Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Birth Cohort Differences in Sexual Identity Development Milestones Among HIV-Negative Gay and Bisexual Men in the United States

The coming-out process for gay and bisexual men (GBM) involves crossing sexual identity development (SID) milestones: (1) self-awareness of sexual attraction to the same sex, (2) self-acceptance of an identity as gay or bisexual, (3) disclosure of this sexual identity to others, and (4) having sex with someone of the same sex. We examined trends in SID milestones by birth cohort in a 2015 U.S. national sample of GBM (n = 1,023). Birth cohort was independent of when men first felt sexually attracted to someone of the same sex (median age 11 to 12). However, with the exception of age of first same-sex attraction, older cohorts tended to pass other milestones at later ages than younger cohorts. Latent class analysis (LCA) of SID milestone patterns identified three subgroups. The majority (84%) began sexual identity development with same-sex attraction around the onset of puberty (i.e., around age 10) and progressed to self-identification, same-sex sexual activity, and coming out—in that order. The other two classes felt same-sex attraction during teen years (ages 12.5 to 18.0) but achieved the remaining SID milestones later in life. For 13% of men, this was during early adulthood; for 3% of men, this was in middle adulthood. Findings highlight the need to monitor ongoing generational differences in passing SID milestones.
Cross-cultural study of caregiver burden for Alzheimer's disease in Japan and Taiwan: result from Dementia Research in Kumamoto and Tainan (DeReKaT)

ABSTRACT Background: Caregiver burden (CB) of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in Taiwan is becoming an urgent social issue as well as that in Japan. The comparison of CB may explain how caregiver feels burden in each country. Methods: The participants were 343 outpatients with AD and their caregivers of Japan (n = 230) and Taiwan (n = 113). We assessed the CB using the Japanese and Chinese version of Zarit Caregiver Burden Interview (ZBI). The initial analysis was an exploratory factor analysis for each group to confirm the factor structure of ZBI. Then, the multiple-group structural equation modeling (MG-SEM) was used to assess the measurement invariance of ZBI such as configural, metric, and scalar invariances. Lastly, we compared the latent factor means of the ZBI between Japan and Taiwan. Results: In both groups, the confirmatory factor analysis extracted 3 factors which were labeled “Impact on caregiver's life”, “Embarrassed/anger”, and “Dependency”. The MG-SEM indicated an acceptable model fit, and established the partial scalar measurement invariance (comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.901, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.066). When we compared the latent factor means, the score of “Impact on caregiver's life” in Taiwanese caregivers was significantly higher than that in Japanese (p = 0.001). However, “Dependency” in Taiwanese caregivers was lower than that in Japanese (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Partial measurement invariance allowed comparing the latent factor mean across two countries. The results of comparisons suggested that there may be differences in the way of feeling CB between Japan and Taiwan.
Taiwan's Public Health National Laboratory System: Success in Influenza Diagnosis and Surveillance

Taiwan's National Laboratory System is one of the action packages of the Global Health Security Agenda, which was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) to promote health security as an international priority and to encourage progress toward full implementation of the WHO International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005. The mission of each national laboratory system is to conduct real-time biosurveillance and effective laboratory-based diagnostics, as measured by a nationwide laboratory system able to reliably conduct diagnoses on specimens transported properly to designated laboratories from at least 80% of the regions in the country. In Taiwan, the national laboratory system for public health is well-established and coordinated by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which is the government authority in charge of infectious disease prevention and intervention. Through the national laboratory system, Taiwan CDC effectively detects and characterizes pathogens that cause communicable diseases across the entire country, including both known and novel threats, and also conducts epidemiologic analyses of infectious diseases. In this article, we describe the national laboratory system for public health in Taiwan. We provide additional information on the national influenza laboratory surveillance network to demonstrate how our national laboratory systems work in practice, including descriptions of long-term seasonal influenza characterization and successful experiences identifying novel H7N9 and H6N1 influenza viruses.
No Evidence of the Effect of the Interventions to Combat Health Care Fraud and Abuse: A Systematic Review of Literature

