Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding Competitive Performance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) - the Competitive Dynamics Perspective

Understanding the antecedents and consequences of a firm’s agility in cloud software applications is important. This papers draws on the competitive dynamics perspective to develop a model that explains the relationships between collaboration with vendors, agility, and competitive performance in software-as-a-service (SaaS) context. Collaboration reflects a firm’s ability to leverage interfirm resources, characterized as knowledge sharing and process alignment. Agility is measured by a firm’s strategy-oriented agility and service-oriented agility. This study also investigates the moderating effect of environmental turbulence. The proposed hypotheses are supported by the empirical data. The results show that competitive performance is affected by ability, which, in turn, is impacted by collaboration. Environmental turbulence positively moderates the relationship between agility and performance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results.
On the Use of Scaling Relations for the Tolman Test

The use of relations between structural parameters of early-type galaxies to perform the Tolman test for the expansion of the universe is reconsidered. Scaling relations such as the fundamental plane or the Kormendy relation require the transformation from angular to metric sizes, to compare the relation at different z-values. This transformation depends on the assumed world model: galaxies of a given angular size, at a given z, are larger (in units of kiloparsecs) in a nonexpanding universe than in an expanding one. Furthermore, the luminosities of galaxies are expected to evolve with z in an expanding model. These effects are shown to conspire to reduce the difference between the predicted surface brightness (SB) change with redshift in the expanding and nonexpanding cases. We have considered expanding models with passive luminosity evolution. We find that their predictions for the visible photometric bands are very similar to those of the static model until z~1, and therefore the test cannot distinguish between the two world models. Recent good-quality data on the Kormendy relation and the fundamental plane at intermediate redshifts are consistent with the predictions from both models. In the K band, where the expected (model) luminosity evolutionary corrections are smaller, the differences between the expanding and static models amount to ~0.4 (0.8) mag at z=0.4 (1). It is shown that, owing to that small difference between the predictions in the covered z-range, and to the paucity and uncertainties of the relevant SB photometry, the existing K-band data are not adequate to distinguish between the different world metrics and cannot yet be used to discard the static case. It is pointed out that the scaling relations could still be used to rule out the nonevolving case if it could be shown that the coefficients change with the redshift.
Running head: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEIVED 1 CALIFORNIA SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AT ALLIANT INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY LOS ANGELES Relationship Between Perceived Narcissistic Personality Traits in Mothers and Level of Differentiation of Self in Their Adult Children A dissertation submitted 

2011 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent on the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
IMPROVEMENT IN CEREBRAL METABOLISM IN CHRONIC BRAIN INJURY AFTER HYPERBARIC OXYGEN THERAPY

While no research study has yet demonstrated convincing evidence for the efficacy of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT); in patients with chronic neurological disorders (CND), anecdotal studies have been suppor -tive of its use in improving healing of the damaged brain. The current study hypothesized that (1) individuals with CND show increases in cerebral blood flow and metabolism as measured by Single Positron Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) in the cerebral hemispheres, but not on measures of cerebellar and pons blood flow; and (2) younger patients show more improvement than older patients. The study used archival data to compare 25 older and 25 younger subjects who were given SPECT scans pretherapy, midtherapy, and posttherapy. ANOVAs using the SPECT scans as a within subjects variable and age as a between subjects variable confirmed the hypothesis that the cerebral measures all changed but that the cerebellar and pons measures did not. Post-hoc t-tests confirmed that there was improvement in blood flow from the beginning to the end of the study. An age effect was found on only two of the five measures; however, there were no interactions. Analysis by post-hoc t-tests showed that the younger group had higher blood flows, but not more improvement than the older group. The results provided the first statistical research data to show the effectiveness of HBOT in improving blood flow in CND. These results indicate that HBOT can be an effective part of the treatment for such clients. The implications of these findings and future research directions were discussed.
Evaluation and treatment of altered mental status patients in the emergency department: Life in the fast lane.

