Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Induction of abortion in early pregnancy with mifepristone in conjunction with gemeprost

This study was performed to investigate the efficacy of oral mifepristone and vaginal gemeprost for termination of early pregnancy. Eighty women requesting first trimester abortion and with amenorrhea of less than 56 days were included. Gestational age was confirmed with ultrasonography. Mifepristone was administered as a single 600 mg dose followed after 48 hours by a vaginal pessary containing 1 mg gemeprost. One woman did not return for gemeprost and later had a vacuum aspiration performed. There was complete abortion in all remaining women. No serious side effects were registered and the number of women requiring opioid analgesia was low (8%). The conclusion is that this treatment is a genuine alternative to vacuum aspiration but medical supervision is necessary for some time after gemeprost administration.
Predictors of preference for financial investment products using CART analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of a post hoc predictive segmentation procedure to find out the variables that are the most important predictors of investor's preference for specific financial investment products.Design/methodology/approach – The study considers various demographic, socio‐economic and psychographic variables for the purpose of understanding the investor's preferences. Using a sample of individual investors (n=377), a classification and regression tree (CART) methodology was used to determine whether psychographic variables were better predictors than demographic and socio‐economic variables for understanding an individual investor's preference for the investment alternatives.Findings – The results showed that psychographic variables emerged as the most important predictors in the case of investment products with greater degree of risk, and the demographic and socio‐economic variables emerged as the most important for the investment instruments with lesser degr.
Managing traditionality and strategic change in nonprofit organizations

Fundamental differences with the for-profit sector, and that sector's own experiences, make it unwise for nonprofit leaders to adopt business organizations' externally focused approach to strategic change. Theories of organizational survival and punctuated equilibrium models of change and continuity, as well as the authors' research, suggest that planning aimed toward matching the organization to changes in its environment has limited value. This article argues that due to the relative constancy of societal needs and nonprofits' missions, and the importance of society's demands for reliable, accountable performance, nonprofits should greatly value continuity. Utilizating a typology of changes that nonprofits may confront, the authors clarify why potential organizational change should be approached cautiously, with a strong regard for traditionality as a mechanism of continuity. They then sketch some of the implications of this perspective for nonprofit sector researchers and leaders concerning the role of traditionality in successful organizational adaptation, including the value of historical analyses and the healthy tension between traditionality and change.
The Small Business Challenge to Management Education.

One result of the recent upsurge of national, and indeed international, political interest in the small firm sector of the economy has been a focus on the role of management training and development in the small firm and on the wider, but related, issue of education and training for entrepreneurship. The basis for this renewed government attention seems to lie in recognition of the employment potential of small firms rather than in the contribution that training and education might make to productivity and efficiency. Added to the weight of official concern is pressure from individuals who, without the early possibility of becoming an employee, are being forced to look to their own resources and initiative. It is, therefore, scarcely surprising that much of the recent stimulus to small firms training has come from government training schemes and, in the UK, from local community‐based ventures aimed at improving local job prospects. The accent in the UK has been on encouraging the new small business start up.
Interpretation of Semantic Tweet Representations

Research in analysis of microblogging platforms is experiencing a renewed surge with a large number of works applying representation learning models for applications like sentiment analysis, semantic textual similarity computation, hashtag prediction, etc. Although the performance of the representation learning models has been better than the traditional baselines for such tasks, little is known about the elementary properties of a tweet encoded within these representations, or why particular representations work better for certain tasks. Our work presented here constitutes the first step in opening the black-box of vector embeddings for tweets.Traditional feature engineering methods for high-level applications have exploited various elementary properties of tweets. We believe that a tweet representation is effective for an application because it meticulously encodes the application-specific elementary properties of tweets. To understand the elementary properties encoded in a tweet representation, we evaluate the representations on the accuracy to which they can model each of those properties such as tweet length, presence of particular words, hashtags, mentions, capitalization, etc.Our systematic extensive study of nine supervised and four unsupervised tweet representations against most popular eight textual and five social elementary properties reveal that Bi-directional LSTMs (BLSTMs) and Skip-Thought Vectors (STV) best encode the textual and social properties of tweets respectively. FastText is the best model for low resource settings, providing very little degradation with reduction in embedding size. Finally, we draw interesting insights by correlating the model performance obtained for elementary property prediction tasks with the high- level downstream applications.
Do You See What I See? Teacher Perceptions of Change

