Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exclusion of brown lemmings reduces vascular plant cover and biomass in Arctic coastal tundra: resampling of a 50 + year herbivore exclosure experiment near Barrow, Alaska

To determine the role lemmings play in structuring plant communities and their contribution to the ‘greening of the Arctic’, we measured plant cover and biomass in 50 + year old lemming exclosures and control plots in the coastal tundra near Barrow, Alaska. The response of plant functional types to herbivore exclusion varied among land cover types. In general, the abundance of lichens and bryophytes increased with the exclusion of lemmings, whereas graminoids decreased, although the magnitude of these responses varied among land cover types. These results suggest that sustained lemming activity promotes a higher biomass of vascular plant functional types than would be expected without their presence and highlights the importance of considering herbivory when interpreting patterns of greening in the Arctic. In light of the rapid environmental change ongoing in the Arctic and the potential regional to global implications of this change, further exploration regarding the long-term influence of arvicoline rodents on ecosystem function (e.g. carbon and energy balance) should be considered a research priority.
Critical success factors through the Mergers and Acquisitions process:revealing pre- and post- M&A connections for improved performance

The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) literature is vast, spanning over half a century of research endeavor and drawing upon multiple disciplinary perspectives. Despite this wealth of material, the field suffers from a lack of connectedness. There is limited and compartmentalized understanding of the complexities of the M&A process, as the various streams of M&A research are only marginally informed by one another. As a result, the existing body of knowledge on M&A research remains fragmented. There is a need to establish links between existing approaches to M&A and the critical success factors they each promote. In this article, the need for a pluralistic and holistic explanatory framework that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of M&A is highlighted. The article shows that dynamic relationships between different perspectives on M&A and critical success factors matter. Identifying these relationships may help to further our understanding about M&A performance outcomes. Thus, the paper focuses on both relationships within each stage and between stages of the M&A process.
Office Space Supply Restrictions in Britain: The Political Economy of Market Revenge

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office space in continental Europe. Exploiting the panel data, we provide strong support for our hypothesis that the regulatory tax varies according to whether an area is controlled by business interests or residents. Our results imply that the cost of the 1990 change converting commercial property taxes from a local to a national basis – transparently removing any fiscal incentive to permit local development – exceeded any plausible rise in local property taxes.
The Effect of Music on Pain and Acute Confusion in Older Adults Undergoing Hip and Knee Surgery

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of music listening in older adults following hip or knee surgery. Acute confusion and pain after surgery can increase length of stay and reduce function. Study results demonstrate a reduction in acute confusion and pain and improved ambulation and higher satisfaction scores in older adults who listened to music.
Scale Efficiency in Organic and Conventional Dairy Farming

Recently, several studies compared the performance of conventional and organic farms. Most studies concentrated on technical efficiency. In this paper we add to this literature by also comparing the scale efficiency of conventional and organic milk farms in Austria during the period 1997-2002. To do so we utilize a bilateral production frontier that includes both production technologies and Green’s (1995a,b) true fixed effects model to account for firm specific time-invariant heterogeneity and technical inefficiency. We find both groups of farms to be on average equally technical efficient (when compared to their production frontier), but conventional farms being on average considerably more scale efficient. However, while scale efficiency remained constant over time for conventional farms it increased for organic farms which seem to catch up.
Uncertain Lifetime, Consumption, and Dissaving in Retirement

This paper asks whether the continued accumulation, or mild dissaving, observed among the retired can be explained by uncertain lifetime. In the absence of annuities, after an initial period influenced by borrowing constraints, under constant relative risk aversion, uncertain lifetime depresses consumption by a proportion increasing with age if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is "small. " Illustrative computations, based on actual income and survival data, show that plausible elasticities are sufficiently small to give this effect. The reduction in consumption is large enough to explain much of the lack of decumulation by the elderly.
The Productivity and Wage Effects of Foreign Acquisition in the United Kingdom

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the impact of foreign ownership on productivity and wages in the United Kingdom. Using a specially constructed database for the period 1989-94, it uses ownership change (acquisition) to control for unobserved differences between plants. It finds that foreign firms pay equivalent employees 3.4% more than domestic firms, though this is wholly attributable to their higher levels of productivity. Firms which are acquired by foreign companies exhibit an increase in labour productivity of 13%. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Quality Assurance in Further and Higher Education

