Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring Middle Managers' Strategic Sensemaking Role in Practice

This paper seeks to deepen the research on middle managers' strategic sensemaking roles. Until now, little research has explored how middle managers use their practical knowledge to realize their sensemaking role during strategic change in their daily activities. Here, through vignettes drawn from the authors' current research, a framework is developed showing that two micro-practices, "performing distributed conversations" and "enrolling networks", are critical in the accomplishment of this middle manager strategic sensemaking role. The paper also shows how these two micro-practices are underpinned by middle manager semantic and sociocultural knowledge, and that it is this practical knowledge that enables the middle managers to engage in these practices as part of their day to day activities and draw people in the change. The paper ends by discussing the challenges raised by the findings for capturing and analyzing the practical abilities of middle managers' strategic sensemaking roles.
Exchange Rate Regimes and the Stability of the International Monetary System

The member countries of the International Monetary Fund collaborate to try to assure orderly exchange arrangements and promote a stable system of exchange rates, recognizing that the essential purpose of the international monetary system is to facilitate the exchange of goods, services, and capital, and to sustain sound economic growth. The paper reviews the stability of the overall system of exchange rates by examining macroeconomic performance (inflation, growth, crises) under alternative exchange rate regimes; implications of exchange rate regime choice for interaction with the rest of the system (external adjustment, trade integration, capital flows); and potential sources of stress to the international monetary system.
Diversity and Progression among Social Work Students in England

This report presents the findings from the Diversity and Progression Among Social Work Students in England study that investigated the particular circumstances of black and ethnic minority, disabled, and lesbian, gay and bisexual students on social work programmes in England. The diversity and progression study was commissioned by the Department of Health (DH) under the Social Care Workforce Research Initiative of the Policy Research Programme, and was undertaken between 2007-2009. It used a qualitative approach to conduct an investigation into the particular circumstances of black and ethnic minority, disabled, and lesbian, gay and bisexual students to identify any specific factors that contribute to their experiences on social work courses. The study originated in the context of longstanding concerns that black and and ethnic minority and disabled students have different progression and completion rates compared to other groups of students on social work courses (see Hussein and colleagues 2006, 2008 and 2009).
Core and Peripheral Criteria of Video Game Addiction in the Game Addiction Scale for Adolescents

Abstract Assessment of video game addiction often involves measurement of peripheral criteria that indicate high engagement with games, and core criteria that indicate problematic use of games. A survey of the Norwegian population aged 16–74 years (N=10,081, response rate 43.6%) was carried out in 2013, which included the Gaming Addiction Scale for Adolescents (GAS). Confirmatory factor analysis showed that a two-factor structure, which separated peripheral criteria from core criteria, fitted the data better (CFI=0.963; RMSEA=0.058) compared to the original one-factor solution where all items are determined to load only on one factor (CFI=0.905, RMSEA=0.089). This was also found when we analyzed men aged ≤33 years, men aged >33 years, women aged ≤33 years, and women aged >33 years separately. This indicates that the GAS measures both engagement and problems related to video games. Multi-group measurement invariance testing showed that the factor structure was valid in all four groups (configural invariance) for the two-factor structure but not for the one-factor structure. A novel approach to categorization of problem gamers and addicted gamers where only the core criteria items are used (the CORE 4 approach) was compared to the approach where all items are included (the GAS 7 approach). The current results suggest that the CORE 4 approach might be more appropriate for classification of problem gamers and addicted gamers compared to the GAS 7 approach.
Some Determinants of the Variation in Earnings for College Men

The influences of several factors on the earnings of men with college degrees were measured using multiple regression with dummy variables. Earnings were found to be positively related to the rank of the colleges where degrees were received. For the holders of bachelor's degrees, engineering, the physical sciences, and business and commerce offer the greatest monetary rewards. For those with higher degrees, health fields and law offer the greatest returns. After accounting for college quality, age, field of specialization, and level of degree, nonwhites were found to have significantly lower average earnings than whites. The difference at each degree level is over $2,400 per year. Other factors tend to reinforce the lower earnings attributable to being nonwhite. Several background factors were introduced into the analysis, but they did not appear to be very important in determining the earnings of college men.
The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Roots, Costs, and Potential Peace Dividend

This paper summarizes the roots and status of the conflict in Mindanao, a large island with a current population of about 18 million -the second oldest internal conflict in the world- briefly examines the social costs, estimates the direct economic costs, lists the indirect costs and the dynamic advantages from cessation of the conflicts, and suggests certain key criteria for lasting resolution of the conflict. The overriding conclusion is that such a resolution carries the potential for vast economic and social advantages not only for the conflict-affected areas, but for Mindanao as a whole. Indeed, a sustainable settlement of this persistent conflict could carry a major benefit for the development of the country -largely through the ensuing improvement of the international image of the Philippines as a predictable and peaceable place to do business.
Auditor Industry Specialization and Earnings Quality

