The association between myopia and various subtypes of lens opacity: SEE (Salisbury Eye Evaluation) project.

PURPOSE: To establish the relationship between myopia and lens opacity. DESIGN: Population-based cross-sectional study. PARTICIPANTS: Two thousand five hundred twenty participants from the Salisbury Eye Evaluation aged 65 to 84 years. METHODS: Participants filled out questionnaires regarding medical history, social habits, and a detailed history of distance spectacle wear. They underwent a full ocular examination. Lens photographs were taken for assessment of lens opacity using the Wilmer grading system. Multivariate logistic regression models using generalized estimating equations were used to analyze the relationship between lens opacity type and degree of myopia, while accounting for potential confounders. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Presence of posterior subcapsular opacity, cortical opacity, or nuclear opacity. RESULTS: Significant associations were found between myopia and both nuclear and posterior subcapsular opacities. For nuclear opacity, the odds ratios (ORs) were 2.25 for myopia between -0.50 diopters (D) and -1.99 D (P<0.001), 3.65 for myopia between -2.00 D and -3.99 D (P<0.001), 4.54 for myopia between -4.00 D and -5.99 D (P<0.001), and 3.61 for myopia -6.00 D or more (P = 0.002). For posterior subcapsular cataracts, ORs were 1.59 for myopia between -0.50 D and -1.99 D (P = 0.11), 3.22 for myopia between -2.00 D and -3.99 D (P = 0.002), 5.36 for myopia between -4.00 D and -5.99 D (P<0.001), and 12.34 for myopia -6.00 D or more (P<0.001). No association was found between myopia and cortical opacity. The association between posterior subcapsular opacity and myopia was equally strong for those wearing glasses by age 21 years and for those without glasses; for nuclear opacity, significantly higher ORs were found for myopes who started wearing glasses after age 21. CONCLUSIONS: These results confirm the previously reported association between myopia, posterior subcapsular opacity, and nuclear opacity. Furthermore, the strong association between early spectacle wear and posterior subcapsular opacity among myopes, absent for nuclear opacity, suggests that myopia may precede opacity in the case of posterior subcapsular opacity, but not nuclear opacity. Measures of association between posterior subcapsular opacity and myopia were stronger in the current study than have previously been found. Longitudinal studies to confirm the association are warranted.

Gramsci, austerity common sense and the attacks on the welfare state: The need to understand and resist the imposition of the global neoliberal agenda and the role of the social work profession.

During the last 30 years governments almost everywhere in the world are furthering a global neoliberal agenda by withdrawing the state from the delivery of services, decreasing social spending and lowering corporate taxation etc. This restructuring has led to a massive transfer of wealth from the welfare state and working class people into capital. In order to legitimize this restructuring conservative governments engage in collective blaming towards their denizens. This presentation will examine some of the well circulated phrases that have been used by the dominant elite in some countries during the last year to legitimize the imposition of austerity measures. Phrases such as, ‘We all partied’ used by the Irish finance minister, Brian Lenihan, to explain the Irish crisis and collectively blame all Irish people, ‘We must all share the pain’, deployed by another Irish Minister Gilmore and the UK coalition administration’s sound bite ‘We are all in this together’, legitimize the imposition of austerity measures. Utilizing the Gramscian concept of common sense (Gramsci, 1971), I call these phrases ‘austerity common sense’. They are austerity common sense because they both reflect and legitimate the austerity agenda. By deploying these phrases, the ruling economic and political elite seek to influence the perception of the people and pre-empt any intention of resistance. The dominant theme of these phrases is that there is no alternative and that austerity measures are somehow self-inflicted and, as such, should not be challenged because we are all to blame. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the “austerity common sense” theme from a Gramscian approach, focus on its implications for the social work profession and discuss the ways to resist the imposition of the global neoliberal agenda.

The basic principles of uncertain information fusion. An organised review of merging rules in different representation frameworks.

