Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intra-cloud lightning: Building CDNs in the cloud

Content distribution networks (CDNs) using storage clouds have recently started to emerge. Compared to traditional CDNs, storage cloud-based CDNs have the advantage of cost effectively offering hosting services to Web content providers without owning infrastructure. However, existing work on replica placement in CDNs does not readily apply in the cloud. In this paper, we investigated the joint problem of building distribution paths and placing Web server replicas in cloud CDNs to minimize the cost incurred on the CDN providers while satisfying QoS requirements for user requests. We formulate the cost optimization problem with accurate cost models and QoS requirements and show that the monthly cost can be as low as 2.62 US Dollars for a small Web site. We develop a suite of offline, online-static and online-dynamic heuristic algorithms that take as input network topology and work load information such as user location and request rates. We then evaluate the heuristics via Web trace-based simulation, and show that our heuristics behave very close to optimal under various network conditions.
Behavioural intension analysis of Avicenna® Hospital Information System

"Hospital Information Systems" are designed for improving the health quality of people and for the management of all the hospital's medical and administrative information in order to enable health professionals to perform their jobs effectively and efficiency. However the main problem has been raising that is whether hospital personnel want to use these systems while performing their tasks. This study tests an extended model by adding some factors to the original model that is based on the literature: technology acceptance model (TAM), to analyze the health professionals' behavioral intention to use hospital information system Avicenna®. The research is tested on the users who are able to use "Hospital Information System" of Yüksek İhtisas Hospital is located in Ankara, Turkey. Data is collected from 52 subjects who are health professionals (doctors, nurses, technical staff etc.) in hospital. Also correlation, explanatory and confirmation factor analysis was performed to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire method. The structural equation modeling (SEM) technique has also been used to evaluate the models.
Business reporting on the internet in Malaysia and Singapore

Purpose – To compare the internet reporting practices of Malaysian listed companies with those in Singapore. To examine the implications of web technology for business reporting and the challenge it poses for standard‐setting bodies.Design/methodology/approach – A standard web browser was used to survey the web sites of listed companies and collect the data. The second objective of this paper was addressed mostly through a literature review.Findings – One of the survey findings was that listed companies in Singapore have a greater web presence compared with Malaysia. Another major finding was that Singapore companies were making better use of the potential the internet had to offer compared with companies based in Malaysia.Research limitations/implications – Internet reporting practices of listed companies in Malaysia and Singapore only were compared.Practical implications – Developing a global internet reporting standard is a major challenge to accounting standard setters world‐wide.Originality/value – T.
A study of the incidence of BCG vaccine complications in infants of Babol, Mazandaran (2011-2013)

Background: BCG vaccination which is administered to prevent tuberculosis is sometimes associated with serious complications. This study aimed to determine the incidence of complications of BCG vaccination in Babol. Methods: All infants who received BCG vaccination between 2011-2013 in health centers of Babol entered the study. Data regarding complications of vaccine were extracted according to the National Inventory of babies. All complicated cases were confirmed by the Academic Committee to review the adverse consequences of the vaccine. Results: Among the 15984 vaccinated neonates, 150 (0.93%) cases presented lymphadenitis. 46.5% were females and 53.5% were males; 43% were rural residents and 57% were urban residents. No cases of lymphadenitis including 1% of lymphadenitis with abscess formation were recovered without treatment. Disseminated infection occurred in 3 cases of immune deficient patients who responded to the treatment. Most complications occurred during 4 months after vaccination. Conclusion: According to the results of this study, the prevalence of lymphadenitis in Babol was higher than the standard of WHO. This may be attributed to type and vaccine storage and injection technique. These findings justify further training of health-center workers.
Merging Plasmonics and Silicon Photonics Towards Greener and Faster “Network-on-Chip” Solutions for Data Centers and High-Performance Computing Systems

© 2012 Papaioannou et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Merging Plasmonics and Silicon Photonics Towards Greener and Faster “Network-on-Chip” Solutions for Data Centers and High-Performance Computing Systems
Growth of Extremely Preterm Survivors From Birth to 18 Years of Age Compared With Term Controls

