Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ratcheting Effect and the Role of Relative Target S etting

Managers use a variety of information sources to set performance targets. This paper examines two of them: past performance that is associated with the ratcheting effect and the performance of comparable responsibility centers associated with relative target setting (RTS). Using data from 432 branches from 2002 to 2006 of a large travel retailer, we find evidence consistent with the relevance of both phenomena. In particular, we hypothesize that the weight on targets of these two sources of information varies with their information content. Consistent with this argument we find that the weight on targets of past performance and of comparable responsibility centers’ performance varies with the degree of relative target setting, the lifecycle stage of the responsibility center, and the magnitude of previous year’s variance and of the relative performance. Moreover the asymmetry often associated with the ratcheting effect fades as RTS is included.
A near-infrared survey for new low-mass members in α Per

We present a near-infrared ($K^{\prime}$-band) survey of 0.7 square degree area in the α Persei open cluster (age = 90 Myr, distance = 182 pc) carried out with the Omega-Prime camera on the Calar Alto 3.5-m telescope. Combining optical data ( R c and I c ) obtained with the KPNO/MOSA detector and presented in Stauffer et al. (1999) with the $K^{\prime}$ observations, a sample of new candidate members has been extracted from the optical-infrared colour–magnitude diagram. The location of these candidates in the colour–colour diagram suggests that two-thirds of them are actually reddened background giants. About 20 new candidate members with masses between 0.3 and 0.04 $M_{\odot}$ are added to the ~400 known α Per cluster members. If they are indeed α Per members, four of the new candidates would be brown dwarfs. We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the near-infrared survey as compared to the optical selection method. We also describe the outcome of optical spectroscopy obtained with the Twin spectrograph on the Calar Alto 3.5-m telescope for about 30 candidates, including selected members from the optical sample presented in Barrado y Navascues et al. (2002) and from our joint optical/infrared catalogue. These results argue in favour of the optical selection method for this particular cluster.
Motion planning for vision-based stevedoring tasks on industrial robots

This paper proposed an autonomous robot motion planner for industrial robots with a focus on vision-based stevedoring applications. The planning algorithm can be divided into two stages. The first stage generates initial geometric paths in the Cartesian space: with the 3D model of the environment and the picking and placing pose of the robot's wrist obtained by visual system, the planner finds a collision-free path using workspace cell decomposition. The second stage searches for a time-jerk optimal joints trajectories: the planner transforms the path nodes described in the Cartesian space into joints angels in the joints configuration space, then formulates and solves the optimization problem by means of cubic splines. The simulation experiments show the obvious improvement of our method with a contrast to several state-of-art algorithms in this field. And the grasping experiment verifies the practicability and effectiveness of the method on the basis of the embedded visual system and ABB120 type industrial robot.
Antimicrobial Susceptibility of Helicobacter pylori Strains Isolated in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Antimicrobial susceptibility of 120 Helicobacter pylori isolates to metronidazole, tetracycline, clarithromycin, and amoxicillin was determined, and 77.5, 15, 10, and 6.6% of the isolates, respectively, were resistant. Only rdxA inactivation and both rdxA and frxA inactivation were responsible for metronidazole resistance in 66% (8 of 12) and 33% (4 of 12) of the isolates, respectively.
Facile Synthesis of Oleanolic Acid Monoglycosides and Diglycosides

Oleanolic acid and its glycosides are important natural products, possessing various attractive biological activities such as antitumor, antivirus and anti-inflammatory properties. In the present work, fifteen oleanolic acid saponins bearing various saccharide moieties, including 3-monoglycoside, 28-monoglycoside and 3,28-diglycoside, were easily synthesized in high yields. Benzyl was chosen as the protective group for the COOH(28) group, instead of commonly used methyl and allyl, to avoid difficulties in the final deprotection. Alkali-promoted condensation of the carboxylic acid with bromo-glycosides was found to be more efficient in the synthesis of 28-glycosides. Two approaches were investigated and proved practicable in the preparation of 3,28-diglycosides. This method is suitable for preparing oleanolic acid glycosides with structural diversity for extensive biological evaluation and structure-activity relationship study, and it also apply new idea for the corresponding synthetic methods to the glycoside derivatives of other triterpenoid.
Measuring Motivation Orientation and School Readiness in Children Served by Head Start

