Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prediction and validation of total and regional skeletal muscle volume using B-mode ultrasonography in Japanese prepubertal children

Abstract Very few effective field methods are available for accurate, non-invasive estimation of skeletal muscle volume (SMV) and mass in children. We aimed to develop regression-based prediction equations for SMV, using ultrasonography, in Japanese prepubertal children, and to assess the validity of these equations. In total, 145 healthy Japanese prepubertal children aged 6–12 years were randomly divided into two groups: the model development group (sixty boys, thirty-seven girls) and the validation group (twenty-nine boys, nineteen girls). Reference data in the form of contiguous MRI with 1-cm slice thickness were obtained from the first cervical vertebra to the ankle joints. The SMV was calculated by the summation of digitised cross-sectional areas. Muscle thickness was measured using B-mode ultrasonography at nine sites in different regions. In the model development group, strong, statistically significant correlations were observed between the site-matched SMV (total, arms, trunk, thigh and lower legs) measured by MRI and the muscle thickness×height measures obtained by ultrasonography, for both boys and girls. When these SMV prediction equations were applied to the validation groups, the measured total and regional SMV were also very similar to the values predicted for boys and girls, respectively. With the exception of the trunk region in girls, the Bland–Altman analysis for the validation group did not indicate any bias for either boys or girls. These results suggest that ultrasonography-derived prediction equations for boys and girls are useful for the estimation of total and regional SMV.
Can Competition Replace Regulation for Small Utility Customers

Many utility markets are now being opened to competition, and some regulators have expressed the hope that this will make the regulation of consumer prices unnecessary. In this paper, entrants offer (differentiated) 'added value', but consumers incur a switching cost if they buy from one of them. The incumbent's profit-maximising price may be well above the level of its costs. This is likely to be the case in the UK's energy industries, but competition may be able to replace regulation in telecommunications, where marginal costs are lower, demand elasticity higher, and entrants can give more 'added value'.
Flocculant-disinfectant point-of-use water treatment for reducing arsenic exposure in rural Bangladesh

We introduced flocculant-disinfectant water treatment for 12 weeks in 103 households in Bangladesh to assess if drinking water would be chemically and microbiologically improved and the body burden of arsenic reduced. The median concentration of arsenic in tubewell water decreased by 88% after introduction of the flocculant-disinfectant from 136 μg/l at baseline to 16 (p < 0.001). The median concentration of total urinary arsenic decreased 42% from 385 μg/g creatinine at baseline to 225 μg/g creatinine after intervention (p < 0.001). Among 206 post-intervention drinking water samples that were reportedly treated on the date the sample was collected, 99 (48%) lacked residual free chlorine and 100 (49%) were contaminated with thermotolerant coliforms. The flocculant-disinfectant markedly reduced arsenic in drinking water, but treated drinking water was frequently contaminated with fecal organisms. The lesser reduction in urinary arsenic compared to water arsenic and the health consequences of this reduction require further research.
A transactional approach to customer loyalty in the hotel industry

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which a transactional marketing approach can generate customer loyalty in a hotel brand.Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a review of the paradigm shift from transactional marketing to relationship marketing, in the services marketing literature. The inductive research used a qualitative approach, with multiple techniques including non‐participant observation in several hotels; in‐depth interviews with hotel managers; and telephone interviews with hotel customers in the UK.Findings – The findings suggest that a transactional approach to marketing can be an effective strategy for hotels, which target niche segments with highly differentiated offers at competitive prices. It was found that this approach can create significant customer loyalty.Research limitations/implications – The case study approach and focused sample mean that attempts to generalize the findings should be taken with care. Furthermore, this study does not attempt.
Citizen deliberations on science and technology and their social environments: case study on the Japanese consensus conference on GM crops

Citizen deliberations cannot be entirely isolated from their wider social, political and cultural context. The fact that particular deliberative mechanisms are based on sound theories does not mean that they will necessarily produce sound results in specific instances. Similarly, the fact that such mechanisms have been found to work well in practice in one social environment does not mean they will necessarily work equally well in another. Using a recent deliberation initiative in Japan, this paper addresses this important issue. It explores how the process of the Japanese consensus conference on genetically modified crops in 2000 was influenced by Japan's sociopolitical environment and how its outcomes challenged the established understanding of the policymaking process. The paper argues that the transfer of a particular policy process from one culture to another can result in a conflict of values between the process and its new social environment. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Dynamics of human body skeletons convey significant information for human action recognition. Conventional approaches for modeling skeletons usually rely on hand-crafted parts or traversal rules, thus resulting in limited expressive power and difficulties of generalization. In this work, we propose a novel model of dynamic skeletons called Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN), which moves beyond the limitations of previous methods by automatically learning both the spatial and temporal patterns from data. This formulation not only leads to greater expressive power but also stronger generalization capability. On two large datasets, Kinetics and NTU-RGBD, it achieves substantial improvements over mainstream methods.
Leveraging Lexical Substitutes for Unsupervised Word Sense Induction

