Comparison of the effectiveness of IPSS and VPSS without any help in LUTS patients: a prospective study

Aim: To compare the correlation of visual prostate symptom score (VPSS) and international prostate symptom score (IPSS). To investigate the effect of educational level and age in the responses to VPSS and IPSS.

Method: Three hundred and nine patients who gave consent and applied via LUTS to our institution were included in this study. They were requested to fill IPSS and VPSS. The patients were divided into two groups as middle-aged and elderly with a cutoff point of 65?years. They were divided into six groups based on educational level. SPSS was used for the statistical evaluation.

Results: The mean age of the patients was 61.5?±?8.9?years. The correlation was found between IPSS and VPSS (p?p?=?.332 and .138, respectively). No difference was found between the middle-aged and elderly groups in terms of the rates of inability to answer IPSS and VPSS (p?=?.177 and .681, respectively).

Conclusions: There is a correlation between VPSS and IPSS. VPSS can be used as an auxiliary or alternative tool instead of IPSS in evaluating LUTS; however, has no superiority to IPSS in elderly group. Currently, the best option to exclude bias in illiterate group is VPSS.     

Gender differences in gambling preferences and problem gambling: a network-level analysis

Most gambling studies have a gender-blind research approach, although a large body of scientific evidence suggests that gambling in females is on the rise and that males and females have different gambling behaviours and experience specific gambling-related harm. This study addressed these gender differences using a network analysis, an innovative approach considering disorders/concepts as dynamic systems of interacting symptoms/items. Data on gambling activities, problem gambling, substance use and mental health were collected in a representative sample of French adult gamblers (n = 8805). The study capitalized on the network analysis directly to compare associations of specific gambling activities with gambling disorder symptoms separately for both genders. The network analysis revealed that problem gambling was strongly associated with gambling machines among females, whereas it was related to sports betting, poker and casino games among males. The networks that included substance use and mental health showed that substance use was related to specific gambling activities. These findings confirm the links between various gender-specific gambling patterns and problem gambling and suggest a need to consider these gender differences to improve prevention efforts. More broadly, the present study further supports the importance of gender differences for gambling research and policy.     

The post-Macy paradox,information management and organising: Good intentions and a road to hell?

Between 1946 and 1953, leading scientists met in New York in the context of the so-called Macy conferences, often linked to the emergence of cybernetics. They hankered for a new vision of mind and society. The traumatism of WW2 was implicit but omnipresent, and the Cold War was beginning. Macy key tools and concepts about information, the value of information, and computer artefacts have finally produced a new world, in particular an organisational world, which is far removed from their original dreams. Organisational members are now involved in difficult situations in terms of organising, that is, new modes of performativity which are difficult to comprehend and deal with; a transformation of meaning and knowledge in collective activity; and a threat to well-being and happiness as mental activities, cognition and bodies are increasingly disconnected. We use the Macy conferences as an entry point to reflect on the ‘longue durée’ evolution of the material underpinnings of information and their relationship with organising. We first explore the new conceptualisations at the core of the Macy conferences, information, value of information, and computer artefacts. We then put the Macy conferences into a socio-historical perspective by means of two theoretical approaches, iconographical and semiotic; this involves a historical comparison between the ‘screen-images’ or our Information Age and the ‘object-images’ of medieval cathedrals. We show that there are important disruptions in organising grounded in a new semiosis, which emerged over the longue durée of collective activity, and was articulated further during the Macy conferences. We describe this long-term evolution as the post-Macy paradox.     

Sampling and empirical risk minimization

ABSTRACT

In certain situations that shall be undoubtedly more and more common in the Big Data era, the datasets available are so massive that computing statistics over the full samples is hardly feasible, if not unfeasible. A natural approach in this context consists in using survey schemes and substituting the ‘full data’ statistics with their counterparts based on the resulting random samples, of manageable size. It is the main purpose of this paper to investigate the impact of survey sampling on statistical learning methods based on empirical risk minimization through the standard binary classification problem, considered here as a ‘case in point’. Precisely, we prove that, in presence of auxiliary information, appropriate use of optimally coupled Poisson survey plans may not affect much the learning rates, while possibly reducing significantly the number of terms that must be averaged to compute the empirical risk functional with overwhelming probability. These striking results are next shown to extend to more general sampling schemes by means of a coupling technique, originally introduced by Hajek [Asymptotic theory of rejective sampling with varying probabilities from a finite population. Ann Math Stat. 1964;35(4):1491–1523].     

Parameter estimation of the flexible Weibull distribution for type I censored samples

Often in practice one is interested in the situation where the lifetime data are censored. Censorship is a common phenomenon frequently encountered when analyzing lifetime data due to time constraints. In this paper, the flexible Weibull distribution proposed in Bebbington et al. [A flexible Weibull extension, Reliab. Eng. Syst. Safety 92 (2007), pp. 719–726] is studied using maximum likelihood technics based on three different algorithms: Newton Raphson, Levenberg Marquardt and Trust Region reflective. The proposed parameter estimation method is introduced and proved to work from theoretical and practical point of view. On one hand, we apply a maximum likelihood estimation method using complete simulated and real data. On the other hand, we study for the first time the model using simulated and real data for type I censored samples. The estimation results are approved by a statistical test.     

Non linear parametric mode regression

In this article, we propose a semi-parametric mode regression for a non linear model. We use an expectation-maximization algorithm in order to estimate the regression coefficients of modal non linear regression. We also establish asymptotic properties for the proposed estimator under assumptions of the error density. We investigate the performance through a simulation study.     

How leader humility helps teams to be humbler,psychologically stronger,and more effective: A moderated mediation model

We hypothesize that (a) the level of humility expressed by leaders predicts team performance through, serially, team humility and team PsyCap, and (b) the strength (i.e., consensus within the team) of the leader humility, team humility and team PsyCap moderates the paths of that hypothesized model. A sample comprising 82 teams (82 leaders; 332 team members) was collected. Team members reported leader humility, team humility and team PsyCap. Leaders reported team performance. To handle the risks of common method bias, each mediating path of the hypothesized model is based on data from two different subsamples within each team. Our model's most novel theoretical contribution is the (moderated mediated) connection between leader humility, collective humility, and team PsyCap, and this was consistently supported in our data. Our inconsistent findings dealing with the relationship between team PsyCap and performance is well established in the literature and our results in both sub-samples were in the theorized direction. The study contributes to understand why, how and when humble leaders are more effective.     

An optimal k of kth MA-ARIMA models under a class of ARIMA model

In this article, we discuss finding the optimal k of (i) kth simple moving average, (ii) kth weighted moving average, and (iii) kth exponential weighted moving average based on simulated ARIMA(p, d, q) model. We run a simulation using the three above examining methods under specific conditions. The main finding is that 5th exponential weighted moving average (5th EWMA) ARIMA model is the best forecasting model among others, which means the optimal k = 5. For Turkish Telecommunications (TTKOM) stock market, real data reveal the similar results of simulation study.