Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the servitization path: a conceptual framework and a case study from the capital goods industry

Performing servitisation requires choice consistency in terms of manufacturing structure, service structure, and the coupling between them. In this paper, we rely on the manufacturing strategy and service innovation literature to build a conceptual framework in order to investigate a servitisation path in industry. This framework aims at describing both the product-oriented production structure and the service-oriented production structure, at key points of a firm’s history. We use this framework within a case study from the capital goods industry, and show its relevance as a support for the diagnosis of consistencies or inconsistencies in strategic choices relating to the design of the product-service production system throughout time.
Research Note: Tourism Expenditure and all-Inclusive Packages – the case of a Mature Mediterranean Destination

Nowadays, all-inclusive packages represent one of the top holiday choices for tourists visiting mature Mediterranean sun-and-sand destinations. Compared to other types of board, all-inclusive packages suppose a change in the way tourists purchase services. This research note analyses the changing patterns of expenditure caused by all-inclusive packages. For that purpose, an empirical analysis is applied to the case of the Balearic Islands, one of the leading Mediterranean destinations. The main findings are twofold: first, compared to other types of board, all-inclusive packages lead to a reduction in the destination's revenue from tourism. Second, all-inclusive packages are causing a significant change in the distribution of tourist expenditure among economic agents. In particular, compared to other types of board, spending in the country of origin is higher for all-inclusive tourists, while spending in the destination is substantially lower.
An investigation of ISO 9000 adoption in Saudi Arabia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the results from a survey on ISO 9000 certified manufacturing companies in Saudi Arabia.Design/methodology/approach – An empirical survey of 175 certified manufacturing firms in Saudi Arabia. This study is focused on the benefits achieved from ISO 9000 implementation, level of satisfaction with the standard, the anticipated steps after ISO 9000 implementation, factors influencing the choice of registration agencies and the associated problems with registration agencies.Findings – Certified firms in Saudi Arabia have performed well in their registration process and have benefited from ISO implementation. This could be due to the high level of interest in the area of quality, as most customers request quality or a certificate to prove existence of quality products/services.Research limitations/implications – For effective implementation of the standard in other organizations, the study recommended that organizations should plan carefully, measuring internal.
Technical and allocative efficiencies of small-scale cassava growers in five selected local government areas of Cross River State.

In this paper, the single equation estimation technique using the ordinary least square (OLS) multiple approach was used to estimate the relationship between farm size and such factors as Capital, Labour and Education of Small Scale Cassava growers in five Local Government Areas of Cross River State. In addition, technical and allocative efficiencies as well as resource elasticities were estimated based on the results of the specified production functions. The R2 (which is the explanatory power) for the production was . 71. For the estimated marginal value product functions, the R2 ranged from . 29 to . 40. Two of the explanatory variables in the production function, land and labour were significant at the 95% confidence level. The results of the marginal value products functions indicated an inverse relationship between productivity and farm size while technical and allocative efficiencies for land, show that the relatively smaller farm sizes were more efficient. Resource elasticities were also found to be inelastic implying that strategies aimed at decreasing resource prices to improve productivity of cassava growers would have minimal effect. Global Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences Volume , No 1 January (2001) pp. 37-42 KEY WORDS: Technical, Allocative, Productivity, efficiency.
Prolonged Membrane Depolarization Enhances Midbrain Dopamine Neuron Differentiation via Epigenetic Histone Modifications

Understanding midbrain dopamine (DA) neuron differentiation is of importance, because of physiological and clinical implications of this neuronal subtype. We show that prolonged membrane depolarization induced by KCl treatment promotes DA neuron differentiation from neural precursor cells (NPCs) derived from embryonic ventral midbrain (VM). Interestingly, the depolarization‐induced increase of DA neuron yields was not abolished by L‐type calcium channel blockers, along with no depolarization‐mediated change of intracellular calcium level in the VM‐derived NPCs (VM‐NPCs), suggesting that the depolarization effect is due to a calcium‐independent mechanism. Experiments with labeled DA neuron progenitors indicate that membrane depolarization acts at the differentiation fate determination stage and promotes the expression of DA phenotype genes (tyrosine hydroxylase [TH] and DA transporter [DAT]). Recruitment of Nurr1, a transcription factor crucial for midbrain DA neuron development, to the promoter of TH gene was enhanced by depolarization, along with increases of histone 3 acetylation (H3Ac) and trimethylation of histone3 on lysine 4 (H3K4m3), and decreases of H3K9m3 and H3K27m3 in the consensus Nurr1 binding regions of TH promoter. Depolarization stimuli on differentiating VM‐NPCs also induced dissociation of methyl CpG binding protein 2 and related repressor complex molecules (repressor element‐1 silencing transcription factor corepressor and histone deacetylase 1) from the CpG sites of TH and DAT promoters. Based on these findings, we suggest that membrane depolarization promotes DA neuron differentiation by opening chromatin structures surrounding DA phenotype genes and inhibiting the binding of corepressors, thus allowing transcriptional activators such as Nurr1 to access DA neuron differentiation gene promoter regions. STEM CELLS 2011;29:1861–1873
Inflation and Real Interest

