Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative CT of Mandibular Bone Density As A Predictor of Osteoporosis in Postmenopausal Women

Objective: The aim of our study is to assess the effect of osteoporosis on the mandibular bone using QCT and to correlate between mandibular and systemic bone mineral densities in postmenopausal women. Subjects and Methods: Twenty postmenopausal women were subjected to full detailed history, comprehensive clinical examination, DXA measurements of the BMD of the lumbar vertebrae, the left femoral neck bone as well as the left forearm bones, QCT spine and mandibular BMD measurements. Results: According to DXA scan, 5 women were normal, 7 were osteopenic and 8 were osteoporotic. Statistical correlations between the mandibular buccal cortex, mandibular lingual cortex, and mandibular trabecular bone with different variables were done. Conclusion: The resulted data suggest that precise mandibular bone density measurement may be a method of identifying persons affected by generalized osteoporosis. Despite the obvious limitations of this study (cross-sectional study design and small number of cases), the results are promising. Future studies overcoming these points are needed to provide more close assessment of the disease effects on the mandible.
Sea-level rise caused by climate change and its implications for society

Sea-level rise is a major effect of climate change. It has drawn international attention, because higher sea levels in the future would cause serious impacts in various parts of the world. There are questions associated with sea-level rise which science needs to answer. To what extent did climate change contribute to sea-level rise in the past? How much will global mean sea level increase in the future? How serious are the impacts of the anticipated sea-level rise likely to be, and can human society respond to them? This paper aims to answer these questions through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. First, the present status of observed sea-level rise, analyses of its causes, and future projections are summarized. Then the impacts are examined along with other consequences of climate change, from both global and Japanese perspectives. Finally, responses to adverse impacts will be discussed in order to clarify the implications of the sea-level rise issue for human society.
Closed-form information-theoretic divergences for statistical mixtures

Statistical mixtures such as Rayleigh, Wishart or Gaussian mixture models are commonly used in pattern recognition and signal processing tasks. Since the Kullback-Leibler divergence between any two such mixture models does not admit an analytical expression, the relative entropy can only be approximated numerically using time-consuming Monte-Carlo stochastic sampling. This drawback has motivated the quest for alternative information-theoretic divergences such as the recent Jensen-Rényi, Cauchy-Schwarz, or total square loss divergences that bypass the numerical approximations by providing exact analytic expressions. In this paper, we state sufficient conditions on the mixture distribution family so that these novel non-KL statistical divergences between any two such mixtures can be expressed in generic closed-form formulas.
Experimental Investigation on Sandstone Rock Permeability of Pakistan Gas Fields

Permeability is the ability of formation to produce hydrocarbon which is affected by compaction, pore size, sorting, cementation, layering and clay swelling. The effect of texture on permeability in term of grain size, sorting, sphericity, degree of cementing has been reported in literature. Also, the effect of permeability on capillary pressure, irreducible water saturation, displacement pressure and pore geometry constant has been studied separately. This preliminary study presents the experimental results of eight samples to understand the effect of similar factors of texture on permeability. With the knowledge of the results, it can be said that the effect of grain size, cementation, texture material, sphericity, and porosity can't be observed on permeability except sorting when less than ten samples are considered from different depositional environment. The results also show the impact of permeability on capillary pressure, irreducible water saturation, and displacement pressure and pore geometry index as similar as published in the literature.
Subsurface Nitrate–N Leaching Loss as Affected by Drainage Size and Depth in a Shallow Slowly–Permeable Soil

