Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human resource management careers: different paths for men and women?

This paper focuses on the career progression of human resource professionals. The perspective is that of graduates from a postgraduate programme which conferred a professional qualification in human resource management. The study explored whether the acquisition of a HR professional qualification had the same impact upon career progression for male and female managers or whether other factors have a more significant effect, regardless of formal qualifications. The findings suggest that the careers of men and women do differ, with men receiving more internal promotions, while women were more likely to seek career progression in another organisation and to be less successful in terms of earnings. The women were much more likely than their male counterparts to perceive barriers to their careers such as lack of role models and difficulties with self‐confidence. This raises issues of curriculum design regarding raising the confidence and aspirations of female managers.
Contribution of Bacillus Isolates to the Flavor Profiles of Vanilla Beans Assessed through Aroma Analysis and Chemometrics

Colonizing Bacillus in vanilla (Vanilla planifolia Andrews) beans is involved in glucovanillin hydrolysis and vanillin formation during conventional curing. The flavor profiles of vanilla beans under Bacillus-assisted curing were analyzed through gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, electronic nose, and quantitative sensory analysis. The flavor profiles were analytically compared among the vanilla beans under Bacillus-assisted curing, conventional curing, and non-microorganism-assisted curing. Vanilla beans added with Bacillus vanillea XY18 and Bacillus subtilis XY20 contained higher vanillin (3.58% ± 0.05% and 3.48% ± 0.10%, respectively) than vanilla beans that underwent non-microorganism-assisted curing and conventional curing (3.09% ± 0.14% and 3.21% ± 0.15%, respectively). Forty-two volatiles were identified from endogenous vanilla metabolism. Five other compounds were identified from exogenous Bacillus metabolism. Electronic nose data confirmed that vanilla flavors produced through the different curing processes were easily distinguished. Quantitative sensory analysis confirmed that Bacillus-assisted curing increased vanillin production without generating any unpleasant sensory attribute. Partial least squares regression further provided a correlation model of different measurements. Overall, we comparatively analyzed the flavor profiles of vanilla beans under Bacillus-assisted curing, indirectly demonstrated the mechanism of vanilla flavor formation by microbes.
Term-dependent confidence for out-of-vocabulary term detection

Within a spoken term detection (STD) system, the decision maker plays an important role in retrieving reliable detections. Most of the state-of-the-art STD systems make decisions based on a confidence measure that is term-independent, which poses a serious problem for out-of-vocabulary (OOV) term detection. In this paper, we study a term-dependent confidence measure based on confidence normalisation and discriminative modelling, particularly focusing on its remarkable effectiveness for detecting OOV terms. Experimental results indicate that the term-dependent confidence provides much more significant improvement for OOV terms than terms in-vocabulary.
Proximity in agreement errors

Across languages subject-verb agreement errors have been established when subjects are producing complex (NP PP) noun-phrases (see Bock, 1995, for an overview). Very recently, Haskell & MacDonalds (2002) proposed a locality-based principle, the principle of proximity, to explain a variety of agreement errors in production. They base they argument partly on preferences in verb number marking in sentences with disjunctive noun phrases (e.g., "the hat and the gloves" vs. "the gloves and the hat"), where they found a preference for number marking that matched the local noun. We will present a series of five written production experiments on German constructions with disjunctive Subjects, NP PP Subjects and Subject-Object-verb subordinate clauses. We will show that although comparable effects can be established for German sentences with disjunctive Subjects a proximity based principle fails to cover major portions of the results. We propose an account that highlights the dynamics of plural-feature activation and percolation. Introduction It is well known by now that occasionally subjects erroneously produce plural verbs following a plural modifier in constructions like (1; quoted form Bock & Miller, 1991). (1) The readiness of our conventional forces are at an all-time low. The mechanism underlying this error is attributed to the marked plural feature percolating up the tree too far (Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998). This account is substantiated by the fact that no comparable singular/plural mismatch effect for constructions with marked plural heads has been established so far. ha l-0 01 42 95 7, v er si on 1 23 A pr 2 00 7 Author manuscript, published in " (2004)"
The combination of dehydroepiandrosterone, transdermal testosterone, and growth hormone as an adjuvant therapy in assisted reproductive technology cycles in patients aged below 40 years with diminished ovarian reserve

