Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business-to-business e-procurement corporate initiative: a descriptive empirical study

An exploratory and empirical study was undertaken to discover the initial e-procurement experiences of firms. Applying the survey method and taking a participant sample from the membership of the Institute for Supply Management and Council for Supply Management Professionals (formerly Council of Logistics Management), this study presents hard data on the perceived and expected benefits from e-procurement, the types of goods and services purchased, the electronic solutions and environments used for purchasing, actual cost savings gained, business practices that encourage successful procurement, and obstacles to systems implementation.
Housing the Intergenerational Families

This study uses recent survey data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics to examine factors relating to married couples coresiding with parents in Taiwan. We investigate how both factors from parents and married couples influence the continuity of intergenerational coresidence by using longitudinal data. The familiar support to aged parents certainly is a key factor for coresidence. Also, the needs of the married couples are closely related to coresidence, especially the need on housing. The finding indicates that those coresiding young couples in the early family life stages are more likely to keep living in parents’ homes.
Localizing Temporal Anomalies in Large Evolving Graphs Teng Wang

Mining for anomalies in graph structured datasets is an important and challenging problem for many applications including security, health care, and social media. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to localize temporal anomalies in large evolving graphs with reduced false alarm rate. Specifically, we first introduce a node-centric model based on Vector Autoregression to analyze node behavior history in dynamic graphs. Then we develop two community-centric models to reduce the amount of false positive results by tracking the structural change and dynamics of graph communities. We analyze the performance of our proposed anomaly localization framework on several synthetic and real-world data sets including Enron email network data, an enterprise network traffic data, and CNN public Facebook page. All experimental results show the effectiveness and consistency of our framework in localizing temporal anomalies with reduced false alarm rate.
Name that tune: A pilot study in finding a melody from a sung query

We have created a system for music search and retrieval. A user sings a theme from the desired piece of music. The sung theme (query) is converted into a sequence of pitch-intervals and rhythms. This sequence is compared to musical themes (targets) stored in a data-base. The top pieces are returned to the user in order of similarity to the sung theme. We describe, in detail, two different approaches to measuring similarity between database themes and the sung query. In the first, queries are compared to database themes using standard string-alignment algorithms. Here, similarity between target and query is determined by edit cost. In the second approach, pieces in the database are represented as hidden Markov models (HMMs). In this approach, the query is treated as an observation sequence and a target is judged similar to the query if its HMM has a high likelihood of generating the query. In this article we report our approach to the construction of a target database of themes, encoding, and transcription of user queries, and the results of preliminary experimentation with a set of sung queries. Our experiments show that while no approach is clearly superior to the other system, string matching has a slight advantage. Moreover, neither approach surpasses human performance.
Smoothing of Mixed Complementarity Problems Smoothing of Mixed Complementarity Problems

We extend the smoothing approach to the mixed complementarity problem, and study the limiting behavior of a path deened by approximate minimizers of a nonlinear least squares problem. Our main result guarantees that, under a mild regularity condition , limit points of the iterates are solutions to the mixed complementarity problem. The analysis is applicable to a wide variety of algorithms suitable for large-scale mixed complementarity problems.
Myxovirus‐1 and protein kinase haplotypes and fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C virus

Candidate genes, including myxovirus resistance‐1 (Mx1), protein kinase (PKR), transforming growth factor‐β1 (TGF‐β), interleukin‐10 (IL‐10), and interferon‐gamma (IFN‐γ), were evaluated for associations with liver fibrosis in 374 treatment‐naive patients with genotype‐1 chronic HCV infection [194 Caucasian Americans (CAs) and 180 African Americans (AAs)], using a genetic haplotype approach. Among the 18 haplotypes that occurred with a frequency ≥5% in the cohort overall, the Mx1‐(‐123C)‐(+6886A)‐(+19820G(379V))‐(+38645T) (abbreviated Mx1‐CAGT), and PKR‐(+110T)‐(+7949G)‐(+13846A)‐(+22937T)‐(+40342T) (abbreviated PKR‐TGATT) haplotypes were independently associated with less severe hepatic fibrosis (Ishak ≥ 3 versus <3). These associations persisted after adjustment for potential confounders such as alcohol use, sex, age (which is strongly correlated with the estimated duration of HCV infection [Spearman's correlation coefficient (rs) = 0.6)], and race (for Mx1‐CAGT: OR = 0.33; 95% CI: 0.16‐0.68; P = 0.0027; and for PKR‐TGATT: OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.32‐0.98; P = 0.0405). Population structure was evaluated using the structured association method using data from 161 ancestry‐informative markers and did not affect our findings. We used an independent cohort of 34 AA and 160 CA in an attempt to validate our findings, although notable differences were found in the characteristics of the two patient groups. Although we observed a similar protective trend for the Mx1‐CAGT haplotype in the validation set, the association was not statistically significant. Conclusion: In addition to other factors, polymorphisms in cytokine genes may play a role in the progression of HCV‐related fibrosis; however, further studies are needed. (HEPATOLOGY 2007.)
Convergence of the Hamiltonian particle-mesh method for barotropic fluid flow

