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BACKGROUND Hypertension can be detected at the primary health-care level and low-cost treatments can effectively control hypertension. We aimed to measure the prevalence of hypertension and progress in its detection, treatment, and control from 1990 to 2019 for 200 countries and territories. METHODS We used data from 1990 to 2019 on people aged 30-79 years from population-representative studies with measurement of blood pressure and data on blood pressure treatment. We defined hypertension as having systolic blood pressure 140 mm Hg or greater, diastolic blood pressure 90 mm Hg or greater, or taking medication for hypertension. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate the prevalence of hypertension and the proportion of people with hypertension who had a previous diagnosis (detection), who were taking medication for hypertension (treatment), and whose hypertension was controlled to below 140/90 mm Hg (control). The model allowed for trends over time to be non-linear and to vary by age. FINDINGS The number of people aged 30-79 years with hypertension doubled from 1990 to 2019, from 331 (95% credible interval 306-359) million women and 317 (292-344) million men in 1990 to 626 (584-668) million women and 652 (604-698) million men in 2019, despite stable global age-standardised prevalence. In 2019, age-standardised hypertension prevalence was lowest in Canada and Peru for both men and women; in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and some countries in western Europe including Switzerland, Spain, and the UK for women; and in several low-income and middle-income countries such as Eritrea, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Solomon Islands for men. Hypertension prevalence surpassed 50% for women in two countries and men in nine countries, in central and eastern Europe, central Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. Globally, 59% (55-62) of women and 49% (46-52) of men with hypertension reported a previous diagnosis of hypertension in 2019, and 47% (43-51) of women and 38% (35-41) of men were treated. Control rates among people with hypertension in 2019 were 23% (20-27) for women and 18% (16-21) for men. In 2019, treatment and control rates were highest in South Korea, Canada, and Iceland (treatment >70%; control >50%), followed by the USA, Costa Rica, Germany, Portugal, and Taiwan. Treatment rates were less than 25% for women and less than 20% for men in Nepal, Indonesia, and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Control rates were below 10% for women and men in these countries and for men in some countries in north Africa, central and south Asia, and eastern Europe. Treatment and control rates have improved in most countries since 1990, but we found little change in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Improvements were largest in high-income countries, central Europe, and some upper-middle-income and recently high-income countries including Costa Rica, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and Iran. INTERPRETATION Improvements in the detection, treatment, and control of hypertension have varied substantially across countries, with some middle-income countries now outperforming most high-income nations. The dual approach of reducing hypertension prevalence through primary prevention and enhancing its treatment and control is achievable not only in high-income countries but also in low-income and middle-income settings. FUNDING WHO.

R. Siegel, K. Miller, A. Jemal

Each year, the American Cancer Society estimates the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths that will occur in the United States and compiles the most recent data on population‐based cancer occurrence. Incidence data (through 2016) were collected by the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program; the National Program of Cancer Registries; and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries. Mortality data (through 2017) were collected by the National Center for Health Statistics. In 2020, 1,806,590 new cancer cases and 606,520 cancer deaths are projected to occur in the United States. The cancer death rate rose until 1991, then fell continuously through 2017, resulting in an overall decline of 29% that translates into an estimated 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if peak rates had persisted. This progress is driven by long‐term declines in death rates for the 4 leading cancers (lung, colorectal, breast, prostate); however, over the past decade (2008‐2017), reductions slowed for female breast and colorectal cancers, and halted for prostate cancer. In contrast, declines accelerated for lung cancer, from 3% annually during 2008 through 2013 to 5% during 2013 through 2017 in men and from 2% to almost 4% in women, spurring the largest ever single‐year drop in overall cancer mortality of 2.2% from 2016 to 2017. Yet lung cancer still caused more deaths in 2017 than breast, prostate, colorectal, and brain cancers combined. Recent mortality declines were also dramatic for melanoma of the skin in the wake of US Food and Drug Administration approval of new therapies for metastatic disease, escalating to 7% annually during 2013 through 2017 from 1% during 2006 through 2010 in men and women aged 50 to 64 years and from 2% to 3% in those aged 20 to 49 years; annual declines of 5% to 6% in individuals aged 65 years and older are particularly striking because rates in this age group were increasing prior to 2013. It is also notable that long‐term rapid increases in liver cancer mortality have attenuated in women and stabilized in men. In summary, slowing momentum for some cancers amenable to early detection is juxtaposed with notable gains for other common cancers.