BACKGROUND Altered mental status (AMS) is a very common emergency case, but the exact etiology of many AMS patients is unknown. Patients often manifest vague symptoms, thus, AMS diagnosis and treatment are highly challenging for emergency physicians. The aim of this study is to provide a framework for the assessment of AMS patients. This assessment should allow providers to better understand the etiology of mental status changes and therefore improve diagnostic skills and management. METHODS This is a prospective cohort observational study. We recruited all adult patients with undifferentiated AMS at a single center tertiary care academic emergency department over 24 months (June 2009 to June 2011). Demographic characteristics, clinical manifestations, assessment approaches, causative factors, emergency treatments and outcomes were collected prospectively. RESULTS In 1934 patients with AMS recruited, accounting for 0.93% of all emergency department (ED) patients, 1 026 (53.1%) were male, and 908 (46.9%) female. Their average age was 51.95±15.71 years. Etiologic factors were neurological (n=641; 35.0%), pharmacological and toxicological (n=421; 23.0%), systemic and organic (n=266; 14.5%), infectious (n=167; 9.1%), endocrine/metabolic (n=145; 7.9%), psychiatric (n=71; 3.9%), traumatic (n=38; 2.1%), and gynecologic and obstetric (n=35; 1.9%). Total mortality rate was 8.1% (n=156). The death rate was higher in elderly patients (≥60) than in younger patients (10.8% vs. 6.9%, P=0.003). CONCLUSIONS Patients with AMS pose a challenge for ED physicians. The most frequently encountered diagnostic categories causing AMS were primary CNS disorders, intoxication, organ system dysfunction, and endocrine/metabolic diseases. AMS has a high fatality rate in the ED. AMS is an important warning signal for ED patients because of its potentially fatal and reversible effects. Prompt evaluation and treatment are essential to decreasing morbidity and mortality associated with AMS.
Students' Conceptual Level of Understanding on Chemical Bonding

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of conceptual change oriented instruction on students’ conceptual understanding of chemical bonding concepts. Pretest - posttest design of quasi-experimental method was used to determine the effectiveness. Traditionally developed textbook and analogies were utilized in the control group whereas conceptual change texts and Teaching-With-Analogies Model were used in the experiment group. Results revealed that conceptual change oriented instruction caused better understanding, and two modes of instruction developed similar attitude toward chemistry. Science process skill was a strong predictor in understanding, but no effect of gender difference on understanding and on students’ attitudes was found. Also, semi-structured interviews were used to examine students’ understanding in detail.
Epidermis and Gastrointestinal Carcinomas Amphiregulin Messenger RNA Is Elevated in Psoriatic

Amphiregulin (AR) is a heparin-regulated, epidermal growth factorlike growth factor capable of stimulating the proliferation of non-tumorigenic cells while inhibiting cell proliferation in some human tumor cell lines in vitro. In the present study, we have investigated AR mRNA expression in normal, hyperproliferative, and neoplastic human epithe lium. Our results demonstrate that, compared with the adjacent uninvolved epithelium, AR mKV Yexpression is markedly elevated in epider mal biopsies derived from three human psoriatic lesions as well as in biopsies derived from five human colon carcinomas and three human stomach carcinomas. Moreover, analysis of a colon carcinoma by in situ hybridization revealed that AR mRNA is localized to the epithelium.
Inventories and the Business Cycle

This paper examines the relationship between the inventory cycle and the business cycle using both macroeconomic and survey data. It is argued that, over the past decade and a half, the changes in inventory management have reduced the amplitude of the inventory cycle. The paper also argues that the behavior of inventories is consistent with demand shocks being an important source of business cycle fluctuations. Copyright 1995 by The Economic Society of Australia.
Peer influence as a predictor of producing and distributing hurtful images of peers and teachers among Flemish adolescents

Abstract This study examines whether self-perceived popularity, need for popularity, and peer pressure explain teenagers’ use of the mobile phone to make and distribute hurtful pictures and videos of peers and teachers. A large-scale quantitative survey study among 1787 Flemish high school pupils in 2010 revealed that, in the six months prior to the study, 25% of adolescents had made a picture/video of a peer who was being ridiculed, 8% of a peer who was being physically bullied, and 11% had distributed such a picture/video online. Thirteen percent had made a picture/video of a teacher being ridiculed, and 6% had distributed such content online. Self-perceived popularity, need for popularity, and perceived peer pressure positively predicted adolescents’ involvement in several of the above practices. The results suggest that greater investments need to be made to counter the social rewards that adolescents receive when engaging in these bullying practices.
SRMR variants for improved blind room acoustics characterization

Reverberation, especially in large rooms, severely degrades speech recognition performance and speech intelligibility. Since direct measurement of room characteristics is usually not possible, blind estimation of reverberation-related metrics such as the reverberation time (RT) and the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) can be valuable information to speech recognition and enhancement algorithms operating in enclosed environments. The objective of this work is to evaluate the performance of five variants of blind RT and DRR estimators based on a modulation spectrum representation of reverberant speech with single- and multi-channel speech data. These models are all based on variants of the so-called Speech-to-Reverberation Modulation Energy Ratio (SRMR). We show that these measures outperform a state-of-the-art baseline based on maximum-likelihood estimation of sound decay rates in terms of root-mean square error (RMSE), as well as Pearson correlation. Compared to the baseline, the best proposed measure, called NSRMR_k , achieves a 23% relative improvement in terms of RMSE and allows for relative correlation improvements ranging from 13% to 47% for RT prediction.
Relationship Between College Students’ Knowledge of the Risk Factors for Type 2 Diabetes and Health Behaviors

