Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance Impacts of Strategy, Information Technology Applications, and Business Process Outsourcing in U.S. Manufacturing Plants

This paper develops a conceptual model to study the role of outsourcing strategies and plant‐level information technology (IT) application infrastructure in the outsourcing of production and support business processes, as well as their subsequent impact on overall plant performance. We validate this model empirically using cross‐sectional survey data from U.S. manufacturing plants. We find that some IT applications are more effective at enabling the outsourcing of business processes than others. For example, the implementation of enterprise management systems is associated with the outsourcing of both production and support processes, whereas operations management systems are not associated with the outsourcing of plant processes. Plants with a low‐cost outsourcing strategy are more likely to outsource support processes than plants with a competency‐focused outsourcing strategy. However, both cost‐ and competency‐based strategies have a positive and similar impact on the outsourcing of production processes. In terms of implications for plant performance, our findings indicate that the outsourcing of production and support processes is associated with higher gross margins. Although plant IT infrastructure is positively associated with favorable on‐time delivery rates, there is no positive association between the incidence of plant outsourcing and on‐time delivery rates. These results have implications for crafting plant‐level outsourcing strategies and for investments in IT systems to facilitate the outsourcing of business processes for enhanced plant performance.
Utilization of I-domain of LFA-1 to Target Drug and Marker Molecules to Leukocytes

The long-term objective of this project is to utilize the I-domain protein for the α-subunit of LFA-1 to target drugs to lymphocytes by binding to ICAM receptors on the cell surface. The short-term goal is to provide proof-of-concept that I-domain conjugated to small molecules can still bind to and uptake by ICAM-1 on the surface of lymphocytes (i.e., Raji cells). To accomplish this goal, the I-domain protein was labeled with FITC at several lysine residues to produce the FITC-I-domain and CD spectroscopy showed that the FITC-I-domain has a secondary structure similar to that of the parent I-domain. The FITC-I-domain was taken up by Raji cells via receptor-mediated endocytosis and its uptake can be blocked by anti-I-domain mAb but not by its isotype control. Antibodies to ICAM-1 enhance the binding of I-domain to ICAM-1, suggesting it binds to ICAM-1 at different sites than the antibodies. The results indicate that fluorophore modification does not alter the binding and uptake properties of the I-domain protein. Thus, I-domain could be useful as a carrier of drug to target ICAM-1-expressing lymphocytes.
On inflation as a regressive consumption tax

Evidence on the portfolio holdings and transaction patterns of households suggests that the burden of in ation is not evenly distributed. We build a monetary growth model consistent with key features of cross-sectional household data and use this framework to study the distributional impact of in ation. At the aggregate level, our model economy behaves similarly to standard monetary growth models within the representative agent abstraction. In ation has, however, important distributional e ects since it is e ectively a regressive consumption tax. Thus, neglecting the distributional consequences of in ation may prove misleading in assessing the e ects of in ation in
Two Drug Interaction Studies Evaluating the Pharmacokinetics and Toxicity of Pemetrexed When Coadministered with Aspirin or Ibuprofen in Patients with Advanced Cancer

Purpose: Pemetrexed is an antimetabolite that is structurally similar to methotrexate. Because nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) impair methotrexate clearance and increase its toxicity, we evaluated the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of pemetrexed when coadministered with aspirin or ibuprofen in advanced cancer patients. Experimental Design: In two independent, randomized, crossover drug interaction studies, cancer patients with a creatinine clearance (CrCl) ≥60 mL/min received an NSAID (aspirin or ibuprofen) with either the first or the second dose of pemetrexed (cycle 1 or 2). Pemetrexed (500 mg/m2) was infused i.v. on day 1 of a 21-day cycle, and all patients were supplemented with oral folic acid and i.m. vitamin B12. Aspirin (325 mg) or ibuprofen (400 mg; 2 × 200 mg) was given orally every 6 hours, starting 2 days before pemetrexed administration, with the ninth and final dose taken 1 hour before infusion. Pemetrexed pharmacokinetics with and without concomitant NSAID treatment were compared for cycles 1 and 2. Results: Data from 27 patients in each study were evaluable for the analysis of pemetrexed pharmacokinetics. Coadministration of aspirin did not alter pemetrexed pharmacokinetics; however, ibuprofen coadministration was associated with a 16% reduction in clearance, a 15% increase in maximum plasma concentration, and a 20% increase in area under the plasma concentration versus time curve but no significant change in Vss compared with pemetrexed alone. No febrile neutropenia occurred in any patient, and no increase in pemetrexed-related toxicity was associated with NSAID administration. Conclusions: Pemetrexed (500 mg/m2) with vitamin supplementation is well tolerated and requires no dosage adjustment when coadministered with aspirin (in patients with CrCl ≥60 mL/min) or ibuprofen (in patients with CrCl ≥80 mL/min).
A method for motion adaptive frame rate up-conversion