Subsurface drainage discharge nitrate–N (NO3–N) losses were evaluated under corn during a three year period under three replicated drainage systems: i) 100 mm diameter drainage tile at 80 cm depth; ii) 50 mm diameter drainage tile at 80 cm depth and iii) 50 mm diameter drainage tile at 50 cm depth. Each drainage system had 12 m spacings between laterals. The field under investigation possessed shallow, imperfectly–to–poorly drained soils. Throughout the investigation average NO3–N concentrations in the drainage outflow were similar for all three systems ranging from 9.6–11.4 mg L−1. Total drainage discharge was significantly lower for the shallow (50 cm) system compared to the two deeper (80 cm) systems. Therefore, significant differences in total NO3–N loss between the shallow (50 cm) and deep (80 cm) systems were observed with shallow systems providing reduced NO3–N losses. Corn yields were significantly lower in the shallow (50 cm) drainage treatment in only one year. Shallow drainage may have many economical and environmental benefits and require further research to evaluate its potential under various soil types.
Strategies for mitigating an influenza pandemic with pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccines

The recent worldwide spread of the swine-origin H1N1 2009 influenza outbreak has resulted in its designation as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. While it appears to result in mild symptoms, concern still exists that a more severe influenza pandemic with a high case fatality ratio might arise by reassortment or mutation of the currently circulating avian influenza (H5N1) virus. Given that recently developed candidate pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccines have shown potential for cross-strain protection, we investigated alternative vaccination strategies that exploit such vaccines using an agent-based simulation model of an actual community of approximately 30 000 people in a developed country. Assuming that a two-dose vaccination regimen would be required, we examined three vaccination strategies: pre-emptive, with vaccination applied prior to emergence of human-transmissible H5N1 influenza; reactive, where vaccination was initiated immediately after the first cases in the community were diagnosed; and a ‘split’ strategy where the first dose was administered pre-emptively during the pre-pandemic phase, with the second dose administered reactively. We showed that by effectively moving the delay between first and second doses into the pre-pandemic period, the split vaccination strategy achieved a substantially better attack rate reduction than the reactive strategy. Our results for an influenza strain with a reproduction number of 1.5 suggest reactive vaccination strategies that may be applicable to the current H1N1 2009 pandemic.
An Assessment of Orthobaric Density in the Global Ocean

Abstract Orthobaric density has recently been advanced as a new density variable for displaying ocean data and as a coordinate for ocean modeling. Here the extent to which orthobaric density surfaces are neutral is quantified and it is found that orthobaric density surfaces are less neutral in the World Ocean than are potential density surfaces referenced to 2000 dbar. Another property that is important for a vertical coordinate of a layered model is the quasi-material nature of the coordinate and it is shown that orthobaric density surfaces are significantly non-quasi-material. These limitations of orthobaric density arise because of its inability to accurately accommodate differences between water masses at fixed values of pressure and in situ density such as occur between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere portions of the World Ocean. It is shown that special forms of orthobaric density can be quite accurate if they are formed for an individual ocean basin and used only in that basin. While orthobari.
Lack of an Effect of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Coinfection on the Pharmacokinetics of Entecavir in Hepatitis B Virus-Infected Patients

ABSTRACT Entecavir is a guanosine nucleoside analogue approved for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. The impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) coinfection on the pharmacokinetics (PK) of entecavir was examined by nonlinear mixed-effects modeling. Plasma concentration data from HIV- and HBV-coinfected patients were analyzed in conjunction with data from HBV-monoinfected patients, and HIV coinfection was tested as a covariate on oral clearance (CL/F). The estimated population averages of intercompartmental clearance and the volumes of distribution in the central and peripheral compartments obtained with a 1-mg dose were 34.2 liters/h (interindividual variability, 30.2%), 115 liters (interindividual variability, 39.2%), and 1,830 liters (interindividual variability, 74%), respectively. CL/F was found to be a function of creatinine clearance, but HIV confection did not show any effect on CL/F. The geometric mean (GM) of individual Bayesian estimates of the steady-state area under the concentration-time curve following 1-mg daily doses were 39.3 and 38.8 ng·h/ml in HIV- and HBV-coinfected and HBV-monoinfected patients, respectively. The adjusted GM ratio (1.01; 90% confidence interval, 0.91 to 1.12) was within the bioequivalence criteria boundary (0.80 to 1.25). In conclusion, the proposed model adequately described the entecavir PK in HBV- and HIV-coinfected patients and HBV-monoinfected patients, and the entecavir exposures were comparable in the two patient populations.
A 1416-year reconstruction of annual, multidecadal, and centennial variability in area burned for ponderosa pine forests of the southern Colorado Plateau region, Southwest USA

