Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structural Dynamics and Intentional Governance in Strategic Interorganizational Network Evolution: A Multilevel Approach

This article aims to shed light on the drivers underlying the role and scope of intentional governance of the structural dynamics of whole interorganizational networks. Prior research has distinguished networks that are emergent from networks that are orchestrated. While empirical studies have shown situations in which the role and scope of intentional governance of whole interorganizational networks has changed in time, and there is a growing interest regarding the endogenous drivers of network dynamics, the dimensions that influence intentional governance of network structure dynamics and the way this is carried out remain still to be elucidated. In order to pinpoint these drivers, we leverage the models of network structure dynamics elaborated within studies conducted at the intersection between network research and complexity science to propose a multilevel interpretive framework that clarifies the role and scope of intentional agency at different structural levels of interorganizational networks. Our framework advances a twofold conceptual contribution: on one hand, we tackle the change in the role and scope of intentional governance of network structures in both the early stages and the later stages of network evolution. On the other, we interpret the network of formal ties as resembling the accelerating network model, with the network of informal ties being akin to the scale-free (or truncated scale-free) network model of complex networks theory.
Extracorporeal shockwave therapy ( ESWT ) with a new-generation pneumatic device in the treatment of heel pain A double blind randomised controlled trial

Although low-energy extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) is widely used to treat a variety of soft tissue disorders, no precise algorithm has been accepted in clinical management. Furthermore, the clinical use of a new generation pneumatic device has not yet been evaluated. We performed a double blind randomised controlled trial on a group of 25 patients with heel pain from chronic plantar fasciitis, to assess the efficacy of ESWT. The main outcome measure was the patients’ subjective assessment of pain by means of a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) and the Roles and Maudsley Score before ESWT, early after treatment and six months later. There appeared to be a significant placebo effect with low-energy ESWT in patients with heel pain, and there was also lack of evidence for the efficacy of ESWT when compared to sham therapy.
Teacher reflection: the development of a typology

In this article, a contribution is made to the discussion of reflection on the part of teachers. The discussion to date has shown that reflection must be broad and deep. However, just what constitutes broad and deep reflection and the relations between the two remain unclear. After consideration of the characteristics of broad and deep reflection, three domains of broad reflection are distinguished (i.e. the pragmatic, ethical and moral domains). Closed versus open approaches to deep reflection are also then distinguished which produces a typology of six reflection possibilities. Empirical support for this typology was gathered via interviews with 11 experienced secondary school teachers. The content of the interviews addressed actual difficult decision situations which the teachers had experienced, and application of the constant comparative method showed the teachers to indeed use the six reflection possibilities when they reflected upon the difficult decision situations. A clear preference for closed types of pragmatic and ethical reflection over open or moral reflection was shown. The conclusion is that the proposed typology can be used to map teacher reflection. The results further suggest that the breadth and depth of teacher reflection are in need of development and that the relations between teacher reflection and their professional behaviour should be examined in greater detail.
Document classification using multiword features

We investigate the use of multiword query features to improve the eeectiveness of text-retrieval systems that accept natural-language queries. A relevance feedback process is explained that expands an initial query with single and multiword features. The multiword features are modelled as a set of words appearing within windows of varying sizes. Our experimental results suggest that windows of larger span yield improvements in retrieval over windows of smaller span. This result gives rise to a query contraction process that prunes 25% of the features in an expanded query with no loss in retrieval eeectiveness.
Challenges of virtual project management in developing countries

Multi-cultural virtual teams are important due to the increasing globalization of organizations and proliferation of new network technologies. Global Virtual Teams rarely meet in a face-to-face context and thus encounter challenging problems not associated with traditional co-located teams. To understand the complex issues in a virtual project environment in developing countries, we conducted a research study encompassing these aspects in various software houses in Pakistan. The research study explores and identifies the major cultural challenges and operational and technical complexities faced by virtual project management. We propose a model showing positive reinforcing relationship between various factors of virtual project management thus resulting in effective virtual project management.
Interaction among autoregulation , CO 2 reactivity , and intracranial pressure : a mathematical model

