Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An empirical study of the relationship between knowledge sharing and IS/IT strategic planning (ISSP)

Purpose – The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between knowledge sharing behaviour and the effectiveness of IS/IT strategic planning (ISSP). Furthermore, we explore the factors influencing knowledge‐sharing behaviour among stakeholders in the ISSP process.Design/methodology/approach – To test the relationships between the constructs in the research model, data were collected by a questionnaire survey sent to the IS/IT executives of 805 large companies in Taiwan.Findings – Survey results indicate that knowledge sharing behaviour influences the effectiveness of ISSP. Certain factors are also found to influence knowledge sharing behaviour among stakeholders in the ISSP process.Research limitations/implications – Future research should focus on the following areas, as motivated by limitations of the present study. First, future researchers might attempt to understand the conclusions about the knowledge sharing factors of this research through structured interviews in case studies of I.
Demystifying the Rise of Hamas

Most scholarly and popular writings portray Hamas as either extremist or anti- systemic and as a threat to democracy. Expected utility theory assumes that voters will reward centrist parties because voters are risk-averse, while prospect theory expects extremist parties to be supported by voters since they tend to become risk-takers when in loss. After contrasting Hamas’s ideological distance from other Palestinian political parties, I argue that the secret of Hamas’s electoral success in 2006 lies not in its extremism but in its ideological centrist domestic message, consistent with expected utility theory. Palestinian voters supported what they saw as a centrist Hamas although it was viewed as extremist in the West. More importantly, the participation of Hamas in the democratic process has moderated its domestic and foreign policies, while its exclusion has destabilizing and radicalizing effects.
Using accounting records to enhance an understanding of a seventeenth-century Italian feudal community: the case of the Commune of Penne (1664–90)

Through the analysis of recently discovered accounting records of the Commune of Penne, this study is concerned with enhancing an understanding of a seventeenth-century Southern Italian feudal commune. Surviving public records and other primary sources are used to both elucidate the commune's organization, administration and accounting procedures and to portray key aspects of community life through a classification analysis of the entries contained in the town Register of the Exchequer. The analysis of these original documents discloses the ways in which money was spent in the Commune of Penne in the period 1664–90, thus specifying the major homogeneous groups of expenses of the Commune and thereby elucidating the adopted social priorities and concerns of the time. Such studies are important in enhancing an understanding of life and times in specific local, time-specific contexts, thus offering the potential to augment our literature on social history.
Effect of Emotional Labor on Emotional Exhaustion and Work Attitudes among Hospitality Employees in India

The present research explores the relationship of emotional labor strategies (i.e., surface and deep acting) with emotional exhaustion, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions among employees in the hospitality industry in India. Data were collected from 204 frontline hotel employees representing different departments. The results of the study demonstrate that surface acting is positively related with emotional exhaustion and turnover intentions and negatively related to affective organizational commitment. Moreover, deep acting was observed to have a negative influence on emotional exhaustion. The findings of the study indicate that frequent use of surface acting may have detrimental consequences for employees as well as for the organization. Managerial implications of the study are discussed.
Joint Tolerance to β-Lactam and Fluoroquinolone Antibiotics in Escherichia coli Results from Overexpression of hipA

ABSTRACT The basis of joint tolerance to β-lactam and fluoroquinolone antibiotics in Escherichia coli mediated byhipA was examined. An antibiotic tolerance phenotype was produced by overexpression of hipA under conditions that did not affect the growth rate of the organism. OverexpressinghipA probably decreases the period in which bacteria are susceptible to the antibiotics by temporarily affecting some aspect of chromosome replication or cell division.
Combined method for fetal electrocardiogram extraction from noninvasive abdominal recordings

Abdominal electrocardiogram (AECG) recording is a non-invasive method to assess fetal well-being during both pregnancy and delivery. However, AECG recording is contaminated by a series of physiological interferences which make difficult the extraction of morphological and temporal parameters of fetal ECG from the raw signals. In this work, it is proposed a combined method to extract the fetal ECG from AECG recording by removing the interferences on a cascade structure using a priori information about the signals nature. In this work, a total of 54 multichannel AECG recordings taken from 21 to 40 weeks of gestation were enrolled. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional independent component analysis, and provides fetal heart rate detection in 80% of the cases. In addition it also permits to obtain fetal ECG morphology from AECG recordings.
The impact of work-life culture on organizational productivity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the relationship of work-life culture and organizational productivity and determine if it is mediated by the availability of work-life programs. Design/methodology/approach – Quantitative data for the study were collected using three sources: an original survey completed by managers of 195 different companies, archival data from two databases, and archival data published in three national surveys. Hypotheses were tested using path analyses. Findings – The data reveals that work-life culture has no direct effect on labor productivity but does have an indirect effect on it, through the availability of work-life programs. Research limitations/implications – One of the study’s limitations is that its design is cross-sectional. The authors suggest that future longitudinal studies examine the impact of work-life culture on organizational outcomes. Practical implications – Practitioners should note the importance of promoting a favorable work-life culture and offeri.
Opening Facebook: How to Use Facebook in the College Classroom

