bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
New Method of Determining the Atrial Fibrillation Cycle Length During Human Atrial Fibrillation
Authors: SHIMIZU AKIHIKO , YOSHIGA YASUHIRO , YAMAGATA TOSHIHIKO , ESATO MASAHIRO , DOI MASAHIRO , KAKUGAWA HIROYUKI , KAMETANI RYOUSUKE , INOUE NORIKO , KANEMOTO MASASHI , MATSUZAKI MASUNORI 
Published: September 2003

Introduction: The aim of this study was to investigate the usefulness of the autocorrelation function (reversed fast Fourier transform analysis) in determining the atrial fibrillation cycle length (AFCL) during human atrial fibrillation (AF). Methods and Results: From 30 episodes of atrial electrograms recorded for 30 seconds from the high right atrium during type I AF in 16 patients, the mean, 5th percentile (p5), and 95th percentile (p95) of the AFCLs were measured by using a computer‐picked activation time. The peak, minimum, and maximum AFCLs also were measured by using the autocorrelation function. The mean AFCL was retrieved at the point of the maximum peak of the coefficient of the first positive autocorrelogram. The minimum AFCL (min AFCL) was chosen as the point where the first positive autocorrelogram crossed the baseline from negative to positive, and the maximum AFCL (max AFCL) was chosen as the point where the first positive autocorrelogram crossed the baseline from positive to negative. There was a significantly strong correlation between the mean and peak AFCLs (r = 0.995, P < 0.0001), p5 and min AFCLs (r = 0.953, P < 0.0001), and p95 and max AFCLs (r = 0.98, P < 0.0001). Conclusion: The autocorrelation function was useful in determining the AFCLs, at least during type I AF. The min AFCL may be used as an index of the refractory period during AF when the p5 AFCL approximates the refractory period. (J Cardiovasc Electrophysiol, Vol. 14, pp. 965‐970, September 2003)
Quantifying Intracardiac Organization of Atrial Arrhythmias Using Temporospatial Phase of the Electrocardiogram
Authors: NARAYAN SANJIV M. , FELD GREGORY K. , HASSANKHANI ALBORZ , BHARGAVA VALMIK 
Published: September 2003

Introduction: Separating nonisthmus‐dependent atrial flutter (AFL) from “organized” atrial fibrillation (AF), or isthmus‐dependent AFL, may be difficult using ECG characteristics alone. We hypothesized that temporal and spatial phase analysis of ECG atrial waveforms could effectively separate these rhythms by quantifying subtle variations in ECG atrial activation during supraventricular tachycardias (SVT). Methods and Results: We studied 52 patients at electrophysiologic study (EPS) who demonstrated isthmus‐dependent (n = 15) and nonisthmus‐dependent (n = 9) AFL, atrial tachycardia (n = 6), AV nodal reentry (n = 9), orthodromic reciprocating tachycardia (n = 6), and AF (n = 7). Atrial activity was represented as a series of correlations of an atrial template to successive time samples of the arrhythmia ECG. Spatial phase was analyzed as a reproducible relationship of this atrial activity between leads over time; temporal regularity was measured from power spectra. Spatial phase was maintained (coherent) in lead planes V5/aVF (XY), V5/V1 (XZ), and aVF/V1 (YZ) in 15 of 15 cases of isthmus‐dependent AFL, but in only 1 of 9 cases of nonisthmus‐dependent AFL (P < 0.01; χ2). Temporally, all cases of AFL showed one dominant peak on correlation spectra (magnitude >6 dB), suggesting one activation wavefront, although this was smeared in nonisthmus‐dependent cases. In contrast, AF showed inconsistent spatial phase in all planes and broad band spectra, consistent with multiple and/or variable activation paths. All other SVTs showed spatial coherence and one dominant spectral peak. Conclusion: Coherence of temporal and spatial phase is a powerful approach to measure the spatial organization of intracardiac activation from the ECG that reveals a spectrum from SVT to isthmus‐dependent and nonisthmus‐dependent AFL, to AF. (J Cardiovasc Electrophysiol, Vol. 14, pp. 971‐981, September 2003)
Investing in the Citizen‐workers of the Future: Transformations in Citizenship and the State under New Labour
Authors: Lister Ruth 
Published: September 2003

AbstractThere is growing interest in the idea of the “social investment state”. This paper analyses the emergence of such a state in the UK, in the context of a brief account of the more general transformations of citizenship and the state under New Labour. It argues that, despite the iconic status of the child in the social investment state, it is the child as “citizen‐worker” of the future rather than “citizen‐child” of the present who is invoked by the future‐oriented discourse of social investment.
Quantifying Quality: Can Quantitative Data (“Metrics”) Explain the 2001 RAE Ratings for Social Policy and Administration?
Authors: McKay Stephen 
Published: September 2003

