The economic consequences of preterm birth : a systematic review of the recent (2009-2017) literature

Abstract Background Despite extensive knowledge on the functional, neurodevelopmental, behavioural and educational sequelae of preterm birth, relatively little is known about its economic consequences. Objective To systematically review evidence around the economic consequences of preterm birth for the health services, for other sectors of the economy, for families and carers, and more broadly for society. Methods Updating previous reviews, systematic searches of Medline, EconLit, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Embase and Scopus were performed using broad search terms, covering the literature from 1 January 2009 to 28 June 2017. Studies reporting economic consequences, published in the English language and conducted in a developed country were included. Economic consequences are presented in a descriptive manner according to study time horizon, cost category and differential denominators (live births or survivors). Results Of 4384 unique articles retrieved, 43 articles met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 27 reported resource use or cost estimates associated with the initial period of hospitalisation, while 26 reported resource use or costs incurred following the initial hospital discharge, 10 of which also reported resource use or costs associated with the initial period of hospitalisation. Only two studies reported resource use or costs incurred throughout the childhood years. Initial hospitalisation costs varied between $576 972 (range$111 152–$576 972) per infant born at 24 weeks’ gestation and$930 (range $930–$7114) per infant born at term (US$, 2015 prices). The review also revealed a consistent inverse association between gestational age at birth and economic costs regardless of date of publication, country of publication, underpinning study design, follow-up period, age of assessment or costing approach, and a paucity of evidence on non-healthcare costs. Several categories of economic costs, such as additional costs borne by families as a result of modifications to their everyday activities, are largely overlooked by this body of literature. Moreover, the number and coverage of economic assessments have not increased in comparison with previous review periods. Conclusion Evidence identified by this review can be used to inform clinical and budgetary service planning and act as data inputs into future economic evaluations of preventive or treatment interventions. Future research should focus particularly on valuing the economic consequences of preterm birth in adulthood

On the dust of tailless Oort-cloud comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar)

We report our new analysis of Oort-cloud comet C/2020 T2 (Palomar) (T2) observed at 2.06 au from the Sun (phase angle of 28.5 deg) about two weeks before perihelion. T2 lacks a significant dust tail in scattered light, showing a strong central condensation of the coma throughout the apparition, reminiscent of so-called Manx comets. Its spectral slope of polarized light increases and decreases in the J (1.25 um) and H (1.65 um) bands, respectively, resulting in an overall negative (blue) slope (-0.31+/-0.14 % um^-1) in contrast to the red polarimetric color of active comets observed at similar geometries. The average polarization degree of T2 is 2.86+/-0.17 % for the J and 2.75+/-0.16 % for the H bands. Given that near-infrared wavelengths are sensitive to the intermediate-scale structure of cometary dust (i.e., dust aggregates), our light-scattering modeling of ballistic aggregates with different porosities and compositions shows that polarimetric properties of T2 are compatible with low-porosity (~66 %), absorbing dust aggregates with negligible ice contents on a scale of 10--100 um (density of ~652 kg m^-3). This is supported by the coma morphology of T2 which has a viable beta (the relative importance of solar radiation pressure on dust) range of <~10^-4. Secular evolution of the r-band activity of T2 from archival data reveals that the increase in its brightness accelerates around 2.4 au pre-perihelion, with its overall dust production rate ~100 times smaller than those of active Oort-cloud comets. We also found an apparent concentration of T2 and Manx comets toward ecliptic orbits. This paper underlines the heterogeneous nature of Oort-cloud comets which can be investigated in the near future with dedicated studies of their dust characteristics.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Patterns, temporal trends and methodological associations in the measurement and valuation of childhood health utilities

