JURNAL AGROTEKNOLOGI
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Hormone replacement therapy in women with cancer and risk of cancer-specific mortality and cardiovascular disease: a protocol for a cohort study from Scotland and Wales
No full textBackground
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is widely used and has proven benefits for women with menopausal symptoms. An increasing number of women with cancer experience menopausal symptoms but the safety of HRT use in women with cancer is unclear. There are particular concerns that HRT could accelerate cancer progression in women with cancer, and also that HRT could increase the risk of cardiovascular disease in such women. Therefore, our primary aim is to determine whether HRT use alters the risk of cancer-specific mortality in women with a range of common cancers. Our secondary objectives are to investigate whether HRT alters the risk of second cancers, cardiovascular disease, venous thromboembolism and all-cause mortality.
Methods
The study will utilise independent population-based data from Wales using the SAIL databank and Scotland based upon the national Prescribing Information System. The study will include women newly diagnosed with common cancers from 2000 to 2016, identified from cancer registries. Women with breast cancers will be excluded. HRT will be ascertained using electronic prescribing in Wales or dispensing records in Scotland. The primary outcome will be time to cancer-specific mortality from national mortality records. Time-dependent cox regression models will be used to calculate hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) for cancer specific death in HRT users compared with non-users after cancer diagnosis after adjusting for relevant confounders, stratified by cancer site. Analysis will be repeated investigating the impact of HRT use immediately before cancer diagnosis. Secondary analyses will be conducted on the risk of second cancers, cardiovascular disease, venous thromboembolism and all-cause mortality. Analyses will be conducted within each cohort and pooled across cohorts.
Discussion
Our study will provide evidence to inform guidance given to women diagnosed with cancer on the safety of HRT use and/or guide modifications to clinical practice
The Galactic center chimneys: the base of the multiphase outflow of the Milky Way
No full textContext. Outflows and feedback are key ingredients of galaxy evolution. Evidence for an outflow arising from the Galactic center (GC) – the so-called GC chimneys – has recently been discovered at radio, infrared, and X-ray bands.
Aims. We undertake a detailed examination of the spatial relationships between the emission in the different bands in order to place constraints on the nature and history of the chimneys and to better understand their impact on the GC environment and their relation with Galactic scale outflows.
Methods. We compare X-ray, radio, and infrared maps of the central few square degrees.
Results. The X-ray, radio, and infrared emissions are deeply interconnected, affecting one another and forming coherent features on scales of hundreds of parsecs, therefore indicating a common physical link associated with the GC outflow. We debate the location of the northern chimney and suggest that it might be located on the front side of the GC because of a significant tilt of the chimneys toward us. We report the presence of strong shocks at the interface between the chimneys and the interstellar medium, which are traced by radio and warm dust emission. We observe entrained molecular gas outflowing within the chimneys, revealing the multiphase nature of the outflow. In particular, the molecular outflow produces a long, strong, and structured shock along the northwestern wall of the chimney. Because of the different dynamical times of the various components of the outflow, the chimneys appear to be shaped by directed large-scale winds launched at different epochs. The data support the idea that the chimneys are embedded in an (often dominant) vertical magnetic field, which likely diverges with increasing latitude. We observe that the thermal pressure associated with the hot plasma appears to be smaller than the ram pressure of the molecular outflow and the magnetic pressure. This leaves open the possibility that either the main driver of the outflow is more powerful than the observed hot plasma, or the chimneys represent a “relic” of past and more powerful activity.
Conclusions. These multiwavelength observations corroborate the idea that the chimneys represent the channel connecting the quasi-continuous, but intermittent, activity at the GC with the base of the Fermi bubbles. In particular, the prominent edges and shocks observed in the radio and mid-infrared bands testify to the most powerful, more recent outflows from the central parsecs of the Milky Way
Theoretical priors in scalar-tensor cosmologies: shift-symmetric Horndeski models
No full textAttempts at constraining theories of late time accelerated expansion often assume broad priors for the parameters in their phenomenological description. Focusing on shift-symmetric scalar-tensor theories with standard gravitational wave speed, we show how a more careful analysis of their dynamical evolution leads to much narrower priors. In doing so, we propose a simple and accurate parametrization of these theories, capturing the redshift dependence of the equation of state,
w (z), and the kinetic braiding parameter, αB(z) , with only two parameters each, and derive their statistical distribution (also known as theoretical priors) that fit the cosmology of the underlying model. We have considered two versions of the shift-symmetric model, one where the energy density of dark energy is given solely by the scalar field and another where it also has a contribution from the cosmological constant. By including current data, we show how theoretical priors can be used to improve constraints by up to an order of magnitude. Moreover, we show that shift-symmetric theories without a cosmological constant are observationally viable. We work up to quartic order in first derivatives of the scalar in the action, and our results suggest this truncation is a good approximation to more general shift-symmetric theories. This work establishes an actionable link between phenomenological parametrizations and Lagrangian-based theories, the two main approaches to test cosmological gravity and cosmic acceleration
Conservation cost‐effectiveness: a review of the evidence base
No full textPrioritizing conservation interventions based on their cost-effectiveness may enhance global conservation impact. To do this prioritization, conservation decision-makers need evidence of what works where and how much it costs. Yet, the size, representativeness, and strength of the cost-effectiveness evidence base are unknown. We reviewed conservation cost-effectiveness studies, exploring the representation of different types of conservation interventions, habitats and locations, and the methods used. Studies were included if they were published in conservation science or related fields before 2017; were peer-reviewed; reported costs and conservation-effectiveness or ratios; and were based on empirical data. From an initial search of 13,184 articles, 91 were considered eligible. We found that the number of cost-effectiveness studies were growing but remain small. Many common conservation interventions were poorly represented, and there were large geographical biases, with few studies in the world's more biodiverse regions. This sparse and patchy evidence may result from challenges faced when conducting cost-effectiveness analysis. However, some of these challenges are not unique to cost-effectiveness studies, and others could be overcome through the use of standardized reporting methods. The reward for overcoming these challenges, and strengthening the evidence base, could be a significant and much-needed improvement in global conservation