Ursino, Mauro, and Carlo Alberto Lodi. Interaction among autoregulation, CO2 reactivity, and intracranial pressure: a mathematical model. Am. J. Physiol. 274 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 43): H1715–H1728, 1998. —The relationships among cerebral blood flow, cerebral blood volume, intracranial pressure (ICP), and the action of cerebrovascular regulatory mechanisms (autoregulation and CO2 reactivity) were investigated by means of a mathematical model. The model incorporates the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) circulation, the intracranial pressure-volume relationship, and cerebral hemodynamics. The latter is based on the following main assumptions: the middle cerebral arteries behave passively following transmural pressure changes; the pial arterial circulation includes two segments (large and small pial arteries) subject to different autoregulation mechanisms; and the venous cerebrovascular bed behaves as a Starling resistor. A new aspect of the model exists in the description of CO2 reactivity in the pial arterial circulation and in the analysis of its nonlinear interaction with autoregulation. Simulation results, obtained at constant ICP using various combinations of mean arterial pressure and CO2 pressure, substantially support data on cerebral blood flow and velocity reported in the physiological literature concerning both the separate effects of CO2 and autoregulation and their nonlinear interaction. Simulations performed in dynamic conditions with varying ICP underline the existence of a significant correlation between ICP dynamics and cerebral hemodynamics in response to CO2 changes. This correlation may significantly increase in pathological subjects with poor intracranial compliance and reduced CSF outflow. In perspective, the model can be used to study ICP and blood velocity time patterns in neurosurgical patients in order to gain a deeper insight into the pathophysiological mechanisms leading to intracranial hypertension and secondary brain damage.
Generation division in Cyprus education? different attitudes to education from younger and older teachers

This study explores whether there is a generation division in Cyprus education, how it is manifested (if it really exists) in terms of teachers' actions and behaviours, and if it has any implications for school improvement. The data used for this article was collected from four schools following qualitative methods of inquiry. It was revealed that teachers were being grouped according to their age. The key characteristics of the two groups of teachers are presented in terms of their relationships with colleagues, pupils, parents and superiors, and in terms of their professional ideology. After exploring similarities and differences between the two groups of teachers I then support the argument that education in Cyprus appears to be divided according to the age of teachers. This division, I argue at the end, may have implications for the proper functioning of schools as well as for the successfulness of attempted innovations.
HMM-based Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition: Using New Feature Extraction and Lexicon Ranking Techniques

In this paper, a new offline Arabic handwriting recognition system is presented. The Douglas-Peucker algorithm is applied on the skeletonized parts of the offline images to convert it into piecewise linear curves that are used for efficient detection of diacritics, noise segments, and the baseline. A hidden Markov model (HMM)-based system is used with features extracted from the image before and after removing the diacritics. A reliable method of lexicon ranking and reduction based on the information of the image's diacritics, number of piece of Arabic words (PAWs), and dimensions information is used. The proposed system has been tested using the IFN/ENIT database and has achieved promising recognition rates.
Low molecular weight chitosan conjugated with folate for siRNA delivery in vitro: optimization studies

The low transfection efficiency of chitosan is one of its drawbacks as a gene delivery carrier. Low molecular weight chitosan may help to form small-sized polymer-DNA or small interfering RNA (siRNA) complexes. Folate conjugation may improve gene transfection efficiency because of the promoted uptake of folate receptor-bearing cells. In the present study, chitosan was conjugated with folate and investigated for its efficacy as a delivery vector for siRNA in vitro. We demonstrate that the molecular weight of chitosan has a major influence on its biological and physicochemical properties, and very low molecular weight chitosan (below 10 kDa) has difficulty in forming stable complexes with siRNA. In this study, chitosan 25 kDa and 50 kDa completely absorbed siRNA and formed nanoparticles (≤220 nm) at a chitosan to siRNA weight ratio of 50:1. The introduction of a folate ligand onto chitosan decreased nanoparticle toxicity. Compared with chitosan-siRNA, folate-chitosan-siRNA nanoparticles improved gene silencing transfection efficiency. Therefore, folate-chitosan shows potential as a viable candidate vector for safe and efficient siRNA delivery.
An Examination of the Effects of Mathematics Anxiety, Modality, and Learner-Control on Teacher Candidates in Multimedia Learning Environments

i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS v LIST OF TABLES xi LIST OF FIGURES xii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 3 COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY 3 COGNITIVE THEORY OF MULTIMEDIA LEARNING 5 HOW COGNITIVE THEORIES EXPLAIN THE MODALITY PRINCIPLE 7 EVIDENTIAL SUPPORT FOR THE MODALITY PRINCIPLE IN INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN. 8 The Modality Principle in Non-Interactive Learning Environments 8 The Modality Principle in Interactive Learning Environments 12 INTERACTIVITY IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS 17 THE EFFECT OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES ON THE MODALITY PRINCIPLE 18 Prior Knowledge and the Modality Principle 18 Working Memory Capacity, Memory Strategy Skills, and the Modality Principle . 20 CONTEXT OF THIS STUDY 22 Mathematics Anxiety and the Modality Principle 22 Mathematics anxiety and its cognitive consequences 23 SUMMARY OF LITERATURE REVIEW 23
Verb SCF extraction for Spanish with dependency parsing

