Effect of testosterone therapy on lumbar spine and hip mineral density in elderly men

Objective.?The aim of the present study was to analyse the effect of testosterone therapy on bone mineral density in healthy elderly men who had low levels of total testosterone.

Design.?Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

Participants.?Forty-eight men over 60 years old with decreased testosterone levels (≤320 ng/dL) comprised the study. Twenty-five out of 48 received intramuscular injections of testosterone enanthate every three weeks during 12 months; the remaining 23 participants formed the control group. All participants had measurements of bone mineral density (BMD) in both lumbar spine and hip before and at the end of the study as well as testosterone and 17-β estradiol levels.

Results:?Testosterone treated group exhibited a significant (p < 0.05) increment (from 1.198 ± 0.153 to 1.240 ± 0.141 g/cm²) in lumbar BMD in parallel with a significant (p < 0.001) increment (from 301 ± 32 to 471 ± 107 ng/dL) in testosterone concentrations, whereas no significant change occurred in femoral neck BMD.

Conclusions.?Testosterone therapy elicited a positive effect only in lumbar BMD in elderly men with diminished testosterone serum levels.     

Deciding manufacturing priorities: Flexibility, cost, quality and service

Traditional manufacturing planning focuses first on understanding the realities of the product marketplace and then aligning the production processes to match those realities. By conforming to that independent-market dependent-production model and simply implementing the determined tactics, manufacturing misses the opportunity to create competitive advantage by adopting a strategy that enhances the firm's position. To illustrate how manufacturing can incorporate strategic objectives into its planning, we add a third dimension to the traditional two-dimensional form of the product—process matrix. Along the new axis we show how four key competitive thrusts relate to the stages of the product—process life cycles. The thrusts of flexibility, cost, quality, and service are made explicit by plotting them, in turn, against the stages in the evolution of the product and the process. Each plot reveals new ways for manufacturing to plan for and realize competitive advantage through the application of computer-integrated manufacturing principles.     

Description of a domestic violence measure for Puerto Rican gay males

A sample of 302 Puerto Rican gay males living in Puerto Rico and New York participated in this study with the objective of assessing the prevalence of domestic violence. A self-administered questionnaire was developed addressing issues of intergenerational violence, addictive behaviors, and domestic violence in three dimensions: emotional, physical, and sexual violence. The results concluded that close to half of the participants had experienced some sort of violence in their intimate relationships, have a history of being witness to domestic violence in their family of origin, and had identified in themselves and their families, addictive behaviors. Other variables measured are HIV and sexual coercion, drug and alcohol abuse, and levels of acculturation among participants living in the United States. The main objective of this work is to describe the development of the instrument used in the study. Based on the results of this study we describe the psychometric characteristics and content of the final questionnaire. Final recommendations are made for other researchers interested in doing domestic violence studies with Latino gay men and men who have sex with men.     

Young adolescents, tobacco advertising, and smoking

BACKGROUND: In adolescents aged 12-14, we measured attitudes to tobacco advertising. Our purpose is to understand the relation of these attitudes to tobacco use and identify the groups most influenced by the advertising. METHODS: Survey of adolescents on Gran Canaria Island, Spain, about aspects of family, school, peers, tobacco consumption, and tobacco advertising. The subjects of the double-stratified cluster sample were 1910 students at the same grade level in 33 schools; 86.6% were 13 or 14 years old, and 51.2% were boys. We generated measures for attitudes to tobacco advertising from replies to seven questions with ordinal scales by an analysis of categorical principal components. To relate attitude to tobacco advertising and the profiles of these adolescents, we used multiple regression and logistic regression models. RESULTS: Attitudes to tobacco advertising are related to some home and school factors, but most significantly to tobacco and alcohol consumption, to amount of time at home without adults, and to peer influence. CONCLUSIONS: It is possible to draw up profiles of the students most vulnerable to tobacco advertising, and to cluster them in two groups, the "vitalists" and the "credulous." The effect of cigarette ads is different between these groups. This study can help to orientate smoking prevention.     

A method for K-Means seeds generation applied to text mining

In this paper, a methodology is proposed in order to produce a set of seeds later used as a starting point to K-Means-type unsupervised classification algorithms for text mining. Our proposal involves using the eigenvectors obtained from principal component analysis to extract initial seeds, upon appropriate treatment for search of lightly overlapping clusters which are also clearly identified by keywords. This work is motivated by the interest of the authors in the problem of identification of topics and themes previously unknown in short texts. Therefore, in order to validate the goodness of this method, it was applied on a sample of labeled e-mails (NG20) representing a gold standard within the field of text mining. Specifically, some corpora referenced in the literature have been used, configured in accordance to a mix of topics contained in the sample. The proposed method improves on the results of other state-of-the-art methods to which it is compared.     

Achievers or slackers? Per capita income trends in European countries

This paper studies the catching up process of the per capita income of Western European countries for the 1870–2014 period. The contribution to the literature is twofold. First, the use of the Kejriwal and Perron (2010) algorithm allows us to detect any number of structural breaks in the level and in the trend without prior knowledge of the integration order. This is a significant improvement over the algorithms previously used in the literature which limits the number of possible structural breaks to two. In fact, we find that some countries show more than two breaks. Second, we use the longest data series in the literature. That enables us to tell a much richer story about the catching up process in Western Europe. We find that events like the World Wars, the creation of the European Economic Community and the information technology revolution, among others, were likely to cause such breaks.     

Wrapped Lindley distribution

In this article, we introduce a new circular distribution to be called as wrapped Lindley distribution and derive expressions for characteristic function, trigonometric moments, coefficients of skewness, and kurtosis. Method of maximum likelihood estimation is used for the estimation of parameters. We carry out a simulation study to show that the obtained maximum likelihood estimator is consistent. The proposed model is also applied to a real-life dataset, and its performance is compared with that of wrapped exponential distribution.     

Estimation and influence diagnostics for zero-inflated hyper-Poisson regression model: full Bayesian analysis

The purpose of this paper is to develop a Bayesian analysis for the zero-inflated hyper-Poisson model. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to develop a Bayesian procedure for the model and the Bayes estimators are compared by simulation with the maximum-likelihood estimators. Regression modeling and model selection are also discussed and case deletion influence diagnostics are developed for the joint posterior distribution based on the functional Bregman divergence, which includes ψ-divergence and several others, divergence measures, such as the Itakura–Saito, Kullback–Leibler, and χ² divergence measures. Performance of our approach is illustrated in artificial, real apple cultivation experiment data, related to apple cultivation.     

The Time-Crunch Paradox

Previous research has shown little difference in the average leisure time of men and women. This finding is a challenge to the second shift argument, which suggests that increases in female labor market hours have not been compensated by equal decreases in household labor. This paper presents time-use and leisure satisfaction data for a variety of western European countries, and shows that accounting for socio-economic factors that differ between men and women is vital for understanding gender differences. We find that working mothers have leisure levels that are much lower than those of working fathers and singles. Working mothers are also most likely to report the least satisfaction with free time. Finding that time stress and leisure time are positively correlated within socio-demographic groups suggests that the second shift argument is still valid, and that feelings of time stress are indeed associated with the lack of leisure time.