Audit Opinion and Earnings Quality: Evidence from Korea

This study examines whether the decrease in qualified opinions is due to improved accruals quality. The proportion of qualified opinions has been declining in Korea for about 10 years. However, it has not been reported that earnings quality has improved. We analyze this contradictory relationship using two models. We find that Korean firms’ accruals quality has no association with unqualified opinions. This means that the increasing trend in unqualified opinions is occurring regardless of earnings quality, although audit opinion chiefly depends on it. Thus, our results suggest that more researches are required to determine why qualified opinions are declining. Keywords: audit opinion; earnings quality; accruals DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-30-02 Publication date:October 31st 202

Socioeconomic Costs of Overactive Bladder and Stress Urinary Incontinence in Korea

Purpose We quantified and described the economic burden of overactive bladder and stress urinary incontinence in Korea. We calculated direct costs by identifying public and private data sources that contain population-based data on resource utilization by patients with stress urinary incontinence and overactive bladder. Methods For estimating indirect costs (productivity loss), the human capital approach was applied. Data were collected from several institutes, including the Health Insurance Review Agency. Results The estimated total economic cost in treating overactive bladder was 117 billion Korean Won (KRW, the currency of South Koea) in 2006 and 145 billion KRW in 2007. The estimated total cost in treating stress urinary incontinence was 122 billion KRW in 2006 and 59 billion KRW in 2007. Conclusions By quantifying the total economic costs of overactive bladder and stress urinary incontinence, this study provides an important perspective in Korea. Because the average age of the Korean population is rapidly increasing, this study provides important information on the direct and indirect costs of overactive bladder and stress urinary incontinence for an aging society

Association between shift work and obesity among female nurses: Korean Nurses’ Survey

Background: Shift work has been hypothesized as a risk factor for obesity. In this study, we investigated the association between current shift work and body mass index (BMI) among female nurses in Korea. The relationship between duration of shift work and BMI of the participants was also evaluated. Methods: This cross-sectional survey evaluated participants in the Korean Nurses’ Survey, conducted from October to December 2011, using web-based self-administered questionnaires. A total of 9,989 nurses were included among 10,000 who registered on the survey web site (5,287 shift workers and 4,702 non-shift workers). Current shift workers were divided into tertiles of shift work duration (0.08–3.00 years, n = 1,732; 3.08–6.75 years, n = 1,731; and 6.83–38.00 years, n = 1,686). The BMI thresholds of overweight and obesity were ≥23 kg/m2 and ≥25 kg/m2, respectively. Data were analyzed using SPSS software. Results: Mean participant age was 33.2 ± 8.6 years and the mean BMI was 20.9 ± 2.5 kg/m2. There were statistically significant differences in current smoking status, regular drinking habit, dietary habits, regular exercise, sleep problems and self-perceived health status according to duration of shift work. The overall prevalence of overweight/obesity (18.6%) and obesity (7.4%) increased significantly as shift work duration increased from the lowest to highest tertile (P for trend <0.001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed no association between current shift work and BMI. However, after adjusting for potential confounders, the participants with the longest duration of shift work were 1.63 (95% CI, 1.22–2.17) times more likely to be overweight or obese than those with the shortest duration. There was a significant positive association between obesity and shift work duration in the unadjusted analysis; however, it was attenuated and no longer significant in the multivariate model. Conclusions: The duration of shift work was positively associated with prevalence of overweight/obesity in nurses in Korea. Although these findings need to be confirmed in prospective studies, they suggest that special attention should be paid to female nurses with a long duration of shift work

Carpe Diem: On the Evaluation of World Knowledge in Lifelong Language Models

In an ever-evolving world, the dynamic nature of knowledge presents challenges for language models that are trained on static data, leading to outdated encoded information. However, real-world scenarios require models not only to acquire new knowledge but also to overwrite outdated information into updated ones. To address this under-explored issue, we introduce the temporally evolving question answering benchmark, EvolvingQA - a novel benchmark designed for training and evaluating LMs on an evolving Wikipedia database, where the construction of our benchmark is automated with our pipeline using large language models. Our benchmark incorporates question-answering as a downstream task to emulate real-world applications. Through EvolvingQA, we uncover that existing continual learning baselines have difficulty in updating and forgetting outdated knowledge. Our findings suggest that the models fail to learn updated knowledge due to the small weight gradient. Furthermore, we elucidate that the models struggle mostly on providing numerical or temporal answers to questions asking for updated knowledge. Our work aims to model the dynamic nature of real-world information, offering a robust measure for the evolution-adaptability of language models.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables; accepted at NeurIPS Syntheticdata4ML workshop, 202

High-fidelity 3D Human Digitization from Single 2K Resolution Images

High-quality 3D human body reconstruction requires high-fidelity and large-scale training data and appropriate network design that effectively exploits the high-resolution input images. To tackle these problems, we propose a simple yet effective 3D human digitization method called 2K2K, which constructs a large-scale 2K human dataset and infers 3D human models from 2K resolution images. The proposed method separately recovers the global shape of a human and its details. The low-resolution depth network predicts the global structure from a low-resolution image, and the part-wise image-to-normal network predicts the details of the 3D human body structure. The high-resolution depth network merges the global 3D shape and the detailed structures to infer the high-resolution front and back side depth maps. Finally, an off-the-shelf mesh generator reconstructs the full 3D human model, which are available at https://github.com/SangHunHan92/2K2K. In addition, we also provide 2,050 3D human models, including texture maps, 3D joints, and SMPL parameters for research purposes. In experiments, we demonstrate competitive performance over the recent works on various datasets.Comment: code page : https://github.com/SangHunHan92/2K2K, Accepted to CVPR 2023 (Highlight

Correlation of hypoxia inducible transcription factor in breast cancer and SUVmax of F-18 FDG PET/CT

