On a stronger reconstruction notion for monoids and clones

Motivated by reconstruction results by Rubin, we introduce a new reconstruction notion for permutation groups, transformation monoids and clones, called automatic action compatibility, which entails automatic homeomorphicity. We further give a characterization of automatic homeomorphicity for transformation monoids on arbitrary carriers with a dense group of invertibles having automatic homeomorphicity. We then show how to lift automatic action compatibility from groups to monoids and from monoids to clones under fairly weak assumptions. We finally employ these theorems to get automatic action compatibility results for monoids and clones over several well-known countable structures, including the strictly ordered rationals, the directed and undirected version of the random graph, the random tournament and bipartite graph, the generic strictly ordered set, and the directed and undirected versions of the universal homogeneous Henson graphs.

Impact of dose-dense neoadjuvant chemotherapy on pathologic response and survival for HER2-positive breast cancer patients who receive trastuzumab

To compare outcomes in patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2)-positive breast cancer who received either dose-dense neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) with trastuzumab or standard-interval chemotherapy with trastuzumab. Patients with HER2-positive breast cancer who received NAC, including epirubicin and cyclophosphamide followed by paclitaxel with trastuzumab were included. Patients were divided into either the dose-dense or standard-interval group. We compared pathologic complete remission (pCR), distant disease-free survival (DDFS), event-free survival (EFS), and breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) between the two groups. Two hundred (49.6%) patients received dose-dense NAC, and 203 (50.4%) received standard-interval NAC. The pCR rate was 38.4% in the dose-dense group and 29.2% in the standard-interval group (P = 0.052). In patients with lymph node (LN) metastases, the LN pCR rate was 70.9% in the dose-dense group and 56.5% in the standard-interval group (P = 0.037). After a median follow-up of 54.6 months, dose-dense chemotherapy presented an improvement on DDFS (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.49, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.19–1.28, EFS (HR = 0.54, 95% CI: 0.24–1.21), and BCSS (HR = 0.41, 95% CI: 0.11–1.51), but the difference was not significant. Compared with standard-interval chemotherapy, dose-dense chemotherapy resulted in a superior 5-year DDFS (100% vs. 75.3%, P = 0.017) and 5-year EFS (96.9% vs. 78.3%, P = 0.022) in patients younger than 40 years. HER2-positive patients can achieve a higher LN pCR rate with dose-dense NAC than with standard-interval NAC with trastuzumab. Better survival may also be achieved with dose-dense chemotherapy with trastuzumab than with standard-interval chemotherapy with trastuzumab among young patients (age ≤ 40 years).

COVID-19 misinformation and the 2020 U.S. presidential election

Voting is the defining act for a democracy. However, voting is only meaningful if public deliberation is grounded in veritable and equitable information. This essay investigates the politicization of public health practices during the Democratic primaries in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, using a dataset of more than 67 million tweets. We find the public sphere on Twitter is politically heterogeneous and the majority—liberal and conservative alike—advocates for wearing masks and vote-by-mail. However, a small, but dense group of conservative users push anti-mask and voter fraud narratives.

Etymological Notes about Balto-Slavic Hydronymy of the Historical Lands of Novgorod and Pskov (Vselug, Dolostso)

The author focuses on hydronyms of the Balto-Slavic type, or the names of water bodies that include lexical and structural components prominent in both Baltic and Slavic languages. The article presents two onomastic sketches containing a historical and etymological analysis of some lake names in the historical lands of Novgorod and Pskov republics. The first study gives an etymological interpretation of the name Vselug that refers to a large lake in the headwaters of the Volga to the west of Seliger. It is substantiated that the hydronym is a baltism with a compound base *Vis(i)-lank-, lit. ‘with all bends’ (characteristic of a lake with meandering shoreline) that naturally transformed into *Vьselukъ on the Slavic linguistic soil. The second sketch focuses on the lake names on Dolos-/Dolys-. Like Vselug, they do not have full structural matches in the appellative vocabulary, but unlike the isolated Vselug, they make up a large, distinctively compact and dense group. The paper provides exhaustive geographical, historical, and microsystem-toponymic information about the names constituting this group of hydronyms. Etymologically, the author assumes the development of the Dolos-/Dolys- stem from the Baltic *Dаlbs-, a deverbative formed with the suffix -s that resulted in Lithuanian del̃bti in the meaning of ‘cut obliquely, hewn, beat, strike’ and in proto-Slavic *delbti ‘gouge, pick.’ The base is interpreted as a dialectal neologism of the ancient Balts living in the sources of the Volga, the upper reaches of the Msta, Western Dvina, and Velikaya rivers. This archaic structure dates back to the early centuries AD or even earlier, the 1st millennium BC. Its very existence attests to a centuries-long presence of the Baltic linguo-ethnic element in the southwestern part of the historical lands of Novgorod and Pskov.