Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Health-Related Quality of Life and Medication Adherence in Pulmonary Tuberculosis in South Africa

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and adherence to treatment are two often inter-related concepts that have implications for patient management and care. Tuberculosis (TB) and its treatment present a major public health concern in South Africa. The study aimed to evaluate the association between HRQOL and adherence in TB patients in South Africa. Methods: Four self-reported HRQOL and one self-reported adherence measures were used in an observational longitudinal multicentre study during 6-month standard TB treatment. These included the generic Short-Form 12 items (SF-12) and European Quality of Life 5 dimensions 5 levels (EQ-5D-5L), the disease-specific St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) and the condition-specific Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) for HRQOL. Adherence was measured by the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale 8 items (MMAS-8). The relationship between both concepts was examined in 131 patients using Spearman's rho correlations, and linear regression models. Results: HRQOL improved over 6-month TB treatment, whereas adherence mean scores stayed constant with participants attaining a medium average level. Around 76% of patients reported to be high adherers and 24% were reporting a medium or low adherence. Associations between HRQOL and adherence were mainly weak. High adherence at treatment start was positively related to improvements in anxiety and depression after 6-month treatment. The overall improvement in pain and discomfort, and psychosocial health aspects over treatment time was positively, but weakly associated with adherence at 6 months of treatment. Conclusion: A positive relationship exists between adherence and HRQOL in TB in a South African setting, but this relationship was very weak, most likely because HRQOL is affected by a number of different factors and not limited to effects of adherence. Therefore, management of TB patients should, besides adequate drug treatment, address the specific mental and psychosocial needs.
Is saving really prior to investment? Time series and panel evidence in the WAEMU

Purpose – This study aims to re‐examine the direction of causality between investment and saving in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). Design/methodology/approach – The study is empirical, testing for Granger causality between investment and saving as well as for other pertinent variables in the determination of the two variables of interest. It uses two methods: co‐integration and decomposition of variances on the one hand, and dynamic panel on the other.Findings – The use of recent developments in the treatment and analysis of time series data and the inclusion of relevant variables omitted in prior studies help to shed more light on the contradictory results that exist so far. The empirical result is a proof that saving is a real constraint on investment in the financially moderate economies of the WAEMU.Practical implications – The paper encourages own resource mobilisation for economic growth and development. Ideas generated in the study suggest that financial liberalization per se .
Sensitivity of Entamoeba histolytica and Entamoeba dispar patient isolates to human complement

Twenty‐one Entamoeba histolytica and 56 Entamoeba dispar patient isolates were investigated for their sensitivity to the classical and alternative pathway of human complement. E. histolytica and E. dispar patient isolates were differentiated by polymerase chain reaction and hexokinase isoenzyme typing. It was found that 90.3% (±12.0%) of the trophozoites of E. histolytica were lysed after 30 min by the alternative pathway of complement in the presence of 50% human serum (19 isolates showed lysis rates higher than 80%), whereas E. dispar cells were less susceptible to the alternative pathway as 68.8% (±28.2%) of lysis occurred. However, 23 of the E. dispar isolates were lysed between 100 and 80% (90.9%±9.1%), demonstrating that about half of the tested E. dispar isolates were highly sensitive to complement lysis. Only 11 of the E. dispar isolates were proven to be ‘resistant’ to the alternative pathway of complement and were lysed less than 40%. These results are in conflict to earlier publications, describing resistance of E. dispar to complement lysis (Hamelmann et al. 1992, 1993).
Debt Overhang and Bank Bailouts

When a bank is deemed 'too big to fail' by regulators, it may be tempted to buy risky assets. This paper analyses bank bailouts involving the purchases of toxic assets, preferred stock and common stock when the government wants to encourage efficient lending. It finds that preferred stock recapitalisations are the least efficient in correcting debt overhang problems from both an ex post and ex ante perspective. In contrast, efficient lending and voluntary participation can be best achieved without subsidy by purchasing either toxic assets or common stock. Nevertheless, troubled banks must be subsidised if they will voluntarily participate in any recapitalisation.
Teacher Involvement in School Decision Making

Owing to the global trend of educational reforms, teachers’ new empowered roles in school had been discussed and advocated. As a review paper, the issues of decentralization will be raised at the outset as the theoretical perspectives for teacher empowerment, and subsequently teacher empowerment, benefits of teacher involvement, and barriers to decision making would be explored in this paper hence. This reviews of teachers’ significant parts in school decision making intended to sustain the research on diverse participation in school administration.
Job Changes and Individual-Job Specific Wage Dynamics