AbstractThis paper finds that around 80 per cent of the differences in the ratings awarded in the 2001 RAE for social policy may be “explained” using half a dozen pieces of quantitative data. Social policy excellence—as judged by peer review—is associated with the award of doctorates, the amount of money raised, publications in a particular (if broad) range of journals and books by major publishers, and being large. Even taking account of differences on all these factors, the analysis found that new universities fared worse than their quantitative data would suggest. It is argued that quantitative data should play a larger role in decisions about research quality, aiding equity and transparency.
Welfare Governance in the Surveillance Society: A Positive‐Realistic Cybercriticalist View
Authors: Dornan Paul , Hudson John 
Published: September 2003

Abstract In exploring the implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs), Fitzpatrick has suggested the need for a new category of rights—virtual rights. To explore this claim, we consider how developments in information management and processing differentially impact on citizens. Using examples from the public and private sectors we explore the dangers posed by the emergent surveillance society and agree these may require new rights. But we suggest that the state has by no means been an exemplar and, moreover, that many of the “surveilling” practices employed by commercial organizations might be used by the state to pursue socially just ends. We argue against a criticalist perspective that narrowly focuses on the dangers posed by new ICTs. Indeed, from a realist perspective we argue that a positive cybercriticalism that seeks to tackle exclusion by harnessing and constraining the surveillance qualities of ICTs is a pressing policy priority.
The Effect of Financial Incentives and Access to Services on Self‐funded Admissions to Long‐term Care
Authors: Netten Ann , Darton Robin 
Published: September 2003

Abstract With the growth in the numbers and proportion of older people in the population the funding and incentive structures around long‐term care are of international concern. A study of the circumstances of self‐funded admissions to care homes allowed the comparison of self‐funders with publicly funded admissions to care homes in the UK, the influences on self‐funders in their decision to move into a care home and resources on which they were able to draw. These findings contribute to our understanding of the impact of current policy on self‐funders and our thinking about the way that future policy and practice changes could improve the way we use society's resources in the provision of long‐term care.
Integrating Health and Social Care at the Micro Level: Health Care Professionals as Care Managers for Older People
Authors: Weiner Kate , Hughes Jane , Challis David , Pedersen Irene 
Published: September 2003

Abstract A common problem in the provision of coordinated long‐term care is the separation of health and social care. The present government has been increasingly concerned with promoting convenient, user‐centred services and improving integration of health and social care. One arrangement that could contribute to this for some older service users is for health care staff to act as care managers, coordinating the provision of both health and social care. This paper presents the findings of a survey of arrangements in place in local authorities for health staff to work as care managers for older people. This was designed to provide details about the range and scope of care management activities undertaken by health care professionals. Key areas of enquiry included: which kinds of health care staff undertook care management and in what settings; how long the arrangements had been in place and how widely available they were; whether there was a distinction between the types of cases and care management processes undertaken by health care staff compared with their social service department counterparts; and what management and training arrangements were in place for the health care staff.
Health Care Fraud and Industry Structure in the United States
Authors: Skeen James W. 
Published: September 2003

AbstractThe cost of health care fraud and abuse is enormous. Not only is it costing us a lot of money but one wonders how many more people could afford and receive medical insurance if fraud and abuse were significantly lower. This paper will show that the problem is embedded in the way America does health business. The problem needs to be better addressed by both the criminal justice community and the health care industry. Most importantly, those making the health care industry policy decisions need to make a paradigm shift. The system is out of balance because of past policies and decisions that have given excessive power and liberty to the medical services community and insurance providers. Using O’Toole's Compass Card of the four major ideas that have influenced political decision‐making as a guide, this paper recommends that current decision‐making needs to strengthen the equality and community poles and restrict the liberty and efficiency poles so that more balance might exist within the American health care system. Talcott Parsons saw the dangers of commercializing health care over half a century ago. The health care scene of today shows that he was correct in his appraisal.
Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals
Authors: Tovey Hilary 
Published: September 2003

AbstractThe paper argues that animals are central to rural social life and a rural sociology needs to develop theorisations of the rural which incorporate this fact. It looks to environmental sociology, the sociology of the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, for help in this respect, but argues that the debates (particularly the ‘realist’ versus ‘social constructionist’ debate) which have characterised recent sociology of the environment have focussed attention on the problems of conceptualising ‘nature’ at the expense of attempts to reconceptualise ‘society’. It ends by arguing that sociology needs a ‘New Societal Paradigm’ which would include at least ‘domestic’ animals within society, and recognise the social relations of inequality and hierarchy through which their life opportunities are structured.
Farm Animal Welfare: A New Repertoire of Nature‐Society Relations or Modernism Re‐embedded ?
Authors: Buller Henry , Morris Carol 
Published: September 2003

