Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association Between Gastrointestinal Events and Health Care Resource Utilization Among Patients with Osteoporosis: Analysis of a U.S. Managed Care Population.

BACKGROUND Among patients on osteoporosis therapy, including oral bisphosphonates (BIS), upper gastrointestinal (GI) conditions have been linked with lower adherence to treatment and increased treatment discontinuation in clinical practice. Patients who are nonadherent to treatment have a higher risk of osteoporotic fractures and, consequently, have greater use of health care services. The burden of upper gastrointestinal events on health care resource utilization (HCRU) among women initiating oral BIS has not been well investigated. OBJECTIVE To examine the association of upper GI events and HCRU in women initiating oral BIS. METHODS Using a U.S. national claims database, this retrospective study identified women aged ≥ 55 years who were prescribed oral BIS during 2001-2011 and had no history of GI events 12 months prior to treatment initiation. Patients with medical claims for an upper GI event ≤ 4 months posttreatment initiation were cases; all others were controls. The date of the first upper GI event among cases and a randomly assigned date ≤ 4 months posttreatment initiation among controls was the index date. Cases were matched 1:1 to controls by propensity scores derived from logistic regression of pre-index patient characteristics. Outcomes were all-cause and osteoporosis (OP)-related HCRU in the 6-month post-index period. Differences were assessed using McNemar's test. RESULTS Of the 62,863 eligible patients, 4,751 (7.6%) experienced an upper GI event ≤ 4 months posttreatment initiation (cases); 4,739 cases were matched with 4,739 controls. Compared with controls, cases had higher rates of all-cause HCRU (outpatient: 99.3% vs. 87.8%; inpatient: 20.2% vs. 6.4%; emergency room [ER]: 12.5% vs. 7.4%; all P less than 0.0001) and OP-related HCRU (outpatient: 24.6% vs. 18.2%; inpatient: 3.4% vs. 1.0%; ER: 0.7% vs. 0.4%; all P less than 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Patients with upper GI events had higher rates of all-cause and OP-related health care utilization. Upper GI events may pose an incremental HCRU burden among patients initiating BIS.
Happiness Adaptation to Income Beyond "Basic Needs"

We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985-2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries from 1975-2002, shows different patterns of adaptation to income across the rich and poor. We find evidence that for wealthy Germans, and for the rich half of European nations, higher levels of per capita income don't buy greater happiness. The reason appears to be adaptation. However even for the rich half of European nations such habituation may take over 5 years so the happiness gains that they experience, whilst not permanent, can still be relatively long-lasting. Finally we study a cross section of nations in 2005 from the World Gallup Poll and find that the past 45 years of economic growth (from 1960-2005) in the rich half of nations has not brought happiness gains above those that were already in place once the 1960s standard of living had been achieved. However in the poorest half of nations we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the happiness gains they have experienced from the past 45 years of growth have been the same as the gains that they experienced from growth prior to the 1960s.
Harmonized Indexes of Consumer Prices: Their Conceptual Foundations

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the single most important indicator of inflation used by the European Central Bank. Sections 2 to 4 of the paper look at the theory of inflation indexes that could be used as target indexes of inflation. A Consumer Price Index (CPI) emerges as perhaps the most useful target index. Four different approaches to index number theory are reviewed and the "best" index number formula from each perspective is determined. Section 6 looks at the methodology of the HICP in the light of the previous sections. Section 7 looks at some of the difficult measurement problems that must be addressed in a CPI or an HICP. These problems include the treatment of quality change, substitution or representativity bias, chained versus fixed base indexes, the choice of formula at the lowest level of aggregation and the treatment of owner occupied housing and seasonal commodities.
Decoupling market incumbency from organizational experience : a study of biotechnology's impact on the market for anti-cancer drugs

In studies of creative destruction, scholars agree that, within researchintensive industries, the demise of incumbents is significantly determined by their lower productivity in researching the radically new technology (Henderson, 1993). Such differences in the research competence of incumbent vs. entrant firms are explained in the literature through theories about established vs. de novo firms (e.g., Nelson and Winter, 1982). A disconnect arises because, frequently, the most competent entrants are established (experienced) firms themselves (i.e., diversifying entrants). In fact, studies where diversifying and de novo entrants are compared find in the former the same mechanisms that scholars have argued take place in incumbent firms (e.g., Mitchell and Singh, 1993; Carroll et al., 1996). With this insight in mind, I present in this dissertation a study that decouples market incumbency from organizational experience. I walk away from the current hypothesis of incompetence in research and development of a radical new technology in the case of incumbents. I instead construct a framework highlighting the competitive disadvantages (organizational inertia) and advantages (competence re-use) that apply to all established firms (incumbents and diversifying entrants) visà-vis de novo firms. I operationalize this study within the context of the market for anti-cancer drugs while this market transitions from cytotoxic (“random”) to targeted (“mechanism-driven”) drug development as a consequence of the biotechnology revolution. I find support for the relevance of distinguishing between diversifying and de novo entrants. In fact, in statistical analyses, it is established vs. de novo firms, and not incumbents vs. entrants, that become the relevant populations to compare. Based on further results, I discuss two more propositions. First, whether R&D competences can be decomposed into a technology-specific side and an applicationspecific side, where the latter represents a unique source of competitive advantage for incumbents even when technologies radically change. And second, whether we should expand attention beyond the advantages of being the first to move into a market, towards being the first to move into a technological competence. Thesis Supervisor: Thomas J. Allen Title: Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management
Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World