Overcoming racism in the twin spheres of conservation science and practice
No full textIt is time to acknowledge and overcome conservation's deep-seated systemic racism, which has historically marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities and continues to do so. We describe how the mutually reinforcing ‘twin spheres’ of conservation science and conservation practice perpetuate this systemic racism. We trace how institutional structures in conservation science (e.g. degree programmes, support and advancement opportunities, course syllabuses) can systematically produce conservation graduates with partial and problematic conceptions of conservation's history and contemporary purposes. Many of these graduates go on to work in conservation practice, reproducing conservation's colonial history by contributing to programmes based on outmoded conservation models that disproportionately harm rural BIPOC communities and further restrict access and inclusion for BIPOC conservationists. We provide practical, actionable proposals for breaking vicious cycles of racism in the system of conservation we have with virtuous cycles of inclusion, equality, equity and participation in the system of conservation we want
NeuroMorph: unsupervised shape interpolation and correspondence in one go
No full textWe present NeuroMorph, a new neural network architecture that takes as input two 3D shapes and produces in one go, i.e. in a single feed forward pass, a smooth interpolation and point-to-point correspondences between them. The interpolation, expressed as a deformation field, changes the pose of the source shape to resemble the target, but leaves the object identity unchanged. NeuroMorph uses an elegant architecture combining graph convolutions with global feature pooling to extract local features. During training, the model is incentivized to create realistic deformations by approximating geodesics on the underlying shape space manifold. This strong geometric prior allows to train our model end-to-end and in a fully unsupervised manner without requiring any manual correspondence annotations. NeuroMorph works well for a large variety of input shapes, including non-isometric pairs from different object categories. It obtains state-of-the-art results for both shape correspondence and interpolation tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of recent unsupervised and supervised methods on multiple benchmarks
Slow progression: Educational trajectories of young men and women in Ethiopia
No full textAs children, the young women and men in the Young Lives study often had high aspirations for their lives after school, but many have found themselves unable to fulfil their dreams. Drawing on Young Lives longitudinal qualitative and survey data in Ethiopia, this working paper finds that more than half of the young people in the study dropped out of school early and that many students are older than the intended age for their school year. Because of their prolonged school trajectories, several are still attending school as adults. Only one has completed university education. Prolonged educational trajectories also mean young women are susceptible to marriage before finishing school
The paper examines the influence of workload, teaching quality, and illness and injury and asks: Why do young people repeat classes or drop out of school early? What effect do poverty, location, gender and other factors have on school progression? And finally, what stops these young people completing their education?
This working paper and the accompanying policy brief are part of a set of eight working papers and eight policy briefs on gendered transitions into young adulthood in Ethiopia
Unravelling the silicon-silicon dioxide interface under different operating conditions
No full textSilicon dioxide (SiO2) has played a critical role in the development of high-efficiency silicon (Si)-based photovoltaic devices. Recently, it has experienced a renaissance as an interlayer in many of the new contact passivating structures. Studies have extensively investigated the recombination process at the Si–SiO2 interface, however, only little is known about the impact of temperature on the surface recombination. In this study, we investigate the recombination at the Si–SiO2 interface by varying the temperature, excess carrier density, and dielectric fixed charge. An improved lifetime is observed with increasing temperature. A forming gas anneal is used to improve the passivation quality, however, at higher temperatures, the hydrogenated interface passivation degrades due to increased surface state density. The degradation is stronger for corona-charged SiO2, due to the instability of the corona charge within the dielectric. Using the extended Shockley-Read Hall recombination model, the Si–SiO2 interface defects’ parameters are extracted. Most importantly, we determine the value and the temperature-dependence of the capture cross-sections at this interface
The Claiming Costs Scale: A new instrument for measuring the costs potential beneficiaries face when claiming social benefits
No full textIt is a well-known feature of social protection systems that not all persons who are entitled to social benefits also claim these benefits. The costs people face when claiming benefits is considered an important cause of this phenomenon of non-take-up. In this paper, we developed and examined the psychometric properties of a new scale, the Claiming Cost Scale (CCS), which measures three dimensions of costs associated with claiming benefits. A multi-phase instrument development method was performed to develop the instrument. The item pool was generated based on a literature review, and presented to academic experts (n = 9) and experts by experience (n = 5) to assess content and face validity. In a second stage, centrality and dispersion, construct validity, convergent and divergent validity, and internal reliability of the instrument were tested. These analyses were based on two samples (n = 141 and n = 1265) of individuals living in low-income households in Belgium. Nine items were retained, which represent three factors (Information costs, Process costs and Stigma). The confirmatory factor analysis proved adequate model fitness. Both convergent and divergent validity were good, and internal consistency was adequate, with Cronbach’s alpha ranging between .73 and .87. The findings showed that the CCS is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the costs potential beneficiaries face when claiming benefits. Consisting of only nine items, the scale can be easily implemented in large-scale survey research or used in day-to-day work of service providers who are interested in understanding non-take-up of their service