This paper develops an error components model that is used to examine the impact of job changes on the dynamics and variance of individual log earnings. I use data on work histories drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), that makes possible to do the distinction between voluntary an involuntary job-to-job changes. The potential endogeneity of job mobility in relation to earnings es circumvented by means of an instrument variable estimation method that also allows to control for unobserved individual-job specific heterogeneity.
Multiple productive immunoglobulin heavy chain gene rearrangements in chronic lymphocytic leukemia are mostly derived from independent clones

In chronic lymphocytic leukemia, usually a monoclonal disease, multiple productive immunoglobulin heavy chain gene rearrangements are identified sporadically. Prognostication of such cases based on immunoglobulin heavy variable gene mutational status can be problematic, especially if the different rearrangements have discordant mutational status. To gain insight into the possible biological mechanisms underlying the origin of the multiple rearrangements, we performed a comprehensive immunogenetic and immunophenotypic characterization of 31 cases with the multiple rearrangements identified in a cohort of 1147 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. For the majority of cases (25/31), we provide evidence of the co-existence of at least two B lymphocyte clones with a chronic lymphocytic leukemia phenotype. We also identified clonal drifts in serial samples, likely driven by selection forces. More specifically, higher immunoglobulin variable gene identity to germline and longer complementarity determining region 3 were preferred in persistent or newly appearing clones, a phenomenon more pronounced in patients with stereotyped B-cell receptors. Finally, we report that other factors, such as TP53 gene defects and therapy administration, influence clonal selection. Our findings are relevant to clonal evolution in the context of antigen stimulation and transition of monoclonal B-cell lymphocytosis to chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
An Adaptive Ridge Procedure for L0 Regularization

Penalized selection criteria like AIC or BIC are among the most popular methods for variable selection. Their theoretical properties have been studied intensively and are well understood, but making use of them in case of high-dimensional data is difficult due to the non-convex optimization problem induced by L0 penalties. In this paper we introduce an adaptive ridge procedure (AR), where iteratively weighted ridge problems are solved whose weights are updated in such a way that the procedure converges towards selection with L0 penalties. After introducing AR its specific shrinkage properties are studied in the particular case of orthogonal linear regression. Based on extensive simulations for the non-orthogonal case as well as for Poisson regression the performance of AR is studied and compared with SCAD and adaptive LASSO. Furthermore an efficient implementation of AR in the context of least-squares segmentation is presented. The paper ends with an illustrative example of applying AR to analyze GWAS data.
Safety stock reduction by order splitting

In this article we consider an item for which a continuous review, reorder point, order quantity inventory control system is used. The amount of safety stock required depends upon, among other factors, the average value and variability of the length of the replenishment lead time. One way to reduce these quantities is to split orders among two or more vendors. In this article the random lead times are assumed to have Weibull distributions. This permits the development of analytic expressions for the reduction in the expected value and variability of total demand until the critical first (earliest) delivery received from a vendor. An expression is also obtained for the reorder point that provides a given probability of no stockout prior to the first delivery. Lower bounds are given on the order quantity so as to ensure that the probability of a stockout before any one of the later (second, third, etc.) deliveries is sufficiently small to be considered negligible. The analytic and tabular results can be used to estimate the benefits (reduced carrying costs and/or increased service level) of order splitting.
Modeling Impact of Transit Operator Fleet Size under various Market Regimes with Uncertainty in Network

A network-based model is proposed for investigating the impact of transit operator fleet size on a network with uncertainty under various market regimes. The market regimes concerned include monopoly, free competition, and oligopoly. In the proposed model, the transit operator aims to determine fleet size to optimize its objective function while accounting for transit passengers’ travel choice decisions that minimize their own perceived disutility of travel. To consider the uncertainty effects on transit networks, the proposed model incorporates the unreliability component of transit services into the passenger disutility function, which is mainly due to variations in in-vehicle travel time and the dwell time of transit vehicles at stops. A numerical example is used to illustrate the application of the proposed model. Numerical results show that transit service unreliability could significantly influence transit system performance and the travel choice behavior of transit passengers.
Lung nodules: improved detection with software that suppresses the rib and clavicle on chest radiographs.

