How one treats others is important within collective action. We ask if resource scarcity in the past, due to its effects upon past behaviors, influences current other-regarding behaviors. Contrasting ...theories and empirical findings on scarcity motivate our framed field experiment. Participants are rural Colombian farmers who have experienced scarcity of water within irrigation. We randomly assign participants to groups and places on group canals. Places order extraction decisions. Our treatments are sequences of scarcities: ‘from lower to higher resources' involves four rounds each of 20, 60, then 100 units of water; ‘from higher to lower resources' reverses the ordering. We find that upstream farmers extract more, but a lower share, when facing higher resources. Further they take a larger share of higher resources when they faced lower resources in earlier rounds (relative to when facing higher resources initially). That is inconsistent with leading models of responses to scarcity which focus upon one's own gain. It is consistent with lowering one's weight on others to, for instance, rationalize having left them little. Our results suggest that facing higher scarcity can erode the bases for collective actions. For establishing new institutions, timing relative to scarcity could affect the probability of success.
•We look for durable effects of past resource scarcity via effects on past behaviors•We implemented a novel framed field experiment with farmers from rural Colombia•Our treatments are orderings of scarcities, higher to lower versus lower to higher•Upstream takes a larger share of higher resources if they have faced low resources•Worse for downstream, this triggers more extraction by midstream following upstream
Strasberg's criteria to detect a critical view of safety is a widely known strategy to reduce bile duct injuries during laparoscopic cholecystectomy. In spite of its popularity and efficiency, recent ...studies have shown that human miss-identification errors have led to important bile duct injuries occurrence rates. Developing tools based on artificial intelligence that facilitate the identification of a critical view of safety in cholecystectomy surgeries can potentially minimize the risk of such injuries. With this goal in mind, we present Cholec80-CVS, the first open dataset with video annotations of Strasberg's Critical View of Safety (CVS) criteria. Our dataset contains CVS criteria annotations provided by skilled surgeons for all videos in the well-known Cholec80 open video dataset. We consider that Cholec80-CVS is the first step towards the creation of intelligent systems that can assist humans during laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Objective:
To describe the population of patients with cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) in terms of cleft phenotypes, gender, age, ethnic group, family history, clinical presentation (syndromic vs ...nonsyndromic), some environmental and behavioral factors, and some clinical features.
Design:
Descriptive retrospective study.
Setting:
Patients attending the genetics counseling practice in Operation Smile Foundation, Bogotá, Colombia, for over 8 years.
Participants:
No screening was conducted. All patients requiring clinical genetics assessment in Operation Smile Foundation were included in the study.
Results:
Left cleft lip and palate (CLP) and nonsyndromic forms were the most frequent types of malformations in this population. Psychomotor retardation and heart disease were the most frequent comorbidities in these patients. A low proportion of mothers exposed to passive smoking during pregnancy was observed and low birth weight accounted for an important number of cases. Aarskog, velocardiofacial, and orofaciodigital syndromes were the most frequent syndromic forms of CLP in this population.
Conclusions:
In this study, the most frequent type of CL/P was the nonsyndromic complete left CLP. Aarskog, velocardiofacial, and orofaciodigital syndromes were the most frequent syndromic forms of CL/P in this population.
El artículo de reflexión aborda con una metodología propia de la hermenéutica jurídica y con técnicas cualitativas de procesamiento de la información, el problema de la efectividad normativa del ...proceso de reparación de las víctimas de la masacre de Mejor Esquina. Es de anotar, que el uso metodológico posibilitó la interpretación de normas, de material documental, de extrapolaciones teóricas y de análisis de jurisprudencia. La estructura de los argumentos se presenta de la siguiente forma: En el item uno se analiza la técnica violenta de las masacres como sistema estructurado de control social, basurización simbólica (Silva Santiesteban, 2008) y eliminacionismo, especialmente, se documenta la masacre de Mejor Esquina como un caso de justicia postergada. El item dos propende por evidenciar las luchas de la posmemoria y la necesidad imperiosa de instaurar una justicia anamnética como garantía de no repetición.