Background Despite the importance of health care fraud and the political, legislative and administrative attentions paid to it, combating fraud remains a challenge to the health systems. We aimed to identify, categorize and assess the effectiveness of the interventions to combat health care fraud and abuse. Methods The interventions to combat health care fraud can be categorized as the interventions for ‘prevention’ and ‘detection’ of fraud, and ‘response’ to fraud. We conducted sensitive search strategies on Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO from 1975 to 2008, and Medline from 1975–2010, and on relevant professional and organizational websites. Articles assessing the effectiveness of any intervention to combat health care fraud were eligible for inclusion in our review. We considered including the interventional studies with or without a concurrent control group. Two authors assessed the studies for inclusion, and appraised the quality of the included studies. As a limited number of studies were found, we analyzed the data using narrative synthesis. Findings The searches retrieved 2229 titles, of which 221 full-text studies were assessed. We found no studies using an RCT design. Only four original articles (from the US and Taiwan) were included: two studies within the detection category, one in the response category, one under the detection and response categories, and no studies under the prevention category. The findings suggest that data-mining may improve fraud detection, and legal interventions as well as investment in anti-fraud activities may reduce fraud. Discussion Our analysis shows a lack of evidence of effect of the interventions to combat health care fraud. Further studies using robust research methodologies are required in all aspects of dealing with health care fraud and abuse, assessing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of methods to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud in health care.
Alternatives to Currency Manipulation: What Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong Can Do

Economists have long decried the efforts of large, advanced economies to manipulate their currencies to boost net exports at their trading partners' expense. But the International Monetary Fund appears to have ignored the beggar-thy-neighbor exchange rate policies of countries with developed, highly open economies. This Policy Brief examines Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong, which have actively kept the value of their currencies low since the 2008–09 global recession. In each case, greater fiscal and especially domestic monetary ease would have achieved similar macroeconomic outcomes with less currency intervention and declining current account surpluses. If such countries had adopted these strategies to increase domestic demand, the global economy would have rebounded faster.
Retaining and motivating employees

This paper reports two studies involving data collected from 583 participants in Hong Kong and 121 participants in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and examines the most popular compensation components offered by organizations to employees and participants’ perceptions regarding the five most important compensation components to retain and motivate people in Hong Kong and PRC, respectively. Results suggested that in Hong Kong, base salary, merit pay, year‐end bonus, annual leave, mortgage loan, and profit sharing were the most important factors to retain and motivate employees. In China, base salary, merit pay, year‐end bonus, housing provision, cash allowance, overtime allowance, and individual bonus were the most important factors to retain and motivate employees. Results are discussed in light of economic, geographic, and culture‐related factors.
A Perspective on the Debt of Deveoloping Countries

Since 1973, when the price of oil was raised very sharply, developing countries have incurred heavy debts. This paper looks at their ability to carry debt, first by examining the balance of payments and external borrowing of all developing countries that are not oil producers in general. It then focuses on a group of ten advanced developing countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Phillipines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) that account for the bulk of the borrowing from private sources that has given rise to widely expressed concern. The analysis that follows leads to an optimistic conclusion about the capacity of the ten countries not only to carry their present debt but to expand it. It does not follow that decision makers in private financial markets will come to the same conclusion. Thus, attention is given also to supplementing private lending with resources supplied by the International Monetary Fund. Furthermore, questions are raised about what could go wrong--what international developments could make the outlook less rosy for the heavy debtors.
Testing for the martingale hypothesis in Asian stock prices: evidence from a new joint variance ratio test

This paper tests for the martingale (or random walk) hypothesis in the stock prices of a group of Asian countries. The selected countries represent well-developed markets (Hong Kong and Japan) as well as emerging markets (Korea, Taiwan and Thailand). This paper adopts a new joint variance ratio test which is a finite sample test based on the wild bootstrap method. It is different from the conventional variance ratio tests in that its sampling distribution is approximated by a resampling method, which has been found to exhibit better small sample properties than the asymptotic method. The test for the martingale hypothesis is conducted with moving-subsample windows, to control the sensitivity of the results to the particular sample periods. Overall, it is found that the stock prices of Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong are found to follow the martingale, indicating that their stock markets have been efficient.
Information Sharing in Global Supply Chain Alliances

ABSTRACT The post–WWII economic expansion of economies such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and more recently China and India was enabled to a significant degree by the increasingly complex, global supply chain networks of large Original Equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the United States, European Union, and Japan. By linking buyers and suppliers across countries and industries, supply chain management (SCM) practices have a large impact on the economic fortunes of companies and countries throughout the world. Nowhere has the effect of this mutual interdependence been felt more strongly than between the U.S. companies and the Asia-Pacific market. Although the benefits of SCM are well documented, some evidence suggests that the reality of SCM implementation can create additional pressures for suppliers. We identify key problem areas experienced by suppliers and their link to the type of information shared by buying firms. The problem area experienced by most suppliers relates to issues of dependence in the alliance. Mere information sharing is insufficient for a successful alliance, and more information can be associated with a number of problems. For example, lack of information sharing can be associated with a supplier's perception of the buyer expecting excessive support. However, greater information sharing can be associated with a supplier's perception of the buyer passing on an excessive burden. Sharing of financial information is perceived as intrusive and controlling. These apparent contradictions uncover the complexity of the supply chain alliance. The moderating factors appear to be open communication and joint sharing of problem solving procedures—factors identified by suppliers that define a world-class buyer.
Variations in human resource management in Asian countries: MNC home-country and host-country effects

