Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Management of osteoporosis with PTH: treatment and prescription patterns in Europe

ABSTRACT Background: PTH is an anabolic agent that promotes new bone formation and offers additional therapeutic options for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis. Two forms of PTH are licensed for treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis and are available in most European countries. Both demonstrate safety and efficacy in clinical trials with similar increases in bone mineral density (BMD) at the spine, total hip and femoral neck, and reductions in the number of vertebral fractures in postmenopausal women. The effect on the number of patients treated with PTH is analysed in terms of the total number of osteoporotic patients and total number of eligible patients, as defined by a literature review of vertebral fracture incidence in European populations. Aims: To analyse the management and treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis with PTH in terms of the prescription patterns for PTH in five European countries and the underlying reasons for observed rates of prescription in each country. Findings: Osteoporosis patients with low vertebral BMD and two fractures are at appreciable risk of sustaining further fractures, particularly hip fractures. Hip fractures are associated with significant mortality and huge economic cost to society. These patients are approved for treatment with PTH but the availability of this therapy varies considerably across Europe. The number of patients receiving PTH varies from 0.24% of eligible patients in the UK to approximately 5% of eligible patients in Spain. Conclusion: Large differences (up to 20-fold) exist in the number of patients receiving PTH across the five European countries. The reasons for the different accessibility to PTH arise from a combination of restrictive schedules of reimbursement, high cost and lack of knowledge of the potential benefits of PTH by physicians.
Virtual Assembly Rapid Prototyping of Near Net Shapes

Virtual reality (VR) provides another dimension to many engineering applications. Its immersive and interactive nature allows an intuitive approach to study both cognitive activities and performance evaluation. Market competitiveness means having products meet form, fi t and function quickly. Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing (RP&M) technologies are increasingly being applied to produce functional prototypes and the direct manufacturing of small components. Despite its fl exibility, these systems have common drawbacks such as slow build rates, a limited number of build axes (typically one) and the need for post processing. This paper presents a Virtual Assembly Rapid Prototyping (VARP) project which involves evaluating cognitive activities in assembly tasks based on the adoption of immersive virtual reality along with a novel non-layered rapid prototyping for near net shape (NNS) manufacturing of components. It is envisaged that this integrated project will facilitate a better understanding of design for manufacture and assembly by utilising equivalent scale digital and physical prototyping in one rapid prototyping system. The state of the art of the VARP project is also presented in this paper.
Bank Incentives, Credit Market Discipline and Firm Performance in China

We exploit data on the differential development of the banking sector across China’s provinces to investigate how banks’ incentives impact performance of Chinese listed firms. We posit that profit seeking banks have stronger incentives to screen and monitor borrowers than do politically driven lenders. We predict that in provinces with higher concentrations of commercially oriented banks, lending decisions will more closely link to borrower quality, firms will invest in more promising projects, and overall firm performance will be higher. We also conjecture that more rigorous credit discipline will impact SOEs more than Non-SOEs. We rank provincial banking sectors yearly on the basis of their commercial lending orientation as measured by the market share of bank deposits held by Big Four relative to Non-Big Four banks, and the proportion of total loans to Non-SOEs within a province. Consistent with our predictions, we find that in more commercially oriented provincial banking sectors (1) lending decisions are more sensitive to borrowers’ past performance and loans have shorter maturity; (2) firms’ investment decisions are more sensitive to past performance; and (3) firms exhibit higher profitability, profit margins, and asset turnover, and lower incidence of related party transactions. Further, these effects are concentrated in SOE firms, consistent with stronger bank incentives to screen and monitor borrowers having a more dramatic impact on SOEs than private-listed firms. This suggests that SOEs are more likely than private firms to be shielded from credit market discipline by access to politically driven loans than will private firms, and so stand to be impacted more from commercialization of the banking sector.
How Kubernetes Changes Operations

Brendan Burns is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, Inc. and a founder of the Kubernetes project, leading engineering efforts to make the Google Cloud Platform the best place to run containers. He also has managed several other cloud teams, including Deployment Manager, Managed VMs, and Cloud DNS. Prior to Cloud, he was a lead engineer in Google’s Web search infrastructure, building backends that powered social and personal search. Prior to working at Google, he was a professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a BA in computer science and studio art from Williams College. bburns@google.com Container cluster managers are used by many Web-scale Internet companies, including Google’s Borg and Omega, Facebook’s Tupperware, Twitter’s Aurora, and many others. At their core, these container orchestration systems schedule and manage (“orchestrate”) collections of Linux application containers. In this article, I will explain the Kubernetes project.
Rapid Urban Growth and Land Use Patterns in Doha, Qatar: Opportunities for Sustainability?