Objective: To evaluate to the efficacy of testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) and growth hormone (GH) supplementations in patients with diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) in assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles. Materials and Methods: A retrospective cohort including 33 women with 81 ART cycles were aged and ovarian reserve matched 52 women with 102 conventional in vitro fertilization (IVF)/intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) protocol. Administration of DHEA for 12 weeks and transdermal testosterone for 4 weeks as pretreatment adjuvant and luteal start GH in DOR patient treatment arm compared to conventional IVF/ICSI cycles. Results: The number of follicles >14 mm, number of oocytes, number of metaphase 2 oocytes and fertilisation rate were significantly higher in ISIK protocol (IP). The clinical pregnancy rate (CPR) per embryo transfer of the IP was 38.2% (13/34). The cancellation rate of cycles decreased significantly from 54.5 % (24/44) to 8.1% (3/37) with the IP, while the OPR was 35.3% (12/34). Conclusions: Our study has shown that even the poorest responders could achieve clinical pregnancy after inducing ovarian folliculogenesis with a combination of transdermal testosterone, DHEA and GH.
Optimum Estimation via Gradients of Partition Functions and Information Measures: A Statistical-Mechanical Perspective

In continuation to a recent work on the statistical-mechanical analysis of minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation in Gaussian noise via its relation to the mutual information (the I-MMSE relation), here we propose a simple and more direct relationship between optimum estimation and certain information measures (e.g., the information density and the Fisher information), which can be viewed as partition functions and hence are amenable to analysis using statistical-mechanical techniques. The proposed approach has several advantages, most notably, its applicability to general sources and channels, as opposed to the I-MMSE relation and its variants which hold only for certain classes of channels (e.g., additive white Gaussian noise channels). We then demonstrate the derivation of the conditional mean estimator and the MMSE in a few examples. Two of these examples turn out to be generalizable to a fairly wide class of sources and channels. For this class, the proposed approach is shown to yield an approximate conditional mean estimator and an MMSE formula that has the flavor of a single-letter expression. We also show how our approach can easily be generalized to situations of mismatched estimation.
Working in Indigenous Contexts: Self‐Reported Experiences of Non‐Indigenous Australian Psychologists

Despite assertions in the literature that psychologists adopt culturally inappropriate strategies for working with Indigenous clients, there is little empirical evidence about this. The aim of this study was to document the self‐reported experiences of non‐Indigenous psychologists working with Indigenous clients, the factors that they felt constrain these interactions, and the clinical, assessment and communication strategies they perceived as effective in Indigenous contexts. Structured interviews were held with 23 psychologists, 18 females and five males, with age groups ranging from 20–30 to 50+. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that participants experienced contradictions between the typical Western white psychologists' ways of interacting with clients, which they had been taught and the typical ways in which relationships are structured in Indigenous communities. The results suggest that the Western model of psychological training does not work very well in Indigenous contexts, and that psychologists working in Indigenous contexts have to work out their own methods on a trial‐and‐error basis. This points to the need for more systematic cultural competence training. However, there is a lack of research into the effectiveness of psychological intervention from the viewpoints of Indigenous clients themselves.
$RLC$ Bridge Based on an Automated Synchronous Sampling System

An RLC bridge based on an automated synchronous sampling system has been developed using commercially available high-resolution analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. This bridge allows the comparison of any kind of impedance standards in the four-terminal-pair configuration at frequencies between 50 Hz and 20 kHz within a range from 1 Ω to 100 kΩ. An automatic balance of the bridge is carried out using a downhill simplex algorithm. Consistency checks have been realized by comparing resistance, inductance, and capacitance standards at different frequencies. The consistency of the measured voltage ratio is better than 20 μV/V over the whole frequency range and even smaller than 5 μV/V around 1 kHz. Finally, the results of the calibration of a 10-nF capacitance standard have been compared to those obtained using a commercial high-accuracy capacitance bridge. The difference is smaller than the commercial bridge specifications over the whole frequency range.
The Dance Teacher: The Ideal Case and Daily Reality.

