Fear of Crime, Incivilities, and Collective Efficacy in Four Miami Neighborhoods

Purpose: Extant literature indicates that individual perceptions of collective efficacy and incivilities are important in explaining fear of crime. These studies, however, often implicitly assume that the relationships between key variables do not differ between neighborhoods. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between perceptions of collective efficacy, perceptions of incivilities, and fear of crime and determine whether these relationships are constant between neighborhoods. Methods: Surveys were conducted using a sample of residents from four neighborhoods within Miami-Dade County. Structural equation models were used to examine the relationships between perceptions of collective efficacy, perceptions of incivilities, and fear of crime for each neighborhood separately. Tests for invariance were conducted to determine whether the coefficients from these models differed across neighborhoods. Results: Results from these analyses suggest that the relationship between perceptions of collective efficacy and fear of crime exhibit significant heterogeneity between neighborhoods, as do a number of other relationships. The relationships between perceptions of collective efficacy and perceptions of incivilities, and perceptions of incivilities and fear of crime do not exhibit heterogeneity. Conclusions: These results illustrate the importance of examining perceptions of collective efficacy within the neighborhood context. Implications for policy and future research are discusse

Speech-driven facial animations improve speech-in-noise comprehension of humans

Understanding speech becomes a demanding task when the environment is noisy. Comprehension of speech in noise can be substantially improved by looking at the speaker’s face, and this audiovisual benefit is even more pronounced in people with hearing impairment. Recent advances in AI have allowed to synthesize photorealistic talking faces from a speech recording and a still image of a person’s face in an end-to-end manner. However, it has remained unknown whether such facial animations improve speech-in-noise comprehension. Here we consider facial animations produced by a recently introduced generative adversarial network (GAN), and show that humans cannot distinguish between the synthesized and the natural videos. Importantly, we then show that the end-to-end synthesized videos significantly aid humans in understanding speech in noise, although the natural facial motions yield a yet higher audiovisual benefit. We further find that an audiovisual speech recognizer (AVSR) benefits from the synthesized facial animations as well. Our results suggest that synthesizing facial motions from speech can be used to aid speech comprehension in difficult listening environments

Local and Global Energies for Shape Analysis in Medical Imaging

In a previous contribution a new Riemannian shape space, named TPS space, was introduced to perform statistics on shape data. This space was endowed with a Rie-mannian metric and a flat connection, with torsion, compatible with the given metric. This connection allows the definition of a Parallel Transport of the deformation compatible with the threefold decomposition in spherical, deviatoric and non affine components. Such a Parallel Transport also conserves the-energy, strictly related to the total elastic strain energy stored by the body in the original deformation. New machinery is here presented in order to calculate the bending energy on the body only (body bending energy) in order to restrict it exclusively within physical boundaries of objects involved in the deformation analysis. The novelty of this new procedure resides in the fact that we propose a new metric to conserve during the TPS direct transport. This allows transporting the shape change more coherently with the mechanical meaning of the deformation. The geometry of the TPS Space is then further developed in order to better represent the relationship between the-energy, the strain energy and the so called bending-energy densities

Bacterial infection elicits heat shock protein 72 release from pleural mesothelial cells

Heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) has been implicated in infection-related processes and has been found in body fluids during infection. This study aimed to determine whether pleural mesothelial cells release HSP70 in response to bacterial infection in vitro and in mouse models of serosal infection. In addition, the in vitro cytokine effects of the HSP70 isoform, Hsp72, on mesothelial cells were examined. Further, Hsp72 was measured in human pleural effusions and levels compared between non-infectious and infectious patients to determine the diagnostic accuracy of pleural fluid Hsp72 compared to traditional pleural fluid parameters. We showed that mesothelial release of Hsp72 was significantly raised when cells were treated with live and heat-killed Streptococcus pneumoniae. In mice, intraperitoneal injection of S. pneumoniae stimulated a 2-fold increase in Hsp72 levels in peritoneal lavage (p,0.01). Extracellular Hsp72 did not induce or inhibit mediator release from cultured mesothelial cells. Hsp72 levels were significantly higher in effusions of infectious origin compared to non-infectious effusions (p,0.05). The data establish that pleural mesothelial cells can release Hsp72 in response to bacterial infection and levels are raised in infectious pleural effusions. The biological role of HSP70 in pleural infection warrants exploration

The TPS Direct Transport: a new method for transporting deformations in the Size-and-shape Space