Fire history reconstructions from fire scars in tree rings have been valuable for assessing fire regime changes and their climatic controls. It has been asserted, however, that these two- to four-century long records from the western USA are unrepresentative of longer periods of the Holocene and are of limited use for understanding current or future fire regimes. The Medieval Climate Anomaly (800–1300 ce) is often suggested as a better analog for future Southwestern US climates but is beyond the chronological range of most fire-scar studies in this region. To evaluate fire regime changes over the past millennium, we build on centennial-length fire–climate studies to generate a 1416 year long reconstruction of fire activity in ponderosa pine forests of the Southern Colorado Plateau region of Arizona and New Mexico. We used a split-period calibration and verification protocol to test the reliability of a multiple regression model using annual and antecedent precipitation (reconstructed from tree-ring width chronologies) to predict the percentage of fire-scar localities (i.e. sites, N=45) that recorded extensive fires within those sites (>25% of recorder trees scarred) each year between 1700 and 1899 ce. The model explains approximately 50% of the variation in annual fire activity. Applying the model to the entire precipitation reconstruction provides a proxy for annual area burned since 572 ce. There are no statistically significant differences between the period available for fire-scar study (1600 ce–present) and the Medieval Climate Anomaly (800–1300 ce) in terms of predicted annual area burned or the frequencies of regional fire years. Multidecadal and centennial variation in the frequencies of regional fire years, however, does indicate reduced surface fire frequencies from approximately 700–800 ce and 1360–1455ce. We hypothesize that these were periods when some forests were vulnerable to altered canopy structure, accumulated fuels, and increased fire severity.
Three Dimensional Mapping of Lingual Myoarchitecture

The tongue is a structurally complex muscular organ, composed of a continuum of variably aligned intrinsic and extrinsic fibers. An understanding tongue structure and function, both under normal and pathological conditions, requires a complete three dimensional representation of fiber orientations present in the whole tissue. In order to investigate lingual myoarchitecture in the mammalian tongue, we employed several magnetic resonance imaging techniques generally based on direction specific differences in water diffusion. Muscle tissue in particular exhibits significant diffusion anisotropy in the direction of fibers, from which diffusion imaging is able to infer fiber direction. In this thesis research, several diffusion weighted MRI signal acquisition and post processing methods were tested, namely diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), DSI with tractography, q-ball imaging, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and ADC and FA mapping. Each imaging method was evaluated in three ways: 1) finite element simulation using 2D structures to model the diffusion environment in an idealized situation, 2) MRI of microfluidic phantoms to quantify the effects of experimental conditions with a known diffusion environment, and 3) MRI of biological tissue, namely ex vivo cow and in vivo human tongues. The results demonstrated the capacity of DSI alone and in association with tractography to depict complex intravoxel and intervoxel fiber populations, in which a voxel is a 1-5 mm cubic imaged volume. In particular, our findings have identified and characterized on a structural basis a novel set of interwoven fiber populations. Future work will be directed to defining the mechanical significance of these interwoven fiber populations in carrying physiological tissue deformations. Thesis Supervisor: Richard J. Gilbert Title: Research Scientist, Mechanical Engineering Thesis Supervisor: Roger D. Kamm Title: Professor, Mechanical Engineering and Biological Engineering
Middleborns Disadvantaged? Testing Birth-Order Effects on Fitness in Pre-Industrial Finns