The purpose of this research is to propose the idea of using the social network site, Facebook, for teacher education. Specifically, this research explores the advantages of this new Web 2.0 medium, and illustrates the different levels of course integration at an instructor's disposal. In addition, it provides specific instructions on how to use Facebook and a discussion of " best practice " policies that can be ethically implemented within the classroom. Specific attention is given to suggestions for creating a professional Facebook presence in which future teachers can emulate.
WOMBAT—A tool for mixed model analyses in quantitative genetics by restricted maximum likelihood (REML)

WOMBAT is a software package for quantitative genetic analyses of continuous traits, fitting a linear, mixed model; estimates of covariance components and the resulting genetic parameters are obtained by restricted maximum likelihood. A wide range of models, comprising numerous traits, multiple fixed and random effects, selected genetic covariance structures, random regression models and reduced rank estimation are accommodated. WOMBAT employs up-to-date numerical and computational methods. Together with the use of efficient compilers, this generates fast executable programs, suitable for large scale analyses. Use of WOMBAT is illustrated for a bivariate analysis. The package consists of the executable program, available for LINUX and WINDOWS environments, manual and a set of worked example, and can be downloaded free of charge from http://agbu.une. edu.au/:_kmeyer/wombat.html
Best Practices in Corporate Governance: What Two Decades of Research Reveals

This report addresses two key questions for today's top executives: Do acquisitions create value for acquirers? And under what circumstances have acquisitions created the most value for acquiring shareholders? The authors' analysis of over 1,500 completed deals by non‐financial companies in the United States over the past 12 years shows that, at announcement, acquirers' shareholders suffer small losses, on average, in the short term around the initial deal announcement. Over longer intervals, such as one or two years following the announcement of the transaction, acquirers tend to slightly outperform industry peers. The average or median market response hides tremendous variability in how the market has reacted to individual deals, however. This article provides evidence that the “right” M&A transaction can create substantial value for acquirers. One‐quarter of the transactions lead to market‐adjusted gains in excess of 5% for the acquirer and oneeighth of the transactions lead to gains in excess of 10% in the short term. However, some deals have also destroyed substantial shareholder value. Financing structure is a key driver of the stock market reaction. Stock‐financed transactions, on average, have a negative stock market reaction, while cash‐financed transactions have benefited acquirers in both the short term as well as the long term. Acquisitions of private companies or assets and units of public companies have consistently generated higher returns for acquirers than purchases of public companies. Moreover, EPS dilution is not a major driver of how the stock market reacts to a deal. Although “accretive” deals perform slightly better than “dilutive” ones in the short and long run, the difference is small and not statistically significant. Over the long run, acquiring shareholders have benefited the most from deals within the same industry and that avoid targets with relatively optimistic earnings growth projections.
Does the Stock Market Overreact to Corporate Earnings Information

This paper tests whether the stock market overreacts to extreme earnings, by examining firms' stock returns over the thirty-six months subsequent to extreme earnings years. While the poorest earners do outperform the best earners, the poorest earners are also significantly smaller than the best earners. When poor earners are matched with good earners of equal size, there is little evidence of differential performance. This suggests that size, and not investor overreaction to earnings, is responsible for the "overreaction" phenomenon, the tendency for prior period losers to outperform prior period winners in the subsequent period. Copyright 1989 by American Finance Association.
Orchestrating Heterogeneous Knowledge: The Effects of Internal and External Knowledge Heterogeneity on Innovation Performance

Heterogeneous knowledge sources may have decreasing returns for innovation performance. While scholars have widely examined the effect of knowledge heterogeneity (KH) on innovation performance, little has been done to explore the differences between external and internal KH, and to integrate these two sources of KH. This study examines the independent and combined effects (the multiplicative and balanced effects) of internal and external KH on innovation performance. Using survey data on 261 firms in technology-intensive industries in China, our study shows an inverse U-shaped relationship between external KH and innovation performance. This differs from the relationship between internal KH and innovation performance, which has a linear rather than curvilinear effect, indicating that internal and external KH have varying influences on innovation performance. By combining the two effects, we find that both the complementary and balanced effects of internal and external KH on innovation performance are significant and positive. The findings indicate that managers should not only put an emphasis on developing internal and external KH, but also identify the means to combine the two types of KH to increase innovation performance.
Quality, Sunk Costs and Competition