M. Cesare, J. Bentham, Gretchen A. Stevens et al.

Summary Background Underweight and severe and morbid obesity are associated with highly elevated risks of adverse health outcomes. We estimated trends in mean body-mass index (BMI), which characterises its population distribution, and in the prevalences of a complete set of BMI categories for adults in all countries. Methods We analysed, with use of a consistent protocol, population-based studies that had measured height and weight in adults aged 18 years and older. We applied a Bayesian hierarchical model to these data to estimate trends from 1975 to 2014 in mean BMI and in the prevalences of BMI categories (<18·5 kg/m2 [underweight], 18·5 kg/m2 to <20 kg/m2, 20 kg/m2 to <25 kg/m2, 25 kg/m2 to <30 kg/m2, 30 kg/m2 to <35 kg/m2, 35 kg/m2 to <40 kg/m2, ≥40 kg/m2 [morbid obesity]), by sex in 200 countries and territories, organised in 21 regions. We calculated the posterior probability of meeting the target of halting by 2025 the rise in obesity at its 2010 levels, if post-2000 trends continue. Findings We used 1698 population-based data sources, with more than 19·2 million adult participants (9·9 million men and 9·3 million women) in 186 of 200 countries for which estimates were made. Global age-standardised mean BMI increased from 21·7 kg/m2 (95% credible interval 21·3–22·1) in 1975 to 24·2 kg/m2 (24·0–24·4) in 2014 in men, and from 22·1 kg/m2 (21·7–22·5) in 1975 to 24·4 kg/m2 (24·2–24·6) in 2014 in women. Regional mean BMIs in 2014 for men ranged from 21·4 kg/m2 in central Africa and south Asia to 29·2 kg/m2 (28·6–29·8) in Polynesia and Micronesia; for women the range was from 21·8 kg/m2 (21·4–22·3) in south Asia to 32·2 kg/m2 (31·5–32·8) in Polynesia and Micronesia. Over these four decades, age-standardised global prevalence of underweight decreased from 13·8% (10·5–17·4) to 8·8% (7·4–10·3) in men and from 14·6% (11·6–17·9) to 9·7% (8·3–11·1) in women. South Asia had the highest prevalence of underweight in 2014, 23·4% (17·8–29·2) in men and 24·0% (18·9–29·3) in women. Age-standardised prevalence of obesity increased from 3·2% (2·4–4·1) in 1975 to 10·8% (9·7–12·0) in 2014 in men, and from 6·4% (5·1–7·8) to 14·9% (13·6–16·1) in women. 2·3% (2·0–2·7) of the world’s men and 5·0% (4·4–5·6) of women were severely obese (ie, have BMI ≥35 kg/m2). Globally, prevalence of morbid obesity was 0·64% (0·46–0·86) in men and 1·6% (1·3–1·9) in women. Interpretation If post-2000 trends continue, the probability of meeting the global obesity target is virtually zero. Rather, if these trends continue, by 2025, global obesity prevalence will reach 18% in men and surpass 21% in women; severe obesity will surpass 6% in men and 9% in women. Nonetheless, underweight remains prevalent in the world’s poorest regions, especially in south Asia. Funding Wellcome Trust, Grand Challenges Canada.