This study explores the beginning phase of a school change process in curriculum innovation and its role in school reform. It aims to identify and explore aspects of the process as understood by participating teachers. Student voice is included in this study to further contextualise teachers’ experiences. The changes in relation to the curriculum innovation are central to the aims and purpose of this study and were internally driven by a new principal, the vision he bought with him to the school and the processes put in place to facilitate attempts to reculture the school. Data for this study comes from semi-structured interviews with six teachers and seventeen students. The data explores the impact of the change process on teacher practice in the classroom. In what ways did changing school culture inform and change teacher practice? Teachers were interviewed individually twice over a period of twelve months from August of one year to July of the following year. Group interviews were used for the collection of student data. Teacher discourse was analysed for implicit and explicit meaning in relation to changing school culture, beliefs about student learning and teacher identity. The study concludes that teacher emotions and their subsequent relationships with other teachers underpin the perceptions that teachers hold of the school culture. This, in turn, affects their levels of engagement in professional learning opportunities and subsequent classroom practice. The study suggests that teacher identity is linked to emotional labour and that there is correlation between the emotions and perceptions of teachers in and outside the classroom. This study has implications for those responsible for leading curriculum innovation as part of school reform, and those in the field of teacher education.
Visual impairment and ocular abnormalities in children with fetal alcohol syndrome

Children with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) may have impaired vision and various ocular abnormalities. All parts of the eye may be affected and anomalies such as microphthalmus, microcornea, Peters' anomaly, cataract, persistent hyperplastic primary hyaloid vitreous body, coloboma of the iris and choroid, retinal dysplasia and, most commonly, optic nerve hypoplasia and tortuosity of the retinal vessels, have been reported. The periocular facial features consist of short palpebral fissures (included in the criteria for diagnosis of FAS), telecanthus, epicanthus and blepharoptosis. Visual function may be reduced to a moderate or severe degree. Refractive errors and strabismus are common. Considering the high frequency of ocular pathology in FAS, an ophthalmological examination is helpful in making the diagnosis. The early detection of impaired vision and ocular abnormalities in affected children is important in the management of the disorder. In this article, the ophthalmological signs and symptoms in children with FAS are presented.
Do Foreign Institutional Investors Reward Transparency and Disclosure

Corporate governance has emerged as a leading investment criterion for institutional investors with the rise of cross-border portfolio flows, especially for markets with weak investor protection. This study provides firm-level evidence on the relationship between the level of foreign institutional investment and the transparency and disclosure performance of companies listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. We develop a self-constructed transparency and disclosure index, consisting of voluntary and mandatory components, and find that only voluntary disclosure is positively associated with foreign institutional investment. We conclude that firms that operate in markets with lower governance standards can indeed attract more institutional investment through better disclosure, beyond what is required by regulations. JEL Classification: G32, G34
Does Studying Politics Make a Difference? The Political Knowledge, Attitudes and Perceptions of School Students

There has been considerable debate in recent years about the effects of the teaching of Politics upon levels of ‘political literacy’ – the knowledge and understanding of the political process and political issues which enables people to perform their roles as citizens effectively. Almost everyone receives some form of political education. For most people, however, the process of political education is informal: political knowledge, as well as opinions and attitudes, is picked up from the family, friends and the media. Informal political education also takes place in schools. In primary schools, children acquire elementary information about the political system, parties, leaders and so on. In secondary schools, subjects such as History and Geography and courses in General Studies frequently involve topics that are relevant to politics.
Competitive product-service systems: lessons from a multicase study

In an attempt to maintain competitiveness, more and more firms are moving towards business models that integrate equipment, goods and services, such as in a product-service system (PSS), with a view to delivering value. This transition requires a shift in business thinking for developing arrangements to provide integrated product-service (PS) offerings that are sustainable, technical and/or marketable. The aim of this article is to offer insights into work systems for providing integrated PS offerings by competitive firms. It adopts ‘work system theory’ as a research lens and an inductive multiple-case logic consisting of an in-depth exploratory study of four competitive micro-engineering firms, to capture ‘what’ and ‘how’ information and service systems contribute to the sustainability, technical and marketability themes for competitiveness using PSSs. The article finds that technical requirements of competitive PSSs are best fulfilled in work systems that emphasise individual timeliness/ buy-ins, synchronous communications managed by strategic roles and tie-ins offered by service contracts. The study also revealed an emphasis, by the case firms, on relationship building and policy implementation for achieving PSS marketability and sustainability, respectively.
Impact of Trade Liberalization on Employment: Review of SAARC Countries

Globalization has become the buzzword for many economies today that fails them to think in isolation for their own good. Today, developing economies race to exploit maximum growth opportunities without ever considering social costs associated. One such cost can be seen on the level of Employment (Domestic Labour Demand). The objective of this study is to observe the effect of FTA on employment levels in the context of SAARC Countries including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Traditionally, positive impact has been observed of Free Trade on the level of employment in developed countries; whereas empirical evidences have suggested negative relationship in case of developing countries.
RETRAINING AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX

The need to maintain up-to-date technological skills despite an aging workforce makes it imperative that organizations increasingly focus on retraining older employees. This article develops an adult career model based on the acquisition of technological skills and gradual skill obsolescence. The model suggests the importance of retraining and provides practical implications to the development of retraining programs. Suggestions for future research are also offered.
Efficiency of conventional versus Islamic banks: evidence from the Middle East

Purpose - This paper aims to investigate the differences in mean cost, revenue and profit efficiency scores of conventional versus Islamic banks. It also aims to examine the effect of size and age on cost, revenue and profit efficiency of the sampled banks. Design/methodology/approach - This study evaluates a cross-country level data compiled from the financial statements of 40 banks in 11 Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) countries over the period 1990-2005. The data were collected for each year available from the BankScope database. The DEA nonparametric efficiency approach originally developed by Farrell was applied to analyse the data. Findings - The findings suggest no significant differences between the overall efficiency of conventional and Islamic banks. However, it was noted that, on average, banks are more efficient in using their resources compared to their ability to generate revenues and profits. The average bank lost an opportunity to receive 27.9 percent more revenue, given the same amount of resources. Similarly, the average bank lost the opportunity to make 20.9 percent more profits utilising the same level of inputs. Clearly there is substantial room for improvement in cost minimisation and revenue and profit maximisation in both banking systems. The size and age factor did not significantly influence the efficiency scores in both banking streams. Originality/value - This research is substantially different from the prior work in this area in three main ways. First, it investigates cost, revenue, and profit efficiency, whereas previous studies focus on cost, profit, or cost and profit efficiency. Also, no previous studies have compared conventional and Islamic banks. Second, this study distinguishes differences among big versus small, and old versus new banks, which allows more detailed insights on the efficiency issue. Third, the age issue in Islamic banks has been addressed, so far undocumented.
Overcoming Fear of Floating: Exchange Rate Policies in Chile

The paper reviews the exchange rate management experience in Chile, with particular emphasis on the floating exchange rate regime and its two forex intervention episodes. It presents evidence on Chile’s favorable conditions to face exchange rate shocks: a well-developed financial sector, that offers hedging opportunities taken up by the corporate sector to decrease its vulnerability through balance sheet effects; and a low and decreasing level of passthrough from the exchange rate to prices. These elements contribute to diminish the costs of the floating exchange rate regime, reducing its implied financial and price instability threat, and therefore avoiding fear of floating. Moreover, it provides enough credibility to the current exchange rate system, reinforcing the commitment to making interventions a rare event.
Endothelin-Converting Enzyme Inhibition Ameliorates Angiotensin II–Induced Cardiac Damage

Abstract—We tested the hypothesis that endothelin-converting enzyme (ECE) inhibition ameliorates end-organ damage in rats harboring both human renin and human angiotensinogen genes (dTGR). Hypertension develops in the animals, and they die by age 7 weeks of heart and kidney failure. Three groups were studied: dTGR (n=12) receiving vehicle, dTGR receiving ECE inhibitor (RO0687629; 30 mg/kg by gavage; n=10), and Sprague-Dawley control rats (SD; n=10) receiving vehicle, all after week 4, with euthanasia at week 7. Systolic blood pressure was not reduced by ECE inhibitor compared with dTGR (205±6 versus 206±6 mm Hg at week 7, respectively). In contrast, ECE inhibitor treatment significantly reduced mortality rate to 20% (2 of 10), whereas untreated dTGR had a 52% mortality rate (7 of 12). ECE inhibitor treatment ameliorated cardiac damage and reduced left ventricular ECE activity below SD levels. Echocardiography at week 7 showed reduced cardiac hypertrophy (4.8±0.2 versus 5.7±0.2 mg/g, P <0.01) and increased left ventricular cavity diameter (5.5±0.3 versus 3.1±0.1 mm, P <0.001) and filling volume (0.42±0.04 versus 0.16±0.06 mL, P <0.05) after ECE inhibitor compared with untreated dTGR. ECE inhibitor treatment also reduced cardiac fibrosis, tissue factor expression, left ventricular basic fibroblast growth factor mRNA levels, and immunostaining in the vessel wall, independent of high blood pressure. In contrast, the ECE inhibitor treatment showed no renoprotective effect. These data are the first to show that ECE inhibition reduces angiotensin II–induced cardiac damage.
Domestic and Foreign Earnings, Stock Return Variability, and the Impact of Investor Sophistication

