Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validity of self-reported age at menarche in computer-assisted interview among Chinese schoolgirls: a cross-sectional study

Objective The attitudes of girls regarding menarche vary according to their cultural backgrounds. Asian girls may hesitate to discuss menarche. Computer-assisted self-administered interviewing (CASI) is considered a valid and effective tool for investigating the timing of menarche; however, the validity of self-reported menarche data from CASI in Chinese culture is currently unknown. We aimed to validate the status and age of menarche attainment by comparing CASI with face-to-face interviewing (FFI). Methods Based on a cross-sectional study, we collected information regarding the status and age of menarche attainment using CASI and FFI among Chinese schoolgirls. We explored the tools of standard epidemiological indices, including sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and accuracy to examine the capacity of CASI for correctly classifying the status of menarche. Both Pearson and Spearman correlations were calculated for the correlation of age at menarche using CASI with FFI. A Bland-Altman plot was drawn to measure the agreement between the two interview techniques. Results In this study, CASI and FFI were conducted in 3478 schoolgirls with an average age (SD) of 14.3 years (2.46). Menarche attainment was reported in 2496 (71.2%) and 2538 (73.0%) girls using CASI and FFI, respectively. Compared with FFI, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value and the accuracy of CASI were 0.97, 0.80, 0.96 and 0.92, respectively. The correlation of age at menarche between CASI and FFI was 0.728. Approximately >95% and 76.3% of the difference in the age at menarche was within 12 months and 3 months, respectively, between the two interview methods. Among primary schoolgirls in grade 5, the sensitivity, specificity, PPV, accuracy and the correlation (0.335) of CASI was lower than those in other subgroups. Conclusions Overall, the timing of menarche investigated using CASI was valid among all Chinese schoolgirls, except for those in grade 5 or lower.
Role of different biodegradable polymers on the permeability of ciprofloxacin

Since permeability across biological membranes is a key factor in the absorption and distribution of drugs, drug permeation characteristics of three oral suspensions of ciprofloxacin were designed and compared. The three suspensions of ciprofloxacin were prepared by taking biodegradable polymers such as carbopol 934, carbopol 940, and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC). The permeability study was performed by using a Franz diffusion cell through both synthetic cellulose acetate membrane and excised goat gastrointestinal membranes in acidic as well as alkaline pH. To know the permeability of drug from control/formulations through different membranes in acidic/alkaline pH, cumulative percentage drug permeation, apparent permeability (Papp), flux, and enhancement ratio (ER) were calculated. Considering Papp and flux values of all formulations, it is evident that formulation containing HPMC was the most beneficial for improving permeation and diffusivity of ciprofloxacin even after 16 h. Hence, this preparation may be considered as the most suitable formulation to obtain prolonged release action of the drug. The ER values of all formulations, through excised goat intestinal mucosal membrane in alkaline pH, were higher than those formulations through goat stomach mucosal membrane in acidic pH. Enhancement ratio values of those formulations indicate that the permeability of the drug was more enhanced by the polymers in the intestinal part, leading to more bioavailability and prolonged action in that portion of the gastrointestinal tract. It may also be concluded from our results that HPMC containing formulation was the best suspension, which may show effective controlled release action. Even carbopol containing formulations might also produce controlled release action.
How "Costly" is Healthcare for the Elderly?

3 INTRODUCTION . 3 LITERATURE REVIEW . 6 1. What does a cost-effective analysis of a healthcare system look like? 6 2. How does cost-effective analyses affect overall health outcomes? 9 3. What does better health outcomes for the elderly consist of? 10 THEORY & MODEL . 12 DATA . 15 1. Figure 1 . 16 2. Figure 2 . 18 3. Figure 3 . 18 RESULTS . 20 1. Figure 4 . 20 CONCLUSION . 23 APPENDIX A . 27 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 31
Validation of a short questionnaire in English and French for use in patients with persistent upper gastrointestinal symptoms despite proton pump inhibitor therapy: the PASS (Proton pump inhibitor Acid Suppression Symptom) test.