Preface and Acknowledgements ix Introduction: How the World Changed in 2008 1 1 Finance Humbled 20 What is fi nancialization? 23 Three perspectives on financial crises 34 More than just a financial crisis 50 Dilemmas of recovery 83 2 Empire Confined 95 The state roars back 95 Collision of empires 106 Orchestrating disharmony 121 Conclusion: Regime Change or System Change? 127 The end of neoliberalism? 127 State, market and planning 134 Notes 144 Index 169
Impact of charge variation on the encapsulation of nanoparticles by virus coat proteins

Electrostatic interaction is the driving force for the encapsulation by virus coat proteins of nanoparticles such as quantum dots, gold particles and magnetic beads for, e.g., imaging and therapeutic purposes. In recent experimental work, Daniel et al (2010 ACS Nano 4 3853–60) found the encapsulation efficiency to sensitively depend on the interplay between the surface charge density of negatively charged gold nanoparticles and the number of positive charges on the RNA binding domains of the proteins. Surprisingly, these experiments reveal that despite the highly cooperative nature of the co-assembly at low pH, the efficiency of encapsulation is a gradual function of their surface charge density. We present a simple all-or-nothing mass action law combined with an electrostatic interaction model to explain the experiments. We find quantitative agreement with experimental observations, supporting the existence of a natural statistical charge distribution between nanoparticles.
R&D, Education, and Productivity: A Retrospective

Zvi Griliches was a modern master of empirical economics. In this short book, he recounts what he and others have learned about the sources of economic growth. This book conveys the way he tackled research problems. For Griliches, economic theorizing without measurement is merely the fashioning of parables, but measurement without theory is blind. Judgement enables one to strike the right balance. The book begins with economists' first attempts to measure productivity growth systematically in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s these efforts culminated in a startling puzzle. The growth of measured inputs like labour and capital explained only a fraction of the growth of national output. Economists called this phenomenon "efficiency" or "technical change" or "the residual". However, Griliches observes that the most accurate name was a "measure of our ignorance". What explained the rest of economic growth quickly became one of the most important questions in economics. Over the next 30 years, Griliches and his colleagues and students looked for various components of the residual in education (the formation of human capital), investment (the formation of physical capital), and research and development. In 1973, after the oil price shocks, productivity growth slowed and the residual almost disappeared. Since the shocks were a short-term phenomenon, they could not account for the slowdown. A main focus on this book is therefore the puzzle of the productivity slowdown and how to date it and how to explain it.
Improving the prediction of protein secondary structure in three and eight classes using recurrent neural networks and profiles

Secondary structure predictions are increasingly becoming the workhorse for several methods aiming at predicting protein structure and function. Here we use ensembles of bidirectional recurrent neural network architectures, PSI‐BLAST‐derived profiles, and a large nonredundant training set to derive two new predictors: (a) the second version of the SSpro program for secondary structure classification into three categories and (b) the first version of the SSpro8 program for secondary structure classification into the eight classes produced by the DSSP program. We describe the results of three different test sets on which SSpro achieved a sustained performance of about 78% correct prediction. We report confusion matrices, compare PSI‐BLAST to BLAST‐derived profiles, and assess the corresponding performance improvements. SSpro and SSpro8 are implemented as web servers, available together with other structural feature predictors at: http://promoter.ics. uci.edu/BRNN‐PRED/. Proteins 2002;47:228–235. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Tikhonov replacement functionals for iteratively solving nonlinear operator equations