A frame interpolation algorithm for frame rate up-conversion of progressive image sequences is proposed. The algorithm is based on simple motion compensation and linear interpolation. A motion vector is searched for each pixel in the interpolated image and the resulting motion field is median filtered to remove inconsistent vectors. Averaging along the motion trajectory is used to produce the interpolated pixel values. The main novelty of the proposed method is the motion compensation algorithm which has been designed with low computational complexity as an important criterion. Subsampled blocks are used in block matching and the vector search range is constrained to the most likely motion vectors. Simulation results show that good visual quality has been obtained with moderate complexity. The algorithm has been designed mainly for 50 Hz to 75 Hz frame rate up-conversion with applications in a multimedia environment, but it can also be used in advanced television receivers to remove artifacts due to low scan rate.
A Robust Image Compression Algorithm using JPEG 2000 Standard with Golomb Rice Coding

Summary Today's communication is mostly in the form of voice and data. The amount of data and voice that are transferred from one part of the world to another is enormous. To refute the issue of bandwidth from the systems in vogue today, and to help provide acceptable quality of services for voice communications, the problem of image compression and decompression has been dealt in this paper. This paper analyzes JPEG 2000 standard with Golomb Rice Technique for various wavelet transforms like D2, D4, D8, D10, D12, Haar and DMEY for compression and decompression of image signals. Further the various wavelet transforms with Golomb Rice technique were tested on 25 image samples for compression and it was found that the DMEY wavelet based Golomb Rice technique achieves a RMSE of nearly zero and number of samples saved around 49.965 % on an average compared to other wavelet, which shows that DMEY is best suited for image compression.
Portuguese adopted adolescents' perception of attachment relationships to parents

The establishment of emotional bonds is one of the most important tasks of the adoptive family. Most research about attachment in adoption focuses on young adopted children, as opposed to adoptees in other stages of development. The present study aims at assessing the adopted adolescents' self-perception of attachment relationships with their adoptive parents, by pairing them with a group of institutionalized adolescents and another one of adolescents in the community. One hundred sixty-five adolescents (55 adopted, 55 in residential care, and 55 living with their birth family), aged 12 to 19, participated in this study. Data were collected using the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment to assess attachment relationships with parents on three dimensions: trust, communication, and alienation. The results showed that adoptees perceived their relationship with their parents in a similar way to peers in the community and presented higher results when compared to institutionalized adolescents in trust and communication and lower scores in alienation. The results highlighted the relevance of family context experiences and suggested that adoption can offer the possibility of building a secure attachment relationship, which is not the case in the context of collective care, as happens within institutionalized care.
Tensorial apparent resistivity mapping and an archeological case study

In order to make sure of existence of subsurface wall remnants around the still existing ruins of the Pilisszentkereszt Cistercian Monastery, Hungary, we carried out geoelectrical mapping with a fixed current electrode (AB) distance = 15 m, potential electrode distance = 50 cm, where two AB directions were used, and both Ex and Ey components were measured. The field was subdivided altogether into 162 blocks, each has a dimension of 7m*7.5 m, and in each block we had 240 electrode positions. The two current directions allowed to construct the full apparent resistivity tensor at 210 sites of each block. On basis of altogether 162*210 tensors, various rotational invariants, as (1) determinant, (2) difference of the main elements, and (3) sum of the square of the tensor elements were computed. These maps do not have depth resolution, but the natural and man-made anomalies can be clearly distinguished from each other. Apparent resistivities of various rotational invariants provide practically the same picture (with slight, but characteristic differences), and some other rotational invariants (e.g. the difference of the secondary elements, if they significantly exceed a threshold value) may refer to local inconsistency of the data.
Teachers' readiness to use technology in the classroom: an empirical study

The growing body of literature associated with educational computer use has examined numerous variables and interrelationships in order to gain a better understanding of computer beliefs and use of computers within education. Teachers' computer acceptance is an important factor to the successful use of computers in education. Thus there is a need to examine the factors affecting teachers' computer use and its implications to teachers' professional development strategies. This article reports a research on the relationship between actual usage of computer (AUC) and technology acceptance constructs among secondary school Mathematics, Science and English language (MSE) teachers in Malaysia. Overall, the study found that the AUC among MSE secondary school teachers were at the moderate level. Meanwhile, the constructs of attitude, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, job relevance, and computer compatibility showed significant positive relationship with AUC. Practical recommendations for school administrators and teachers been discussed.
ePluribus: Ethnicity on Social Networks