We propose and advocate basic principles for the fusion of incomplete or uncertain information items, that should apply regardless of the formalism adopted for representing pieces of information coming from several sources. This formalism can be based on sets, logic, partial orders, possibility theory, belief functions or imprecise probabilities. We propose a general notion of information item representing incomplete or uncertain information about the values of an entity of interest. It is supposed to rank such values in terms of relative plausibility, and explicitly point out impossible values. Basic issues affecting the results of the fusion process, such as relative information content and consistency of information items, as well as their mutual consistency, are discussed. For each representation setting, we present fusion rules that obey our principles, and compare them to postulates specific to the representation proposed in the past. In the crudest (Boolean) representation setting (using a set of possible values), we show that the understanding of the set in terms of most plausible values, or in terms of non-impossible ones matters for choosing a relevant fusion rule. Especially, in the latter case our principles justify the method of maximal consistent subsets, while the former is related to the fusion of logical bases. Then we consider several formal settings for incomplete or uncertain information items, where our postulates are instantiated: plausibility orderings, qualitative and quantitative possibility distributions, belief functions and convex sets of probabilities. The aim of this paper is to provide a unified picture of fusion rules across various uncertainty representation settings.

Multilinear and Integer Programming for Markov Decision Processes with Imprecise Probabilities

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are extensively used to encode sequences of decisions with probabilistic effects. Markov Decision Processes with Imprecise Probabilities (MDPIPs) encode sequences of decisions whose effects are modeled using sets of probability distributions. In this paper we examine the computation of Γ-maximin policies for MDPIPs using multilinear and integer programming. We discuss the application of our algorithms to “factored” models and to a recent proposal, Markov Decision Processes with Set-valued Transitions (MDPSTs), that unifies the fields of probabilistic and “nondeterministic” planning in artificial intelligence research. 

Lake Kumphawapi revisited – The complex climatic and environmental record of a tropical wetland in NE Thailand

Kumphawapi, which is Thailand’s largest natural freshwater lake, contains a >10,000-year-long climatic and environmental archive. New data sets (stratigraphy, chronology, hydrogen isotopes, plant macrofossil and charcoal records) for two sedimentary sequences are here combined with earlier multi-proxy studies to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of past climatic and environmental changes for Northeast Thailand. Gradually higher moisture availability due to a strengthening of the summer monsoon led to the formation of a large shallow lake in the Kumphawapi basin between >10,700 and c. 7000 cal. BP. The marked increase in moisture availability and lower evaporation between c. 7000 and 6400 cal. BP favoured the growth and expansion of vegetation in and around the shallow lake. The increase in biomass led to gradual overgrowing and infilling, to an apparent lake level lowering and to the development of a wetland. Multiple hiatuses are apparent in all investigated sequences between c. 6500 and 1400 cal. BP and are explained by periodic desiccation events of the wetland and erosion due to the subsequent lake level rise. The rise in lake level, which started c. 2000 cal. BP and reached shallower parts c. 1400 cal. BP, is attributed to an increase in effective moisture availability. The timing of hydroclimatic conditions during the past 2000 years cannot be resolved because of chronological limitations.

Main eigenvalues and (κ, τ)-regular sets

A (κ, τ)-regular set is a subset of the vertices of a graph G, inducing a κ-regular subgraph such that every vertex not in the subset has τ neighbors in it. A main eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix A of a graph G has an eigenvector not orthogonal to the all-one vector j. For graphs with a (κ, τ)-regular set a necessary and sufficient condition for an eigenvalue be non-main is deduced and the main eigenvalues are characterized. These results are applied to the construction of infinite families of bidegreed graphs with two main eigenvalues and the same spectral radius (index) and some relations with strongly regular graphs are obtained. Finally, the determination of (κ, τ)-regular sets is analyzed. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Educational and Employment Aspirations of Adolescents from Areas of High Deprivation in London

Adolescents from areas of high deprivation are often assumed to have low aspirations for the future. However, recent research has suggested otherwise and there have been calls for more substantial investigation into the relationship between poverty and aspiration. This article reports levels and variation in aspiration from 1,214 adolescents (49.5% male; 50.5% female) living in areas of high deprivation across 20 London boroughs. A strength of this study is our large and diverse population of low socio-economic status (SES) adolescents, comprising of white British (22%), black African (21%), black Caribbean (9%), Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Other Asian (24%), mixed ethnicity (9%), and 15% defining themselves as Other. Our measures indicated a high group level of reported aspiration with notable variations. Females reported higher educational (but not occupational) aspirations than males; white British students reported lower educational and occupational aspirations than other ethnic groups; and black African children reported the highest educational aspirations. Perceived parental support for education had the largest positive association with aspirations. In contrast to previous findings from studies carried out in the United States, aspirations were found to be negatively associated with perceptions of school and school peer environment. These measures explored feelings of safety, happiness and belonging within the school environment and school peer group. We discuss possible explanations for this unexpected finding within our population of adolescents from UK state schools and how it might affect future policy interventions. This study makes an important contribution to the literature on adolescent aspirations because of the unique nature of the data sample and the multiple domains of functioning and aspiration measured.