This study examines the association between measures of earnings quality and auditor industry specialization. Prior work has examined the association between auditor brand name and earnings quality, using auditor brand name to proxy for audit quality. Recent work has hypothesized that auditor industry specialization also contributes to audit quality. Extending this literature, we compare the absolute level of discretionary accruals (DAC) and earnings response coefficients (ERC) of firms audited by industry specialists with those of firms not audited by industry specialists. We restrict our study to clients of Big 6 (and later Big 5) auditors to control for brand name. Because industry specialization is unobservable, we use multiple proxies for it. After controlling for variables established in prior work to be related to DAC and the ERC, we find clients of industry specialist auditors have lower DAC and higher ERC than clients of nonspecialist auditors. This finding is consistent with clients of industry .
Visual attention based surveillance videos compression

Visual attention models (VAM) try to mimic the human visual system in distinguishing salient regions from non-salient ones in the scene. Only a few attention models propose to detect salient motion in surveillance videos. These model utilizes static features such as color, intensity, orientation, face, and dynamic features such as motion to detect most salient regions in videos. This motivated us to propose a compression algorithm based on visual attention model that is developed specificly for surveillance videos. In this paper we are using a state of the art visual attention model developed by combining bottom-up, top-down, and motion cues. Based on its similarity with experimentally obtained gaze maps evaluated both visually and with quantitative measures, a compression model based on this attention model is proposed for H.264/AVC encoded videos. Our experimental results show that we can encode videos with same or better quality than those obtained with the standard baseline profile of the JM 18.0 reference encoder, while reducing the file size uptil 22%.
Frequency of Regulatory T-Cells in the Peripheral Blood of Patients with Pulmonary Tuberculosis from Shanxi Province, China

Background Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease caused by the chronic and continuous infection of the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis). M. tuberculosis is an intracellular bacterial pathogen and is eliminated mainly through CD4+ effector Th cells. M. tuberculosis induces regulatory T lymphocytes (Tregs) that mediate immune suppression by cell-to-cell contact or by secreting cytokines such as transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β). To understand the role of regulatory T-cells in the pathogenesis of TB, we have measured the in vivo frequency of regulatory T-cells and associated in vivo cytokine production in pulmonary tuberculosis patients. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, we analyzed blood samples from 3 different populations (Group 1: patients with active TB, Group 2: patients recovered from TB and Group 3: healthy controls). We measured natural regulatory T-cell expression in peripheral blood using flow cytometry, and levels of blood serum IFN-γ and TGF-β1 using ELISA. The in vivo function of inductive regulatory T cells was mainly indicated by the expression of IFN-γ, TGF-β1, etc. Frequencyof natural regulatory T cells and inductive regulatory T cells in the peripheral blood samples from Group 1 patients were all significantly higher (P<0.05) than those from Groups 2 and 3. Conclusion/Significance Our results indicate that frequency of natural regulatory T cells and inductive regulatory T cells are significantly higher in the peripheral blood of patients with active pulmonary tuberculosis. These findings have potential application in improving TB diagnostic methods.
Fog Computing: Comprehensive Approach for Security Data Theft Attack Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Decoy Technology

Fog computing extends cloud computing, provides the services like data, compute, storage and application to end user. It improves the quality of service and also reduces latency. According to Cisco, due to its wide geographical distribution, the Fog computing is well suited for real time analytics and big data. This article, by exploitation advantages of Fog computing Paradigm, analyzes its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks, Decentralized Smart Building Control, IoT and Cyber-physical systems and software defined networks, and reviews Comprehensive Approach for security Data Theft Attack the use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and decoy technology in such a constrained environment along with the other two aspects of ECC, namely its security and efficiency. In the article, the performance of ECC is compared with the other PKC applications which should prove that ECC performs well and is more suitable for Fog environments.
Coinfection with Different Trypanosoma cruzi Strains Interferes with the Host Immune Response to Infection

