Does geographic location impact the survival differential between screen- and interval-detected breast cancers?

Although mammography screening programs aim to diagnose breast cancer at an early stage, not all tumours are detected during the regular screening examination. This study examines the influence of various characteristics, including geographical residence, on the survival between screen- and interval-detected breast cancers among participants of a public population-based breast screening program in Queensland, Australia. The investigation was performed using the linked population-based datasets from BreastScreen Queensland and the Queensland Cancer Registry for the period of 1997–2008 for women aged 40–89 years at diagnosis. A Bayesian spatial relative survival modelling approach that accommodates rare outcomes in small geographic regions was adopted, with the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo computation, to evaluate the relative excess risk of breast cancer. In the multivariate Bayesian spatial model, higher relative excess risk of mortality was observed in interval-detected cancer (RER = 1.59, 95 % credible interval = [1.33, 1.89]) compared to screen-detected cancer. Higher cancer survival among the study cohort was also observed among younger women (40–59 years), those of non-Indigenous ethnicity, with localised (stage I) tumour stage as well as those not in the work force. There was no independent association with marital status. Moreover, there was no substantive evidence of either measured geographical or latent random spatial inequalities in survival among screening participants across Queensland, meaning the higher survival for screen-detected breast cancer patients compared to interval-detected women was consistent across the state. These results provide suggestive evidence supporting the effectiveness of the BreastScreen Queensland screening program in reaching socio-economically disadvantaged women as well as those living in rural and remote areas of the state, but also highlights the need for any interval cancer awareness programs to be geographically widespread.     

Close-range constrained image sequences

This paper deals with a novel imaging arrangement for special modeling purpose. The method introduced here will take care of the geometrical consistence of photography. It is based on image ray bundles and is meant for conditions where imaging is accomplished inside the object space (e.g. in case of interior model reconstruction). Imaging is designed to be constrained in terms of camera position and orientation and to consist of two image sequences. The image orientations will be resolved by use of LSQ-estimation in heavily overdetermined conditions. The benefits of overdetermination are discussed and the accuracy assessment in a real experiment is published. The accuracy assessment is accomplished with help of exterior reference and stochastic error propagation.     

Innovation,a neglected locational factor

The regional variation in the sales of a new product, a corrugated zink plate for roofing, is described and explained with the help of regression analysis covering a four year period following the product's introduction. Distance from the plant, share of rural population, income per capita, intensity of competition and a regional dummy explain 76–90 % of the regional variation in a year. As the product commands a practically uniform price and has identical availability irrespective of customer location, and as official marketing information is centralized and therefore also uniform, the distance and dummy variables should not appear in the regression equation. Their actual appearance and the positive sign of the competition-variable are explained by the spatial innovation effect. Its significance is evaluated and measures are suggested for its exploitation.     

Agricultural risk management policies under climate uncertainty

Climate change is forecasted to increase the variability of weather conditions and the frequency of extreme events. Due to potential adverse impacts on crop yields it will have implications for demand of agricultural risk management instruments and farmers’ adaptation strategies. Evidence on climate change impacts on crop yield variability and estimates of production risk from farm surveys in Australia, Canada and Spain, are used to analyse the policy choice between three different types of insurance (individual, area-yield and weather index) and ex post payments. The results are found to be subject to strong uncertainties and depend on the risk profile of different farmers and locations; the paper provides several insights on how to analyse these complexities. In general, area yield performs best more often across our countries and scenarios, in particular for the baseline and marginal climate change (without increases in extreme events). However, area yield can be very expensive if farmers have limited information on how climate change affects yields (misalignment in expectations), and particularly so under extreme climate change scenarios. In these more challenging cases, ex post payments perform well to increase low incomes when the risk is systemic like in Australia; Weather index performs well to reduce the welfare costs of risks when the correlation between yields and index is increased by the extreme events. The paper also analyses the robustness of different instruments in the face of limited knowledge of the probabilities of different climate change scenarios; highlighting that this added layer of uncertainty could be overcome to provide sound policy advice under uncertainties introduced by climate change. The role of providing information to farmers on impacts of climate change emerges as a crucial result of this paper as indicated by the significantly higher budgetary expenditures occurring across all instruments when farmers’ expectations are misaligned relative to actual impacts of climate change.     