The dance teacher is a central figure in the world of dance; the impact of the dance teacher on the career of a young dancer can be decisive. A dance teacher is more often than not described as authoritarian. The present study investigated the various dimensions of the dance teacher's behavior. To map the teacher's behavior, a dance-adapted version of the Leadership Scale for Sport (LSS; Chelladurai & Saleh, 1980) was constructed as the Leadership Scale for Dance (LSD). The LSD was administered to both teachers and students of the dance department of the Amsterdam Theatre School. In addition, dance teachers were asked to rate daily class behaviors of the themselves as teachers, and dance students were asked to rate their current dance teacher. While the characteristics of the ideal teacher were very similar for both teachers and students, large differences appeared in the rating of daily class activities. Ratings of the teachers and dance classes are interpreted within the framework given by the LSD scale.
Organizational Climate as Antecedent of Commitment, Effort and Entrepreneurial Orientation in Mexican Family and Non-Family firms

El objetivo de esta investigacion fue determinar si la variable de clima organizacional esta asociada con variables de compromiso organizacional, orientacion emprendedora y esfuerzo. Los instrumentos de medicion se aplicaron a 839 sujetos de pequenas, medianas y grandes empresas divididas en miembros de empresas familiares (521) y miembros de empresas no familiares (318). Los resultados indican que el clima organizacional, en las seis dimensiones consideradas, es una variable que influye significativamente en los cinco factores de la orientacion emprendedora considerados en este estudio. Se identifico que el factor de autonomia arroja un alto porcentaje de varianza explicada (23.7%) considerando como variables independientes las dimensiones de clima organizacional. En los factores de pro actividad, innovacion, toma de riesgos y competitividad se identifico un bajo porcentaje de la varianza explicada.
An Association Thesaurus for Information Retrieval

Although commonly used in both commercial and experimental information retrieval systems, thesauri have not demonstrated consistent benefits for retrieval performance, and it is difficult to construct a thesaurus automatically for large text databases. In this paper, an approach, called PhraseFinder, is proposed to construct collection-dependent association thesauri automatically using large full-text document collections. The association thesaurus can be accessed through natural language queries in INQUERY, an information retrieval system based on the probabilistic inference network. Experiments are conducted in INQUERY to evaluate different types of association thesauri, and thesauri constructed for a variety of collections.
The causes of rapid infant mortality decline in England and Wales, 1861-1921. Part II.

Changes in adult mortality in Italy for cohorts born between 1882 and 1953 are analysed and interpreted by means of two different statistical models. The first, an Age–Period–Early Mortality (APEM) model, is employed to analyse the possible relationships between adverse conditions during the first 15 years of life and subsequent mortality. It is shown that higher mortality early in life is associated with higher mortality up to age 45 and lower mortality at latter ages. Finally, possible links between the observed decline in early mortality and the evolution of adult mortality are analysed and discussed.
Neighborhood Déjà Vu: Classification in Metropolitan Cleveland, 1970-2000

