Beyond the Brotherhood: Skoal Bandits' role in the evolution of marketing moist smokeless tobacco pouches.

Background: Since 2006, “snus” smokeless tobacco has been sold in the U.S.. However, U.S. Smokeless Tobacco (USST) and Swedish Match developed and marketed pouched moist snuff tobacco (MST) since 1973. Methods: Analysis of previously secret tobacco documents, advertisements and trade press. Results: USST partnered with Swedish Match, forming United Scandia International to develop pouch products as part of the “Lotus Project.” Pouched MST was not commonly used, either in Sweden or the U.S. prior to the Lotus Project’s innovation in 1973. The project aimed to transform smokeless tobacco from being perceived as an “unsightly habit of old men” into a relevant, socially acceptable urban activity, targeting 15–35 year-old men. While USST’s initial pouched product “Good Luck,” never gained mainstream traction, Skoal Bandits captured significant market share after its 1983 introduction. Internal market research found that smokers generally used Skoal Bandits in smokefree environments, yet continued to smoke cigarettes in other contexts. Over time, pouch products increasingly featured increased flavor, size, nicotine strength and user imagery variation. Conclusions: Marlboro and Camel Snus advertising mirrors historical advertising for Skoal Bandits, designed to recruit new users and smokers subjected to smokefree places. Despite serious efforts, pouched MST marketing has been unable to dispel its association with traditional smokeless tobacco stereotypes as macho and rural. Public education efforts to discourage new users and dual use of MST and cigarettes should emphasize that “new” pouch products are simply repackaging “old” smokeless tobacco

Anterior Hippocampus and Goal-Directed Spatial Decision Making

Contains fulltext : 115487.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Mapping annual forest cover by fusing PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI during 2007–2016

Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Arrayed L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) HH and HV polarization data were used previously to produce annual, global 25 m forest maps between 2007 and 2010, and the latest global forest maps of 2015 and 2016 were produced by using the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data. However, annual 25 m spatial resolution forest maps during 2011–2014 are missing because of the gap in operation between ALOS and ALOS-2, preventing the construction of a continuous, fine resolution time-series dataset on the world's forests. In contrast, the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI images were available globally since 2000. This research developed a novel method to produce annual 25 m forest maps during 2007–2016 by fusing the fine spatial resolution, but asynchronous PALSAR/PALSAR-2 with coarse spatial resolution, but synchronous MODIS NDVI data, thus, filling the four-year gap in the ALOS and ALOS-2 time-series, as well as enhancing the existing mapping activity. The method was developed concentrating on two key objectives: 1) producing more accurate 25 m forest maps by integrating PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI data during 2007–2010 and 2015–2016; 2) reconstructing annual 25 m forest maps from time-series MODIS NDVI images during 2011–2014. Specifically, a decision tree classification was developed for forest mapping based on both the PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI data, and a new spatial-temporal super-resolution mapping was proposed to reconstruct the 25 m forest maps from time-series MODIS NDVI images. Three study sites including Paraguay, the USA and Russia were chosen, as they represent the world's three main forest types: tropical forest, temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, and boreal conifer forest, respectively. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed approach produced the most accurate continuous time-series of fine spatial resolution forest maps both visually and quantitatively. For the forest maps during 2007–2010 and 2015–2016, the results had greater overall accuracy values (>98%) than those of the original JAXA forest product. For the reconstructed 25 m forest maps during 2011–2014, the increases in classifications accuracy relative to three benchmark methods were statistically significant, and the overall accuracy values of the three study sites were almost universally >92%. The proposed approach, therefore, has great potential to support the production of annual 25 m forest maps by fusing PALSAR/PALSAR-2 and MODIS NDVI during 2007–2016

