Impact of Outpatient vs Inpatient ABSSSI Treatment on Outcomes: A Retrospective Observational Analysis of Medical Charts Across US Emergency Departments

Background The objective of this study was to characterize treatment of patients with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections (ABSSSIs) and describe the association between hospital admission and emergency department (ED) visits or readmissions within 30 days after initial episode of care (IEC). Methods This was a retrospective, observational, cohort study of adults with ABSSSI who presented to an ED between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013. Patient, health care facility, and treatment characteristics, including unplanned ED visits or readmissions, were obtained through manual chart review and abstraction. Adjusted logistic regression analysis examined likelihood of all-cause unplanned ED visits or readmissions between admitted and nonadmitted patients. Results Records from 1527 ED visits for ABSSSI from 40 centers were reviewed (admitted, n = 578 [38%]; nonadmitted, n = 949 [62%]). Admitted patients were typically older (mean age, 52.2 years vs 43.0 years), more likely to be morbidly obese (body mass index \u3e 40 kg/m2; 17.3% vs 9.1%), and had more comorbidities (Charlson Comorbidity Index ≥ 4; 24.4% vs 6.8%) compared with those not admitted. In the primary analysis, adjusted logistic regression, controlling for comorbidities and severity of illness, demonstrated that there was a similar likelihood of all-cause unplanned ED visits or readmissions between admitted and nonadmitted patients (odds ratio, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.74–1.43; P = .87). Conclusions ABSSSI treatment pathways leveraging outpatient treatment vs hospital admission support similar likelihood of unplanned 30-day ED visits or readmissions, an important clinical outcome and quality metric at US hospitals. Further research regarding the decision criteria around hospital admission to avoid potentially unnecessary hospitalizations is warranted

The More, The Better? A Case History Of Audit Committee Regulations

An understanding of changing auditing regulatory environment is vital in preparing students for the challenges in the accounting profession. The revised requirements for audit committees are one of the significant changes after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Presenting a case history of regulatory changes for audit committees, this study requires students to critically analyze information and to conduct research on auditing topics. Meanwhile, integrating further discussion on corporate governance into auditing class can enrich students learning experience by stimulating critical thinking

A Stochastic Segmentation Model for Categorical and Continuous Features of various biological sequential

Nowadays, Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has been widely used in analysis of various biological data for both smoothing and clustering. However, characterizing each hidden state by a single distribution, the classical HMM might have some limitations on the data whose hidden state is composed by a mixture of distributions (Heng Lian et al. | 2006). To address this issue, we proposed a new stochastic segmentation model and an associated estimation procedure that has attractive analytical and computational properties. We combined the forward and backward filter together based on Bayes\u27 theorem to calculate the posterior mean and variance. Besides, we developed an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the hyper-parameters. Furthermore, we utilized a bounded complexity mixture (BCMIX) approximation whose computational complexity is linear in sequence length. Another important feature of this segmentation model is that it yields explicit formulas for posterior means and probability of categorical states, which can be used to make inference on both categorical and continuous aspects of the data. Other quantities relating to the posterior distribution that are useful for making confidence assessments of any given segmentation can also be estimated by using our method. We perform intensive simulation studies (1) to compare the Bayes and BCMIX estimates (2) to evaluate the BCMIX estimates in terms of sum square error, Kullback-Leibler divergence and the identification ratio of true segments. We also applied our model on two biological data sets: (1) reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) data (A.Molaro et al. | 2011) (2) ENCODE Nimblegen tilled arrays (Sabo et al. | 2006). Our model shows good performance on segmentation of these two sequential data. In RRBS data it can further help identify differential methylation region (DMR) while in microarray data it can discover the DNAsel Hypersensitive Sites (DHSs). | 107 page