G. Charness, U. Gneezy

Riddhasree Bhattacharyya, Pallabi Dutta, Sushmita Mitra

Prostate cancer being one of the frequently diagnosed malignancy in men, the rising demand for biopsies places a severe workload on pathologists. The grading procedure is tedious and subjective, motivating the development of automated systems. Although deep learning has made inroads in terms of performance, its limited interpretability poses challenges for widespread adoption in high-stake applications like medicine. Existing interpretability techniques for prostate cancer classifiers provide a coarse explanation but do not reveal why the highlighted regions matter. In this scenario, we propose a novel prototype-based weakly-supervised framework for an interpretable grading of prostate cancer from histopathology images. These networks can prove to be more trustworthy since their explicit reasoning procedure mirrors the workflow of a pathologist in comparing suspicious regions with clinically validated examples. The network is initially pre-trained at patch-level to learn robust prototypical features associated with each grade. In order to adapt it to a weakly-supervised setup for prostate cancer grading, the network is fine-tuned with a new prototype-aware loss function. Finally, a new attention-based dynamic pruning mechanism is introduced to handle inter-sample heterogeneity, while selectively emphasizing relevant prototypes for optimal performance. Extensive validation on the benchmark PANDA and SICAP datasets confirms that the framework can serve as a reliable assistive tool for pathologists in their routine diagnostic workflows.

Zetian Feng, Juan Fu, Xuebin Zou et al.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men, and accurate identification of clinically significant PCa (csPCa) is critical for timely intervention. Transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) is widely used for prostate biopsy; however, its low contrast and anisotropic spatial resolution pose diagnostic challenges. To address these limitations, we propose a novel hybrid-view attention (HVA) network for csPCa classification in 3D TRUS that leverages complementary information from transverse and sagittal views. Our approach integrates a CNN-transformer hybrid architecture, where convolutional layers extract fine-grained local features and transformer-based HVA models global dependencies. Specifically, the HVA comprises intra-view attention to refine features within a single view and cross-view attention to incorporate complementary information across views. Furthermore, a hybrid-view adaptive fusion module dynamically aggregates features along both channel and spatial dimensions, enhancing the overall representation. Experiments are conducted on an in-house dataset containing 590 subjects who underwent prostate biopsy. Comparative and ablation results prove the efficacy of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/mock1ngbrd/HVAN.

Palakorn Achananuparp, Ye Xu, Yao Lu et al.

We present a large-scale analysis of career mobility of college-educated U.S. workers using online resume profiles to investigate how gender, race, and job change options are associated with upward mobility. This study addresses key research questions of how the job changes affect their upward career mobility, and how the outcomes of upward career mobility differ by gender and race. We address data challenges -- such as missing demographic attributes, missing wage data, and noisy occupation labels -- through various data processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. In particular, we develop a large language models (LLMs) based occupation classification method known as FewSOC that achieves accuracy significantly higher than the original occupation labels in the resume dataset. Analysis of 228,710 career trajectories reveals that intra-firm occupation change has been found to facilitate upward mobility most strongly, followed by inter-firm occupation change and inter-firm lateral move. Women and Black college graduates experience significantly lower returns from job changes than men and White peers. Multilevel sensitivity analyses confirm that these disparities are robust to cluster-level heterogeneity and reveal additional intersectional patterns.

Abubakker Siddiq Mohamed Hameed, Mohammed Nayeem Shaji, Prasanna Appiya Premvignesh et al.

<h4>Introduction</h4>Testicular cancer (TC) is one of the most common cancers affecting men between the ages of 15 and 40 years. Testicular self-examination (TSE) is an effective tool for the early detection of TC, significantly improving survival rates. This study aimed to assess the level of awareness and practice of TSE among adult males in Ajman, United Arab Emirates (UAE).<h4>Methods</h4>A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 1031 adult men residing in Ajman, UAE, using a structured self-administered and interviewer-administered questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the data, and Chi-square tests were applied to assess associations between awareness and practice of TSE with socio-demographic variables.<h4>Results</h4>The mean age of participants was 34.9 ± 9.8 years. Overall, 212 participants (20.6%) reported being aware of TSE. Among those who were aware, 106 individuals (50%) reported practicing TSE.<h4>Conclusion</h4>The findings highlight a low level of awareness and practice of TSE among men in Ajman. There is a critical need for targeted health campaigns and educational interventions to promote knowledge and practice of TSE. Healthcare providers should play a proactive role in raising awareness about TC and the importance of regular self-examination for early detection.

Abayomi Bolaji Ajayi, Victor Ajayi, Kazeem Adewale Osuolale et al.