Silk fibroin nanoparticles (SFN) have become a promising tool in drug delivery systems due to their physicochemical characteristics. SFN have shown their outstanding properties as an active vehicle ...for polyphenols, enhancing their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects on macrophages; therefore, it becomes necessary to have an easy, reproducible and scalable production method. In order to improve the production of nanoparticles, we performed direct precipitation of non-dialyzed silk fibroin solutions and evaluated the reproducibility of the method using dynamic light scattering. We also studied the loading efficiency of three different natural polyphenols using propylene glycol as a solvent. The loaded nanoparticles were fully characterized and used to treat human macrophage cells to assess the anti-inflammatory activity of these nanoparticles. The measured hydrodynamic characteristics of the SFN and the overall yield of the process showed that the new preparation method is highly reproducible and repeatable. Thus, we not only present a new scalable method to prepare silk nanoparticles but also how to improve the loading of natural polyphenolic compounds to the SFN, as well as the important anti-inflammatory effects of these loaded nanoparticles in a cell model of human macrophage cells.
Machine learning is a useful tool for predicting medical outcomes. This study aimed to develop a machine learning-based preoperative score to predict cardiac surgical operative mortality.
We ...developed various models to predict cardiac operative mortality using machine learning techniques and compared each model to European System for Cardiac Operative Risk Evaluation-II (EuroSCORE-II) using the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and precision-recall (PR) curves (ROC AUC and PR AUC) as performance metrics. The model calibration in our population was also reported with all models and in high-risk groups for gradient boosting and EuroSCORE-II. This study is a retrospective cohort based on a prospectively collected database from July 2008 to April 2018 from a single cardiac surgical center in Bogotá, Colombia.
Model comparison consisted of hold-out validation: 80% of the data were used for model training, and the remaining 20% of the data were used to test each model and EuroSCORE-II. Operative mortality was 6.45% in the entire database and 6.59% in the test set. The performance metrics for the best machine learning model, gradient boosting (ROC: 0.755; PR: 0.292), were higher than those of EuroSCORE-II (ROC: 0.716, PR: 0.179), with a P value of .318 for the AUC of the ROC and .137 for the AUC of the PR.
The gradient boosting model was more precise than EuroSCORE-II in predicting mortality in our population based on ROC and PR analyses, although the difference was not statistically significant.
Fungal unspecific peroxygenases (UPOs) are hybrid biocatalysts with peroxygenative activity that insert oxygen into non-activated compounds, while also possessing convergent peroxidative activity for ...one electron oxidation reactions. In several ligninolytic peroxidases, the site of peroxidative activity is associated with an oxidizable aromatic residue at the protein surface that connects to the buried heme domain through a long-range electron transfer (LRET) pathway. However, the peroxidative activity of these enzymes may also be initiated at the heme access channel. In this study, we examined the origin of the peroxidative activity of UPOs using an evolved secretion variant (PaDa-I mutant) from
Agrocybe aegerita
as our point of departure. After analyzing potential radical-forming aromatic residues at the PaDa-I surface by QM/MM, independent saturation mutagenesis libraries of Trp24, Tyr47, Tyr79, Tyr151, Tyr265, Tyr281, Tyr293 and Tyr325 were constructed and screened with both peroxidative and peroxygenative substrates. These mutant libraries were mostly inactive, with only a few functional clones detected, none of these showing marked differences in the peroxygenative and peroxidative activities. By contrast, when the flexible Gly314-Gly318 loop that is found at the outer entrance to the heme channel was subjected to combinatorial saturation mutagenesis and computational analysis, mutants with improved kinetics and a shift in the pH activity profile for peroxidative substrates were found, while they retained their kinetic values for peroxygenative substrates. This striking change was accompanied by a 4.5°C enhancement in kinetic thermostability despite the variants carried up to four consecutive mutations. Taken together, our study proves that the origin of the peroxidative activity in UPOs, unlike other ligninolytic peroxidases described to date, is not dependent on a LRET route from oxidizable residues at the protein surface, but rather it seems to be exclusively located at the heme access channel.
