Extensive Assessment of Underlying Etiological Factors in Primary Infertile Men Reduces the Proportion of Men With Idiopathic Infertility

ObjectiveUp to 40% of infertile men remain without a recognized cause (i.e., idiopathic infertility). We aimed to identify, categorize, and report the supposed causes of male infertility in a cohort of white-European men presenting for primary couple’s infertility, by using a thorough and extensive baseline diagnostic work-up.Material and MethodsCross-sectional study of 1,174 primary infertile men who underwent a thorough diagnostic work-up including: detailed medical history, physical examination, hormonal assessment, genetic testing, semen analyses; semen and urine cultures; testis color Duplex US. Men without any identified causal factor were considered as idiopathic. Six different etiological categories were established, and their prevalence was estimated. Logistic regression models estimated the risk of missing causal identification.ResultsA possible causal factor was identified in 928 (81%) men. Hypogonadism was the most frequent identified cause (37%), followed by varicocele (27%). Genetic abnormalities were found in 5% of patients. A causal factor was more easily identifiable for the more severe infertility cases, and azoospermic men were those less likely to be defined as idiopathic (OR and 95% CIs: 0.09; 0.04-0.20). Relative proportion of identified causes remained constant during the 10-year study period (p>0.43).ConclusionsDue to a more comprehensive and extensive diagnostic work-up, at least one underlying cause of male infertility factor in 4 out of 5 infertile men can be identified. Men with a less severe phenotype remain a clinical challenge in terms of establishing a possible etiologic factor. Further studies are needed to assess which subset of infertile men deserves a more extensive work-up.

ALCOHOL ABUSE AS AN UNDERESTIMATED CAUSE OF NON-TRAUMATIC OSTEONECROSIS OF THE FEMORAL HEAD (DESCRIPTION OF CLINICAL CASES)

Osteonecrosis of the femoral head is a severe degenerative-dystrophic disease, which is characterized by the destruction of the bone substance in the head in the most vulnerable (loaded) parts. Due to a rapid progression in the absence of proper surgical treatment, osteonecrosis of the femoral head, as a rule, results in disability. There is a wide range of causes that cause the development of osteonecrosis. According to the authors, alcohol abuse should be attributed to the underestimated causal factors of this pathology. The article presents two clinical observations which convincingly demonstrate the role of alcohol abuse as a cause of osteonecrosis. In a 44-year-old man prolonged alcohol abuse led to a progressive (within a year) advance of osteonecrosis in the heads of both femurs, and in a 26-year-old woman, along with a short-term intake of glucocorticoids, it contributed to the formation of multifocal non-traumatic osteonecrosis with damage to the pelvic, right knee, shoulder joints. The authors explain underestimated role of alcohol abuse as a causal factor of osteonecrosis as follows. Firstly, patients, as a rule, try not to display their addiction, and therefore, unlike other predictors of developing femoral bone osteonecrosis (injuries, serious somatic diseases, taking glucocorticoids), this fact is not reflected in medical documentation. Secondly, patients with idiopathic forms of osteonecrosis often do not have an "assigned" doctor who could dynamically follow up the patient and, consequently, monitor more carefully his condition and risk factors for osteonecrosis. When consulting such a patient, a subspecialist, as a rule, sets himself the task first of all to exclude "his disease", which makes the patient vulnerable in terms of finding out the causes of osteonecrosis. These clinical cases demonstrate the need to take into account alcohol abuse as a significant causal factor in the development of osteonecrosis.

Primary school education resources on conservation in New Zealand over-emphasise killing of non-native mammals

Guidelines for sustainability linked to the government-approved National Curriculum for education in New Zealand emphasise values of empathy and respect for all life. These instruct educators to discuss different values around sustainability and conservation. I reviewed educational resources published or endorsed by government agencies to determine compliance with these sustainability Guidelines. The resources reviewed promote the view that non-native mammals should be killed. Some resources go further in giving instructions to children on how to do this, and how to source kill traps. Children are provided with material designed to engender dislike towards non-native mammals, particularly possums. Resources conflate issues of conservation by tying it in with protection of tourism, ornamental plants and primary industries. This encouragement of killing in environmental educational resources appears unique to New Zealand. It is discussed in light of increasing evidence that performing or witnessing animal abuse is a causal factor for future violence towards human and non-human animals.

A Stoic Ethics for Attention (Seneca Letter 56)

Seneca’s Letters sketch a theory of attentive action according to which distraction is caused by inconsistent beliefs about values, such that the degree of an agent’s attention to an endorsed action is proportionate to the consistency of her beliefs about value, i. e. her proximity to virtue. The agent’s activity of attentive action is co-ordinated with a state of alertness to her interests, which accordingly triggers switches in attention that sustain the endorsed action in single-minded agents or cause distraction if the new interest is irrelevant to it. Seneca’s theory reflects the older Stoic conception of the tensional mental strength of the virtuous agent, which Chrysippus identified as the causal factor over and above virtue that ensures her successful performance of right action.