Amidst chaotic growth of Asian cities, the expansion of urban infrastructure in the Middle East's Gulf region is arguably outpacing any other region on the planet. Yet we have a limited understanding of the types of urban form or the extent to which this rapid urbanization is giving rise to sustainable patterns of growth. We ask, what is the pace and character of urban growth in one Middle East city, Doha, Qatar. By using remotely sensed imagery from 1987 to 2013, we examined the pace, quality, and characteristics of urban growth. We further use the results to create a typology of urban growth that integrates historical and spatial dimensions for describing the qualitative aspects of growth and its implications on regional landscapes. Our results suggest that Doha is creating development patterns similar to many Western cities, and that planners may need to consider whether the emerging urban form offers opportunities for more sustainable growth in the future.
Stress voiding in wide copper lines

Hot Stage optical microscopy was used to make in-situ observations of stress void formation in wide (10–30 μm) passivated copper lines. It was found that void nucleation and growth occurred readily where grain boundaries intersected the top copper/dielectric interface. Void closure was observed to occur on heating to temperatures above 300 °C indicating that the lines are in compression above this temperature. Isothermal holds at temperatures below 300 °C caused void growth to occur with the highest density of voids being observed at 200 °C. Cycling to temperatures above the maximum process temperature the structure received (400 °C) was found to cause an increase in the density of void nucleation sites activated at the lower void growth temperature. Based on the observations we suggest that localized regions of triaxial stress arise at grain boundaries in wide copper lines causing enhanced void nucleation at the copper/dielectric interface. Possible causes of localized stresses at grain boundaries are discussed including grain boundary sliding and the mismatch of the elastic properties across grain boundaries.Hot Stage optical microscopy was used to make in-situ observations of stress void formation in wide (10–30 μm) passivated copper lines. It was found that void nucleation and growth occurred readily where grain boundaries intersected the top copper/dielectric interface. Void closure was observed to occur on heating to temperatures above 300 °C indicating that the lines are in compression above this temperature. Isothermal holds at temperatures below 300 °C caused void growth to occur with the highest density of voids being observed at 200 °C. Cycling to temperatures above the maximum process temperature the structure received (400 °C) was found to cause an increase in the density of void nucleation sites activated at the lower void growth temperature. Based on the observations we suggest that localized regions of triaxial stress arise at grain boundaries in wide copper lines causing enhanced void nucleation at the copper/dielectric interface. Possible causes of localized stresses at grain boundaries are di.
3D localization and tracking in unknown environments

This paper describes a vision-based system for 3D localization and tracking of a mobile robot in an unmodified environment. The system includes a mountable head with three on-board stereo CCD cameras that can be installed on the robot. There the main emphasis is on the ability to estimate the geometric information of the robot independently from any prior scene knowledge, landmark or extra sensory device. Distinctive scene features are identified using a novel algorithm and their 3D locations are estimated with a stereo algorithm. Using multi-stage feature tracking and motion estimation in a symbolic manner, precise motion vectors are obtained. The 3D positions of the scene features are updated by a Kalman filtering process. Experimental results show that robust tracking and localization can be achieved using our vision system.
Systematic Review: The Role of Race and Socioeconomic Factors on IBD Healthcare Delivery and Effectiveness

Background:Race and socioeconomic status (SES) significantly affect the content and delivery of healthcare for multiple chronic disease states. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a set of complex, chronic diseases with the potential for significant morbidity if the content or delivery of healthcare is suboptimal. However, the literature related to race, SES, and IBD remains fragmented. Methods:Using guidelines published by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, we performed a systematic review of the world's literature to identify studies related to: 1) IBD, 2) race/ethnicity, 3) SES, 4) healthcare delivery, and 5) healthcare effectiveness. Results:We identified 40 studies that met inclusion criteria. Twenty-four studies (60%) assessed the role of SES and 21 (53%) evaluated race. Topics addressed by these studies included: 1) Utilization of Medical and Surgical Therapy; 2) Adherence to Medical Therapy; 3) Clinical Outcomes; 4) Healthcare Access and Utilization; 5) Disease Perception and Knowledge; and 6) Employment/Insurance. We identified race- and SES-based disparities in the content of medical and surgical healthcare, utilization of inpatient and ambulatory medical care, adherence to medical therapy, and disease perceptions and knowledge. Several studies also identified race- and SES-based disparities in outcomes for IBD, including in-hospital mortality rates and health-related quality of life. Conclusions:Race- and SES-based disparities in the delivery and effectiveness of healthcare for patients with IBD exist in numerous domains, yet studies remain limited in their scope and breadth. Concerted, prospective, multicenter efforts are needed to address underlying causes for disparities and to identify methods of reducing and eliminating disparities.
The Opinion Mining Based on Fuzzy Domain Sentiment Ontology Tree for Product Reviews