AbstractWithin society, farm animal welfare is moving up the policy and moral agenda as many of the industrial processes associated with animal farming are now being called into question. In the academy, there is growing intellectual interest in the relationship of humanity to animality and the porosity or otherwise of the biologically and socially constructed boundaries between them. This paper uses the farm animal welfare debate to explore changes in society animal relations by looking in turn at the farm, at farm animals and at the notion of farm animal welfare itself. The paper explores the paradox that for as long as society eats and kills animals for food, we are necessarily bound up in a persistent modernist and essentialist conceptualisation of animals and nature. However, alternative approaches are investigated as part of what might be described as a more postmodern approach to animalian difference.
Lay Immunology, Local Foods and Rural Identity: Defending Unpasteurised Milk in England
Authors: Enticott Gareth 
Published: September 2003

AbstractRecent policy statements on the future directions for agriculture have expressed the importance of the alternative food economy in promoting rural sustainability and improving public health. This paper suggests that these aims can prove incompatible. Alternative constructions of health and safety are likely to resist official discourses of healthy eating as a result of ‘lay immunologies’ and different cultures of nature. A Ministry of Agriculture consultation exercise on the consumption of unpasteurised milk is analysed to show how people living in rural areas situate health in particular versions of nature to cure and immunise the body from illness. These lay immunologies reconfigure the boundaries of purity/impurity by emphasising the importance of nature, bacteria, dirt and rawness in promoting health. This view is also deeply embedded in notions of rural identity and ‘defensive localism’. Scientific recommendations to purify foods are therefore resisted as an erosion of rural identity.
Conflicting Environmental Visions of the Rural: Windfarm Development in Mid Wales
Authors: Woods Michael 
Published: September 2003

AbstractThe development of wind turbine power stations in rural locations has become an increasingly controversial issue with conflict revolving around representations of nature and the balance that should be struck between the preservation of a local environment and landscape, and the wider concern of tacking climate change through reducing fuel dependency. As such, conflicts over ‘windfarm’ development provide a rare insight into how political actors negotiate and rationalise the often closed relationship between nature, environment and rurality that lies at the core of much contemporary rural policy and planning strategy. This paper explores these themes through examination of the debate that surrounded proposals to build Europe's largest ‘windfarm’ at Cefn Croes in Wales. By deconstructing the rhetoric employed by both sides in the conflict, the paper demonstrates how ‘nature’ is constructed in different ways to allow both lobbies to claim the environmental high ground, how lay discourses are contrasted with technical discourses, and how landscape is connected to the changing rural economy.
A Multilevel Cross-Classified Modelling Approach to Peer Review of Grant Proposals: The Effects of Assessor and Researcher Attributes on Assessor Ratings
Authors: Jayasinghe Upali W. , Marsh Herbert W. , Bond Nigel 
Published: September 2003

SummaryThe peer review of grant proposals is very important to academics from all disciplines. Although there is limited research on the reliability of assessments for grant proposals, previously reported single-rater reliabilities have been disappointingly low (between 0.17 and 0.37). We found that the single-rater reliability of the overall assessor rating for Australian Research Council grants was 0.21 for social science and humanities (2870 ratings, 1928 assessors and 687 proposals) and 0.19 for science (7153 ratings, 4295 assessors and 1644 proposals). We used a multilevel, cross-classification approach (level 1, assessor and proposal cross-classification; level 2, field of study), taking into account that 34% of the assessors evaluated more than one proposal. Researcher-nominated assessors (those chosen by the authors of the research proposal) gave higher ratings than panel-nominated assessors chosen by the Australian Research Council, and proposals from more prestigious universities received higher ratings. In the social sciences and humanities, the status of Australian universities had significantly more effect on Australian assessors than on overseas assessors. In science, ratings were higher when assessors rated fewer proposals and apparently had a more limited frame of reference for making such ratings and when researchers were professors rather than non-professors. Particularly, the methodology of this large scale study is applicable to other forms of peer review (publications, job interviews, awarding of prizes and election to prestigious societies) where peer review is employed as a selection process.
Social Identities and Political Cleavages: The Role of Political Context
Authors: Andersen Robert , Heath Anthony 
Published: September 2003

SummaryUsing a novel method, the paper investigates the influence of social group identities on attitudes and on voting in a variety of political contexts. Examining the major regions of Britain, Canada and the USA, we find considerable national and regional diversity in the nature of social cleavages. For example, social class and race had widely different effects across societies, but within societies their effects on attitudes and on voting were very similar. However, despite that, age and religion had a similar effect on attitudes across societies; the effects on voting varied considerably. The significant within-country differences underline the importance of using region, rather than country, as the unit of analysis. More importantly, these results highlight the role of political context, especially competing cleavages and the structure of party competition, in the establishment of politically relevant social cleavages.
Using Success to Measure Quality in British Higher Education: Which Subjects Attract the Best-Qualified Students?
Authors: Leslie Derek 
Published: September 2003

