Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Getting to Sweden, Part I: War and Malfeasance, 1720–1850

How and why some countries were able to make the historical transition from a patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt bureaucracy to a clean, Weberian and professionalised one is still an under-studied topic in the literature on corruption. This article presents original data on such a transition in the case of Sweden, drawing on court hearings of cases of malfeasance among public officials in the period 1720–1850. It is argued, theoretically, that an important explanation for why the Swedish bureaucracy was able to break out of the collective action trap of corruption relates to Charles Tilly's theory of the importance of war for state-making. Rather than viewing war-making in itself as a driver of change, however, this article pinpoints the importance of having lost a significant war – in the Swedish case, the war against Russia in 1808–9 – and the constitutional and regime changes this set in motion. Drawing on comparative data on malfeasance, the similarities in this regard between the Swedish and Danish cases are highlighted.
Presidential Campaigning in the 2002 Congressional Elections

Many different elements make up the strength of a president, but a president with a majority in both houses of Congress works from a position of power. While a congressional majority does not guarantee that a president can pass his agenda (witness Jimmy Carter and the first two years of the Clinton presidency), a president that has majority in Congress will have natural allies instead of natural enemies when he works to enact his legislative agenda.
Employee motivation: a Malaysian perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the motivating factors of employees working in various Malaysian organizations.Design/methodology/approach – A survey method was adopted. The survey questionnaire consisted of two parts: respondents' personal information were obtained through Part A and in Part B, they were asked to rank the ten motivating factors in terms of their effectiveness. The motivating factors were compiled from the existing literature and refined through consultation with human resource professionals.Findings – An ordered set of motivating factors for employees working in Malaysian organizations. Demographic factors like gender, race, education, etc. were found to have impact on the ranking of the factors.Originality/value – The findings are expected to provide useful guidelines to managers while developing employee motivation programs.
The long-term effects of housing assistance on work and welfare

This paper examines the long-term effect of project-based housing assistance-public housing and private assisted housing-on work, earnings, and welfare receipt. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Assisted Housing Database to identify women ever living in project-based assisted housing and to create comparison groups using propensity scores. Analyses show no evidence that moving into this type of assisted housing is associated with sustained reductions in employment rates, work hours, or earnings. Although welfare rates decline, they remain higher for assisted housing recipients compared with nonrecipients. Overall, these findings align with those of recent experimental and nonexperimental studies that include other forms of housing assistance and cover different time periods. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.
University Impact on Student Growth: A quality measure?

This conceptual view of quality is premised on the idea that institutions of higher education are founded on processes of causing growth and development of students in a holistic sense, incorporating not just intellectual growth, but social, emotional and cultural development as well. Under this view, the assessment of quality in higher education or the performance of universities should therefore be gauged in terms of its impact on students' growth. This calls for attention to student outcomes including gains in both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of learning, skills and satisfaction with the university environment.
Probing the Contribution of IKs to Canine Ventricular Repolarization: Key Role for &bgr;-Adrenergic Receptor Stimulation

Background—In large mammals and humans, the contribution of IKs to ventricular repolarization is still incompletely understood. Methods and Results—In vivo and cellular electrophysiological experiments were conducted to study IKs in canine ventricular repolarization. In conscious dogs, administration of the selective IKs blocker HMR 1556 (3, 10, or 30 mg/kg PO) caused substantial dose-dependent QT prolongations with broad-based T waves. In isolated ventricular myocytes under baseline conditions, however, IKs block (chromanols HMR 1556 and 293B) did not significantly prolong action potential duration (APD) at fast or slow steady-state pacing rates. This was because of the limited activation of IKs in the voltage and time domains of the AP, although at seconds-long depolarizations, the current was substantial. Isoproterenol increased and accelerated IKs activation to promote APD95 shortening. This shortening was importantly reversed by HMR 1556 and 293B. Quantitatively similar effects were obtained in ventricular-tissue preparations. Finally, when cellular repolarization was impaired by IKr block, IKs block exaggerated repolarization instability with further prolongation of APD. Conclusions—Ventricular repolarization in conscious dogs is importantly dependent on IKs. IKs function becomes prominent during &bgr;-adrenergic receptor stimulation, when it promotes AP shortening by increased activation, and during IKr block, when it limits repolarization instability by time-dependent activation. Unstimulated IKs does not contribute to cellular APD at baseline. These data highlight the importance of the synergism between an intact basal IKs and the sympathetic nervous system in vivo.
A study on e-commerce security in Jordan

