LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Internet-based ICT adoption among SMEs: Demographic versus benefits, barriers, and adoption intention

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the demographic characteristics of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with regards to their patterns of internet-based information and communications technology (ICT) adoption, taking into account the dimensions of ICT benefits, barriers, and subsequently adoption intention. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire-based survey is used to collect data from 406 managers or owners of SMEs in Malaysia. Findings – The results reveal that the SMEs would adopt internet-based ICT regardless of years of business start-up and internet experience. Some significant differences are spotted between manufacturing and service SMEs in terms of their demographic characteristics and internet-based ICT benefits, barriers, and adoption intention. Both the industry types express intention to adopt internet-based ICT, with the service-based SMEs demonstrating greater intention. Research limitations/implications – The paper focuses only on the SMEs in the southern region of Malaysia. Practical implications – The findings offer valuable insights to the SMEs – in particular promoting internet-based ICT adoption for future business success. Originality/value – This paper is perhaps one of the first to comprehensively investigate the relationship between demographic characteristics of SMEs and the various variables affecting their internet-based ICT adoption intention.
Slavery, Institutional Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa, 1400-2000

Can Africa’s current state of under-development be partially attributed to the large trade in slaves that occurred during the Atlantic, Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades? To answer this question, I combine shipping data with historical records that report slave ethnicities and construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa between 1400 and 1913. I find the number of slaves exported from a country to be an important determinant of economic performance in the second half of the 20th century. To correct for potential biases arising from measurement error and unobservable country characteristics, I instrument slave exports using measures of the distance from each country to the major slave markets around the world. I also find that the importance of the slave trade for contemporary development is a result of its detrimental impact on the formation of domestic institutions, such as the security of private property, the quality of the judicial system, and the overall rule of law. This is the channel through which the slave trade continues to matter today. JEL classification: F14; N17; N47; P16
Diabetes, other risk factors, and 12-yr cardiovascular mortality for men screened in the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial.

OBJECTIVE
To assess predictors of CVD mortality among men with and without diabetes and to assess the independent effect of diabetes on the risk of CVD death.


RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
Participants in this cohort study were screened from 1973 to 1975; vital status has been ascertained over an average of 12 yr of follow-up (range 11-13 yr). Participants were 347,978 men aged 35-57 yr, screened in 20 centers for MRFIT. The outcome measure was CVD mortality.


RESULTS
Among 5163 men who reported taking medication for diabetes, 1092 deaths (603 CVD deaths) occurred in an average of 12 yr of follow-up. Among 342,815 men not taking medication for diabetes, 20,867 deaths were identified, 8965 ascribed to CVD. Absolute risk of CVD death was much higher for diabetic than nondiabetic men of every age stratum, ethnic background, and risk factor level--overall three times higher, with adjustment for age, race, income, serum cholesterol level, sBP, and reported number of cigarettes/day (P < 0.0001). For men both with and without diabetes, serum cholesterol level, sBP, and cigarette smoking were significant predictors of CVD mortality. For diabetic men with higher values for each risk factor and their combinations, absolute risk of CVD death increased more steeply than for nondiabetic men, so that absolute excess risk for diabetic men was progressively greater than for nondiabetic men with higher risk factor levels.


CONCLUSIONS
These findings emphasize the importance of rigorous sustained intervention in people with diabetes to control blood pressure, lower serum cholesterol, and abolish cigarette smoking, and the importance of considering nutritional-hygienic approaches on a mass scale to prevent diabetes.
The impact of preprocessing on text classification

Preprocessing is one of the key components in a typical text classification framework. This paper aims to extensively examine the impact of preprocessing on text classification in terms of various aspects such as classification accuracy, text domain, text language, and dimension reduction. For this purpose, all possible combinations of widely used preprocessing tasks are comparatively evaluated on two different domains, namely e-mail and news, and in two different languages, namely Turkish and English. In this way, contribution of the preprocessing tasks to classification success at various feature dimensions, possible interactions among these tasks, and also dependency of these tasks to the respective languages and domains are comprehensively assessed. Experimental analysis on benchmark datasets reveals that choosing appropriate combinations of preprocessing tasks, rather than enabling or disabling them all, may provide significant improvement on classification accuracy depending on the domain and language studied on. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Automatic indexing: an approach using an index term corpus and combining linguistic and statistical methods

This thesis discusses the problems and the methods of finding relevant information in large collections of documents. The contribution of this thesis to this problem is to develop better content analysis methods which can be used to describe document content with
in Women ’ s Studies / Gender Research No . 2 THE ‘ FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY ’ AND WOMEN ’ S HUMAN RIGHTS

