Burden of fire injuries in Finland: lost productivity and benefits

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the economic burden of fire-related injury from two perspectives: post-injury social security compensations and also productivity losses due to the lost productive time from a societal perspective induced by the injury. Design and methods: A cohort of 1503 inpatients who sustained firerelated injury during the period 2001–2005 was retrospectively followed up for 5-10 years until the end of 2010, using linkages between several administrative registers. The study process was started in 2015 and finalized on March 2016. Results: Annual productivity loss was on average EUR 5.72 million, giving a total for the five-year study period of EUR 28.6 million, with a mean value of EUR 19,070 per person. Mean/median disability time for those who received benefits was 572/63 days, ranging from 3 days to 36.5 years. Total average cost of benefits to the injured annually during the study period was EUR 1.03 million. This equates to EUR 3430 per patient for the whole cohort or EUR 14,860 for those who received benefits. Conclusions: The burden of fire-related injuries in terms of payment transfers and lost productivity due to periods of disability as indirect costs is high; in a population of 5.4 million, the annual loss exceeded EUR 5.7 million. The results could be used in planning preventive measures and therefore yield saving

Consciousness, Action Selection, Meaning and Phenomenic Anticipation

Phenomenal states are generally considered the ultimate sources of intrinsic motivation for autonomous biological agents. In this article, we will address the issue of the necessity of exploiting these states for the design and implementation of robust goal-directed artificial systems. We will provide an analysis of consciousness in terms of a precise definition of how an agent "understands" the informational flows entering the agent and its very own action possibilities. This abstract model of consciousness and understanding will be based in the analysis and evaluation of phenomenal states along potential future trajectories in the state space of the agents. This implies that a potential strategy to follow in order to build autonomous but still customer-useful systems is to embed them with the particular, ad hoc phenomenality that captures the system-external requirements that define the system usefulness from a customer-based, requirements-strict engineering viewpoint

Methodological challenges in using the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register for studying fire-related injuries leading to inpatient care

Peer reviewe

What do we know about the α/β for prostate cancer?

Since last decade, the debate on the parameter which reflects prostate cancer sensitivity to fractionation in a radiotherapy treatment, the α/β, has become extensive. Unlike most tumors, the low labeling indices (LI) and large potential doubling time that characterize the prostate tumor led some authors to consider that it may behave as a late responding tissue. So far, the existing studies with regard to this subject point to a low value of α/β, around 2.7 Gy, which may be considered as a therapeutic gain in relation to surrounding normal tissues by using fewer and larger fractions. The aim of this paper is to review several estimates that have been made in the last few years regarding the prostate cancer α/β both from clinical and experimental data, as well as the set of factors that have potentially influenced these evaluations

Perception and recollection of fire hazards in dwelling fires

Current understanding of dwelling fire injury outcomes is impacted by data limitations, confounds, and failures to adequately examine occupant behaviour. For instance, research rarely considers: occupant perception of fire hazard properties (e.g. size of flames/smoke when first encountered); resultant engagement (enter smoky room, tackle flames); whether hazard size percepts are accurate when recollected for investigators; and what the best recollection method is. Two experiments (N = 141, 132) presented short videos of kitchen fires where hazard size was either Small, Mid or Large. Immediately after seeing this (Experiment 1), or after a delay (Experiment 2), participants’ performance at recollecting hazard size and their willingness to (hypothetically) engage with the hazards was tested. Recollection performance was compared across three methods. Interestingly, free recall resulted in poor performance but performance improved by 2-3 times when using two types of layperson-friendly descriptors (text, pictures) that allowed hazard size to be referenced to other scene elements. Pictures had a slight advantage over text descriptors. Larger hazards were recollected less accurately than small ones, albeit still somewhat meaningfully; the exception was mid-sized smoke and attentional narrowing effects are discussed. Importantly, while increased hazard size reduced willingness, a concerning percentage of participants nevertheless considered engaging with the largest hazards; such risky behaviours may explain injury outcomes. Prior fire experience and gender affected recollection and willingness, often interacting with hazard size. Delayed recollection and individual differences did not. These findings suggest occupant behaviour, characteristics and hazard size data need capturing to help assess fire injury risks

Molecular evolution of viral multifunctional proteins: the case of Potyvirus HC-Pro