ORBS and the limits of static slicing

Observation-based slicing is a recently-introduced, language-independent, slicing technique based on the dependencies observable from program behaviour. Due to the wellknown limits of dynamic analysis, we may only compute an under-approximation of the true observation-based slice. However, because the observation-based slice captures all possible dependence that can be observed, even such approximations can yield insight into the limitations of static slicing. For example, a static slice, S that is strictly smaller than the corresponding observation based slice is guaranteed to be unsafe. We present the results of three sets of experiments on 12 different programs, including benchmarks and larger programs, which investigate the relationship between static and observation-based slicing. We show that, in extreme cases, observation-based slices can find the true static minimal slice, where static techniques cannot. For more typical cases, our results illustrate the potential for observation-based slicing to highlight unsafe static slices. Finally, we report on the sensitivity of observation-based slicing to test quality.

Neurophysiologic, psychological, sport and health dimensions of three meditation techniques

The aim of this study was to record experiences of three meditation conditions: Ratio Breathing, Transcendental Meditation and Zazen, with special reference to sport, health, neuro-physiology and sense of coherence. The participants (N=9), seven males and two females were all British, actively competing across a range of individual and team sports, with no experience of using meditation techniques or practices in their sporting or daily lives. Their mean age was 31.56 years with an age range of 22 to 44 years. The study employed a within-subjects, repeated measures design, with each participant practising each meditation condition in a randomly counterbalanced order. Integrative findings support the value of all three meditation conditions for health and to a lesser extent for sport, especially with regard to their effect on focus. All three meditation conditions were associated with a decrease in respiration. The differential effect of the meditations was apparent. Participants valued Ratio breathing for its effect on concentration, Transcendental Meditation for its depth of meditation and Zazen for its effect on self and removal of external distractions. These qualitative findings were associated with differentially significant quantitative effects on lowered respiration rate in the Ratio Breathing group, increased physical relaxation and alpha activity in the Transcendental Meditation group, and increases in both alpha and theta activity in the Zazen group.

Population dynamics and fisheries assessment of the bigeye thresher (Alopias superciliosus) in the Atlantic: a comparison between North Atlantic and South Atlantic stocks

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências do Mar, da Terra e do Ambiente (Biologia Pesqueira), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015

Population and landscape genetics of the stone marten and red fox in Portugal : implications for conservation management of common carnivores

Tese de doutoramento, Biologia (Biologia da Conservação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015

Perceived Social Pressures and the Internalization of the Mesomorphic Ideal: the Role of Drive for Muscularity and Autonomy in Physically Active Men

BACKGROUND: Researchers have tested the beliefs of sportspeople and sports medicine specialists that cognitive strategies influence strength performance. Few investigators have synthesised the literature. OBJECTIVES: The specific objectives were to review evidence regarding (a) the cognitive strategy-strength performance relationship; (b) participant skill level as a moderator; and (c) cognitive, motivational, biomechanical/physiological, and emotional mediators. METHOD: Studies were sourced via electronic databases, reference lists of retrieved articles, and manual searches of relevant journals. Studies had to be randomised or counterbalanced experiments with a control group or condition, repeated measures, and a quality control score above 0.5 (out of 1). Cognitive strategies included goal setting, imagery, self-talk, preparatory arousal, and free choice. Dependent variables included maximal strength, local muscular endurance, or muscular power. RESULTS: Globally, cognitive strategies were reliability associated with increased strength performance (results ranged from 61 to 65 %). Results were mixed when examining the effects of specific strategies on particular dependent variables, although no intervention had an overall negative influence. Indeterminate relationships emerged regarding hypothesised mediators (except cognitive variables) and participant skill level as a moderator. CONCLUSIONS: Although cognitive strategies influence strength performance, there are knowledge gaps regarding specific types of strength, especially muscular power. Cognitive variables, such as concentration, show promise as possible mediators.

