Hyperuricemia is a risk factor for gout. It has been well observed that large proportion of individuals with hyperuricemia have never had gout flare(s), while some patients can normuricemia. This raises puzzle the real role serum uric acid (SUA) in occurrence flares. As molecule its dual effects vivo antioxidant properties as being an inflammatory promoter, it placed delicate position balancing...

In English, “puns” are usually perceived as a subclass of “jokes”. In Japanese, however, this is not necessarily true. In this paper we investigate whether Japanese native speakers perceive dajare (puns) as jooku (jokes). We first summarize existing research in the field of computational humor, both in English and Japanese, focusing on the usage of these two terms. This shows that in works of J...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results call into question common implicit assumptions that tighter ELBOs are better variational objectives for simultaneous model learning and inference amortization...

Recent work suggests that Cournot oligopolists competing in a spatial model, with a uniform distribution of consumers, agglomerate in the center of the market. In this paper we analyze the robustness of this result with a general symmetric distribution of consumers and show that if the population density is "too thin" at the center of the market, then Cournot competition does not yield spatial ...

Different from the typical findings in the privatization literature, this study of 31 Singapore government-linked companies (GLCs) covering a period from 1975 to1998 shows no significant changes in performance upon share issue privatization. Also, there is no evidence that the GLCs are less profitable than a selected group of non-GLCs that match by size and industry. Taking a buy-andhold strate...