Abstract Currently, the most widely used direct assessment of motivation orientation for preschoolers has little to no research on its reliability and validity. This study examined the test–retest reliability and concurrent and predictive validity of this direct assessment. Results highlight potential limitations of this measure in capturing motivation orientation in preschoolers from low-income families.
Molecular targets in urothelial cancer: detection, treatment, and animal models of bladder cancer

Bladder cancer remains one of the most expensive cancers to treat in the United States due to the length of required treatment and degree of recurrence. In order to treat bladder cancer more effectively, targeted therapies are being investigated. In order to use targeted therapy in a patient, it is important to provide a genetic background of the patient. Recent advances in genome sequencing, as well as transcriptome analysis, have identified major pathway components altered in bladder cancer. The purpose of this review is to provide a broad background on bladder cancer, including its causes, diagnosis, stages, treatments, animal models, as well as signaling pathways in bladder cancer. The major focus is given to the PI3K/AKT pathway, p53/pRb signaling pathways, and the histone modification machinery. Because several promising immunological therapies are also emerging in the treatment of bladder cancer, focus is also given on general activation of the immune system for the treatment of bladder cancer.
Glycogen Synthase Isoforms in Synechocystis sp. PCC6803: Identification of Different Roles to Produce Glycogen by Targeted Mutagenesis

Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 belongs to cyanobacteria which carry out photosynthesis and has recently become of interest due to the evolutionary link between bacteria and plant species. Similar to other bacteria, the primary carbohydrate storage source of Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 is glycogen. While most bacteria are not known to have any isoforms of glycogen synthase, analysis of the genomic DNA sequence of Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 predicts that this strain encodes two isoforms of glycogen synthase (GS) for synthesizing glycogen structure. To examine the functions of the putative GS genes, each gene (sll1393 or sll0945) was disrupted by double cross-over homologous recombination. Zymogram analysis of the two GS disruption mutants allowed the identification of a protein band corresponding to each GS isoform. Results showed that two GS isoforms (GSI and GSII) are present in Synechocystis sp. PCC6803, and both are involved in glycogen biosynthesis with different elongation properties: GSI is processive and GSII is distributive. Total GS activities in the mutant strains were not affected and were compensated by the remaining isoform. Analysis of the branch-structure of glycogen revealed that the sll1393− mutant (GSI−) produced glycogen containing more intermediate-length chains (DP 8–18) at the expense of shorter and longer chains compared with the wild-type strain. The sll0945− mutant (GSII−) produced glycogen similar to the wild-type, with only a slightly higher proportion of short chains (DP 4–11). The current study suggests that GS isoforms in Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 have different elongation specificities in the biosynthesis of glycogen, combined with ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase and glycogen branching enzyme.
Feature Selection and Fault Classification of Reciprocating Compressors using a Genetic Algorithm and a Probabilistic Neural Network

Reciprocating compressors are widely used in industry for various purposes and faults occurring in them can degrade their performance, consume additional energy and even cause severe damage to the machine. Vibration monitoring techniques are often used for early fault detection and diagnosis, but it is difficult to prescribe a given set of effective diagnostic features because of the wide variety of operating conditions and the complexity of the vibration signals which originate from the many different vibrating and impact sources. This paper studies the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) and neural networks (NNs) to select effective diagnostic features for the fault diagnosis of a reciprocating compressor. A large number of common features are calculated from the time and frequency domains and envelope analysis. Applying GAs and NNs to these features found that envelope analysis has the most potential for differentiating three common faults: valve leakage, inter-cooler leakage and a loose drive belt. Simultaneously, the spread parameter of the probabilistic NN was also optimised. The selected subsets of features were examined based on vibration source characteristics. The approach developed and the trained NN are confirmed as possessing general characteristics for fault detection and diagnosis.
A Note on Learning and Evolution in Neural Networks

Interactions between evolution and lifetime learning are of great interest to studies of adaptive behaviour both in the natural world and the field of evolutionary computation. This contribution revisits an earlier discovered observation that the average performance of a population of neural networks which are evolved to solve one task is improved by lifetime learning on a different task. Two existing, and very different, explanations of this phenomenon are summarised and examined. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate that neither of these explanations are sufficient to fully explain the phenomenon. A new explanation, together with experimental justification, is presented which describes the effect in terms of lifetime learning providing a buffer against the potentially deleterious effects of mutation.
A Novel Cache Architecture and Placement Framework for Packet Forwarding Engines