A century after the discovery of Trypanosoma cruzi in a child living in Lassance, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1909, many uncertainties remain with respect to factors determining the pathogenesis of Chagas disease (CD). Herein, we simultaneously investigate the contribution of both host and parasite factors during acute phase of infection in BALB/c mice infected with the JG and/or CL Brener T. cruzi strains. JG single infected mice presented reduced parasitemia and heart parasitism, no mortality, levels of pro-inflammatory mediators (TNF-α, CCL2, IL-6 and IFN-γ) similar to those found among naïve animals and no clinical manifestations of disease. On the other hand, CL Brener single infected mice presented higher parasitemia and heart parasitism, as well as an increased systemic release of pro-inflammatory mediators and higher mortality probably due to a toxic shock-like systemic inflammatory response. Interestingly, coinfection with JG and CL Brener strains resulted in intermediate parasitemia, heart parasitism and mortality. This was accompanied by an increase in the systemic release of IL-10 with a parallel increase in the number of MAC-3+ and CD4+ T spleen cells expressing IL-10. Therefore, the endogenous production of IL-10 elicited by coinfection seems to be crucial to counterregulate the potentially lethal effects triggered by systemic release of pro-inflammatory mediators induced by CL Brener single infection. In conclusion, our results suggest that the composition of the infecting parasite population plays a role in the host response to T. cruzi in determining the severity of the disease in experimentally infected BALB/c mice. The combination of JG and CL Brener was able to trigger both protective inflammatory immunity and regulatory immune mechanisms that attenuate damage caused by inflammation and disease severity in BALB/c mice.
Zvi Griliches on Diffusion, Lags and Productivity Growth …Connecting the Dots

The three most extensively cited papers by Zvi Griliches deal with the diffusion of innovations, distributed lags and the sources of the growth of measured total factor productivity, respectively. The close economic connections between these dynamic phenomena remained largely unexplored and were at best only implicit in his published writings until late in his career. Yet, from his later reflective writings, it is clear that Griliches not only recognized the existence of those connections, but regarded them to be critically important in understanding the determinants of the pace of economic growth. The present paper proceeds in that spirit. It examines the relationship between Gliches’ pioneering study of the diffusion of hybrid corn and the subsequent development of economic theories explaining diffusion phenomenon. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of the literature, its aim is to expose the connections with lagged investment in capital-embodied innovations, and formalize of the micro-to macro links between technological diffusion dynamics and the pace of measured productivity growth. The heterodox, “evolutionary economics” aspects of this approach to explaining technological ‘transitions’ may be thought to be a significant yet under-appreciated part of Griliches’ intellectual legacy.
Effects of Unexpected Chords and of Performer's Expression on Brain Responses and Electrodermal Activity

Background There is lack of neuroscientific studies investigating music processing with naturalistic stimuli, and brain responses to real music are, thus, largely unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings This study investigates event-related brain potentials (ERPs), skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rate (HR) elicited by unexpected chords of piano sonatas as they were originally arranged by composers, and as they were played by professional pianists. From the musical excerpts played by the pianists (with emotional expression), we also created versions without variations in tempo and loudness (without musical expression) to investigate effects of musical expression on ERPs and SCRs. Compared to expected chords, unexpected chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN, reflecting music-syntactic processing) and an N5 (reflecting processing of meaning information) in the ERPs, as well as clear changes in the SCRs (reflecting that unexpected chords also elicited emotional responses). The ERAN was not influenced by emotional expression, whereas N5 potentials elicited by chords in general (regardless of their chord function) differed between the expressive and the non-expressive condition. Conclusions/Significance These results show that the neural mechanisms of music-syntactic processing operate independently of the emotional qualities of a stimulus, justifying the use of stimuli without emotional expression to investigate the cognitive processing of musical structure. Moreover, the data indicate that musical expression affects the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of musical meaning. Our data are the first to reveal influences of musical performance on ERPs and SCRs, and to show physiological responses to unexpected chords in naturalistic music.
Clustering of Shared Subobjects in Databases

The topic of this article is multi-criterion, structure-based clustering in object-oriented databases. We study an object class, which is the target (subobject) of several multi-valued reference types from other object classes. The aim is to serve all access paths fairly, so that the number of page accesses is proportional to the number of referenced occurrences of the subobject class. An eecient heuristic algorithm is developed for inserting new subobjects in an existing page set. Signiicant beneets can be obtained in read-intensive applications, if the connuent references are semantically correlated.
The Role of Urbanization in the Global Carbon Cycle