We examine the importance of foreign earnings relative to domestic earnings for a sample of U.S. multinationals using variance decomposition. Our methodology represents an alternative and complementary approach over the prior literature, which is based on traditional regressions and earnings response coefficients. We document that domestic earnings are more important in explaining the variance of unexpected returns than are foreign earnings and that the relative importance of domestic earnings is a decreasing function of investor sophistication. Last, we classify institutional investors as either short‐ or long‐term oriented following Bushee [1998]. We find that the variance contribution of foreign earnings increases with the level of investment by long‐term investors. In contrast, there is no significant relation between the degree of ownership by short‐term (or transient) investors and the variance contribution of domestic and foreign earnings. Overall, our results are consistent with Thomas's [1999] finding that investors on average underestimate the persistence of foreign earnings.
Cytocompatibility of regenerated silk fibroin film: a medical biomaterial applicable to wound healing

ObjectiveTo explore the feasibility of using regenerated silk fibroin membrane to construct artificial skin substitutes for wound healing, it is necessary to evaluate its cytocompatibility.MethodsThe effects of regenerated silk fibroin film on cytotoxicity, adhesion, cell cycle, and apoptosis of L929 cells, growth and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression of ECV304 cells, and VEGF, angiopoietin-1 (Ang-1), platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) and fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) expression of WI-38 cells were assessed by 3-(4,5)-dimethylthiahiazo (-z-y1)-3,5-di-phenytetrazoliumromide (MTT) assay, viable cell counting, flow cytometry (FCM), and enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay (ELISA). ResultsWe showed that the regenerated silk fibroin film was not cytotoxic to L929 cells and had no adverse influence on their adhesion, cell cycle or apoptosis; it had no adverse influence on the growth and VEGF secretion of ECV304 cells and no effect on the secretion of VEGF, Ang-1, PDGF and FGF2 by WI-38 cells.ConclusionThe regenerated silk fibroin film should be an excellent biomaterial with good cytocompatibility, providing a framework for reparation after trauma in clinical applications.
Unitary Boards and Mutual Fund Governance

A unique governance structure for mutual funds is unitary board—one board overseeing all funds in the entire family. We find strong evidence for unitary board as an effective governance mechanism. Funds with unitary boards are associated with lower fees, are more likely to pass the economies of scale benefits to investors, are less likely to be involved in trading scandals, and rank higher on stewardship. In contrast, funds with larger or more independent boards charge higher fees and rank lower on stewardship. Our findings indicate that unitary boards of small size, rather than independent boards, may be more beneficial to fund shareholders.
Culture and climate for innovation

Notes that many companies pay “lip service” to the idea of innovation and stresses that becoming innovative requires an organisational culture which nurtures innovation and is conducive to creativity. Considers the nature of organisational climate and of organisational culture, focusing on factors which make for an effective organisational culture. Looks at the interplay between various organisational factors and innovation and suggests elements which promote innovation. Concludes that the most innovative companies of the future will be those which have created appropriate cultures and climates.
Genetic diversity of avian blood parasites in SE Europe: Cytochrome b lineages of the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus (Haemosporida) from Bulgaria

We used a nested PCR protocol to examine the genetic diversity of cytochrome b (cyt b) lineages from blood parasites of the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus in birds in Bulgaria. In total, 460 birds of 43 species and 14 families (mostly passerines) were examined for the presence of infections. Of them, 267 were recognised as infected with haemosporidian parasites. Mixed infections were recorded in 24 individuals (9%). Besides the 24 individuals with mix infections, 114 (43%) were positive for Plasmodium spp. and 129 (48%) for Haemoproteus spp. We identified 52 genetic lineages of haemosporidian parasites: 38 of Haemoproteus and 14 of Plasmodium. Twelve new cyt b lineages of Haemoproteus were recorded; they occurred in the following hosts: grey-faced woodpecker (Picus canus), golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus), jay (Garrulus glandarius), barred warbler (Sylvia nisoria), song thrush (Turdus philomelos), spotted flycatcher (Muscicapa striata), spanish sparrow (Passer hispaniolensis), hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes), and cirl bunting (Emberiza cirlus). We also detected 22 new host records for previously known lineages. The most common lineage was SGS1 (Plasmodium relictum), which had a total prevalence of 14% and occurred in 8 host species belonging to 5 families. Three of the cyt b lineages of genus Haemoproteus (DURB1, DURB2 and SYNIS2) showed more than 5% divergence from all described morphologically lineages. These lineages probably represent at least 2 different morphospecies which remains to be identified.
Altruism and Charitable Giving in a Fully Replicated Economy

In this paper, an economy is analyzed where one group of agents, the altruists, cares about the well-being of another group of agents, the recipients. It is asked how changes in the size of these groups affect the altruists' charitable giving in the Nash equilibrium. I show that a pure group size effect, i.e., a proportional expansion of both subgroups can lead to less free riding and to a lower degree of underprovision relative to the efficient level of charitable giving.