This paper investigates the determinants of HRM strategy in a random sample of firms operating in Korea and Taiwan. Both indigenous and foreign-owned firms are studied. HRM strategy is measured in terms of the company's reliance on high-performance, versus more traditional, HRM policies and practices in several different areas, including staffing, employee influence, employee rewards and employee autonomy. Independent variables include the firm's country or region of origin (USA, Japan, Europe, Korea or Taiwan), the host country (Korea or Taiwan) and the internal culture of the firm, as measured by upper management's perception that human resources constitute a significant source of value for the organization. Pronounced differences are found across countries of origin and between the two host countries. Managerial values and various organizational characteristics that serve as control variables are also found to impact on HRM strategy.
Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run

Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run; second edition revised and updated: 960-2030 AD, Paris, OECD, 2007, 213 pp.Angus Maddison is a specialist in questions of economic growth and development, and is best known for his overview published in 2001, The World Economy: A millennial perspective (OECD), in which he reconstitutes hundreds of statistical records to retrace the evolution of the global economy over more than ten centuries.In Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run (the first edition of which was published back in 1998) he gives us a mathematically documented history of the economic development of the Middle Kingdom from the late tenth century to the present, ending with a forecast for the next 25 years. The true interest of such a work, to which no summary overview can do justice, lies in the thousands of precise figures it contains, making it an inexhaustible mine of information for every researcher concerned with China. But this is where Angus Maddison shows his true talent: reading his books is never burdensome. His works provide a lively reflection on his topics, and while they are considerably enhanced and enriched by graphs and tables, these can be momentarily set aside by readers who wish to get straight to the point. This book follows a straightforward chronological line from imperial China (Chapter 1) to the author's forecast for the coming quarter century (Chapter 4), having passed through the vicissitudes that beset the Middle Kingdom between 1820 and 1949 (Chapter 3) and the developmental dynamics displayed by the country since 1949, especially after 1978 (Chapter 3). The author shows how the centre of gravity of the Chinese economy shifted southwards between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. In the eighth century, three quarters of the population lived in the north, and their main crops were wheat and millet, whereas five centuries later three quarters lived south of the Yangtze and cultivated mainly rice. From the tenth to the early fifteenth century, per capita income in China was higher than levels attested for Europe. It was only between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries that China yielded its economic lead to Europe, which was better suited for the birth of modern capitalism. There followed, from 1820 to 1949, a long period of "economic decline and humiliations from abroad" (p. 49). The establishment of the People's Republic of China reversed that trend. The author emphasises, for example, that despite the ravages caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the country's isolation, the tense relationship with the Soviet Union and the United States, and the wars against Korea and India, China's GDP nonetheless tripled between 1952 and 1978. Meanwhile per capita income rose by 180 percent and labour productivity by 160 percent (p. …
Anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies, IgM and IgA rheumatoid factors in the diagnosis and prognosis of rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the association of anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP) antibodies with immunoglobulin (Ig) M and IgA rheumatoid factors (RF) in discriminating between rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other rheumatic diseases, and to determine, in a longitudinal study, whether clinical signs of disease severity are associated with the presence of these autoantibodies at the time of patient inclusion. METHODS The presence of these three markers was determined in 196 patients with established RA, 239 non-RA controls with various rheumatic diseases (cross-sectional study) and in 27 patients with arthritis of less than 1 yr disease duration who were subsequently followed during about 8 yr (longitudinal study). At the time of follow-up, 21 of these 27 patients had RA. They were further evaluated and several clinical variables were recorded. RESULTS The specificity was significantly increased (from 82-90% to 98% in the cross-sectional study) when the combination of anti-CCP antibodies with IgA RF or the combination of the three serological markers was used. An association was observed between the presence of the three autoantibodies and clinical signs of disease severity (functional disability, presence of erosions and absence of clinical remission). CONCLUSIONS The presence either of anti-CCP antibodies and IgA RF or of the three markers appears to be useful in the diagnosis of RA. Their association with clinical signs of disease severity at the time of patient inclusion suggests their potential usefulness as markers for prognosis.
How ‘global’ are investment banks? An analysis of investment banking networks in Asian equity capital markets

ABSTRACT This paper examines the distribution of power within financial networks of investment banks in equity capital markets of three key economies in Asia: Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. Using social network analysis, it shows that while bulge-bracket banks occupy core positions in all three locations, their dominance is challenged by emerging Asian investment banks. The equity capital market networks of investment banks are strongly shaped by development trajectory and regional contexts of specific international financial centres, which reveals the differentiated nature of finance across Asia. Results also highlight the need for further research on networks within financial centres in addition to inter-city networks in order to understand the roles and development of international financial centres.
Rheumatoid arthritis-related interstitial lung disease: associations, prognostic factors and physiological and radiological characteristics--a large multicentre UK study.