Urban areas account for more than 70% of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Urban expansion in tropics is responsible for 5% of the annual emissions from land use change. Here I show that the effect of urbanization on the global carbon cycle extends beyond these emissions. I quantify the contribution of urbanization to the major carbon fluxes and pools globally and identify gaps crucial for predicting the evolution of the carbon cycle in the future. Urban residents currently control ~22 (12-40) % of the land carbon uptake (112 PgC/yr) and ~24 (15-39) % of the carbon emissions (117 PgC/yr) from land globally. Urbanization resulted in the creation of new carbon pools on land such as buildings (~6.7 PgC) and landfills (~30 PgC). Together these pools store 1.6 (±0.3) % of the total vegetation and soil carbon pools globally. The creation and maintenance of these new pools has been associated with high emissions of CO2, which are currently better understood than the processes associated with the dynamics of these pools and accompanying uptake of carbon. Predictions of the future trajectories of the global carbon cycle will require a much better understanding of how urban development affects the carbon cycle over the long term.
Hippocampal Dendritic Spines Modifications Induced by Perinatal Asphyxia

Perinatal asphyxia (PA) affects the synaptic function and morphological organization. In previous works, we have shown neuronal and synaptic changes in rat neostriatum subjected to hypoxia leading to long-term ubi-protein accumulation. Since F-actin is highly concentrated in dendritic spines, modifications in its organization could be related with alterations induced by hypoxia in the central nervous system (CNS). In the present study, we investigate the effects of PA on the actin cytoskeleton of hippocampal postsynaptic densities (PSD) in 4-month-old rats. PSD showed an increment in their thickness and in the level of ubiquitination. Correlative fluorescence-electron microscopy photooxidation showed a decrease in the number of F-actin-stained spines in hippocampal excitatory synapses subjected to PA. Although Western Blot analysis also showed a slight decrease in β-actin in PSD in PA animals, the difference was not significant. Taken together, this data suggests that long-term actin cytoskeleton might have role in PSD alterations which would be a spread phenomenon induced by PA.
Clinical, MRI, and CSF Markers of Disability Progression in Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disorder of the central nervous system (CNS) in which the complex interplay between inflammation and neurodegeneration determines varying degrees of neurological disability. For this reason, it is very difficult to express an accurate prognosis based on purely clinical information in the individual patient at an early disease stage. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers are promising sources of prognostic information with a good potential of quantitative measure, sensitivity, and reliability. However, a comprehensive MS outcome prediction model combining multiple parameters is still lacking. Current relevant literature addressing the topic of clinical, MRI, and CSF markers as predictors of MS disability progression is reviewed here.
Three Essays in Macroeconomics of Fiscal and Monetary Policies

This dissertation studies the effects of inflation on long-term economic growth and economic inequality through the interactions of fiscal and monetary policy. Inflation is generated through the faster growth rate of nominal money supply. The fiscal policy in discussion includes different tax schedules, productive government spending, unproductive government spending, and transfer. Chapter one examines the effects of inflation on the distributions of income, earnings, consumption and wealth. We build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which consumers differ in terms of their earning abilities and time preference. Money is introduced via a generalized cash-in-advance constraint. In the quantitative analysis, we first calibrate the model to match the income and wealth distributions in the United States, and other key features of the U.S. economy. We then conduct a series of counterfactual experiments to quantify the distributional impacts of inflation. Chapter two discusses the growth effects of inflation. We build a monetary search model with two subperiods. One subperiod captures the frictional, decentralized trading and bargaining between buyers and sellers. The other subperiod is the centralized, neoclassical growth model. The long-term economic growth is promoted by the productive government spending and the growth rate is endogenously determined. More money on the one hand generates inflation, and on the other, it facilitates stochastic trading and therefore enhances the assets accumulation. Chapter three investigates the question about how the property of the progressive tax affects the relationship between economic inequality and long-term economic growth. We find that heterogeneity has positive (negative) effects on capital accumulation and economic growth if and only if the marginal tax function of the progressive tax is concave (convex). Three Essays in Macroeconomics of Fiscal and Monetary Policies
Solvent‐tuning the collapse and helix formation time scales of λ6‐85*

The λ6‐85* pseudo‐wild type of lambda repressor fragment is a fast two‐state folder (kf ≈ 35 μsec−1 at 58°C). Previously, highly stable λ6‐85* mutants with kf > 30 μsec−1 have been engineered to fold nearly or fully downhill. Stabilization of the native state by solvent tuning might also tune λ6‐85* away from two‐state folding. We test this prediction by examining the folding thermodynamics and kinetics of λ6‐85* in a stabilizing solvent, 45% by weight aqueous ethylene glycol at −28°C. Detection of kinetics by circular dichroism at 222 nm (sensitive to helix content) and small angle X‐ray scattering (measuring the radius of gyration) shows that refolding from guanidine hydrochloride denatured conditions exhibits very different time scales for collapse and secondary structure formation: the two processes become decoupled. Collapse remains a low‐barrier activated process, while the fastest of several secondary structure formation time scales approaches the downhill folding limit. Two‐state folding of λ6‐85* is not a robust process.