Parental investment is a limited resource for which offspring compete in order to increase their own survival and reproductive success. However, parents might be selected to influence the outcome of sibling competition through differential investment. While evidence for this is widespread in egg-laying species, whether or not this may also be the case in viviparous species is more difficult to determine. We use pre-industrial Finns as our model system and an equal investment model as our null hypothesis, which predicts that (all else being equal) middleborns should be disadvantaged through competition. We found no overall evidence to suggest that middleborns in a family are disadvantaged in terms of their survival, age at first reproduction or lifetime reproductive success. However, when considering birth-order only among same-sexed siblings, first-, middle- and lastborn sons significantly differed in the number of offspring they were able to rear to adulthood, although there was no similar effect among females. Middleborn sons appeared to produce significantly less offspring than first- or lastborn sons, but they did not significantly differ from lastborn sons in the number of offspring reared to adulthood. Our results thus show that taking sex differences into account is important when modelling birth-order effects. We found clear evidence of firstborn sons being advantaged over other sons in the family, and over firstborn daughters. Therefore, our results suggest that parents invest differentially in their offspring in order to both preferentially favour particular offspring or reduce offspring inequalities arising from sibling competition.
Measured and calculated seismic velocities and densities for granulites from xenolith occurrences and adjacent exposed lower crustal sections: A comparative study from the North China craton

Granulites from the Neogene xenolith-bearing Hannuoba alkaline basalt and from the Manjinggou-Wayaokou exposed lower crustal section in the Archean Huai 'an terrain, which occurs within and surrounds the Hannuoba basalt, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative study on petrophysical properties and composition of the lower crust represented by these two types of samples. P and S wave velocities and densities of 12 Hannuoba lower crustal xenoliths and one associated spinel Iherzolite xenolith as well as nine granulites and granulite-facies metasedimentary rocks from the Archean Huai 'an terrain were measured in laboratory at pressures up to 600 MPa and temperatures up to 600°C. Calculations of P and S wave velocities were also made for the same suite of samples based on modal mineralogy and single-crystal velocities whose variations with composition are considered by using microprobe analyses and velocities of end members. The measured and calculated Vp at room temperature and 600 MPa, where the microcrack effect is considered to be almost eliminated, agree within 4% for rocks from the Manjinggou-Wayaokou section and the adjacent Wutai-Jining upper crustal to upper lower crustal section. In contrast, the xenoliths show systematically lower measured Vp by up to 15% relative to calculated velocities, even if decompression-induced products of kelyphite and glass are taken into account. The lower measured velocities for xenoliths are attributed to grain boundary alteration and residual porosity. This implies that although granulite xenoliths provide direct information about lower crustal constitution and chemical composition, they are not faithful samples for studying in situ seismic properties of the lower crust in terms of measured velocities due to alterations during their entrainment to the surface, which changes their physical properties significantly. In this respect, granulites from high-grade terrains are better samples because they are not subjected to significant changes during their slow transport to the surface and because physical properties depend primarily on mineralogy in addition to pressure and temperature. On the other hand, calculated velocities for granulite xenoliths are consistent with velocities for granulites from terrains, suggesting that they can be also used to infer lower crust composition by correlating with results from seismic refraction studies.
Engaging patients in medical decision making

The growing consensus that patients ought to be more involved in their own care lies at the confluence of several powerful ideas. Political trends, thinking on ethics, and research on health services have all contributed. As experienced consumers, patients understand that they have rights, and they are much less inclined than they used to be to leave medical decisions entirely to the experts. Ethicists have by and large accepted the principle that autonomy (what the competent, informed patient wants) trumps beneficence (what the doctor thinks best for the patient) in all but the most extreme circumstances.1 In addition, there is evidence that the expanding involvement of patients in care produces better health outcomes, providing an empirical rationale for what may have been an inevitable shift in power and social control.2 A supplement to this September's issue of Quality in Health Care focuses on engaging patients in medical decisions. Twelve articles, derived from a Medical Research Council conference, cover the meaning, mutability, and measurement of patients' preferences regarding treatment. The proceedings leave the clear …
An ethnobotany of Baja California's Kumeyaay Indians

