Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information, Authority and Internal Governance of the Firm

A theory of optimal internal organizational structure of the firm as a problem of governing the internal trade in a firm's resources is presented and analyzed in this paper. A principal faces several agents in a multi-product organization who are differentially and privately-informed about revenue prospects and quality of an organizational asset. I analyze first a "structure-less organization" in which there is free communication and coalition-formation among players including the principal. In this environment and under complete contracting, I show that when a productively-critical agent can control the allocation of his own labor services and can withold information on allocative efficiency of resources he becomes the nexus of competing interests within the organization and can thereby capture its disposable rents. This results in no loss of allocative efficiency of the organization and no complete contract offered by the principal can alter this outcome in equilibrium. Information hoarding is consistent with numerous observations by organizational behaviorists and economic historians. I show that a solution for the principal is to impose an incomplete-contract mechanism, where the principal ignores efficiency-enhancing messages from agents. This mechanism functions as an authority structure and provides rent-extraction for the principal but decreases the allocative efficiency of the organization. I characterize how the principal optimally structures trade in resources between authority centers. The model shows how authority functions like "intra-organizational property rights" in assigning to the authority-holders exclusive rights of use and intra-organizational trade over dedicated shares of the critical agent's labor services. This provides a rationale for the employment relationship: elimination of personal discretion over allocation of the critical agent's labor services becomes a pre-condition of his access to the principal's productive assets. An implication is that worker-controlled firms will not exist in cases in which productive assets must be provided by an outside principal without an external enforcement mechanism.
Managing the Risk of Fraud and Misconduct: Meeting the Challenges of a Global, Regulated and Digital Environment

INTRODUCTION Section One: Understanding Fraud Chapter 1: Asset Misappropriation Chapter 2: Financial Reporting Fraud Section Two: Understanding Other Forms of Misconduct and Illegal Activity Chapter 3: Bribery & Corruption Chapter 4: Money Laundering & Trade Sanctions Chapter 5: Falsifying Government Claims and Insider Trading Section Three: A Framework for an Effective Compliance Program Chapter 6: A Framework for an Effective Compliance Program Section Four: A Model for Managing Fraud and Misconfuct Rock--Prevention, Detection and Response Chapter 7: Prevetion-Risk Assessment Chapter 8: Prevention-Codes of Conduct, Training and Communication Chapter 9: Prevetion-Corporate Intelligence (or Enhanced Due Diligence) Chapter 10: Detection-Mechanisms for Reporting Fraud and Misconduct Chapter 11: Detection-Auditing and Monitoring Chapter 12: Response-Investigations Chapter 13: Response-Government Settlement Agreements Chapter 14: Response-Recovery, Preservation and Analysis of Electronically Stored Information
The perceptions of parents and educators with regards to formal and informal education.

In general, a particularly complicated and difficult relationship has existed between parents and educators, due in part, to the fact that educators have always been seen as the experts and proverbial holders of knowledge in the educational process while parents have been seen to be peripheral to this process. This inequality is seen to be problematic as a child's significant learning is increasingly understood to occur in both the home and school contexts. This study explored the perceptions of a selection of parents and educators across the three levels of the educational process with the aim of facilitating a dialogue amongst all the participants in order to establish partnerships that would assist in the integration of the formal and informal learning processes. Using the Dialogue Game as a research tool, the participants in this study revealed many of the dilemmas that inhibit the establishment of partnerships between the two contexts. While the educators appeared resistant to the idea of a partnership as they perceived themselves to be 'experts' in the area of education, parents were aware that significant learning occurs in many contexts, but felt unconfident in their abilities to educate children. Some of the findings from the current study mirror those of two earlier studies (Van der Riet, 1997 and Danckwerts, 2002) conducted in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, respectively. Although all three samples were drawn from different socio-economic and cultural groups, the findings would suggest that the parents and educators of South Africa have essentially similar perceptions regarding formal and informal education.
Macular pigment and percentage of body fat.

PURPOSE To investigate the relationship between percentage of body fat and macular pigment (MP) optical density. METHODS One hundred healthy subjects of ages between 22 and 60 years volunteered to participate in this study. MP optical density was measured psychophysically, serum lutein and zeaxanthin were quantified by HPLC, and dietary intake of lutein and zeaxanthin was assessed using a validated food frequency questionnaire. Body fat was measured by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA); body mass index (BMI) was also calculated for each subject. Clinical and personal details were recorded, with particular attention directed toward putative risk factors for AMD. RESULTS There was a significant inverse relationship between the percentage of body fat and MP optical density in males (r=-0.392, P <0.01), and after correcting for age and dietary lutein and zeaxanthin, this inverse relationship remained significant (r=-0.290, P <0.05). The relationship between MP optical density and percentage of body fat in females was inverse, but not significant (r=-0.197, P=0.149). A significant and inverse relationship between serum zeaxanthin and percentage of body fat was observed for females only (r=-0.354, P <0.01). Dietary intake of fat was inversely related to serum lutein and zeaxanthin, and significantly so for lutein (r=-0.256, P <0.05). However, dietary fat was unrelated to MP optical density (r=0.041, P=0.688). CONCLUSIONS A relative lack of MP is associated with adiposity in men, and may underlie the association between body fat and risk for AMD progression in males. Further, the processes governing accumulation and/or stabilization of lutein and zeaxanthin in fat tissue appear to differ for males and females.
Automation of micro finance institutions in Nigeria: Implication for the accountants

