antiretroviral treatment (ART) on neuropsychological test performance in treatment-naive HIV-positive adults with >500 CD4+ cells/μL. DESIGN: Randomized trial. METHODS: The START parent study randomized participants to commence immediate versus deferred ART until CD4+ <350 cells/μL. The START Neurology substudy used 8 neuropsychological tests, at baseline, months 4, 8, 12 and annually, to compare groups for changes in test performance. Test results were internally standardized to z-scores. The primary outcome was the average of the eight test z-scores (QNPZ-8). Mean changes in QNPZ-8 from baseline were compared by intent-to-treat using longitudinal mixed models. Changes from baseline to specific time points were compared using ANCOVA models. RESULTS: 592 participants had a median age of 34 years; median baseline CD4+ count of 629 cells/μL; the mean follow-up was 3.4 years. ART was used for 94% and 32% of accrued person-years in the immediate and deferred groups, respectively. There was no difference between the immediate and deferred ART groups in QNPZ-8 change through follow-up [-0.018 (95% CI: -0.062 to 0.027, p = 0.44)], or at any visit. However, QNPZ-8 scores increased in both arms during the first year, by 0.22 and 0.24, respectively (p < 0.001 for increase from baseline). CONCLUSIONS: We observed substantial improvement in neurocognitive test performance during the first year in both study arms, underlining the importance of using a control group in studies assessing neurocognitive performance over time. Immediate ART neither benefitted nor harmed neurocognitive performance in individuals with CD4+ cell counts above 500 cells/μL