Records of land use and medieval settlement history in Vuonninen,Dvina Karelia,Northwest Russia

Although the documented history of Dvina Karelia (northern Russian Karelia) does not begin until the second half of the 16th century, individual finds of prehistoric artifacts point to earlier human occupation. The present paleoecological study of the Vuonninen area is the first of its kind concerning prehistoric land use in Dvina Karelia, a large region extending from Finland to the White Sea. It is based on the pollen analysis of sediments from Lake Ylä‐Kuittijärvi near the old Karelian village of Vuonninen. In its general features, the picture of the early stages of cultivation and human activity in the village of Vuonninen is comparable to results from East Finland, the Karelian Isthmus, and the northern shores of Lake Ladoga. The first, minor indications of human influence appear in the sediments of the 4th–6th centuries A.D. in Lake Kuittijärvi. Distinct and unambiguous signs of human activity appear in the pollen record in the 12th century. This is particularly evident in the decreasing proportion of Picea, caused by the clearance of spruce forest. The beginning of cultivation is dated according to Secale pollen to the beginning of the 15th century. Intensive arable farming emerges in the early 19th century in the form of regular occurrences of Secale and Hordeum pollen. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Population, income and ecological conditions as determinants of forest area variation in the tropics

The underlying causes of forest area variation were studied by using data from the original forest assessments between 1970 and 1991 of FAO FORIS database representing 477 subnational geographical units in 67 tropical countries. Multiple regression modelling was applied to measure the effects. Five ecological variables were used to control the varying ecological conditions in the subnational units. Three variables were used to control the varying reliability of forest inventory data. Population and income variables were found to be significant factors explaining forest area variation after controlling for ecological variation. In particular population density and income per capita turned out to be significant underlying factors of deforestation. The overall conclusion is that determining the factors behind forest area variation helps explaining the causes of deforestation.     

Strengthened East Asian summer monsoons during a period of high-latitude warmth? Isotopic evidence from Mio-Pliocene fossil mammals and soil carbonates from northern China

The East Asian monsoons have fluctuated in concert with high-latitude warmth during the past several hundred thousand years, with humid summer monsoon-dominant climates characterizing warm intervals, including interglacials and interstadials, and arid winter monsoon-dominant climates characterizing cool intervals, including glacials and stadials. Of the states comprising the mid-Pleistocene to recent climatic regime, interglacials are most similar in terms of high latitude ice volumes and temperatures to those extant during the late Miocene and early Pliocene. Thus, an important question is whether Mio-Pliocene climates in northern China were analogous to a hypothetical ‘prolonged interglacial state,’ with increased summer monsoon precipitation and expansion of forest and steppe environments at the expense of desert environments.We utilize new and previously published carbon isotopic data from fossil teeth and soil carbonates to place constraints on paleovegetation distributions and to help infer the behavior of the monsoon system between ～ 7 and 4 Ma. We find that plants using the C₄ photosynthetic pathway—which today are largely grasses found in regions with warm season precipitation—were present in northern China by late Miocene time, demonstrating that the C₄ expansion in China was not significantly delayed compared to the global C₄ event. During the late Miocene–early Pliocene interval, soil carbonate and tooth enamel δ¹³C data indicate: 1) that nearly pure C₃-plant ecosystems existed in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP), and therefore ecosystems there were dominated by woody dicot, herbaceous dicot, or cool-season grass vegetation (or a combination of these), and 2) that the CLP was characterized by a pattern of northward-increasing C₄ vegetation and aridity. Utilizing a broadened conceptual model for interpreting δ¹³C data, and citing independent faunal, floral, and lithostratgraphic data, we suggest that these patterns reflect northward expansion of forest and steppe ecosystems and relatively humid monsoon climates during the late Miocene and early Pliocene. An important implication of this interpretation is that the forcing mechanism illuminated by the temporal correlation during the Pleistocene between warm high latitudes and strong East Asian summer monsoons is a robust feature of the Eurasian tectonic–climatic system that predates the Plio-Pleistocene climatic reorganization.