Does smoking reduction in midlife reduce mortality risk? Results of 2 long-term prospective cohort studies of men and women in Scotland

A long-term cohort study of working men in Israel found that smokers who reduced their cigarette consumption had lower subsequent mortality rates than those who did not. We conducted comparable analyses in 2 populations of smokers in Scotland. The Collaborative Study included 1,524 men and women aged 40–65 years in a working population who were screened twice, in 1970–1973 and 1977. The Renfrew/Paisley Study included 3,730 men and women aged 45–64 years in a general population who were screened twice, in 1972–1976 and 1977–1979. Both groups were followed up through 2010. Subjects were categorized by smoking intensity at each screening as smoking 0, 1–10, 11–20, or ≥21 cigarettes per day. At the second screening, subjects were categorized as having increased, maintained, or reduced their smoking intensity or as having quit smoking between the first and second screenings. There was no evidence of lower mortality in all reducers compared with maintainers. Multivariate adjusted hazard ratios of mortality were 0.91 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.75, 1.10) in the Collaborative Study and 1.08 (95% CI: 0.97, 1.20) in the Renfrew/Paisley Study. There was clear evidence of lower mortality among quitters in both the Collaborative Study (hazard ratio = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.56, 0.78) and the Renfrew/Paisley Study (hazard ratio = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.84). In the Collaborative Study only, we observed lower mortality similar to that of quitters among heavy smokers (≥21 cigarettes/day) who reduced their smoking intensity. These inconclusive results support the view that reducing cigarette consumption should not be promoted as a means of reducing mortality, although it may have a valuable role as a step toward smoking cessation

Detection of Anti-patterns in Mobile Applications

International audienceAn approach to detect anti-patterns in Android Application

Détection d’anti-patrons dans les applications Android

Mobile apps are becoming complex software systems that must be developed quickly and evolve continuously to fit new user requirements and execution contexts.However, addressing these constraints may result in poor design choices, known as antipatterns, which may incidentally degrade software quality and performance.Thus, the automatic detection of antipatterns is an important activity that eases both maintenance and evolution tasks.Moreover, it guides developers to refactor their applications and thus, to improve their quality.While antipatterns are well-known in object-oriented applications, their study in mobile applications is still in their infancy.In this paper, we propose a tooled approach, called Paprika, to analyze Android applications and to detect object-oriented and Android-specific antipatterns from binaries of mobile apps.We validate the effectiveness of our approach on a set of popular mobile apps downloaded from the Google Play Store.Les applications mobiles deviennent des systèmes logiciels complexes qui doivent être développés rapidement et évoluer continuellement pour s’adapter aux nouvelles exigences des utilisateurs et à de multiples contextes d’exécution. La réponse à ces changements peut mener à de mauvaises solutions de conceptions ou d’implémentations, connues sous le nom d’anti-patrons, qui peuvent dégrader la qualité du logiciel ainsi que ses performances. Par conséquent, la détection automatique de ces anti-patrons est importante pour faciliter les tâches de maintenance etd’évolutions des applications. Cela peut aussi aider les développeurs à réusiner leurs applications et par conséquent augmenter leurs qualités. Bien que les anti-patrons soient bien connues pourles applications orientés objets, leur étude pour les applications mobiles est encore à ses balbutiements. Dans ce rapport, nous proposons une approchée outillée nommée Paprika qui permet d’analyser les binaires d’applications Android afin de détecter des anti-patrons orientés objets et spécifiques à Android. Nous validons l’efficacité de notre approche sur un ensemble de plusieurs applications populaires téléchargées depuis le Google Play Store

Impact of eddy–wind interaction on eddy demographics and phytoplankton community structure in a model of the North Atlantic Ocean

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Dynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans 52 (2011): 80-94, doi:10.1016/j.dynatmoce.2011.01.003.Two eddy-resolving (0.1-degree) physical-biological simulations of the North Atlantic Ocean are compared, one with the surface momentum flux computed only from wind velocities and the other using the difference between air and ocean velocity vectors. This difference in forcing has a significant impact on the intensities and relative number of different types of mesoscale eddies in the Sargasso Sea. Eddy/wind interaction significantly reduces eddy intensities and increases the number of mode-water eddies and “thinnies” relative to regular cyclones and anticyclones; it also modifies upward isopycnal displacements at the base of the euphotic zone, increasing them in the centers of mode water eddies and at the edges of cyclones, and decreasing them in the centers of cyclones. These physical changes increase phytoplankton growth rates and biomass in mode-water eddies, bringing the biological simulation into better agreement with field data. These results indicate the importance of including the eddy/wind interaction in simulations of the physics and biology of eddies in the subtropical North Atlantic. However, eddy intensities in the simulation with eddy/wind interaction are lower than observed, which suggests a decrease in horizontal viscosity or an increase in horizontal grid resolution will be necessary to regain the observed level of eddy activity.LAA and DJM gratefully acknowledge the support of NASA grant 07-CARBON07-17. SCD and IDL gratefully acknowledge support from the NSF Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education (C-MORE; NSF EF-0424599)

