The Macroeconomic Effects of Public Debt: An Empirical Analysis of Evidence from Canada

Public debt refers to the amount of money which a particular country owes to the lenders either inside the country or outside the country. The lenders might be the individuals, businesses or even governments of the other countries. It might also be called as national debt or sovereign debt. Several types are associated with public debt such as domestic debt, external debt and the total debt. Public debt has critical relations with different macroeconomic factors such as economic growth, price levels and exchange rate. In this context, the current study has been conducted with the motive to explore the impact casted by public domestic debt, public external debt and total debt on the macroeconomic factors i.e. economic growth and general price level. As the study has been conducted in the context of Canada, therefore the researcher collected secondary and time series data for Canada. The collected data comprised the time of 28 years. The data regarding the variables of the study was analyzed by using different techniques and tools so that the objective of the study can be fulfilled. The results obtained from the analysis provide information that PDD has negative impact on the economic growth and positive impact on price level in short run as well. In addition, the impact of PED and TD on economic growth is positive only for shorter run and in longer run, this result is not applicable. However, the impact of PED and TD on price levels is too ambiguous to draw any conclusion

An exploratory study of pet raising and health of the elderly people in Hong Kong

Introduction: Pets such as dogs, cats and fish were popular in many other countries (Marx et al., 1988; Gammonley, 1991; Brodie & Biley, 1999; PIAS, 2002). In Hong Kong, pet owners increased to 0.26 million (Census and Statistics Department, 2006). Dating back to 1980s, a research study reported the association between pet ownerships and health benefits for humans (McNicholas et al., 2005). According to the report, domesticated pets brought a sense of companionship and provided pet owners with pleasure. These pets could be tools for enhancing human social relationship and could also provide their owners with emotional comfort. Recent studies also revealed that the influence of the complex and rich relationship between pets and owners might far surpass daily pleasure in terms of improving physical, psychological and mental health of the elderly (Serpell, 1991; Garrity et al., 1989; Murrell et al., 1983). 1.2. Objectives : Not many studies in the literature were to investigate the positive impacts of pet raising on health of the elderly in Hong Kong. If pet raising had a positive impact on older people’s health, there would be important implications to the health services in Hong Kong, with regard to further studies on an in-depth understanding of this issue and policy recommendations for the Hong Kong government to improve the health services of the elderly population. In light of the above rationale, the present study was designed to explore the qualitative impacts of pet raising on well-being of the elderly people in Hong Kong. The specific aims of the study were: To explore the value of pet raising as perceived by the elderly people in Hong Kong; To explore the impacts of pet raising on the physical, psychological and overall life satisfaction of the elderly people in Hong Kong; To identify the critical factors influencing the physical, psychological and overall life satisfaction of the elderly people in Hong Kong; and To make suggestions to policy makers regarding effective health services for the elderly people in Hong Kong

The Impact of Surgery on Circulating Malignant Tumour Cells in Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Importance: The extent to which surgical management of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) disseminates cancer is currently unknown. Objective: To determine changes in numbers of malignant cells released into systemic circulation immediately following tumour removal and over the first seven post-operative days. Design: An observational study from March 2019 to February 2021. Setting: This study was undertaken at Queen Mary University Hospital, Hong Kong. Participants: Patients with biopsy-proven oral SCC were considered for eligibility. Patients under 18 years of age, pregnant or lactating women and those unable to understand the study details or unable to sign the consent form were excluded. Twenty-two patients were enrolled (12 male and 10 female) with mean age of 65.5 years. Intervention: Primary tumour management was performed in accord with multi-disciplinary team agreement. Anaesthesia and post-operative care were unaltered and provided in accord with accepted clinical practice. Main Outcomes and Measures: Three types of malignant cells detected in peripheral blood samples were enumerated and sub-typed based on the presence of chromosomal aneuploidy and immunohistochemical characteristics. To test the hypothesis that malignant cells are released by surgery, the numbers of single circulating tumour cells (CTCs), circulating tumour microemboli (CTM) and circulating endothelial cells (CTECs) were recorded pre-operatively, upon tumour removal and the second and seventh post-operative days. Results: Of a potential 88 data collection points, specimens were not obtainable in 12 instances. Tumour removal resulted in a statistically significant increase in CTCs and a non-statistically significant rise in CTMs. CTCs, CTMs and CTECs were detected in the majority of patients up to the seventh post-operative day. Individual patients demonstrated striking increases in post-operative CTCs and CTECs numbers. Conclusions/Relevance: Surgical management of OSCC has a significant impact on the systemic distribution of cancer cells. Malignant cells persisted post-operatively in a manner independent of recognised staging methods suggesting differences in tumour biology between individuals. Further investigation is warranted to determine whether circulating malignant cell enumeration can be used to refine risk stratification for patients with OSCC

The Impact of the Extent of Lymphadenectomy on Oncologic Outcomes in Patients Undergoing Radical Cystectomy for Bladder Cancer : A Systematic Review

Copyright © 2014 European Association of Urology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPostprin

CNN-MoE based framework for classification of respiratory anomalies and lung disease detection

This paper presents and explores a robust deep learning framework for auscultation analysis. This aims to classify anomalies in respiratory cycles and detect diseases, from respiratory sound recordings. The framework begins with front-end feature extraction that transforms input sound into a spectrogram representation. Then, a back-end deep learning network is used to classify the spectrogram features into categories of respiratory anomaly cycles or diseases. Experiments, conducted over the ICBHI benchmark dataset of respiratory sounds, confirm three main contributions towards respiratory- sound analysis. Firstly, we carry out an extensive exploration of the effect of spectrogram types, spectral-time resolution, overlapping/non-overlapping windows, and data augmentation on final prediction accuracy. This leads us to propose a novel deep learning system, built on the proposed framework, which outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we apply a Teacher-Student scheme to achieve a trade-off between model performance and model complexity which holds promise for building real-time applications

Detection of regional DNA methylation using DNA-graphene affinity interactions

We report a new multiplexed strategy for the electrochemical detection of regional DNA methylation across multiple regions. Using the sequence dependent affinity of bisulfite treated DNA towards gold surfaces, the method integrates the high sensitivity of a micro-fabricated multiplex device comprising a microarray of gold electrodes, with the powerful multiplexing capability of multiplex-PCR. The synergy of this combination enables the monitoring of the methylation changes across several genomic regions simultaneously from as low as 500 pg μl(-1) of DNA with no sequencing requirement