Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARTICIPATION AND PERFORMANCE : THE ROLES OF PROCEDURAL JUSTICE AND EVALUATIVE STYLES by

This study proposes that (i) the fairness of the organisation performance and reward allocation process (procedural justice) and (ii) the subordinates' need for participation to resolve ambiguity in performance evaluation criteria are important in influencing the effect of participation on managerial performance. The results support a significant three-way interaction between participation, procedural justice and budget emphasis affecting managerial performance. They also support the expectation that participation is important in influencing managerial performance in high budget emphasis situations only if procedural justice is low. In low budget emphasis situations, participation is important to the subordinates, regardless of the extent of procedural justice. INTRODUCTION Much research has been undertaken on the relationships between supervisory evaluative style (budget emphasis) and subordinates’ behaviour and performance (Kren and Liao, 1988; Briers and Hirst 1990; Lindsay and Ehrenberg, 1993; Otley and Fakiolas, 1997). Based on the results of prior studies, two important general patterns have emerged from these research areas. First, prior studies have found that the effects of supervisory evaluative style (budget emphasis) on subordinates' behavior and performance is contingent upon a number of moderating variables. These include budgetary participation (Brownell, 1982), task uncertainty (Hirst, 1981, 1983), environment uncertainty (Brownell, 1985), business strategy (Govindarajan and Gupta, 1986), participation and task uncertainty (Brownell and Hirst, 1986), participation and task difficulty (Brownell and Dunk, 1991; Lau et al., 1995), locus of control (Frucot and Shearon, 1991), national culture (Harrison, 1992), personality (Harrison, 1993) and interpersonal trust (Ross,
Are Constant Loop Widths an Artifact of the Background and the Spatial Resolution?

We study the effect of the coronal background in the determination of the diameter of EUV loops, and we analyze the suitability of the procedure followed in a previous paper for characterizing their expansion properties. For the analysis we create different synthetic loops, and we place them on real backgrounds from data obtained with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE). We apply to these loops the same procedure followed in our previous works, and we compare the results with real loop observations. We demonstrate that the procedure allows us to distinguish constant width loops from loops that expand appreciably with height, as predicted by simple force-free field models. This holds even for loops near the resolution limit. The procedure can easily determine when loops are below the resolution limit and therefore not reliably measured. We find that small-scale variations in the measured loop width are likely due to imperfections in the background subtraction. The greatest errors occur in especially narrow loops and in places where the background is especially bright relative to the loop. We stress, however, that these effects do not impact the ability to measure large-scale variations. The result that observed loops do not expand systematically with height is robust.
Selection Against Maternal microRNA Target Sites in Maternal Transcripts

In animals, before the zygotic genome is expressed, the egg already contains gene products deposited by the mother. These maternal products are crucial during the initial steps of development. In Drosophila melanogaster, a large number of maternal products are found in the oocyte, some of which are indispensable. Many of these products are RNA molecules, such as gene transcripts and ribosomal RNAs. Recently, microRNAs (small RNA gene regulators) have been detected early during development and are important in these initial steps. The presence of some microRNAs in unfertilized eggs has been reported, but whether they have a functional impact in the egg or early embryo has not being explored. I have extracted and sequenced small RNAs from Drosophila unfertilized eggs. The unfertilized egg is rich in small RNAs and contains multiple microRNA products. Maternal microRNAs often are encoded within the intron of maternal genes, suggesting that many maternal microRNAs are the product of transcriptional hitchhiking. Comparative genomics analyses suggest that maternal transcripts tend to avoid target sites for maternal microRNAs. I also developed a microRNA target mutation model to study the functional impact of polymorphisms at microRNA target sites. The analysis of Drosophila populations suggests that there is selection against maternal microRNA target sites in maternal transcripts. A potential role of the maternal microRNA mir-9c in maternal-to-zygotic transition is also discussed. In conclusion, maternal microRNAs in Drosophila have a functional impact in maternal protein−coding transcripts.
On the parameter choice for the Non-Local Means

This paper deals with the parameter choice for the NL-Means algorithm. Starting with basic computations on toy models, we study the bias-variance trade-off of this filter using a simple notion of regularity in the patch space. We show that this regularity is necessarily local and so should be the parameters of the filter. Relying on Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate, we then propose a way to locally set these parameters, and we compare this method with the Non-Local Means with optimal global parameter.
Working with Forgiveness in Gestalt Therapy