Abstract Background Sperm DNA fragmentation detection methods include SCSA, SCD, COMET assay, and TUNEL. In 2021, the DFI test became the first evidence-based sperm DNA integrity test included in international guidelines. However, limited data exists from Nigeria. This study explores the relationship between demographic, lifestyle, and medical factors and DFI among infertility patients at Nordica Fertility Centre, aiming to guide interventions to improve fertility outcomes. Methods A total of 643 male infertility patients undergoing DFI analysis were evaluated. Participants were categorized based on age, occupation, BMI, alcohol use, smoking habits, and ejaculation frequency. The DFI was assessed both continuously and categorically using a 25% threshold (≤ 25% good, > 25% poor integrity). Chi-square tests examined associations between categorical variables while t-test was also used to examine significant association in terms of mean comparisons between DFI and other variables. Logistic regression analysis, with forward stepwise selection, identified independent predictors of high DFI, adjusting for potential confounders. Results Participants had a mean age of 44.1 years; 55.7% were under 45. Most were professionals (57.1%) with a mean BMI of 27.5 kg/m². Alcohol use was reported by 45.2% and smoking by 9.6%. Mean DFI was 37.8% (range: 6–93%). Higher DFI was significantly associated with older age (χ²=12.21, p = 0.001), non-professional occupation (χ²=162.75, p < 0.001), and poor sperm motility (χ²=5.724, p = 0.017). Logistic regression showed that age above 45 years (OR = 2.45, 95% CI: 1.39–4.32, p = 0.002), occupation category (Professional/Technical/Managerial/ Clerical) (OR = 0.001, 95% CI: 0.0001–0.011, p < 0.001), and alcohol use (OR = 18.01, 95% CI: 7.03–46.12, p < 0.001) were independently associated with the outcome. Conclusion Older age, alcohol consumption, Professional/Technical/Managerial/ Clerical occupations, and alcohol use are associated with increased sperm DNA fragmentation. These findings highlight the need for personalized fertility assessments and targeted interventions to enhance male reproductive health.

Daniel Redondo-Sánchez, Miguel Rodríguez-Barranco, Alberto Ameijide et al.

We assessed the validity of one of the most frequently used methods to estimate cancer incidence, on the basis of cancer mortality data and the incidence-to-mortality ratio IMR, the IMR method. Using the previous 15 year cancer mortality time series, we derived the expected yearly number of cancer cases in the period 2004 to 2013 for six cancer sites for each sex. Generalized linear mixed models, including a polynomial function for the year of death and smoothing splines for age, were adjusted. Models were fitted under a Bayesian framework based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The IMR method was applied to five scenarios reflecting different assumptions regarding the behavior of the IMR. We compared incident cases estimated with the IMR method to observed cases diagnosed in 2004 to 2013 in Granada. A goodness-of-fit GOF indicator was formulated to determine the best estimation scenario. The relative differences between the observed and predicted numbers of cancer cases were less than 10 percent for most cancer sites. The constant assumption for the IMR trend provided the best GOF for colon, rectal, lung, bladder, and stomach cancers in men and colon, rectum, breast, and corpus uteri in women.

Jessica L. Rosenberg, Nancy Holincheck, Michele Colandene

Efforts to build the workforce in support of the second quantum revolution are growing, including the creation of education programs that will prepare students for jobs in this area. We surveyed 186 undergraduate students with majors across the STEM disciplines and followed up with group interviews to understand their perspectives. The project was designed to understand what these STEM students know about quantum and quantum career opportunities and their level of interest in pursuing a career related to quantum. We found that most of the students know very little about quantum. Nevertheless, except for students in the life sciences, there was an interest in quantum careers. Across STEM majors, women were less likely to express interest in quantum careers than men, but this difference disappeared when we examined only physical and computer science majors. Of the few students who had knowledge of quantum concepts, most learned about this topic from online media, especially online videos. Some students reported learning about quantum in high school classes, where it was taught as an extension beyond the usual topics of the course. The undergraduate STEM students in our study identified multiple ways they would like to learn more about quantum, including short videos, seminars, courses, certificates, and degree programs.

