Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Randomized clinical trial on root caries prevention among community- dwelling elders

Dental root caries is a common disease among elders. More efforts on preventing this disease are needed. Silver diammine fluoride (SDF) is known to be able to prevent dental caries in primary teeth. However, clinical evidence of its efficacy in preventing root surface caries is limited. This clinical trial aimed to compare the effectiveness of SDF in preventing root caries among elders in a water fluoridated area. A total of 323 elders who had at least five teeth with exposed root surfaces and had self-care ability were randomly allocated into 3 intervention groups as follows: Gp1 (placebo control) – annual application of tonic water; Gp2 – annual application of SDF solution; Gp3 – annual application of SDF solution immediately followed by potassium iodide (KI) solution. Oral hygiene instructions and fluoride toothpaste were provided to all subjects. Status of dental root surface was assessed every 6 months by the same independent examiner. After 30 months, 257 (79.6%) elders were reviewed. The mean numbers of root surface with new caries experience in the control, SDF, and SDF/KI groups were 1.1, 0.4, and 0.5 respectively (ANOVA, p<0.001). Scheffe’s multiple comparison showed that elders who received placebo developed more new root caries lesions (p<0.05) while the difference between the SDF and SDF/KI groups was not statistically significant (p>0.05). Moreover, elders who had higher visible plaque index scores at 30-month examination (ANCOVA, p<0.001) and those who had higher baseline DMFT scores (ANCOVA, p=0.005) developed more new root caries. It is concluded that annual application of SDF or SDF/KI solution is effective in preventing root caries among community-dwelling elders in a fluoridated area. (Clinicaltrials.gov # NCT02360124)
Signal Intensity Characteristics of Liver Masses at Hepatobiliary Phase Images of Gadoxetate-Enhanced MR (EOB-MR): Qualitative Assessment

Gadolinium ethoxybenzyl diethylenetriamineoentacetic acid (gadoxetic acid disodium, or Gd-EOB-DTPA, Primovist, BayerSchering, Germany) is a liver cell specific contrast agent, with which dynamic phase images can be obtained to assess arterial blood supply or arterial flow to the liver tumors, in addition to hepatobiliary phase (HBP) images that yields high accuracy in the detection of liver lesions [1-3]. In other words, Gd-EOB-DTPA behaves as non-specific extracellular contrast agent in the early dynamic phase, and as a tissue-specific contrast agent in later phases. Evaluation of vascularity helps in part differentiate various liver lesions, applying our previous experience of Gd-based extracellular contrast medium [4-6]. It is sometimes difficult, however, to make differentiation only from findings of GdEOB-DTPA-enhanced MR (EOB-MR) images, because of insufficient arterial enhancement due to small dose of Gd-EOB-DTPA used (25μmol/kg), and lack of “equilibrium phase images” in the conventional sense of the word [1].
The Environmental Movement and the Modes of Political Action

There have been widely differing claims about how environmental groups attempt to reform environmental policy—from those who see the movement as challenging the prevailing social paradigm through confrontation and violence, to those who lament the movement's reliance on conventional styles of political persuasion. This article uses data from the 1998 Global Environmental Organizations Survey (GEOS) to map the political activities used by environmental groups across the globe and to determine what best accounts for these patterns of action. The authors examine the responses of 248 environmental groups in the GEOS; these data allow the authors to compare environmental group behaviors across 59 nations and 5 continents. They find that most environmental groups engage in a mixture of political methods and activities. Although there is little evidence that institutional structures influence participation, the mix of organizational resources and ideology are potent influences on participation patterns. The results help to explain the role that environmental groups play in contemporary politics and the factors that affect this role.
ACOUSTIC EMISSION FROM IMPACTS OF RIGID BODIES

The characteristics of stress waves accompanying the collisions of rigid bodies are investigated. It is shown that high-frequency transducer of acoustic emission apparatus transforms initial impact perturbation into two separate signals, arriving with delay equal to impact duration. AE signals are generated at the moments corresponding to discontinuities of the derivative of surface displacement function of impacting bodies; i.e., at the initial moment of loading and the final moment of contact. It is shown experimentally that different Lamb modes recorded in the far-field zone of the impact source contain double signals arriving with the same delay as the signals in the near-field zone. The relationship between the AE waveform and the impact parameters determined in the study enables one to estimate physical characteristics of impact, such as surface displacement, contact time and impact force. Practical significance of these findings for evaluation of structural integrity is discussed.
Precursor motion to iceberg calving at Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland, observed with terrestrial radar interferometry