In recent years, much has been written about forgiveness as a way to overcome the intense hurt and anger from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, divorce, infidelity, and other past acts of betrayal. Although there is growing interest in forgiveness as a therapeutic issue, it is noteworthy that the Gestalt therapy literature has very few references to forgiveness and how to work with forgiveness in therapy. This article first presents some ways to conceptualize forgiveness. Forgiveness is then viewed through the lenses of Gestalt theory and Jewish spiritual practice. Finally, through the integration of Gestalt methodology and Jewish spiritual practice, some ways to work with forgiveness in Gestalt therapy are presented and discussed. Introduction In recent years, much has been written about forgiveness as a way to overcome the intense hurt and anger from past violations and acts of betrayal (Enright & Fitzgibbons, 2000; Kersting, 2003; Richards & Bergin, 1997). However, clients who are victims of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, divorce, infidelity, and other personal tragedies are often quite conflicted about forgiveness. Do they try to forgive because it’s the “right thing to do”? Is forgiveness necessary for healing to occur? Are some things unforgivable? Even if clients want to forgive, how would they do it? In some instances, clients look to their religions or spiritual traditions for guidance and find that forgiveness is often advocated with little regard for the clients’ readiness, which can add additional pressure to finish one’s emotional business before one is ready. Although there is growing interest in forgiveness as a therapeutic issue, it is surprising that the Gestalt therapy literature has so few references to forgiveness and how to work with forgiveness in therapy. This article first presents some ways to conceptualize forgiveness. Forgiveness is then viewed through the lenses of Gestalt theory and Jewish spiritual practice. Finally, through the integration of Gestalt methodology and Jewish spiritual practice, some ways to work with forgiveness in therapy are presented and discussed. Characteristics of Forgiveness There seems to be considerable confusion for clients and therapists alike about what forgiveness actually is. Luskin (2002) states that forgiveness does not mean feeling good toward the offender nor does it mean forgetting what happened. Also, forgiveness does not seem to be a very natural response. In fact, forgiveness seems to go against our natural tendency. What’s the first response when someone hurts us? It’s often to want to hurt them back or get even with
Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2004

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations. It fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish reports and specialized analyses of the meaning and significance of such statistics; assist state and local education agencies in improving their statistical systems; and review and report on education activities in other countries. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating statistical information about crime, its perpetrators and victims, and the operation of the justice system at all levels of government. These data are critical to federal, state, and local policymakers in combating crime and ensuring that justice is both efficient and evenhanded. For youth to fulfill their potential in school, schools should be safe and secure places for all students, teachers, and staff members. Without a safe learning environment, teachers may have difficulty teaching and students may have difficulty learning. Gauging the safety of the school environment, however, may be difficult given the large amount of attention devoted to isolated incidents of extreme school violence nationwide. Ensuring safer schools requires establishing good indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the nation and periodically monitoring and updating these indicators. Indicators of School Crime and Safety is designed to provide an annual snapshot of specific crime and safety indicators, covering topics such as victimization, fights, bullying, classroom disorder, teacher injury, weapons, and student perceptions of school safety. In addition to covering a wide range of topics, the indicators are based on information drawn from a wide range of sources, including surveys of students, teachers, and principals, and data collections by federal departments and agencies such as The key findings of the report are presented below. , there were 32 school-associated violent deaths in the United States (Indicator 1). Twenty-four of these violent deaths were homicides and 8 were suicides. Sixteen of the 24 school-associated homicides involved school-aged children. These 16 homicides are a relatively small percentage (1 percent) of the total of 2,124 children ages 5–19 who were victims of homicide over the same period. Six of the 8 school-associated suicides from July 1, 1999, through June 30, 2000, involved school-aged children. Away from …
A hybrid fuzzy evolutionary algorithm for a multi-objective resource allocation problem

In this paper a hybrid fuzzy evolutionary algorithm for a multi-objective resource allocation problem, the student project allocation (SPA) problem, is presented. Student project allocation must satisfy a number of soft objectives stemming from multiple points of view. The proposed algorithm employs a fuzzy inference system to model and aggregate the objectives, assuming the role of the fitness function in the evolutionary algorithm. The fuzzy system captures preferences of the decision maker in the compromise between various objectives, thereby guiding the search to interesting regions in the objective space. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this hybrid approach for a large data set.
Factor of safety in a partially saturated slope inferred from hydro‐mechanical continuum modeling

Rainfall weakens an earth slope and triggers mass movement. Relevant triggering mechanisms are complex and include reduction of capillary pressure due to increased saturation and frictional drag on the sediment induced by fluid flow. Physics‐based continuum models utilizing modern computational tools are useful for understanding the mechanisms of deformation in partially saturated slopes; however, they do not provide a scalar indicator called ‘factor of safety’ that measures the potential of a given slope for mass movement. In the present work, we employ sequential calculations consisting of a physics‐based finite element model that couples solid deformation with fluid flow to quantify the stress and deformation fields in a steep hillside slope subjected to rainfall infiltration. This is followed by a limit‐equilibrium calculation based on the method of slices that evaluates the desired factor of safety. The field condition investigated is similar to the steep experimental catchment CB1 near Coos Bay, Oregon, which failed as a large debris flow from heavy rainfall. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Human activity recognition by smartphone

