Bosonic description of a Tomonaga-Luttinger model with impurities

We extend a recently proposed non-local version of Coleman's equivalence between the Thirring and sine-Gordon models to the case in which the original fermion fields interact with fixed impurities. We explain how our results can be used in the context of one-dimensional strongly correlated systems (the so called Tomonaga-Luttinger model) to study the dependence of the charge-density oscillations on the range of the fermionic interactions.Comment: 8 pages, latex, no figures. Minor correction in eq. (6). Version to appear in PL

THE IMPACT OF CREDIT RATING CHANGE ON NORTH AMERICAN COMPANIES\u27 CORPORATE DECISION AND STOCK PERFORMANCE

This paper analyses the impact of credit rating changes from two aspects. Firstly,credit rating will impact company capital structure decisions. It is found thatcompanies generally issue more debt when forecasting a credit downgrade totake the advantage of the relatively low cost of capital, while a small number offirms keep corporate structure unchanged due to flexibility concerns. Secondly,there is an offset pattern in daily abnormal returns and volatility of stock returnsincreases after a credit rating change event. Specifically, downgrade has abigger impact on stock performance

The Insurance Role of Household Labor Supply for Older Workers

In this paper, we explore and compare how older and younger couple house- holds use adjustments in the wife’s labor supply to mitigate the e?ects of negative shocks to the husband’s employment status. Using di?erence-in-di?erences match- ing methods, we document a substantial added worker e?ect for younger house- holds. However, the wives of older men do not increase employment in response to their husbands’ negative employment shocks. Instead, in older households, fe- male unemployment increases. These results are consistent with older women being constrained by the labor market in the extent to which they can adjust their labor supply to mitigate the e?ects of spousal employment shocks. Our ?ndings suggest that spousal labor supply is not an e?ective intra-household insurance device for older households.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110118/1/wp309.pd

Topical clobetasol for the treatment of toxic epidermal necrolysis: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundToxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is a rare systemic allergic drug eruption with high patient mortality. Currently, no established treatments have been shown to be effective for TEN beyond supportive care. Prior studies of systemic corticosteroids have yielded conflicting data, with some showing a possible benefit and others reporting in increased mortality. However, topical steroids have shown promise for treatment of ocular sequelae of TEN, such as scarring and vision loss. We have designed a randomized controlled trial to evaluate topical clobetasol for treatment of the epidermal manifestations of TEN. In addition, we propose genetic studies to characterize the TEN transcriptome and alterations in cutaneous gene expression that might occur following topical steroid treatment.Methods/designThis split-body randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase IIa proof-of-concept trial will evaluate the safety and efficacy of once-daily topical clobetasol applied to the skin of patients with TEN. This multicenter trial will recruit a total of 15 patients between the ages of 12 and 85 from the University of California Davis Medical Center and Shriners Hospital for Children inpatient burn units. Designated treatment areas on opposite sides of the body will be treated with blinded clobetasol 0.05% ointment or control petrolatum ointment daily for 14 days. On day 3 of therapy, a biopsy will be taken from the treated area for genetic studies. The primary study aims will be to establish the safety of topical clobetasol treatment and determine the time to cessation of skin detachment for the control and clobetasol-treated areas. Secondary endpoints will evaluate efficacy using parameters such as time to 90% re-epithelialization and percentage of affected skin at 0, 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15 days. Genomic DNA and RNA will be obtained from biopsy samples, to characterize the TEN transcriptome and identify changes in gene expression after topical steroid treatment.DiscussionTopical steroids have shown promise for treating ocular complications of TEN, but to date have not been evaluated for cutaneous manifestations of the disease. This trial will investigate clinical and molecular outcomes of topical clobetasol application and hopefully provide insight into the disease pathophysiology.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT02319616. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02351037

Iterative algorithms for nonexpansive mappings on Hadamard manifolds

Two iterative algorithms for nonexpansive mappings on Hadamard manifolds, which are extensions of the well-known Halpern's and Mann's algorithms in Euclidean spaces, are proposed and proved to be convergent to a fixed point of the mapping. Some numerical examples are provided.Dirección General de Enseñanza SuperiorNational Natural Science Foundations of ChinaJunta de AndalucíaMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovació

Relationship of Associated Cardiovascular Risk Factors and Chronic Kidney Disease with Participants Enrolled in the National Kidney Foundation of Hawai\u27i Kidney Early Detection Screening (KEDS) Program

