Walking works wonders: a workplace health intervention evaluated over 24 months

Walking Works Wonders (WWW) is a workplace intervention designed to increase physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour. WWW involves tailoring health information according to employees’ readiness for change. The approach recognises that when attempting to motivate behaviour change, success is greater when interventions align with recipients’ attitudes and beliefs. The impact of the tailored approach was investigated by comparing tailored interventions with standard conditions and control groups in a 24-month longitudinal study in 10 worksites across the UK. Employees who received either a standard or tailored intervention demonstrated significantly higher self-reported work ability and improved organizational commitment, job motivation, job satisfaction, and a reduction in intention to quit the organization. The tailored interventions significantly reduced BMI and waist circumference compared to standard and control conditions. Workplace health interventions designed to increase physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour are likely to be more effective where the information is tailored to employees’ readiness to change

On domain walls in a Ginzburg-Landau non-linear S^2-sigma model

The domain wall solutions of a Ginzburg-Landau non-linear $S^2$-sigma hybrid model are unveiled. There are three types of basic topological walls and two types of degenerate families of composite - one topological, the other non-topological- walls. The domain wall solutions are identified as the finite action trajectories (in infinite time) of a related mechanical system that is Hamilton-Jacobi separable in sphero-conical coordinates. The physical and mathematical features of these domain walls are thoroughly discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figure

Molecular, serological and biological variation among chickpea chlorotic stunt virus isolates from five countries of North Africa and West Asia

Chickpea chlorotic stunt virus (CpCSV), a proposed new member of the genus Polerovirus (family Luteoviridae), has been reported only from Ethiopia. In attempts to determine the geographical distribution and variability of CpCSV, a pair of degenerate primers derived from conserved domains of the luteovirus coat protein (CP) gene was used for RT-PCR analysis of various legume samples originating from five countries and containing unidentified luteoviruses. Sequencing of the amplicons provided evidence for the occurrence of CpCSV also in Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, and Syria. Phylogenetic analysis of the CP nucleotide sequences of 18 samples from the five countries revealed the existence of two geographic groups of CpCSV isolates differing in CP sequences by 8–10%. Group I included isolates from Ethiopia and Sudan, while group II comprised those from Egypt, Morocco and Syria. For distinguishing these two groups, a simple RFLP test using HindIII and/or PvuII for cleavage of CP-gene-derived PCR products was developed. In ELISA and immunoelectron microscopy, however, isolates from these two groups could not be distinguished with rabbit antisera raised against a group-I isolate from Ethiopia (CpCSV-Eth) and a group-II isolate from Syria (CpCSV-Sy). Since none of the ten monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) that had been produced earlier against CpCSV-Eth reacted with group-II isolates, further MAbs were produced. Of the seven MAbs raised against CpCSV-Sy, two reacted only with CpCSV-Sy and two others with both CpCSV-Sy and -Eth. This indicated that there are group I- and II-specific and common (species-specific) epitopes on the CpCSV CP and that the corresponding MAbs are suitable for specific detection and discrimination of CpCSV isolates. Moreover, CpCSV-Sy (group II) caused more severe stunting and yellowing in faba bean than CpCSV-Eth (group I). In conclusion, our data indicate the existence of a geographically associated variation in the molecular, serological and presumably biological properties of CpCSV

The influence of feature selection methods on accuracy, stability and interpretability of molecular signatures

Motivation: Biomarker discovery from high-dimensional data is a crucial problem with enormous applications in biology and medicine. It is also extremely challenging from a statistical viewpoint, but surprisingly few studies have investigated the relative strengths and weaknesses of the plethora of existing feature selection methods. Methods: We compare 32 feature selection methods on 4 public gene expression datasets for breast cancer prognosis, in terms of predictive performance, stability and functional interpretability of the signatures they produce. Results: We observe that the feature selection method has a significant influence on the accuracy, stability and interpretability of signatures. Simple filter methods generally outperform more complex embedded or wrapper methods, and ensemble feature selection has generally no positive effect. Overall a simple Student's t-test seems to provide the best results. Availability: Code and data are publicly available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~ahaury/

Eosinophils Are Important for Protection, Immunoregulation and Pathology during Infection with Nematode Microfilariae

Eosinophil responses typify both allergic and parasitic helminth disease. In helminthic disease, the role of eosinophils can be both protective in immune responses and destructive in pathological responses. To investigate whether eosinophils are involved in both protection and pathology during filarial nematode infection, we explored the role of eosinophils and their granule proteins, eosinophil peroxidase (EPO) and major basic protein-1 (MBP-1), during infection with Brugia malayi microfilariae. Using eosinophil-deficient mice (PHIL), we further clarify the role of eosinophils in clearance of microfilariae during primary, but not challenge infection in vivo. Deletion of EPO or MBP-1 alone was insufficient to abrogate parasite clearance suggesting that either these molecules are redundant or eosinophils act indirectly in parasite clearance via augmentation of other protective responses. Absence of eosinophils increased mast cell recruitment, but not other cell types, into the broncho-alveolar lavage fluid during challenge infection. In addition absence of eosinophils or EPO alone, augmented parasite-induced IgE responses, as measured by ELISA, demonstrating that eosinophils are involved in regulation of IgE. Whole body plethysmography indicated that nematode-induced changes in airway physiology were reduced in challenge infection in the absence of eosinophils and also during primary infection in the absence of EPO alone. However lack of eosinophils or MBP-1 actually increased goblet cell mucus production. We did not find any major differences in cytokine responses in the absence of eosinophils, EPO or MBP-1. These results reveal that eosinophils actively participate in regulation of IgE and goblet cell mucus production via granule secretion during nematode-induced pathology and highlight their importance both as effector cells, as damage-inducing cells and as supervisory cells that shape both innate and adaptive immunity

Mechanical Systems with Symmetry, Variational Principles, and Integration Algorithms

This paper studies variational principles for mechanical systems with symmetry and their applications to integration algorithms. We recall some general features of how to reduce variational principles in the presence of a symmetry group along with general features of integration algorithms for mechanical systems. Then we describe some integration algorithms based directly on variational principles using a discretization technique of Veselov. The general idea for these variational integrators is to directly discretize Hamilton’s principle rather than the equations of motion in a way that preserves the original systems invariants, notably the symplectic form and, via a discrete version of Noether’s theorem, the momentum map. The resulting mechanical integrators are second-order accurate, implicit, symplectic-momentum algorithms. We apply these integrators to the rigid body and the double spherical pendulum to show that the techniques are competitive with existing integrators

An?lisis legal, contable y tributario de las posibles transacciones a ser realizadas con criptomonedas por personas naturales y jurid?cas en el Per?

Las transacciones con criptomonedas en el Per? no cuentan con ning?n tipo de regulaci?n; sin embargo, de la revisi?n del marco normativo vigente, se ve un impacto en el riesgo de lavado de activos y la vulneraci?n de los derechos del consumidor. A nivel contable y financiero, se determina que no existe con una normativa espec?fica para el tratamiento contable y financiero de una criptomoneda, sin embargo, los criterios de las NIIF sirven como base la correcta clasificaci?n de la criptomoneda, bien como pasivo, o bien como activo, y, por tanto, no ahondan en su naturaleza contable en s? mismo. Finalmente, se encuentra que, si bien no hay una definici?n de criptomoneda en la normativa tributaria nacional, y que aparentemente su uso est? completamente desligado del ?mbito de aplicaci?n actual, s? hay operaciones realizadas con criptomonedas que se encuentran dentro del marco tributario