OBJECTIVES: To determine changes in height, weight, and BMI of extremely preterm (EPT; gestational age <28 completed weeks) survivors from birth to 18 years of age, compared with term controls. METHODS: Birth, discharge, and follow-up at ages 2, 5, 8, and 18 years of consecutive EPT survivors and contemporaneous term controls born in 1991–1992 in Victoria, Australia. Weight, height, and BMI were converted to z scores and compared between groups. Height z scores at age 2 and midparental height z scores were examined as predictors of height z score at age 18 years. RESULTS: Follow-up rates were >90% until 18 years, when 166 (74%) of 225 EPT subjects and 153 (60%) of 253 controls were assessed. EPT subjects had lower weight z scores than controls at birth, with a much greater difference at discharge, which reduced progressively until age 18 years. EPT children were shorter than controls at all ages, and this difference did not alter greatly over time. BMI z scores were lower in EPT children at younger ages, but by age 18 were similar between groups. Height at age 2 was a better predictor of height at age 18 in EPT participants, compared with midparental height. CONCLUSIONS: EPT survivors were substantially lighter than term controls from birth to late adolescence, although the gap in weight steadily decreased over time from a peak at the time of discharge. The height disadvantage in EPT children compared with controls remained constant over time and BMI scores were similar at age 18 years.
A model of quantum-like decision-making with applications to psychology and cognitive science

We consider the following model of decision-making by cognitive systems. We present an algorithm -- quantum-like representation algorithm (QLRA) -- which provides a possibility to represent probabilistic data of any origin by complex probability amplitudes. Our conjecture is that cognitive systems developed the ability to use QLRA. They operate with complex probability amplitudes, mental wave functions. Since the mathematical formalism of QM describes as well (under some generalization) processing of such quantum-like (QL) mental states, the conventional quantum decision-making scheme can be used by the brain. We consider a modification of this scheme to describe decision-making in the presence of two ``incompatible'' mental variables. Such a QL decision-making can be used in situations like Prisoners Dilemma (PD) as well as others corresponding to so called disjunction effect in psychology and cognitive science.
Publishing Central Bank Forecasts

In this paper, a simple model of information asymmetry is used to study central bank forecast publication. Central banks are assumed to choose between not publishing a forecast, publishing a forecast that conditions on current policy, publishing an unconditional forecast, or publishing both. There is no incentive for the central bank to publish forecasts unless it faces conflicting output and inflation objectives, and also possesses an information advantage over agents. A conservative central bank that does not have a large information advantage over agents may prefer not to publish forecasts at all, while a central bank that enjoys a large information advantage will prefer to publish unconditional forecasts.
The Value of Durable Bank Relationships: Evidence from Korean Banking Shocks

Using a large sample of exogenous events that negatively affected Korean banks during the 1997-1998 period, we examine the value of durable bank relationships in Korea. We show that adverse shocks to banks have a negative effect not only on the value of the banks themselves, but also on the value of their client firms, and that this adverse effect on firm value is a decreasing function of the financial health of both banks and client firms. Our results are concentrated in the second half of the sample period, when banks experienced severe difficulties.
Public Pensions and Growth

This paper studies the short- and long-run effects of pay-as-you-go financed public pensions on productivity growth and discusses the possibility of a Pareto-improving reform. It shows that a reduction of those intergenerational transfers that are inherent in the leads to a permanent increase in productivity growth, a Pareto-improvement does not result. Yet, there is scope for a Pareto-improving public pension reform. Such a reform implies distributing public pension revenues in the form of savings subsidies rather that as lump-sum pension benefits.
Gauge freedom for gravitational wave problems in tensor scalar theories of gravity

A specific choice of gauge is shown to imply a decoupling between the tensor and scalar components of Gravitational Radiation in the context of Brans-Dicke type theories of gravitation. The comparison of the predictions of these theories with those of General Relativity is thereby made straightforward. Comment: 11 pages, no figure
Knowledge Sharing in a Collaborative Networked Environment

Knowledge is a key resource that must be managed within organisations and across collaborative enterprise networks. In particular, the two major challenges that such organisations face are ensuring that they have the appropriate knowledge to support their operations and ensuring that they optimise these knowledge resources available to them. In recent years, researchers, consultants and industrialists have developed approaches in an attempt to address these requirements. Most of these approaches have been technology oriented. In other words, the implementation of information technology systems is seen as the solution to enterprise knowledge management problems. However, research indicates that organisations are still failing to convert individual skills and competencies into tangible products and services. Knowledge management is an emerging discipline and it is still not very well understood or managed in industry. Consequently, new knowledge initiatives are not exploited to their full potential. In other words, companies are not reaping the full benefits of knowledge management projects. This paper explores the key constituents to managing knowledge and examines the main problems with sharing knowledge across teams and organisational boundaries. Findings from a qualitative study suggest that the key problems to managing knowledge across a collaborative network are person centric and consequently managers should focus their efforts on improving critical areas such as motivation and trust as well as people oriented methods and tools.
Visual document analysis: towards a semantic analysis of large document collections

