Independent Sources Of Information Research Articles

Success of a Pre-medical Master's Degree Program in Preparing Students for Medical Careers

Abstract A substantial number of qualified college graduates in the United States and Canada fail to secure admission to medical school because their undergraduate academic performance is not deemed to be competitive by medical school admissions committees. The aim of this report is to describe the success of the Master of Arts in Medical Sciences (MAMS) program at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) in preparing students with non-competitive undergraduate credentials to gain admission into medical school. Several independent sources of information about student performance including MAMS application data, Boston University academic transcripts, and medical school acceptance information were assembled in a unified database for this longitudinal study. The privacy of individual students was maintained and no names or other data that are individually identifiable are presented in this communication. As indicated herein, admission to both U.S. and non-U.S. medical schools (allopathic and osteopathic) are included in these analyses. We also examined the residency placements of a cohort of MAMS graduates who matriculated at the BUSM MD program (MAMS/MD), since these are the only students for whom we know the placements that resulted from the National Resident Match Program (NRMP). The MAMS program has been in existence for more than 25 years and has educated more than 2500 students with approximately 70% of graduates admitted to medical school. The MAMS/MD students performed well in medical school and secured high quality residency positions. Graduate programs in medical sciences in a medical school environment are important vehicles for preparing and increasing the pool of academically qualified medical school applicants who will become successful medical school students in the near term and effective practitioners in the long term.

Learning about Climate: An Exploration of the Socialization of Climate Change

Abstract While the term “climate change” is highly recognized by the nonscientific general public, understandings of its manifestations are varied, contrasting, and complex. It is argued that this is because climate change has become simultaneously a physical and a social phenomenon. Thus, climate change is becoming socialized through nonscientific interpretation. Research has considered the roles of independent sources of information used to inform these communities, ranging from media sources to personal experiences. However, little consideration has been made of the interplay between information sources and how these sources are perceived by nonscientific communities in terms of trust. This paper presents a qualitative study of 52 ski industry stakeholders in Queenstown, New Zealand. It explores the sources of information used by these communities to construct understandings about climate change, their perceptions of these sources, the dominant interpretive factors, and the interactions between the information sources. It finds that personal experiences of weather are used to interpret other sources of information and are drawn upon to corroborate and reject the existence of climate change and its relevance for their locality. This paper concludes that locally relevant information on climate change is required to ensure that it is applicable to nonscientific realities and lived experiences.

Josephus, Antiquities 10.180–82, Jeremiah, and Nebuchadnezzar

Scholars have long pointed to Josephus, Ant. 10.180–182 as evidence that Nebuchadnezzar campaigned in the Levant in his twenty-third year (582 B.C.E.), but have not determined the viability of this passage as a historical source. Extant Greek sources do not provide the details visible in Josephus’ text and it is thus unlikely that they were his source. The details of the campaign are, however, available from Jeremiah or by inference from it. As such, the study argues that Ant. 10.180–182 is not an independent historical source of information for a campaign of Nebuchadnezzar in 582 B.C.E.

Assessing the Sensitivity of the OMI-NO2 Product to Emission Changes across Europe

The advent of satellite data has provided a source of independent information to monitor trends in tropospheric nitrogen dioxide levels. To interpret these trends, one needs to know the sensitivity of the satellite retrieved NO2 column to anthropogenic emissions. We have applied a chemistry transport model to investigate the sensitivity of the modeled NO2 column, sampled at the OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) overpass time and location and weighted by the OMI averaging kernel, to emission sources across Europe. The most important contribution (~35%) in Western Europe is made by road transport. Off-road transport and industrial combustion each contribute 10%–15% across continental Europe. In Eastern Europe, power plant contributions are of comparable magnitude as those of road transport. To answer the question if the OMI-NO2 trends can be translated directly into emission changes, we assessed the anticipated changes in OMI-NO2 between 2005 and 2020. Although the results indicated that for many countries, it is indeed possible, for medium- and small-sized coastal countries, the contribution of the increasing shipping emissions in adjacent sea areas may mask a significant part of national emission reductions. This study highlights the need for a combined use of models, a priori emission estimates and satellite data to verify emission trends.