A Novel Privacy Enhancement Scheme with Dynamic Quantization for Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) has been widely regarded as a promising paradigm for privacy preservation of raw data in machine learning. Although, the data privacy in FL is locally protected to some extent, it is still a desideratum to enhance privacy and alleviate communication overhead caused by repetitively transmitting model parameters. Typically, these challenges are addressed separately, or jointly via a unified scheme that consists of noise-injected privacy mechanism and communication compression, which may lead to model corruption due to the introduced composite noise. In this work, we propose a novel model-splitting privacy-preserving FL (MSP-FL) scheme to achieve private FL with precise accuracy guarantee. Based upon MSP-FL, we further propose a model-splitting privacy-preserving FL with dynamic quantization (MSPDQ-FL) to mitigate the communication overhead, which incorporates a shrinking quantization interval to reduce the quantization error. We provide privacy and convergence analysis for both MSP-FL and MSPDQ-FL under non-i.i.d. dataset, partial clients participation and finite quantization level. Numerical results are presented to validate the superiority of the proposed schemes

Equity pledge of controlling shareholders, property right structure and enterprise innovation efficiency: evidence from Chinese firms

The innovation efficiency of an enterprise is subject to the behavior of the innovation subject, while the equity pledge behavior of the controlling shareholder not only brings convenience for innovation investment and financing, but also brings risks which has an impact on the innovation output of the enterprise. In this paper, we investigate how equity pledge of controlling shareholders affect the enterprise innovation efficiency using the data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2014 to 2020, and examine the effect of property right structure on the relationship between them from the two dimensions of equity nature and equity concentration. We find that equity pledge of controlling shareholders are signifcantly negatively related to innovation efficiency, meaning that equity pledge inhibits the innovation behavior of enterprises and reduces the innovation efficiency. We further provide evidence to show that the impediment effect of equity pledge of controlling shareholder on enterprise innovation efficiency is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and decentralized equity enterprises. Moreover, our analysis shows that different equity concentration levels have different effects in the process of equity pledge affecting enterprise innovation efficiency and the effect of concentrated equity enterprises is lower than that of decentralized enterprises

Measuring psi(3770) -> Kshort Klong as a test of the S- and D-wave mixing of charmonia

Adding to the long standing "rho-pi puzzle" in psi(3686) and J/psi decays, recently BES reported the branching ratio of psi(3686) -> Kshort Klong which is enhanced relative to the pQCD " 12% rule" expectation from the branching ratio of J/psi -> Kshort Klong. If the enhancement is due to the mixing of the S- and D-wave charmonium states as in the rho-pi case, the newly measured branching ratio of psi(3686) -> Kshort Klong gives a constraint on the psi(3770) -> Kshort Klong. It serves as a good test for the scenario of the S- and D-wave mixing in the psi(3686) and psi(3770).Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Observation of ηc→ωω\eta_c\to\omega\omega in J/ψ→γωωJ/\psi\to\gamma\omega\omega

Using a sample of $(1310.6\pm7.0)\times10^6$ $J/\psi$ events recorded with the BESIII detector at the symmetric electron positron collider BEPCII, we report the observation of the decay of the $(1^1 S_0)$ charmonium state $\eta_c$ into a pair of $\omega$ mesons in the process $J/\psi\to\gamma\omega\omega$. The branching fraction is measured for the first time to be $\mathcal{B}(\eta_c\to\omega\omega)= (2.88\pm0.10\pm0.46\pm0.68)\times10^{-3}$, where the first uncertainty is statistical, the second systematic and the third is from the uncertainty of $\mathcal{B}(J/\psi\to\gamma\eta_c)$. The mass and width of the $\eta_c$ are determined as $M=(2985.9\pm0.7\pm2.1)\,$MeV/$c^2$ and $\Gamma=(33.8\pm1.6\pm4.1)\,$MeV.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Search for the decay J/ψ→γ+invisibleJ/\psi\to\gamma + \rm {invisible}

We search for $J/\psi$ radiative decays into a weakly interacting neutral particle, namely an invisible particle, using the $J/\psi$ produced through the process $\psi(3686)\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi$ in a data sample of $(448.1\pm2.9)\times 10^6$ $\psi(3686)$ decays collected by the BESIII detector at BEPCII. No significant signal is observed. Using a modified frequentist method, upper limits on the branching fractions are set under different assumptions of invisible particle masses up to 1.2 $\mathrm{\ Ge\kern -0.1em V}/c^2$. The upper limit corresponding to an invisible particle with zero mass is 7.0$\times 10^{-7}$ at the 90\% confidence level