Exposome studies are advancing in high-income countries to understand how multiple environmental exposures impact health. However, there is a significant research gap in low- and middle-income and ...tropical countries. We aimed to describe the spatiotemporal variation of the external exposome, its correlation structure between and within exposure groups, and its dimensionality. A one-year follow-up cohort study of 506 children under 5 in two cities in Colombia was conducted to evaluate asthma, acute respiratory infections, and DNA damage. We examined 48 environmental exposures during pregnancy and 168 during childhood in eight exposure groups, including atmospheric pollutants, natural spaces, meteorology, built environment, traffic, indoor exposure, and socioeconomic capital. The exposome was estimated using geographic information systems, remote sensing, spatiotemporal modeling, and questionnaires. The median age of children at study entry was 3.7 years (interquartile range: 2.9–4.3). Air pollution and natural spaces exposure decreased from pregnancy to childhood, while socioeconomic capital increased. The highest median correlations within exposure groups were observed in meteorology (r = 0.85), traffic (r = 0.83), and atmospheric pollutants (r = 0.64). Important correlations between variables from different exposure groups were found, such as atmospheric pollutants and meteorology (r = 0.76), natural spaces (r = −0.34), and the built environment (r = 0.53). Twenty principal components explained 70%, and 57 explained 95% of the total variance in the childhood exposome. Our findings show that there is an important spatiotemporal variation in the exposome of children under 5. This is the first characterization of the external exposome in urban areas of Latin America and highlights its complexity, but also the need to better characterize and understand the exposome in order to optimize its analysis and applications in local interventions aimed at improving the health conditions and well-being of the child population and contributing to environmental health decision-making.
Display omitted
•We described the early-life exposome in Colombian children under five.•Exposome varied considerably by city and time (pregnancy and childhood).•Health studies with air pollutants should consider other exposure groups.•It is very complex to summarize exposome into a few exposure components.•Due to time-space variations, more exposome studies are needed in Latin America.
The loss of tropical forests has continued in recent decades despite wide recognition of their importance to maintaining biodiversity. Here, we examine the conversion of forests to pastures and coca ...crops (illicit activity) on the San Lucas Mountain Range, Colombia for 2002-2007 and 2007-2010. Land use maps and biophysical variables were used as inputs to generate land use and cover change (LUCC) models using the DINAMICA EGO software. These analyses revealed a dramatic acceleration of the pace of deforestation in the region, with rates of conversion from forest to pasture doubling from the first to the second period. Altitude, distance to other crops, and distance to rivers were the primary drivers of deforestation. The influence of these drivers, however, differed markedly depending on whether coca cultivation or pastures replaced forest. Conversion to coca was more probable farther from other crops and from settlements. In contrast, proximity to other crops and to settlements increased conversion to pasture. These relationships highlight the different roles of coca and pastures in forest loss, with coca tending to open up new forest frontiers, and pastures tending to consolidate agricultural expansion and urban influence. Large differences between LUCC processes for each period suggest highly dynamic changes, likely associated with shifting underlying causes of deforestation. These changes may relate to shifts in demand for illicit crops, land, or mining products; however, the data to test these hypotheses are currently lacking. More frequent and detailed monitoring is required to guide actions to decrease the loss of forest in this highly vulnerable biodiversity hotspot in the Northern Andes.
To compare the pediatric population that presented with accidental and non-accidental abdominal trauma treated in a reference hospital in Bogotá, Colombia.
Comparative retrospective case series study ...of children who presented with accidental abdominal trauma (AT) and non-accidental abdominal trauma (NAT) was carried out. The children were treated at HOMI Fundación Hospital Pediatrico la Misericordia from June 2013 to December 2019. Statistical analysis was performed calculating measures of central tendency and dispersion.
The study included 175 patients. There was no gender predilection. The most common trauma mechanism in AT was fall (35.17 %) and in NAT was physical aggression (40 %). No difference was found in the dispersion of the Injury Severity Score (ISS). The requirement for surgical approach was higher in the NAT group (63.33 % vs 25.52 %). This group presented with a greater involvement of intra-abdominal organs (75 % vs 52.95 %), greater involvement of the small (20 %) and large (20 %) intestines. NAT children also had more multiple intra-abdominal organs involved (25 % vs 11.76 %), longer intensive care unit stay (56.67 % vs 39.31 %), prolonged hospital stay (7.5 days vs 4 days), and higher complications and mortality (6.67 % vs 2.07 %).
Non-accidental abdominal trauma has greater morbidity and mortality in children compared to accidental trauma. For this reason, early identification of these cases is important in order to prevent future complications.