Effects of ultrasonic and sonic scaling on surfaces of tooth‑colored restorative materials: An in vitro study

Objective: The effects of sonic and ultrasonic scalings (USSs) on the surface roughness of nanohybrid, flowable, and polyacid-modified resin composites and conventional glass ionomer cement were examined, and the effectiveness of repolishing on the scaled material surfaces was determined.Materials and Methods: The surface roughness of each sample was measured three times before and after each scaling and after repolishing, and the data were analyzed using repeated measuresanalysis of variance, Tukey’s multiple comparisons, and paired t-tests by a statistical program.Results: Although sonic and USS both significantly increased the surface roughness of all the tooth-colored materials, USS roughened the surfaces of all the test materials more than SS did. Hence, USS may detrimentally affect tooth-colored restorative materials, especially conventional glass ionomers and compomers. Repolishing decreased the surface roughness of all the materials to near their baseline levels.Conclusions: On the basis of these results, the repolishing of restoration surfaces is strongly recommended after dental scalings.Keywords: Repolishing, sonic scaling, tooth‑colored dental materials, ultrasonic scalin

Investigation of Polishing Abilities of Undergraduates and Postgraduates by Using Various Systems on Composite Materials

Background: The purpose of dental education is to enable students to gain the knowledge and skills to provide the best service to their patients upon graduation. In order to achieve this, students need to work with a sufficient number of cases and use current materials throughout their education. Aim: The aim of this in vitro study, conducted in 2017, was to examine the surface roughness of two types of composites prepared with different polishing systems, constructed by either undergraduate or doctoral students. Methods: Bulk-fill (Filtek Bulk Fill Posterior) and nano-hybrid (Ceram.x One Universal) composites were polished using single-step (OneGloss Set) and multi-step (Sof-Lex System) systems. The finishing and polishing procedures were performed by ten dental undergraduate students and ten doctoral students. Average surface roughness values (Ra, µm) were measured using a profilometer. Data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (α = 0.05). Results: No statistically significant differences in Ra values were noted between operators with different levels of experience. Surface roughness was higher in the samples prepared using the single-step system than in those prepared using the multi-step system for both sample types tested in this study. Conclusion: Practitioner ability does not affect the performance of polishing systems. Regardless of the composite type, the single-step polishing system produces rougher surfaces than the multi-step system

Supply-Demand Interaction in the Formation of Freight Rates: China’s Trade Volume as Demand Side in the Dry Bulk Market

Freight revenues are a fundamental objective of the maritime industry, and provide a baseline for stakeholders to plan their current strategies and future investments. Reduction of uncertainty-induced risk is therefore essential for predicting market prospects and for achieving sustainable growth for sector participants. This can be achieved by conceiving the formation of freight rates as well as the macro variables that have the greatest impact on rates. This study aims to contribute to the existing freight rate formation literature by empirically testing the supply–demand balance of China, one of the world’s largest economies. The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) has been selected as a measure of freight rates, trade volume of China has been selected as a demand-side indicator and the dry bulk fleet has been selected as a supply-side indicator in the model. It has been hypothesized that a larger trade volume has the effect of increasing freight rates, while an increasing fleet capacity has the effect of reducing freight rates. Correlation and regression analyses have been applied to test the econometric relationships between variables. The results of the study have confirmed the hypotheses, and it has been found that freight rates reacted more vigorously to changes in the dry bulk fleet, which forms the supply side

Employee Stock Ownership and Financial Performance in European Countries: The Moderating Effects of Uncertainty Avoidance and Social Trust