Modern shape analysis allows the fine comparison of shape changes occurring between different objects. Very often the classic machineries of Generalized Procrustes Analysis and Principal Component Analysis are used in order to contrast the shape change occurring among configurations represented by homologous landmarks. However, if size and shape data are structured in different groups thus constituting different morphological trajectories, a data centering is needed if one wants to compare solely the deformation representing the trajectories. To do that, inter-individual variation must be filtered out. This maneuver is rarely applied in studies using simulated or real data. A geometrical procedure named Parallel Transport, that can be based on various connection types, is necessary to perform such kind of data centering. Usually, the Levi Civita connection is used for interpolation of curves in a Riemannian space. It can also be used to transport a deformation. We demonstrate that this procedure does not preserve some important characters of the deformation, even in the affine case. We propose a novel procedure called `TPS Direct Transport' which is able to perfectly transport deformation in the affine case and to better approximate non affine deformation in comparison to existing tools. We recommend to center shape data using the methods described here when the differences in deformation rather than in shape are under study

The decomposition of deformation: new metrics to enhance shape analysis in medical imaging

In landmarks-based Shape Analysis size is measured, in most cases, with Centroid Size. Changes in shape are decomposed in affine and non affine components. Furthermore the non affine component can be in turn decomposed in a series of local deformations (partial warps). If the extent of deformation between two shapes is small, the difference between centroid size and m-Volume increment is barely appreciable. In medical imaging applied to soft tissues bodies can undergo very large deformations, involving large changes in size. The cardiac example, analyzed in the present paper, shows changes in m-Volume that can reach the 60%. We show here that standard Geometric Morphometrics tools (landmarks, Thin Plate Spline, and related decomposition of the deformation) can be generalized to better describe the very large deformations of biological tissues, without losing a synthetic description. In particular, the classical decomposition of the space tangent to the shape space in affine and non affine components is enriched to include also the change in size, in order to give a complete description of the tangent space to the size-and-shape space. The proposed generalization is formulated by means of a new Riemannian metric describing the change in size as change in m-Volume rather than change in Centroid Size. This leads to a redefinition of some aspects of the Kendall’s size-and-shape space without losing Kendall’s original formulation. This new formulation is discussed by means of simulated examples using 2D and 3D platonic shapes as well as a real example from clinical 3D echocardiographic data. We demonstrate that our decomposition based approaches discriminate very effectively healthy subjects from patients affected by Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Increased risk of incident dementia following use of anticholinergic agents: A systematic literature review and meta-analysis

Background/rationale: Long-term treatment with anticholinergic agents may increase the risk of cognitive impairment or dementia. This systematic literature review and meta-analysis aimed to assess the impact of ≥3 months of exposure to anticholinergics as a class on the risk of dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and change in cognitive function. The impact of anticholinergic agents specifically used to treat overactive bladder was also evaluated. Materials and Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted to identify English language articles evaluating the impact of anticholinergic use for ≥3 months on dementia or cognitive function in adult patients. Databases searched included PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library. Meta-analyses were conducted using random-effects models; 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and 95% prediction intervals (PIs) were reported. Results: A total of 2122 records were identified. Out of those, 21 studies underwent qualitative synthesis and 6 reported endpoints relevant for inclusion in a meta-analysis assessing the risk of incident dementia. The overall rate ratio for incident dementia was 1.46 (95% CI: 1.17–1.81; 95% PI: 0.70–3.04; n = 6). The risk of incident dementia increased with increasing exposure (n = 3). In addition, two studies from the meta-analysis reported an increased risk of dementia with ≥3 months of use of bladder antimuscarinics (adjusted odds ratios ranged from 1.21 to 1.65, depending on exposure category). Conclusion: Anticholinergic use for ≥3 months increased the risk of dementia on average by an estimated 46% versus nonuse. This relationship was consistent in studies assessing overactive bladder medications. The risk of developing dementia should be carefully considered in the context of potential benefit before prescribing anticholinergics

Crime Watch:Hurricanes and Illegal Activities

We investigate the relationship between hurricane strikes and crime for Jamaica. To this end, we construct hurricane damages and daily recorded criminal activity. Hurricanes are found to significantly increase crime by 35%, where the impact is stronger for more damaging storms, but this only lasts for the duration of the storm. Decomposing crime into its various subtypes, one finds that while aggravated assault, break-ins, and shooting increase during a hurricane, murders, rapes, and robberies actually decline. The greatest increase is with shootings, whereas the greatest decline is with rape. Crucially, the impact of crime depends on the existence of a storm warning. Our results also show that high frequency data more accurately estimate the impact of hurricanes on crime.</p

Percutaneous laser ablation for benign and malignant thyroid diseases

Minimally invasive image-guided thermal ablation is becoming increasingly common as an alternative to surgery for the treatment of benign thyroid nodules. Among the various techniques for thermal ablation, laser ablation (LA) is the least invasive, using the smallest applicators available on the market and enabling extremely precise energy deposition. However, in some cases, multiple laser fibers must be used simultaneously for the treatment of large nodules. In this review, the LA technique is described, and its main clinical applications and results are discussed and illustrated