Word sense induction is the most prominent unsupervised approach to lexical disambiguation. It clusters word instances, typically represented by their bag-of-words contexts. Therefore, uninformative and ambiguous contexts present a major challenge. In this paper, we investigate the use of an alternative instance representation based on lexical substitutes, i.e., contextually suitable, meaning-preserving replacements. Using lexical substitutes predicted by a state-of-the-art automatic system and a simple clustering algorithm, we outperform bag-of-words instance representations and compete with much more complex structured probabilistic models. Furthermore, we show that an oracle based on manually-labeled lexical substitutes yields yet substantially higher performance. Taken together, this provides evidence for a complementarity between word sense induction and lexical substitution that has not been given much consideration before.
Tax compliance obstacles encountered by small and medium enterprises in South Africa

It is internationally acknowledged that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in enhancing a country’s economic growth and in creating jobs. It is therefore in the public interest and in the interests of all governments to support SMEs. A study concentrating on the tax function in small and medium manufacturing concerns operating in the Gauteng Province in South Africa was recently undertaken. In this article, which is based on the study, the authors identify the main problem areas that manufacturing SMEs in the Gauteng Province have to cope with in administering government taxes. The article discusses the administration process only, and not the taxes themselves. The authors have identified tax compliance requirements in South Africa as a stumbling block for SMEs. They suggest that the government seriously consider reducing the number of taxes SMEs have to administer, reduce the compliance requirements and make additional tools available to SMEs to assist them in administering taxes.
The Need for Interval Appendectomy after Resolution of an Appendiceal Mass Questioned

Background: Our current treatment of an appendiceal mass is initially conservative, followed by an interval appendectomy. The necessity of this routine interval appendectomy is debatable. A study was conducted to evaluate whether surgical factors and pathological features of the excised appendices support interval appendectomy. Methods: We performed a retrospective study at the University Hospital Groningen and the Deventer Ziekenhuis. All patients diagnosed with an appendiceal mass in the period January 1991 to January 1997 were identified using the hospital database. The medical records of all these patients (n = 233, 108 M, 125 F) were reviewed. The clinical course of the appendiceal mass patients was split up into three distinct episodes: initial diagnosis and treatment of the appendiceal mass, the interval period and the interval appendectomy. Presenting symptoms, findings at clinical examination and additional imaging (ultrasound) were registered, as well as the course of the primary hospitalisation, the interval period, and the interval appendectomy. Results of histological examination of all resected specimens were reviewed. Results: It was found that clinical findings alone were not specific enough to diagnose an appendiceal mass; 47% had a palpable abdominal mass and the median temperature was 38.2°C ranging from 36 to 40.5°C. Ultrasound examination was done in 69% of patients and showed an appendiceal mass in 72%. During the interval period, 4 patients presented with an appendiceal mass needing drainage, and 3 with acute appendicitis requiring emergency appendectomy. At interval appendectomy, histological examination of resection specimen showed a normal appendix without signs of previous inflammation in 30% of cases. In addition, complications due to interval appendectomy were seen in 18% of patients, including sepsis, bowel perforation, small bowel ileus, and various wound abscesses. Conclusions: We conclude that when causes for the appendiceal mass other than appendicitis are excluded, interval appendectomy seems unnecessary in patients who respond well to initial conservative treatment.
Productive and Unproductive Capital: A mapping of the New Zealand system of national accounts to classical economic categories, 1972‐95

New Zealand has gained considerable international attention for the neo-liberal economic reform programme it enacted from the mid-1980s; this programme has served as a model for similar reform elsewhere. Within the neoclassical framework of the reformers, the programme has produced many improvements to the economy. Such fundamental indicators as lower inflation, lower budget deficits and higher economic growth are cited as evidence of the improved economic conditions. Yet unemployment remains high, real interest rates are among the highest in the world, nominal interest rates and business confidence fluctuate considerably, and the balance of payments is deteriorating. Using a classical framework, this paper examines the neo-liberal reform of the New Zealand economy to see if there are alternative explanations for the persistence of these problems. The methodology developed by Shaikh & Tonak (1994) is used to map official national accounts data to classical economic categories for the 1972 to 1995 period. This approach is compared with earlier attempts at estimating classical economic categories for New Zealand. This classical view of the economic reforms is compared with the conventional view. The paper's main results are that there was a large increase in unproductive economic activity associated with the economic reforms in New Zealand; that the improvement in economic fundamentals emphasised by the reformers reflects this growth of unproductive activity; and that the persistence of other economic indicators is related to the ongoing weakness of productive activity.
In Vivo Responses of the Human and Murine Pregnane X Receptor to Dexamethasone in Mice