In this paper, we present a novel method that integrates domain sentiment knowledge into the analysis approach to deal with feature-level opinion mining By constructing a domain ontology called Fuzzy Domain Sentiment Ontology Tree (FDSOT), we then utilize the prior sentiment knowledge of our ontology to achieve significantly accuracy in sentiment classification. Particularly, the FDSOT is the conceptual model which represents the semantic relation between features and sentiment words. The evaluation is based on the Chinese product reviews collected from 360buy.com 1 . The experimental results demonstrate that our approach is able to automatically identify the domain-dependent polarity for a large subset of sentiment expression and effectively improve the performance of opinion mining.
TRANSMIT DIVERSITY WEIGHT GENERATION FOR WIRELESS FDD SYSTEMS WITH FEEDBACK

Transmit diversity techniques provide attractive solutions for increasing downlink capacity in 3G systems within lowmobility environments. Open-loop and closed-loop transmit diversity modes with two transmit antennas have already been included into 3GPP WCDMA Release 4, and schemes exploiting a larger number of transmit antennas are being developed. System capacity can be increased from that of open–loop modes if the transmitter is equipped with additional side information of the downlink channel. In a frequency division duplex (FDD) system this means that the receiver has to provide the information through some feedback mechanism. In this paper we give two feedback signal designs and an algorithm to design corresponding transmit weights utilizing linear functions of order statistics of the underlying random process. This provides a simple tool to design closed– loop transmit diversity systems depending on the feedback capacity of the system and propagation environment.
High Performance Carbon Nanotube Fibers Spun from Long Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes

In this paper we report on dry spinning of carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers from vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays. Long and spinnable multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) arrays have been synthesized by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method using acetylene as carbon source. Carbon nanotube fibers were fabricated by high speed drawing and twisting of carbon nanotubes webs. CNTs have been characterized by SEM and TEM observations, and mechanical properties of CNT fibers have been evaluated from tensile strength measurements. We achieved ultimate tensile strength of several hundreds of MPa for fibers of tens of micrometers in diameter.
Visualizing Robustness of Critical Points for 2D Time‐Varying Vector Fields

Analyzing critical points and their temporal evolutions plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of vector fields. A key challenge is to quantify the stability of critical points: more stable points may represent more important phenomena or vice versa. The topological notion of robustness is a tool which allows us to quantify rigorously the stability of each critical point. Intuitively, the robustness of a critical point is the minimum amount of perturbation necessary to cancel it within a local neighborhood, measured under an appropriate metric. In this paper, we introduce a new analysis and visualization framework which enables interactive exploration of robustness of critical points for both stationary and time‐varying 2D vector fields. This framework allows the end‐users, for the first time, to investigate how the stability of a critical point evolves over time. We show that this depends heavily on the global properties of the vector field and that structural changes can correspond to interesting behavior. We demonstrate the practicality of our theories and techniques on several datasets involving combustion and oceanic eddy simulations and obtain some key insights regarding their stable and unstable features.
Handling mismatch in corpus-based forensic speaker recognition

This paper deals with automatic speaker recognition in forensic applications and handling mismatched technical conditions in a Bayesian framework for evaluating the strength of evidence. Mismatch in recording conditions has to be considered in the estimation of the strength of evidence, i.e., how likely it is that a questioned recording (trace) has been produced by a suspected speaker rather than by any other person from a relevant population. In forensic speaker recognition, in order to estimate such a likelihood ratio, a Bayesian interpretation framework and a corpus based methodology is employed. Although automatic speaker recognition has shown high performance under controlled conditions, the conditions in which recordings are made by the police (anonymous calls and wiretapping) cannot be controlled and are far from ideal. Differences in the phone handset, in the transmission channel and in the recording tools introduce a variability, over and above the variability of human speech. In this paper we focus on how to estimate and deal with differences in recording conditions of the databases used: detection of whether there is good discrimination between speakers within a database, detection of significant mismatch in recording conditions and statistical compensation in case of mismatch.
Coresets and Sketches