Product innovation and the costs of energy-using product policies

Energy-using Products (EuPs) contribute significantly to the United Kingdom’s CO2 emissions, both in the domestic and non-domestic sectors. Policies that encourage the use of more energy efficient products (such as minimum performance standards, energy labelling, enhanced capital allowances, etc.) can therefore generate significant reductions in overall energy consumption and hence, CO2 emissions. While these policies can impose costs on the producers and consumers of these products in the short run, the process of product innovation may reduce the magnitude of these costs over time. If this is the case, then it is important that the impacts of innovation are taken into account in policy impact assessments. Previous studies have found considerable evidence of experience curve effects for EuP categories (e.g. refrigerators, televisions, etc.), with learning rates of around 20% for both average unit costs and average prices; similar to those found for energy supply technologies. Moreover, the decline in production costs has been accompanied by a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of EuPs. Building on these findings and the results of an empirical analysis of UK sales data for a range of product categories, this paper sets out an analytic framework for assessing the impact of EuP policy interventions on consumers and producers which takes explicit account of the product innovation process. The impact of the product innovation process can be seen in the continuous evolution of the energy class profiles of EuP categories over time; with higher energy classes (e.g. A, A+, etc.) entering the market and increasing their market share, while lower classes (e.g. E, F, etc.) lose share and then leave the market. Furthermore, the average prices of individual energy classes have declined over their respective lives, while new classes have typically entered the market at successively lower “launch prices”. Based on two underlying assumptions regarding the shapes of the “lifecycle profiles” for the relative sales and the relative average mark-ups of individual energy classes, a simple simulation model is developed that can replicate the observed market dynamics in terms of the evolution of market shares and average prices. The model is used to assess the effect of two alternative EuP policy interventions – a minimum energy performance standard and an energy-labelling scheme – on the average unit cost trajectory and the average price trajectory of a typical EuP category, and hence the financial impacts on producers and consumers.

Detailed phenotypic and genotypic characterization of bietti crystalline dystrophy

OBJECTIVE: To provide a detailed phenotype/genotype characterization of Bietti crystalline dystrophy (BCD). DESIGN: Observational case series. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty patients from 17 families recruited from a multiethnic British population. METHODS: Patients underwent color fundus photography, near-infrared (NIR) imaging, fundus autofluorescence (FAF) imaging, spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), and electroretinogram (ERG) assessment. The gene CYP4V2 was sequenced. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Clinical, imaging, electrophysiologic, and molecular genetics findings. RESULTS: Patients ranged in age from 19 to 72 years (median, 40 years), with a visual acuity of 6/5 to perception of light (median, 6/12). There was wide intrafamilial and interfamilial variability in clinical severity. The FAF imaging showed well-defined areas of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) loss that corresponded on SD-OCT to well-demarcated areas of outer retinal atrophy. Retinal crystals were not evident on FAF imaging and were best visualized with NIR imaging. Spectral domain OCT showed them to be principally located on or in the RPE/Bruch's membrane complex. Disappearance of the crystals, revealed by serial recording, was associated with severe disruption and thinning of the RPE/Bruch's membrane complex. Cases with extensive RPE degeneration (N = 5) had ERGs consistent with generalized rod and cone dysfunction, but those with more focal RPE atrophy showed amplitude reduction without delay (N = 3), consistent with restricted loss of function, or that was normal (N = 2). Likely disease-causing variants were identified in 34 chromosomes from 17 families. Seven were novel, including p.Met66Arg, found in all 11 patients from 8 families of South Asian descent. This mutation appears to be associated with earlier onset (median age, 30 years) compared with other substitutions (median age, 41 years). Deletions of exon 7 were associated with more severe disease. CONCLUSIONS: The phenotype is highly variable. Several novel variants are reported, including a highly prevalent substitution in patients of South Asian descent that is associated with earlier-onset disease. Autofluorescence showed sharply demarcated areas of RPE loss that coincided with abrupt edges of outer retinal atrophy on SD-OCT; crystals were generally situated on or in the RPE/Bruch's complex but could disappear over time with associated RPE disruption. These results support a role for the RPE in disease pathogenesis.

Power law and entropy analysis of catastrophic phenomena

Catastrophic events, such as wars and terrorist attacks, tornadoes and hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides, are always accompanied by a large number of casualties. The size distribution of these casualties has separately been shown to follow approximate power law (PL) distributions. In this paper, we analyze the statistical distributions of the number of victims of catastrophic phenomena, in particular, terrorism, and find double PL behavior. This means that the data sets are better approximated by two PLs instead of a single one. We plot the PL parameters, corresponding to several events, and observe an interesting pattern in the charts, where the lines that connect each pair of points defining the double PLs are almost parallel to each other. A complementary data analysis is performed by means of the computation of the entropy. The results reveal relationships hidden in the data that may trigger a future comprehensive explanation of this type of phenomena.