Purpose To systematically assess patterns and temporal changes in the measurement and valuation of childhood health utilities and associations between methodological factors. Methods Studies reporting childhood health utilities using direct or indirect valuation methods, published by June 2017, were identified through PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, PsycINFO, EconLit, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and PEDE. The following were explored: patterns in tariff application; linear trends in numbers of studies/samples and paediatric cost-utility analyses (CUAs) and associations between them; changes in proportions of studies/samples within characteristic-based categories over pre-specified periods; impact of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance on primary UK research; and associations between valuation method, age and methodological factors. Results 335 studies with 3,974 samples covering all ICD-10 chapters, 23 valuation methods, 12 respondent types, and 42 countries were identified by systematic review. 34.0% of samples using indirect methods compatible with childhood applied childhood-derived tariffs. There was no association between numbers of studies/samples and numbers of CUAs. Compared to 1990-2008, 2009-June 2017 saw a significant fall in the proportion of studies using case series; significant compositional changes across ICD-10 chapters; and significantly higher sample proportions using childhood/adolescent-specific and adult-specific indirect valuation methods, and based on pre-adolescents, self-assessment, self-administration and experienced health states. NICE guidance was weakly effective in promoting reference methods. Associations between valuation method, age and methodological factors were significant. Conclusion 1990-2017 witnessed significant changes in primary research on childhood health utilities. Health technology assessment agencies should note the equivocal effect of methodological guidance on primary research methods

Fibrous Composite Failure Criteria with Material Degradation for Finite Element Solvers

A method and system for modeling fibrous composites. Initially, material properties are obtained for a model of a fibrous composite, where the model includes integration points and unit cells. For each integration point, composite level stresses and strains are determined based on the material properties, the composite level stresses and strains are decomposed into component level stresses and strains for the integration point, the component level stresses and strains are used to calculate failure quotients at the integration point, an appropriate material reduction model is applied at a component level based on the failure quotients to detect a component failure, the component failure is upscaled to determine updated material properties at a composite level, and the updated material properties are incorporated into the model. At this stage, a composite failure is detected based on the updated model.US 11,556,683 B

Income Inequality, Household Income, and Mass Shooting in the United States

Mass shootings are becoming a more common occurrence in the United States. Data show that mass shootings increased steadily over the past nearly 50 years. Crucial is that the wide-ranging adverse effects of mass shootings generate negative mental health outcomes on millions of Americans, including fear, anxiety, and ailments related to such afflictions. This study extends previous research that finds a strong positive relationship between income inequality and mass shootings by examining the effect of household income as well as the interaction between inequality and income. To conduct our analyses, we compile a panel dataset with information across 3,144 counties during the years 1990 to 2015. Mass shootings was measured using a broad definition of three or more victim injuries. Income inequality was calculated using the post-tax version of the Gini coefficient. Our results suggest that while inequality and income alone are both predictors of mass shootings, their impacts on mass shootings are stronger when combined via interaction. Specifically, the results indicate areas with the highest number of mass shootings are those that combine both high levels of inequality and high levels of income. Additionally, robustness checks incorporating various measures of mass shootings and alternative regression techniques had analogous results. Our findings suggest that to address the mass shootings epidemic at its core, it is essential to understand how to stem rising income inequality and the unstable environments that we argue are created by such inequality

Ribosomal Incorporation of Aromatic Oligoamides as Peptide Sidechain Appendages

Derivatives of 4‐aminomethyl‐l ‐phenylalanine with aromatic oligoamide foldamers as sidechain appendages were successfully charged on tRNA by means of flexizymes. Their subsequent incorporation both at the C‐terminus of, and within, peptide sequences by the ribosome, was demonstrated. These results expand the registry of chemical structures tolerated by the ribosome to sidechains significantly larger and more structurally defined than previously demonstrated

A Fast Post-Training Pruning Framework for Transformers

Pruning is an effective way to reduce the huge inference cost of large Transformer models. However, prior work on model pruning requires retraining the model. This can add high cost and complexity to model deployment, making it difficult to use in many practical situations. To address this, we propose a fast post-training pruning framework for Transformers that does not require any retraining. Given a resource constraint and a sample dataset, our framework automatically prunes the Transformer model using structured sparsity methods. To retain high accuracy without retraining, we introduce three novel techniques: (i) a lightweight mask search algorithm that finds which heads and filters to prune based on the Fisher information; (ii) mask rearrangement that complements the search algorithm; and (iii) mask tuning that reconstructs the output activations for each layer. We apply our method to BERT-BASE and DistilBERT, and we evaluate its effectiveness on GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our framework achieves up to 2.0x reduction in FLOPs and 1.56x speedup in inference latency, while maintaining < 1% loss in accuracy. Importantly, our framework prunes Transformers in less than 3 minutes on a single GPU, which is over two orders of magnitude faster than existing pruning approaches that retrain. Our code is publicly available