Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Thermal Treatment Conditions on the Properties of Dental Silicate Cements

In this study the sol-gel process was used to synthesize a precursor mixture for the preparation of silicate cement, also called mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA) cement. This mixture was thermally treated under two different conditions (1400 °C/2 h and 1450 °C/3 h) followed by rapid cooling in air. The resulted material (clinker) was ground for one hour in a laboratory planetary mill (v = 150 rot/min), in order to obtain the MTA cements. The setting time and mechanical properties, in vitro induction of apatite formation by soaking in simulated body fluid (SBF) and cytocompatibility of the MTA cements were assessed in this study. The hardening processes, nature of the reaction products and the microstructural characteristics were also investigated. The anhydrous and hydrated cements were characterized by different techniques e.g., X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and thermal analysis (DTA-DTG-TG). The setting time of the MTA cement obtained by thermal treatment at 1400 °C/2 h (MTA1) was 55 min and 15 min for the MTA cement obtained at 1450 °C/3 h (MTA2). The compressive strength values were 18.5 MPa (MTA1) and 22.9 MPa (MTA2). Both MTA cements showed good bioactivity (assessed by an in vitro test), good cytocompatibility and stimulatory effect on the proliferation of cells.
Non-small-cell lung cancer prognosis using carcinoembryonic antigen levels in pleural lavage fluid.

OBJECTIVES The study aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of carcinoembryonic antigen levels in pleural lavage fluid (p-CEA) in patients with completely resected non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). METHODS We examined 72 patients who underwent curative surgical resections. Pleural lavage fluid was collected at thoracotomy before lung resection. Pleural lavage cytology and p-CEA were determined. The relationships between p-CEA and clinicopathological factors were analysed. RESULTS Four patients (5.6%) had positive pleural lavage cytologies. The median p-CEA was 65.2 ng/g protein (range, 0-7331.7). p-CEA was significantly correlated with pleural invasion and CEA levels in serum (s-CEA). Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis identified an optimal cut-off of 38 ng/g protein for p-CEA for predicting recurrence [area under the curve (AUC) = 0.669; sensitivity = 91.7%; specificity = 43.7%; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.541-0.796; P = 0.020], whereas this could not be identified for s-CEA (AUC = 0.535; 95% CI = 0.392-0.678; P = 0.629). With a mean follow-up period of 57.5 months, 5-year disease-free survival (DFS) rates were 86.5% for p-CEA ≤ 38 ng/g protein and 47.7% for p-CEA >38 ng/g protein (P = 0.0013). Even for patients with Stage I lung cancer, 5-year DFS rates were 88.2 and 53.8%, respectively (P = 0.017). Multivariate Cox analysis revealed that p-CEA was a significant independent factor for DFS and overall survival. CONCLUSIONS Intraoperative p-CEA may be a more powerful prognostic determinant than s-CEA for patients with NSCLC.
Public Sector Accounting Research In Malaysia: Identifying Gaps And Opportunities

This study aims to identify gaps that exist in academic literatures on public sector accounting (PSA) in Malaysian context. Sixty five journal articles and dissertations dated from year 1981 to 2010 available on the web were extracted. These literatures are then being classified into four classifications including the research setting, research area, research method, and journal type. Overall, the study found a scarcity of literature on Malaysian PSA. Specifically, it was found that the literatures do not sufficiently covers the various types of Malaysian public sector for example, statutory bodies, and different accounting issues such as accountability reporting. Furthermore, high proportion of studies used questionnaire survey as its data collection method and the preferred mixed method approach to research appears to be lacking. It is suggested that accounting researchers do take this challenge to explore the numerous research opportunities available in this area. This study would be resourceful for practitioners who needs to identify the research trends in public sector accounting in the context of a developing nation, particularly in terms of the issues covered and the type of public sector entities being researched. Knowing this would assist them into having a better insight and understanding on the developments of the researches in the area and more importantly to be able to later suggest future research areas that will result in them managing the public administration offices efficiently and effectively.
Taxing the Opposition: Cactus League Attendance and the Efficiency of the ‘Cubs Tax’

In 2010, a plan to finance a new spring training stadium for the Cubs through a ticket surcharge on all games in the Cactus League was proposed. We find that the Cubs increase attendance when they are the away team by about 37%. Thus, the surcharge would be economically justified as long as the price elasticity of tickets is less than 0.32, which many prior studies find to be the case. This tax provides one of the few examples in which the cost of a subsidized stadium would be born primarily by the group that benefits the most from the arrival of the subsidized team.
Molecular Characterization of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Strains Isolated from Intensive Care Units in Iran: ST22-SCCmec IV/t790 Emerges as the Major Clone