BACKGROUND: Tumor hypoxia induces the expression of several genes via the hypoxia-inducible transcription factor-1 alpha (HIF-1a). It is associated with the prognosis of several cancers. We studied the immunohistochemical expression of HIF-1a in patients with invasive ductal cancer (IDC) of the breast and the possible correlation with the maximum standardized uptake value of the primary tumor (pSUVmax) as well as other biological parameters. Prognostic significance of pSUVmax and expression of HIF-1a for the prediction of progression-free survival (PFS) was also assessed. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Two-hundred seven female patients with IDC who underwent pretreatment fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography (F-18 FDG PET/CT) were enrolled. The pSUVmax was compared with clinicopathological parameters including estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), axillary lymph node (LN) metastasis, stage and HIF-1a expression. The prognostic value of pSUVmax for PFS was assessed using the Kaplan-Meier method. RESULTS: pSUVmax was significantly higher in patients with HIF-1a expression ≥ 2 compared to patients with HIF-1a expression &lt; 2 (5.2 ± 4.5 vs. 3.7 ± 3.1, p = 0.008). pSUVmax was also significantly higher in higher stage (p &lt; 0.000001), ER-negative tumors (p &lt; 0.0001), PR-negative tumors (p = 0.0011) and positive LN metastasis (p = 0.0013). pSUVmax was significantly higher in patients with progression compared to patients who were disease-free (6.8 ± 4.4 vs. 4.1 ± 3.7, p = 0.0005). A receiver-operating characteristic curve demonstrated a pSUVmax of 6.51 to be the optimal cutoff for predicting PFS (sensitivity: 53.6%, specificity: 86.0%). Patients with high pSUVmax (&gt; 6.5) had significantly shorter PFS compared to patients with low pSUVmax (p &lt; 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: pSUVmax on pretreatment F-18 FDG PET/ CT reflect expression of HIF-1a and can be used as a good surrogate marker for the prediction of progression in patients with IDC. The amount of FDG uptake is determined by the presence of glucose metabolism and hypoxia in breast cancer cell

GOChase-II: correcting semantic inconsistencies from Gene Ontology-based annotations for gene products

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a controlled vocabulary for describing genes and gene products. In spite of the undoubted importance of GO, several drawbacks associated with GO and GO-based annotations have been introduced. We identified three types of semantic inconsistencies in GO-based annotations; semantically redundant, biological-domain inconsistent and taxonomy inconsistent annotations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To determine the semantic inconsistencies in GO annotation, we used the hierarchical structure of GO graph and tree structure of NCBI taxonomy. Twenty seven biological databases were collected for finding semantic inconsistent annotation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The distributions and possible causes of the semantic inconsistencies were investigated using twenty seven biological databases with GO-based annotations. We found that some evidence codes of annotation were associated with the inconsistencies. The numbers of gene products and species in a database that are related to the complexity of database management are also in correlation with the inconsistencies. Consequently, numerous annotation errors arise and are propagated throughout biological databases and GO-based high-level analyses. GOChase-II is developed to detect and correct both syntactic and semantic errors in GO-based annotations.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We identified some inconsistencies in GO-based annotation and provided software, GOChase-II, for correcting these semantic inconsistencies in addition to the previous corrections for the syntactic errors by GOChase-I.</p

Effects of fibrin-binding oligopeptide on osteopromotion in rabbit calvarial defects

Purpose: Fibronectin (FN) has been shown to stimulate bone regeneration in animal models. The aim of this study was to evaluate the capacity of bovine bone mineral coated with synthetic oligopeptides to enhance bone regeneration in rabbit calvarial defects. Methods: Oligopeptides including fibrin-binding sequences of FN repeats were synthesized on the basis of primary and tertiary human plasma FN structures. Peptide coated and uncoated bone minerals were implanted into 10 mm calvarial defects in New Zealand white rabbits, and the animals were sacrificed at 4 or 8 weeks after surgery. After specimens were prepared, histologic examination and histomorphometric analysis were performed. Results: At 4 weeks after surgery, the uncoated groups showed a limited amount of osteoid formation at the periphery of the defect and the oligopeptide coated groups showed more osteoid formation and new bone formation in the center of the defect as well as at the periphery. At 8 weeks, both sites showed increased new bone formation. However, the difference between the two sites had reduced. Conclusions: Fibrin-binding synthetic oligopeptide derived from FN on deproteinized bovine bone enhanced new bone formation in rabbit calvarial defects at the early healing stage. This result suggests that these oligopeptides can be beneficial in reconstructing oral and maxillofacial deformities or in regenerating osseous bone defects. ⓒ 2010 Korean Academy of Periodontology.

CIB1 protects against MPTP-induced neurotoxicity through inhibiting ASK1.

Calcium and integrin binding protein 1 (CIB1) is a calcium-binding protein that was initially identified as a binding partner of platelet integrin αIIb. Although CIB1 has been shown to interact with multiple proteins, its biological function in the brain remains unclear. Here, we show that CIB1 negatively regulates degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in a mouse model of Parkinson\u27s disease using 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). Genetic deficiency of the CIB1 gene enhances MPTP-induced neurotoxicity in dopaminergic neurons in CIB1(-/-) mice. Furthermore, RNAi-mediated depletion of CIB1 in primary dopaminergic neurons potentiated 1-methyl-4-phenyl pyrinidium (MPP(+))-induced neuronal death. CIB1 physically associated with apoptosis signal-regulating kinase 1 (ASK1) and thereby inhibited the MPP(+)-induced stimulation of the ASK1-mediated signaling cascade. These findings suggest that CIB1 plays a protective role in MPTP/MPP(+)-induced neurotoxicity by blocking ASK1-mediated signaling