Dexamethasone (DEX) is a potent and widely used anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant glucocorticoid. It can bind and activate the pregnane X receptor (PXR), which plays a critical role as xenobiotic sensor in mammals to induce the expression of many enzymes, including cytochromes P450 in the CYP3A family. This induction results in its own metabolism. We have used a series of transgenic mouse lines, including a novel, improved humanized PXR line, to compare the induction profile of PXR-regulated drug-metabolizing enzymes after DEX administration, as well as looking at hepatic responses to rifampicin (RIF). The new humanized PXR model has uncovered further intriguing differences between the human and mouse receptors in that RIF only induced Cyp2b10 in the new humanized model. DEX was found to be a much more potent inducer of Cyp3a proteins in wild-type mice than in mice humanized for PXR. To assess whether PXR is involved in the detoxification of DEX in the liver, we analyzed the consequences of high doses of the glucocorticoid on hepatotoxicity on different PXR genetic backgrounds. We also studied these effects in an additional mouse model in which functional mouse Cyp3a genes have been deleted. These strains exhibited different sensitivities to DEX, indicating a protective role of the PXR and CYP3A proteins against the hepatotoxicity of this compound.
Describing Nurse Leaders’ and Direct Care Nurses’ Perceptions of a Healthy Work Environment in Acute Care Settings, Part 2

BACKGROUND: The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) Healthy Work Environment Assessment Tool was developed as a simple screening tool to assess the characteristics of a healthy work environment (HWE) in critical care environments. PURPOSES: The purposes of these 2 qualitative research studies are to explore the nurse leaders’ and direct care nurses’ perceptions of the meaning of a HWE, to describe the nurse leaders’ and direct care nurses’ perceptions of a HWE, and to define the characteristics of a HWE in acute care settings. METHODS: Exploratory descriptive designs using focus groups and guided questions with tape-recorded interviews were used to define the characteristics of an HWE. RESULTS: The 6 original themes from AACN HWE standards and 2 new themes emerged as a result of the nurse leaders and direct care nurses defining the characteristics of a HWE, which included appropriate staffing, authentic leadership, effective decision making, meaningful recognition, skilled communication, true collaboration genuine teamwork, and physical and psychological safety. The qualitative statements from these 2 studies will be used in future studies to describe and develop HWE scales for nurse leaders and direct care nurses and to assess the psychometric properties of these new tools.
A Basin-Scale Estimation of Carbon Stocks of a Forest Ecosystem Characterized by Spatial Distribution and Contributive Features in the Liuxihe River Basin of Pearl River Delta

Forest ecosystems make a greater contribution to carbon (C) stocks than any other terrestrial ecosystem. To understand the role of regional forest ecosystems in global climate change and carbon exchange, forest C stocks and their spatial distribution within the small (2300 km2) Liuxihe River basin in China were analyzed to determine the different contributors to the C stocks. Forest C stocks were quantified by measuring the biomass of trees, understory vegetation, litter and roots, as well as soil organic C, using data from field samples and laboratory experiments. The results showed that forests stored 38.04 Tg·C in the entire basin, with secondary and planted forests accounting for 89.82% and 10.18%, respectively, of the stored C. Five types of forests, a subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest, a subtropical coniferous and broad-leaved mixed forest, a subtropical coniferous forest, a timber forest, and a non-wood forest, stored 257.55 ± 15.01, 218.92 ± 9.59, 195.24 ± 18.29, 177.42 ± 17.55, and 117.86 ± 6.04 Mg·C·ha−1, respectively. In the forest ecosystem C stocks of the basin, soils on average contributed about 73.78%, not including root underground biomass. The results of this study, which provide baseline forest C stock data for ecosystem services and regional C flux research, are useful to support the basin-scale forest management and land use change.
REIT Stock Repurchases: Completion Rates, Long-Run Returns, and the Straddle Hypothesis

This study of real estate investment trusts (REITs) analyzes three possible explanations for the stock price reaction to a repurchase announcement and the subsequent repurchase behavior of managers under each hypothesis. Two of the hypotheses, the signaling hypothesis and the exchange option hypothesis, are established in the existing literature; the third hypothesis is a modification of the exchange option hypothesis. The exchange option hypothesis is extended to allow for additional flexibility in management decisions. This extended exchange option hypothesis is termed the â€˜â€˜straddleâ€™â€™ hypothesis because it provides management with both a call and put option. The empirical analyses show the straddle hypothesis is a more robust explanation of changes in shares outstanding in the postannouncement period than the alternative explanations.
Serotype distribution & sensitivity pattern of nasopharyngeal colonizing Streptococcus pneumoniae among rural children of eastern India