PURPOSE To demonstrate possible superiority in the performance of a radiologist who is tasked with detecting actionable nodules and aided by the bone suppression and soft-tissue visualization algorithm of a new software program that produces a modified image by suppressing the ribs and clavicles, filtering noise, and equalizing the contrast in the area of the lungs. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study and use of anonymized and deidentified data received approval from the MedStar-Georgetown University Oncology Institutional Review Board. Informed consent was obtained from 15 study radiologists. The study radiologists participated as observers in a reader study of 368 patients in an approximately 2:1 cancer-free-to-cancer ratio. The localized receiver operating characteristic (LROC) method was used for analyses. Images were rerandomized for each radiologist. Each patient image was sequentially read, first with the standard radiograph and then with the software-aided image. Normal studies were confirmed with computed tomography (CT), follow-up, and/or panel consensus. RESULTS Each reader and the combined scores of the 15 readers showed improvement. The area under the combined LROC curve increased significantly from 0.460 unaided to 0.558 aided by visualization software (P = .0001). When measured according to the reader's indication that a case should be sent or not sent for CT or biopsy, sensitivity for cancer detection increased from 49.5% unaided to 66.3% aided by software (P < .0001); specificity decreased from 96.1% to 91.8% (P = .004). Seventy-four percent of the aided detections occurred in cancers with 70% or greater overlap of the bone and the nodule. CONCLUSION The radiologists using visualization software significantly increased their detection of lung cancers and benign nodules.
Economic Analysis of the Targeting Strategy of Artisanal Fishers in Dominica

Abstract This article examines the entrepreneurial artisanal fisher's problem of choosing a set of targets that minimize variability in net trip revenues given limited inputs and the carrying capacity constraints of an artisanal vessel in an open-access fishery. Specifically, it explores the fishing behaviour and targeting options of fishermen in Dominica, with the objective of identifying catch-sets that can reduce the variance in the mean net income earned by artisanal fishers over a fishing season. The objective therein is to enable fishers to earn a more stable income, thus reducing their vulnerability to economic shocks. This is explored within the context of a risk tradeoff model for mean-variance portfolio optimization. Literature supports the view that the high degree of variability in mean catch rate contributes to the unprofitability and vulnerability of fishers and may also encourage their use of unsustainable harvesting practices in an attempt to improve fishing net revenue. The article also estimates the efficacy of targeting strategies employed by artisanal fishers, as evidenced by the ability to land the ex ante target species. The results show that there exists catch portfolios capable of reducing variance in net trip revenue across a fishing season returns for all sites, and that some fishers are in fact able to effectively land ex ante targets, which are important to overall reduction in the variability of trip net revenue. This suggests that there is scope for increasing the profitability of artisanal fishing activity in Dominica with existing vessels and gear operations of the artisanal fleet. JEL Classification Codes: G11, C61
The responsible tenant: housing governance and the politics of behaviour

Writers influenced by Foucault's work on governmentality have characterised emerging forms of governance in advanced liberal democracies as being based upon ‘technologies of the self’ in which power works through the self‐regulation of subjects within constructed norms of responsible and ethical conduct. This ‘politics of behaviour’ has been particularly prominent in UK housing policy debates in relation to anti‐social behaviour, benefit reform and tenant participation. This paper argues that recent reforms are premised upon the identification of the responsible (and responsive) tenant as a central organising mechanism in new processes of housing governance. Although tenant responsibility is not a new concept, the paper argues that the nature and scope of this responsibility is currently being broadened and deepened, and discusses how this reconfiguration of responsibility reflects a wider realignment of governing identities within housing policy and practice.
Organizational Governance, Leadership, and the Influence of Competition

This paper studies the emergence of firm asymmetry as an equilibrium outcome. We consider differentiated Cournot and Bertrand duopolies where firms endogenously select their organizational governance and their timing strategy. For Cournot competition asymmetric and symmetric equilibria may occur. In an asymmetric equilibrium, firms always select different organizational structures. In Bertrand competition, firms always select different timing strategies at the market stage, but may select the same organizational structure. For Bertrand competition we observe that firm profits are nonmonotonic in the intensity of competition, so that firms might be better off if the intensity of competition between firms increases.
Field seasonal influenza vaccine effectiveness

Thanks to the screening method, we estimated among target groups the 2010/2011 field vaccine effectiveness (FVE) against laboratory confirmed influenza cases seen in general practice. We also compared the values of FVE estimations obtained by using three sources of the population vaccination coverage (VC) based on three different methodologies: (1) administrative data from the main social security scheme (Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie des Travailleurs Salariés—CNAMTS) covering about 85% of the French population, (2) a cross-sectional national telephone survey in the general population, and (3) a declarative survey in the population seen in a one-day general practitioner (GP) consultations. The FVE estimates among target groups were stratified by age (<65 y old with reported chronic illness; ≥65 y old and overall). Using the VC of the CNAMTS, the FVE of the 2010/2011 seasonal trivalent vaccine against laboratory confirmed infection with any influenza virus was 59% (95% Confidence Interval, 17 to 81). It was 85% (17 to 99) and 50% (–16 to 80) for A(H1N1)pdm09 and B influenza infections, respectively. The values of FVE using the influenza VC obtained in a sample of the general population and of the population of GPs’ patients were 73% (45 to 87) and 82% (63 to 92), respectively. We estimated a moderate influenza FVE in preventing confirmed influenza viruses in target groups by using the VC of the CNAMTS. We also observed that the screening method generates FVE values dependent on the choice of the source of VC and thus should be used cautiously.
Conservative Central Banks and Nominal Growth, Exchange Rate and Inflation Targets