BACKGROUND The management of persistent symptoms during acid suppression therapy in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease or dyspepsia might be improved if patient-physician communication regarding the presence and character of these persistent symptoms were facilitated. AIM To validate a short, simple questionnaire (the Proton pump inhibitor [PPI] Acid Suppression Symptom [PASS] test), in English and French, to identify patients with persistent acid-related symptoms during PPI therapy and document their response to a change in therapy. METHODS Patients with persistent acid-related symptoms on PPI therapy were interviewed to produce a draft, five-item questionnaire; content validity was evaluated by focus groups comprising English- and French-speaking patients. Psychometric validity was subsequently evaluated in a multicentre, family practice-based study of English- and French-speaking patients with persistent acid-related upper gastrointestinal symptoms despite PPI therapy. The PASS test, Global Overall Symptom scale, Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale (GSRS), Quality of Life in Reflux and Dyspepsia questionnaire and Reflux Disease Questionnaire were completed at baseline and repeated after one week while patients continued their original PPI therapy. All patients then received esomeprazole 40 mg once daily for four weeks, after which all questionnaires and an evaluation of overall treatment effect were completed. RESULTS Content validity was established in 20 English- and 16 French-speaking patients. Psychometric validation in 158 English- and 113 French-speaking patients revealed good-to-excellent test-retest reliability coefficients: 0.76 for English; 0.68 for French. For construct validity, the PASS test showed moderate-to-high correlation with the GSRS scale (0.51 for English; 0.43 for French). After four weeks of therapy, the PASS test score fell to zero in 30% of English- and 33% of French-speaking patients, while the Global Overall Symptom score fell to one (no symptoms) in 32% of patients (English- and French-speaking); the PASS test demonstrated good responsiveness in comparison with the GSRS, Reflux Disease Questionnaire and Quality of Life in Reflux and Dyspepsia questionnaire. CONCLUSION The five-item PASS test is a valid tool for the evaluation of persistent acid-related symptoms in patients receiving PPI therapy. It demonstrates good content validity, test-retest reliability, responsiveness and construct validity in both English and French forms. The PASS test is a simple, clinically applicable tool for the identification of patients with persistent acid-related symptoms during therapy and the assessment of their responses to a change in therapy.
The Association Between Information Asymmetry and the Cost of Equity Capital : An Examination of Earnings Quality

Theory suggests that a company’s information environment will influence its cost of capital. This notion is supported in empirical work. Using earnings quality as a proxy for the degree of information asymmetry, several studies using US data have documented an inverse relationship between earnings quality and the cost of capital. However, the existing literature is lacking with respect to Australian evidence on this issue. This paper seeks to contribute to the existing literature through the use of Australian data and a new and expanded definition of total accruals that will provide a better signal of earnings quality.
Enhanced-Boost Z-Source Inverters With Alternate-Cascaded Switched- and Tapped-Inductor Cells

In this paper, a number of alternate-cascaded switched-inductor and tapped-inductor networks have been proposed for Z-source inverters. The resulting topologies have enhanced voltage-boost capability while retaining the usual voltage-buck flexibility of a conventional voltage-source inverter. The enhanced capability is achieved by using lower rated components that can more readily be found. These components are assembled without direct series connection and hence avoid unbalanced voltage sharing problems and losses linked to balancing resistive circuits. The component count is, however, high, meaning that the proposed inverters should only be considered when a design requires multiple lower rated components rather than a few higher rated ones. Analysis, simulation, and experimental results have already validated the concepts discussed.
Split and Rephrase: Better Evaluation and Stronger Baselines

Splitting and rephrasing a complex sentence into several shorter sentences that convey the same meaning is a challenging problem in NLP. We show that while vanilla seq2seq models can reach high scores on the proposed benchmark (Narayan et al., 2017), they suffer from memorization of the training set which contains more than 89% of the unique simple sentences from the validation and test sets. To aid this, we present a new train-development-test data split and neural models augmented with a copy-mechanism, outperforming the best reported baseline by 8.68 BLEU and fostering further progress on the task.
The Validity of Purchasing Power Parity Hypothesis in Middle East and Northern Africa Countries

This paper re-examines the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis in which the endogenously determined break points are incorporated in thirteen major Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) countries by using official and black market exchange rates data over 1970-1998. We utilize Lagrange Multiplier (LM) unit root test that endogenously determines structural breaks in level and trend. We find evidence of PPP for all countries using official and/or black market real exchange rates at the 10% level or better.
Assessment of insight in psychosis.

OBJECTIVE It is frequently reported that patients with psychotic disorders have poor insight into their illness. Previous research has suggested that poor insight may have considerable power in predicting the long-term course of chronic mental disorders and an impact on patients' compliance with treatment plans. The authors, proposing that insight is best viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon, developed the Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder, which samples discrete and global aspects of insight across a variety of manifestations of illness. This article reports on a reliability and validity study of the scale. METHOD The study subjects were 43 patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Various aspects of insight into illness were evaluated with the scale. In addition, ratings of psychopathology, course of illness, and compliance with treatment were made. RESULTS Item variability was high and normally distributed, supporting the authors' contention that insight can be rated on a continuous rather than dichotomous scale. Results of the analyses examining the relations between the various dimensions of insight assessed and the psychopathology, course, and compliance variables were generally as hypothesized. Convergent validity with other global measures of insight was found, and aspects of poor insight were correlated with poorer compliance and course of illness. Examination of the interrelations among the four insight subscales revealed that these subscales sample independent phenomena. CONCLUSIONS The Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder has good reliability and validity and has certain advantages over previous measures of insight, suggesting the usefulness of a multidimensional view of this complex concept.
CoLink: An Unsupervised Framework for User Identity Linkage