The internet and all other kinds of networks have changed our way of life in general and the way to do business in particular and, as a result, many companies nowadays are conducting and transferring their businesses online. However, some of them are not successful. Until now, the majority of companies and customers have not been certain that doing business online is secure and protects them from any illegal activities, since there is no physical interaction (face-to-face) between customers and companies and every business will be cautious about payment methods, the quality and quantity of products or services and the delivery system, among many others. This paper attempts to evaluate whether security issues are the major obstacles to the growth of e-commerce in Jordan. A survey conducted for the study reveals that security issues are major barriers to internet banking and e-commerce activities among consumers.
First Best Bayesian Privatization Mechanisms

A planner is interested in designing an ex-post efficient, individually rational, Bayesian mechanism for allocating a single indivisible object to one of the agents who knows his own valuation and only the distribution of other agents' valuations of the object. In this paper, we show that it is impossible to design such a mechanism without any transfers among agents and the planner. However, we discover and describe an ex-post efficient, ex-post individually rational, Bayesian mechanism which balances transfers among agents without any payment to (or from) the planner. Our result that an ex-post efficient, ex-post individually rational, transfer balanced, Bayesian mechanism exists, is in stark contrast to two well-known impossibility results in the literature; the nonexistence of a Bayesian public good mechanism satisfying expost efficiency, individual rationality and budget balance (Laffont and Maskin (1979)) and the impossibility of an ex-post efficient, individually rational, Bayesian bilateral trading mechanism between a seller and a buyer without an outside subsidy (Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983)).
Labeled Memory Networks for Online Model Adaptation

Augmenting a neural network with memory that can grow without growing the number of trained parameters is a recent powerful concept with many exciting applications. In this paper, we establish their potential in online adapting a batch trained neural network to domain-relevant labeled data at deployment time. We present the design of Labeled Memory Network (LMN), a new memory augmented neural network (MANN) for fast online model adaptation. We highlight three key features of LMNs. First, LMNs treat memory as a second boosted stage following the trained network thereby allowing the memory and network to play complementary roles. Unlike all existing MANNs that write to memory at every cycle, LMNs provide better memory utilization by writing only labeled data with non-zero loss. Second, LMNs organize the memory with the discrete class label as the primary key unlike existing MANNs where key is a real vector derived from the input. This simple, yet surprisingly unexplored alternative organization, safeguards against catastrophic forgetting of rare labels that current LRU based MANNs are subject to. Finally, LMNs model the evolving expertise of memory and network using a RNN, to determine online their respective weights we evaluate online model adaptation strategies on five sequence prediction tasks, an image classification task, and two language modeling tasks. We show that LMNs are better than other MANNs designed for meta-learning. We also found them to be more accurate and faster than state-of-the-art methods of retuning model parameters for adapting to domain-specific labeled data.
Lean and mean in the civil service: the case of processing in HMRC

The public sector has been importing private sector methods and practices aimed at generating efficiencies and cost savings. However, the consequences of these changes on the working lives of civil servants are under-researched. This article uses detailed fieldwork to investigate the impact of Lean on labour processes in HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC). We argue that Lean has a detrimental effect on employees, their working lives, and the service that is provided to the public. The consequences of Lean on public sector work are highly problematic, which is of serious concern given its progressive impact on other civil service departments in the UK.
Association of renal dysfunction with mortality following cardiac surgery.