We prove convergence of the Hamiltonian Particle-Mesh (HPM) method, initially proposed by J. Frank, G. Gottwald, and S. Reich, on a pe- riodic domain when applied to the irrotational shallow water equations as a prototypical model for barotropic compressible uid ow. Under appropriate assumptions, most notably suciently fast decay in Fourier space of the global smoothing operator, and a Strang{Fix condition of order 3 for the local par- tition of unity kernel, the HPM method converges as the number of particles tends to innity and the global interaction scale tends to zero in such a way that the average number of particles per computational mesh cell remains con- stant and the number of particles within the global interaction scale tends to innity. The classical SPH method emerges as a particular limiting case of the HPM algorithm and we nd that the respective rates of convergence are comparable under suitable assumptions. Since the computational complexity of bare SPH is algebraically superlinear and the complexity of HPM is logarithmically su- perlinear in the number of particles, we can interpret the HPM method as a fast SPH algorithm.
Life Gets Better and Better: Cultural Life Script Theory and Subjective Trajectories for Life Satisfaction

Young adults typically believe that life gets increasingly satisfying over time. We examined the cultural life script as a source of these beliefs. In Study 1 (N = 1244), tabulation of previously published studies indicated that life script events are perceived as becoming increasingly positive over time between the ages of 10 and 30. Further, a specific series of 16 key life script events during this life stage was identified. These results were replicated in Study 2 (N = 100, Mage = 21.14, 51% female) based on young adults‘ perceptions concerning life script events in their personal life stories. Further, the perception that life script events in one's personal life story were becoming increasingly positive over time was linked with more steeply inclining subjective life satisfaction trajectories (i.e. recollected past < current < anticipated future life satisfaction). In Study 3 (N = 261, Mage = 18.5, 93.7% female), manipulating life script event information (number and positivity of events over time) within a personal life story had an additive impact on young adults‘ subjective life satisfaction trajectories. These findings reveal a robust connection between information contained with the cultural life script and the belief that life gets more and more satisfying over time. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology
Preferential Trade Liberalisation, Fiscal Policy Responses and Welfare: A Dynamic CGE Model for Jordan

This paper aims at assessing the effects on the Jordanian economy of the Association Agreement (AA) between Jordan and the European Union (EU). Particular emphasis is placed on the effects on consumer welfare. The EU-Jordan AA was signed in 1997 and entered into force in May 2002. It eliminates progressively tariffs on most industrial goods imported by Jordan from the EU. Custom duties on agricultural goods and processed agricultural products are gradually and only partially eliminated. Trade liberalisation is expected to bring about a positive impact on consumer welfare through lower prices of investment and consumption goods. On the other hand, it reduces government revenue due to foregone tariff revenue. Therefore counteracting fiscal measures are required in order to offset the loss in government revenue. In order to capture intertemporal effects brought about by trade liberalisation on the Jordanian economy, a multisectoral dynamic CGE model is specified and calibrated. Simulation results show that the implementation of the AA raises consumer welfare in Jordan and has positive effects on all macroeconomic variables in the long-run, but it reduces consumption in the short-run.
THE NON-LINEARITY EFFECT ON THE COLOR-TO-METALLICITY CONVERSION OF GLOBULAR CLUSTERS IN NGC 5128

The metallicity distribution of globular clusters (GCs) provides a crucial clue for the star formation history of their host galaxy. With the assumption that GCs are generally old, GC colors have been used as a proxy for GC metallicities. Bimodal color distributions of GCs observed in most large galaxies have, for decades, been interpreted as bimodal metallicity distributions, indicating the presence of two populations within a galaxy. However, the conventional view has been challenged by a new theory that non-linear GC color-metallicity relations can cause a bimodal color distribution even from a single-peaked metallicity distribution. Using photometric and spectroscopic data of NGC 5128 GCs in combination with stellar population simulation models, we examine the eect of non-linearity in GC color-metallicity relations on transformation of the color distributions into the metallicity distributions. Although in some colors osets are present between observations and models for the color-metallicity relations, their overall shape agrees well for various colors. After the osets are corrected, the observed spectroscopic metallicity distribution is well reproduced via modeled color-metallicity relations from various color distributions having dierent morphologies. We discuss the implications of our results.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADER-MEMBER EXCHANGE, JOB SATISFACTION AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT: THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

