Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Growth and economies of scale among timber haulage companies

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to help growth‐oriented timber haulage entrepreneurs to recognise the problems of growth and understand its implications.Design/methodology/approach – Data from 30 companies were retrieved from their financial statements between 2001 and 2006. The relevant literature consists of the company growth theory, strategy analysis and definitions of entrepreneurship. In this empirical study a resource‐based approach was used as the theoretical background. The research method was purely financial analysis.Findings – Economies of scale exist in the sector but are limited and do not evolve hand‐in‐hand with company size. There is an optimum size for a timber haulage company at which it can operate efficiently. However, the sector may be polarised.Research limitations/implications – The data used in the study do not clarify the particular entrepreneurial actions taken in companies as they grew.Originality/value – This empirical study covers new ground and offers new information .
The "geographical agglomeration-private R&D expenditure" effect: Empirical evidence on Italian data

Recent theoretical contributions show that geographical proximity, by increasing the payoff from free-riding on knowledge accumulation, may reduce the relative profitability of individual R&D activity vis-à-vis imitation and other alternative forms of technological innovation which exploit more efficiently the presence of geographical spillovers. As a consequence, these models predict that aggregate R&D effort is likely to be lower for firms agglomerated in "industrial districts" than for isolated firms. In this paper we provide partial support to this theoretical hypothesis by showing that geographical agglomeration reduces private R&D expenditures and has a negative impact on the decision to invest in R&D. We also find that a marginal increase in agglomeration within the industrial district has the effect of increasing the quality of innovation but not of individual R&D expenditures. These findings seem to confirm that innovation in industrial districts is influenced more by agglomeration externalities than by higher individual R&D effort, emphasising once again the importance of technological spillovers as channels of knowledge accumulation and diffusion in these areas.
CCPR Survey of Sports Clubs 2009

This survey provides information on the state of sports clubs run by their members in the UK in terms of finances, facilities, membership, volunteering and the challenges they face. Sports clubs run by volunteers are a critical part of the sporting infrastructure in the UK. They provide the opportunity for a large proportion of sports participation, with its associated benefits to individuals and the community. They provide opportunities for the expression of active citizenship through volunteering, and are more important than any other type of sporting organisation in this respect (1, 2). Further, they provide the opportunities for social interaction that enriches local communities. In the broadest sense the ability of volunteers to come together and create something reflecting their shared values - in this case, their passion for sport - is a reflection of a society in which free expression of collective values is possible and encouraged, as a positive contribution to society (3). Voluntary sector sports clubs, within their national governing body (NGB) structure, have developed in the UK since the latter half of the 19th century. Sports clubs and NGBs have a long tradition of independence; however they have developed in parallel to commercial sport and sports opportunities provided by local and central government, and continue to do so. Thus while the structure of voluntary sector sport in the UK may appear very resilient, it has to adapt to change and the challenges this brings (4). These challenges include: attracting, managing and retaining volunteers; attracting and retaining members; reacting to pressures to ‘professionalise’ in terms of emulating the management practices of the other sectors; reacting to the policy priorities of local and national government; and reacting to changes in legislation (5, 6, 7). These challenges are not unique to the UK (8) and recently have also included the need to react to the downturn in the economy. This survey was commissioned by CCPR to provide a sound basis for its work of supporting, representing and lobbying for the voluntary sector in sport. While it is anticipated that repeating the survey will allow an identification of trends, the present survey is not comparable with previous work (9) because of differences in sampling, weighting procedures and questions. In particular, the present survey has asked more details about clubs’ volunteers, income and expenditure - the financial questions are particularly important in the present economic climate.
The Distributional and Allocative Impacts of Virtual Labor Mobility Across Time Zones Through Communication Networks