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and its prevalence is growing across the United States in all populations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact knowledge regarding T2D has on health behaviors, specifically, behaviors related to physical activity and sugar and fat consumption. A questionnaire was distributed through email to 500 undergraduate students at one specific campus of the State University of New York college system. Fifty-one of these subjects met the eligibility criteria and were used as part of this study. The questionnaire instrument consisted of four self-report areas: (a) demographics, (b) current knowledge of T2D risk factors, (c) physical activity behavior, and (d) dietary behavior. The researcher found the average T2D knowledge score was 33.7, physical activity score was 3.5 sessions per week, sugar consumption frequency score was 25.2, fat consumption 3.6, and junk food consumption was 28.8. The researcher failed to support the hypotheses that knowledge was significantly correlated with health behaviors. However, the effect size for each of these relationships was small to medium, indicating that with a larger sample we would expect to see a significant correlation. Overall, the researcher concluded that the college student population is overweight and most students do not practice positive health behaviors to prevent chronic disease, such as T2D. It is recommended that colleges and universities consider promoting healthier lifestyles for their students by offering more opportunities for physical activity, good nutrition, and health education/support groups. Document Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Education (EdD) Department Executive Leadership First Supervisor C. Michael Robinson Subject Categories Education This dissertation is available at Fisher Digital Publications: https://fisherpub.sjfc. edu/education_etd/278 Relationship Between College Students’ Knowledge of the Risk Factors for Type 2 Diabetes and Health Behaviors
Individual Properties of the Two Functional Agonist Sites in GABAA Receptors

The members of the pentameric ligand-gated receptor channel family are involved in information transfer in synapses and the neuromuscular junction. They often contain several copies of the same subunit isoform. Here, we present a method to functionally dissect the role of individual subunits that occur in multiple copies in these receptors. Opening of the inherent chloride channel in the GABAA receptor is achieved through the binding of two agonist molecules; however, it has been difficult to obtain information on the contribution of the two individual binding sites. The sites are both located at β(+)/α(-) subunit interfaces, suggesting similar properties. One pair of subunits is flanked by γ and β (site 1) and the other by α and γ (site 2), the different environment possibly affecting the binding sites. Here, we used concatenated subunits and two point mutations of amino acid residues, each in α and β subunits, both located in the agonist binding pocket, to investigate the properties of these two sites. The sites were individually mutated, and consequences of these mutations on GABA and muscimol-induced channel opening and its competitive inhibition by bicuculline were studied. A model predicts that opening also occurs for receptors occupied with a single agonist molecule but is promoted approximately 60-fold in those occupied by two agonists and that site 2 has an approximately threefold higher affinity for GABA than site 1, whereas muscimol and bicuculline show some preference for site 1.
A comparative Study of Cost Modelling Techniques using Public Domain multi-organisational and company-specific Data

This research examines the use of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) repository, which is a large database of completed software projects from different organisations, for estimating the required effort for new software projects. The accuracy of the estimates based on this repository is compared with the results obtained from using a one-company data set from a company called Megatec. This study investigates two questions: (1) What are the differences in accuracy between a traditional technique such as ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression and Analogy-based estimation? (2) Is there a difference between estimates derived from multi-company data and estimates derived from company-specific data? Regarding the first question, our results show that OLS regression performs as well (when based on one-company data) and significantly better than (when based on multi-organisational data) Analogy-based estimation. This result is in contrast to previous studies that showed promising results applying Analogy on software engineering data. On the other hand, the result confirms the outcomes of investigating Analogy on another large multi-organisational database (called Laturi) from the business applications domain. Addressing the second question, we found two results. When applying Analogy, significantly more accurate models could be built based on company-specific data than based on multi-organisational data. The results reveal that Analogy-based procedures do not seem as robust when using data external to the organisation for which the model is built. When applying OLS regression, no significant advantage was found when using local, company-specific data opposed to multi-organisational data. Again, this result is consistent with a previously performed comprehensive comparison on the Laturi database as well as on the ESA database. We plan to further investigate the reasons for consistencies and inconsistencies in the current and previous results to derive generalisable conclusions.
Use of new World Health Organization child growth standards to assess how infant malnutrition relates to breastfeeding and mortality.