Nowadays, it is very common for one person to be in different social networks. Linking identical users across different social networks, also known as the User Identity Linkage (UIL) problem, is fundamental for many applications. There are two major challenges in the UIL problem. First, it's extremely expensive to collect manually linked user pairs as training data. Second, the user attributes in different networks are usually defined and formatted very differently which makes attribute alignment very hard. In this paper we propose CoLink, a general unsupervised framework for the UIL problem. CoLink employs a co-training algorithm, which manipulates two independent models, the attribute-based model and the relationship-based model, and makes them reinforce each other iteratively in an unsupervised way. We also propose the sequence-to-sequence learning as a very effective implementation of the attribute-based model, which can well handle the challenge of the attribute alignment by treating it as a machine translation problem. We apply CoLink to a UIL task of mapping the employees in an enterprise network to their LinkedIn profiles. The experiment results show that CoLink generally outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches by an F1 increase over 20%.
Intention to Use and Actual Use of Electronic Information Resources: Further Exploring Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)

Following up a previous study that examined public health students' intention to use e-resources for completing research paper assignments, the present study proposed two models to investigate whether or not public health students actually used the e-resources they intended to use and whether or not the determinants of intention to use predict actual use of e-resources. Focus groups and pre- and post-questionnaires were used to collect data. Descriptive analysis, data screening, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques were used for data analysis. The study found that the determinants of intention-to-use significantly predict actual use behavior. Direct impact of perceived usefulness and indirect impact of perceived ease of use to both behavior intention and actual behavior indicated the importance of ease of use at the early stage of technology acceptance. Non-significant intention-behavior relationship prompted thoughts on the measurement of actual behavior and multidimensional characteristics of the intention construct.
Human Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells Activated by CpG Oligodeoxynucleotides Induce the Generation of CD4+CD25+ Regulatory T Cells1

Plasmacytoid dendritic cells (PDCs) are key effectors in host innate immunity and orchestrate adaptive immune responses. CpG oligodeoxynucleotides (ODN) have potent immunostimulatory effects on PDCs through TLR9 recognition and signaling. Little is known about the effects of CpG ODN on human PDC-mediated T cell priming. Here we show that type B CpG ODN effectively promotes PDCs to prime allogeneic naive CD4+CD25− T cells to differentiate into CD4+CD25+ regulatory T (Treg) cells. The CD4+CD25+ T cells induced by CpG ODN-activated PDCs express forkhead transcription factor 3 and produce IL-10, TGF-β, IFN-γ, and IL-6, but low IL-2 and IL-4. These CD4+CD25+ T cells are hyporesponsive to secondary alloantigen stimulation and strongly inhibit proliferation of autologous or allogeneic naive CD4+ T cells in an Ag-nonspecific manner. CpG ODN-activated PDCs require direct contact with T cells to induce CD4+CD25+ Treg cells. Interestingly, IL-10 and TGF-β were undetectable in the supernatants of CpG ODN-stimulated PDC cultures. Both CpG-A and CpG-C ODN-activated PDCs similarly induced the generation of CD4+CD25+ Treg cells with strong immune suppressive function. This study demonstrates that TLR9 stimulation can promote PDC-mediated generation of CD4+CD25+ Treg cells and suggests PDCs may play an important role in the maintenance of immunological tolerance.
Hierarchical Patterns : A Way to Organize ( Analysis ) Patterns

The paper addresses the issue of categorization and generalization in software patterns. It focuses on the realm of analysis (conceptual) patterns in which the problem is more noticeable when compared to design patterns. The paper introduces hierarchical analysis patterns as a means for categorization and balancing generality and real-world usefulness. A three level hierarchy of analysis patterns is presented. It is documented using real-world examples. Finally, there is a rational that hierarchization might be useful for other kinds of software patterns as well.
Employer-to-Employer Flows in the U.S. Labor Market: The Complete Picture of Gross Worker Flows

Despite the importance of employer-to-employer (EE) flows to our understanding of labor market and business cycle dynamics, the literature has lacked a comprehensive and representative measure of the size and character of these flows. To construct the first reliable measures of EE flows for the United States, this paper exploits the "dependent interviewing" techniques introduced in the Current Population Survey in 1994. The paper concludes that EE flows are large: On average 2.6 percent of employed persons change employers each month, a flow more than twice as large as that from employment to unemployment. Indeed, on-the-job search appears to be an important element in hiring, as nearly two-fifths of new jobs started between 1994 and 2003 represented employer changes. EE flows are also markedly procyclical, although the cyclicality is concentrated around the recession: EE flows did not increase as the labor market tightened between 1994 and 2000, but they did drop sharply as the labor market loosened during the period 2001 through 2003. We view the uneven cyclical pattern of EE flows as a pattern to be incorporated into future models.
Improving Outcomes in State AIDS Drug Assistance Programs