Invasive pneumococcal diseases are estimated to be responsible for about one million deaths each year globally among children less than 5 yr of age1. Colonization by Streptococcus pneumoniae is a prerequisite for invasion2. The colonizing isolates act as important reservoirs of drug resistance and disseminate by means of horizontal gene transfer to others3. Drug resistant pneumococci have been reported in both colonizing and invasive isolates from different parts of India4-8. Vaccination can be an effective way for prevention, but vaccines developed from polysaccharides and conjugates against S. pneumoniae target different serotypes. So far 919 different serotypes have been identified and their prevalence differs from one region to another and a few of these have been accounted for invasive pneumococcal diseases (IPD) globally10. Serotypes 1, 5, 6, 14, 19 and 23 are common in world including Asian and African countries and reported to be responsible for up to 68 per cent of IPD10. Studies have been carried out in India to find out the carriage rate, serotype prevalence and resistance pattern among nasopharyngeal and clinical isolates4-8,11. Since pneumococcal diseases occur after colonization of strain2, these colonizing normal flora in the nasopharynx can be considered for prediction of drug resistance patterns and serotype prevalence for treatment and vaccine formulations. It is also useful to know the locally prevalent serotypes.
Upgrading or Decline? Globalization, Retail Structure, and Labour in the Chilean Textile and Clothing Industry

Trade liberalization has plunged the textile and clothing industry in many countries — both in the developed and developing world — into a crisis with important employment losses. Important differences across countries exist regarding the extent of decline, the productivity performance, and the working conditions for the remaining workers in this industry. Based on elements of global commodity chain analysis and the varieties of capitalism (VoC) approach, these different patterns have been explained for developed countries, placing particular emphasis on the scope and effective implementation of industry-wide minimum wages and labour regulations, as well as on retail concentration. In this article, we apply the above framework to Chile, where the process of downsizing of the industry has followed the least virtuous pattern, with meagre productivity results and precarization of remaining employment. Part of the remaining textile and clothing employment has moved to the informal economy and sweatshop-type enterprises. This outcome is explained by the high degree of retail concentration in Chile, the virtual absence of sectoral collective bargaining and the partial coverage of labour inspection among micro and small enterprises.
Momentum investing across economic states: evidence of market inefficiency in good times

Hammami (2011) contends that excessive optimism and overconfidence arise naturally in good times when the economy is strong. This implies that market inefficiency might occur principally in good times. To examine this hypothesis, we investigate the momentum strategy (buying recent winners and selling recent losers) across economic states. We find that the profitability of the momentum strategy in the US stock market appears only in periods in which the expected market risk premium is low (good times). Traditional explanations based on seasonal effects or systematic risk do not account for the abnormal returns generated by momentum investing in good times. Alternatively, we discover that the profitability of the momentum strategy disappears in the post-1993 sample (following the discovery of momentum), which is consistent with the view that if momentum is an anomaly, then it will not appear in future data. These findings are viewed as evidence that the momentum anomaly is a market inefficiency, which has appeared especially in good times.
Estimating ethnic parity in Jobcentre Plus programmes: a quantitative analysis using the Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study (wpls) : a report of research carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions

Access to Jobcentre Plus services may be one way of overcoming any disadvantage that Ethnic Minorities may experience in the labour market and the extent to which Jobcentre Plus delivers ethnic parity in labour market outcomes from its services is of clear policy interest. This exhaustive study estimates the extent of ethnic parity in employment and benefit outcomes for 2,658 different Ethnic Minority subgroups accessing a range of Jobcentre Plus services and programmes in 2003 (including IB; IS; JSA; NDLP; ND25+; NDYP). All the analysis uses data from the Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study (WPLS), which contains longitudinal (spell-based) information on individuals’ work, benefit and pension histories. Data within the WPLS come from administrative data on benefit claims (DWP); administrative data on employment, earnings, savings, tax credits and pensions (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC)); and operational data on customers’ activities (e.g. participation in back-to-work programmes) (Jobcentre Plus).
Pay attention to neglected firms!*

T he intensity of the research performed by security analysts on listed companies varies widely. Some companies receive broad and continuous attention, while others get virtually no coverage at all. Examples of the latter can be found even among large corporations. In fact, at any given moment, between 100 to 150 companies included in the SP it