OBJECTIVE To compare the estimated prevalence of malnutrition using the World Health Organization's (WHO) child growth standards versus the National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) growth reference, to examine the relationship between exclusive breastfeeding and malnutrition, and to determine the sensitivity and specificity of nutritional status indicators for predicting death during infancy. METHODS A secondary analysis of data on 9424 mother-infant pairs in Ghana, India and Peru was conducted. Mothers and infants were enrolled in a trial of vitamin A supplementation during which the infants' weight, length and feeding practices were assessed regularly. Malnutrition indicators were determined using WHO and NCHS growth standards. FINDINGS The prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight in infants aged < 6 months was higher with WHO than NCHS standards. However, the prevalence of underweight in infants aged 6-12 months was much lower with WHO standards. The duration of exclusive breastfeeding was not associated with malnutrition in the first 6 months of life. In infants aged < 6 months, severe underweight at the first immunization visit as determined using WHO standards had the highest sensitivity (70.2%) and specificity (85.8%) for predicting mortality in India. No indicator was a good predictor in Ghana or Peru. In infants aged 6-12 months, underweight at 6 months had the highest sensitivity and specificity for predicting mortality in Ghana (37.0% and 82.2%, respectively) and Peru (33.3% and 97.9% respectively), while wasting was the best predictor in India (sensitivity: 54.6%; specificity: 85.5%). CONCLUSION Malnutrition indicators determined using WHO standards were better predictors of mortality than those determined using NCHS standards. No association was found between breastfeeding duration and malnutrition at 6 months. Use of WHO child growth standards highlighted the importance of malnutrition in the first 6 months of life.
Improved low-temperature rate constants for rotational excitation of CO by H 2

Cross sections for the rotational (de)excitation of CO by ground state para- and ortho-H 2 are obtained using quantum scattering calculations for collision energies between 1 and 520 cm -1 . A new CO-H 2 potential energy surface is employed and its quality is assessed by comparison with explicitly correlated CCSD(T)-R12 calculations. Rate constants for rotational levels of CO up to 5 and temperatures in the range 5-70 K are deduced. The new potential is found to have a strong influence on the resonance structure of the cross sections at very low collision energies. As a result, the present rates at 10 K differ by up to 50% with those obtained by Flower (2001) on a previous, less accurate, potential energy surface.
Crises and Crisis Management: Integration, Interpretation, and Research Development

Organizational research has long been interested in crises and crisis management. Whether focused on crisis antecedents, outcomes, or managing a crisis, research has revealed a number of important findings. However, research in this space remains fragmented, making it difficult for scholars to understand the literature’s core conclusions, recognize unsolved problems, and navigate paths forward. To address these issues, we propose an integrative framework of crises and crisis management that draws from research in strategy, organizational theory, and organizational behavior as well as from research in public relations and corporate communication. We identify two primary perspectives in the literature, one focused on the internal dynamics of a crisis and one focused on managing external stakeholders. We review core concepts from each perspective and highlight the commonalities that exist between them. Finally, we use our integrative framework to propose future research directions for scholars interested in crises and crisis management.
Prevalence of early stages of chronic kidney disease in apparently healthy central government employees in India.

BACKGROUND Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. US data show that 11-15.6% of population has CKD, but there is no data from India on early stages of CKD. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of early stages of CKD using the Kidney Disease Quality Outcomes Initiative (KDOQI) guidelines in an Indian population. METHODS A cross-sectional study of Indian central government employees over 18 years of age was carried out. Data on anthropometric profile and investigations including routine urine exam, semi-quantitative microalbuminuria (MAU), serum creatinine, lipid profile and fasting blood glucose (FPG) were collected. Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was calculated using the Modification of Diet in Renal Diseases (MDRD) and Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) equations. RESULTS A total of 3398 subjects, with 2244 (66.04%) males and 1154 (33.96%) females, were studied. Of the subjects, 9.96% (n = 284) were found to have MAU >30 mg/L, and 11.47% (n = 327) had a deranged albumin:creatinine ratio (ACR) of 30-300 mg/g. Mean GFR was 98 mL/min/1.73 m(2) (+/- 25.25) by the MDRD equation, and 100 mL/min/1.73 m(2) (+/- 19.48) by CKD-EPI. Using the MDRD equation for GFR, 189 (6.62%) had stage I CKD, 154 (5.40%) had stage II CKD and 86 (3.02%) had stage III CKD. By using the CKD-EPI equation, the corresponding percentages were 192 (6.73%), 122 (4.28%) and 60 (2.11%), respectively. Age >40 years, FPG >126 mg/dL and hypertension were found to be independent risk factors for CKD. CONCLUSIONS Of the apparently healthy adult Indian central government employees, 15.04% and 13.12% were found to have early stages of CKD using the MDRD and CKD-EPI criteria for GFR, respectively.