Presents the case that in the 1990s further and higher education in the UK is facing unprecedented and increasing levels of market accountability precipitated by the legislative processes of Conservative administrations. Linked to their new responsibilities and freedoms (made possible by the 1988 and 1992 Education Acts), management in the newly incorporated institutions is becoming increasingly “business‐like”. The need for managers to justify their actions and demonstrate quality and effectiveness has never been greater. Hence the proliferation of league tables, performance indicators and the focus by audit units on measurement of an increasingly complex array of process and output statistics. The result has been a preoccupation with quality, among other issues, which is linked to performance appraisal and management techniques synonymous with the commercial sector of the economy. Points to the limitations of such models as TQM and of management‐driven approaches to quality which deprofessionalize, and proposes the need for a collegial model of organizations which accepts the central importance of interactive professionalism in assuring real quality of teaching and learning. Acknowledges the existence of common strategic drivers within the international and European arena and points to the need for quality assessment systems which overlay professional practice and serve to provide relevant information in a comparative international context.
Do the components of manualized family-based treatment for anorexia nervosa predict weight gain?

OBJECTIVE Family-based treatment for anorexia nervosa (FBT) has demonstrated efficacy in the treatment of adolescents with anorexia nervosa (AN) in a number of randomized control trials (RCT). The aim of the current research was to determine whether adherence to the key components of the model as outlined in the treatment manual predict weight gain or dropout. METHOD The 59 participants were under 19 years and had AN for less than 3 years. Five core treatment objectives and working alliance were measured across 20 sessions of FBT. RESULTS The core objectives of parents taking control, being united, not criticizing the patient and externalizing the illness predicted greater weight gain. Sibling support did not predict weight gain. The relationship between therapeutic alliance and weight gain was positive for mothers but negative for fathers. Dropout was predicted by low control and poor maternal-therapeutic alliance. DISCUSSION The results of this study lend further support for the efficacy of the FBT, demonstrating that the principles guiding clinical practice are those which lead to weight gain. The finding that parental control is the central predictor of change can also support the development of augmentations to the model.
Chorionic Villus Sampling Compared With Amniocentesis and the Difference in the Rate of Pregnancy Loss

OBJECTIVE: To compare loss rates following amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS) over time. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study of all amniocentesis and CVS procedures resulting in a normal karyotype from 1983–2003 at a single prenatal diagnostic referral center was conducted. Pregnancy loss rates for amniocentesis, CVS, and nonintervention groups (ie, those who had nuchal translucency screening or counseling, but no procedure) were compared using the &khgr;2 test. Year of procedure, maternal age, parity, race or ethnicity, and gestational age at procedure were controlled for in multivariable logistic regression models. RESULTS: There were 9,886 CVS and 30,893 amniocentesis procedures performed during the study period that resulted in a normal karyotype. The overall loss rates were 3.12% for CVS and 0.83% for amniocentesis (P < .001). When examined by 5-year intervals, there was a statistically significant decrease in the CVS loss rate (P < .001) and a nonsignificant lesser decrease in the loss rate for amniocentesis over time. Although the pregnancy loss rate from CVS over the entire study period was higher than from amniocentesis (adjusted odds ratio 4.23, 95% confidence interval 2.29–7.81), in the most recent time period, 1998 to 2003, there was no difference between the two procedures (adjusted odds ratio 1.03, 95% confidence interval 0.23–4.52). CONCLUSION: The loss rates for both amniocentesis and CVS at our institution have decreased over time. Because the decrease in loss rate for CVS has been greater, there is no longer a statistically significant difference between the two. These results are informative in both patient counseling and establishing widespread prenatal diagnostic and screening programs. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II-2
A Comparative Model of Bargaining: Theory and Evidence

Recent laboratory studies of alternating-offer bargaining find many empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard theory. In this paper, the author postulates that bargainers behave as if they are negotiating over both "absolute" and "relative" money. Absolute money is measured by cash, relative money by the disparity between absolute measures. The resulting model is consistent with previously observed regularities. New experiments provide further support as well as evidence against several alternative explanations. Also finding some support is an extension that predicts that the equilibrium of the standard theory will be observed when bargaining is done in a "tournament" setting. Copyright 1991 by American Economic Association.
Metabolism of anthracene by a Rhodococcus species.