OBJECTIVES The prevalence of interstitial lung disease (ILD) in RA is ∼5%. Previous work identified increasing age, active articular disease and articular damage as risk factors for RA-associated ILD (RA-ILD). The roles of high-resolution CT (HRCT) and lung function testing in defining the nature and extent of pulmonary involvement have recently been explored. This study is the first to examine predictive and prognostic factors for the development of RA-ILD and to report on the physiological and radiological characteristics of the condition from a large multicentre UK network. METHODS We collected data from centres across the UK on patients with both RA and ILD (proved on HRCT) diagnosed over a 25-year period from 1987 to 2012 using a standard pro forma. Potential predictors of RA-ILD were analysed. Baseline lung function data were recorded and related to HRCT findings. We analysed HRCT for subtype and extent of lung involved and examined the relationship between these and both all-cause and pulmonary mortality. We compared our results with case controls matched for age and gender using computer-generated selection from the RA population from one contributing centre. RESULTS A total of 230 patients were identified from across the UK with proven RA-ILD diagnosed over 25 years. Median age at diagnosis was 64 years and the male:female ratio was 1:1.09. Univariate analysis showed anti-CCP antibody titres to be the single most strongly associated predictor of RA-ILD. Male gender, age at onset, smoking and RF were all independently associated with RA-ILD on multivariate analysis. Vital capacity (VC) was preserved in limited disease but reduced in extensive disease, while gas transfer was reduced in both. Usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP) was the most common subtype on HRCT and both this and extensive disease were associated with increased all-cause mortality. CONCLUSION This is the largest study of RA-ILD in the UK. Anti-CCP antibodies were strongly associated with RA-ILD in both sexes. Smoking was strongly associated with ILD in males, which may explain the higher frequency of RA-ILD in men. The predominant HRCT pattern was UIP and most patients had limited disease at presentation. The presence of UIP and extensive disease are associated with increased mortality. Baseline gas transfer is a useful screening tool for ILD, while the preservation of VC at baseline might predict limited disease on HRCT.
Etiopathogenesis of systemic autoimmune diseases.

DOI:10.1097/BOR.0b013e32835cf2d1 Systemic autoimmune diseases result from a dysregulated immune system. They are, generally, characterized by the presence of autoantibodies in conjunction with a particular clinical syndrome. There is increasing evidence that the generation of autoantibodies precedes the clinical manifestations of the disease in question. This has been demonstrated for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) in which a progressive accumulation of different autoantibodies occurs in time preceding the onset of the disease for many years [1]. Also in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), rheumatoid factor and anticyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (antiCCP) were shown to precede the development of RA [2,3]. What triggers the development of these autoantibodies has not been fully elucidated but both genetic and environmental factors have been implicated. Interestingly, genetic factors, in particular human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-class II antigens, are more closely linked with particular autoantibodies than with the associated diseases. The HLA-DRB1 shared epitope alleles were shown to be primarily a risk factor for anti-CCP without being an independent risk factor for RA [4]. Also in the antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA)associated vasculitides, specific ANCAs, rather than their associated diseases, were linked to particular HLA-class II antigens: antiproteinase 3 ANCA is associated with HLA-DP and antimyeloperoxidase ANCA with HLA-DQ [5]. These associations were stronger with the autoantibodies than with the respective diseases, that is granulomatosis with polyangiitis and microscopic polyangiitis. However, not only genetics but also the interaction between genes and environmental factors is crucial for the induction of autoantibodies. This has been suggested for smoking in relation to the HLA-DR shared epitope alleles [6], although not confirmed in all cohorts [7]. In this issue of Current Opinion in Rheumatology several factors operative at the interplay between gene expression and environment in autoimmune diseases are being discussed. First, the role of microRNAs in RA is reviewed [8]. MicroRNAs are noncoding RNAs that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level and their aberrant expression has been associated with different autoimmune diseases such as RA [8] and SLE [9]. These microRNAs may be targets for future treatment.