The use of Ginkgo biloba in healthy elderly.

To promote health-conscious behavior in the aging society and gain insight into the sources of knowledge on which preventive strategies are based, analyzing the behavior of elderly people who are recognized as highly health conscious may be useful. We focused on the use of Ginkgo biloba, which is commonly considered to be effective in preventing cognitive decline and dementia, among elderly adults. A total of 1,672 questionnaires were distributed among geriatric participants (60-94 years) who attended university lectures at 22 universities throughout Germany. Response rate was 36.1 %. We collected data on demographic characteristics, preventive strategies (use of Ginkgo and other supplements), health-conscious behavior, sources of knowledge concerning health behavior, and factors associated with the participants' concept of aging. The prevalence of Ginkgo use was 15.3 %. Ginkgo was assumed to be effective for cognitive enhancement and the treatment of cognitive decline by two thirds of the surveyed participants and one third believed Ginkgo to be effective for preventing dementia. Ginkgo use was significantly higher among participants using natural remedies and herbal and food supplements. The use of Ginkgo was recommended by physicians (57.3 %), chemists (16 %), and healthcare magazines (10.7 %). Food supplements were taken by 65.8 % of the sample: this percentage was significantly higher among subjects who exhibited health-conscious behavior. "Knowledge" about strategies to enhance cognition or prevent cognitive decline among the elderly do not appear to be evidence based. Thus, there is a need to establish reliable and independent sources of scientific information for healthcare professionals and the general public.

Ordinary muon capture in hydrogen reexamined

The rate of muon capture in a muonic hydrogen atom is calculated in heavy-nucleon chiral perturbation theory up to next-to-next-to-leading order. To this order, we present the systematic evaluation of all the corrections due to the QED and electroweak radiative corrections and the proton-size effect. Since the low-energy constants involved can be determined from other independent sources of information, the theory has predictive power. For the hyperfine-singlet $\ensuremath{\mu}p$ capture rate ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}_{0}$, our calculation gives ${\ensuremath{\Gamma}}_{0}=710\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}5$ s${}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, which is in excellent agreement with the experimental value obtained in a recent high-precision measurement by the MuCap Collaboration.

Epidemiology and Public Health in 1906 England: Arthur Newsholme’s Methodological Innovation to Study Breastfeeding and Fatal Diarrhea

In 1906 Arthur Newsholme linked artificial feeding and fatal diarrhea in infants aged one year and younger on the basis of two independent sources of information: mortality registration and a three-year (1903-1905) census of infants from Brighton, United Kingdom. Artificial feeding was more common in the infants who had died (89.3%) than in those in the survey (22.3%). However, boldly assuming the two data sources were nested, Newsholme computed the risks of fatal diarrhea: these were 48 times greater for infants fed fresh cow's milk and 94 times greater for those fed condensed milk than for infants who were exclusively breastfed. This mode of computing risks and risk ratios before the invention of the cohort study design was more innovative than was the usual investigation techniques of his contemporary epidemiologists. Newsholme's conclusions were consistent with the current knowledge that breastfeeding protects against fatal diarrhea.

Stovepiping

In hierarchical organizations lower-level agents can often censor the information that a higher-level principal has available to make a decision. We present a model of this interaction in which the principal can also access an independent source of unfiltered but lower-quality information besides that provided by the agent. This provision of outside information can be thought of as ‘stovepiping,’ the transmission of unfiltered information from analysts directly to decision-makers. Stovepiping can, in equilibrium, result in the agent passing along more information to the principal, precisely because the outsider’s information is of lower quality than the agent’s. But it can also lead the agent to ‘destroy’ information so that there is no basis for any policy change. Accordingly, stovepiping has countervailing effects on the principal’s utility. We discuss the comparative statics of equilibrium levels of information transmission with respect to the preferences of the principal, the outsider, and the probability that the outsider has access to the information held by the agent.