Critical Care Medicine www.ccmjournal. org e49 fractions, more other comorbidities, and longer perfusion and cross-clamp times, and were more likely to have coronary artery bypass surgery combined with another cardiac surgery and be transfused. It implies that decedents may have worse health status and heavier surgery and comorbidity burdens than survivors. In our opinion, no matter how refined the adjustment is for differences in health status, surgery, and comorbidity burdens, it is never possible to ensure a complete adjustment for differences between decedents and survivors. Furthermore, postoperative AKI has been associated independently with a number of comorbidities and known risk factors that can significantly affect operative death, such as advanced age, poor ejection fraction, renal dysfunction, myocardial infarction, prolonged perfusion and cross-clamp times, and intraoperative transfusion (2–4). All these make us with the dilemma of differentiating these important interrelated risk factors and their causative influences on operative deaths. Even sophisticated multivariable analysis also is probably inadequate to clarify if occurrence of AKI is a true determinant of operative deaths or simply a sensitive indicator of a more severe and complex clinical situation. Actually, a “kitchen sink” approach of adjusting for all available variables with multivariable analysis may lead to overadjustment and therefore bias the true effect of AKI. Perhaps, propensity-matching patients with and without AKI on the prior-defined confounders is a desirable approach to obtain total effect of AKI on operative deaths via all possible pathways. Second, all patients included in this study underwent cardiac surgery. We speculate that postoperative cardiac function should be improved in most patients. Thus, when analyzing the risk factors that are independently associated with late mortality, cardiac function variables entered multivariable models should be improved ejection fraction, and modified prevalences of myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure at hospital discharge, rather than their preoperative values. As shown in this study, after using multivariable analysis adjustment for other preoperative factors, AKI remained associated with increased late mortality. However, when discharge creatinine was included as a baseline hazard in multivariable analysis, AKI and baseline creatinine became nonsignificant predictors for late mortality, whereas residual renal function was associated with late mortality. This means that only persistent vital organ dysfunctions at hospital discharge are important predictors of late mortality. Thus, we cannot exclude the possibility that inclusion of preoperative cardiac variables in multivariable models has tampered with inferences of hazard adjustment for late mortality. The authors have disclosed that they do not have any potential conflicts of interest.
The Impact of Media, Phylogenetic Classification, and E. coli Pathotypes on Biofilm Formation in Extraintestinal and Commensal E. coli From Humans and Animals

Extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC) include avian pathogenic E. coli (APEC), neonatal meningitis E. coli (NMEC), and uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) and are responsible for significant animal and human morbidity and mortality. This study sought to investigate if biofilm formation by ExPEC likely contributes to these losses since biofilms are associated with recurrent urinary tract infections, antibiotic resistance, and bacterial exchange of genetic material. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine differences in biofilm formation among a collection of ExPEC and to ascertain if there is a relationship between their ability to produce biofilms and their assignment to phylogenetic groups in three media types – M63, diluted TSB, and BHI. Our results suggest that ExPEC produce relatively different levels of biofilm formation in the media tested as APEC (70.4%, p = 0.0064) and NMEC (84.4%, p = 0.0093) isolates were poor biofilm formers in minimal medium M63 while UPEC isolates produced significantly higher ODs under nutrient-limited conditions with 25% of strains producing strong biofilms in diluted TSB (p = 0.0204). Additionally, E. coli phylogenetic assignment using Clermont’s original and revised typing scheme demonstrated significant differences among the phylogenetic groups in the different media. When the original phylogenetic group isolates previously typed as group D were phylogenetically typed under the revised scheme and examined, they showed substantial variation in their ability to form biofilms, which may explain the significant values of revised phylogenetic groups E and F in M63 (p = 0.0291, p = 0.0024). Our data indicates that biofilm formation is correlated with phylogenetic classification and subpathotype or commensal grouping of E. coli strains.
Aspirin and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug use and the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer.

OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that the regular use of aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) is negatively associated with the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer. DESIGN Case-control study with four age- and sex-matched control subjects for each incident colorectal cancer case. POPULATION AND SETTING Patient population of a large municipal teaching hospital in Atlanta, Ga. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Odds of colorectal cancer as a function of aspirin, nonaspirin NSAIDs, and acetaminophen dispensed to the study population in the 4 years prior to incident colorectal cancer diagnosis. MAIN RESULTS The risk of colorectal cancer estimated by odds ratios decreased with increasing days of exposure to aspirin linearly in a dose-dependent fashion (likelihood ratio statistic: for cumulative days, P < .001; for cumulative dose, P < .001). The coefficient for days of exposure to aspirin was highly significant even when modeled as a continuous variable (P = .001). There appeared to be a threshold above which nonaspirin NSAIDs afforded protection (likelihood ratio statistic: for cumulative days, P = .021; for cumulative dose, P = .019). Acetaminophen conferred no risk reduction. CONCLUSION The results of previous experimental animal models, interventional case studies, and some but not all epidemiological investigations and the present data point toward a causal relationship between NSAID use and the prevention of cancer of the large bowel and rectum. Because of the potential gastrointestinal and renal side effects of NSAID use, particularly in the elderly, chemoprevention trials are now needed to allow risk-benefit analysis in populations at high risk for colorectal cancer.
Distribution Study of Chlamydia trachomatis Serovars among High-Risk Women in China Performed Using PCR-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Genotyping