Objective The objective of this study was to further examine the relationship of associated cardiovascular risk factors and chronic kidney disease (CKD) with a large cross-sectional sample of Native Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and White participants who were enrolled in the National Kidney Foundation of Hawai\u27i Kidney Early Detection Screening (KEDS) program. Methods Data for this cross-sectional study was collected between 2006 and 2009 from the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii (NKFH). Nine hundred and fifteen participants who attended the NKFH KEDS program were 18 years and older, and residents of the State of Hawaii. Data included demographic information, clinical risk factors, anthropometric measurements, and lab values. Microalbuminuria was used as an indicator for CKD. Descriptive analysis using frequencies, means, and standard deviations, chi-square tests, and ANOVA were conducted to examine the differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and normal and abnormal microalbuminuria groups. A multivariate hierarchical logistic regression model was used to identify the CV risk factors associated with abnormal microalbuminuria. The Hosmer and Lemeshow Goodness of Fit test and R-2-type indices examined the fit of the regression model to the data. Results Significant results related to microalbuminuria included BMI (p=0.004), glucose (p=.004), and Japanese ethnicity (p=.008). Conclusion The findings support the need to address CVD risk factors in NKFH KEDS program. Keywords: chronic kidney disease, CVD risk factors, microalbuminuria, Asians, Native Hawaiians Pacific Islander

Cross Border Transportation Patterns at the Western Cascade Gateway: Implications for Mitigating the Impact of Delay on Regional Supply Chains

The Pacific Highway border crossing in Blaine, Washington, is the fourth busiest commercial crossing on the northern border and the most significant commercial crossing for Western Canada and the U.S. (USDOT/FHWA 2006). The primary commodities that flow across this border are agricultural/food, wood, and paper products (WCOG Manifest Data). These commodities are not viewed as particularly time critical, as they do not move in a strictly scheduled environment, although in fact a significant proportion of these goods are highly perishable. Both of these factors are significantly different than along the eastern portion of the northern border, where goods are flowing across the border in a time sensitive business environment that requires more precise delivery time estimates. These regional characteristics are important in understanding the current U.S. commercial vehicle transportation phenomenon and the impacts of delays, as well as in developing improvements and anticipating the consequences of change both at border crossings and within the Cascade border region as a whole

Runx1 and Runx3 Are Involved in the Generation and Function of Highly Suppressive IL-17-Producing T Regulatory Cells

CD4+Foxp3+ T regulatory cells (Tregs) display phenotypic and functional plasticity that is regulated by cytokines and other immune cells. Previously, we determined that during co-culture with CD4+CD25− T cells and antigen presenting cells, Tregs produced IL-17. Here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying the differentiation of IL-17-producing Treg (Tr17) cells and their molecular and functional properties. We determined that during stimulation via TCR/CD3 and CD28, the combination of IL-1β and IL-2 was necessary and sufficient for the generation of Tr17 cells. Tr17 cells expressed Runx1 transcription factor, which was required for sustained expression of Foxp3 and RORγt and for production of IL-17. Surprisingly, Tr17 cells also expressed Runx3, which regulated transcription of perforin and granzyme B thereby mediating cytotoxic activity. Our studies indicate that Tr17 cells concomitantly express Foxp3, RORγt, Runx1 and Runx3 and are capable of producing IL-17 while mediating potent suppressive and cytotoxic function

Monotone and accretive vector fields on Riemannian manifolds

The relationship between monotonicity and accretivity on Riemannian manifolds is studied in this paper and both concepts are proved to be equivalent in Hadamard manifolds. As a consequence an iterative method is obtained for approximating singularities of Lipschitz continuous, strongly monotone mappings. We also establish the equivalence between the strong convexity of convex functions and the strong monotonicity of its subdifferentials on Riemannian manifolds. These results are then applied to solve the minimization problem of convex functions on Riemannian manifolds.Ministerio de Ciencia e InnovaciónJunta de AndalucíaNational Natural Science Foundations of Chin

Graph Q-Learning for Combinatorial Optimization

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout natural and social sciences, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been shown to be effective at solving prediction and inference problems on graph data. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate that GNNs can be applied to solve Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems. CO concerns optimizing a function over a discrete solution space that is often intractably large. To learn to solve CO problems, we formulate the optimization process as a sequential decision making problem, where the return is related to how close the candidate solution is to optimality. We use a GNN to learn a policy to iteratively build increasingly promising candidate solutions. We present preliminary evidence that GNNs trained through Q-Learning can solve CO problems with performance approaching state-of-the-art heuristic-based solvers, using only a fraction of the parameters and training time