Meta-analysis of melanoma incidence in the United States: demographic variation and relationship with UV index and latitude

A link between exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation and melanoma skin cancer formation has generally been accepted in the scientific community, but precise quantification of such a link into a predictive equation is difficult to find in scientific literature. It was the aim of this study to determine if a quantifiable relationship exists between UV exposure and melanoma rates in the United States. Prior to the initiation of this study, it was hypothesized that existing predictive equations using accumulated UV index and latitude for general skin cancer incidence (i.e., including both melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers) in Chile would be effective in predicting melanoma incidence rates in the United States. It was also hypothesized that melanoma rates for specific locations in the United States are related to the latitudes and accumulated UV index values for those locations, respectively. After accumulated UV index values, latitudes, and melanoma incidence rates for locations across the United States were obtained, regression analyses were performed in Microsoft Excel 2010® between accumulated UV index, latitude, and melanoma incidence rates for all demographic groups combined as well as differing demographic groups. The Chilean skin cancer equations (Rivas equations) were found to have no predictive power for melanoma rates in the United States. The only demographic group which had a significant relationship with accumulated UV index and latitude was American Indian or Alaska Native. For the remaining ethnicities, the regression analyses failed to reject the null hypotheses. Due to a variety of confounding variables and the limitations of the available data, a quantifiable relationship between UV exposure and melanoma might be determined only by more complex methodology. Factors such as skin color variation within each listed ethnicity, differences in UV exposure patterns between individuals, and inconsistent reporting to cancer registries by dermatologists may preclude the formation of simple predictive equations for melanoma incidence. Future research which incorporates individuals\u27 behaviors (e.g., time spent in the sun) may have more success

Disraeli and Bentinck and Personal and Political Relationship in History and Memory

Benjamin Disraeli has long been the source of wonder and examination for the academic world. Indeed, is now perhaps the most discussed nineteenth-century politician. His political practices, ideas and writings have been extensively mined to come up with a coherent understanding of his life and career. He has for so long been understood in relation to the contemporary allegation that he was an adventurer, opportunist, and man of few political principles. A man apart from his parliamentary colleagues who distrusted and disliked him. A view largely cemented by the formidable professional histories of the 1960s. More recent works on Disraeli have explored his ideas on race, empire and his own Jewish identity. This work attempts to move away from those valuable contributions to once again explore Disraeli’s politics and political thought. It is all too easy to lose the bigger picture. It would have been quite impossible for a metropolitan, middle-class, Jewish novelist dandy and parvenu to climb to the top of British politics, where he stayed for over thirty years without both political principle and a extraordinary ability to collaborate. Therefore, this work attempts to re-establish Disraeli in his own contemporary context. An Englishman and a thorough-going Tory, who rather than being different or apart from his colleagues, was a first-rate political collaborator

Meta-analysis of melanoma incidence in the United States: demographic variation and relationship with UV index and latitude

A link between exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation and melanoma skin cancer formation has generally been accepted in the scientific community, but precise quantification of such a link into a predictive equation is difficult to find in scientific literature. It was the aim of this study to determine if a quantifiable relationship exists between UV exposure and melanoma rates in the United States. Prior to the initiation of this study, it was hypothesized that existing predictive equations using accumulated UV index and latitude for general skin cancer incidence (i.e., including both melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers) in Chile would be effective in predicting melanoma incidence rates in the United States. It was also hypothesized that melanoma rates for specific locations in the United States are related to the latitudes and accumulated UV index values for those locations, respectively. After accumulated UV index values, latitudes, and melanoma incidence rates for locations across the United States were obtained, regression analyses were performed in Microsoft Excel 2010® between accumulated UV index, latitude, and melanoma incidence rates for all demographic groups combined as well as differing demographic groups. The Chilean skin cancer equations (Rivas equations) were found to have no predictive power for melanoma rates in the United States. The only demographic group which had a significant relationship with accumulated UV index and latitude was American Indian or Alaska Native. For the remaining ethnicities, the regression analyses failed to reject the null hypotheses. Due to a variety of confounding variables and the limitations of the available data, a quantifiable relationship between UV exposure and melanoma might be determined only by more complex methodology. Factors such as skin color variation within each listed ethnicity, differences in UV exposure patterns between individuals, and inconsistent reporting to cancer registries by dermatologists may preclude the formation of simple predictive equations for melanoma incidence. Future research which incorporates individuals’ behaviors (e.g., time spent in the sun) may have more success

Modeling applied to problem solving

We describe a modeling approach to help students learn expert problem solving. Models are used to present and hierarchically organize the syllabus content and apply it to problem solving, but students do not develop and validate their own Models through guided discovery. Instead, students classify problems under the appropriate instructor‐generated Model by selecting a system to consider and describing the interactions that are relevant to that system. We believe that this explicit System, Interactions and Model (S.I.M.) problem modeling strategy represents a key simplification and clarification of the widely disseminated modeling approach originated by Hestenes and collaborators. Our narrower focus allows modeling physics to be integrated into (as opposed to replacing) a typical introductory college mechanics course, while preserving the emphasis on understanding systems and interactions that is the essence of modeling. We have employed the approach in a three‐week review course for MIT freshmen who received a D in the fall mechanics course with very encouraging results.National Science Foundation (U.S.