ABSTRACT Time-varying elevations near the calving front of Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland were observed with a terrestrial radar interferometer (TRI) in June 2015. An ice block with surface dimensions of 1370 m × 290 m calved on 10 June. TRI-generated time series show that ice elevation near the calving front began to increase 65 h prior to the event, and can be fit with a simple block rotation model. We hypothesize that subsurface melting at the base of the floating terminus breaks the gravity-buoyancy equilibrium, leading to slow subsidence and rotation of the block, and its eventual failure.
Aerosol optical properties and trace gas emissions by PAX and OP-FTIR for laboratory-simulated western US wildfires during FIREX

Abstract. Western wildfires have a major impact on air quality in the US. In the fall of 2016, 107 test fires were burned in the large-scale combustion facility at the US Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory as part of the Fire Influence on Regional and Global Environments Experiment (FIREX). Canopy, litter, duff, dead wood, and other fuel components were burned in combinations that represented realistic fuel complexes for several important western US coniferous and chaparral ecosystems including ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, Engelmann spruce, lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, chamise, and manzanita. In addition, dung, Indonesian peat, and individual coniferous ecosystem fuel components were burned alone to investigate the effects of individual components (e.g., “duff”) and fuel chemistry on emissions. The smoke emissions were characterized by a large suite of state-of-the-art instruments. In this study we report emission factor (EF, grams of compound emitted per kilogram of fuel burned) measurements in fresh smoke of a diverse suite of critically important trace gases measured using open-path Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (OP-FTIR). We also report aerosol optical properties (absorption EF; single-scattering albedo, SSA; and Angstrom absorption exponent, AAE) as well as black carbon (BC) EF measured by photoacoustic extinctiometers (PAXs) at 870 and 401 nm. The average trace gas emissions were similar across the coniferous ecosystems tested and most of the variability observed in emissions could be attributed to differences in the consumption of components such as duff and litter, rather than the dominant tree species. Chaparral fuels produced lower EFs than mixed coniferous fuels for most trace gases except for NO x and acetylene. A careful comparison with available field measurements of wildfires confirms that several methods can be used to extract data representative of real wildfires from the FIREX laboratory fire data. This is especially valuable for species rarely or not yet measured in the field. For instance, the OP-FTIR data alone show that ammonia (1.62 g kg −1) , acetic acid (2.41 g kg −1) , nitrous acid (HONO, 0.61 g kg −1) , and other trace gases such as glycolaldehyde (0.90 g kg −1) and formic acid (0.36 g kg −1) are significant emissions that were poorly characterized or not characterized for US wildfires in previous work. The PAX measurements show that the ratio of brown carbon (BrC) absorption to BC absorption is strongly dependent on modified combustion efficiency (MCE) and that BrC absorption is most dominant for combustion of duff (AAE 7.13) and rotten wood (AAE 4.60): fuels that are consumed in greater amounts during wildfires than prescribed fires. Coupling our laboratory data with field data suggests that fresh wildfire smoke typically has an EF for BC near 0.2 g kg −1 , an SSA of ∼ 0.91, and an AAE of ∼ 3.50, with the latter implying that about 86 % of the aerosol absorption at 401 nm is due to BrC.
The Private Costs of Patent Litigation

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.
Non-Mendelian Genetic Aspects in Spinocerebellar Ataxias (SCAS): The Case of Machado-Joseph Disease (MJD)

Manuela Lima1,2, Jacome Bruges-Armas1,3 and Conceicao Bettencourt1,2,4 1Genetic and Arthritis Research Group, Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology (IBMC), University of Porto, Porto 2Center of Research in Natural Resources (CIRN) and Department of Biology, University of the Azores, Ponta Delgada 3Servico Especializado de Epidemiologia e Biologia Molecular, Hospital de Santo Espirito de Angra do Heroismo 4Laboratorio de Biologia Molecular, Instituto de Enfermedades Neurologicas, Fundacion Socio-Sanitaria de Castilla-La Mancha, Guadalajara 1,2,3Portugal 4Spain
Dynamic and Target Theories of Vowel Classification: Evidence from Monophthongs and Diphthongs in Australian English

Recent studies on the perception of speech have suggested that vowel identification depends on dynamic cues, rather than a single ‘static’ spectral slice at the vowel midpoint. The experiments reported in this paper seek both to test the extent to which vowel recognition depends on dynamic information, and to identify the nature of the dynamic cues on which such recognition might depend. Gaussian classification techniques, as well as different kinds of neural network architectures, were used to classify some 3000 vowels in /CVd/ citation-form Australian English words, following training on roughly the same number of vowel tokens produced by different talkers. The first set of experiments shows that when vowels are classified from three spectral slices taken at the vowel margins and midpoint, only diphthongs, but not monophthongs, benefit from the additional spectral information at the vowel margins. A further experiment shows that vowels are no better classified from a time-delay neural network than from the three-slice network in which time is not explicitly represented. At least for the citation-form, Australian English vowels in this study, these results are interpreted as being more consistent with a target, rather than a dynamic, theory of vowel perception.
ANALYSIS OF AN EMBEDDED DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN METHOD WITH IMPLICIT-EXPLICIT TIME-MARCHING FOR CONVECTION-DIFFUSION PROBLEMS