A Rhodococcus sp. isolated from contaminated river sediment was investigated to determine if the isolate could degrade high molecular mass polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The Rhodococcus sp. was able to utilize anthracene (53%), phenanthrene (31%), pyrene (13%), and fluoranthene (5%) as sole source of carbon and energy, but not naphthalene or chrysene. In a study of the degradation of anthracene by a Rhodococcus sp. , the identification of ring-fission products indicated at least two ring-cleavage pathways. One results in the production of 6,7-benzocoumarin, previously shown to be produced chemically from the product of meta cleavage of 1,2-dihydroxyanthracene, a pathway which has been well established in Gram-negative bacteria. The second is an ortho cleavage of 1,2-dihydroxyanthracene that produces 3-(2-carboxyvinyl)naphthalene-2-carboxylic acid, a dicarboxylic acid ring-fission product. This represents a novel metabolic pathway only identified in Gram-positive bacteria.
Prediction and recommendation in online media

With billions of internet users, online media services have become commonplace. Prediction and recommendation for online media are fundamental problems in various applications, including recommender systems and information retrieval. As an example, accurately predicting user behaviors improves user experiences through more intelligent user interfaces. On the other hand, user behavior prediction in online media is also strongly related to behavior targeting and online advertisement which is the major business for most consumer internet services. Estimating and understanding users' click behaviors is a critical problem in online advertising. In this dissertation, we investigate the prediction and recommendation problems in various online media. We find a number of challenges: high order relations, temporal dynamics, complexity of network structure, high data sparsity and coupled social media activities. We consider user behavior understanding and prediction in four areas: tag prediction in a social tagging system, link prediction in microblogging services, multi-context modeling in online social media and click prediction in sponsored search. In such topics, based on real world data, we analyze user behaviors and discover patterns, properties and challenges. Subsequently, we design specific models for online user behavior prediction in various online media: a probabilistic model for personalized tag prediction, a user-tag-specific temporal interests model for tracking users' interests over time in tagging systems, a personalized structure based link prediction model for micro-blogging systems, a generalized latent factor model and Bayesian treatment for modeling across multiple contexts in online social media, a context-aware click model and framework for estimating ad group performance in sponsored search. Our extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show our novel models advance the state-of-the-art.
The Mucosal Immune Function Is Not Compromised during a Period of High-Intensity Interval Training. Is It Time to Reconsider an Old Assumption?

Purpose: The aim of the study was to evaluate the mucosal immune function and circadian variation of salivary cortisol, Immunoglobin-A (sIgA) secretion rate and mood during a period of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) compared to long-slow distance training (LSD). Methods: Recreational male runners (n = 28) completed nine sessions of either HIIT or LSD within 3 weeks. The HIIT involved 4 × 4 min of running at 90–95% of maximum heart rate interspersed with 3 min of active recovery while the LSD comprised of continuous running at 70–75% of maximum heart rate for 60–80 min. The psycho-immunological stress-response was investigated with a full daily profile of salivary cortisol and immunoglobin-A (sIgA) secretion rate along with the mood state on a baseline day, the first and last day of training and at follow-up 4 days after the last day of training. Before and after the training period, each athlete's running performance and peak oxygen uptake (V·O2peak) was determined with an incremental exercise test. Results: The HIIT resulted in a longer time-to-exhaustion (P = 0.02) and increased V·O2peak compared to LSD (P = 0.01). The circadian variation of sIgA secretion rate showed highest values in the morning immediately after waking up followed by a decrease throughout the day in both groups (P < 0.05). With HIIT, the wake-up response of sIgA secretion rate was higher on the last day of training (P < 0.01) as well as the area under the curve (AUCG) higher on the first and last day of training and follow-up compared to the LSD (P = 0.01). Also the AUCG for the sIgA secretion rate correlated with the increase in V·O2peak and running performance. The AUCG for cortisol remained unaffected on the first and last day of training but increased on the follow-up day with both, HIIT and LSD (P < 0.01). Conclusion: The increased sIgA secretion rate with the HIIT indicates no compromised mucosal immune function compared to LSD and shows the functional adaptation of the mucosal immune system in response to the increased stress and training load of nine sessions of HIIT.
Gender wage gap and the glass ceiling effect: a firm-level investigation