We propose an approach to determine the ethnic breakdown of a population based solely on people's names and data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. We demonstrate that our approach is able to predict the ethnicities of individuals as well as the ethnicity of an entire population better than natural alternatives. We apply our technique to the population of U.S. Facebook users and uncover the demographic characteristics of ethnicities and how they relate. We also discover that while Facebook has always been diverse, diversity has increased over time leading to a population that today looks very similar to the overall U.S. population. We also find that different ethnic groups relate to one another in an assortative manner, and that these groups have different profiles across demographics, beliefs, and usage of site features.
Fluctuation phenomena in crystal plasticity—a continuum model

On microscopic and mesoscopic scales, plastic flow of crystals is characterized by large intrinsic fluctuations. Deformation by crystallographic slip occurs in a sequence of intermittent bursts (‘slip avalanches’) with power-law size distribution. In the spatial domain, these avalanches produce characteristic deformation patterns in the form of slip lines and slip bands which exhibit long-range spatial correlations. We propose a generic continuum model which accounts for randomness in the local stress–strain relationships as well as for long-range internal stresses that arise from the ensuing plastic strain heterogeneities. The model parameters are related to the local dynamics and interactions of lattice dislocations. The model explains experimental observations on slip avalanches as well as the associated slip and surface pattern morphologies.
Real-time android with RTDroid

This paper presents RTDroid, a variant of Android that provides predictability to Android applications. Although there has been much interest in adopting Android in real-time contexts, surprisingly little work has been done to examine the suitability of Android for real-time systems. Existing work only provides solutions to traditional problems, including real-time garbage collection at the virtual machine layer and kernel-level real-time scheduling and resource management. While it is critical to address these issues, it is by no means sufficient. After all, Android is a vast system that is more than a Java virtual machine and a kernel. Thus, this paper goes beyond existing work and examines the internals of Android. We discuss the implications and challenges of adapting Android constructs and core system services for real-time and present a solution for each. Our system is unique in that it redesigns Android's internal components, replaces Android's Java VM (Dalvik) with a real-time VM, and leverages off-the-shelf real-time OSes. We demonstrate the feasibility and predictability of our solution by evaluating it on three different platforms---an x86 PC, a LEON3 embedded board, and a Nexus S smartphone. The evaluation results show that our design can successfully provide predictability to Android applications, even under heavy load.
Fading Signatures of Critical Brain Dynamics during Sustained Wakefulness in Humans

Sleep encompasses approximately a third of our lifetime, yet its purpose and biological function are not well understood. Without sleep optimal brain functioning such as responsiveness to stimuli, information processing, or learning may be impaired. Such observations suggest that sleep plays a crucial role in organizing or reorganizing neuronal networks of the brain toward states where information processing is optimized. Increasing evidence suggests that cortical neuronal networks operate near a critical state characterized by balanced activity patterns, which supports optimal information processing. However, it remains unknown whether critical dynamics is affected in the course of wake and sleep, which would also impact information processing. Here, we show that signatures of criticality are progressively disturbed during wake and restored by sleep. We demonstrate that the precise power-laws governing the cascading activity of neuronal avalanches and the distribution of phase-lock intervals in human electroencephalographic recordings are increasingly disarranged during sustained wakefulness. These changes are accompanied by a decrease in variability of synchronization. Interpreted in the context of a critical branching process, these seemingly different findings indicate a decline of balanced activity and progressive distance from criticality toward states characterized by an imbalance toward excitation where larger events prevail dynamics. Conversely, sleep restores the critical state resulting in recovered power-law characteristics in activity and variability of synchronization. These findings support the intriguing hypothesis that sleep may be important to reorganize cortical network dynamics to a critical state thereby assuring optimal computational capabilities for the following time awake.
Kaempferol Downregulates Insulin-like Growth Factor-I Receptor and ErbB3 Signaling in HT-29 Human Colon Cancer Cells