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN 2005) has reported that over 60 percent of currency in circulation is outside the banks and that 70 percent of this are to be handled by the newly established Micro Finance Fanks (MFBs). Evidences from the literature confirm positive correlation between Information Technology (IT) and performance. Taking a cue from Diffusion of Information theory, the perception of stakeholders in microfinance institutions on the ITimpact on service delivery in the MFBs and the implications for the Accountants is worthy of exploration. This paper explored the impact of information technology on the performance of MFBs and the role of Nigerian accountants with a view to proffering solutions to problems. The study adopts largely exploratory methodology through view analysis of the scholars and practitioners in Information Technology, Accountancy and microfinance institutions in Nigeria. We submit that most of the MFBs are automating their services to enhance service delivery and that accountants have changing roles than the conventional accounting practice prior to the computer revolution. Accountants must continue to update their skills in Information Technology competence for better performance.
Similar lymphocytic infiltration pattern in primary breast cancer and their corresponding distant metastases

ABSTRACT Tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in primary breast cancer (TIL) are acknowledged measures of disease free survival (DFS) in adjuvant and neoadjuvant settings. Little is known about the biology of metastasis infiltrating lymphocytes (mTIL) although the local immunity of the metastatic site may critically influence the infiltrate composite. To address this question, we compared mTIL with their matched TIL in 87 breast cancer patients and their corresponding distant metastasis at four different anatomical locations. Sections of surgical specimen were immunohistochemically analyzed for CD4+, CD8+ and CD20+ lymphocytes in three different tumor compartments: intratumoral lymphocytes (iTIL) defined as lymphocytes in direct contact with breast cancer cells, stromal lymphocytes (sTIL) located within the intratumoral stromal tissue and invasive-margin lymphocytes (imTIL). Overall, we found fewer (p < 0.001) mTIL than TIL. Within the tumor compartments, imTIL were more frequent than sTIL and iTIL both within metastases and the matched primary tumors (PT) (p < 0.001). CD4+ T cells were more numerous than CD8+ T cells and CD20+ B cells (p < 0.001). There was a similar pattern in PT and their corresponding metastasis. Only patients with brain metastases differed from the others displaying less CD20+ B cells at the infiltrative margin of the PT (p < 0.05). In summary, mTIL were significantly reduced within metastases but still mirrored the infiltrate pattern of the PT, interestingly regardless of the metastatic anatomical locations investigated. Our results suggest that the PT assigns the infiltrating lymphocyte pattern resumed at the metastatic site.
The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decrees (1972 and 1977) and indigenisation in Nigeria

The thesis is a comprehensive examination of the Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decrees of 1972 and 1977, and more broadly of the process of indigenisation in Nigeria. A brief introduction to the historical background of indigenisation before 1970 is followed by an account of the timing of the Decrees in the context of the oil boom in the country's economy. An examination of the problems encountered in implementing the Decrees and their effects, and an analysis of the distribution of benefits, is informed by empirical research including interviews, carried out by the author in Nigeria between 1982 and 1985. The record shows that indigenisation has led to the consolidation of an economy which accommodates the interests of ex-State personnel, the State as an institution, private indigenous businessmen and foreign capital, in an order which is far from certain to bring about the national economic independence which, in official terms, is the chief objective. Nigeria's commitment to capitalism and the promotion of Indigenous private enterprise, on the basis of resources generated initially by the agricultural economy, between the 1940s and 1960s, and then much more spectacularly and more significantly by oil revenues in the 1970s, provides an instructive example of the limits to what a post-colonial society in black Africa can achieve by trying to indigenise the ownership structure of its economy.
The chronometrics of cortical excitation as explored with auditory probes