Introduction The emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in different patient populations is a major public health concern. This study determined the prevalence and distribution of circulating molecular types of MRSA in hospitalized patients in ICU of hospitals in Tehran. Materials and Methods A total of 70 MRSA isolates were collected from patients in eight hospitals. Antimicrobial resistance patterns were determined using the disk diffusion method. The presence of toxin encoding genes and the vancomycin resistance gene were determined by PCR. The MRSA isolates were further analyzed using multi-locus sequence, spa, SCCmec, and agr typing. Results The MRSA prevalence was 93.3%. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing revealed a high resistance rate (97.1%) to ampicillin and penicillin. The rate of resistance to the majority of antibiotics tested was 30% to 71.4%. Two isolates belonging to the ST22-SCCmec IV/t790 clone (MIC ≥ 8 μg/ml) had intermediate resistance to vancomycin. The majority of MRSA isolates (24.3%) were associated with the ST22-SCCmec IV/t790 clone; the other MRSA clones were ST859-SCCmec IV/t969 (18.6%), ST239-SCCmec III/t037 (17.1%), and ST291-SCCmec IV/t030 (8.6%). Conclusions The circulating MRSA strains in Iranian hospitals were genetically diverse with a relatively high prevalence of the ST22-SCCmec IV/t790 clone. These findings support the need for future surveillance studies on MRSA to better elucidate the distribution of existing MRSA clones and detect emergence of new MRSA clones.
Quantitative XRD Analysis of the Structural Changes of Ba-Exchanged Montmorillonite: Effect of an in Situ Hydrous Perturbation

The structural changes along the c axis, of the Ba-exchanged montmorillonite (Swy-2-Ba), under variable relative humidity (% RH), is investigated. In this regard, the arrangement, amount and position of both exchangeable cation and the water molecules in the interlamellar space (IS), are evaluated. This aim is achieved using the X-ray diffraction (XRD) profile modeling approach that consists of comparing experimental and theoretical patterns calculated from structural models. The contributions of the hydration states and the interlayer water amounts, as a function of the % RH, are registered by quantitative XRD investigation. The validated structural models are heterogeneous, suggesting various proportions of layer types at different RH ranges, which means the coexistence of different mixed layer structure MLS packages, exhibiting different proportions of layers with contrasting hydration states. This result is attributed to the orientation of the applied hydration sequence. Indeed, the interlayer water molecule amounts, which led to the appearance of a logic hydration hysteresis, are strongly affected by hydrous perturbation.
Statistical Interior Tomography

This paper presents a statistical interior tomography (SIT) approach making use of compressed sensing (CS) theory. With the projection data modeled by the Poisson distribution, an objective function with a total variation (TV) regularization term is formulated in the maximization of a posteriori (MAP) framework to solve the interior problem. An alternating minimization method is used to optimize the objective function with an initial image from the direct inversion of the truncated Hilbert transform. The proposed SIT approach is extensively evaluated with both numerical and real datasets. The results demonstrate that SIT is robust with respect to data noise and down-sampling, and has better resolution and less bias than its deterministic counterpart in the case of low count data.
Visuokinesthetic Perception of Hand Movement is Mediated by Cerebro–Cerebellar Interaction between the Left Cerebellum and Right Parietal Cortex

Combination of visual and kinesthetic information is essential to perceive bodily movements. We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to investigate the neuronal correlates of visuokinesthetic combination in perception of hand movement. Participants experienced illusory flexion movement of their hand elicited by tendon vibration while they viewed video-recorded flexion (congruent: CONG) or extension (incongruent: INCONG) motions of their hand. The amount of illusory experience was graded by the visual velocities only when visual information regarding hand motion was concordant with kinesthetic information (CONG). The left posterolateral cerebellum was specifically recruited under the CONG, and this left cerebellar activation was consistent for both left and right hands. The left cerebellar activity reflected the participants' intensity of illusory hand movement under the CONG, and we further showed that coupling of activity between the left cerebellum and the “right” parietal cortex emerges during this visuokinesthetic combination/perception. The “left” cerebellum, working with the anatomically connected high-order bodily region of the “right” parietal cortex, participates in online combination of exteroceptive (vision) and interoceptive (kinesthesia) information to perceive hand movement. The cerebro–cerebellar interaction may underlie updating of one's “body image,” when perceiving bodily movement from visual and kinesthetic information.
Analyst Conflicts and Research Quality