Julia S. Schmid, Sean Simmons, Mark S. Poesch et al.

Recreational fishing is an important economic driver and provides multiple social benefits. To predict fishing activity, identifying variables related to variation, such as gender or Covid-19, is helpful. We conducted a Canada-wide email survey of users of an online fishing platform and analyzed responses focusing on gender, the impact of Covid-19, and variables directly related to fishing effort. Genders (90% men and 10% women) significantly differed in demographics, socioeconomic status, and fishing skills but showed similar fishing preferences, fishing effort in terms of trip frequency, and travel distance. Covid-19 altered trip frequency for almost half of fishers, with changes varying by gender and activity level. A Bayesian network revealed travel distance as the main determinant of trip frequency, negatively impacting fishing activity for 61% of fishers, with fishing expertise also playing a role. The results suggest that among active fishers, socio-economic differences between genders do not drive fishing effort, but responses to Covid-19 were gender-specific. Recognizing these patterns is critical for equitable policy-making and accurate socio-ecological models, thereby improving resource management and sustainability.

Mariana Macedo, Akrati Saxena

Social media and digital platforms allow us to express our opinions freely and easily to a vast number of people. In this study, we examine whether there are gender-based differences in how communication happens via Twitter in regard to soccer. Soccer is one of the most popular sports, and therefore, on social media, it engages a diverse audience regardless of their technical knowledge. We collected Twitter data for three months (March-June) for English and Portuguese that contains 9.5 million Tweets related to soccer, and only 18.38% tweets were identified as belonging to women, highlighting a possible gender gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We then conduct a fine-grained text-level and network-level analysis to identify the gender differences that might exist while communicating on Twitter. Our results show that women express their emotions more intensely than men, regardless of the differences in volume. The network generated from Portuguese has lower homophily than English. However, this difference in homophily does not impact how females express their emotions and sentiments, suggesting that these aspects are inherent norms or characteristics of genders. Our study unveils more gaps through qualitative and quantitative analyses, highlighting the importance of examining and reporting gender gaps in online communication to create a more inclusive space where people can openly share their opinions.

Eiji Yamamura, Fumio Ohtake

Using individual-level survey data from 2024, this study investigated how respondent characteristics are associated with a subjective view of generative artificial intelligence (GAI). We asked 14 questions concerning respondents view about GAI, such as general view, faulty GAI, autonomous GEI, GAI replacing humans, and importance of human learning. Regression analysis based on the ordered logit model revealed that: (1) In some cases, the results of smartphone and computer usage times differed. Smartphone usage time was negatively correlated with the importance of human learning, whereas computer usage was not negatively correlated. (2) Managers and ordinary businesspeople have positive views of GAI. However, managers do not show a positive view about GAI being responsible for human decision making. (3) Teachers generally have a negative view about GAI replacing humans and no need of learning. They do not have negative views about GAI producing documents unless GAI is faulty. (4) Medical industry workers positively view GAI if it operates following their direction. However, they do not agree with the view that GAI replaces humans, and that human learning is unnecessary. (5) Females are less likely than men to have a positive view of GAI. In summary, views about GAI vary widely by the individual characteristics and condition of GAI, and by the question set.