Background:State AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs) provide antiretroviral medications to patients with no access to medications. Resource constraints limit the ability of many ADAPs to meet demand for services. Objective:To determine ADAP eligibility criteria that minimize morbidity and mortality and contain costs. Methods:We used Discrete Event Simulation to model the progression of HIV-infected patients and track the utilization of an ADAP. Outcomes included 5-year mortality and incidence of first opportunistic infection or death and time to starting antiretroviral therapy (ART). We compared expected outcomes for 2 policies: (1) first-come first-served (FCFS) eligibility for all with CD4 count ≤350/μL (current standard) and (2) CD4 count prioritized eligibility for those with CD4 counts below a defined threshold. Results:In the base case, prioritizing patients with CD4 counts ≤250/μL led to lower 5-year mortality than FCFS eligibility (2.77 vs. 3.27 deaths per 1000 person-months) and to a lower incidence of first opportunistic infection or death (5.55 vs. 6.98 events per 1000 person-months). CD4-based eligibility reduced the time to starting ART for patients with CD4 counts ≤200/μL. In sensitivity analyses, CD4-based eligibility consistently led to lower morbidity and mortality than FCFS eligibility. Conclusion:When resources are limited, programs that provide ART can improve outcomes by prioritizing patients with low CD4 counts.
Internal or External Production and Satisfaction with the Chosen Sourcing in Danish Municipalities: Different Theoretical Explanations

Abstract There is a large literature on both why local governments and public organisations choose internal or external production of services and what explains the performance of internal and external production. A range of different theories have been used to answer these questions. However, these studies show mixed results. In this study we investigate four theories: transaction cost economics, neoclassical economics, the resource-based view of strategy and institutional theory. Can these theories explain whether local governments choose internal or external production and can they explain the satisfaction with the internal and external production? Do the same variables explain the choice and the satisfaction? Based on a survey of four different service areas in Danish municipalities, it is shown that different theoretical variables explain the choice and satisfaction with the sourcing mode. Internal expertise is strongly related to the choice of internal or external production, whereas most transaction cost variables are unrelated to this choice. However, other variables such as supplier expertise and technological uncertainty are related to satisfaction with service production. The results corroborate the view that different variables are needed for explaining the performance of suppliers and the choice between internal and external suppliers. Furthermore, the results suggest that the study of local governments' sourcing may benefit from integrating theories focusing on internal expertise and markets. Studies may also benefit from integrating economic theories, which assume rationality, with institutional theory emphasising more unreflective and socially determined behaviour.
International Evidence on Real Estate as a Portfolio Diversifier

This paper provides an international comparison of the benefits of including real estate assets in mixed-asset portfolios. Real estate returns are desmoothed using a variant of the Geltner (1993) approach, and Bayes-Stein estimators are used to increase the stability of portfolio weight estimations. Both unhedged and hedged analyses are conducted. Real estate is found to be an effective portfolio diversifier, and even more so when both domestic and international real estate assets are considered. The optimal allocation to real estate is 15% to 25%, and remains stable when the level of the standard deviation of real estate is altered. Real estate allocation between domestic and nondomestic assets, however, varies substantially across countries, depending on whether returns are hedged or not.
Analysis of Mars analogue soil samples using solid-phase microextraction, organic solvent extraction and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry

Abstract Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are robust and abundant molecules in extraterrestrial environments. They are found ubiquitously in the interstellar medium and have been identified in extracts of meteorites collected on Earth. PAHs are important target molecules for planetary exploration missions that investigate the organic inventory of planets, moons and small bodies. This study is part of an interdisciplinary preparation phase to search for organic molecules and life on Mars. We have investigated PAH compounds in desert soils to determine their composition, distribution and stability. Soil samples (Mars analogue soils) were collected at desert areas of Utah in the vicinity of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), in the Arequipa region in Peru and from the Jutland region of Denmark. The aim of this study was to optimize the solid-phase microextraction (SPME) method for fast screening and determination of PAHs in soil samples. This method minimizes sample handling and preserves the chemical integrity of the sample. Complementary liquid extraction was used to obtain information on five- and six-ring PAH compounds. The measured concentrations of PAHs are, in general, very low, ranging from 1 to 60 ng g−1. The texture of soils is mostly sandy loam with few samples being 100 % silt. Collected soils are moderately basic with pH values of 8–9 except for the Salten Skov soil, which is slightly acidic. Although the diverse and variable microbial populations of the samples at the sample sites might have affected the levels and variety of PAHs detected, SPME appears to be a rapid, viable field sampling technique with implications for use on planetary missions.