The classification of 40 years of neighborhood data for the Cleveland, OH, region reveals five types of neighborhoods—Struggling, Struggling African American, Stability, New Starts, and Suburbia. The way in which these neighborhoods appear, disappear, and reappear in different locations throughout the region and throughout the study period gives rise to the term neighborhood déjà vu. It aptly describes how a changing neighborhood may seem to transition to something entirely different, but in reality is simply becoming another established type of neighborhood. Cluster analysis acts upon demographic, economic, and housing data for census tracts from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 to identify these neighborhood types. What makes this analysis unique is that the clustering procedure operates on each tract in each of the census years. Thus, each neighborhood is treated as four individual observations: one for each of the census years. By defining each variable relative to its census year mean, the data are comparable across census years, allowing for neighborhoods of one time period to cluster with neighborhoods from another time period. Thus, the five neighborhood types are spread not only throughout the region, but also throughout the study period. This yields the ability to trace through time and space the rise (or fall) or concentration (or diffusion) of any of the resulting neighborhoods. Of particular concern is that spatially, traditional Suburbia neighborhoods are migrating farther and farther from the urban core, and that numerically, they are disappearing from the region altogether—as of 2000, only 55% of 1970's Suburbia neighborhoods remained.
An examination of social presence to increase interaction in online classes

Social presence, one of the most critical factors in technology-based learning, was not originally examined to explain learning in the computer environment. It was initially studied in face-to-face, audio and closed-circuit television encounters. However, it has recently been found that in order to increase the level of online interaction, the degree of social presence must be increased. Previous studies have defined social presence as the degree of person-to-person awareness. This is not a clear definition of social presence as used in the mediated classroom. The purpose of this study was to redefine social learning theory for the online learning environment. Three dimensions of social presence and the privacy factor were examined in this study through the use of quantitative and qualitative methods to redefine social presence theory. Three dimensions of social presence—social context, online communication and interactivity—emerged with the privacy factor playing an important part. However, the privacy factor did not correlate with social presence theory. Further studies should be done to examine risk-taking behaviors in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Social presence in the online environment was found to be the degree of feeling, perception and reaction of being connected to another intellectual entity through a text-based encounter using CMC. An increase in the level of online interaction occurs with an ideal level of social presence, which must be fostered through a better understanding of the learners, selecting the appropriate CMC medium, and applying appropriate instructional engagement.
Multicenter survey on hospital-acquired pneumonia and the clinical efficacy of first-line antibiotics in Japan.

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to investigate the pathophysiology of hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) and the clinical efficacy of its first-line treatment and to examine the validity of "the Japanese Respiratory Society (JRS) Guidelines for management of HAP". METHODOLOGY The observational survey was conducted during the period of June 2002-May 2004 and patients with HAP were prospectively surveyed using the consecutive enrollment method. A total of 1,356 patients from 254 hospitals nationwide were analyzed. Clinical response to first-line antibiotics was evaluated at the end of the medication. RESULTS The 30-day mortality rate was 19.8%. Patients were classified into four groups according to the JRS guideline criteria. There were remarkable variances in the number of cases of each group. Mild/moderate pneumonia with no risk factors (group I) accounted for 0.3% of all cases. The mortality rate tended to be higher, as clinical conditions became more serious (group II < III < IV). Alternatively, though categorized in the same group (group III), there was a difference in the mortality rate by the severity of pneumonia (severe cases 32.2% vs. moderate cases 11.0%). First-line medication using carbapenems accounted for 61.7% of total cases. The efficacy rate of guideline-concordant therapy was significantly higher than that of guideline-discordant therapy (54.2% vs. 41.7%). CONCLUSIONS This is the first nationwide study on HAP in Japan. The clinical characteristics and prognosis of HAP were elucidated. Review of the current classification of the disease is required and these results provide valuable information for the next revision of the guidelines.
Dietary Vitamin D Intake in Advanced CKD/ESRD