Geometric data summarization has become an essential tool in both geometric approximation algorithms and where geometry intersects with big data problems. In linear or near-linear time large data sets can be compressed into a summary, and then more intricate algorithms can be run on the summaries whose results approximate those of the full data set. Coresets and sketches are the two most important classes of these summaries. We survey five types of coresets and sketches: shape-fitting, density estimation, high-dimensional vectors, high-dimensional point sets / matrices, and clustering.
Rapid whole-blood flow cytometry assay for diagnosis of chronic granulomatous disease

Chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) is characterized by defective killing of intracellular microorganisms due to mutations in one of the four known components of the NADPH oxidase system. This system is responsible for the generation of superoxide and related antimicrobial oxidants. Diagnosis of CGD requires the demonstration of an abnormal oxidase system in the leukocytes of affected patients. Recently, several flow cytometry-based procedures which measure various reactive oxygen intermediates generated by the NADPH oxidase system have been developed. Most of the procedures developed to date require time-consuming granulocyte isolation, washing, and counting procedures, or they lack sensitivity. We have modified an existing procedure such that cell labelling and stimulation are performed directly in whole blood. Optimization of this procedure and its use in the diagnosis of patients with CGD or X-linked carriers are presented.
Spatial Patterns and Natural Recruitment of Native Shrubs in a Semi-arid Sandy Land

Passive restoration depending on native shrubs is an attractive approach for restoring desertified landscapes in semi-arid sandy regions. We sought to understand the relationships between spatial patterns of native shrubs and their survival ability in sandy environments. Furthermore, we applied our results to better understand whether passive restoration is feasible for desertified landscapes in semi-arid sandy regions. The study was conducted in the semi-arid Mu Us sandy land of northern China with the native shrub Artemisia ordosica. We analyzed population structures and patterns of A. ordosica at the edges and centers of land patches where sand was stabilized by A. ordosica-dominated vegetation. Saplings were more aggregated than adults, and both were more aggregated at the patch edges than at the patch centers. At the patch edges, spatial association of the saplings with the adults was mostly positive at distances 0.3–6.6 m, and turned from positive to neutral, and even negative, at other distances. At the patch centers, the saplings were spaced almost randomly around the adults, and their distances from the adults did not seem to affect their locations. A greater number of A. ordosica individuals emerged at the patch edges than at the patch centers. Such patterns may have resulted from their integrative adjustment to specific conditions of soil water supply and sand drift intensity. These findings suggest that in semi-arid sandy regions, native shrubs that are well-adapted to local environments may serve as low-cost and competent ecological engineers that can promote the passive restoration of surrounding patches of mobile sandy land.
Interprofessional Oral Health Education Improves Knowledge, Confidence, and Practice for Pediatric Healthcare Providers

Dental caries is the most prevalent chronic childhood disease in the United States. Dental caries affects the health of 60–90% of school-aged children worldwide. The prevalence of untreated early childhood dental caries is 19% for children 2–5 years of age in the U.S. Some factors that contribute to the progression of dental caries include socioeconomic status, access to dental care, and lack of anticipatory guidance. The prevalence of dental caries remains highest for children from specific ethnic or racial groups, especially those living in underserved areas where there may be limited access to a dentist. Although researchers have acknowledged the various links between oral health and overall systemic health, oral health care is not usually a component of pediatric primary health care. To address this public health crisis and oral health disparity in children, new collaborative efforts among health professionals is critical for dental disease prevention and optimal oral health. This evaluation study focused on a 10-week interprofessional practice and education (IPE) course on children’s oral health involving dental, osteopathic medical, and nurse practitioner students at the University of California, San Francisco. This study’s objective was to evaluate changes in knowledge, confidence, attitude, and clinical practice in children’s oral health of the students completed the course. Thirty-one students participated in the IPE and completed demographic questionnaires and four questionnaires before and after the IPE course: (1) course content knowledge, (2) confidence, (3) attitudes, and (4) clinical practice. Results showed a statistically significant improvement in the overall knowledge of children’s oral health topics, confidence in their ability to provide oral health services, and clinical practice. There was no statistically significant difference in attitude, but there was an upward trend toward positivity. To conclude, this IPE evaluation showed that offering an interprofessional course on children’s oral health to graduate students in dentistry, nursing, and osteopathic medicine can improve their knowledge, confidence, and practice toward children’s oral health and expand their professional goals to include caring for underserved, minority children.