Natalia V. Grishina

Background. One of the trends in the development of modern psychology is an increasing interest in the study of context within the principle of contextuality as recognition of the influence of context factors on psychological phenomenology. The focus on studying the context, once designated by G.M. Andreeva as a fundamental principle of the new paradigm of social psychology, is currently the methodological principle of all psychological science and modern personality psychology. Objectives. The goal of the study consists in theoretical and empirical substantiation of the concept of purpose as a parameter for describing a person’s relationship with the outside world. Study Participants. The total sample included 350 people (45.9% women and 53.8% men). Young people took part in the survey (84.8% aged 17 to 25 years). Method. To describe a person’s life goals and the characteristics of the purpose setting, a survey form was created. The form recorded the significance of goals in the main areas of a person’s life, satisfaction with their implementation, an assessment of the possibilities for achieving these goals in the current life situation, etc. (40 points). The “Potential for Self-Change” technique (V.R. Manukyan, I.R. Murtazina, N.V. Grishina); “Test of existential motivations” (A. Langle); “Time Perspective Questionnaire” (F. Zimbardo) were used to assess personal factors. Cluster analysis was used to process the data in this study. Results. The data obtained confirmed the contextual nature of a person’s goals, their connection with the spatiotemporal coordinates of the context, the most important role of goals as a factor in organizing a person’s relationship with the outside world, with the meaningfulness of life. Depending on the presence or absence of significant goals in a person, the expressiveness of the goal orientation, types of relationships with the outside world are identified — focus on pre-adaptive change, readiness for adaptive change, unpreparedness for change. Conclusion. The results obtained confirmed the effectiveness of describing the purpose regulation of human activity as a language for describing the relationship of an individual with the outside world. The most important prospect in the further development of this research direction is the description of the integrity of an individual as a form of a person’s relationship with the world.

Asghar Rezaei, Sandesh G Bhat, Chih-Hsiu Cheng et al.

<h4>Background</h4>Longevity is increasing worldwide due to improvements in healthcare and living standards. Aging is often associated with disability and multiple health concerns. To address these challenges, effective interventions are essential. This study investigated potential age-related declines in gait, balance, and strength. We also sought to assess any relationships between these three parameters and explore potential differences between women and men.<h4>Methods</h4>Healthy individuals over 50 years of age were recruited for this cross-sectional study. Upper extremity (grip) strength and lower extremity (knee) strength of the dominant side were measured. Static balance was performed on the force plate in different situations each for 30 seconds: bilateral stance with eyes open, bilateral stance with eyes closed, as well as dominant leg and non-dominant leg unilateral stance with eyes open. Gait was measured during level walking using an optical motion capture system. Additionally, the dynamic stability margin (DSM) was calculated for the level walking trials.<h4>Results</h4>The study results indicated that gait parameters were not significantly affected by age (p≥0.12), while knee and grip strength, along with several balance parameters, showed a significant decline with age. All individuals were able to maintain their bipedal balance, but their center of pressure movement increased significantly by age (p≤0.028). Z-scores were calculated to compare significant age parameters. Unipedal stance time was found to be the most affected by age compared to other contributing factors (p≤0.001). The duration of unipedal balance showed the most significant change per decade (non-dominant: -0.62 SDs; dominant: -0.53 SDs), while strength measures exhibited the lowest amount of change per decade (grip strength: -0.34 SDs; knee strength: -0.26 SDs). Sex differences were observed exclusively in strength parameters, with no discernible impact on the decline in balance parameters.<h4>Conclusions</h4>These findings suggest that the duration of unipedal stance can serve as a reliable and gender-independent measure of neuromuscular aging for both elderly male and female subjects.

Chaohua Wei, Zhuchao Wu, Xinlan Mao et al.

Abstract Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, non-therapeutic interventions (NPIs), such as traffic restrictions, work stoppages, and school suspensions, have led to a sharp decline in the concentration of air pollutants in the epidemic sites. However, few studies focused on the impact of air pollutant changes on the risk of nonaccidental death. Method We selected Yancheng City, China, as the study site and applied a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) based on the quasi-Poisson distribution to evaluate the impact of atmospheric pollutants exposure on the nonaccidental death of local residents. The time span of this study was set from January 1, 2013, to December 21, 2022, that is, before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Results The concentration of some air pollutants has greatly varied after the outbreak of COVID-19, with a significant decline for PM2.5 (− 43.4%), PM10 (− 38.5%), SO2 (− 62.9%), and NO2 (− 22.6%), but an increase for O3 (+ 4.3%). Comparative analysis showed that PM2.5 contributed to an increased risk of nonaccidental death after the outbreak of COVID-19. With an increase in PM2.5 by 10 µg/m³, the excess relative risks (ER) of nonaccidental death of residents increased by 1.01% (95%CI: 0.19%,1.84%). The stratified analysis revealed that air pollutants impacted nonaccidental deaths in both men and women before the outbreak of COVID-19. After the outbreak of COVID-19, PM10 had a significant effect on male nonaccidental deaths. The concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, and SO2 increased by 10 µg/m³, the ER of PM2.5, PM10, and SO2 on female nonaccidental death increased by 1.52% (0.38%,2.67%), 0.58% (0.02%,1.13%), and 15.09% (5.73%,25.28%), respectively. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, five air pollutants had an impact on the death of residents from cardiovascular disease (CVD). After the outbreak of COVID-19, only PM10 significantly affected the death risk of CVD. In addition, we discovered that PM2.5, PM10, and SO2 significantly impacted the risk of death due to respiratory diseases before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. Conclusions Air pollutants have different effects on nonaccidental deaths before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. A decrease in air pollutant concentration due to the NPIs for COVID-19 had a significant effect on the reduction of the risk of nonaccidental death.

