Twenty five year follow-up for breast cancer incidence and mortality of the Canadian national breast screening study: randomised screening trial

Annual mammography in women aged 40-59 does not reduce mortality from breast cancer beyond that of physical examination or usual care when adjuvant therapy for breast cancer is freely available. Abstract Objective: To compare breast cancer incidence and mortality up to 25 years in women aged 40-59 who did or did not undergo mammography screening. Design: Follow-up of randomised screening trial by centre coordinators, the study’s central office, and linkage to cancer registries and vital statistics databases. Setting: 15 screening centres in six Canadian provinces,1980-85 (Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia). Participants: 89 835 women, aged 40-59, randomly assigned to mammography (five annual mammography screens) or control (no mammography). Interventions: Women aged 40-49 in the mammography arm and all women aged 50-59 in both arms received annual physical breast examinations. Women aged 40-49 in the control arm received a single examination followed by usual care in the community. Main outcome measure: Deaths from breast cancer. Results: During the five year screening period, 666 invasive breast cancers were diagnosed in the mammography arm (n=44 925 participants) and 524 in the controls (n=44 910), and of these, 180 women in the mammography arm and 171 women in the control arm died of breast cancer during the 25 year follow-up period. The overall hazard ratio for death from breast cancer diagnosed during the screening period associated with mammography was 1.05 (95% confidence interval 0.85 to 1.30). The findings for women aged 40-49 and 50-59 were almost identical. During the entire study period, 3250 women in the mammography arm and 3133 in the control arm had a diagnosis of breast cancer, and 500 and 505, respectively, died of breast cancer. Thus the cumulative mortality from breast cancer was similar between women in the mammography arm and in the control arm (hazard ratio 0.99, 95% confidence interval 0.88 to 1.12). After 15 years of follow-up a residual excess of 106 cancers was observed in the mammography arm, attributable to over-diagnosis. Conclusion: Annual mammography in women aged 40-59 does not reduce mortality from breast cancer beyond that of physical examination or usual care when adjuvant therapy for breast cancer is freely available. Overall, 22% (106/484) of screen detected invasive breast cancers were over-diagnosed, representing one over-diagnosed breast cancer for every 424 women who received mammography screening in the trial

Using Wikis to Support Peer Assessment Activities in Higher Education

This study explored the effectiveness of using wikis as an environment to support peer-assessment in higher education settings. The participants of this study were nineteen per-serviced teachers who enrolled in an undergraduate course on the application of instructional technologies in classroom. In the study, the participants created their personal wiki pages within a course wiki and formed groups of three or four. Five peer-assessment activities were assigned, in which the participants uploaded their class projects to their wiki pages and went to their group member’s pages to provide feedback. The participants were expected to evaluate other’s projects in terms of educational values, visual effects and the format. A short survey was conducted after each activity asking participants’ perceived learning and a post-survey was conducted at the end of the study to ask their general experience of peer-assessment activities in the wiki environment. The survey results and the analysis of participants’ wiki posts indicated that the wiki was an interactive environment that facilitated the peer-assessment effectively. With proper guidance, the participants were able to provide critical peer feedback within the wiki environment

Learning Outside of Classroom: Exploring the Active Part of an Informal Online English Learning Community in China

This study explored how the GRE Analytical Writing Section Discussion Forum, an informal online language learning community in China, functioned to support its members to improve their English writing proficiency. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) model was used as the theoretical framework to explore the existence of teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence in the GRE Analytical Writing Section Discussion Forum. The transcript analysis of postings in the GRE Analytical Writing Section Discussion Forum was used to find the existence of teaching, cognitive presence, and social presence, and an adapted CoI survey was sent to members to measure their perceived teaching, cognitive, and social presences. The results showed strong evidences of teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence, and high levels of perceived teaching, cognitive, and social presences in the GRE Analytical Writing Section Discussion Forum. The well-designed technological environment, distributed teaching presence shared by moderators and members, and extensive evidences of social presence in the discussion forum worked together to support learning in the GRE Analytical Writing Section Discussion Forum

A Holistic Perspective on the Performance Implications of Strategic Alignment in Knowledge Management

Recently, the importance of the information technology (IT) for effective knowledge management (KM) activities has been noted. The match of IT and KM is an important concern for executives. However, their efforts do not always yield positive organizational outcome since enough exceptions indicate that knowledge strategy and human resource management (HRM) strategy are interdependent that must be integrated with IT as a whole. Consequently, a linkage of effective IT strategy and KM strategy that are consistent with HRM strategy is the key to reduced costs, which in turn, will achieve a higher performance. Drawing on the concept of strategic alignment, this study proposes a KM strategic alignment model in the MIS area within which KM strategy, IT strategy, and HRM strategy, coexist. Survey research method is employed in this study. Empirical data for hypotheses testing are collected from top-ranking companies in Taiwan, yielding 161 valid samples. Performance implications of strategic alignment are examined using covariation approaches. The results suggest that strategic alignment among these three strategies contributes to business performance. Based on the research results, meaningful findings and conclusions are described and suggestions for future research are proposed