OF THE THESIS An Ethnobotany of Baja California’s Kumeyaay Indians by Michael Alan Wilken Master of Arts in Anthropology San Diego State University, 2012 The Kumeyaay Indians (also ‘Iipay–Tiipay, Ipai–Tipai, or Diegueño in the United States, or Kumiai in Mexico) have inhabited the landscapes of northern Baja California, Mexico, and southern California since long before European contact, originally making a living as mobile hunting, gathering, and fishing peoples in the region’s varied environments. The division of Kumeyaay territory in 1848 by two distinct nation states imposed on the region an international boundary as well as separate political and economic structures, cultures, and languages. Historical processes have reduced Kumeyaay territory and population, and transformed indigenous lifeways, yet a few elder Kumeyaay still speak their native language and maintain cultural knowledge of the environment. In this thesis, I explore the questions of how contemporary ethnobotanical knowledge of Baja California’s Kumeyaay Indians can make new contributions to scientific research of diachronic human– plant interactions in the study area, and how this knowledge can inform Kumeyaay cultural and linguistic revitalization through its incorporation in interpretive exhibits. I synthesize information from interviews conducted with 16 Kumeyaay plant specialists, documenting Kumeyaay knowledge of traditional uses for 47 native plants as food, medicine, tools, construction materials, and ritual resources, covering indigenous nomenclature, plant scheduling, harvesting, processing, and consumption, as well as cultural meanings associated with plants. I review archaeological, historical, ethnographic, linguistic, and botanical literature to situate the Kumeyaay ethnobotanical data in a regional and diachronic context. I discuss how this study contributes new information on the Kumeyaay and their interactions with the vegetative environment, and provide examples of how I have applied this information to support efforts toward Kumeyaay cultural and linguistic revitalization.
Single and Double Mutations in gyrA but Not in gyrB Are Associated with Low- and High-Level Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Helicobacter pylori

ABSTRACT In one French hospital the rate of resistance to ciprofloxacin in Helicobacter pylori was 3.3% (2 of 60 strains) in 1999. The six resistant clinical strains (four from 1996 and two from 1999) and three ciprofloxacin-selected single-step mutants studied carried one gyrA mutation but none in gyrB. Clinafloxacin and garenoxacin were the most active fluoroquinolones against these mutants. Occurrence of a second gyrA mutation was associated with high MICs of all fluoroquinolones tested.
Effects of advertisements on smokers’ interest in trying e-cigarettes: the roles of product comparison and visual cues

Introduction Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) are battery-powered nicotine delivery devices that have become popular among smokers. We conducted an experiment to understand adult smokers’ responses to e-cigarette advertisements and investigate the impact of ads’ arguments and imagery. Methods A US national sample of smokers who had never tried e-cigarettes (n=3253) participated in a between-subjects experiment. Smokers viewed an online advertisement promoting e-cigarettes using one of three comparison types (emphasising similarity to regular cigarettes, differences or neither) with one of three images, for nine conditions total. Smokers then indicated their interest in trying e-cigarettes. Results Ads that emphasised differences between e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes elicited more interest than ads without comparisons (p<0.01), primarily due to claims about e-cigarettes’ lower cost, greater healthfulness and utility for smoking cessation. However, ads that emphasised the similarities of the products did not differ from ads without comparisons. Ads showing a person using an e-cigarette created more interest than ads showing a person without an e-cigarette (p<0.01). Conclusions Interest in trying e-cigarettes was highest after viewing ads with messages about differences between regular and electronic cigarettes and ads showing product use. If e-cigarettes prove to be harmful or ineffective cessation devices, regulators might restrict images of e-cigarette use in advertising, and public health messages should not emphasise differences between regular and electronic cigarettes. To inform additional regulations, future research should seek to identify what advertising messages and features appeal to youth.