In this paper we present the results of our experiments in automatic production of verb subcategorization frame lexica for Spanish. The work was carried out in the framework of a project aiming at the automatic acquisition of lexical information reducing at maximum human intervention. In our experiments, a chain of different tools was used: domain focused web crawling, automatic cleaning, segmentation and tokenization, PoS tagging, dependency parsing and finally SCFs extraction. The obtained results show a high dependency on the quality of the results of the intervening components, in particular of the dependency parsing, which is the focus of this paper. Nevertheless, the results achieved are in line with the state-of-the-art for other languages in similar experiments.
A Characterization of the Combined Effects of Overlap and Imbalance on the SVM Classifier

In this paper we demonstrate that two common problems in Machine Learning---imbalanced and overlapping data distributions---do not have independent effects on the performance of SVM classifiers. This result is notable since it shows that a model of either of these factors must account for the presence of the other. Our study of the relationship between these problems has lead to the discovery of a previously unreported form of "covert" overfitting which is resilient to commonly used empirical regularization techniques. We demonstrate the existance of this covert phenomenon through several methods based around the parametric regularization of trained SVMs. Our findings in this area suggest a possible approach to quantifying overlap in real world data sets.
Does the Urinary Microbiome Play a Role in Urgency Urinary Incontinence and Its Severity?

Objectives: Traditionally, the urinary tract has been thought to be sterile in the absence of a clinically identifiable infection. However, recent evidence suggests that the urinary tract harbors a variety of bacterial species, known collectively as the urinary microbiome, even when clinical cultures are negative. Whether these bacteria promote urinary health or contribute to urinary tract disease remains unknown. Emerging evidence indicates that a shift in the urinary microbiome may play an important role in urgency urinary incontinence (UUI). The goal of this prospective pilot study was to determine how the urinary microbiome is different between women with and without UUI. We also sought to identify if characteristics of the urinary microbiome are associated with UUI severity. Methods: We collected urine from clinically well-characterized women with UUI (n = 10) and normal bladder function (n = 10) using a transurethral catheter to avoid bacterial contamination from external tissue. To characterize the resident microbial community, we amplified the bacterial 16S rRNA gene by PCR and performed sequencing using Illumina MiSeq. Sequences were processed using the workflow package QIIME. We identified bacteria that had differential relative abundance between UUI and controls using DESeq2 to fit generalized linear models based on the negative binomial distribution. We also identified relationships between the diversity of the urinary microbiome and severity of UUI symptoms with Pearson's correlation coefficient. Results: We successfully extracted and sequenced bacterial DNA from 95% of the urine samples and identified that there is a polymicrobial community in the female bladder in both healthy controls and women with UUI. We found the relative abundance of 14 bacteria significantly differed between control and UUI samples. Furthermore, we established that an increase in UUI symptom severity is associated with a decrease in microbial diversity in women with UUI. Conclusions: Our study provides further characterization of the urinary microbiome in both healthy controls and extensively phenotyped women with UUI. Our results also suggest that the urinary microbiome may play an important role in the pathophysiology of UUI and that the loss of microbial diversity may be associated with clinical severity.
Companion animals in Thailand: human factors that predict sterilization of cats and dogs

The prevalence of companion animal caregiving was estimated, and demographic and psychosocial factors that predict sterilization behaviors in caregivers in Thailand were identified. Thai nationals ( n = 494) were recruited by random for the Culture and Human-Animal Interactions ( CHAI ) telephone survey. The results showed 74% of respondents had a cat and/or a dog (60% dogs, 23% cats); 22% of dogs and 19% of cats were sterilized. Logistic Regression analyses revealed positive attitudes toward desexing, and the perception that important others would endorse this practice best predicted sterilization practices. For caregivers with unsterilized companions, Hierarchical Multiple Regression analyses revealed perceived capability to sterilize, positive attitudes toward desexing, and perceived normative pressure to sterilize accounted for 35% and 45% of the variance in intentions to sterilize dogs and cats, respectively. Culturally sensitive initiatives targeting negative attitudes, enhancing normative pressure, and increasing perceived personal agency to sterilize may improve sterilization rates in Thailand.
Soil Biochemical Changes Induced by Poultry Litter Application and Conservation Tillage under Cotton Production Systems

Problems arising from conventional tillage (CT) systems (such as soil erosion, decrease of organic matter, environmental damage etc.) have led many farmers to the adoption of no-till (NT) systems that are more effective in improving soil physical, chemical and microbial properties. Results from this study clearly indicated that NT, mulch tillage (MT), and winter rye cover cropping systems increased the activity of phosphatase, β-glucosidase and arylsulfatase at a 0–10 cm soil depth but decreased the activity of these enzymes at 10–20 cm. The increase in enzyme activity was a good indicator of intensive soil microbial activity in different soil management practices. Poultry litter (PL) application under NT, MT, and rye cropping system could be considered as effective management practices due to the improvement in carbon (C) content and the biochemical quality at the soil surface. The activities of the studied enzymes were highly correlated with soil total nitrogen (STN) soil organic carbon (SOC) at the 0–10 cm soil depth, except for acid phosphatase where no correlation was observed. This study revealed that agricultural practices such as tillage, PL, and cover crop cropping system have a noticeable positive effect on soil biochemical activities under cotton production.
Relationship of abdominal bloating to distention in irritable bowel syndrome and effect of bowel habit.