THE theory of interest under inflation needs further investigation. Irving Fisher's analysis, which concluded that the money rate of interest rises by the anticipated rate of inflation or falls by the anticipated rate of deflation, was subjected to attack by Keynes: "The mistake lies in supposing that it is the rate of interest on which prospective changes in the value of money will directly react, instead of the marginal efficiency of a given stock of capital. "' Fisher himself seems to have had misgivings about the empirical reliability of his explanation and presented evidence suggesting that the adjustment of money interest was only partial, concluding:
Financial engine or glorified back office? Dublin's International Financial Services Centre going global

Summary Considerable geographical analysis has been directed towards understanding the emergence and development of ‘world cities’ and their role in the coordination of the global economy. In particular, there has been an emphasis on exploring the character and nature of financial services located in these centres. In examining global centres,‘other’ places are often implicitly constructed as peripheries. Yet these ‘peripheries’ have been experiencing significant transformations in the nature of their integration into the global economy. In this paper, I chart the rise of Dublin's International Financial Services Centre as an example of a regulated site that has emerged as a niche centre in international corporate and financial transactions.
Policy Failure: The Non-Reform of American Health Care

of government-funded Medicare and Medicaid programmes there have been marked problems of cost, of quality and of access. Despite numerous piecemeal initiatives these problems have, if anything, worsened. The cost explosion places the USA comfortably at the top of every league table of spending in 1989 health care consumed about £ 1300 per head, compared to Britain’s £550 and neighbouring Canada’s £1000. The quality of both doctors and treatments is a cause for concern, and researchers have questioned the medical necessity for much that is provided. Access to health care has deteriorated, with sharp rises in the numbers of uninsured and of seriously underinsured. This article briefly reviews the more significant of the piecemeal attempts to tackle these problems (for a more detailed analysis, see Wood, 1990), concluding that the prognosis for their future success is poor. It goes on to examine a number
Value Relevance of IAS 27 (2003) Revision on Presentation of Non-Controlling Interest: Evidence from Hong Kong

This study investigates the value relevance of the IAS 27 Consolidated and Separate Financial Statements (2003) revision, which requires the presentation of non-controlling interest as components of equity and earnings. The investigation is carried out in the context of companies publicly listed in Hong Kong during 2004–2006 where IAS 27 (2003) is replaced by the local but word-for-word equivalent standard of HKAS 27 (2004). The results of this study provide strong evidence that the revision has significant value relevance in changing investors' perception about non-controlling interest, which is no longer perceived as liabilities. Investors have apparently not been confused by the revised presentation of non-controlling interest within equity and continue to associate company values only with the equity amount actually owned by the parent company's shareholders. The results of this study give support for the accounting regulator's first move towards the economic unit theory of consolidated financial statements.
Resources, Political Support, and Citizen Participation in Environmental Policy: A Reexamination of Conventional Wisdom

A study of a citizens' advisory council is used to reexamine a long-standing proposition, referred to here as the resources hypothesis, drawn from the participation literature. The hypothesis proposes that the effectiveness of citizen participation mechanisms will be enhanced by increased access to resources (such as funding and technical assistance). The council considered here is involved in the environmental management of the marine oil trade in Alaska, and has greater access to resources than any other council examined in the extant literature. However, this council has experienced uneven success in securing the implementation of its proposals for policy change. The results suggest that the success of a participatory mechanism in a given policy domain depends not only on its internal resources, but also on external political support from other groups with authority (or influence) within that policy domain.
Why are the Effects of Recent Oil Price Shocks so Small?

