Anatomical Injection Guidelines for Glabellar Frown Lines Based on Ultrasonographic Evaluation

When botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) is injected to treat glabellar frown lines, the corrugator supercilia muscle (CSM) and procerus muscles are the main targets. Although there have been many studies on the treatment of glabellar frown lines, no study has confirmed the dynamic movement under ultrasonography (US). This study examined and evaluated dynamic muscle movements under US, thereby providing more effective BoNT injection guidelines for glabellar frowning. Glabellar frowning was categorized as either Type A or B. Type A is the general frowning pattern in which vertical wrinkles are made by contracting the CSM and procerus muscles (81%, n = 13). On US images, the procerus muscle thickens and the bilateral CSMs contract. Type B is an upward frowning pattern demonstrating upward elevation of vertical wrinkles due to hyperactive contraction of the frontalis muscle during frowning (19%, n = 3). On US images, the hypoechoic frontalis muscle thickens, forming horizontal forehead lines. After BoNT injection into the CSM and frontalis muscle but not the procerus muscle, Type B patterns showed improvements in the vertical crease and horizontal forehead line. Both types showed improvement in glabellar frown lines after conventional injection, but the horizontal forehead line did not improve in Type B. Type B wrinkles improved after additional injections into the frontalis muscle. This study provided novel anatomical findings related to the injection of glabellar frown lines with BoNT. Preliminary analysis and optimized procedures using US will enable more effective and safer injections.

INDIVIDUAL ISSUES OF LEGAL UNDERSTANDING OF FACTORING

The article is devoted to the disclosure of certain issues concerning the understanding of the essence of the category “factoring” as an important component of financial services through the prism of today’s challenges. It is determined that the concept of factoring (financing under the assignment of the right of monetary claim) is not enshrined in civil law. It was stressed that the economic crisis has exacerbated the problem of limiting financial resources and providing quality financial services, which leads to the search and implementation of innovative types of financial services and needs to improve the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, development of credit operations of banks and financial companies standards of the European Union, improving trade conditions in Ukraine. And here, factoring comes in handy, which is an effective tool to accelerate money circulation and increase business efficiency. However, due to the rapid development of factoring in the financial services market – regulations in this area need to be updated and there is a need to introduce new scientific recommendations for its practical application. In the article the essence of factoring is covered in the plane of theory, and also, in the plane of judicial practice. It is noted that among researchers of this issue there is no generalizing concept of this category and understanding the essence of this legal phenomenon through the prism of today’s challenges. Emphasis is placed on the existence of four main concepts of factoring, namely: the assignment of the right of claim; it is a banking operation; this is a type of financial services; this is a separate independent contract type. It is proposed to consider factoring as a complex concept. Particular attention is paid to the indication of the characteristics of financial services, which allows through their prism to highlight factoring transactions.

Some remarks on change and innovation in ancient Near Eastern customary law

The article presents the ways customary law could be gradually changed in the ancient Near East. They included working with existing institutions while modifying their consequences as well as their scope of application with tools such as legal fiction. However, the conservative nature of the ancient oriental culture, as well as that of the scribal education made any sudden, radical modification impossible, and even if a new contract type was created, it would keep the pretense of following a long-established practice.

The Selection of the Best Deal for Sweet Potato Contract Farming under Directing of Multinomial Logit Model: An Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior

The purposes of this study are based upon the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the impact of past experiences of contract farming on selecting a specific type of contract farming in the future and then compare different psychological factors in the TPB for different potential contract farmer statuses. These statuses include homesteaders, farmers from cooperative farms, farmers from production and sales teams, professional farmers, and brokers. The impact of factors in the TPB for a particular contract type on potential contract farmers is further to compute. To this end, data are collected in three major sweet potato production areas in Taiwan. The results show that the farmers’ past contract farming experience does not influence the selection of the contract in the future. As for the selection of contract type, strengthening the perception and motivating the behavioral intention of contract farming for cooperative farms will increase the probability of selecting an unclassified sweet potato size contract. On the other hand, enhancing perceived behavioral control factors and behavioral intention factors for professional farmers and brokers is apt to have a relatively high probability of selecting those types involving the highest amount or the best price to obtain the best deal.