We shall be concerned with the construction of Tikhonov-based iteration schemes for solving nonlinear operator equations. In particular, we are interested in algorithms for the computation of a minimizer of the Tikhonov functional. To this end, we introduce a replacement functional, that has much better properties than the classical Tikhonov functional with nonlinear operator. Namely, the replacement functional is globally convex and can effectively be minimized by a fixed point iteration. On the basis of the minimizers of the replacement functional, we introduce an iterative algorithm that converges towards a critical point of the Tikhonov functional, and under additional assumptions for the nonlinear operator F, to a global minimizer. Combining our iterative strategy with an appropriate parameter selection rule, we obtain convergence and convergence rates. The performance of the resulting numerical scheme is demonstrated by solving the nonlinear inverse SPECT (single photon emission computerized tomography) problem.
Evaluation of the American English Matrix Test with cochlear implant recipients

The American English Matrix Test (AMT) is a recently developed adaptive speech-in-noise test that determines a speech reception threshold. The aim of the proposed study is to evaluate speech recognition in cochlear implant (CI) recipients using the AMT, determine test-retest reliability, and compare it to current clinical speech recognition tests.
THE ROLE OF MOLECULAR GAS IN OBSCURING SEYFERT ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI,

In a sample of local active galactic nuclei (AGNs) studied at a spatial resolution on the order of 10 pc, we show that the interstellar medium traced by the molecular hydrogen ν = 1-0 S(1) line at 2.1 μm forms a geometrically thick, clumpy disk. The kinematics of the molecular gas reveals general rotation, although an additional significant component of random bulk motion is required by the high local velocity dispersion. The size scale of the typical gas disk is found to have a radius of ∼30 pc with a comparable vertical height. Within this radius, the average gas mass is estimated to be ∼107 M☉ based on a typical gas mass fraction of 10%, which suggests column densities of NH ∼ 5 × 1023 cm−2. Extinction of the stellar continuum within this same region suggests lower column densities of NH ∼2 × 1022 cm−2, indicating that the gas distribution on these scales is dominated by dense clumps. In half of the observed Seyfert galaxies, this lower column density is still great enough to obscure the AGN at optical/infrared wavelengths. We conclude, based on the spatial distribution, kinematics, and column densities that the molecular gas observed is spatially mixed with the nuclear stellar population and is likely to be associated with the outer extent of any smaller scale nuclear obscuring structure. Furthermore, we find that the velocity dispersion of the molecular gas is correlated with the star formation rate per unit area, suggesting a link between the two phenomena, and that the gas surface density follows known “Schmidt–Kennicutt” relations. The molecular/dusty structure on these scales may be dynamic since it is possible that the velocity dispersion of the gas, and hence the vertical disk height, is maintained by a short, massive inflow of material into the nuclear region and/or by intense, short-lived nuclear star formation.
Multiple Modes of Network Homeostasis in Visual Cortical Layer 2/3

Sensory experience is crucial for shaping the cortical microcircuit during development and is thought to modify network function through several forms of Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity. Where and when these different forms of plasticity are expressed at particular synapse types within cortical microcircuits, and how they interact, is poorly understood. Here we investigated how two different visual deprivation paradigms, lid suture (LS) and intraocular TTX, affect the local microcircuit within layer 2/3 of rat visual cortex during the classical critical period for visual system plasticity. Both forms of visual deprivation produced a compensatory increase in the spontaneous firing of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in acute slices derived from monocular visual cortex. TTX increased spontaneous activity through an increase in the excitation/inhibition (E/I) balance within layer 2/3. In contrast, LS decreased the E/I balance by strongly depressing excitatory transmission, and the homeostatic increase in spontaneous activity was instead achieved through an increase in the intrinsic excitability of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons. The microcircuit in layer 2/3 can thus use different forms of homeostatic plasticity to compensate for the loss of visual drive, depending on the specific demands produced by visual experience. The existence of multiple, partially redundant forms of homeostatic plasticity may ensure that network compensation can be achieved in response to a wide range of sensory perturbations.
Entrepreneurial Orientation and Firm Performance in New Ventures and Established Firms

Lots of studies suggest a positive relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance; however, the empirical findings are inconclusive. There are two explanations for the contradictory results: the performance implication of EO is context‐specific and the relationship between EO and performance may be curvilinear. Consulted on the perspective of the liability of newness and taken together these explanations, this paper probes into the difference in the EO‐performance linkage between new ventures and established firms. We find that the relationship between EO and performance is inverse U‐shaped in new ventures but positive in established firms. Finally, we discuss our contributions, implications, and possible future extensions.
On-farm adoption of conservation practices: the role of farm and farmer characteristics, perceptions, and health hazards

The research reported in this paper concerns (1) Quebec potato farmers and the factors that compose their concern for environmental degradation and (2) the adoption of conservation practices using a two-stage decision-making process. The surveyed farmers are concerned mainly with the problem of pest infestation. Their awareness of environmental problems is raised by the level of educational attainment, membership in producers' organizations, and participation in government sponsored farm programs. The actual adoption of conservation practices by farmers is influenced by the extent to which they perceive environmental degradation to be a problem, their educational level, the expected crop loss to pests and weeds, the perceived health effects of farm chemicals application, and the availability of adequate information on the best management practices.
Genetic variation at the SLC12A3 locus is unlikely to explain risk for advanced diabetic nephropathy in Caucasians with type 2 diabetes.