The aim of this study is to measure the relationship between leader-member exchange, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The outcomes of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) model analysis confirmed that distributive justice does act as an important mediator in the relationship between leader-member exchange, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Furthermore, implications of this study to training practices and theory, methodological and conceptual limitations, as well as direction for future research are also discussed in this article. Keywords: distributive justice, job satisfaction, leader-member exchange organizational commitment
Low-lying magnetic loops in the solar internetwork

Aims. We study the structure of the magnetic field vector in the internetwork and search for the presence of small-scale loops. Methods. We invert 1.56 μ m spectropolarimetric observations of internetwork regions at disc centre by applying the SIR code. This allows us to recover the atmospheric parameters that play a role in the formation of these spectral lines. We are mainly interested in the structure of the magnetic field vector. Results. We find that many opposite polarity elements of the internetwork are connected by short ($2{-}6$´´), low-lying (photospheric) loops. These loops connect at least the $10{-}20$% of the internetwork flux visible in our data. Also we have some evidence that points towards a dynamic scenario that can be produced by the emergence of internetwork magnetic flux.
Pending Problems in QSOs

Quasars (Quasi Stellar Objects, abbreviated as QSOs) are still nowadays, close to half a century after their discovery, objects which are not completely understood. In this brief review a description of the pending problems, inconsistencies and caveats in the QSO's research is presented. The standard paradigm model based on the existence of very massive black holes that are responsible for the QSO's huge luminosities, re-sulting from to their cosmological redshifts, leaves many facts without explanation. There are several obser-vations which lack a clear explanation, for instance: the absence of bright QSOs at low redshifts, a mysteri-ous evolution not properly understood; the inconsistencies of the absorption lines, such as the different structure of the clouds along the QSO's line of sight and their tangential directions; the spatial correlation between QSOs and galaxies; and many others.
Seasonal and successional streamflow response to forest cutting and regrowth in the northwest and eastern United States

This study examined daily streamflow response over up to four decades in northwest conifer forest and eastern deciduous forest sites in the United States. We used novel methods to analyze daily observations of climate and streamflow spanning more than 900 basin years of record at 14 treated/control basin pairs where forest removal and regrowth experiments were underway in the period 1930–2002. In the 1 to 5‐year period after forest removal, maximum daily increases ranged from 2 to 3 mm at deciduous forest sites, to 6 to 8 mm at conifer forest sites. Significant spring surpluses persisted for up to 35 years in conifer forest basins, but winter and spring streamflow deficits appeared after 10 to 15 years of forest regrowth in eastern deciduous forest basins. In all 5‐yr posttreatment periods, absolute changes in daily streamflow were significantly more likely during moist, warm seasons, or during snowmelt seasons, but relative changes were more likely during warm seasons irrespective of moisture status. Both relative and absolute streamflow changes in the 1 to 5 and 15 to 25‐year periods after forest removal were significantly positively related to the age of the forest at the time it was cut. Eastern deciduous forests had been disturbed by logging or hurricane 12 to 56 years prior to forest removal, while Pacific Northwest conifer forests had been not experienced logging or wildfire for 90 to 450 years. Paired basin experiments provide a continuous, and continuously changing, record of vegetation structure, composition, and climate, and their effects on streamflow.
Search Patterns in Transition Economies : A Comparison of Thirteen European Countries

Searching for externally available knowledge has been characterised as a vital part of the innovation process. The availability of such innovation impulses, however, critically depends on the environment a firm is operating in. Little is known on how national environments differ with respect to the munificence in providing innovation impulses. These differences may be particularly pronounced between transition economies and established market economies. We argue that firms from transition and established economies differ in their search pattern and that these search patterns moderate the relationship between innovation inputs and outputs. Based on a sample of almost 7,000 firms from 13 European countries we find strong support for open innovation strategies in both settings. However, performance differs in established and transition economy contexts.
Quantization of coboundary Lie bialgebras

We show that any coboundary Lie bialgebra can be quantized. For this, we prove that: (a) Etingof-Kazhdan quantization functors are compatible with Lie bialgebra twists, and (b) if such a quantization functor corresponds to an even associator, then it is also compatible with the operation of taking coopposites. We also use the relation between the Etingof-Kazhdan construction of quantization functors and the alternative approach to this problem, which was established in a previous work.
Performance Comparison of Data Mining Techniques for Predicting of Heart Disease Survivability