In this paper, we analyze implicit-explicit (IMEX) Runge-Kutta (RK) time discretization methods for solving linear convection-diffusion equations. The diffusion operator is treated implicitly via the embedded discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method and the convection operator explicitly via the upwinding discontinuous Galerkin method.
NBA Court Realty

Continuously throughout every basketball possession, players control different regions of the basketball court. Some regions are more valuable than others, and players’ control (or lack thereof) of valuable court space dictates the low and strategy of a basketball possession for both the offense and defense. As professionals engaged in high-stakes competition, we assume players are rational actors, and the exchanges they make to acquire new court space represent a winning strategy for their team. This simple assumption allows us to infer the value (price) of court real estate based on player and ball movement alone. In this paper, we provide a de inition of court space ownership, and infer the value of court space using SportVu player location data. Spatial tracking data has enabled a recent paradigm shift in basketball analytics [4, 7, 1, 3]; we add to this growing literature by focusing on space, itself, as the object of investigation. By modeling court space and court ownership, we reveal different valuable regions of the court among the NBA’s players and teams, and insightful new metrics for both offense and defense. For instance, we can measure ballcarriers’ off-ball impact on offense by calculating the value of the space freed up for their teammates to control. For analyzing defense, we can quantify how effectively different teams (and players) contain the offense (and particular players) within low-value regions of the court.
The Use of Hearing Aid Outcome Measures in the Audiologic Treatment of Older Adults

ii Acknowledgments. iiii Vita . ivv Chapter 1: Overview of Outcome Measures . 1 Chapter 2: Objective Measures . 7 Chapter 3: Subjective Measures . 11 Benefit & Satisfaction . 15 Residual Activity & Participation Restrictions . 19 Quality of Life. 23 Chapter 4: Standardized vs. Customized Measures . 30 Client-Oriented Scale of Improvement . 32 Chapter 5: Additional Considerations & Discussion . 35 Conclusion . 38
Physiochemical Properties and Meat Quality Parameters of Wild Boar Meat: A Review

Wild boar meat has well balanced with nutrients and comprised with unique sensory attributes and meat quality parameters, however, limited information and studies have been performed on nutritional quality and meat quality parameters. The proximate composition of wild boar meat, mainly protein and fat contents were ranged at 21.624. 11% and 2.27-2.62% respectively. The composition of fatty acids in wild boar has obtained higher values for unsaturated fatty acids particularly mono unsaturated fatty acids; nonetheless, investigation on availability of essential amino acids was scarce. Wild boar meat was darker colour, less tender and pH ranged at 5.44-5.71. Further, sophisticated studies will promote the consumption rate of wild boar meat among consumers that ultimately provide an opportunity to industries to enhance their production. Keywords— Meat Quality Parameters, Proximate Composition, Sensory Attributes, Wild Boar Meat
ON QUANTITATIVE COMPACTNESS ESTIMATES FOR HYPERBOLIC CONSERVATION LAWS

We are concerned with the compactness in Lloc of the semigroup (St)t≥0 of entropy weak solutions generated by hyperbolic conservation laws in one space dimension. This note provides a survey of recent results establishing upper and lower estimates for the Kolmogorov ε-entropy of the image through the mapping St of bounded sets in L1 ∩ L∞, both in the case of scalar and of systems of conservation laws. As suggested by Lax [16], these quantitative compactness estimates could provide a measure of the order of “resolution” of the numerical methods implemented for these equations.
Impacts of prescribed burning on soil greenhouse gas fluxes in a suburban native forest of south-eastern Queensland, Australia

