BACKGROUND Recent research on fertility in industrialized countries focuses primarily on delayed childbearing, despite the facts that large numbers of women continue to enter parenthood at relatively young ages and that early childbearing has been linked to economic disadvantage. OBJECTIVE This cross-national comparative study describes relationships between women’s educational attainment and young age at first birth and evaluates the extent to which these differences have changed over time for women born 1955–1981. METHODS Defining ‘early’ childbearing as the age by which 20% of first births have occurred to women in a given birth cohort and country, we describe differences in early childbearing by educational attainment across three cohorts of women in 20 countries. RESULTS We find a strong negative educational gradient in early childbearing across all 20 countries and some evidence of an increase in the relative prevalence of early childbearing among the least-educated women. In 10 countries, the relative prevalence of early childbearing among women with low education is significantly higher for one or both of the more recent birth cohorts compared to the earliest cohort. However, many countries show no significant change, and in one country (Poland) there is modest evidence of a decreasing educational gap. CONCLUSIONS Evidence that educational differences in early childbearing have grown in some countries is generally consistent with the notion of family bifurcation and ‘diverging destinies’ by socioeconomic status. However, the pattern is not universal and future work should examine the various factors that shape these patterns, including the role of public policies.

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[1] Structural complexity is common at the terminations of earthquake surface ruptures; similar deformation may therefore be expected at the end zones of earthquake ruptures at depth. The 8.2 km long Glacier Lakes fault (GLF) in the Sierra Nevada is a left-lateral strike-slip fault with a maximum observed displacement of 125 m. Within the fault, pseudotachylytes crosscut cataclasites, showing that displacement on the GLF was accommodated at least partly by seismic slip. The western termination of the GLF is defined by a gradual decrease in the displacement on the main fault, accompanied by a 1.4 km wide zone of secondary faulting in the dilational quadrant of the GLF. The secondary faults splay counterclockwise from the main fault trace forming average angles of 39°with the main fault. Slip vectors defined by slickenlines plunge more steeply west for these splay faults than for the GLF. Static stress transfer modeling shows that the orientations of the splays, and the plunge of displacement on those splays, are consistent with displacement on the main fault. The GLF termination structure shows that structural complexity is present at the terminations of faults at seismogenic depths and therefore ruptures that propagate beyond fault terminations, or through step overs between two faults, will likely interact with complex secondary fault structures. Models of dynamic rupture propagation must account for the effect of preexisting structures on the elastic properties of the host rock. Additionally, aftershock distributions and focal mechanisms may be controlled by the geometry and kinematics of structures present at fault terminations.

BackgroundThe aim of this study is to profile the cytokines and immune cells of body fluid from metastatic gastric cancer (mGC), and evaluate the potential role as a prognostic factor and the feasibility as a predictive biomarker or monitoring source for immune checkpoint inhibitor.MethodsBody fluid including ascites and pleural fluid were obtained from 55 mGC patients and 24 matched blood. VEGF-A, IL-10, and TGF-β1 were measured and immune cells were profiled by fluorescence assisted cell sorting (FACS).ResultsVEGF-A and IL-10 were significantly higher in body fluid than in plasma of mGC. Proportion of T lymphocytes with CD69 or PD-1, memory T cell marked with CD45RO, and number of Foxp3+ T regulatory cells (Tregs) were significantly higher in body fluid than those in blood of mGC. Proportion of CD8 T lymphocyte with memory marker (CD45RO) and activation marker (HLA-DR), CD3 T lymphocyte with PD-1, and number of FoxP3+ Tregs were identified as independent prognostic factors. When patients were classified by molecular subgroups of primary tumor, VEGF-A was significantly higher in genomically stable (GS)-like group than that in chromosomal instability (CIN)-like group while PD-L1 positive tumor cells (%) showed opposite results. Monitoring immune dynamics using body fluid was also feasible. Early activated T cell marked with CD25 was significantly increased in chemotherapy treated group.ConclusionsBy analyzing cytokines and proportion of immune cells in body fluid, prognosis of patients with mGC can be predicted. Immune monitoring using body fluid may provide more effective treatment for patients with mGC.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s40425-019-0708-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Among the HTML elements, HTML tables [RHJ98] encapsulate hierarchically structured data (hierarchical data in short) in a tabular structure.HTML tables do not come with a rigid schema and almost any forms of two-dimensional tables are acceptable according to the HTML grammar. This relaxation complicates the process of retrieving hierarchical data from HTML tables. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for retrieving hierarchical data from HTML tables. The proposed approach constructs the content tree of an HTML table, which captures the intended hierarchy of the data content of the table, without requiring the internal structure of the table to be known beforehand. Also, the user of the content tree does not deal with HTML tags while retrieving the desired data from the content tree. Our approach can be employed by (i) a query language written for retrieving hierarchically structured data, extracted from either the contents of HTML tables or other sources, (ii) a processor for converting HTML tables to XML documents, and (iii) a data warehousing repository for collecting hierarchical data from HTML tables and storing materialized views of the tables. The time complexity of the proposed retrieval approach is proportional to the number of HTML elements in an HTML table.