A framework is developed in which inflation biases with different target variables are compared. A nominal growth target measured in consumer prices may yield less stabilization bias than a nominal income growth target. Exchange rate and inflation targets result in less stabilization bias than an income growth target the more important the terms-of-trade stabilization. Persistence in output causes excessive stabilization of productivity shocks and of shocks to the terms of trade under discretion. An inflation-weight conservative central bank is more likely under an inflation target than under an exchange rate target, and less likely under a nominal income growth target.
The Value of a Government Monitor for U.S. Banking Firms

Do federal bank examinations add value to the market's supervisory process? To address this question, the author investigates whether Federal Reserve inspections of bank holding companies affect the association between banks' reported book values and the market value of their equity. Using data from the fourth quarters of 1988 and 1990, he finds that the market is aware of bank examinations and takes them into account when valuing bank stocks. Apart from the obvious value they provide to regulators, examinations affect market values in several ways. In some instances, they provide useful certifying information which reduces risk and increases market value. In other instances, examinations induce additional regulatory risk which may reduce market value. The net effect of these results appears to vary over time, and across different types of banks.
Impact of correlated generation of oxide defects on SILC and breakdown distributions

A three-dimensional Monte Carlo model for analysis of the reliability of flash memory arrays is developed, and applied to thin tunnel oxide (t/sub ox/ = 5 nm) samples. Good agreement between experimental data and simulation results are obtained, assuming a correlated defect generation in the tunnel oxide of our samples as evidenced in (Ielmini et al., 2004). The impact of correlated defect generation on dielectric breakdown is also addressed by means of a percolation model. It is shown that correlated generation provides no significant degradation of the breakdown lifetime with respect to Poisson statistics.
Progression of USDA Corn and Soybean Acreage Estimates and Prospects for Final Estimates for 2015

Each year, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) provides a series of estimates of planted acreage of corn and soybeans in the U.S. That series begins with an estimate of planting intentions and ends with a final estimate of acreage actually planted. There is obvious interest in the magnitude of the final NASS estimates of planted acreage of corn and soybeans in 2015 as those estimates will impact final production estimates. Those estimates in turn will impact the projected supply/demand balance and price prospects for the 2015-16 marketing year. In this article, we review the progression of USDA planted acreage estimates for a particular crop year and then use estimates available through October 2015 to anticipate final planted acreage for 2015.
An International Comparison of Strategic Management Accounting Practices

Following a consideration of what accounting practices may comprise strategic management accounting (SMA), the results of a questionnaire survey investigating the incidence and perceived merit of twelve SMA practices are reported. The survey sample comprises large companies in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. There is a wide range of application rates for the twelve practices appraised; competitor accounting and strategic pricing are the most widely-used. Most of the SMA practices appraised are not used widely. However, based on the perceptions of the benefits from adopting such practices, the potential for greater use exists in all countries examined. Cross-country comparisons highlight fairly similar levels of SMA usage. However, when controlling for company size, there is a suggestion that some practices are used relatively more in N.Z. and relatively less in the U.K. and U.S. There appears to be negligible use of the term "strategic management accounting" in organizations and practising accountants have a limited appreciation of what the term means. Key Words: Strategic management accounting; International comparison
Maturational changes in the human envelope-following responses.

INTRODUCTION The auditory ability to discriminate rapid changes in the envelope of language sounds is essential for speech comprehension. Human envelope-following responses (EFRs) are useful for objective measurement of temporal auditory processing in subjects who are unable to give accurate behavioural responses (e.g., young children). OBJECTIVE To evaluate age-dependent changes in EFRs during the first 2 years of life. METHODS The EFRs were recorded in a sample of 16 well babies distributed into 2 age groups (G1: 12 newborns; G2: 4 babies of 2 years). The EFRs were evoked by white noise carrier stimuli with a sweep of modulation frequencies from 20 to 200 Hz presented at 50 dB HL. RESULTS The age-related changes affected both morphology and EFR detectability. The main morphological differences were at the expense of frequencies below 50 Hz, where the first component P1 was not well defined in either of the 2 age groups. For all modulation frequencies, age significantly affected EFR amplitude and detectability. CONCLUSIONS The present study provides the first evidence on EFR maturation. Some understanding of normal EFR development would facilitate a better use of this technique in clinically-objective measurement of auditory temporal processing in infants who cannot provide reliable behavioural responses.