“La donnée n’est pas un donné”: Statistics, Quantification and Democratic Choice

This article investigates the transformation of employment policies in France, Germany, the UK and at European level, problematizing their shift towards governance-driven quantification, which has at its core the quest for efficiency putting equivalence between more and better, and having more for less. Numbers become both targets and evaluators leading to rational optimization of the data produced. This calls democracy into question. Citizens have no say in how they are accounted for. Employment takes on a very different meaning encompassing any job, regardless of wage, working conditions, or contract type. Social criticism movements face the task to produce alternative data relying on democratized procedures and justice expectations. Such data, capable of legitimately counteracting governance-driven quantification, would support another “understanding” of the collective issue at hand.

Loss given default in SME leasing

Leasing provides a fundamental source of firm funding, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. A crucial difference from loans and bonds is that the lessor retains ownership rights of the leased asset during the lease term. This facilitates the asset utilization and work-out process and leads to higher liquidation proceeds. Hence, previous findings on the loan and bond loss given default (LGD) are not transferable to the leasing industry. Our analysis is based on a very granular data set covering a great variety of information on the lessee, the leased asset, as well as contractual and transactional characteristics. We examine novel LGD determinants such as an external credit rating, the lessee’s limited liability, and the number of leased assets and collaterals. Moreover, new results on previously explored factors question earlier findings, for example, on the lease contract type. Most importantly, as proposed by Miller and Töws (J Bank Finance 91:189–201, 2018), we analyze two different LGDs, one based on the asset utilization proceeds, the other on repayments. Our results clearly indicate the crucial importance of this separation when analyzing the drivers of the leasing LGD in detail because several determinants affect these LGDs in different ways. Our study assists both lessors and regulators in assessing the effective risk of lease contracts and enables lessors to enhance their risk management and work-out processes.

The Green Blockchains of Circular Economy

Eco-friendly systems are necessitated nowadays, as the global consumption is increasing. A data-driven aspect is prominent, involving the Internet of Things (IoT) as the main enabler of a Circular Economy (CE). Henceforth, IoT equipment records the system’s functionality, with machine learning (ML) optimizing green computing operations. Entities exchange and reuse CE assets. Transparency is vital as the beneficiaries must track the assets’ history. This article proposes a framework where blockchaining administrates the cooperative vision of CE-IoT. For the core operation, the blockchain ledger records the changes in the assets’ states via smart contracts that implement the CE business logic and are lightweight, complying with the IoT requirements. Moreover, a federated learning approach is proposed, where computationally intensive ML tasks are distributed via a second contract type. Thus, “green-miners” devote their resources not only for making money, but also for optimizing operations of real-systems, which results in actual resource savings.

Divisive jobs: three facets of risk, precarity, and redistribution

A central challenge in understanding public opinion shifts is identifying whose opinions change. Political economists try to uncover this by exploring voters’ economic vulnerability, particularly the relationship between labor-market risk and redistribution preferences. Predominantly, however, such work imputes risk from occupational or sectoral characteristics. Due to within-occupational inequality in exposure to risk, considerable variation remains unexplored. I propose an individual-level, dynamic account of risk inferred from job tenure, contract type, and expectations of job security. These aspects, importantly, account for individual variation in risk and the possibility that one's experience of risk may change across time. The results indicate the usefulness of this approach to risk in understanding changes in social spending preferences.

Type of Employment as a Determinant of Subjective Well-Being: Problems of Comparability of Research Results

The review of empirical studies of the relationship between subjective well-being and the employment type reveals: unlike workers under an open-ended contract, workers with temporary or informal employment show a lower or the same level of subjective well-being, self-employed ones – higher or the same. The results vary depending on the considered indicators of subjective well-being, the criteria for identifying groups of workers, the controlled variables, etc. The use of different models for studying the relationship between subjective well-being and the employment type gives rise to problems of results comparability. Possible sources of contradictions are highlighted in the article. Some of them relate to the measurement of subjective well-being: its indicators vary and are interconnected in different ways with the employment type, have different significance for workers, which may differ not only in the level of subjective well-being, but in the nature of interconnection of its indicators. Another block of methodological difficulties is associated with the classification of workers and their differentiation. Even with the same contract type they are heterogeneous not only in terms of employment conditions, but also in motives and in the nature of subjective well-being. The study of the relationship between the employment type and the subjective well-being of workers requires the development of methodological solutions, including the selection of an informative indicators of subjective well-being, taking into account the structure of the relationship between them, as well as the study of the differentiation of workers and the reconstruction of social types among them.