An examination of the “feminization of poverty” around the world is approached in terms of the three contributing factors that have been underscored in the women-in-development and gender-anddevelopment (WID/GAD) literature: (1) the growth of female-headed households, (2) intra-household inequalities and bias against women and girls, and (3) neoliberal economic policies, including structural adjustments and the post-socialist market transitions. The growing visibility of women’s poverty, it is argued, is rooted in demographic trends, “cultural” patterns, and political economy. The paper finds cross-regional variation in the economic status of female-headed households, based partly on the social policy or political regime, and partly on women’s access to employment and property. Intra-household inequalities are found to exacerbate the vulnerability of women and girls; the problem may be most severe in parts of South Asia, and may also vary by social class. The paper confirms that the poverty-inducing nature of neoliberal restructuring has been especially severe on women. Although the claim that the majority of the world’s poor are women cannot be substantiated, the disadvantaged position of women is incontestable. If poverty is to be seen as a denial of human rights, it should be recognized that the women among the poor suffer doubly from the denial of their human rights – first on account of gender inequality, second on account of poverty. Therefore, programs to eliminate or alleviate poverty require attention to gender inequality and women’s human rights. 1 This paper is based on a larger study commissioned in 1996 by the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme, for the Human Development Report 1997, which focused on poverty. A version was subsequently published as Occasional Paper 2 by the Women’s Studies Program at Illinois State University (1997), and the Brown Journal of World Affairs, vol. 5, no. 1 (1998): 225-48. This version (October 2004) contains some updates to the earlier material, but the framework and argument remain the same.
Natural language processing

ing Automatic abstracting and text summarization are now used synonymously that aim to generate abstracts or summaries of texts. This area of NLP research is becoming more common in the web and digital library environment. In simple abstracting or summarization systems, parts of text  sentences or paragraphs  are selected automatically based on some linguistic and/or statistical criteria to produce the abstract or summary. More sophisticated systems may merge two or more
Identification of environmental lead sources and pathways in a mining and smelting town: Mount Isa, Australia.

Lead (Pb) concentrations and isotopic compositions from soils, dusts and aerosols from public land and residential lots adjacent to the copper and Pb mine and smelter at Mount Isa, Australia, were examined to understand the sources and risks of environmental Pb exposure. Urban soil samples contain elevated Pb concentrations (mean 1560 mg/kg), of which 45-85% of the Pb is bioaccessible. The Pb isotopic composition of surface soils (0-2 cm), aerosols and dusts ((206)Pb/(207)Pb, (208)Pb/(207)Pb range: 1.049, 2.322-1.069, 2.345) are dominated by Pb derived from the Mount Isa Pb-zinc ore bodies. Underlying soil horizons (10-20 cm) have distinctly different Pb isotopic compositions ((206)Pb/(207)Pb, (208)Pb/(207)Pb range: 1.093, 2.354-1.212, 2.495). Surface soil-, dust- and aerosol-Pb are derived predominantly from smelter emissions and fugitive mining sources and not from in situ weathered bedrock. Remediation strategies should target legacy and ongoing sources of environmental Pb to mitigate the problem of Pb exposure at Mount Isa.
The Sedona Effect : Correlations between Geomagnetic Anomalies , EEG Brainwaves & Schumann Resonance

ABSTRACT Evidence of Sedona magnetic anomaly and brainwave EEG synchronization can be demonstrated with portable equipment on site in the field, during sudden magnetic events. Previously, we have demonstrated magnetic anomaly charts recorded in both known and unrecognized Sedona vortex activity locations. We have also shown a correlation or amplification of vortex phenomena with Schumann Resonance. Adding the third measurable parameter of brain wave activity, we demonstrate resonance and amplification among them. We suggest tiny magnetic crystals, biogenic magnetite, make human beings highly sensitive to ELF field fluctuations. Biological Magnetite could act as a transducer of both low frequency magnetic fields and RF fields.
Accommodation of Diversity in Education: A Human Rights Agenda?

