Does air pollution cause respiratory illness? A new look at Canadian cities

It is routinely asserted that urban air pollution is a major cause of acute respiratory conditions, leading to thousands of hospitalizations each year. The claim is based on inferences from partial correlations between ambient air pollution levels and hospitalization rates. Yet questions persist about the statistical robustness of the epidemiological findings, and controlled experiments have not confirmed the statistical findings. In this paper we present and analyze a new monthly data base showing concentrations of five major air contaminants in 11 large Canadian cities from 1974 to 1994, matched with monthly hospital admission rates by age group for all lung diagnostic categories; as well as a comprehensive set of socioeconomic and meteorological covariates. We compare two estimation approaches: model selection and Bayesian model averaging. Almost all of our estimates of the health effects of air pollution are insignificant. Two pollutant types have significantly negative coefficients, indicating, if interpreted in the standard way, that these pollutants are actually beneficial for health. We do not claim this, but we conclude that the perceived statistical relationship between air pollution and health is not robust

Garbage as a Feed for Swine

Garbage is the main feed for swine in the Territory of Hawaii because of the high cost of other concentrates commonly fed to hogs. An extensive study has therefore been made of the value of garbage as a feed for swine. This study has included experiments with weanling pigs, with growing and fattening pigs, with brood sows, and supplementary experiments with rats. Analyses of 622 samples of military garbage and of 50 samples from a civilian cafeteria indicate that military garbage is ordinarily well balanced. at least in respect to nutritive ratio. That from the cafeteria was considerably lower in protein

Integrable Deformations of c^=1\hat{c}=1 Strings in Flux Backgrounds

We study d=2 0A string theory perturbed by tachyon momentum modes in backgrounds with non-trivial tachyon condensate and Ramond-Ramond (RR) flux. In the matrix model description, we uncover a complexified Toda lattice hierarchy constrained by a pair of novel holomorphic string equations. We solve these constraints in the classical limit for general RR flux and tachyon condensate. Due to the non-holomorphic nature of the tachyon perturbations, the transcendental equations which we derive for the string susceptibility are manifestly non-holomorphic. We explore the phase structure and critical behavior of the theory.Comment: 39 pages, 4 figure

Is nonperturbative inflatino production during preheating a real threat to cosmology?

We discuss toy models where supersymmetry is broken due to non-vanishing time-varying vacuum expectation value of the inflaton field during preheating. We discuss the production of inflatino the superpartner of inflaton due to vacuum fluctuations and then we argue that they do not survive until nucleosynthesis and decay along with the inflaton to produce a thermal bath after preheating. Thus the only relevant remnant is the helicity \pm 3/2 gravitinos which can genuinely cause problem to nucleosynthesis.Comment: 10 pages, Updates to match the accepted version in Phys. Rev.

Generating asymptotically plane wave spacetimes

In an attempt to study asymptotically plane wave spacetimes which admit an event horizon, we find solutions to vacuum Einstein's equations in arbitrary dimension which have a globally null Killing field and rotational symmetry. We show that while such solutions can be deformed to include ones which are asymptotically plane wave, they do not posses a regular event horizon. If we allow for additional matter, such as in supergravity theories, we show that it is possible to have extremal solutions with globally null Killing field, a regular horizon, and which, in addition, are asymptotically plane wave. In particular, we deform the extremal M2-brane solution in 11-dimensional supergravity so that it behaves asymptotically as a 10-dimensional vacuum plane wave times a real line.Comment: 23 pages, 1 eps figure; harvmac; v2:refs added; v3:minor comments adde

The impact of treatment adherence for patients with diabetes and hypertension on cardiovascular disease risk : a protocol for a retrospective cohort study, 2008-2018

