No association between routinely recorded infections in early life and subsequent risk of childhood-onset Type 1 diabetes: a matched case-control study using the UK General Practice Research Database

Aims To determine whether children with infections in early life (recorded routinely in general practice) have a reduced risk of Type 1 diabetes, as would be expected from the hygiene hypothesis.

The Right to Self-Defence in National and International Law: The Role of the Imminence Requirement

This article explores the doctrine of self-defence within the context of the challenges directed at the imminence requirement, from the perspective of both national and international law. The article will attempt to illustrate that the requirement of imminence underlines the political character of the self-defence doctrine wherein private force may only be resorted to in the absence of institutional protection. This study will argue that the imminence rule can not merely be regarded as a "proxy" for establishing necessity; rather, the elements of imminence, necessity, and proportionality are inextricably connected to ensure that defensive force is only resorted to when national or international authorities are not in a position to prevent an illegal aggression, and that the defensive lethal force is not abused.

The Contours of the Right to Self-defence: Is the Requirement of Imminence Merely a Translator for the Concept of Necessity?

The right to self-defence has lately been subjected to intense academic controversy, both at the domestic and international level. The debate is focused on the question of whether or not the requirement of imminence is merely a translator for the notion of necessity. At the domestic level, the debate has mainly been kindled by feminist scholars, who, in the context of the 'battered woman', argue that the requirement of imminence should be discarded from the contours of the self-defence doctrine. The purpose of this article is to prove the necessity of the imminence requirement as a litmus test to detect possible abuses of the self-defence doctrine.

Breast cancer mortality in neighbouring European countries with different level of breast screening but similar access to treatment: An analysis of WHO mortality database

Objective: To compare trends in breast cancer mortality within three pairs of neighbouring European countries in relation to implementation of screening. Design: Retrospective trend analysis.
Setting: Three country pairs (Northern Ireland (United Kingdom) v Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands v Belgium and Flanders (Belgian region south of the Netherlands), and Sweden v Norway).
Data sources: WHO mortality database on cause of death and data sources on mammography screening, cancer treatment, and risk factors for breast cancer mortality.
Main outcome measures: Changes in breast cancer mortality calculated from linear regressions of log transformed, age adjusted death rates. Joinpoint analysis was used to identify the year when trends in mortality for all ages began to change.
Results: From 1989 to 2006, deaths from breast cancer decreased by 29% in Northern Ireland and by 26% in the Republic of Ireland; by 25% in the Netherlands and by 20% in Belgium and 25% in Flanders; and by 16% in Sweden and by 24% in Norway. The time trend and year of downward inflexion were similar between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and between the Netherlands and Flanders. In Sweden, mortality rates have steadily decreased since 1972, with no downward inflexion until 2006. Countries of each pair had similar healthcare services and prevalence of risk factors for breast cancer mortality but differing implementation of mammography screening, with a gap of about 10-15 years.
Conclusions: The contrast between the time differences in implementation of mammography screening and the similarity in reductions in mortality between the country pairs suggest that screening did not play a direct part in the reductions in breast cancer mortality.

The SEMAINE Database: Annotated Multimodal Records of Emotionally Colored Conversations between a Person and a Limited Agent

SEMAINE has created a large audiovisual database as a part of an iterative approach to building Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) agents that can engage a person in a sustained, emotionally colored conversation. Data used to build the agents came from interactions between users and an operator simulating a SAL agent, in different configurations: Solid SAL (designed so that operators displayed an appropriate nonverbal behavior) and Semi-automatic SAL (designed so that users' experience approximated interacting with a machine). We then recorded user interactions with the developed system, Automatic SAL, comparing the most communicatively competent version to versions with reduced nonverbal skills. High quality recording was provided by five high-resolution, high-framerate cameras, and four microphones, recorded synchronously. Recordings total 150 participants, for a total of 959 conversations with individual SAL characters, lasting approximately 5 minutes each. Solid SAL recordings are transcribed and extensively annotated: 6-8 raters per clip traced five affective dimensions and 27 associated categories. Other scenarios are labeled on the same pattern, but less fully. Additional information includes FACS annotation on selected extracts, identification of laughs, nods, and shakes, and measures of user engagement with the automatic system. The material is available through a web-accessible database. © 2010-2012 IEEE.

The Belfast Induced Natural Emotion Database

For many years psychological research on facial expression of emotion has relied heavily on a recognition paradigm based on posed static photographs. There is growing evidence that there may be fundamental differences between the expressions depicted in such stimuli and the emotional expressions present in everyday life. Affective computing, with its pragmatic emphasis on realism, needs examples of natural emotion. This paper describes a unique database containing recordings of mild to moderate emotionally coloured responses to a series of laboratory based emotion induction tasks. The recordings are accompanied by information on self-report of emotion and intensity, continuous trace-style ratings of valence and intensity, the sex of the participant, the sex of the experimenter, the active or passive nature of the induction task and it gives researchers the opportunity to compare expressions from people from more than one culture.