Alien Registration- Hoyt, David B. (Monticello, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/33899/thumbnail.jp

The Effectiveness of Insurance Fraud Statutues: Evidence from Automobile Insurance

Insurance fraud, which adds an estimated $85 billion per year to the total insurance bill in the U.S., is an extremely serious problem for consumers, regulators, and insurance companies. This paper analyzes the effects of state legislation and market conditions on automobile insurance fraud from 1988 to 1999, a period representing a substantial increase in the enactment of antifraud legislation. Our empirical results show that the laws have mixed effects; two laws have no statistically significant effect on fraud. The strongest evidence of fraud mitigation effects are associated with mandatory Special Investigation Units, classification of insurance fraud as a felony, and mandatory reporting of professionals to licensing authorities. However, laws requiring insurers to report potentially fraudulent claims to law enforcement authorities increase fraud, which may reflect some substitution from more efficacious private efforts to less productive state activity. Many underlying characteristics of the market also affect fraud.Insurance Fraud, Automobile Insurance, Moral Hazard

Nutrition impacts the prevalence of peripheral arterial disease in the United States

ObjectiveTraditional recommendations for peripheral arterial disease (PAD) risk factor reduction include smoking cessation, low-fat/low-salt diet, exercise, and optimal medical management of chronic disease. Little attention has been paid to the role of dietary supplementation of specific nutrients in the prevention of PAD.MethodsThis cross-sectional study used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to determine specific nutrients that are associated with prevalent PAD in the United States (US) population. NHANES data include nationwide sampling of the US population, using physical examination, questionnaire, and laboratory testing. PAD status was defined by an ankle-brachial index (ABI) of <0.9. Nutritional information was collected by 24-hour dietary recall using the US Department of Agriculture dietary collection instrument. Data were linked to a database of foods and their nutrient composition. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to evaluate associations between specific nutrient intake and the presence of PAD. Multivariate models adjusted for the effects of age, gender, hypertension, coronary vascular disease, diabetes, and smoking.ResultsNHANES data for 1999 to 2004 included 7203 lower extremity examinations, of which 422 individuals had prevalent PAD (5.9%). Examinees with PAD had significantly higher rates of hypertension, coronary artery disease, diabetes, and smoking than those without PAD. Univariate analysis revealed that consumption of all nutrients considered were associated with lower odds of PAD, including antioxidants (vitamins A, C, and E), folate, other B vitamins (B6, B12), fiber, and polyunsaturated and saturated fatty acids. After adjustment for traditional risk factors, nutrients associated with reduced prevalence of PAD were vitamin A (odds ratio [OR], 0.79; P = .036), vitamin C (OR, 0.84; P < .001), vitamin E (OR, 0.78; P = .011), vitamin B6 (OR, 0.71; P = .023), fiber (OR, 0.65; P < .001), folate (OR, 0.67; P = .006), and ω-3 (α-linolenic) fatty acid (OR, 0.79; P = .028).ConclusionsImproved nutrition is associated with a reduced prevalence of PAD in the US population. Higher consumption of specific nutrients, including antioxidants (vitamin A, C, and E), vitamin B6, fiber, folate, and ω-3 fatty acids have a significant protective effect, irrespective of traditional cardiovascular risk factors. These findings suggest specific dietary supplementation may afford additional protection, above traditional risk factor modification, for the prevention of PAD

A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM).

Despite progress in the development of standards for describing and exchanging scientific information, the lack of easy-to-use standards for mapping between different representations of the same or similar objects in different databases poses a major impediment to data integration and interoperability. Mappings often lack the metadata needed to be correctly interpreted and applied. For example, are two terms equivalent or merely related? Are they narrow or broad matches? Or are they associated in some other way? Such relationships between the mapped terms are often not documented, which leads to incorrect assumptions and makes them hard to use in scenarios that require a high degree of precision (such as diagnostics or risk prediction). Furthermore, the lack of descriptions of how mappings were done makes it hard to combine and reconcile mappings, particularly curated and automated ones. We have developed the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) which addresses these problems by: (i) Introducing a machine-readable and extensible vocabulary to describe metadata that makes imprecision, inaccuracy and incompleteness in mappings explicit. (ii) Defining an easy-to-use simple table-based format that can be integrated into existing data science pipelines without the need to parse or query ontologies, and that integrates seamlessly with Linked Data principles. (iii) Implementing open and community-driven collaborative workflows that are designed to evolve the standard continuously to address changing requirements and mapping practices. (iv) Providing reference tools and software libraries for working with the standard. In this paper, we present the SSSOM standard, describe several use cases in detail and survey some of the existing work on standardizing the exchange of mappings, with the goal of making mappings Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The SSSOM specification can be found at http://w3id.org/sssom/spec. Database URL: http://w3id.org/sssom/spec

Imidazol-1-ylethylindazole Voltage-Gated Sodium Channel Ligands Are Neuroprotective during Optic Neuritis in a Mouse Model of Multiple Sclerosis

[Image: see text] A series of imidazol-1-ylethylindazole sodium channel ligands were developed and optimized for sodium channel inhibition and in vitro neuroprotective activity. The molecules exhibited displacement of a radiolabeled sodium channel ligand and selectivity for blockade of the inactivated state of cloned neuronal Na(v) channels. Metabolically stable analogue 6 was able to protect retinal ganglion cells during optic neuritis in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis

The Making of a Productivity Hotspot in the Coastal Ocean

Highly productive hotspots in the ocean often occur where complex physical forcing mechanisms lead to aggregation of primary and secondary producers. Understanding how hotspots persist, however, requires combining knowledge of the spatio-temporal linkages between geomorphology, physical forcing, and biological responses with the physiological requirements and movement of top predators.) off the Baja California peninsula, Mexico.We have identified the set of conditions that lead to a persistent top predator hotspot, which increases our understanding of how highly migratory species exploit productive regions of the ocean. These results will aid in the development of spatially and environmentally explicit management strategies for marine species of conservation concern

δ13C methane source signatures from tropical wetland and rice field emissions

The atmospheric methane (CH4) burden is rising sharply, but the causes are still not well understood. One factor of uncertainty is the importance of tropical CH4 emissions into the global mix. Isotopic signatures of major sources remain poorly constrained, despite their usefulness in constraining the global methane budget. Here, a collection of new δ13CCH4 signatures is presented for a range of tropical wetlands and rice fields determined from air samples collected during campaigns from 2016 to 2020. Long-term monitoring of δ13CCH4 in ambient air has been conducted at the Chacaltaya observatory, Bolivia and Southern Botswana. Both long-term records are dominated by biogenic CH4 sources, with isotopic signatures expected from wetland sources. From the longer-term Bolivian record, a seasonal isotopic shift is observed corresponding to wetland extent suggesting that there is input of relatively isotopically light CH4 to the atmosphere during periods of reduced wetland extent. This new data expands the geographical extent and range of measurements of tropical wetland and rice δ13CCH4 sources and hints at significant seasonal variation in tropical wetland δ13CCH4 signatures which may be important to capture in future global and regional models. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Rising methane: is warming feeding warming? (part 2)’