BACKGROUND & AIMS The relationship between the sensation of bloating, often ranked as the most bothersome symptom by patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and actual distention manifest as an increase in abdominal girth is controversial. Investigation of this problem has been hampered by the lack of a reliable ambulatory technique to measure abdominal girth. The aim of this study was to use the technique of abdominal inductance plethysmography to compare diurnal variation in girth in IBS patients and healthy volunteers, relating these changes to the sensation of bloating. METHODS Abdominal girth was recorded for 24 hours in 20 IBS-constipation (age, 18-73 y), 20 IBS-diarrhea (age, 25-62 y) and 10 IBS-alternating (age, 21-59 y) female patients meeting Rome II criteria and 20 healthy female controls (age, 18-67 y). All subjects pursued normal daily activities, recording their symptoms of bloating and pain together with bowel habit. RESULTS All patients with IBS, irrespective of bowel habit, reported significantly greater bloating than controls (P < .0001). Forty-eight percent of patients also showed distention beyond the 90% control range, with this being most prominent in IBS-constipation. Bloating correlated strongly only with distention in IBS-constipation (r > or = 0.48; P < or = .02). Neither bloating nor distention in IBS was related to body mass index, age, parity, or psychologic status. CONCLUSIONS Abdominal distention is a clearly definable phenomenon in IBS that can reach 12 cm. However, it only occurs in half of patients reporting bloating, and the 2 only correlate in IBS-constipation. Bloating and distention may differ pathophysiologically and this appears to be reflected in the bowel habit subtype.
Limits on primordial non-Gaussianity from Minkowski Functionals of theWMAPtemperature anisotropies

We present an analysis of the Minkowski Functionals (MFs) describing the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) 3-yr temperature maps to place limits on possible levels of primordial non-Gaussianity. In particular, we apply perturbative formulae for the MFs to give constraints on the usual non-linear coupling constant fNL. The theoretical predictions are found to agree with the MFs of simulated cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps including the full effects of radiative transfer. The agreement is also very good even when the simulation maps include various observational artefacts, including the pixel window function, beam smearing, inhomogeneous noise and the survey mask. We accordingly find that these analytical formulae can be applied directly to observational measurements of fNL without relying on non-Gaussian simulations. Considering the bin-to-bin covariance of the MFs in WMAP in a chi-square analysis, we find that the primordial non-Gaussianity parameter is constrained to lie in the range -70 < fNL < 91 [95 per cent confidence level (C.L.)] using the Q + V + W co-added maps.
Rapid Prenatal Diagnosis of Aneuploidy Using Quantitative Fluorescence-PCR (QF-PCR)

Molecular cytogenetic aneuploidy testing for pregnant women at increased risk of chromosome abnormality leads to rapid reassurance for those with normal results and earlier decisions on pregnancy management in the case of abnormality. We tested 9080 prenatal samples using a one-tube QF-PCR test for trisomies 13, 18, and 21; the abnormality rate was 5.9%. There were no misdiagnoses for non-mosaic trisomy. A sex chromosome multiplex was developed that detects structural sex chromosome abnormalities as well as aneuploidies. The sex chromosome test was targeted at pregnancies (272) with specific abnormalities suggestive of Turner syndrome; 13.2% showed 45,X, confirmed by follow-up analysis.
Identification of the Tolfenamic Acid Binding Pocket in PrbP from Liberibacter asiaticus

In Liberibacter asiaticus, PrbP is an important transcriptional accessory protein that was found to regulate gene expression through interactions with the RNA polymerase β-subunit and a specific sequence on the promoter region. It was found that inactivation of PrbP, using the inhibitor tolfenamic acid, resulted in a significant decrease in the overall transcriptional activity of L. asiaticus, and the suppression of L. asiaticus infection in HLB symptomatic citrus seedlings. The molecular interactions between PrbP and tolfenamic acid, however, were yet to be elucidated. In this study, we modeled the structure of PrbP and identified a ligand binding pocket, TaP, located at the interface of the predicted RNA polymerase interaction domain (N-terminus) and the DNA binding domain (C-terminus). The molecular interactions of PrbP with tolfenamic acid were predicted using in silico docking. Site-directed mutagenesis of specific amino acids was followed by electrophoresis mobility shift assays and in vitro transcription assays, where residues N107, G109, and E148 were identified as the primary amino acids involved in interactions with tolfenamic acid. These results provide insight into the binding mechanism of PrbP to a small inhibitory molecule, and a starting scaffold for the identification and development of therapeutics targeting PrbP and other homologs in the CarD_CdnL_TRCF family.