SummaryA theory is developed to measure the quality of applicants into UK higher education. It is based on the principle that more able applicants will self-select into more difficult subject choices. The advantage is that it gives a unidimensional measure whereby different groups can easily be compared across any dimension of interest, e.g. men, women and the various ethnic groups. Here the relative quality of applicants and acceptances across 170 separate subject groups is calculated and discussed by using a data set with over 2 million observations. It, therefore, offers a way of achieving a more refined measure of the quality of human capital.
The Need for New Statistical Legislation for the UK
Authors: Holt D. 
Published: September 2003

SummaryThe paper is written to inform public discussion on whether or not statistical legislation for the UK is needed and, if so, on its nature and content. A brief account of the background to the current position is given. The Government's stated intention is to create an ‘independent statistical service’ and a discussion of the meaning of independence in the context of official statistics and governance arrangements is provided. Recent international experience is described and the Statistics Acts of some other countries are used to distil the key features of Statistics Acts in other countries. The arguments for and against possible legislation are described. Whether or not a Statistics Act is desirable for the UK depends strongly on the legislation being well framed. There are several key issues on which Parliament would need to develop an informed view and these are set out towards the end of the paper.
Using Panel Methods to Model Waiting Times for National Health Service Surgery
Authors: Martin Stephen , Smith Peter C. 
Published: September 2003

SummaryLong waiting times for non-emergency (elective) procedures are a central feature of the UK's National Health Service, with about 1 million people waiting for surgery at any one time. This paper develops empirical models of the demand for and supply of elective surgery which simultaneously determine waiting times. The models are tested by using a panel of annual data for 5499 small areas from 1991 to 1998. Supply and demand functions are estimated for all specialties combined and for seven individual specialties, using panel data methods that incorporate simultaneously determined variables. The elasticity of demand with respect to waiting time varies between specialties but is always quite small. The results are discussed in the light of UK Government policy initiatives designed to reduce waiting times substantially. The analysis suggests that these initiatives will not stimulate demand markedly and therefore stand a good chance of succeeding provided that adequate additional resources are made available.
A Bayesian Approach to Markov Modelling in Cost-Effectiveness Analyses: Application to Taxane use in Advanced Breast Cancer
Authors: Cooper Nicola J. , Abrams Keith R. , Sutton Alex J. , Turner David , Lambert Paul C. 
Published: September 2003

SummaryThe paper demonstrates how cost-effectiveness decision analysis may be implemented from a Bayesian perspective, using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods for both the synthesis of relevant evidence input into the model and the evaluation of the model itself. The desirable aspects of a Bayesian approach for this type of analysis include the incorporation of full parameter uncertainty, the ability to perform all the analysis, including each meta-analysis, in a single coherent model and the incorporation of expert opinion either directly or regarding the relative credibility of different data sources. The method is described, and its ease of implementation demonstrated, through a practical example to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of using taxanes for the second-line treatment of advanced breast cancer compared with conventional treatment. For completeness, the results from the Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation model are compared and contrasted with those from a classical Monte Carlo simulation model.
Selection Effects of Source of Contraceptive Supply in an Analysis of Discontinuation of Contraception: Multilevel Modelling When Random Effects are Correlated with an Explanatory Variable
Authors: Steele Fiona 
Published: September 2003

SummaryConventional multilevel models assume that the explanatory variables are uncorrelated with the random effects. In some situations, this assumption may be invalid. One such example is the evaluation of a health or social programme that is non-randomly placed and/or in which participation is voluntary. In this case, there may be unobserved factors influencing the placement of the programme and the decision to participate that are correlated with the unobserved factors that influence the outcome of interest. The paper presents an application of a multiprocess multilevel model to assess the difference in rates of discontinuation of contraception between private and Government family planning providers, while accounting for the possibility that there may be unobserved individual and community level factors that influence both a couple's choice of provider and their probability of discontinuation.
The Evaluation of DNA Evidence in Pedigrees Requiring Population Inference
Authors: Corradi Fabio , Lago Giampietro , Stefanini Federico M. 
Published: September 2003

SummaryThe evaluation of nuclear DNA evidence for identification purposes is performed here taking account of the uncertainty about population parameters. Graphical models are used to detail the hypotheses being debated in a trial with the aim of obtaining a directed acyclic graph. Graphs also clarify the set of evidence that contributes to population inferences and they also describe the conditional independence structure of DNA evidence. Numerical illustrations are provided by re-examining three case-studies taken from the literature. Our calculations of the weight of evidence differ from those given by the authors of case-studies in that they reveal more conservative values.