Anxious and Angry: A Replication Investigating the Effects of Emotions on Perceptions of Online Review Helpfulness

This study is an exact replication of three studies investigating how emotional content embedded in a product review influences perceptions of review helpfulness (Yin, Bond, and Zhang 2014). The replication confirms that emotional content influences perceptions of review helpfulness. Consistent with the original study, our experimental findings indicate that the relationship between review helpfulness and the emotion embedded in a review is mediated by the perception of reviewer cognitive effort. However, this experiment found that angry as well as anxious reviews were considered helpful, deviating from the original findings in which only anxious reviews were perceived as helpful. Further, examination of a large sample of reviews confirms that reviews with anxious content are rated as more helpful, while angry content does not influence helpfulness. However, we were unable to replicate the findings of the second experiment reported in the original research as neither anxious nor angry reviews were considered helpful in our second study. It may be that, at this time, reviews with high levels of emotional content are not perceived as helpful. Instead, we found that only empathy (perceptions of shared emotion with the reviewer) impacted perceptions of review helpfulness. Therefore, the influence of empathy on review helpfulness may be worth investigating in future studies. That our findings deviate slightly from those of the original study provides further support for the importance of replications

Reduction in squamous cell carcinomas in mouse skin by dietary zinc supplementation.

Inadequate dietary Zn consumption increases susceptibility to esophageal and other cancers in humans and model organisms. Since Zn supplementation can prevent cancers in rodent squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) models, we were interested in determining if it could have a preventive effect in a rodent skin cancer model, as a preclinical basis for considering a role for Zn in prevention of human nonmelanoma skin cancers, the most frequent cancers in humans. We used the 7,12-dimethyl benzanthracene carcinogen/phorbol myristate acetate tumor promoter treatment method to induce skin tumors in Zn-sufficient wild-type and Fhit (human or mouse protein) knockout mice. Fhit protein expression is lost in \u3e50% of human cancers, including skin SCCs, and Fhit-deficient mice show increased sensitivity to carcinogen induction of tumors. We hypothesized that: (1) the skin cancer burdens would be reduced by Zn supplementation; (2) Fhit(-/-) (Fhit, murine fragile histidine triad gene) mice would show increased susceptibility to skin tumor induction versus wild-type mice. 30 weeks after initiating treatment, the tumor burden was increased ~2-fold in Fhit(-/-) versus wild-type mice (16.2 versus 7.6 tumors, P \u3c 0.001); Zn supplementation significantly reduced tumor burdens in Fhit(-/-) mice (males and females combined, 16.2 unsupplemented versus 10.3 supplemented, P = 0.001). Most importantly, the SCC burden was reduced after Zn supplementation in both strains and genders of mice, most significantly in the wild-type males (P = 0.035). Although the mechanism(s) of action of Zn supplementation in skin tumor prevention is not known in detail, the Zn-supplemented tumors showed evidence of reduced DNA damage and some cohorts showed reduced inflammation scores. The results suggest that mild Zn supplementation should be tested for prevention of skin cancer in high-risk human cohorts

A Study on the Factors Influencing the Intention of Reusing an eCommerce Website

A customer’s intention of reusing an e-commerce website for shopping has a great consequence for the website’s profitability; therefore, understanding the factors that influence a Web-customer’s reuse intention is of great importance to e-commerce. This study examines the influencing factors by constructing an integrated model with the Motivation Hub and the Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, and adopting the constructs of general and specific Internet self-efficacy, perceived performance, disconfirmation, satisfaction, and reuse intention. Six research hypotheses derived from the integrated model were validated by EQS using a field survey of the users of top 100 e-commerce websites in Taiwan. The academic implication of this study is that the integrated model explains the factors that influence Web-customers’ reuse intention. For practical application, the e-commerce companies can adopt the research outcomes to ensure the success of their websites

Pseudo Supervised Metrics: Evaluating Unsupervised Image to Image Translation Models In Unsupervised Cross-Domain Classification Frameworks

The ability to classify images accurately and efficiently is dependent on having access to large labeled datasets and testing on data from the same domain that the model is trained on. Classification becomes more challenging when dealing with new data from a different domain, where collecting a large labeled dataset and training a new classifier from scratch is time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes infeasible or impossible. Cross-domain classification frameworks were developed to handle this data domain shift problem by utilizing unsupervised image-to-image (UI2I) translation models to translate an input image from the unlabeled domain to the labeled domain. The problem with these unsupervised models lies in their unsupervised nature. For lack of annotations, it is not possible to use the traditional supervised metrics to evaluate these translation models to pick the best-saved checkpoint model. In this paper, we introduce a new method called Pseudo Supervised Metrics that was designed specifically to support cross-domain classification applications contrary to other typically used metrics such as the FID which was designed to evaluate the model in terms of the quality of the generated image from a human-eye perspective. We show that our metric not only outperforms unsupervised metrics such as the FID, but is also highly correlated with the true supervised metrics, robust, and explainable. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it can be used as a standard metric for future research in this field by applying it to a critical real-world problem (the boiling crisis problem).Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2212.0910