Dialogic Fluency - Why it Matters

Speech as an LSP: Many dialogues presented to language learners could be better described as ‘interleaved mini-monologues’, their purpose being to provide examples of grammatical sentences in realistic settings. Real dialogues, on the other hand, are worked out ‘live’, with neither speaker knowing in detail where the conversation will lead. Speaker interaction is marked to a large extent by prosody and often even good communicators sound disfluent if their half of the dialogue is judged in isolation. Dialogic fluency: The objective of dialoguing L1 speakers, however, is to realise a social or personal goal, with language only part of effective communication. Possibly the bulk of the communication devolves to prosody, shared knowledge and body language. Whereas this might not be a mainstream production goal for language learners, all users of English as an international language likely to come into contact with native speakers should be sensitised to native-speaker prosody. Influence of live dialogue on speech production: Given that the aim of an L1-L1 dialogue is not to provide learners with sample sentences, but rather to use language as a key factor in a social encounter, learners need a tool which will allow them to study the interaction of real dialogues. Of particular interest is the turn-taking behaviour of speakers, which is often flagged prosodically and produces utterances which, on the surface seem disfluent, but which on further analysis are seen to have an interactive function. The production of such a tool is the aim of the Dynamic Speech Corpus (DSC)

What do Seniors Remember From Freshman Physics?

We have given a group of 56 MIT seniors who took mechanics as freshmen a written test similar to the final exam they took in their freshman course, plus the Mechanics Baseline Test (MBT) and Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (C‐LASS) standard instruments. Students in majors unrelated to physics scored 60% lower on the written analytic part of the final than they did as freshmen. The mean score of all students on conceptual multiple choice questions included on the final also declined by about 60% relative to the scores of freshmen. The mean score of all participants on the MBT was insignificantly changed from the posttest taken as freshmen. More specifically, however, the students’ performance on 9 of the 26 MBT items (with 6 of the 9 involving graphical kinematics) represents a gain over their freshman pretest score (a normalized gain of about 70%, double the gain achieved in the freshman course alone), while their performance on the remaining 17 questions is best characterized as a loss of approximately 50% of the material learned in the freshman course. Attitudinal survey results indicate that almost half the seniors feel the specific mechanics course content is unlikely to be useful to them, a significant majority (75–85%) feel that physics does teach valuable skills, and an overwhelming majority believe that mechanics should remain a required course at MIT.National Science Foundation (U.S.

What Else (Besides the Syllabus) Should Students Learn in Introductory Physics?

We have surveyed what various groups of instructors and students think students should learn in introductory physics. We started with a Delphi Study based on interviews with experts, then developed orthogonal responses to “what should we teach non‐physics majors besides the current syllabus topics?” AAPT attendees, atomic researchers, and PERC08 attendees were asked for their selections. All instructors rated “sense‐making of the answer” very highly and expert problem solving highly. PERers favored epistemology over problem solving, and atomic researchers “physics comes from a few principles.” Students at three colleges had preferences anti‐aligned with their teachers, preferring more modern topics, and the relationship of physics to everyday life and also to society (the only choice with instructor agreement), but not problem solving or sense‐making. Conclusion #1: we must show students how old physics is relevant to their world. Conclusion #2: significant course reform must start by reaching consensus on what to teach and how to hold students’ interest (then discuss techniques to teach it).National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF grant PHY-0757931

The DiTME Project: interdisciplinary research in music technology

This paper profiles the emergence of a significant body of research in audio engineering within the Faculties of Engineering and Applied Arts at Dublin Institute of Technology. Over a period of five years the group has had significant success in completing a Strand 3 research project entitled Digital Tools for Music Education (DiTME)

Safety of Infusing Rituximab at a More Rapid Rate in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Results from the RATE-RA Study

As recommended in the current prescribing information, rituximab infusions in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) take 4.25hours for the first infusion and 3.25hours for subsequent infusions, which is a burden on patients and the health care system. We therefore evaluated the safety of infusing rituximab at a faster rate for an infusion period of 2hours in patients with RA

A Phase III Randomized Trial of Gemcitabine–Oxaliplatin versus Carboplatin–Paclitaxel as First-Line Therapy in Patients with Advanced Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Purpose:This phase III study compared the efficacy and tolerability of gemcitabine and oxaliplatin (GEMOX) with paclitaxel and carboplatin (PCb) in chemotherapy-naive patients with stage IIIB/IV non-small cell lung cancer.Patients and Methods:Patients aged 18 years or older were randomized to PCb (paclitaxel 225 mg/m2 followed by carboplatin area under the curve = 6 on day 1 every 3 weeks) or GEMOX (gemcitabine 1,000 mg/m2 on days 1 and 8 followed by oxaliplatin 130 mg/m2 on day 1 every 3 weeks) for up to six cycles. The primary end point was progression-free survival (PFS), with tumor response rate, overall survival (OS), and quality of life as secondary end points.Results:The study was terminated after 383 patients had been randomized (371 received treatment) as the incidence of adverse events had exceeded the protocol-specified safety threshold (≥20% in either arm). No formal statistical comparisons were conducted. Median PFS was 4.44 months and 4.67 months in the GEMOX and PCb groups, respectively. Objective response rates (complete or partial) were 15.2% and 22.4% in the GEMOX and PCb arms, respectively. Median OS was 9.90 months (GEMOX) and 9.24 months (PCb); post hoc analyses showed median OS in patients aged 70 years or older to be similar to those younger than 70 years. PFS was similar in both groups of patients with adenocarcinoma histology, although OS favored the GEMOX group. Quality of life was improved from baseline in both groups. Toxicity profiles were comparable between the groups.Conclusion:PFS, OS, and objective response rates with GEMOX were similar to PCb. Nevertheless, toxicities limit the adoption of this regimen for routine use in advanced non-small cell lung cancer