performed a primary task. The primary tasks were designed to induce changes in slow cortical potentials (SCP) such as P300, contingent negative variation (CNV), and postimperative negative variation (PINV). Brief auditory stimuli were presented before, during or after the primary task. The interactions between the two types of event-related potentials, SCP and the probe-evoked N 1/P2, served to further explore the nature of SCP, particularly in its relation to excitability in cortical neuronal networks. The functional state indicated by SCP was also probed in patients with a chronic schizophrenic disorder, who are known to exhibit deviant SCP. Increased amplitudes of the probe-evoked vertex potential (N1/P2) and faster motor responses to probes during the CNV, and reduced N 1/P2-omplitudes and delayed motor responses during positive waves (P300) support the hypothesis that anticipatory cortical negativity indicates excitation in cortical neuronal networks while positive-going waves may indicate widespread cortical suppression (with focused islands of cortical excitability). Increased amplitudes of the N 1/P2 during the CNV but not during the PINV suggest a different functional significance of these two negative-going slow waves. Although schizophrenic patients displayed different amplitudes and scalp distribution, particularly of the PINV, suggesting a deviant spatia-temporal regulation of cortical excitability, the functional relation between SCP and probe-related activity was similar in schizophrenic patients and control subjects.
Physiological Differentiation of Vertebrate Populations

Although studies of geographic variation are relatively common, the vast majority have dealt with morphometric or meristic traits (13, 120, 297, 327), allozymes (150, 233, 327), or most recently, mitochondrial DNA (9). The relative rarity of studies of geographic variation in physiological traits (see 42, 245, 312 for reviews of early studies) is somewhat surprising, considering that a major focus within vertebrate "physiological ecology," "comparative physiology," "environmental physiology," and "biophysical ecology" is the study of adaptation (14, 15, 44, 75, 102, 112, 156, 181, 244, 246, 298, 299). Of course, populations may show differentiation on other than large geographic scales, such as "microgeographic" (150, 188, 213, 233, 290),
Factors Determining Participation of the Elderly in Ssi

The same low participation rates which plague many welfare programs have been observed among the elderly eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). A number of hypotheses have been offered to explain the low enrollment, but none has attracted universal acceptance. In this paper I use the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the participation of the elderly in SSI. Because of the high quality of the data, I am able to determine eligibility more accurately than in most previous studies. In this sample, only 56 percent of those whom I determine to be eligible for SSI are presently receiving benefits. I model the decision to participate as a probit equation, but modify the likelihood function to account for measurement error in the expected benefit. The results indicate that participation is primarily determined by the financial situation of the eligible individuals. Although all those eligible for SSI are poor, those with little in the way of other resources are significantly more likely to participate. This finding differs from widespread beliefs that eligible individuals are discouraged by the difficulty of the application process, or that many are uninformed about the program.
Feature-Specific Information Processing Precedes Concerted Activation in Human Visual Cortex

Current knowledge about the precise timing of visual input to the cortex relies largely on spike timings in monkeys and evoked-response latencies in humans. However, quantifying the activation onset does not unambiguously describe the timing of stimulus-feature-specific information processing. Here, we investigated the information content of the early human visual cortical activity by decoding low-level visual features from single-trial magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses. MEG was measured from nine healthy subjects as they viewed annular sinusoidal gratings (spanning the visual field from 2 to 10° for a duration of 1 s), characterized by spatial frequency (0.33 cycles/degree or 1.33 cycles/degree) and orientation (45° or 135°); gratings were either static or rotated clockwise or anticlockwise from 0 to 180°. Time-resolved classifiers using a 20 ms moving window exceeded chance level at 51 ms (the later edge of the window) for spatial frequency, 65 ms for orientation, and 98 ms for rotation direction. Decoding accuracies of spatial frequency and orientation peaked at 70 and 90 ms, respectively, coinciding with the peaks of the onset evoked responses. Within-subject time-insensitive pattern classifiers decoded spatial frequency and orientation simultaneously (mean accuracy 64%, chance 25%) and rotation direction (mean 82%, chance 50%). Classifiers trained on data from other subjects decoded the spatial frequency (73%), but not the orientation, nor the rotation direction. Our results indicate that unaveraged brain responses contain decodable information about low-level visual features already at the time of the earliest cortical evoked responses, and that representations of spatial frequency are highly robust across individuals.
Cognition, Academic Progress, Behavior and Self-Concept at 14 Years of Very Low Birth Weight Children

The aim of this study was to compare cognition, academic progress, behavior, and self-concept children of very low birth weight (VLBW, birth weight < 1501 g) born in the period 1980 to 1982 with randomly selected children of normal birth weight (NBW, birth weight > 2499 g). At 14 years of age, 130 (84.4%) of 154 VLBW and 42 (70.0%) of 60 NBW children were assessed. Ten VLBW children and one NBW child who had cerebral palsy were excluded. VLBW children scored at a significantly lower level on all three composite scales of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, 3rd Edition. VLBW children were also significantly disadvantaged on more specific cognitive processes, including tests of visual processing and visual memory and on subtests reflecting learning and problem solving. Only in arithmetic was a difference between the groups discerned on tests of achievement. Significantly more VLBW children were rated by teachers as socially rejected and by their parents as having learning problems at school. VLBW children had significantly reduced self-esteem. VLBW children had more cognitive, academic, and behavioral problems and lower self-esteem at 14 years of age than NBW control subjects.
Estimating the Dispersion Parameter of the Negative Binomial Distribution for Analyzing Crash Data Using a Bootstrapped Maximum Likelihood Method