Recent oil price shocks have relatively small effects on real economic activity and inflation compared to the experiences of the seventies and the early eighties. In this paper we analyse possible reasons for these phenomena using the example of the German economy. At first, by estimating a VAR-model and calculating impulse responses to an oil price shock it is confirmed that the macroeconomic effects have become much smaller. Moreover, our simulations show that oil price hikes are more closely related to global economic activity since the early nineties.Then, to get a deeper understanding of the structural changes which are responsible for these results we utilize a new Keynesian open economy model. It becomes obvious that the small effects of the recent oil price shocks on the German economy can be explained by a combination of a reduced energy cost share and good luck in terms of a strong growing global economy. Hence, if global economic growth decreases, pure oil price shocks may still have substantial effects on the German economy, even if the energy pricevulnerability has been reduced.These results should be valid also for other oil importing countries, at least from a qualitative point of view.
Non-Market Valuation Techniques: The State of the Art

This paper presents individual overviews of the current issues and innovations regarding the application of the following non-market valuation techniques: contingent valuation, choice experiments, travel cost method, and hedonic pricing. Each technique is described conceptually and theoretically, followed by a discussion ofcurrent research, a critique, sample applications, and suggested additional reading.
Inferring U.S. Tax Liability from Financial Statement Information

Abstract: Using a multi‐year matched tax return‐financial statement data set, this study builds empirical models that infer U.S. tax liability on the corporate tax return from publicly available financial statement disclosures, including those of Statement on Financial Accounting Standards No. 109, Accounting for Income Taxes. Results show that current U.S. tax expense, the tax benefit from stock options, current‐year tax cushion accrual, consolidation book‐tax differences, and R&D are informative in inferring actual tax, while intraperiod tax allocation is not. Additionally, the sign of pretax book income and the existence of net operating loss carryforwards are useful partitioning variables in estimating actual tax. In general, for every dollar of current U.S. tax expense reported on the financial statements, approximately $0.70 is reported in U.S. tax liability on the tax return. The models are validated using a holdout sample, providing support for the notion that public parties can reliably use these.
Do Internal and International Remittances Matter to Health, Education and Labor of Children? The Case of Vietnam

Using data from Vietnam Household and Living Standard Surveys in 2006 and 2008, the paper estimates the effect of the receipt of international remittances and internal remittances on education, labor and healthcare utilization of children in Vietnam. It shows that there are no statistically significant effects of receipt of remittances on school enrolment of children as well as child labor. However, receiving international remittances helps children increase the number of completed grades by around 2 percent of the average completed grade for children. Both international and internal remittances are positively associated with the number of outpatient health care contacts.
The Propagation of U.S. Shocks to Canada: Understanding the Role of Real Financial Linkages

This paper examines the transmission of U.S. real and financial shocks to Canada and, in particular, the role of financial frictions in affecting the transmission of these shocks. These questions are addressed within the Bank of Canada's Global Economy Model (de Resende et al. forthcoming), a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking sector and a detailed role for financial frictions. We find that U.S. financial shocks, as well as real shocks, have important effects on the Canadian economy. Moreover, financial frictions on both the demand and supply sides of credit amplify the first round impact of all types of U.S. shocks on the U.S. economy, as well as the second round impact on Canada. Real-financial linkages also increase the persistence of the Canadian response to U.S. shocks. We find that the interaction between the endogenous response of commodity prices and U.S. financial frictions plays an important role in the propagation of U.S. shocks to the Canadian economy. Finally, real-financial linkages also help to generate the positive cross correlation between domestic demand in the United States and Canada observed in the data, which is difficult to explain with a model where the transmission of shocks between countries is only based only on trade.
Risk and liberal peace: democratisation as risk management

This paper argues that democratisation is characterised by risk management. Democratisation aims not only to manage the risks to global security believed to emerge from the borderlands. Rather, as a complex of depoliticised strategies, democratisation advances a set of technocratic solutions to administer local populations who are constructed as risky, in particular, prone to conflict and extremism. Yet, efforts to manage risk beget new risks to be managed, rendering democratisation a self-defeating and interminable project. This interminability perpetually defers democracy for (‘riskised’) local populations that are constructed as unfit for democracy; thus, democratisation emerges as a quasi-permanent modality of global governance. This article reviews risk in democratisation discourse through three illustrative examples: the discourses of electoral risk, the risk of freedom and the risk of inclusion.
Race and Gender Differences Under Federal Sentencing Guidelines

Using data from the United States Sentencing Commission, we examine how judicial biases may have influenced sentences during the era of the Federal criminal sentencing guidelines. Our utility maximization model of judicial sentencing preferences leads to a partially censored ordered probit model that accounts for mass points in the sentencing distribution that occur at the upper and lower guideline limits and at sentences involving no prison time. Our results indicate that racial- and gender-based discrepancies exist, even after controlling for circumstances such as the severity of the offense and past criminal history.
Factors controlling renin in man.