Packet forwarding is a memory-intensive application requiring multiple accesses through a trie structure. With the requirement to process packets at line rates, high-performance routers need to forward millions of packets every second with each packet needing up to seven memory accesses. Earlier work shows that a single cache for the nodes of a trie can reduce the number of external memory accesses. It is observed that the locality characteristics of the level-one nodes of a trie are significantly different from those of lower level nodes. Hence, we propose a heterogeneously segmented cache architecture (HSCA) which uses separate caches for level-one and lower level nodes, each with carefully chosen sizes. Besides reducing misses, segmenting the cache allows us to focus on optimizing the more frequently accessed level-one node segment. We find that due to the nonuniform distribution of nodes among cache sets, the level-one nodes cache is susceptible to high conflict misses. We reduce conflict misses by introducing a novel two-level mapping-based cache placement framework. We also propose an elegant way to fit the modified placement function into the cache organization with minimal increase in access time. Further, we propose an attribute preserving trace generation methodology which emulates real traces and can generate traces with varying locality. Performance results reveal that our HSCA scheme results in a 32 percent speedup in average memory access time over a unified nodes cache. Also, HSCA outperforms IHARC, a cache for lookup results, with as high as a 10-fold speedup in average memory access time. Two-level mapping further enhances the performance of the base HSCA by up to 13 percent leading to an overall improvement of up to 40 percent over the unified scheme.
A critique of the literature on etiology of eating disorders

The development of eating disorders including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, and atypical eating disorders that affect many young women and even men in the productive period of their lives is complex and varied. While numbers of presumed risk factors contributing to the development of eating disorders are increasing, previous evidence for biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural effects on the development of eating disorders have not been conclusive. Despite the fact that a huge body of research has carefully examined the possible risk factors associated with the eating disorders, they have failed not only to uncover the exact etiology of eating disorders, but also to understand the interaction between different causes of eating disorders. This failure may be due complexities of eating disorders, limitations of the studies or combination of two factors. In this review, some risk factors including biological, psychological, developmental, and sociocultural are discussed.
Strategic Design of a Robust Supply Chain

The strategic design of a robust supply chain has as goal the configuration of the supply chain structure so that the performance of the supply chain remains of a consistently high quality for all possible future scenarios. We model this goal with an objective function that trades off the central tendency of the supply chain profit with the dispersion of the profit as measured by the standard deviation for any value of the weights assigned to the two components. However, the standard deviation, used as the dispersion penalty for profit maximization, has a square root expression which makes standard maximization algorithms non applicable. The focus in this article is on the development of the strategic and tactical models. The application of the methodology to an industrial case will be reported. The optimization algorithm and detailed numerical experiments will be described in future research.
Recovering Intrinsic Images by Minimizing Image Complexity

This paper tackles the problem of decomposing a single image into two intrinsic images – a shading image (the illumination at each point) and a reﬂectance image (the colour at each point). Assuming a linear response of the camera, the acquired image I ( x , y ) is modelled as the product of the shading S ( x , y ) and the reﬂectance R ( x , y ) (collectively called intrinsic images ): the goal is to recover S and R from I ( x , y ) . The proposed method stems from the observation that R is "simpler" than I, in some sense related to its information content. This allows to formulate the problem as the minimization over all the possible S of a cost function describing the complexity of a tentative reﬂectance image given a shading image S. Given a 3D model of the scene, the orientation of the camera, and an illumination model, S can be parameterized with the position of light sources on a hemisphere. Preliminary experiments in a simulated environment validate the substance of the method, although many details will be subject of further improvement.
Efficient Implementation of Continuous MAP Decoders and a Synchronisation Technique for Turbo Decoders

Steven S. PietrobonSatellite Communications Research Centre, University of South Australia, The Levels SA 5095, AustraliaEmail: steven@spri.levels. unisa.edu. auAbstract A method of efficiently implementing a con-tinuous MAP decoding algorithm is presented. A slidingwindow technique is used to reduce the block size at theexpense of extra computations. The smaller block sizeresults in a large reduction in memory storage require-ments, reduced delay , and the ability to implement a con -tinuous MAP decoder. A technique for reducing the syn-chronisation time for a turbo decoder without the use ofsynchronisation words is also presented. This techniqueartificially forces the low delay inner decoder to syn-chronise to a large number of states so that the large delayouter decoder (due to the interleaver between the innerand outer decoder) has fewer states to synchronise to.The overall synchronisation time is thus reduced.Index Terms MAP decoding, continuous decoding,turbo codes, synchronisationI. I
On detection strategies for linearly precoded MIMO-OFDM systems

