OBJECTIVES Variations in sex hormones and the calcium balance can influence bone health in men. The present study aimed to examine the relationship between the calcaneal speed of sound and biochemical determinants of bone mass, such as sex hormones, parathyroid hormones and serum calcium. METHODS Data from 549 subjects from the Malaysian Aging Male Study, which included Malay and Chinese men ...

Current question answering systems typically combine methods based in information retrieval and information extraction. Such methods leverage the speed of the resulting algorithms and the presence of information redundancy, but few systems use methods based on linguistic information beyond the word level. In this paper we present a study of the impact of the syntactic and semantic information i...

Reputation indexes of employment protection have proven popular constructs in studies of the covariation of labor market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable rank order in such measures of the stringency of employment protection. We critique this reputation in two ways: first, by offering a modicum of 'corrective' institutional detail on the nature of employm...

Real Time Delphi (RTD) is an advanced online implementation of the Delphi Method (DM), designed to speed up the period of time needed to conduct a survey using nowadays internet technology. However its overall design is still very restricted and does not leverage the full potential for collaboration of this new Information and Communications Technology (ICT) channel. In this paper we propose tw...

The leverage effect has become an extensively studied phenomenon that describes the (usually) negative correlation between stock returns and volatility. All the previous studies have focused on the origin and properties of the leverage effect. Even though most studies of the leverage effect are based on cross-sectional calibration with parametric models, few of them have carefully studied its e...

Speculative episodes typically involve leverage. For example, the well known tulipmania episode was accompanied by the introduction of foward contracts which allowed speculators to take leveraged positions in tulip bulbs. More recently, the Great Crash of 1929 was exacerbated by leveraged trusts which used leverage to buy stocks. These leveraged trusts could in turn be bought on margin which al...

Cable Operators have an unprecedented opportunity to leverage an existing asset (big data) to better understand subscriber behavior, improve quality of experience (QOE) for their subscribers, and generate new revenue streams. The challenge so far has been to address the rapidly growing rates of data volumes, which are inturn being driven by the explosive rise of IP content, tablets & smartphone...