Large amounts of data are only available in textual form. However, due to the semistructured nature of text and the impressive flexibility and complexity of natural language the development of automatic methods for text analysis is a challenging task. The presented work is centered around a framework for analyzing document (collections) that takes the whole document analysis process into account. Central to this framework is the idea that most analysis tasks do not require a full text understanding. Instead, one or several semantic aspects of the text (called quasi-semantic properties) can be identified that are relevant for answering the analysis task. This permits to targetly search for combinations of (measurable) text features that are able to approximate the specific semantic aspect. Those approximations are then used to solve the analysis task computationally or to support the analysis of a document (collection) visually. The thesis discusses the above mentioned framework theoretically and presents concrete application examples in four different domains: literature analysis, readability analysis, the extraction of discriminating and overlap terms, and finally sentiment and opinion analysis. Thereby, the advantages of working with the above mentioned framework are shown. A focus is put on showing where and how visualization techniques can provide valuable support in the document analysis process. Novel visualizations are introduced and common ones are evaluated for their suitability in this context. Furthermore, several examples are given how good approximations of semantic aspects of a document can be found and how given measures can be evaluated and improved. Figure 1: Graphical summary, showing frequent terms of the dissertation. The image was generated with the tool Wordle (www.wordle.net).
The China Wave:Rise of a Civilizational State

This is a best-seller in China and a geopolitical book for our times. As a leading thinker from China, Zhang Weiwei provides an original, comprehensive and engrossing study on the rise of China and its effective yet controversial model of development, and the book has become a centerpiece of an unfolding debate within China on the nature and future of the world's most populous nation and its possible global impact. China's rise, according to Zhang, is not the rise of an ordinary country, but the rise of a different type of country, a country sui generis, a civilizational state, a new model of development and a new political discourse which indeed questions many of the Western assumptions about democracy, good governance and human rights. The book is as analytical as it is provocative, and should be required reading for everyone concerned with the rise of China and its global implications.
Characterizing changes in parent labelling and gesturing and their relation to early communicative development

In a longitudinal study, 17 parent–child dyads were observed during free-play when the children were 1;0, 1;6, and 2;0. Parents' labelling input in the verbal and gestural modalities was coded at each session, and parents completed a vocabulary checklist for their children at each visit. We analysed how the frequency of labelling in the verbal and gestural modalities changed across observation points and how changes in parental input related to children's vocabulary development. As a group, parents' verbal labelling remained constant across sessions, but gestural labelling declined at 2;0. However, there are notable individual differences in parental trajectories in both modalities. Parents whose verbal labelling frequency increased over time had children whose vocabulary grew more slowly than those whose labelling frequency decreased, remained constant, or peaked at 1;6. There were few systematic relations between patterns of parental gesturing and children's vocabulary development. Parents' verbal and gestural labelling patterns also appeared dissociable. However, parents' words and gestures were correlated when their children were 1;6, suggesting that gestures serve an important bootstrapping function at a critical point in children's vocabulary development.
Testing for Bias in Graduate School Admissions

This paper provides an empirical examination of the factors that influence graduate admissions decisions. It exploits a unique, large data set on applications and admissions to 48 leading graduate schools in five disciplines, including economics. The analysis shows that these graduate schools in the aggregate gave substantial preference in four out of five fields to U.S. citizens over foreign applicants, modest preference in three fields to women over men, and substantial preference in all fields to underrepresented minorities over other U.S. citizens. The findings suggest that higher standards are applied to overrepresented groups to achieve more diverse enrollments.
Food for Thoughts: Feeding Time and Hormonal Secretion