This paper explores the link between quality, cost and concentration. Using concentration and cost data and product quality indicators for 2,244 products in over eighty industries in 1997 and 2002 in the US, a two-stage, ordered probit, random effects estimation explores the impact of concentration and cost on quality. The results demonstrate that overall market concentration and high fixed costs are both positively correlated with product quality across most industries. Generally, when either industry concentration or industry fixed costs increase, the likelihood of the product being higher quality increases and the likelihood of observing a lower quality decreases. Further, the authors confirm that prices are a good signal of product quality. A theoretical model is also derived.
How Do Leverage Ratios Affect Bank Share Performance During Financial Crises: The Japanese Experience of the Late 1990s

This study investigates the relationship between leverage ratios and bank share performance for a sample of Japanese banks during the period of financial crisis in the late 1990s. We differentiate between two types of leverage ratios: book leverage and market leverage. We show that market leverage instead of book leverage observed before the crisis has statistically and economically significant predictive power for the cross-sectional variation in bank performance during the crisis, even after controlling for a variety of other indicators reflecting bank’s characteristics and financial conditions. We also find that banks with lower market leverage ratios were affected more adversely by the failure announcements of large financial institutions during the crisis. The results are robust across alternative model specifications, statistical methodologies, lengths of sample intervals, and measures of bank share performance during the crisis. Our results therefore have important implications for regulators in identifying distressed banks that are vulnerable to the deterioration in conditions of the financial system.
Gamma Discounting and the Combination of Forecasts

We argue that gamma discounting (Weitzman, 2001) can be understood as a veridical approach to combining experts' forecasts, in which experts are treated as either right or wrong and are weighted equally in pursuit of the 'true' forecast. More appropriate is the optimal-seeking approach in which experts are wrong to varying degrees and forecasts are combined to minimise forecast errors. With uncertainty in the true mean rate characterised in this way the decline in the Certainty Equivalent Discount Rate (CER) is minimal compared to gamma discounting. Using the asymptotic distribution leads to virtually no decline in the CER, even in the deep future. The same is true when small samples of experts are used or when experts are influenced by schools of thought and hence are no longer independent. Risk adjustment is further shown to have minimal impact on our results, with obvious implications for policy.
Sticking Together

How does classroom racial diversity affect the civic dimension of American adolescents’ education? Does a high level of diversity correlate with more or less discussion of political issues, a key criterion for an effective civic education? Do different levels of political discussion, in turn, have consequences for the intention of adolescents to become informed voters? Using the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Civic Education Study, this article puts these questions to the empirical test. Results show that racial diversity corresponds to a lower level of political discussion in the classroom. Less political discussion, in turn, correlates with a lower likelihood of adolescents’ stated intention of becoming an informed voter.
Emergent themes in the writing of perfectionists: A qualitative study

Abstract As an initial step toward uncovering the therapeutic potential of expressive writing for treating perfectionism, the current study utilized an emotional writing prompt to penetrate the inner world of 14 maladaptive perfectionists. The major question driving the inquiry was whether informative themes would emerge when perfectionists were prompted to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings. Procedures derived from Consensual Qualitative Research were used to analyze the written text. Results revealed domains labeled Stress, Relationships, Coping, Expectations, Perfectionism, and Academic/Professional Goals. These domains and their respective categories, along with the use of expressive writing, could enrich clinical interventions in treatment studies of perfectionists.
Do Political Connections Add Value to Audit Firms? Evidence from IPO Audits in China

Audit firms become politically connected when their partners are appointed to the regulatory committee that screens prospective initial public offering (IPO) companies. Connections with regulators may enable audit firms to gain insights into the regulatory process which can help their clients prepare IPO applications, and lobby for favorable regulatory decisions. These arguments suggest that connections with regulators may help audit firms reduce IPO rejection risk for their clients, thus allowing them to charge higher IPO audit fees and gain more IPO clients. Regulatory committee appointments may benefit non-top tier audit firms more than they do top tier audit firms because reputational concerns are likely to encourage the latter to refrain from helping their clients raise the likelihood of passing the IPO screening process to a level higher than that justified by their clients’ fundamentals. Consistent with these arguments and predictions, the findings of this study show that after their partners are appointed to the IPO screening committee, non-top audit firms significantly increase their IPO audit fees and IPO market share, and reduce IPO rejection risk for their clients, whereas top tier audit firms do not.
Potential clinical value of circulating chromogranin A in patients with prostate carcinoma.