This paper examines whether the quality of stock analysts' forecasts is related to conflicts of interest from their employers' investment banking (IB) and brokerage businesses. We consider four aspects of forecast quality: accuracy, bias, and revision frequency of quarterly earnings per share (EPS) forecasts and relative optimism in long-term earnings growth (LTG) forecasts. Using a unique dataset that contains the annual revenue breakdown of analysts' employers among IB, brokerage, and other businesses, we uncover two main findings. First, accuracy and bias in quarterly EPS forecasts appear to be unrelated to conflict magnitudes after controlling for forecast age, firm resources, and analyst characteristics. Second, relative optimism in LTG forecasts and the revision frequency of quarterly EPS forecasts are positively related to the importance of brokerage business to analysts' employers. Additional tests suggest that the frequency of quarterly forecast revisions is positively related to analysts' trade generation incentives. Our findings suggest that reputation concerns keep analysts honest with respect to short-term earnings forecasts but not LTG forecasts. In addition, conflicts from brokerage appear to play a more important role in shaping analysts' forecasting behavior than has been previously recognized.
The Effects of Agricultural Extension on Farm Yields in Kenya

The paper examines effects of agricultural extension on crop yields in Kenya controlling for other determinants of yields, notably the schooling of farmers and agro-ecological characteristics of arable land. The data we use were collected by the Government of Kenya in 1982 and 1990, but the estimation results reported in the paper are based primarily on the 1982 data set. The sample used for estimation contains information about crop production, agricultural extension workers (exogenously supplied to farms), educational attainment of farmers, usage of farm inputs, among others. A quantile regression technique was used to investigate productivity effects of agricultural extension and other farm inputs over the entire conditional distribution of farm yield residuals. We find that productivity effect of agricultural extension is highest at the extreme ends of distribution of yield residuals. Complementarity of unobserved farmer ability with extension service at higher yield residuals and the diminishing returns to the extension input, which are uncompensated for by ability at the lower tail of the distribution, are hypothesized to account for this U-shaped pattern of the productivity effect of extension across yield quantiles. This finding suggests that for a given level of extension input, unobserved factors such as farm management abilities affect crop yields differently. Effects of schooling on farm yields are positive but statistically insignificant. Other determinants of farm yields that we analyze include labour input, farmer experience, agro-ecological characteristics of farms, fallow acreage, and types of crops grown.
Applications of strong convexity--strong smoothness duality to learning with matrices

It is known that a function is strongly convex with respect to some norm if and only if its conjugate function is strongly smooth with respect to the dual norm. This result has already been found to be a key component in deriving and analyzing several learning algorithms. Utilizing this du-ality, we isolate a single inequality which seamlessly implies both generalization bounds and on-line regret bounds; and we show how to construct strongly convex functions over matrices based on strongly convex functions over vectors. The newly constructed functions (over matrices) inherit the strong convexity properties of the underlying vector functions. We demonstrate the potential of this framework by analyzing several learning algorithms including group Lasso, kernel learning, and online control with adversarial quadratic costs.
Airline network revenue management with buy-up

Several existing revenue management (RM) models are based on some simplifying assumptions. One of these is that passengers, who do not get the fare they want, book and travel on other airlines or they do not travel at all. In reality, many customers are not necessarily lost to the airline but they buy-up, i.e. buy a more expensive ticket. We model network RM which incorporates buy-up using dynamic programming (DP). Due to the curse of dimensionality, the DP model is analytically and computationally intractable. Thus, to provide a valuable support for the decision-making process, different approximate models are presented and their solutions are used to define several capacity-control schemes based on partitioned booking limits and bid prices. The schemes are compared in a computational study showing that a significant increase in revenue is obtainable even when the buy-up probability is relatively small. The booking limits for high-fare products, as well as the bid prices for all itineraries, are likely to increase in the buy-up probability.
Age and diagnostic performance of Alzheimer disease CSF biomarkers

Objectives: Core CSF changes in Alzheimer disease (AD) are decreased amyloid &bgr;1–42, increased total tau, and increased phospho-tau, probably indicating amyloid plaque accumulation, axonal degeneration, and tangle pathology, respectively. These biomarkers identify AD already at the predementia stage, but their diagnostic performance might be affected by age-dependent increase of AD-type brain pathology in cognitively unaffected elderly. Methods: We investigated effects of age on the diagnostic performance of CSF biomarkers in a uniquely large multicenter study population, including a cross-sectional cohort of 529 patients with AD dementia (median age 71, range 43–89 years) and 304 controls (67, 44–91 years), and a longitudinal cohort of 750 subjects without dementia with mild cognitive impairment (69, 43–89 years) followed for at least 2 years, or until dementia diagnosis. Results: The specificities for subjects without AD and the areas under the receiver operating characteristics curves decreased with age. However, the positive predictive value for a combination of biomarkers remained stable, while the negative predictive value decreased only slightly in old subjects, as an effect of the high AD prevalence in older ages. Conclusion: Although the diagnostic accuracies for AD decreased with age, the predictive values for a combination of biomarkers remained essentially stable. The findings highlight biomarker variability across ages, but support the use of CSF biomarkers for AD even in older populations. GLOSSARY A&bgr;42: amyloid &bgr;1–42 AD: Alzheimer disease AUROC : area under the receiver operating characteristic curve DSM-IV : Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition LR : likelihood ratio MCI : mild cognitive impairment NPV : negative predictive value p-tau : phospho-tau PPV : positive predictive value ROC: receiver operating characteristic SMCI: stable mild cognitive impairment STARD : Standards for the Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy t-tau: total tau
Price Discounts in Rights Issues: Why Do Managers Insist on What Investors Hate?