Forecasting Economic Activity from Yield Curve Factors

This paper provides clear cut evidence that the slope and curvature factors of the yield curve contain more information about future changes in economic activity than the term spread alone, often used in practice as an indicator of future economic conditions. These two factors constitute independent sources of information about future economic activity, which are offset to each other in term spread regressions. The slope factor has predictive power on future economic activity over longer horizons ahead, compared to the curvature factor. The latter improves the forecasting ability of the term spread over shorter or medium horizons. These results hold for a number of world leading economies.

Dead Reckoning in a Dynamic Quadruped Robot Based on Multimodal Proprioceptive Sensory Information

It is an important ability for any mobile robot to be able to estimate its posture and to gauge the distance it traveled. In this paper, we have addressed this problem in a dynamic quadruped robot by combining traditional state estimation methods with machine learning. We have designed and implemented a navigation algorithm for full body state (position, velocity, and attitude) estimation that uses no external reference but relies on multimodal proprioceptive sensory information only. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) was used to provide error estimation and data fusion from two independent sources of information: 1) strapdown mechanization algorithm processing raw inertial data and 2) legged odometry. We have devised a novel legged odometer that combines information from a multimodal combination of sensors (joint and pressure). We have shown our method to work for a dynamic turning gait, and we have also successfully demonstrated how it generalizes to different velocities and terrains. Furthermore, our solution proved to be immune to substantial slippage of the robot's feet.

Ireland, Africa and Love in Emily Brontë’s Gondal Poems

This article proposes that in the ‘Gondal Poems’ Notebook, Emily Brontë outlined historical personages and events in the Irish Rebellions of 1579–83 and 1798, disguised as the warfare of Pacific Ocean isles. She named the isles Gondal and Gaaldine, after Gondar, an early capital of Abyssinia, and the neighbouring Galla, the Gondar ascendancy’s source of slaves. Their warfare is described in James Bruce’s Journey in Search of the Source of the Nile, a book in the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute Library. The African analogy echoed and concealed the view of Ireland as London’s slave plantation, held by the United Irishmen, its leadership dedicated to republican ideals, and a movement in which her uncle William Brontë participated during the 1798 Rebellion. Her ‘Gondal Poems’ Notebook reflects her love for Ireland, Haworth and her family, including her visiting uncle Hugh Brontë, her probable source of independent information about Ireland.

Extracting drug indication information from structured product labels using natural language processing.

To extract drug indications from structured drug labels and represent the information using codes from standard medical terminologies. We used MetaMap and other publicly available resources to extract information from the indications section of drug labels. Drugs and indications were encoded by RxNorm and UMLS identifiers respectively. A sample was manually reviewed. We also compared the results with two independent information sources: National Drug File-Reference Terminology and the Semantic Medline project. A total of 6797 drug labels were processed, resulting in 19 473 unique drug-indication pairs. Manual review of 298 most frequently prescribed drugs by seven physicians showed a recall of 0.95 and precision of 0.77. Inter-rater agreement (Fleiss κ) was 0.713. The precision of the subset of results corroborated by Semantic Medline extractions increased to 0.93. Correlation of a patient's medical problems and drugs in an electronic health record has been used to improve data quality and reduce medication errors. Authoritative drug indication information is available from drug labels, but not in a format readily usable by computer applications. Our study shows that it is feasible to use publicly available natural language processing resources to extract drug indications from drug labels. The same method can be applied to other sections of the drug label-for example, adverse effects, contraindications. It is feasible to use publicly available natural language processing tools to extract indication information from freely available drug labels. Named entity recognition sources (eg, MetaMap) provide reasonable recall. Combination with other data sources provides higher precision.

Enhanced people detection combining appearance and motion information

The combination of two of the most recent people detectors from the state of the art is proposed. It is already known that the combination of independent information sources is useful for any detection task. In relation to people detection, there are two main discriminative information sources that characterise a person: appearance and motion. Proposed is the combination of two recent approaches based on both information sources. Experimental results over an extensive dataset show that the proposed combination significantly improves the results.