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to assess the relevance of the glass ceiling effect, according to which the gender log wage gap accelerates in the upper tail of the wage distribution, at the firm level. Design/methodology/approach - The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 4,654 employees, working in a French private company from the Defence and Aerospace sector. Quantile wage regressions were used to study whether a glass ceiling effect exits at the firm level. The difference between the male and female wage distributions is also decomposed into two components, one due to differences in labour market characteristics between men and women and one due to differences in rewards to these individual characteristics. Findings - It was found that the gender wage gap measured through OLS is quite low, less than 8 per cent when controlling for age, experience, qualification and location. It remains rather flat along the wage distribution, a result which casts doubt on the glass ceiling theory. The gender gap is mainly due to differences in labour market characteristics rather than to differences in the rewards of these characteristics, especially among executives. Finally, women face a lower probability of reaching higher hierarchical positions within the firm. Research limitations/implications - Taking into account firm effects matters when measuring the magnitude of the gender wage throughout the wage gap distribution. Originality/value - This paper presents original estimates of the gender wage gap with an unusual, firm-based sample of workers.
Market competition, ownership, payment systems and the performance of health care providers – a panel study among Finnish occupational health services providers

Abstract Many health care reforms rely on competition although health care differs in many respects from the assumptions of perfect competition. Finnish occupational health services provide an opportunity to study empirically competition, ownership and payment systems and the performance of providers. In these markets employers (purchasers) choose the provider and prices are market determined. The price regulation of public providers was abolished in 1995. We had data on providers from 1992, 1995, 1997, 2000 and 2004. The unbalanced panel consisted of 1145 providers and 4059 observations. Our results show that in more competitive markets providers in general offered a higher share of medical care compared to preventive services. The association between unit prices and revenues and market environment varied according to the provider type. For-profit providers had lower prices and revenues in markets with numerous providers. The public providers in more competitive regions were more sensitive to react to the abolishment of their price regulation by raising their prices. Employer governed providers had weaker association between unit prices or revenues and competition. The market share of for-profit providers was negatively associated with productivity, which was the only sign of market spillovers we found in our study.
Enterprise Resource Planning: An Empirical Study of Its Impact on Job Performance

One of the most significant technological advances to emerge during the last decade is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems-also called simply Enterprise Systems (ES). Both ERP and ES are industry terms for a broad set of activities supported by multi-module application software that integrates all business processes and data into a single system and thus helps a business to better manage the important parts of its daily operations. The problems that frequently appear in job performance when an ERP system is implemented indicate that organizations often find it difficult to master this industry tool. The purpose of this empirical study is to identify and assess the impact of ERP system implementation on job performance, based on the results of a questionnaire designed to measure five critical factors-task productivity and innovation, customer satisfaction, management control, interdepartmental communication and cooperation, and data analysis and conversion. The Likert scale was applied to 89 usable responses, and the analytical results show that there is a highly significant relationship among all five identified factors of the independent variables and the job performance.
Virtual university in a globalizing world : a comparison of policy initiatives in France and the UK

This thesis sets out to compare and contrast the conception, initiation and implementation of virtual university policy-making in higher education in the UK and France between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. This thesis falls into a longstanding tradition of cross-national comparative education research. The central thrust of the argument presented here is that the more recent developments in the field cannot be understood as being solely a matter of implementing digital technology into higher education. Indeed, the core issues considered here relate less to the forms that this digital technology may take, and more to how competing models of the virtual university feed into broader questions of the type of learning-society they imply. The comparative method adopted is based on a well-established qualitative research tradition. With this tool, the model of the policy network is explored and is shown to have shaped the planning and implementation of the policy initiatives compared. Data consist of semi-structured interviews with policy actors, as well as a wide range of policy texts. The discourse on the knowledge-based economy strongly advocates the need for higher education to 'modernize' its structures and its curricula in order to support the requirement of the information society of tomorrow. Digital technology has been at the centre of the policy-making of the knowledge-based economy. Strongly associated with this is a tendency to over emphasize our powerlessness in the face of globalization. One of the outcomes of this comparative research is that human agency is as strong as ever and that far from national characteristics being swept away by global policy trends, the dominant relevance of local and regional characteristics in the design and implementation of such policy initiatives remains robust and enduring. The thesis argues that one of the key dimensions of the discourses surrounding the initiatives was not primarily about virtual higher education provision but rather was concerned with purely political agendas.