This article examines the current agenda of the international human rights community with regard to the accommodation of religious and linguistic diversity in education and discusses the potential implications for education in the UK.
Some Assembly Required: How Scientific Explanations are Constructed During Clinical Interviews

This article is concerned with commonsense science knowledge, the informally-gained knowledge of the natural world that students possess prior to formal instruction in a scientific discipline. Although commonsense science has been the focus of substantial study for more than two decades, there are still profound disagreements about its nature and origin, and its role in science learning. What is the reason that it has been so difficult to reach consensus? We believe that the problems run deep; there are difficulties both with how the field has framed questions and the way that it has gone about seeking answers. In order to make progress, we believe it will be helpful to focus on one type of research instrument – the clinical interview – that is employed in the study of commonsense science. More specifically, we argue that we should seek to understand and model, on a moment-by-moment basis, student reasoning as it occurs in the interviews employed to study commonsense science. To illustrate and support this claim, we draw on a corpus of interviews with middle school students in which the students were asked questions pertaining to the seasons and climate phenomena. Our analysis of this corpus is based on what we call the mode-node framework. In this framework, student reasoning is seen as drawing on a set of knowledge elements we call nodes, and this set produces temporary explanatory structures we call dynamic mental constructs. Furthermore, the analysis of our corpus seeks to highlight certain patterns of student reasoning that occur during interviews, patterns in what we call conceptual dynamics. These include patterns in which students can be seen to search through available knowledge (nodes), in which they assemble nodes into an explanation, and in which they converge on and shift among alternative explanations.
Insulin Secretion and Its Determinants in the Progression of Impaired Glucose Tolerance to Type 2 Diabetes in Impaired Glucose-Tolerant Individuals

OBJECTIVE
We investigated the effect of early-phase insulin secretion on the incidence of type 2 diabetes in individuals with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) participating in the Finnish Diabetes Prevention Study (DPS). We examined how a lifestyle intervention affected early-phase insulin secretion (ratio of total insulin area under the curve [AUC] and total glucose AUC [AIGR] from 0 to 30 min) during a 4-year follow-up intervention trial and whether AIGR(0-30) response was modified by insulin sensitivity (IS) and obesity.


RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS
A total of 443 participants with IGT originally randomized to a lifestyle intervention or control group were studied. IS and AIGR(0-30) were estimated from an oral tolerance glucose test administered annually during the 4-year follow-up trial and were related to the risk of diabetes onset over a 6-year follow-up.


RESULTS
Lifestyle intervention resulted in higher IS (P = 0.02) and lower unadjusted AIGR(0-30) (P = 0.08) during the 4-year follow-up. A higher IS and a lower BMI during the follow-up were associated with a lower unadjusted AIGR(0-30) during the follow-up, independently of study group (P < 0.001). A greater increase in IS on the median cutoff point of a 0.69 increase was associated with higher IS-adjusted AIGR(0-30) during the follow-up (P = 0.002). In multivariate models, IS and IS-adjusted AIGR(0-30) were both inversely associated with diabetes incidence (P < 0.001). Participants who progressed to type 2 diabetes were more obese and had lower IS and Matsuda IS index-AIGR(0-30) than nonprogressors.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results indicate that the reduction in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes after lifestyle intervention is related to the improvement of IS along with weight loss. Improved IS may also have beneficial effects on preservation of β-cell function.
Possible association between screening BV at the prenatal visit and reduced cervical cerclage: multi-center questionnaire in Hokkaido, Japan.

AIMS
To study the screening frequency for cervical cancer, Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) infection, and bacterial vaginosis (BV) among pregnant women, and to study the association between administration of these three screening tests and performance of cervical cerclage (CC) in Hokkaido during 2004.


METHODS
Questionnaires were mailed to 70 clinics providing prenatal care only and to 113 hospitals providing prenatal care and performing deliveries. Responses were obtained anonymously.


RESULTS
A total of 6744 pregnant women received prenatal care at the 36 responding clinics and 24 050 deliveries were performed at the 56 hospitals. The percentage of clinics that screened all pregnant women for cervical cancer, CT infection or BV was 66.7%, 69.4% and 33.3%, respectively, and the corresponding percentages among the hospitals were 87.5%, 87.5% and 57.1%, respectively. Pregnant women found to have CT infection or BV, were all treated. Screening for cervical cancer or CT infection was not associated with the frequency of CC. On the other hand, screening for BV was significantly associated with the frequency of CC (P = 0.0006). The frequency of emergency CC was 0.8% among women who received prenatal care at hospitals that did not perform BV screening, while it was only 0.2 or 0.3% among women who received prenatal care at hospitals that performed BV screening on all pregnant women or on those women who were suspected of having BV, respectively.