Real‐time high‐rate co‐seismic displacement from ambiguity‐fixed precise point positioning: Application to earthquake early warning

AbstractNowadays more and more high‐rate real‐time GPS data become available that provide a great opportunity to contribute to earthquake early warning (EEW) system in terms of capturing regional surface displacements, as an independent information source, useful for promptly estimating the magnitude of large destructive earthquake. In our study, we demonstrate the performance of the real‐time ambiguity‐fixed precise point positioning (PPP) approach using 5 Hz GPS data collected during El Mayor‐Cucapah earthquake (Mw 7.2, 4 April 2010). The PPP‐based displacements show to agree with accelerometer‐based displacement at centimeter level. The key for successfully obtaining high precision displacements is the efficient ambiguity resolution. PPP with ambiguity fixing can result in correct permanent co‐seismic offsets and correct recovery of moment magnitude and fault slip inversion at levels comparable to post‐processing.

True lemurs…true species - species delimitation using multiple data sources in the brown lemur complex

BackgroundSpecies are the fundamental units in evolutionary biology. However, defining them as evolutionary independent lineages requires integration of several independent sources of information in order to develop robust hypotheses for taxonomic classification. Here, we exemplarily propose an integrative framework for species delimitation in the “brown lemur complex” (BLC) of Madagascar, which consists of seven allopatric populations of the genus Eulemur (Primates: Lemuridae), which were sampled extensively across northern, eastern and western Madagascar to collect fecal samples for DNA extraction as well as recordings of vocalizations. Our data base was extended by including museum specimens with reliable identification and locality information for skull shape and pelage color analysis.ResultsBetween-group analyses of principal components revealed significant heterogeneity in skull shape, pelage color variation and loud calls across all seven populations. Furthermore, post-hoc statistical tests between pairs of populations revealed considerable discordance among different data sets for different dyads. Despite a high degree of incomplete lineage sorting among nuclear loci, significant exclusive ancestry was found for all populations, except for E. cinereiceps, based on one mitochondrial and three nuclear genetic loci.ConclusionsUsing several independent lines of evidence, our results confirm the species status of the members of the BLC under the general lineage concept of species. More generally, the present analyses demonstrate the importance and value of integrating different kinds of data in delimiting recently evolved radiations.

Pharmaceutical promotional literature: opinions of physicians in a tertiary care hospital in Mumbai

Backgrounds: The aim of this study was to assess physician’s opinion regarding pharmaceutical promotional material and make an objective assessment about their opinion on current drug promotional methods. Methods: 250 questionnaires were sent to physicians. Questionnaires was based on question assessing physicians opinion about 1) Influence of information provided on their prescription writing pattern. 2) Most common information which they seek for and find missing, was assessed on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 for each type of information 3) Type of promotional material preferred for drug information. 4) Significance of the various types of references cited which was assessed on likert scale of 1 to 5. Results: 207 questionnaires were returned. 59.5 % of the physicians were of the opinion that the information provide in promotional literature mostly influences their prescription. Physicians feel that there is minimal information on adverse drug reaction, comparison with other drugs, price, drug interactions and clinical trial results and contraindications. Likert score of 4.8, 4.7, 4.6, 4.6, 4.5 and 3.9 respectively. 41.07% physicians prefer pamphlets, and leave behind leaflet. Whereas they consider randomized controlled trials, meta-analysis and case controlled or cohort studies as significant references, with likert score 4.9, 4.7, and 4.6 respectively. Conclusion: There is need for strong regulatory infrastructure and monitoring of the content of pharmaceutical promotional activities. Therefore, in the absence of effective regulations and standards physicians should be aware of the risks of using non independent information sources.