Abstract. Prescribed burning is a forest management practice that is widely used in Australia to reduce the risk of damaging wildfires. Prescribed burning can affect both carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling in the forest and thereby influence the soil-atmosphere exchange of major greenhouse gases, i.e. carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). To quantify the impact of a prescribed burning (conducted on 27 May 2014) on greenhouse gas exchange and the potential controlling mechanisms, we carried out a series of field measurements before (August 2013) and after (August 2014 and November 2014) the fire. Gas exchange rates were determined in four replicate plots which were burned during the combustion and in another four adjacent unburned plots located in green islands, using a set of static chambers. Surface soil properties including temperature, pH, moisture, soil C and N pools were also determined either by in situ measurement or by analysing surface 10 cm soil samples. All of the chamber measurements indicated a net sink of atmospheric CH4, with mean CH4 uptake ranging from 1.15 to 1.99 mg m−2 d−1. Prescribed burning significantly enhanced CH4 uptake as indicated by the significant higher CH4 uptake rates in the burned plots measured in August 2014. In the following 3 months, the CH4 uptake rate was recovered to the pre-burning level. Mean CO2 emission from the forest soils ranged from 2721.76 to 7113.49 mg m−2 d−1. The effect of prescribed burning on CO2 emission was limited within the first 3 months, as no significant difference was observed between the burned and the adjacent unburned plots in both August and November 2014. The CO2 emissions showed more seasonal variations, rather than the effects of prescribed burning. The N2O emission in the plots was quite low, and no significant impact of prescribed burning was observed. The changes in understory plants and litter layers, surface soil temperature, C and N substrate availability and microbial activities, following the prescribed burning, were the factors that controlled the greenhouse gas exchanges. Our results suggested that the low-intensity prescribed burning would decrease soil CO2 emission and increase CH4 uptake, but this effect would be present within a relatively short period. Only slight changes in the surface soil properties during the combustion and very limited impacts of prescribed burning on the mineral soils supported the rapid recovery of the greenhouse gas exchange rates.
Molecular Breeding of Cotton

Molecular characterization provides comprehensive information about the extent of genetic diversity, it assists for the development of an effective, highly accurate, and rapid marker‐assisted cotton breeding program. Due to one of the world’s leading fiber crops, molecular studies of cotton are being explored widely by cotton researchers. Cotton provides raw material to the textile industry among other products. Limitations in conventional breeding program for genetic improvement are due to the complexity and limited knowledge on economically important traits. The use of molecular markers for the detection and exploitation of DNA polymorphism is one of the most significant developments in molecular genetics. In the present scenerio, cotton molecular breeding has become a reliable source through the study and exploitation of its genetic diversity and due to better understanding of the cotton genomes using the next‐generation sequencing technologies. Cotton breeders should utilize genomics in breeding programs for effective selection of best parents for agronomic and fiber‐related traits, as well as for the development of resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses. The genomic research work could be based upon genotyping using DNA markers, quantitative trait loci mapping, genome‐wide associations, and next‐generation sequencing. The objective of this chapter is to describe evolution as well as utilization of various molecular markers and review the contribution of marker‐assisted selection (MAS) in cotton breeding.
Vapour–liquid phase equilibrium and surface tension of fully flexible Lennard–Jones chains

ABSTRACT We report measurements of the vapour–liquid coexistence densities and surface tension of fully flexible Lennard–Jones chain molecules ranging in length from 4 to 60 beads. We demonstrate that the surface tension for all chain lengths collapses to a single master curve when plotted according to the universal parachor correlation. We find a universal parachor exponent 3.79 ± 0.05 for conditions close to the critical point, with a deviation observed for the longest chains far below the critical point.
Stewart Mountain Terrace: A New Salt River Terrace with Implications for Landscape Evolution of the Lower Salt River Valley, Arizona

ABSTRACT Stream terraces of the Salt River form the interpretive backbone of Plio-Pleistocene landscape evolution of central Arizona, because they represent the base level of all tributary streams. This paper presents a new addition to T.L. Péwé' s Salt River Terrace sequence (in decreasing topographic position and age: Sawik, Mesa, Blue Point, and Lehi) that has been unrefined for the last 30 years. The existence of an older, higher terrace was predicted by research suggesting that the lower Salt River originated by lake overflow from an ancestral Pliocene lake in the Tonto Basin. Field reconnaissance, aerial photo interpretation, and sedimentological analysis revealed this terrace on the north side of the Salt River, named here the Stewart Mountain Terrace (SMT). Where exposed, the fluvial sediments of SMT overlay Tertiary basin fill unconformably. SMT sediments are characterized by ∼50 m thick fluvial gravels found more than 70 m above remnants of the Sawik Terrace. Although the gravels are distinctly Salt River in origin, Stewart Mountain gravels differ from the lower and younger Salt River Terraces. The clast sizes are much larger on average and host a significantly different lithology. Because of these differences the SMT has profound implications for the understanding of regional drainage reorganization after basin and range extension. The existence of this terrace and its distinct gravels are consistent with, but do not prove, a lake overflow mechanism for the initiation of through flowing drainage in the Salt River Valley.
Management of collateral ligament laxity in ACL revision

Collateral ligament injury can be a cause of ACL graft failure. These ligament injuries must be addressed at revision surgery in order to prevent failure of the revision surgery. In malalignment with associated collateral ligament injury, osteotomy may be the preferred choice to manage the collateral ligament laxity. This outline will describe techniques for managing collateral ligament injury in revision ACL reconstruction and also for identifying patients where osteotomy is indicated.