Many daily cycles are imposed on us by our environment, such as alternating days and nights, temperature fluctuations or rhythms in food availability. When food is accessible every day at the same time, animals will adapt their physiology and behaviour to match the daily meal. They will anticipate the access to food by waking up and being active in the hours prior to feeding, foraging for food. Adaptation of physiology to changing conditions of food availability is not only evident at the behavioural level, but also for hormonal systems. Thus, corticosteroids, melatonin, leptin/ghrelin, insulin/glucagon, orexins and thyroid hormones, which show rhythmic profiles of secretion in ad libitum feeding conditions, are sensitive to increase and/or depletion in energy supplies and will be influenced when food sources are limited or available at unusual times. The present review reports the influence of restricted feeding schedules on secretion profiles of diverse hormones compared to normal ad libitum feeding conditions in rodents. In the end, the interplay between these systems and their response to environmental challenges will allow the animal to maintain their fitness for survival.
‘Forward guidance’: new monetary policy instrument or esoteric fad?

In August 2013, the Bank of England adopted a new monetary policy known as ‘forward guidance’. This paper sheds light on this landmark moment and this rather obscure policy instrument. The authors unpack the rationale of this policy, its implementation modality and provide international evidence on its impact. Important questions are then raised about whether this policy is needed in the UK, and about the downsides of this seemingly innocuous monetary experiment.
Agent-Based Approach to Investors' Behavior and Asset Price Fluctuation in Financial Markets

In this paper, we use Agent-Based Approach to analyze how asset prices are affected by investors and investment systems that are based on Behavioral Finance. We build a virtual financial market that contains two types of investors: fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. As a result of intensive experiments in the market, we find that (1) the traded price agrees with the fundamental value and the fundamentalists survive according to the principle of natural selection in the case that the market contains the same number of fundamentalists and trend predictors (investors who make trend prediction), (2) the traded price largely deviates from the fundamental value and the non-fundamentalists frequently obtain excess returns and therefore the fundamentalists are eliminated according to the principle of natural selection in the case that the proportion of trend predictors is extremely high or in the case that the investment ratio of the risk asset is restricted, and (3) the traded price largely deviates from the fundamental value in the case that the non-fundamentalists estimate the losses excessively, as pointed in Prospect Theory. These results indicate that the non-fundamentalists affect the traded prices and obtain excess returns also in real markets.
Using Genetic Algorithms in a Large Nationally Representative American Sample to Abbreviate the Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are robust machine learning approaches for abbreviating a large set of variables into a shorter subset that maximally captures the variance in the original data. We employed a GA-based method to shorten the 62-item Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire (MEAQ) by half without much loss of information. Experiential avoidance or the tendency to avoid negative internal experiences is a key target of many psychological interventions and its measurement is an important issue in psychology. The 62-item MEAQ has been shown to have good psychometric properties, but its length may limit its use in most practical settings. The recently validated 15-item brief version (BEAQ) is one short alternative, but it reduces the multidimensional scale to a single dimension. We sought to shorten the 62-item MEAQ by half while maintaining fidelity to its six dimensions. In a large nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 7884; 52% female; Age: M = 47.9, SD = 16), we employed a GA method of scale abbreviation implemented in the R package, GAabbreviate. The GA-derived short form, MEAQ-30 with five items per subscale, performed virtually identically to the original 62-item MEAQ in terms of inter-subscales correlations, factor structure, factor correlations, and zero-order correlations and unique latent associations of the six subscales with other measures of mental distress, wellbeing and personal strivings. The two measures also showed similar distributions of means across American census regions. The MEAQ-30 provides a multidimensional assessment of experiential avoidance whilst minimizing participant burden. The study adds to the emerging literature on the utility of machine learning methods in psychometrics.
Critical Success Factors for Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation and Upgrade

Seven categories of critical success factors were identified from the ERP literature: (1) business plan and vision; (2) change management; (3) communication; (4) ERP team composition, skills and compensation; (5) management support and championship; (6) project management; (7) system analysis, selection and technical implementation. We conducted a case study of two organizations that had implemented and upgraded ERP systems. We adopted Markus and Tanis' four-phase model and compared the importance of these critical success factors across the phases of ERP implementation and upgrade. The importance of these factors across the phases of ERP implementation and upgrade is very similar. ‘Business Plan and Vision’ and ‘Top Management Support and Championship’ are critical during the Chartering phase. ‘ERP Team Composition, Skills and Compensation,’ ‘Project Management’ and ‘System Analysis, Selection and Technical Implementation’ are most important during the Project phase. ‘Change Management’ and ‘Communication’ are very important during the Project and Shakedown phases.