IL-2 Immunotherapy to Recently HIV-1 Infected Adults Maintains the Numbers of IL-17 Expressing CD4+ T (TH17) Cells in the Periphery

Little is known about the manipulation of IL-17 producing CD4+ T cells (TH17) on a per-cell basis in humans in vivo. Previous studies on the effects of IL-2 on IL-17 secretion in non-HIV models have shown divergent results. We hypothesized that IL-2 would mediate changes in IL-17 levels among recently HIV-1-infected adults receiving anti-retroviral therapy. We measured cytokine T cell responses to CD3/CD28, HIV-1 Gag, and CMV pp65 stimulation, and changes in multiple CD4+ T cell subsets. Those who received IL-2 showed a robust expansion of naive and total CD4+ T cell counts and T-reg counts. However, after IL-2 treatment, the frequency of TH17 cells declined, while counts of TH17 cells did not change due to an expansion of the CD4+ naïve T cell population (CD27+CD45RA+). Counts of HIV-1 Gag-specific T cells declined modestly, but CMV pp65 and CD3/CD28 stimulated populations did not change. Hence, in contrast with recent studies, our results suggest IL-2 is not a potent in vivo regulator of TH17 cell populations in HIV-1 disease. However, IL-2-mediated T-reg expansions may selectively reduce responses to certain antigen-specific populations, such as HIV-1 Gag

Time reversal and Hermiticity characteristics of polarizability and optical activity operators

Exact non-singular effective polarizability operators are introduced that exhibit well defined time reversal and Hermiticity characteristics and can therefore be applied to all forms of (optically active) light scattering including resonance phenomena. Dual circular polarization (DCP) and dual linear polarization (DLP) Raman optical activity (ROA) observables are reformulated in terms of matrix elements of these generalized scattering operators. Employing the fundamental operator symmetry properties, Stokes and anti-Stokes ROA observables are shown to exhibit the same signs for the in-phase DCPI and out-of-phase DLPII modulation technique, and opposite signs for the out-of-phase DCPII and in-phase DLPI modulation approach for the case of diamagnetic chiral molecules

Recent developments in Raman optical activity instrumentation

We describe the latest versions of two current multichannel Raman optical activity (ROA) instruments from our laboratory. Both are based on an astigmatic spectrograph equipped with a holographic notch filter and a charge-coupled device detector and employ the incident circular polarization (ICP) modulation strategy for ROA measurements, one in backscattering and the other in right-angle scattering. A selection of ROA spectra is presented which demonstrates the excellent performance characteristics of both instruments, especially in the lower wavenumber region. We also discuss the design for a future ICP instrument for backscattering ROA measurements which uses state-of-the-art stigmatic spectrograph technology and which is currently under construction in our laboratory

New aspects of second-harmonic optical activity from chiral surfaces and interfaces

New expressions are developed within the electric dipole approximation for the four Stokes parameters characterizing the polarization properties of coherent second-harmonic radiation generated from chiral isotropic surfaces in reflection. These are employed to derive, in addition to the three well-known incident circular polarization second-harmonic opticalactivity (SHOA) observables, thirteen new basic observables for the detection of surface SHOA which involve second-harmonic intensity difference measurements using right and left circular, and + 45 and - 45 linear, polarization modulation in the incident and second-harmonic radiation and in both simultaneously. Because of their dependence on a fully electric dipole allowed tensor these circular and linear intensity differences and the corresponding intensity sums have the same order of magnitude, so that all the dimensionless surface SHOA effects they generate are of the order of unity. The circular intensity differences (CIDs) depend on the imaginary part of products of second-order surface susceptibility tensor components and can therefore be observed only under preresonance or resonance scattering conditions; whereas the linear intensity differences (LIDs) depend on the real part of the same tensor component products and can therefore also be detected at transparent frequencies. Employing elliptically polarized incident radiation, appropriate combinations of CIDs and LIDs also measure, respectively, real and imaginary parts of the relevant surface susceptibility tensor products so that a suitable CID combination may also be detected under non-resonance scattering conditions. The best experimental strategies are identified for SHOA detection and extraction of complete SHOA information and relationships are discussed between the SHOA observables and the second-harmonic polarization azimuth, ellipticity and degree of polarization. Because only pure electric dipole scattering processes are considered, the basic formalism applies also to magnetically induced SHOA phenomena

Raman optical activity

No abstract available

Vibrational Raman optical activity: from fundamentals to biochemical applications

No abstract available