The objective of this study is to improve the estimation of the dispersion parameter of the negative binomial distribution for modeling motor vehicle collisions. The negative binomial distribution is widely used to model count data such as traffic crash data, which often exhibit low sample mean values and small sample sizes. Under such situations, the most commonly used methods for estimating the dispersion parameter, the method of moment and the maximum likelihood estimate, may become inaccurate and unstable. A bootstrapped maximum likelihood estimate is proposed to improve the estimation of the dispersion parameter. The proposed method combines the technique of bootstrap resampling with the maximum likelihood estimation method to obtain better estimates of the dispersion parameter. The performance of the bootstrapped maximum likelihood estimate is compared with the method of moment and the maximum likelihood estimates through Monte Carlo simulations. To validate the simulation results, the methods are applied to observed data collected at 4-legged unsignalized intersections in Toronto, Ont. Overall, the results show that the proposed bootstrap maximum likelihood method produces smaller biases and more stable estimates. The improvements are more pronounced with small samples and low sample means.
Polarization rotation evaluation for macrocell MIMO channel

In this paper, the impact of the polarization on the performance of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with cross-polarized antennas has been investigated based on the outdoor macrocell measurement at 2.53 GHz. A simple model which can capture the major characteristics of the cross polarized channel is proposed. The effective polarization rotation during the propagation is evaluated using the proposed model, and found to follow a bimodal Rayleigh distribution. The commonly accepted uniform distribution polarization rotation angle is a reasonable but coarse assumption compared with our estimated results. The vertical and horizontal polarization perform similarly in line-of-sight (LOS) scenario, but may be different in non-LOS (NLOS) scenario depending on the environment where the receiver is located. The polarization diversity outperforms the spatial diversity in LOS scenario, but shows relatively small gain in a rich scattering scenario. This is further proofed by the comparison of the capacity of a 4 × 4 MIMO channel with cross-polarized antennas.
Do social allowance transfers crowd out private transfers? An analysis of responses among elderly households in Taiwan

Chuang JCC. Do social allowance transfers crowd out private transfers? An analysis of responses among elderly households in Taiwan This article examines whether public transfers ‘crowd out’ private inter-household transfers in Taiwan, focusing on two old age social allowance schemes (old age allowance and old age farmer allowance) during the 2002–2008 period. This study used a data set from the Survey of Family Income and Expenditure in Taiwan. Empirical evidence suggests that Taiwanese donors are strongly motivated by altruism, and that the increase of public transfers will crowd out private transfers, and vice versa. Besides, altruism is more likely to dominate among poorer elderly recipients, whereas the exchange motive would dominate among richer recipients. Thus, the response of Taiwanese donors is likely to neutralise the distributional impact of public transfers. Finally, the elderly are not a homogenous group, and the effect of public transfers on private transfers varies significantly by household characteristics, in particular depending on age, marital status and living arrangements.
Variance Estimation for the General Regression Estimator

A hybrid memory system having electromechanical memory cells is disclosed. A memory cell core circuit has an array of electromechanical memory cells, in which each cell is a crossbar junction at least one element of which is a nanotube or a nanotube ribbon. An access circuit provides array addresses to the memory cell core circuit to select at least one corresponding cell. The access circuit is constructed of semiconductor circuit elements.
Non-circular motion evidence in the circumnuclear region of M100 (NGC 4321)

We analyse new integral field spectroscopy of the inner region (central 2.5 kpc) of the spiral galaxy NGC 4321 to study the peculiar kinematics of this region. Fourier analysis of the velocity residuals obtained by subtracting an axisymmetric rotation model from the Hα velocity field, indicates that the distortions are global features generated by an m = 2 perturbation of the gravitational potential which can be explained by the nuclear bar. This bar has been previously observed in the near-infrared but not in the optical continuum dominated by star formation. We detect the optical counterpart of this bar in the 2D distribution of the old stellar population (inferred from the equivalent width map of the stellar absorption lines). We apply the Tremaine–Weinberg method to the stellar velocity field to calculate the pattern speed of the inner bar, obtaining a value of b=160±70 km s 1 kpc 1 . This value is considerably larger than the one obtained when a simple bar model is considered. However the uncertainties in the pattern speed determination prevent us to give support to alternative scenarios.