This study investigates how the effect of employee stock ownership on financial performance may hinge on the diverse cultural and societal contexts of European countries. Based on agency and national culture theories, we hypothesize that the positive relationship between employee stock ownership and return on assets (ROA) is stronger in those nations with lower uncertainty avoidance and higher social trust. Using a multisource, time‐lagged, large‐scale dataset of 1,741 firms from 21 countries in Europe, our multilevel, random coefficient modeling analysis found evidence for these hypotheses, suggesting that uncertainty avoidance and social trust serve as important contextual cues in predicting the linkage between employee stock ownership and financial performance. Our supplemental analysis with distinction between the managerial and nonmanagerial employee stock ownership further indicates managerial employee stock ownership has a direct positive effect on ROA. Although nonmanagerial employee stock ownership had a nonsignificant association with ROA, the relationship was positive and significant when uncertainty avoidance was low and social trust was high. This research contributes to the existing literature by illuminating some of the contextual influences altering the effectiveness of employee stock ownership. Our findings also offer practical suggestions for effectively using employee stock ownership

The evaluation of vitamin K status in children with febrile seizure

Background: Febrile seizure is the most common neurological disorder in childhood. The exact pathophysiology of febrile seizures is unknown. Recent studies showed the role of vitamin K in nonhematological and inflammatory disorders. This study aimed to investigate the serum vitamin K levels in children with febrile seizures. Aims: To evaluate vitamin K levels in children with febrile seizures. Study Design: Prospective case-control study. Methods: This multicenter study examined representative populations in 8 different cities in Turkey between April 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019. Blood samples were taken from all children at presentation. Vitamin K1, vitamin K2, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin 1 beta, and interleukin 6 levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: A total of 155 children were included in the study—84 children with febrile seizures and 71 children in febrile control group. Serum vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 levels were also higher in children with febrile seizures than in the controls. The results of statistical analysis showed that vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 levels were correlated with tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin 1 beta, and interleukin 6 levels. The median vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 levels of children experiencing their first febrile seizure were higher than those in children with recurrent febrile seizures. Type of febrile seizure has no effect on serum vitamin K1 and vitamin K2 levels. Conclusion: In children with febrile seizures, vitamin K levels are higher than those in the control group. These new findings may contribute to elucidating the etiopathogenesis of febrile seizures

Efeito de diferentes aplicações clínicas nas propriedades físico-mecânicas de resinas compostas

Although clinicians use fluoride agents to reduce the occurrence of caries, and surface sealing agents to protect composite restorations, the effects of these agents on composite resins have not yet been investigated. The goal of this study was to determine the effect of different surface applications (fluoride or surface sealant) on resin composites with different organic structures (Siloranes, Sonicfill, 3M Z550, Kalore). In this study, 120 discs and 120 bars made of composite resin were stored in water for three months before being thermally aged by cycling between 5°C and 55°C for 10,000 cycles. The discs were 15 mm in diameter and 1 mm thick; the bars were 25 × 2 × 2 mm. The surface sealant and fluoride were applied to the specimens, and evaluations were performed after 24h. Initial and final calculations were performed for flexural strength, microhardness, roughness, gloss, water sorption, and solubility. Silorane composite showed the lowest water sorption levels (p <0.05) for both initial and aged groups. Silorane and SonicFill composite groups showed the lowest solubility (p <0.05). Both before and after aging, the SonicFill group showed the highest values of flexural strength and microhardness. Silorane showed the highest roughness and lowest gloss values. Lower water sorption and solubility rates were seen on materials fabricated from hydrophobic monomers. High water sorption and solubility degrades the mechanical and surface properties. Fluoridation and surface sealant application can alter the surface properties but do not have any effect on the mechanical properties.RESUMO: Embora os clínicos utilizem agentes de flúor para reduzir a ocorrência de cáries e agentes de vedaçãode superfície para proteger restaurações compostas, os efeitos desses agentes sobre as resinas compostas ainda não foram investigados. O objetivo deste estudo foi determinar o efeito de diferentes aplicações de superfície (fluoreto ou selante de superfície) em resinas compostas com diferentes estruturas orgânicas (Siloranes, Sonicfill, 3M Z550, Kalore). Neste estudo, 120 discos e 120 barras de resina composta foram armazenados em água por três meses antes de serem envelhecidos termicamente por ciclos alternados entre 5 °C e 55 °C por 10.000 ciclos. Os discos tinham 15 mm de diâmetro e 1 mm de espessura; as barras eram 25 × 2 × 2 mm. O selante de superfície e o flúor foram aplicados nos espécimes e as avaliações foram realizadas após 24 horas. Cálculos iniciais e finais foram realizados para resistência à flexão, microdureza, rugosidade, brilho, sorção de água e solubilidade. O compósito de silorano apresentou os menores níveis de sorção de água (p <0,05) para os grupos inicial e envelhecido. Os grupos compostos Silorane e SonicFill apresentaram a menor solubilidade (p <0,05). Tanto antes quanto depois do envelhecimento, o grupo SonicFill apresentou os maiores valores de resistência à flexão e microdureza. Silorane apresentou a maior rugosidade e menores valores de brilho. Baixas taxas de sorção e solubilidade da água foram observadas em materiais fabricados a partir de monômeros hidrofóbicos. A alta sorção e solubilidade da água degrada as propriedades mecânicas e de superfície. A fluoretação e a aplicação de selante de superfície podem alterar as propriedades da superfície, mas não afetam as propriedades mecânicas.Istanbul Universit