The diagnosis of heart disease is a significant and tedious task in medicine. The healthcare environment is generally perceived as being ‘information rich’ yet ‘knowledge poor’. There is a wealth of data available within the healthcare systems. However, there is a lack of effective analysis tools to discover hidden relationships and trends in data. Knowledge discovery and data mining have found numerous applications in business and scientific domain. Valuable knowledge can be discovered from application of data mining techniques in healthcare system. Using medical profile such as age, sex, blood pressure and blood sugar it can predict the likelihood of patients getting a heart disease. It enables significant knowledge, e.g. patterns, relationships between medical factors related to heart disease, to be established. It can serve a training tool to train nurses and medical students to diagnose patients with heart disease. It is a web based user friendly system and can be used in hospitals if they have a data ware house for their hospital. Presently we are analyzing the performances of the ten classification data mining techniques by using various performance measures. For implementation of the work a real time patient database is taken and the patient records are experimented and the final best classifier is identified with quick response time and least error rate. A typical confusion matrix is furthermore displayed for quick check. The study describes algorithmic discussion of the heart disease dataset from Cleveland Heart Disease database, on line repository of large datasets. The Best results are achieved by using Tanagra tool. Tanagra is data mining matching set. The accuracy is calculate based on addition of true positive and true negative followed by the division of all possibilities.
Evaluation of anti-oxidant treatments in an in vitro model of alkaptonuric ochronosis.

OBJECTIVES Alkaptonuria (AKU) is a rare genetic disease associated with deficient homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase activity in the liver. This leads to the accumulation of homogentisic acid (HGA) and its oxidized/polymerized products in connective tissues, which in turn become characterized by the presence of melanin-like pigments (ochronosis). Since at present, further studies are necessary to support the use of drugs for the treatment of AKU, we investigated the effects of various anti-oxidants in counteracting melanin-like pigmentation and oxidative stress related to HGA and its metabolites. METHODS We set up an in vitro model using human serum treated with 0.33 mM HGA and tested the anti-oxidants ascorbic acid, N-acetylcysteine, phytic acid (PHY), taurine (TAU), ferulic acid (FER) and lipoic acid (LIP) for their ability to prevent or delay the production of melanin-like pigments, as well as to reduce oxidative post-translational modifications of proteins. Monitoring of intrinsic fluorescence of HGA-induced melanin-like pigments was used to evaluate the efficacy of compounds. RESULTS Our model allowed us to prove efficacy especially for PHY, TAU, LIP and FER in counteracting the production of HGA-induced melanin-like pigments and protein oxidation induced by HGA and its metabolites. CONCLUSIONS Our model allows the opening of new anti-oxidant therapeutic strategies to treat alkaptonuric ochronosis.
How service values influence the processing of word-of-mouth in the evaluation of credence beliefs

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of service values on the processing of word-of-mouth (WOM) information, and their impact on a complex belief in a high-involvement service context. Hypotheses are tested on survey data collected from 378 respondents facing a high-involvement service choice. The results suggest that two distinct information processing routes are active when consumers (here prospective students) evaluate complex beliefs. Furthermore, service values have distinct effects on the processing of WOM information. Self-oriented values foster more cognitive processing, whereas socially oriented values have the opposite effect. Considering the reasons as to why a service is needed (service values) should be a focus for marketers since they can be a powerful persuasion approach affecting the processing of WOM. This study contributes to earlier research on higher education marketing by incorporating service values into the pre-purchase phase of prospective students’ decision-making.
How Much Does Malaria Vector Control Quality Matter: The Epidemiological Impact of Holed Nets and Inadequate Indoor Residual Spraying

Background Insecticide treated nets (ITN) and indoor residual spraying (IRS) are the two pillars of malaria vector control in Africa, but both interventions are beset by quality and coverage concerns. Data from three control programs were used to investigate the impact of: 1) the physical deterioration of ITNs, and 2) inadequate IRS spray coverage, on their respective protective effectiveness. Methods Malaria indicator surveys were carried out in 2009 and 2010 in Bioko Island, mainland Equatorial Guinea and Malawi to monitor infection with P.falciparum in children, mosquito net use, net condition and spray status of houses. Nets were classified by their condition. The association between infection and quality and coverage of interventions was investigated. Results There was reduced odds of infection with P.falciparum in children sleeping under ITNs that were intact (Odds ratio (OR): 0.65, 95% CI: 0.55–0.77 and OR: 0.81, 95% CI: 0.56–1.18 in Equatorial Guinea and in Malawi respectively), but the protective effect became less with increasingly worse condition of the net. There was evidence for a linear trend in infection per category increase in deterioration of nets. In Equatorial Guinea IRS offered protection to those in sprayed and unsprayed houses alike when neighbourhood spray coverage was high (≥80%) compared to those living in areas of low IRS coverage (<20%), regardless of whether the house they lived in was sprayed or not (adjusted OR = 0.54, 95% CI 0.33–0.89). ITNs provided only personal protection, offering no protection to non users. Although similar effects were seen in Malawi, the evidence was much weaker than in Equatorial Guinea. Conclusions Universal coverage strategies should consider policies for repair and replacement of holed nets and promote the care of nets by their owners. IRS programs should ensure high spray coverage since inadequate coverage gives little or no protection at all.