BACKGROUND Large-scale genotyping efforts performed on Japanese subjects with type 2 diabetes have implicated polymorphisms in solute carrier family 12 (sodium/chloride transporters) member 3 (SLC12A3) as being associated with advanced diabetic nephropathy. However, it is not known whether these polymorphisms confer a risk for this complication in type 2 diabetic Caucasians. METHODS A case-control study was conducted that consisted of 295 cases with advanced diabetic nephropathy and 174 controls who have remained normoalbuminuric despite >or=7 years of diabetes. A total of 11 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning the SLC12A3 locus was analysed including +34372G>A (Arg913Gln) that was the marker previously showing the strongest evidence for disease association in type 2 diabetic Japanese. Power calculations indicated that with an alpha of 0.05, our study has >90% power to detect disease associations of the magnitude previously reported for +34372G>A (Arg913Gln). RESULTS Allele and genotype distributions for all 11 SNPs were found to be comparable between cases and controls, consistent with the absence of disease association. This negative result was reiterated in subgroup analysis after taking into account potentially important covariates including gender, diabetes duration, blood pressure and glycaemic control. No significant disease associations were likewise found for SLC12A3 haplotypes. Allele, genotype and haplotype distributions were similar in cases regardless of whether they were proteinuric or had developed chronic renal failure/end-stage renal disease. CONCLUSIONS Genetic variation at the SLC12A3 locus is unlikely to explain the risk for advanced diabetic nephropathy among type 2 diabetic Caucasians.
Properties of flat‐pressed wood plastic composites containing fire retardants

This study investigated physical, mechani- cal, and fire properties of the flat-pressed wood plastic composites (WPCs) incorporated with various fire retard- ants (FRs) (5 or 15% by weight (wt)) at 50 wt % of the wood flour (WF). The WPC panels were made from dry- blended WF, polypropylene (PP) with maleic anhydride- grafted PP (2 wt %), and FR powder formulations using a conventional flat-pressing process under laboratory condi- tions. The water resistance and strength values of the WPC panels were negatively affected by increasing the FR content as compared to the WPC panels without FR. The WPC panels incorporated with zinc borate (ZB) gave an overall best performance in both water resistance and strength values followed by the panels containing magne- sium hydroxide (MH) and ammonium polyphosphate (APP). For these three FR's, the best fire resistance as measured in the cone calorimeter was obtained with the 15 wt % APP treatment and then followed by 15 wt % ZB, or 15 wt % MH formulations. V C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 122: 3201-3210, 2011
Uncovering Some Causal Relationships between Productivity Growth and the Structure of Economic Fluctuations: A Tentative Survey

This paper discusses recent theoretical and empirical work on the interactions between growth and business cycles. One may distinguish two very different types of approaches to the problem of the influence of macroeconomic fluctuations on long-run growth. In the first type of approach, which relies on learning by doing mechanisms or aggregate demand externalities, productivity growth and direct production activities are complements. An expansion therefore has a positive long-run effect on total factor productivity. In the second type of approach, hereafter labeled 'opportunity cost or 'learning-by-doing', productivity growth and production activities are substitutes. The opportunity cost of some productivity improving activities falls in a recession, which has a long-run positive impact on output. This does not mean, however, that recessions should on average last longer or be more frequent, since the expectation of future recessions reduces today's incentives for productivity growth. We also briefly discuss some empirical work which is mildly supportive of the opportunity cost approach, while showing that it can be reconciled with the observed pro-cyclical behavior of measured total factor productivity. We also describe some theoretical work on the effects of growth on business cycles.
Spectra of Hot Molecules of Astrophysical Importance: an Update on the ExoMol Project

Abstract The ExoMol project aims at providing comprehensive line lists of molecular transitions which are likely to be important in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets and cool stars, including brown dwarfs. The physics of the molecules involved varies and can be categories according to the number atoms in the species. Thus the molecules can be grouped as diatomics, both closed and open and shell, triatomics, tetratomics, methane and larger species. Progress in providing complete sets of line list for the molecules in each of these categorizes is considered. The latest line lists and related data for each of the species can be found on the project website www.exomol. com.