Human activity recognition is one of the most important core building blocks behind many applications on smartphone such as medical applications, fitness tracking, context-aware mobile, human survey system, etc. This paper describes a robust system for human activity recognition by smartphone. Different from other work, we investigated the use and combination feature selection and instance selection to reduce dimensionality of dataset in order to enhance the performance. We implemented the system on Android and our experimental results showed that our system achieves better accuracy of up to 15% and the response time is 3 to 5 times faster when comparing to the original system.
Short term power load forecasting using Deep Neural Networks

Accurate load forecasting greatly influences the planning processes undertaken in operation centres of energy providers that relate to the actual electricity generation, distribution, system maintenance as well as electricity pricing. This paper exploits the applicability of and compares the performance of the Feed-forward Deep Neural Network (FF-DNN) and Recurrent Deep Neural Network (R-DNN) models on the basis of accuracy and computational performance in the context of time-wise short term forecast of electricity load. The herein proposed method is evaluated over real datasets gathered in a period of 4 years and provides forecasts on the basis of days and weeks ahead. The contribution behind this work lies with the utilisation of a time-frequency (TF) feature selection procedure from the actual “raw” dataset that aids the regression procedure initiated by the aforementioned DNNs. We show that the introduced scheme may adequately learn hidden patterns and accurately determine the short-term load consumption forecast by utilising a range of heterogeneous sources of input that relate not necessarily with the measurement of load itself but also with other parameters such as the effects of weather, time, holidays, lagged electricity load and its distribution over the period. Overall, our generated outcomes reveal that the synergistic use of TF feature analysis with DNNs enables to obtain higher accuracy by capturing dominant factors that affect electricity consumption patterns and can surely contribute significantly in next generation power systems and the recently introduced SmartGrid.
Memory and Organizational Evolvability in a Neutral Landscape

Many organizational theories are not sanguine over the chances of organizations to adapt and evolve, even if they should learn from the past through memory. Innovative search in the adaptive biology tradition leads quickly to dead ends. However, memory is useful for rendering innovative search more efficient. The concept from evolutionary biology of neutrality and drift along neutral pathways introduces the possibility that organizations are robust to local innovations and therefore potential candidates for evolvability. Through simulations in a neutral NK hypercube, our analysis shows that neutrality does not create value when future payoffs are discounted and change is costly. Here is the role for memory. Memory enables the faster development of better capabilities and reverses the negative assessment of evolvability. Even when allowing for forgetting, memory is a positive capability that improves evolvability of organizations so they can achieve better performance and better ways of doing so. Memory and neutrality are complementary for creating organizational evolvability, a finding consistent with the overwhelming evidence that organizations are more productive today than before because of innovation.
Early Detection of Collaboration Conflicts and Risks

Conflicts among developers' inconsistent copies of a shared project arise in collaborative development and can slow progress and decrease quality. Identifying and resolving such conflicts early can help. Identifying situations which may lead to conflicts can prevent some conflicts altogether. By studying nine open-source systems totaling 3.4 million lines of code, we establish that conflicts are frequent, persistent, and appear not only as overlapping textual edits but also as subsequent build and test failures. Motivated by this finding, we develop a speculative analysis technique that uses previously unexploited information from version control operations to precisely diagnose important classes of conflicts. Then, we design and implement Crystal, a publicly available tool that helps developers identify, manage, and prevent conflicts. Crystal uses speculative analysis to make concrete advice unobtrusively available to developers.
DEVELOPING CUSTOMER LOYALTY : THE ROLE OF SALESPERSON AND FIRM-SPECIFIC RELATIONSHIPS by

Aston Business School Research Institute is the administrative centre for all research activities at Aston Business School. The School comprises more than 70 academic staff organised into thematic research groups along with a Doctoral Programme of more than 50 research students. Research is carried out in all of the major areas of business studies and a number of specialist fields. For further information contact:
Constraining the Metallicity of the Low Density Lyman-Alpha Forest Using OVI Absorption