Object-Based Area-to-Point Regression Kriging for Pansharpening

Optical earth observation satellite sensors often provide a coarse spatial resolution (CR) multispectral (MS) image together with a fine spatial resolution (FR) panchromatic (PAN) image. Pansharpening is a technique applied to such satellite sensor images to generate an FR MS image by injecting spatial detail taken from the FR PAN image while simultaneously preserving the spectral information of MS image. Pansharpening methods are mostly applied on a per-pixel basis and use the PAN image to extract spatial detail. However, many land cover objects in FR satellite sensor images are not illustrated as independent pixels, but as many spatially aggregated pixels that contain important semantic information. In this article, an object-based pansharpening approach, termed object-based area-to-point regression kriging (OATPRK), is proposed. OATPRK aims to fuse the MS and PAN images at the object-based scale and, thus, takes advantage of both the unified spectral information within the CR MS images and the spatial detail of the FR PAN image. OATPRK is composed of three stages: image segmentation, object-based regression, and residual downscaling. Three data sets acquired from IKONOS and Worldview-2 and 11 benchmark pansharpening algorithms were used to provide a comprehensive assessment of the proposed OATPRK approach. In both the synthetic and real experiments, OATPRK produced the most superior pan-sharpened results in terms of visual and quantitative assessment. OATPRK is a new conceptual method that advances the pixel-level geostatistical pansharpening approach to the object level and provides more accurate pan-sharpened MS images. IEE

Large N_c, chiral approach to M_eta' at finite temperature

We study the temperature dependence of the eta and eta' meson masses within the framework of U(3)_L x U(3)_R chiral perturbation theory, up to next-to-leading order in a simultaneous expansion in momenta, quark masses and number of colours. We find that both masses decrease at low temperatures, but only very slightly. We analyze higher order corrections and argue that large N_c suggests a discontinuous drop of M_eta' at the critical temperature of deconfinement T_c, consistent with a first order transition to a phase with approximate U(1)_A symmetry.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures. 2 footnotes added, 1 reference changed and 1 typo corrected. To be published in Phys. Rev.

Distributed flow optimization and cascading effects in weighted complex networks

We investigate the effect of a specific edge weighting scheme $\sim (k_i k_j)^{\beta}$ on distributed flow efficiency and robustness to cascading failures in scale-free networks. In particular, we analyze a simple, yet fundamental distributed flow model: current flow in random resistor networks. By the tuning of control parameter $\beta$ and by considering two general cases of relative node processing capabilities as well as the effect of bandwidth, we show the dependence of transport efficiency upon the correlations between the topology and weights. By studying the severity of cascades for different control parameter $\beta$, we find that network resilience to cascading overloads and network throughput is optimal for the same value of $\beta$ over the range of node capacities and available bandwidth

From presentation to paper: gender disparities in oncological research

Gender disparities in scientific publications have been identified in oncological research. Oral research presentations at major conferences enhance visibility of presenters. The share of women presenting at such podia is unknown. We aim to identify gender-based differences in contributions to presentations at two major oncological conferences. Abstracts presented at plenary sessions of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meetings and European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congresses were collected. Trend analyses were used to analyze female contribution over time. The association between presenter's sex, study outcome (positive/negative) and journals' impact factors (IFs) of subsequently published papers was assessed using Chi-square and Mann-Whitney U tests. Of 166 consecutive abstracts presented at ASCO in 2011-2018 (n = 34) and ESMO in 2008-2018 (n = 132), 21% had female presenters, all originating from Northern America (n = 17) or Europe (n = 18). The distribution of presenter's sex was similar over time (p = 0.70). Of 2,425 contributing authors to these presented abstracts, 28% were women. The proportion of female abstract authors increased over time (p <0.05) and was higher in abstracts with female (34%) compared to male presenters (26%; p <0.01). Presenter's sex was not associated with study outcome (p = 0.82). Median journals' IFs were lower in papers with a female first author (p <0.05). In conclusion, there is a clear gender disparity in research presentations at two major oncological conferences, with 28% of authors and 21% of presenters of these studies being female. Lack of visibility of female presenters could impair acknowledgement for their research, opportunities in their academic career and even hamper heterogeneity in research

Measurement of the branching fraction for Υ(1S)→τ+τ−\Upsilon (1S) \to \tau^+ \tau^-

We have studied the leptonic decay of the $\Upsilon (1S)$ resonance into tau pairs using the CLEO II detector. A clean sample of tau pair events is identified via events containing two charged particles where exactly one of the particles is an identified electron. We find $B(\Upsilon(1S) \to \tau^+ \tau^-) = (2.61~\pm~0.12~{+0.09\atop{-0.13}})$. The result is consistent with expectations from lepton universality.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX, two Postscript figures available upon request, CLNS 94/1297, CLEO 94-20 (submitted to Physics Letters B