This paper considers novel receiver structures for linearly precoded MIMO-OFDM systems, making special emphasis on soft detection principles. After reviewing the operation of MMSE detectors, an optimal iterative soft receiver based on list sphere detection (LSD) is proposed. This scheme provides the best possible performance from an error rate point of view at the expense of a rather high computational cost. To address this downside, a lower complexity yet optimal detector that combines linear and non-linear processing is proposed for a class of precoders that are particularly important from a practical point of view.
OPTIMIZING BLACKBOARD IMPLEMENTATION OF AGENT-CONDUCTED AUCTIONS

Blackboard is a classic abstraction for exchanging information in distributed environments. Once an entity puts a data element on the blackboard, information about this fact is either delivered to subscribers (push) or interested entities check for new data (pull). Another dimension of information exchange is method of access to the blackboard, which can be either direct, or mediated by a “blackboard-manager. ” This article describes design and implementation of a blackboard used in to inform about status of agentbased price negotiations. Preliminary experimental results are also reported.
Using Simulated Annealing and Ant-Colony Optimization Algorithms to Solve the Scheduling Problem

The scheduling problem is one of the most challenging problems faced in many different areas of everyday life. This problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, and it has been solved with various methods using meta-heuristics and intelligent algorithms. We present in this paper a solution to the scheduling problem using two different heuristics namely Simulated Annealing and Ant Colony Optimization. A study comparing the performances of both solutions is described and the results are analyzed.
Dividend Policy and Income Taxation

The e¤ects of dividend and capital gains taxes on optimal dividend payout policy are analyzed in the context of a one-good model (so that capital consists of stored units of the consumption good). The aftertax discount factor is assumed to adjust to taxes to bring about equality between the discounted value of the rms aftertax dividend stream under the optimal dividend policy and the number of units of capital the rm is operating. A standard result that the Miller-Modigliani dividend irrelevance proposition applies in the presence of taxes if the dividend tax rate equals the capital gains tax rate (and if capital gains are taxed as they accrue) is demonstrated. The analysis is extended to deal with unequal tax rates. The two major results are (1) allocating retained earnings to share repurchases has the same tax implications as allocating retained earnings to new investments, and (2) either of these will be optimal if and only if the tax rate on capital gains is lower than that on dividends. JEL codes G1, G3. The Miller-Modigliani [14] dividend-irrelevance principle asserts (among other propositions) that, in the absence of frictions, corporate dividend policy does not affect rm value. This is so because if investment is held constant, as Miller-Modigliani assumed, then by an identity a change in dividends is o¤set one-for-one by a change in proceeds from new security issues. Assuming that investors value rms by discounting payments to stockholders net of proceeds of new issues, rm value is una¤ected by the dividends change. A related dividend-irrelevance proposition, often incorrectly attributed to MillerModigliani, may apply if investment is not held constant: variations in future dividends do not a¤ect rm value provided that retained earnings are invested in zeronet-present-value projects. This invariance is held to occur because the direct e¤ect on rm value of an increase in current dividends increase is exactly o¤set by lower I am indebted to Alan Auerbach, Harry DeAngelo, Marek Kapicka, Oddgeir Ottesen and Yongli Zhang for discussions and correspondence on this material.
On the Design of Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation Schemes Using Symbol-Based Exit Charts

In this paper we design bandwidth efficient parallel-concatenated turbo trellis coded modulation (TTCM) schemes for communicating over AWGN and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. The convergence properties of the symbol-based TTCM schemes employing various constituent codes, were analysed using symbol-based extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts. The traditional method used of generating EXIT charts is based on computationally complex multidimensional histogram measurements, which is only feasible for analysing TTCM schemes employing low-order modulation schemes, such as 4PSK and 8PSK. Hence, a novel low-complexity technique was employed in this paper for computing the symbol-based EXIT charts. Capacity-approaching TTCM schemes were designed based on the best constituent codes found when employing 8PSK, 16QAM, 32QAM and 64QAM modulation schemes.
1 What Have We Learned about Creditless Recoveries ?

Bank credit is considered as a critical factor in facilitating economic activities. However, we do observe creditless recoveries after some recessions, namely economic growth without credit growth. This phenomenon was first documented by Calvo, Izquierdo and Talvi (2006), who study what happens to output and credit after global or “systemic” sudden stop episodes. They find that, on average, output returns quickly to pre-crisis levels, but with weak investment and virtually no recovery in domestic or external credit (so-called “Phoenix miracles”).