On bubbling dynamics generated by a stochastic model of herd behavior

This paper suggests a class of stochastic collective learning processes exhibiting very irregular behavior. In particular, there are multimodal long run distributions. Some of these modes may vanish as the population size increases. This may be thought of as "bubbles" persistent for a finite range of population sizes but disappearing in the limit. The limit distribution proves to be a discontinuous function of parameters determining the learn- ing process. This gives rise to another type of "bubbles": limit outcomes corresponding to small perturbations of parameters are different. Since an agent's decision rule involves imitation of the majority choice in a random sample of other members of the population, the resulting collective dynamics exhibit "herding" or "epidemic" features

HIV screening of tuberculosis patients in Portugal: what are we missing?

BACKGROUND: Knowledge of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status is essential to effectively manage both tuberculosis (TB) and HIV infection. This is why the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends routine HIV testing in all TB patients. OBJECTIVE: To determine the number of TB patients with unknown HIV status in Portugal and to identify the factors associated with unknown HIV status. METHODS: A retrospective study of all TB notifications from 2008 to 2014 in Portugal was conducted. A multiple logistic regression model was used to evaluate the association of sociodemographic and clinical factors with unknown HIV status. RESULTS: We examined the records of 18 445 patients with TB notification, 2402 of whom (13%) had unknown HIV status. Unknown HIV status was positively associated with age >= 65 years (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.208, 95%CI 1.037-1.408) and extra-pulmonary TB (aOR 1.381, 95%CI 1.252-1.523), but negatively associated with unemployment (aOR 0.755, 95%CI 0.637-0.895), alcohol dependence (aOR 0.809, 95%CI 0.682-0.959) and drug dependence (aOR 0.566, 95%CI 0.449-0.713). CONCLUSION: Risk perception is the most important barrier to complete knowledge of HIV status in TB patients in Portugal. Given the importance of HIV screening in TB patients, every effort should be made to ensure that all TB patients undergo HIV screening.RG was supported in part by the Centre for Mathematics of the University of Porto, Porto (UID/MAT/00144/2013), which is funded by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal, with national (Ministerio da Educacao e Ciencia) and European structural funds (Fonds europeen de developpement regional) under the PT2020 partnership agreement

Analisis Framing Robert Entman pada Pemberitaan Konflik Kpk Vs Polri di Vivanews.co.id dan Detiknews.com

Media online saat ini menjadi lebih digemari dibandingkan dengan media konvesional karena kecepatan, kemudahan dalam mengaksesnya dan informasi yang diberikan selalu baru. Dalam pemberitaannya, setiap selalu dipengaruhi oleh ideologi, kekuasaan dan kepentingan pemilik media. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui bagaimana suatu media membingkai dan mengkonstruksikan realitas berita mengenai konflik KPK dan Polri di vivanews.co.id dan detik.com. framing yang digunakan dalam penelitian adalah framing milik Robert Entman yang berfokus pada bagaimana medefinisikan suatu masalah, apa/siapa penyebab masalah, keputusan moral apa yang terdapat dalam berita tersebut dan apa penyelesaian yang ditwarkan oleh wartawan. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa dalam mengkonstruksi dan membingkai konflik KPK dan Polri baik vivanews.co.id dan detik.com memiliki kesan yang berbeda. Dimana vivanews.co.id cenderung memojokkan Jokowi bahwa keputusannya dalam mengajukan Budi Gunawan sebagai calon Kapolri adalah awal dari konflik tersebut, namun berbeda detiknews.com yang mana meminta presiden Jokowi mengakhiri konflik tersebut dengan mempertimbangkan masukkan dari tim independennya. Kata Kunci : Media Online, Analisis Framing Robert Entman, KPK – Polr

Hip Manipulation Under Anesthesia for Post-Hip Arthroscopy Pericapsular Scarring: Indications and Techniques

Hip arthroscopy has become an increasingly common procedure with expanding indications over the last several decades. With the increase in number of procedures performed a complication profile has emerged, although there is yet to be a formal classification system for complications. The most cited complications include lateral femoral cutaneous nerve neuropraxia, other sensory deficits, chondral or labral iatrogenic damage, superficial infection and deep vein thrombosis. One complication that has not yet been well documented in the literature is pericapsular scarring/adhesions resulting in decreased hip range of motion and function. If this complication is noted to persist after adequate impingement resection and a rigorous post-operative physical therapy regimen, the senior author has addressed this with a hip manipulation under anesthesia. Therefore, this techniques paper aims to describe pericapsular scarring as a post hip-arthroscopy condition which may cause pain and demonstrate our technique to address this diagnosis through hip manipulation under anesthesia

On Bubbling Dynamics Generated by a Stochastic Model of Herd Behavior.