In healthy individuals, vitamin D produced in the skin or derived from nutritional sources is converted to 25‐hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) in the liver, and then 1,25‐dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25[OH]2D) by 1α‐hydroxylase in the kidney. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is accompanied by a progressive decline in the ability to produce 1,25(OH)2D; thus, replacement of this hormonal form of vitamin D has been the focus of therapeutic interventions to prevent and treat complications such as hypocalcemia, and secondary hyperparathyroidism. New research suggests that conversion of 25(OH)D to 1,25(OH)2D outside of the kidney may have important biological roles beyond those traditionally ascribed to vitamin D. 25(OH)D levels have increasingly been linked to important clinical outcomes in CKD. This article reviews vitamin D metabolism, emerging new roles for vitamin D, and data surrounding the potential importance of nutritional sources of vitamin D in the management of patients with CKD.
Prognostic impact of Ki-67 in patients with gastric cancer—the importance of depth of invasion and histologic differentiation

Abstract Ki-67 protein is a cellular marker for proliferation. The role of Ki-67 as a prognostic biomarker has not been established in gastric cancer. The present study was performed to investigate the significance of Ki-67 expression as a biomarker in early gastric cancer (EGC). With tissue microarray for 320 patients with gastric cancer, we performed immunohistochemical staining for Ki-67. Its clinical significance was analyzed with adjustment via the propensity score-matching. For validation, we performed bootstrap resampling. The median follow-up duration was 72 months (range: 3–120 months). Ki-67-high group showed worse prognosis than Ki-67-low group in EGC (5-YSR, 78.9% vs 92.0%, P = .018), but not in advanced gastric cancer (AGC) (5-YSR, 58.5% vs 59.2%, P = .951). Interestingly, in the patients with well-differentiated histology, prognosis for Ki-67-high group was considerably worse than that for Ki-67-low group (5-YSR, 67.0% vs 94.4%, P = .012), but not in those with moderately differentiated (P = .504) and poorly differentiated histology (P = .905). In this cohort, there was a strong correlation between the proportion of EGC and well-differentiated histology (r = 0.215, P = .002). Multivariate analysis also revealed that the high-Ki-67 expression serves as a poor prognostic factor in EGC (HR 4.346, 95% CI 1.397–13.515, P = .011), especially in the well-differentiated histology, but not in all the patients (P = .171). Bootstrap resampling internally validated this result (P = .011). This study suggests that Ki-67 expression may be a good biomarker for prognosis prediction for EGC with well-differentiated histologic type.
FAINT FUZZY STAR CLUSTERS IN NGC 1023 AS REMNANTS OF MERGED STAR CLUSTER COMPLEXES

In the lenticular galaxy NGC 1023 a third population of globular clusters (GCs), called faint fuzzies (FFs), was discovered next to the blue and red GC populations by Larsen & Brodie. While these FFs have colors comparable to the red population, the new population is fainter, larger (Reff>7 pc) and, most importantly, shows clear signs of corotation with the galactic disk of NGC 1023. We present N-body simulations verifying the hypothesis that these disk-associated FFs are related to the young massive cluster complexes (CCs) observed by Bastian et al. in M51, who discovered a mass–radius relation for these CCs. Our models have an initial configuration based on the observations from M51 and are placed on various orbits in a galactic potential derived for NGC 1023. All computations end up with a stable object containing 10%–60% of the initial CC mass after an integration time of 5 Gyr. A conversion to visual magnitudes demonstrates that the resulting objects cover exactly the observed range for FFs. Moreover, the simulated objects show projected half-mass radii between 3.6 and 13.4 pc, in good agreement with the observed FF sizes. We conclude that objects like the young massive CCs in M51 are likely progenitors of the FFs observed in NGC 1023.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERSONALITY TRAITS AND ONLINE SHOPPING MOTIVATIONS

In this study we investigated the relationship between personality traits and online shopping motivations by comparing Big Five model of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1987) and motivations for Internet shopping. Data were collected from 216 participants using a questionnaire. Regression analysis results indicated that openness was positively associated with adventure and idea motivation, and conscientiousness was positively associated with convenience motivation. Furthermore, extraversion was positively associated with sociality motivation, and neuroticism was positively related to lack of sociality motivation. Implications and further research directions are then discussed.