Background: Novel dietary agents for colon cancer prevention and therapy are desired. Kaempferol, a flavonol, has been reported to possess anticancer activity. However, little is known about the molecular mechanisms of the anticancer effects of kaempferol. The aim of this study was to determine the inhibitory effect of kaempferol on growth factor-induced proliferation and to elucidate its underlying mechanisms in the HT-29 human colon cancer cell line. Methods: To assess the effects of kaempferol and/or growth factors [insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I and heregulin (HRG)-β], cells were cultured with or without 60 μmol/L kaempferol and/or 10 nmol/L IGF-I or 20 μg/L HRG-β. Cell proliferation, DNA synthesis, and apoptosis were determined by a cell viability assay, a [3H]thymidine incorporation assay, and Annexin-V staining, respectively. Western blotting, immunoprecipitation, and an in vitro kinase assay were conducted to evaluate expression and activation of various signaling molecules involved in the IGF-I receptor (IGF-IR) and ErbB3 signaling pathways. Results: IGF-I and HRG-β stimulated HT-29 cell growth but did not abrogate kaempferol-induced growth inhibition and apoptosis. Kaempferol reduced IGF-II secretion, HRG expression and phosphorylation of Akt and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)-1/2. Kaempferol reduced IGF-I- and HRG-β-induced phosphorylation of the IGF-IR and ErbB3, their association with p85, and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) activity. Additionally, kaempferol inhibited IGF-I- and HRG-β-induced phosphorylation of Akt and ERK-1/2. Conclusions: The results demonstrate that kaempferol downregulates activation of PI3K/Akt and ERK-1/2 pathways by inhibiting IGF-IR and ErbB3 signaling in HT-29 cells. We suggest that kaempferol could be a useful chemopreventive agent against colon cancer.
Foreign-Affiliate Activity and U.S. Skill Upgrading

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using U.S. manufacturing data from 1977 to 1994, we find that inward FDI has not contributed to U.S. within-industry skill upgrading. In fact, the 1980s wave of Japanese greenfield investments was significantly correlated with lower, not higher, relative demand for skilled labor. This casts doubt upon one possible channel of skill-biased technological change that was previously unexplored.
Story comprehension in pre-readers: understanding goal structure and generating inferences when a story has competing goals

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore pre-readers’ comprehension of a story with competing character goals. Fifty-eight children in three age groups (2½–3 years; 3–4 years; and 4–5 years) were read a story in which the protagonist’s goal was unstated and conflicted with the goal of the secondary character. Understanding of explicit story content was tested through a joint story retell, during which children were prompted to supply 10 story elements. Children in the two older groups supplied more than half of the elements; those in the youngest group obtained a significantly lower score, supplying an average of two elements. Responses to questions suggested that a majority of participants in each age group had accurately inferred the protagonist’s goal. However, few children demonstrated that they had linked actions with goal, an indication that they had difficulty grasping the goal structure of a story with competing goals.
Representation and new party survival in multi-level systems

ABSTRACT This contribution investigates how the structure of new political parties’ success influences their survival. Improving on the standard of previous studies, we argue in particular that there is no simple linear relationship between vote shares and the likelihood of party survival. Rather, the probability of survival increases sharply if new parties gain enough votes to secure representation. Furthermore, we argue that new parties should be more likely to survive when they are successful at the subordinate (local) level. We test our expectations using a new data set that includes information on 107 newly founded Czech regional parties. Our results show that studies on party lifespans and the electoral success of new political parties require an understanding of the impact of representational thresholds. Most importantly, the reported analyses indicate that models of party survival need to consider the significance of parliamentary representation and the multilevel structure of party competition.
A tale of two perspectives: Australian risk management in theory and in practice

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is an important area connecting academic researchers with the practitioners due to its critical role in financial risk management as required by the Basel Accord. While both academic researchers and the practitioners recognize that VaR models provide a convenient method for quantifying market risk, their objectives and interests in VaR can be quite different. Academic researchers are primarily interested in the accuracy of VaR models in forecasting market risk. These results are of interest to the regulator to ensure adequate risk mitigation is undertaken by banks as a result of inadequate capital reserves. Banks, however, can choose to use standardized or the internally designed VaR models to measure market risk. The thesis aims to demonstrate the differences in approaches and objectives to VaR modelling and forecasting by academic researchers and the practitioners. In theory, the more complex VaR models may be preferred by the academic researchers for risk forecasting as these models capture volatility structures of asset returns that are usually not directly observable. However, these models raise some difficulties in practice. For an ADI who trades large and complex portfolios of financial assets and derivatives daily, these models require continuous constructing and updating new volatility forecasts that come with high transaction costs. Therefore, combining these different objectives is crucial to developing a more practical approach that can satisfy both the literature and regulatory objectives.
The Relationship between Willingness to Communicate and Language Learning Anxiety among Iranian College Students

General language communication has attracted researchers' attention for over fifty years (McCroskey, 1992). Therefore, teachers try to improve learners' communication abilities as far as possible, but on the contrary, although learners are given the opportunity to speak up in classroom or elsewhere some prefer to avoid speaking. Since one of the reasons of language difficulty has been considered to be anxiety (Tran, 2012), therefore, the present study tries to find out if there is a correlation between willingness to communicate and anxiety. Thirty three third year university students participated in the study. The study showed that there was a negative correlation found between level of anxiety and willingness to communicate, indicating that with the increase of anxiety willingness to communicate decreases. Therefore, the result of the study indicates that if the instructor decreases the anxiety of the learner, the willingness to communicate on the part of the learner will improve.