Reducing Local Correlations Among Causal Factor Classifications as a Strategy to Improve Landslide Susceptibility Mapping

A landslide susceptibility map (LSM) is the basis of hazard and risk assessment, guiding land planning and utilization, early warning of disaster, etc. Researchers are often overly keen on hybridizing state-of-the-art models or exploring new mathematical susceptibility models to improve the accuracy of the susceptibility map in terms of a receiver operator characteristic curve. Correlation analysis of the causal factors is a necessary routine process before susceptibility modeling to ensure that the overall correlation among all factors is low. However, this overall correlation analysis is insufficient to detect a high local correlation among the causal factor classes. The objective of this study is to answer three questions: 1) Is there a high correlation between causal factors in some parts locally? 2) Does it affect the accuracy of landslide susceptibility assessment? and 3) How can this influence be eliminated? To this aim, Wanzhou County was taken as the test site, where landslide susceptibility assessment based on 12 causal factors has been previously performed using the frequency ratio (FR) model and random forest (RF) model. In this work, we conducted a local spatial correlation analysis of the “altitude” and “rivers” factors and found a sizeable spatial overlap between altitude-class-1 and rivers-class-1. The “altitude” and “rivers” factors were reclassified, and then the FR model and RF model were used to reevaluate the susceptibility and analyze the accuracy loss caused by the local spatial correlation of the two factors. The results demonstrated that the accuracy of LSMs was markedly enhanced after reclassification of “altitude” and “rivers,” especially for the RF model–based LSM. This research shed new light on the local correlation of causal factors arising from a particular geomorphology and their impact on susceptibility.

Store robberies for tobacco products: Perceived causes and potential solutions

Robberies of New Zealand convenience stores for tobacco products spiked between 2016 and 2017. According to media reports, many robberies involved the use of weapons and resulted in injury to retailers. We conducted a content analysis of all online media articles containing commentary about these robberies, published between 2014 and 2019, to identify the perceived causes of the increase in robberies for tobacco and remedies implemented or demanded. The commentators in the articles were categorized into three groups of stakeholders: elites, grassroots, and interest groups. Overall, there was a mismatch between perceiving the primary cause to be socially and economically determined and suggesting solutions that were mostly situational shop level changes or tertiary prevention strategies, such as more and harsher policing. A further mismatch was that existing policing policy was not adapted to balance the perverse consequences of the tobacco excise tax increases. Early commentators tended to deflect blame away from their own sector. Later commentary converged to agree that the high tobacco excise tax was a critical causal factor.

The Development of a Bayesian Network Framework with Model Validation for Maritime Accident Risk Factor Assessment

An integrative approach to maritime accident risk factor assessment in accordance with formal safety assessment is proposed, which exploits the multifaceted capabilities of Bayesian networks (BNs) by consolidation of modelling, verification, and validation. The methodology for probabilistic modelling with BNs is well known and its application to risk assessment is based on the model verified though sensitivity analysis only, while validation of the model is often omitted due to a lack of established evaluation measures applicable to scarce real-world data. For this reason, in this work, the modified Lyapunov divergence measure is proposed as a novel quantitative assessor that can be efficiently exploited on an individual accident scenario for contributing causal factor identification, and thus can serve as the measure for validation of the developed expert elicited BN. The proposed framework and its approach are showcased for maritime grounding of small passenger ships in the Adriatic, with the complete grounding model disclosed, quantitative validation performed, and its utilization for causal factor identification and risk factor ranking presented. The data from two real-world grounding cases demonstrate the explanatory capabilities of the developed approach.

Evaluation of Airport Size and Delay Causal Factor Effects on Delay Propagation Dissipation

The International Civil Aviation Organization identifies departure and arrival punctuality as on-time key performance indicators. However, these metrics assume a flight’s delay is a result of either the origin or destination airport, providing limited information on where delay should be mitigated in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). This study evaluates the relationship between delay propagation magnitude, delay causal factor, airport size, and charged facility (airport or Air Route Traffic Control Center), to examine if certain delays take longer to dissipate. First, using flights from July 2018, results show that most delay propagation chains originate at large-hub airports. However, these delays were the quickest to recover. Second, this study presents a regression model, predicting total propagated delay using fixed effects based on the weather region where the original delay occurred. Each additional flight affected by downstream delay adds 18.7 min on average to total arrival delay in a propagation chain. Additionally, if weather was the original causal factor, total propagated delay increased by 11.6 min compared with non-weather delays. Lastly, this study compares delay propagation in July 2018 and July 2020. Results show uneven impacts of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) across the large-hub airports. Some of the investigated airports did not witness large improvements in average delay per delayed flight, warranting further research in the future. While delay and delay propagation have not been completely eradicated in the NAS during the COVID-19 pandemic, findings suggest that both have significantly declined on average.

IDEOLOGICAL SHIFT OF TEXT AND THE INFLUENCE OF TRANSLATION IDEOLOGY IN THE NOVEL “HALF OF YELLOW SUN”

ABSTRACTThis research paper concerned with the analysis of factor affecting ideological shift of text in the translation of literary work. As the data source, a novel entitled 'half of yellow sun' a work of Chimamanda Adichie was analyzed. The analysis was specified to clauses taken from the English and Indonesian version of the novel, as the data. Further, the researcher applied descriptive qualitative approach in collecting and analyzing the data. Halliday’s theory of metafunction, specified on the analysis of transitivity system was used as main theory. Moreover, the theory of ideology in translation was adopted in the analysis, as causal factor to see how translation ideology cause the ideological shift of text in translation. Then, the result of the analysis revealed that the intermetafunctional shift is the most significant category found in the text (90.24%), while the intra-metafunctional shift was only found once (9.75%). It proved that there were significant change of ideology of text showed by the changing of the process of transitivity system. Morever, the result of analysis releaved that, the ideological shifts of text were mostly affected by domestication ideology with percentages 78.05%, and foreignization ideology by percentages 21.95% or equal to a quarter of the whole clauses. It means that the translator produced the translation based on her goal and point of view and ideology of target language's culture and trying to make the text as closely as possible to the target readers’ language. It means the ideological shift of text were affected by translation ideology in which the translator produced the translation based on her goal and point of view and ideology of target language's culture and trying to make the text as closely as possible to the target readers’ language.Keywords: Systemic Functonal Linguistics, Translation, Discourse Analysis, Ideological Shift, literary work