Enlisting Employees in Improving Payroll-Tax Compliance: Evidence from Mexico

Non-compliance of firms with tax regulations is a major constraint on state capacity in developing countries. We focus on an arguably under-appreciated dimension of non-compliance: under-reporting of wages by formal firms to evade payroll taxes. We develop a simple partial-equilibrium model of endogenous compliance by heterogeneous firms to guide the empirical investigation. We then compare two independent sources of individual-level wage information from Mexico -- firms' wage reports to the Mexican social security agency and workers' responses to a household labor-force survey -- to investigate the extent of wage under-reporting and how it responded to an important change in the social security system. We document that under-reporting by formal firms is extensive, and that compliance is better in larger firms. Using a difference-in-differences strategy based on the 1997 Mexican pension reform, which effectively tied pension benefits more closely to reported wages for younger workers than for older workers, we show that the reform led to a relative decline in under-reporting for younger workers. Within metro area/sector/firm size cells, the decline in under-reporting was greater in cells initially employing a younger workforce on average. The empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical model and suggest that giving employees incentives and information to improve the accuracy of employer reports can be an effective way to improve payroll-tax compliance.

Predicting Cognitive Decline in Subjects at Risk for Alzheimer Disease by Using Combined Cerebrospinal Fluid, MR Imaging, and PET Biomarkers

To assess the extent to which multiple Alzheimer disease (AD) biomarkers improve the ability to predict future decline in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) compared with predictions based on clinical parameters alone. All protocols were approved by the institutional review board at each site, and written informed consent was obtained from all subjects. The study was HIPAA compliant. Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) studies for 97 subjects with MCI were used. MR imaging-derived gray matter probability maps and FDG PET images were analyzed by using independent component analysis, an unbiased data-driven method to extract independent sources of information from whole-brain data. The loading parameters for all MR imaging and FDG components, along with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteins, were entered into logistic regression models (dependent variable: conversion to AD within 4 years). Eight models were considered, including all combinations of MR imaging, PET, and CSF markers with the covariates (age, education, apolipoprotein E genotype, Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive subscale score). Combining MR imaging, FDG PET, and CSF data with routine clinical tests significantly increased the accuracy of predicting conversion to AD compared with clinical testing alone. The misclassification rate decreased from 41.3% to 28.4% (P < .00001). FDG PET contributed more information to routine tests (P < .00001) than CSF (P = .32) or MR imaging (P = .08). Imaging and CSF biomarkers can improve prediction of conversion from MCI to AD compared with baseline clinical testing. FDG PET appears to add the greatest prognostic information.

Drug Side-Effect Prediction Based on the Integration of Chemical and Biological Spaces

Drug side-effects, or adverse drug reactions, have become a major public health concern and remain one of the main causes of drug failure and of drug withdrawal once they have reached the market. Therefore, the identification of potential severe side-effects is a challenging issue. In this paper, we develop a new method to predict potential side-effect profiles of drug candidate molecules based on their chemical structures and target protein information on a large scale. We propose several extensions of kernel regression model for multiple responses to deal with heterogeneous data sources. The originality lies in the integration of the chemical space of drug chemical structures and the biological space of drug target proteins in a unified framework. As a result, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method on the simultaneous prediction of 969 side-effects for approved drugs from their chemical substructure and target protein profiles and show that the prediction accuracy consistently improves owing to the proposed regression model and integration of chemical and biological information. We also conduct a comprehensive side-effect prediction for uncharacterized drug molecules stored in DrugBank and confirm interesting predictions using independent information sources. The proposed method is expected to be useful at many stages of the drug development process.

The Design and Implementation of the Content Aggregation and Distribution Platform of New Media for Mobile Terminal

Base on the new media service bus of Tianjin Port, aim at the business needs and characteristics of the enterprise, through the digital content aggregation system gathers and manages multimedia resources, through cataloging、processing、storage the aggregated information processed by the content center and retrieve it as an independent source of information for other systems shared-used, Finally, through the distribution of the digital content platform, the powerful route of transmission of the new media to all-round、 three-dimensional report. This platform can distribute text, graphics, images, video and other media means on different media terminals, such as online media, mobile media, making the audience to be able to get more timely, more angles, more audio-visual and personalized communication experience, especially the mobile terminal play a particular advantage to meet user’s demand of accessing and feedback of new information anytime and anywhere.