CONCLUSION
Our results suggest that the frequency of emergency CC may be reduced in women who receive BV screening and subsequent treatment of positive cases during pregnancy.
Underwater target classification using wavelet packets and neural networks

In this paper, a new subband-based classification scheme is developed for classifying underwater mines and mine-like targets from the acoustic backscattered signals. The system consists of a feature extractor using wavelet packets in conjunction with linear predictive coding (LPC), a feature selection scheme, and a backpropagation neural-network classifier. The data set used for this study consists of the backscattered signals from six different objects: two mine-like targets and four nontargets for several aspect angles. Simulation results on ten different noisy realizations and for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 12 dB are presented. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of the classifier generated based on these results demonstrated excellent classification performance of the system. The generalization ability of the trained network was demonstrated by computing the error and classification rate statistics on a large data set. A multiaspect fusion scheme was also adopted in order to further improve the classification performance.
A Compact Yagi–Uda Antenna With Enhanced Bandwidth

A three-element compact Yagi-Uda antenna is pro posed that maintains a high absolute gain and low VSWR over a 10% fractional bandwidth with an element spacing of 0.053λ. The proposed Yagi-Uda antenna uses a director and reflector to create a dual resonance and approach superdirectivity at each resonant frequency. By adjusting the reflector and director's resonant frequency, the gain and bandwidth of the antenna can be maximized. The driven element has one folded arm to increase the impedance of the antenna. The reflector and director elements are bowtie de signs to increase the bandwidth. The measured impedance and gain agrees well with the computational model.
Coordination in Software Development

Since its inception, the software industry has been in crisis. As Blazer noted 20 years ago, “[Software] is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive … and has been for the past 20 years” [4]. In a survey of software contractors and government contract officers, over half of the respondents believed that calendar overruns, cost overruns, code that required in-house modifications before being usable, and code that was difficult to modify were common problems in the software projects they supervised [22]. Even today, problems with software systems are common and highly-publicized occurrences.
The efficacy of a blended motivational interviewing and problem solving therapy intervention to reduce substance use among patients presenting for emergency services in South Africa: A randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND
The treatment of substance use disorders is a public health priority, particularly in South Africa where the prevalence of these disorders is high. We tested two peer-counsellor delivered brief interventions (BIs) for risky substance use among adults presenting to emergency departments (EDs) in South Africa.


METHODS
In this randomised controlled trial, we enrolled patients presenting to one of three 24-hour EDs who screened at risk for substance use according to the Alcohol, Smoking, and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST). Eligible patients were randomly allocated to one of three conditions: Motivational Interviewing (MI), blended MI and Problem Solving Therapy (MI-PST) or a Psycho-educational Control Group (CG). The primary outcome was reduction in ASSIST scores at three months follow-up.


RESULTS
Of the 2736 patients screened, 335 met inclusion criteria, were willing to participate in the intervention and were randomised to one of three conditions: 113 to MI, 112 to MI-PST and 110 to CG. ASSIST scores at three months were lower in the MI-PST group than they were in the MI and CG groups (adjusted mean difference of -1.72, 95 % CI -3.36 - -0.08). We recorded no significant difference in ASSIST scores between the CG and MI group (adjusted mean difference of -0.02, 95 % CI -2.01 - 1.96).


CONCLUSION
With the addition of minimal resources, BIs are feasible to conduct in EDs in a low resourced country. These preliminary findings report that MI-PST appears to be an effective BI for reducing substance use among at risk participants. Further research is required to replicate these findings with effort to limit attrition, to determine whether reductions in substance use are persistent at 6 and 12 month follow-up and whether parallel changes occur in other indications of treatment outcomes, such as injury rates and ED presentations.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
This trial registered with the Pan African Clinical Trial Registry (PACTR201308000591418).
Stratigraphic, structural, and metamorphic relationships in the Dansey Pass area, Otago, New Zealand

Abstract In the Dansey Pass area, greywacke, semischist, and schist on the north-eastern margin of the Otago schist arc show a progressive increase in metamorphic grade from prehnite-pumpellyite to greenschist facies, or in terms of textural development, from non-foliated greywacke of textural zone 1 to laminated schist of textural zone 3B. Locally a stratigraphic sequence some 15000 m thick can be recognised, in which the metamorphic grade increases towards the top. The rocks have been affected by four periods of folding. The earliest phase, probably initially penecontemporaneous with the later stages of sedimentation, resulted in steeply dipping strata, overturned throughout extensive areas. Phase II folding may have commenced as the early phase progressed, as early Phase II structures show evidence of soft sediment deformation, although other evidence indicates that Phase II continued until well into the metamorphic event. Isograds and isotects are not folded by Phase II structures, however, indicating...