The study received partial in-kind funding from Diabetes Action Canada (503854).Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally and in Canada. Diabetes and hypertension are major risk factors for CVD events. Despite the increasing availability of effective treatments, the majority of diabetic and hypertensive patients do not have adequate blood pressure and glycemic control. One of the major contributors is poor treatment adherence. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the impact of treatment adherence for patients with both diabetes and hypertension on acute severe CVD events and intermediate clinical outcomes in Canadian primary care settings. Methods: We will conduct a population-based retrospective cohort study of patients living with both diabetes and hypertension in Ontario, Canada, between January 1, 2008, and March 31, 2018. The Social Cognitive Theory will be used as a conceptual framework by which to frame the reciprocal relationship between treatment adherence, personal factors, and environmental determinants and how this interplay impacts CVD events and clinical outcomes. Data will be derived from the Diabetes Action Canada National Data Repository. A time-varying Cox proportional hazards model will be used to estimate the impacts of treatment adherence on CVD morbidity and mortality. Multivariable linear regression models and hierarchical regression models will be used to estimate the associations between treatment adherence of different medication categories and intermediate clinical outcomes. Our primary outcome is the association between treatment adherence and the risk of acute severe CVD events, including CVD mortality. The secondary outcome is the association between treatment adherence and intermediate clinical outcomes including diastolic and systolic blood pressures, glycated hemoglobin, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and total cholesterol. Owing to data limitation, we use medication prescriptions as a proxy to estimate treatment adherence. We assume that a patient adhered to medications if she or he had any prescription record in the 4 preceding quarters and 1 quarter after each quarter of interest. Acute severe CVD events are defined based on the World Health Organization’s Monitoring Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Disease Project, including acute coronary heart disease, stroke, and heart failure. As causes of death are not available, the number of CVD deaths will be computed using the most recent systolic blood pressure distributions and the population attributable risks related to systolic blood pressure level. Results: The project was funded by Diabetes Action Canada (reference number: 503854) and approved by the University of Toronto Research Ethics Board (reference number: 36065). The project started in June 2018 and is expected to be finished by September 2019. Conclusions: The findings will be helpful in identifying the challenges of treatment adherence for diabetic and hypertensive patients in primary care settings. This will also help to develop intervention strategies to promote treatment adherence for patients with multi-morbidities.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The role of groups as local context in large Enterprise Social Networks: A Case Study of Yammer at Deloitte Australia

Enterprise Social Networking, the application of popular social networking techniques to the workplaces of organisations, is an increasingly common phenomenon. But its nature, benefits and proliferation are not yet fully understood. In this study we investigate ESN communication at the micro-level. We focus on the role of the group feature in structuring and providing context for communication in large ESNs. Our case study is Yammer at Deloitte. In contrast to previous studies we carry out an analysis of communication at the thread (conversation) level, rather than at the level of single messages. This allows us to provide a more contextual understanding of the group aspects of communication. We find that information sharing underpins the majority of communication threads, which speaks to the usefulness of ESN, in particular in the context of knowledge-intensive work. We further uncover differences between network-wide and group-centred communication and derive a framework of four group archetypes, based on different group communication patterns. Our findings are useful for decision-makers in providing a better understanding of the role of groups in providing local contexts for users in large ESNs

Experiencing the world with archetypal symbols: A new form of aesthetics.

According to the theories of symbolic interactionism, phenomenology of perception and archetypes, we argue that symbols play the key role in translating the information from the physical world to the human experience, and archetypes are the universal knowledge of cognition that generates the background of human experience (the life-world). Therefore, we propose a conceptual framework that depicts how people experience the world with symbols, and how archetypes relate the deepest level of human experience. This framework indicates a new direction of research on memory and emotion, and also suggests that archetypal symbolism can be a new resource of aesthetic experience design.Postprint (published version

Deriving the mass of particles from Extended Theories of Gravity in LHC era

We derive a geometrical approach to produce the mass of particles that could be suitably tested at LHC. Starting from a 5D unification scheme, we show that all the known interactions could be suitably deduced as an induced symmetry breaking of the non-unitary GL(4)-group of diffeomorphisms. The deformations inducing such a breaking act as vector bosons that, depending on the gravitational mass states, can assume the role of interaction bosons like gluons, electroweak bosons or photon. The further gravitational degrees of freedom, emerging from the reduction mechanism in 4D, eliminate the hierarchy problem since generate a cut-off comparable with electroweak one at TeV scales. In this "economic" scheme, gravity should induce the other interactions in a non-perturbative way.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figur