BACKGROUND Neuroendocrine (NE) differentiation of prostate adenocarcinoma has received increasing attention in recent years as a result of possible implications for prognosis and therapy. The presence of NE tumor subpopulation can be gauged non invasively by measuring circulating levels of secretory products, primarily chromogranin A (CgA). METHODS This article provides a review on published papers evaluating circulating CgA in prostate cancer patients. RESULTS Circulating CgA levels were found to be higher in prostate cancer patients than in patients with benign or pre-malignant prostatic diseases. In patients with malignancy, they correlated either to the stage of disease or to the condition of hormone refractoriness. CgA levels did not correlate with serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) and were supranormal in the majority of advanced patients with PSA within normality. In hormone refractory cases, elevated CgA was a significant predictor of poor prognosis, independently from serum PSA. CgA values were not substantially affected by either endocrine therapy or chemotherapy. They were found to increase during androgen deprivation in some cases and this trend preceded that of PSA. The administration of a somatostatin analog in hormone refractory cases was able to reduce plasma CgA values consistently. CONCLUSIONS Present data suggest a potential role of circulating CgA in the management of prostate cancer patients. CgA determination may be useful diagnostically and prognostically and could offer complementary information with respect to PSA. Serial evaluation of circulating CgA could provide information on changes in the NE phenotype expression as a consequence of tumor progression and/or treatment administration.
STRATEGIC CSR SHIFTS TOWARDS ADAPTIVE FOOD GOVERNANCE UNDER ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE: A COMPARISON BETWEEN SOUTH AFRICAN AND BRAZILIAN RETAILERS

Governance in the food system has become a key topic of discussion in light of the 2007-08 food price crisis. Of special importance has been the shift to include the role that non-state actors are likely to play in achieving food security under global environmental change (GEC). This paper aims to compare private sector food system governance trends in two emerging economies, Brazil and South Africa. It focuses on practices around adaptation, an area largely neglected in climate change discussion, yet a critical factor in coping with the societal consequences of GEC. This study identifies several processes, particularly within the retail sector, that could indicate normative mechanisms through which ‘good governance’ can be translated into practice.
Examining the Statistical Properties of Financial Ratios

This paper focuses on two popular predictive variables that are often used to forecast stock market returns: the dividend yield and the price earnings ratio. First, we question the theoretical premise that the dividend yield ought to have predictive power for the aggregate stock market. By referring to the Modigliani and Miller (1961) theorem that dividend policy is irrelevant, but allowing for uncertainty, we show that the dividend yield might not be the appropriate variable to forecast returns on equity. In addition, we show that the dividend yield for stock indexes tends toward the dividend yield of the fastest growing firm in the index, thereby introducing a downward trend in the dividend yield. On the other hand, the earnings yield provides a good proxy for the expected return under mild conditions: if the return on aggregate investment coincides with the expected market return and expected returns form a martingale sequence. Our theoretical findings are confirmed in the S&P 500 data: prices seemingly overreact to dividends, even in the long-run, as suggested by the long-run elasticity of prices with respect to dividends of about 1.5 as first observed by Barsky and DeLong (1993). The long-run elasticity of prices with respect to earnings, however, is insignificantly different from one, suggesting that the focus on dividends alone might be rather misguiding in judging the efficiency of the market. Accounting for these facts, simple tests of market efficiency can be constructed. We find that, in the short-run, the efficient markets hypothesis cannot be rejected.
A Novel Approach Utilizing Biofilm Time-Kill Curves To Assess the Bactericidal Activity of Ceftaroline Combinations against Biofilm-Producing Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT Medical device infections frequently require combination therapy. Beta-lactams combined with glycopeptides/lipopeptides are bactericidal against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Novel macrowell kill-curve methods tested synergy between ceftaroline or cefazolin plus daptomycin, vancomycin, or rifampin against biofilm-producing MRSA. Ceftaroline combinations demonstrated the most pronounced bacterial reductions. Ceftaroline demonstrated greatest kill with daptomycin (4.02 ± 0.59 log10 CFU/cm2), compared to combination with vancomycin (3.36 ± 0.35 log10 CFU/cm2) or rifampin (2.68 ± 0.61 log10 CFU/cm2). These data suggest that beta-lactam combinations are useful against MRSA biofilms.