THE FIELD related to the renin-angiotensin system has received great impetus in the last few years because of the accumulating evidence which demonstrates the direct and specific effect of angiotensin on aldosterone secretion and because of the availability of more specific, accurate, sensitive and reproducible methods for measurement of arterial angiotensin levels and of peripheral blood renin activity levels. Recent work from our laboratory strongly suggests that there is a very close relationship between, on one hand, the renin-angiotensin system, and, on the other hand, sodium regulation, some hypertensive entities, and most conditions characterized by significant changes in aldosterone secretion.1-7Studies concerning possible factors controlling renin in man assume therefore great importance. In this presentation, we wish to describe our studies concerning three possible factors: (1) sodium intake or excretion, (2) angiotensin, and (3) prolonged and excessive aldosterone secretion. Methods and Subjects The procedure used for measurement of peripheral
A Retrospective Evaluation of European Financial Management (1995-2008)

We provide a retrospective evaluation of European Financial Management (EFM) from 1995 to 2008. In 14 years, EFM has published a total of 333 articles, with 564 authors from 299 academic and non-academic institutions. The authors and institutions represent 26 different countries. Two interesting results emerge from this analysis. First, although EFM is a young finance journal, it has achieved a highly respectable status among all finance journals. In fact, EFM has surpassed a number of well-established finance journals in its research impact. Second, consistent with its mission, EFM has published articles whose authors have European affiliations and research content. Nonetheless, we find that EFM is the publication outlet of authors outside the European region as well. The rising readership and variety of articles published suggest that EFM is a general finance journal that has done very well in serving the interests of the finance profession for the last 14 years.
A More Human Way to Play Computer Chess.

The idea of dynamic move chains has been described in a preceding paper [13]. Re-using an earlier piece of search allows the tree to be forward-pruned, which is known to be dangerous, because that can remove new information which would only be realised through a more exhaustive search process. This paper has added to the forward-pruning technique by using 'Move Tables' that can act in the same way as Transposition Tables, but for moves not positions. They use an efficient memory structure and has put the design into the context of short and long-term memories. The long-term memory uses a play path with weight reinforcement, while the short-term memory can be immediately added or removed. Therefore, 'long branches' can play a short path, before returning to a full search at the resulting leaf nodes. Automatic feature analysis is now central to the search algorithm, where key squares and related squares can be generated automatically and used to guide the search process. Also using the analysis, if a search result is inferior, it can re-insert un-played moves that cover these key squares, thereby correcting those tactical errors. In particular, a type of move that the forward-pruning will fail on is recognised and a solution to that problem is suggested. This process reduces some gains made by forward-pruning but has created an intelligent framework that could make it more reliable. This has completed the theory of an earlier paper and resulted in a more human-like approach to searching for a chess move.
Suppression of miR-184 in malignant gliomas upregulates SND1 and promotes tumor aggressiveness.

BACKGROUND Malignant glioma is an aggressive cancer requiring new therapeutic targets. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression post transcriptionally and are implicated in cancer development and progression. Deregulated expressions of several miRNAs, specifically hsa-miR-184, correlate with glioma development. METHODS Bioinformatic approaches were used to identify potential miR-184-regulated target genes involved in malignant glioma progression. This strategy identified a multifunctional nuclease, SND1, known to be overexpressed in multiple cancers, including breast, colon, and hepatocellular carcinoma, as a putative direct miR-184 target gene. SND1 levels were evaluated in patient tumor samples and human-derived cell lines. We analyzed invasion and signaling in vitro through SND1 gain-of-function and loss-of-function. An orthotopic xenograft model with primary glioma cells demonstrated a role of miR-184/SND1 in glioma pathogenesis in vivo. RESULTS SND1 is highly expressed in human glioma tissue and inversely correlated with miR-184 expression. Transfection of glioma cells with a miR-184 mimic inhibited invasion, suppressed colony formation, and reduced anchorage-independent growth in soft agar. Similar phenotypes were evident when SND1 was knocked down with siRNA. Additionally, knockdown (KD) of SND1 induced senescence and improved the chemoresistant properties of malignant glioma cells. In an orthotopic xenograft model, KD of SND1 or transfection with a miR-184 mimic induced a less invasive tumor phenotype and significantly improved survival of tumor bearing mice. CONCLUSIONS Our study is the first to show a novel regulatory role of SND1, a direct target of miR-184, in glioma progression, suggesting that the miR-184/SND1 axis may be a useful diagnostic and therapeutic tool for malignant glioma.
Promoting business with corporate gifts – major issues and empirical evidence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how corporate gifts are an important tool in the marketing communication mix.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is divided into two parts. It first reviews the literature of corporate gifts and incentives, focusing on major issues in the use of corporate gifts: marketing issues, practical considerations, and ethical and cultural concerns. In the second part, it presents a survey in the UK airline industry.Findings – Corporate gifts are found to be used mainly as a means of enhancing corporate image and creating goodwill. They are also used to help reinforce other elements in the marketing communication mix such as advertising and sales promotion.Originality/value – Illustrates the important role that corporate gifts and incentives play in the marketing communication mix.