7,956 research outputs found
Cityness and African Urban Development
This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and absenceAfrican urbanism, everyday practices, social infrastructures, urban violence
Good clinical practice in clinical interventional studies
Good clinical practice (GCP) guidelines should always be implemented and obeyed in clinical interventional studies. In this mini-review, we will address several burning questions relating to GCP in a concise ‘frequently asked questions’ format.While compliance to current rules and regulations is our mission, we also wish to play devil’s advocate attempting to translate the rules into sizeable chunks using a high dose of common sense
Optimal Sparsification for Some Binary CSPs Using Low-degree Polynomials
This paper analyzes to what extent it is possible to efficiently reduce the
number of clauses in NP-hard satisfiability problems, without changing the
answer. Upper and lower bounds are established using the concept of
kernelization. Existing results show that if NP is not contained in coNP/poly,
no efficient preprocessing algorithm can reduce n-variable instances of CNF-SAT
with d literals per clause, to equivalent instances with bits for
any e > 0. For the Not-All-Equal SAT problem, a compression to size
exists. We put these results in a common framework by analyzing
the compressibility of binary CSPs. We characterize constraint types based on
the minimum degree of multivariate polynomials whose roots correspond to the
satisfying assignments, obtaining (nearly) matching upper and lower bounds in
several settings. Our lower bounds show that not just the number of
constraints, but also the encoding size of individual constraints plays an
important role. For example, for Exact Satisfiability with unbounded clause
length it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of constraints to n+1,
yet no polynomial-time algorithm can reduce to an equivalent instance with
bits for any e > 0, unless NP is a subset of coNP/poly.Comment: Updated the cross-composition in lemma 18 (minor update), since the
previous version did NOT satisfy requirement 4 of lemma 18 (the proof of
Claim 20 was incorrect
Indirect horizontal application of the right to have access to health care services
Apart from their direct application against the state, the justiciability of socio-economic rights also requires the transformation of those aspects of private law that regulate relationships which are crucial for their effective enjoyment. This is acknowledged by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, which determines that rights may sometimes bind private parties and requires courts to develop the common law in accordance with the spirit, purport and objects of the rights in the Bill of Rights
Independent predictors of breast malignancy in screen-detected microcalcifications: biopsy results in 2545 cases
Background: Mammographic microcalcifications are associated with many benign lesions, ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and invasive cancer. Careful assessment criteria are required to minimise benign biopsies while optimising cancer diagnosis. We wished to evaluate the assessment outcomes of microcalcifications biopsied in the setting of population-based breast cancer screening. Methods: Between January 1992 and December 2007, cases biopsied in which microcalcifications were the only imaging abnormality were included. Patient demographics, imaging features and final histology were subjected to statistical analysis to determine independent predictors of malignancy. Results: In all, 2545 lesions, with a mean diameter of 21.8 mm (s.d. 23.8 mm) and observed in patients with a mean age of 57.7 years (s.d. 8.4 years), were included. Using the grading system adopted by the RANZCR, the grade was 3 in 47.7%; 4 in 28.3% and 5 in 24.0%. After assessment, 1220 lesions (47.9%) were malignant (809 DCIS only, 411 DCIS with invasive cancer) and 1325 (52.1%) were non-malignant, including 122 (4.8%) premalignant lesions (lobular carcinoma in situ, atypical lobular hyperplasia and atypical ductal hyperplasia). Only 30.9% of the DCIS was of low grade. Mammographic extent of microcalcifications >15 mm, imaging grade, their pattern of distribution, presence of a palpable mass and detection after the first screening episode showed significant univariate associations with malignancy. On multivariate modeling imaging grade, mammographic extent of microcalcifications >15 mm, palpable mass and screening episode were retained as independent predictors of malignancy. Radiological grade had the largest effect with lesions of grade 4 and 5 being 2.2 and 3.3 times more likely to be malignant, respectively, than grade 3 lesions. Conclusion: The radiological grading scheme used throughout Australia and parts of Europe is validated as a useful system of stratifying microcalcifications into groups with significantly different risks of malignancy. Biopsy assessment of appropriately selected microcalcifications is an effective method of detecting invasive breast cancer and DCIS, particularly of non-low-grade subtypes.G Farshid, T Sullivan, P Downey, P G Gill, and S Pieters
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