[EN] Our knowledge on the mode of evolution of the multifunctional viral proteins remains incomplete. To tackle this problem, here, we have investigated the evolutionary dynamics of the potyvirus multifunctional protein HC-Pro, with particular focus on its functional domains. The protein was partitioned into the three previously described functional domains, and each domain was analyzed separately and assembled. We searched for signatures of adaptive evolution and evolutionary dependencies of amino acid sites within and between the three domains using the entire set of available potyvirus sequences in GenBank. Interestingly, we identified strongly significant patterns of co-occurrence of adaptive events along the phylogenetic tree in the three domains. These patterns suggest that Domain I, whose main function is to mediate aphid transmission, has likely been coevolving with the other two domains, which are involved in different functions but all requiring the capacity to bind RNA. By contrast, episodes of positive selection on Domains II and III did not correlate, reflecting a trade-off between their evolvability and their evolutionary dependency likely resulting from their functional overlap. Covariation analyses have identified several groups of amino acids with evidence of concerted variation within each domain, but interdomain significant covariations were only found for Domains II and III, further reflecting their functional overlappingThis work was supported by grants BFU2012-30805 (SFE) and BFU2012-36346 (MAF) from the Spanish Direccio´n General de Investigacio´n Cientı´fica y Te´cnica and by an EMBO Short-Term Fellowship and the Mentoring Program from the Foundation for Polish Science (BHJ).Hasiów-Jaroszewska, B.; Fares Riaño, MA.; Elena Fito, SF. (2014). Molecular evolution of viral multifunctional proteins: the case of Potyvirus HC-Pro. 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J Biol Chem 286:21937–21943Haikonen T, Rajamäki ML, Tian YP, Valkonen JPT (2013) Mutation of a short variable region in HC-Pro protein of Potato virus A affects interactions with microtubule-associated protein and induces necrotic responses in tobacco. Mol Plant Microbe Interact 26:721–733Hall TA (1999) BIOEDIT: a user-friendly biological sequence alignment editor and analysis program for Windows 95/98/NT. Nucl Acids Symp Ser 41:95–98Hughes AL (2009) Small effective population sizes and rare nonsynonymous variants in potyviruses. Virology 393:127–134Jones DT (1999) Protein secondary structure prediction based on position-specific scoring matrices. J Mol Biol 292:195–202Kasschau KD, Carrington JC (1995) Requirement for HC-Pro processing during genome amplification of Tobacco etch potyvirus. Virology 209:268–273Kasschau KD, Carrington JC (2001) Long-distance movement and replication maintenance functions correlate with silencing suppression activity of potyviral HC-Pro. 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Toward Self-Referential Autonomous Learning of Object and Situation Models

Most current approaches to scene understanding lack the capability to adapt object and situation models to behavioral needs not anticipated by the human system designer. Here, we give a detailed description of a system architecture for self-referential autonomous learning which enables the refinement of object and situation models during operation in order to optimize behavior. This includes structural learning of hierarchical models for situations and behaviors that is triggered by a mismatch between expected and actual action outcome. Besides proposing architectural concepts, we also describe a first implementation of our system within a simulated traffic scenario to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach

Antiviral Silencing and Suppression of Gene Silencing in Plants

RNA silencing is an evolutionary conserved sequence-specific gene inactivation mechanism that contributes to the control of development, maintains heterochromatin, acts in stress responses, DNA repair and defends against invading nucleic acids like transposons and viruses. In plants RNA silencing functions as one of the main immune systems. RNA silencing process involves the small RNAs and trans factor components like Dicers, Argonautes and RNA-dependent RNA poly- merases. To deal with host antiviral silencing responses viruses evolved mecha- nisms to avoid or counteract this, most notably through expression of viral suppressors of RNA silencing. Due to the overlap between endogenous and antiviral silencing pathways while blocking antiviral pathways viruses also impact endogenous silencing processes. Here we provide an overview of antiviral silencing pathway, host factors implicated in it and the crosstalk between antiviral and endogenous branches of silencing. We summarize the current status of knowledge about the viral counter-defense strategies acting at various steps during virus infection in plants with the focus on representative, well studied silencing suppres- sor proteins. Finally we discuss future challenges of the antiviral silencing and counter-defense research field