This paper suggests a class of stochastic collective learning processes exhibiting very irregular behavior. In particular, there are multimodal long run distributions. Some of these modes may vanish as the population size increases. This may be thought of as "bubbles" persistent for a finite range of population sizes but disappearing in the limit. The limit distribution proves to be a discontinuous function of parameters determining the learning process. This gives rise to another type of "bubbles": limit outcomes corresponding to small perturbations of parameters are different. Since an agent's decision rule involves imitation of the majority choice in a random sample of other members of the population, the resulting collective dynamics exhibit "herding" or "epidemic" features.

Is time the real line?

This paper is devoted to discussing the topological structure of the arrow of time. In the literature, it is often accepted that its algebraic and topological structures are that of a one-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{E}^1$, although a critical review on the subject is not easy to be found. Hence, leveraging on an operational approach, we collect evidences to identify it structurally as a normed vector space $(\mathbb{Q}, |\cdot|)$, and take a leap of abstraction to complete it, up to isometries, to the real line. During the development of the paper, the space-time is recognized as a fibration, with the fibers being the sets of simultaneous events. The corresponding topology is also exposed: open sets naturally arise within our construction, showing that the classical space-time is non-Hausdorff. The transition from relativistic to classical regimes is explored too.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures. Misprints corrected and minor adjustments according to the review proces

Anxiety and Depression Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cluster Analysis of Individuals Living in Portugal

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is an illustration of how a physical illness can damage people's minds. In this regard, the goal of this study was to see how different sociodemographic and behavioral factors were linked to anxiety and depression symptoms in a group of individuals living in PortugalMethods: Between November 2020 and February 2021, a cross-sectional, snowball online study was conducted. The study's target population was adults over the age of 18, residents of the country. For the statistical analysis, the clustering technique - K-means algorithm was applied. The chi-squared test was used to determine the relationships between clusters and sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics. Statistical analyses were conducted in R language, with a significance level of 0.05. A total of 453 participants were included.Results: The majority were female (69.8%), under the age of 40 (60.8%), with a higher education degree (75.3%), and not married (54.4%). Furthermore, the majority were from the country's north region (66%). Cluster 1 (n = 194) was characterized by low or nonexistent levels of anxiety and depression symptoms, which means normal; cluster 2 by severe symptoms (n = 82), meaning case; and cluster 3 by mild symptoms (n = 177), which means border-line. Younger participants (p-value 0.024), female (p-value 0.041), with drinking habits (p-value 0.002), food insecurity (p-value < 0.001), food affordability exacerbation (p-value < 0.001), comorbidity (p-value < 0.001), use of anxiolytics (p-value < 0.001), insufficient household income (p-value 0.017) and income change (p-value < 0.001) were significantly associated with the anxiety-depression clusters. From the three clusters, cluster 2 was mainly repre-sented by younger participants, with more persons stating that their household income was insufficient and that their income has changed as a result of COVID-19 and that they had the highest probability of food insecurity. Conclusion: The impacts of a crisis on mental health extend longer than the event itself. We were able to observe that younger women with insuf-ficient household income who suffered a change in income due to COVID-19 and were classified as food insecure presented higher levels of anxiety and depression symptoms. These results highlight the presence of a social gradient where we saw that people who were less advantaged in terms of socioeconomic position presented worse mental health outcomes, stressing, in this sense, the need to bring the best public health responses for these specific groups of the population.This work was financed by Portuguese Funds through FCT -Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the projects UIDB/04750/2020 and LA/P/0064/2020.Ana Aguiar PhD Grant (Reference: 2020.09390.BD), co-funded by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) and the Fundo Social Europeu (FSE) Program, was also used to assist this research.Rita Gaio has received support from CMUP, which is financed by national funds through FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project with reference UIDB/00144/2020.& nbsp;& nbsp

Evaluation of drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment outcome in Portugal, 2000-2016

Treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), which is usually less successful than that of drug-susceptible TB, represents a challenge for TB control and elimination. We aimed to evaluate treatment outcomes and to identify the factors associated with death among patients with MDR and XDR-TB in Portugal. We assessed MDR-TB cases reported for the period 2000-2016, using the national TB Surveillance System. Treatment outcomes were defined according to WHO recommendations. We identified the factors associated with death using logistic regression. We evaluated treatment outcomes of 294 MDR- and 142 XDR-TB patients. The treatment success rate was 73.8% among MDR- and 62.7% among XDR-TB patients (p = 0.023). The case-fatality rate was 18.4% among MDR- and 23.9% among XDR-TB patients. HIV infection (OR 4.55; 95% CI 2.31-8.99; p < 0.001) and resistance to one or more second-line injectable drugs (OR 2.73; 95% CI 1.26-5.92; p = 0.011) were independently associated with death among MDR-TB patients. HIV infection, injectable drug use, past imprisonment, comorbidities, and alcohol abuse are conditions that were associated with death early on and during treatment. Early diagnosis of MDR-TB and further monitoring of these patients are necessary to improve treatment outcome.This work was developed under the scope of the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000013 and NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023, supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and projects PTDC/SAU-PUB/29521/2017. This work was partially supported by “Contratos-Programa” UIDB/50026/2020 and UIDB/04050/2020 funded by national funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. OO is supported by the project NORTE-08-5369-FSE-000041, financed by the Operational Program NORTE 2020 and co-financed by the European Social Fund through a doctoral grant (UMINHO/BD/47/2016). This work was also supported by national funds through the FCT, I.P., under the project UIDB / 04750/2020

Hackflex: low-cost, high-throughput, Illumina Nextera Flex library construction.

We developed a low-cost method for the production of Illumina-compatible sequencing libraries that allows up to 14 times more libraries for high-throughput Illumina sequencing to be generated for the same cost. We call this new method Hackflex. The quality of library preparation was tested by constructing libraries from Escherichia coli MG1655 genomic DNA using either Hackflex, standard Nextera Flex (recently renamed as Illumina DNA Prep) or a variation of standard Nextera Flex in which the bead-linked transposase is diluted prior to use. In order to test the library quality for genomes with a higher and a lower G+C content, library construction methods were also tested on Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923, respectively. We demonstrated that Hackflex can produce high-quality libraries and yields a highly uniform coverage, equivalent to the standard Nextera Flex kit. We show that strongly size-selected libraries produce sufficient yield and complexity to support de novo microbial genome assembly, and that assemblies of the large-insert libraries can be much more contiguous than standard libraries without strong size selection. We introduce a new set of sample barcodes that are distinct from standard Illumina barcodes, enabling Hackflex samples to be multiplexed with samples barcoded using standard Illumina kits. Using Hackflex, we were able to achieve a per-sample reagent cost for library prep of A$7.22 (Australian dollars) (US$5.60; UK £3.87, £1=A$1.87), which is 9.87 times lower than the standard Nextera Flex protocol at advertised retail price. An additional simple modification and further simplification of the protocol by omitting the wash step enables a further price reduction to reach an overall 14-fold cost saving. This method will allow researchers to construct more libraries within a given budget, thereby yielding more data and facilitating research programmes where sequencing large numbers of libraries is beneficial

Hackflex: low cost Illumina sequencing library construction for high sample counts

ABSTRACT We developed Hackflex, a low-cost method for the production of Illumina-compatible sequencing libraries that allows up to 11 times more libraries for high-throughput Illumina sequencing to be generated at a fixed cost. We call this new method Hackflex. Quality of library preparation was tested by constructing libraries from E. coli MG1655 genomic DNA using either Hackflex, standard Nextera Flex or a variation of standard Nextera Flex in which the bead-linked transposase is diluted prior to use. We demonstrated that Hackflex can produce high quality libraries and yields a highly uniform coverage, equivalent to the standard Nextera Flex kit. Using Hackflex, we were able to achieve a per sample reagent cost of library prep of A$8.66, which is 8.23 times lower than the Standard Nextera Flex protocol at advertised retail price. An additional simple modification to the protocol enables a further price reduction of up to 11 fold or about A$6.50/sample. This method will allow researchers to construct more libraries within a given budget, thereby yielding more data and facilitating research programs where sequencing large numbers of libraries is beneficial