ABSTRACT This was one of the first epidemiological studies in China focused on genital Chlamydia trachomatis serotype distribution in high-risk female populations using omp1 gene-based restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. One thousand seven hundred seventy cervical swab samples from women attending sexually transmitted disease clinics and female sex workers in six cities in China (Shenzhen and Guangzhou in southern China, Nanjing and Shanghai in eastern China, and Nanning and Chengdu in southwestern China) were subjected to serovar genotyping. The proportion of omp1 genes successfully amplified in 240 C. trachomatis plasmid-positive samples was 94.2% (226/240). Serotypes E (n = 63; 27.9%), F (n = 53; 23.5%), G (n = 28; 12.4%), and D (n = 25; 11.1%) were most prevalent. Though there was no significant difference in the geographic distribution of C. trachomatis, serotype E was predominant in the South (32.1%) and East (27.1%), while serotype F was predominant in the Southwest (28.3%). Serotype F infection was associated with young age and single status. Serovar G was associated with lower abdominal pain; 47.5% of asymptomatic patients were infected with serovar E. These results provide information on distribution of genital C. trachomatis serotypes among high-risk women in China and indicate that high-risk women, including those who are asymptomatic, can be infected with multiple serovars of C. trachomatis, revealing exposure to multiple sources of infection. Although the scope for generalizations is limited by our small sample size, our results showing clinical correlations with genotypes are informative.
To Continue Sharing or Not to Continue Sharing? – An Empirical Analysis of User Decision in Peer-to-Peer Sharing Networks

Peer-to-peer sharing networks have seen explosive growth recently. In these networks, sharing files is completely voluntary, and there is no financial reward for users to contribute. Yet many users continue to share despite the massive free-riding by others. Using a large-scale dataset of individual activities in a peer-to-peer music-sharing network, we seek to understand users’ continued-sharing behavior as a private contribution to a public good. We find that the more benefit users “get from” the network, in the form of downloads, browses, and searches, the more likely they are to continue sharing. Also, the more value users “give to” the network, in the form of downloads by other users and recognition by the network, the more likely they are to continue sharing. Moreover, our findings suggest that, overall, “getting-from” is a stronger force for the continued-sharing decision than “giving-to. ”
Differential Responsiveness in Europe: The Effects of Preference Difference and Electoral Participation

As a core principle of contemporary democracy, political representation has been the subject of numerous studies. In particular, responsiveness has been thoroughly examined and research suggests that policies tend to reflect citizens’ preferences. However, it has also been argued that, in some instances, responsiveness systematically reflects the preferences of the rich better than those of the poor, hence violating a second democratic principle, that of political equality. While much research has focused on the United States, this study tests whether differential responsiveness also occurs in European democracies and enquires about the structural factors that may cause such inequality. The article examines to what extent the preference gap between the rich and the poor as well as the level of electoral participation can account for variation in differential responsiveness. To do this, a dataset including information on 25 European countries from 2002 to 2010 is constructed and analysed using time-series cross-sectional methods. The findings suggest that European democracies experience differential responsiveness and that the preference gap and level of turnout partly account for this.
Association of Urinary Tract Infection in Married Women Presenting with Urinary Incontinence in a Hospital based Population.

INTRODUCTION Urinary incontinence (UI) is increasingly recognized as a significant health problem, which remains a hygienic as well as social problem. Women have higher risk of developing incontinence in their lifetime compared with men. Urinary tract infection can increase the incidence of incontinence. Present study was undertaken to assess the association of UTI in married women who presented with UI. AIM The present study was aimed to identify the patients (married women) with complaints of UI and determining its association with UTI; and to identify the causative organism for the UTI along with its antimicrobial susceptibility pattern. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a cross-sectional, non-randomized study of 107 married women with UI, who attended outpatient department in our hospital. Mid-stream urine (MSU) samples were collected from these patients with positive history of incontinence. Screening of urine for significant bacteriuria and culture to identify the etiological agents were performed followed by evaluation of their antimicrobial susceptibility profiles using Kirby Bauer disc diffusion method. RESULTS Overall 25.2% of patients with incontinence had a positive urine culture. History of UTI was elicited in around 38.3% of patients, among which 15% had positive urine culture and 10.3% of the patients who did not have a history had positive culture. Escherichia coli was the commonest causative organism (66.6) causing UTI, followed by Enterococcus spp. (22.3%), Klebsiella pneumoniae (7.4%) and Proteus mirabilis (3.7%). The antimicrobial susceptibility pattern for Escherichia coli showed high sensitivity to Nitrofurantoin (94.4%) and high resistance to Ampicillin (94.4%). CONCLUSION Our study revealed one in every four incontinent patients had UTI and almost half of them suffered from previous episodes of UTI. Thus appropriate correction of the existing UTI can help in the treatment of UI.