We analyse the causes and impact of the significant mean price discounts (25% for financial and 29% for non-financial firms) in rights issues in the UK using a sample of 264 observations for the period of 1994 to 2006. We observe that for non-financial companies the issue terms announcement returns are negatively affected by the discount size, while firm size, growth prospects and good previous stock performance have a positive impact. We also investigate which factors seem to influence managers to engage in deeper discounts when these are so disliked by investors. Evidence is provided that firms with more leverage, larger bid-ask spreads or suffering losses tend to choose deeper discounts. We conclude that managers balance the expected negative reaction of the market to a price discount with the risks of a costly issue failure, with these being higher when the firm experiences losses, has a higher volatility and also when the stock market climate is more adverse.
Deeper Integration ? Constructing Europe Network Network of Excellence Priority 7 – Citizens and Governance in the Knowledge-based Society POWER IN THE ENLARGED EU : GAME THEORETICAL INSIGHTS

Power and Cause are the same thing. Correspondent to cause and effect, are POWER and ACT; nay, those and these are the same things. - In general, we understand by " power " the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.
How do elevated CO 2 and O 3 affect the interception and utilization of radiation by a soybean canopy ?

Net productivity of vegetation is determined by the product of the efficiencies with which it intercepts light («i) and converts that intercepted energy into biomass («c). Elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) increases photosynthesis and leaf area index (LAI) of soybeans and thus may increase «i and «c; elevated O3 may have the opposite effect. Knowing if elevated CO2 and O3 differentially affect physiological more than structural components of the ecosystem may reveal how these elements of global change will ultimately alter productivity. The effects of elevated CO2 and O3 on an intact soybean ecosystem were examined with Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment (SoyFACE) technology where large field plots (20-m diameter) were exposed to elevated CO2 ( 550 lmol mol ) and elevated O3 (1.2 ambient) in a factorial design. Aboveground biomass, LAI and light interception were measured during the growing seasons of 2002, 2003 and 2004 to calculate «i and «c. A 15% increase in yield (averaged over 3 years) under elevated CO2 was caused primarily by a 12% stimulation in «c , as «i increased by only 3%. Though accelerated canopy senescence under elevated O3 caused a 3% decrease in «i, the primary effect of O3 on biomass was through an 11% reduction in «c. When CO2 and O3 were elevated in combination, CO2 partially reduced the negative effects of elevated O3. Knowing that changes in productivity in elevated CO2 and O3 were influenced strongly by the efficiency of conversion of light energy into energy in plant biomass will aid in optimizing soybean yields in the future. Future modeling efforts that rely on «c for calculating regional and global plant productivity will need to accommodate the effects of global change on this important ecosystem attribute.
Classification of Attacks Using Support Vector Machine (SVM) on KDDCUP'99 IDS Database

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to preserve the data integrity and confidentiality from attacks. In order to identify the type of attack in IDS, different methodologies like various data mining techniques exist. But some are very time consuming and laborious. Therefore we have proposed the usage of SVM (Support Vector Machine) for classification of attack from large amount of raw intrusion detection datasets on standard personal computers. SVM is a method which is used in data mining to extract predicted data. We have use KDDCUP'99 IDS database for classification.
Capital Structure and Debt Structure

Using a novel data set that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms, we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation. Relative to high credit quality firms, low credit quality firms are more likely to have a multi-tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non-bank debt with loose covenants. We discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts.
Human behavior segmentation and recognition using Continuous Linear Dynamic System

Recognizing continuous action composition in human behavior is an important and yet challenging problem. In this paper we tackle the task by developing both reliable image features and classification algorithms. For image features, we introduce the Embedded Optical Flow (EOF) feature based on embedding optical flow using Locality-constrained Linear Coding with weighted average pooling. The EOF feature is histogram-like but presents excellent linear separability. For classification, we propose the Continuous Linear Dynamic System (CLDS) framework that consists of two sets of Linear Dynamic System (LDS) models, one to model the dynamics of individual actions and the other to model the transition between actions. The inference process estimates the best decomposition of the whole sequence into continuous alternating between human actions and action transitions. In this way, both action type and action boundary can be accurately recognized. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed EOF feature and CLDS algorithm.