Jongwook Si, Sungyoung Kim

The objective of a style transfer is to maintain the content of an image while transferring the style of another image. However, conventional research on style transfer has a significant limitation in preserving facial landmarks, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, which are crucial for maintaining the identity of the image. In Korean portraits, the majority of individuals wear "Gat", a type of headdress exclusively worn by men. Owing to its distinct characteristics from the hair in ID photos, transferring the "Gat" is challenging. To address this issue, this study proposes a deep learning network that can perform style transfer, including the "Gat", while preserving the identity of the face. Unlike existing style transfer approaches, the proposed method aims to preserve texture, costume, and the "Gat" on the style image. The Generative Adversarial Network forms the backbone of the proposed network. The color, texture, and intensity were extracted differently based on the characteristics of each block and layer of the pre-trained VGG-16, and only the necessary elements during training were preserved using a facial landmark mask. The head area was presented using the eyebrow area to transfer the "Gat". Furthermore, the identity of the face was retained, and style correlation was considered based on the Gram matrix. The proposed approach demonstrated superior transfer and preservation performance compared to previous studies.

Owen O'Neill, Fintan Costello

A commonly observed pattern in machine learning models is an underprediction of the target feature, with the model's predicted target rate for members of a given category typically being lower than the actual target rate for members of that category in the training set. This underprediction is usually larger for members of minority groups; while income level is underpredicted for both men and women in the 'adult' dataset, for example, the degree of underprediction is significantly higher for women (a minority in that dataset). We propose that this pattern of underprediction for minorities arises as a predictable consequence of statistical inference on small samples. When presented with a new individual for classification, an ML model performs inference not on the entire training set, but on a subset that is in some way similar to the new individual, with sizes of these subsets typically following a power law distribution so that most are small (and with these subsets being necessarily smaller for the minority group). We show that such inference on small samples is subject to systematic and directional statistical bias, and that this bias produces the observed patterns of underprediction seen in ML models. Analysing a standard sklearn decision tree model's predictions on a set of over 70 subsets of the 'adult' and COMPAS datasets, we found that a bias prediction measure based on small-sample inference had a significant positive correlations (0.56 and 0.85) with the observed underprediction rate for these subsets.

Rita Garcia, Christoph Treude, Wendy La

The open-source community uses the GitHub platform to exchange and share software applications and services of interest. This paper aims to identify the open-source community's interest in gender-related projects on GitHub. Our findings create research opportunities and identify resources by the open-source community that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. We use data mining to identify GitHub projects that focus on gender-related topics. We apply quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the projects' attributes and to classify them within a gender social structure and a gender bias taxonomy. We aim to understand the open-source community's efforts and interests in gender topics through active projects. In this paper, we report on a preponderance of projects focusing on specific gender topics and identify those with a narrow focus. We examine projects focusing on gender bias and how they address this non-inclusive behaviour. Results show a propensity of GitHub projects focusing on recognising and detecting an individual's gender and a dearth of projects concentrating on the cultural expectations placed on women and men. In the gender bias domain, the projects mainly focus on occupational biases. These findings raise opportunities to address the limited focus of GitHub on gender-related topics through developing projects that mitigate exclusive behaviours.