Zero-shot, One Kill: BERT for Neural Information Retrieval

[Background]: The advent of bidirectional encoder representation from trans- formers (BERT) language models (Devlin et al., 2018) and MS Marco, a large scale human-annotated dataset for machine reading comprehension (Bajaj et al., 2016) that made publicly available, led the field of information retrieval (IR) to experience a revolution (Lin et al., 2020). The retrieval model based on BERT of Nogueira and Cho (2019), by the time they published their paper, became the top entry in the MS Marco passage-reranking leaderboard, surpassing the previous state of the art by 27% in MRR@10. However, training such neural IR models for different domains than MS Marco is still hard because neural approaches often require a vast amount of training data to perform effectively, which is not always available. To address the problem of the shortage of labelled data a new line of research emerged, training neural models with weak supervision. In weak supervision, given an unlabelled dataset labels are generated automatically using an existing model and then a machine learning model is trained upon the artificial “weak“ data. In case of weak supervision for IR, the training dataset comes in the form of a tuple (query, passage). Dehghani et al. (2017) in their work used the AOL query logs (Pass et al., 2006), which is a set of millions of real web queries, and BM25 to retrieve the relevant passages for each of the user queries. A drawback with this approach is that it is hard to obtain query logs for every single different domain. [Objective]: This thesis proposes an intuitive approach for addressing the shortage of data in domains with limited or no data at all through transfer learning in the context of IR. We leverage Wikipedia’s structure for creating a Wikipedia-based generic IR training dataset for zero-shot neural models. [Method]: We create the “pseudo-queries“ by concatenating the titles of Wikipedia’s articles along with each of their title sections and we consider the associated section’s passage as the relevant passage of the pseudo-queries. All of our experiments are evaluated on a standard collection: MS Marco, which is a large scale web collection. For our zero-shot experiments, our proposed model, called “Wiki“, is a BERT model trained on the artificial Wikipedia-based dataset and the baseline is a default BERT model without any additional training. In our second line of experiments, we explore the benefits gained by pre-fine- tuning on the Wikipedia-based IR dataset and further fine-tuning on in-domain data. Our proposed model, "Wiki+Ma", is a BERT model pre-fine-tuned in the Wikipedia-based dataset and further fine-tuned in MS Marco, while the baseline is a BERT model fine-tuned only in MS Marco. [Results]: Results regarding our first experiments show that our BERT model trained on the Wikipedia-based IR dataset, called "Wiki", achieves a performance of 0.197 in MRR@10, which is about +10 points more in comparison to a BERT model with default weights; in addition, results in the development set indicate that the “Wiki“ model performs better than BERT model trained on in-domain data when the data is between 10k-50k instances. Results regarding our second line of experiments show that pre-fine-tuning on the Wikipedia-based IR dataset benefits later fine-tuning steps on in-domain data in terms of stability. [Conclusion]: Our findings suggest that transfer learning for IR tasks by leveraging the generic knowledge incorporated in Wikipedia is possible, though more experimentation is needed to understand its limitations in comparison with the traditional approaches such as the BM25.