RATIONALE The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical efficacy and safety of a fixed-dose combination of mometasone furoate/formoterol fumarate (MF/F) administered via a metered-dose inhaler in subjects with moderate-to-very severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). METHODS This multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial had a 26-week treatment period and a 2...

1 Notation and Definitions 2 2 MF Models 2 3 Latent Factors 3 3.1 L2 regularization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.2 Baseline Predictors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 4 SVD++ [4] 6 5 Joint Factorization (JF) Models 7 5.1 Brian’s Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5.2 Eliminating...

Although beef demand improved modestly in 1999, 20 years of declining demand has plagued the beef industry. Inflation-adjusted retail beef prices were collapsing at the same time per capita consumption was declining. The result, beef demand declined precipitously from 1980 through the late 1990s. For example, Purcell’s beef demand index indicates 1998 Choice retail beef prices were 50 percent l...

PURPOSE To compare visual performance with the Biofinity multifocal (MF) contact lens with monovision (MV) with the Biofinity single-vision contact lens. METHODS A crossover study of 20 presbyopic patients was conducted. Patients were randomized first into either an MF or an MV lens for 15 days for each modality, with a washout period between each lens type. Measurements included monocular an...

In this paper we prove a discrete version of Tanaka’s Theorem [19] for the Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator in dimension n = 1, both in the non-centered and centered cases. For the non-centered maximal operator f M we prove that, given a function f : Z→ R of bounded variation, Var(f Mf) ≤ Var(f), where Var(f) represents the total variation of f . For the centered maximal operator M we prove th...

The key factors that distinguish algorithms for nonadiabatic mixed quantum/classical (MQC) simulations from each other are how they incorporate quantum decoherence-the fact that classical nuclei must eventually cause a quantum superposition state to collapse into a pure state-and how they model the effects of decoherence on the quantum and classical subsystems. Most algorithms use distinct mech...

Objective: To compare visual function stability between silicone and hydrophobic acrylic materials of diffractive multifocal intraocular lenses (MF-IOLs). Methods: This retrospective study reviewed clinical records of 10 patients who received a silicone MF-IOL in the first eye and hydrophobic acrylic lens in the fellow eye. Intra-individual differences in logMAR corrected distance visual acuity...

Cardiac fibroblasts, when coupled functionally with myocytes, can modulate the electrophysiological properties of cardiac tissue. We present systematic numerical studies of such modulation of electrophysiological properties in mathematical models for (a) single myocyte-fibroblast (MF) units and (b) two-dimensional (2D) arrays of such units; our models build on earlier ones and allow for zero-, ...

Matrix Factorization (MF) is one of the most popular approaches for recommender systems. Existing MF-based recommendation approaches mainly focus on the prediction of the users’ ratings on unknown items. The performance is usually evaluated by the metric Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). However, achieving good performances in terms of RMSE does not guarantee a good performance in the top-N recomm...

Based on deep VLT/ISAAC JHK photometry, we have derived the presentday mass function of the central starburst cluster NGC3603YC (Young Cluster) in the giant Hii region NGC3603. The effects of field contamination, individual reddening, and a possible binary contribution are investigated. The MF slopes resulting from the different methods are compared, and lead to a surprisingly consistent cluste...