We present a systematic search for OVI(1032Å,1037Å) absorption in a Keck HIRES spectrum of the z = 3.62 quasar Q1422+231, with the goal of constraining the metallicity and ionization state of the low density intergalactic medium (IGM). Comparison of CIV absorption measurements to models of the Lyα forest based on cosmological simulations shows that absorbers with NHI ∼> 10 14.5cm−2 have a mean carbon abundance [C/H] ≈ −2.5, assuming a metagalactic photoionizing background with the spectral shape predicted by Haardt & Madau (1996, HM). In these models, lower column density absorption arises in lower density gas where most CIV is photoionized to CV. Therefore, OVI should be the most sensitive tracer of metallicity in Lyα absorbers with NHI ∼< 10 14.5cm−2. OVI lines lie at wavelengths heavily contaminated by Lyman series absorption, so we interpret the search results by comparing to carefully constructed, mock Q1422 spectra drawn from a hydrodynamic simulation of a Λ-dominated cold dark matter model. A search for deep, narrow absorption features yields only a few candidate OVI lines in the spectrum of Q1422. HI absorption blankets the position of the doublet companion line in each case, and the total number of narrow lines is statistically consistent with that in zero-metallicity artificial spectra. Artificial spectra generated with the HM background and [O/H] ∼> −2.5 predict too many narrow lines and are statistically inconsistent with the data. We also search for OVI associated with CIV systems, using the optical depth ratio technique of Songaila (1998). With this method we do find significant OVI absorption; matching the data requires [O/C] ≈ +0.5 and corresponding [O/H] ≈ −2.0. Taken together, the narrow line and optical depth ratio results imply that (a) the metallicity in the low density regions of the IGM is at least a
Cell-Specific IRF-3 Responses Protect against West Nile Virus Infection by Interferon-Dependent and -Independent Mechanisms

Interferon regulatory factor (IRF)-3 is a master transcription factor that activates host antiviral defense programs. Although cell culture studies suggest that IRF-3 promotes antiviral control by inducing interferon (IFN)-β, near normal levels of IFN-α and IFN-β were observed in IRF-3−/− mice after infection by several RNA and DNA viruses. Thus, the specific mechanisms by which IRF-3 modulates viral infection remain controversial. Some of this disparity could reflect direct IRF-3-dependent antiviral responses in specific cell types to control infection. To address this and determine how IRF-3 coordinates an antiviral response, we infected IRF-3−/− mice and two primary cells relevant for West Nile virus (WNV) pathogenesis, macrophages and cortical neurons. IRF-3−/− mice were uniformly vulnerable to infection and developed elevated WNV burdens in peripheral and central nervous system tissues, though peripheral IFN responses were largely normal. Whereas wild-type macrophages basally expressed key host defense molecules, including RIG-I, MDA5, ISG54, and ISG56, and restricted WNV infection, IRF-3−/− macrophages lacked basal expression of these host defense genes and supported increased WNV infection and IFN-α and IFN-β production. In contrast, wild-type cortical neurons were highly permissive to WNV and did not basally express RIG-I, MDA5, ISG54, and ISG56. IRF-3−/− neurons lacked induction of host defense genes and had blunted IFN-α and IFN-β production, yet exhibited only modestly increased viral titers. Collectively, our data suggest that cell-specific IRF-3 responses protect against WNV infection through both IFN-dependent and -independent programs.
Nucleus Accumbens Adenosine A2A Receptors Regulate Exertion of Effort by Acting on the Ventral Striatopallidal Pathway

Goal-directed actions are sensitive to work-related response costs, and dopamine in nucleus accumbens is thought to modulate the exertion of effort in motivated behavior. Dopamine-rich striatal areas such as nucleus accumbens also contain high numbers of adenosine A2A receptors, and, for that reason, the behavioral and neurochemical effects of the adenosine A2A receptor agonist CGS 21680 [2-p-(2-carboxyethyl) phenethylamino-5′-N-ethylcarboxamidoadenosine] were investigated. Stimulation of accumbens adenosine A2A receptors disrupted performance of an instrumental task with high work demands (i.e., an interval lever-pressing schedule with a ratio requirement attached) but had little effect on a task with a lower work requirement. Immunohistochemical studies revealed that accumbens neurons that project to the ventral pallidum showed adenosine A2A receptors immunoreactivity. Moreover, activation of accumbens A2A receptors by local injections of CGS 21680 increased extracellular GABA levels in the ventral pallidum. Combined contralateral injections of CGS 21680 into the accumbens and the GABAA agonist muscimol into ventral pallidum (i.e., “disconnection” methods) also impaired response output, indicating that these structures are part of a common neural circuitry regulating the exertion of effort. Thus, accumbens adenosine A2A receptors appear to regulate behavioral activation and effort-related processes by modulating the activity of the ventral striatopallidal pathway. Research on the effort-related functions of these forebrain systems may lead to a greater understanding of pathological features of motivation, such as psychomotor slowing, anergia, and fatigue in depression.