Using a specific-factors' model, with two goods (a shift-working good and a non-shift-working good), three factors (capital specific to shift-working, land specific to non-shift-working and labor) and two countries (Home and Foreign), which are located in different time zones, we highlight the impact of trade in labor services via communication networks on factor prices and production patterns. If two countries are identical in size, then under free trade in labor services, all workers work only in their local daytime, and night shift in each country is performed by imported labor services supplied by residents of the other country in their local daytime. Night-time wage becomes the same as daytime wage (a wage equalization result). Other factor prices are also equalized. In both countries, capital rental rate increases, while land rent decreases. However, if two countries are different in size, trade in labor services does not equalize wages: in the large country, wages for night-shift workers are higher than daytime wages and some residents work at night; in the small country, daytime wages become higher than night-time wages and no one works at night, and night-shift work is done by imported labor services from the large country. Land rent in the small country decreases. Land rent in the large country may or may not decrease, but it is always higher than in the small country. Capital rental rates in both countries are equalized and increase.
Socio‐economic disparities in maternal mortality in China between 1996 and 2006

Please cite this paper as: Feng X, Zhu J, Zhang L, Song L, Hipgrave D, Guo S, Ronsmans C, Guo Y, Yang Q. Socio‐economic disparities in maternal mortality in China between 1996 and 2006. BJOG 2010;117:1527–1536.
Equivalent power curve model of a wind farm based on field measurement data

This paper discusses how a simple equivalent model of a whole wind farm can be obtained using field measurement data for individual wind turbines at the site. The equivalent model, which is formulated as a power curve, is specifically intended for steady state performance assessment, i.e. estimation of annual energy production of the wind farm. Two general approaches for building the equivalent steady state model of the wind farm are analysed: a) aggregate-measured power curve, obtained as an averaged aggregate representation of the outputs from all wind turbines, and b) cluster-measured power curve, obtained using the support vector clustering technique. Recorded measurement data from two actual wind farms are used to perform the analysis and to validate the results, where the accuracy of both proposed methods is assessed by direct comparison with the available recordings.
Fuzzy measures defined by addition of fuzzy measures

Given a measurable space (X, A) and two fuzzy measures μ1 and μ2 defined on A, the addition of μ1 and μ2 determines another set function on A. Such a new set function is a fuzzy measure, too. We shall discuss the relation between the new fuzzy measure and the original fuzzy measures. We shall see that the new fuzzy measure preserves some structural characteristics, such as subadditivity, several kinds of continuity, null-additivity, weak null-additivity, pseudo generating property, property (S), strong order continuity, regularity, of the original fuzzy measures. By means of these inherited characteristics of fuzzy measures, we show the generalized versions of Egoroff-like theorem, Lebesgue-like theorem, Riesz-like theorem and Lusin-like theorem, which are associated with two fuzzy measures, respectively. It is shown that the Choquet integral with respect to addition of two fuzzy measures is equal to the sum of two Choquet integrals for the original fuzzy measures.
The Capital Asset Pricing Model, A Fundamental Critique

The CAPM derives an ex post equilibrium relationship for the price of non-diversifiable risk based on investors utilizing two criteria only when making investment decisions: expected value and standard deviation. This article investigates the ex ante and ex post state of the CAPM in a hypothetical three-asset universe: either the CAPM indicates identical respective discount rates for different amounts of risks (i.e., total risk versus non-diversifiable risk) or the CAPM indicates the ex ante price of total risk (read: standard deviation) depending on the ex post price of non-diversifiable risk. The former outcome is irrational, the latter outcome is circular: the CAPM is fundamentally flawed.
Structural and Return Characteristics of Small and Large Firms

The authors examine differences in structural characteristics that lead firms of different sizes to react differently to the same economic news. They find that a small firm portfolio contains a large proportion of marginal firms--firms with low production efficiency and high financial leverage. The authors construct two size-matched indices designed to mimic the return behavior of marginal firms and find that these return indices are important in explaining the time-series return difference between small and large firms. Furthermore, risk exposures to these indices are as powerful as log(size) in explaining average returns of size-ranked portfolios. Copyright 1991 by American Finance Association.
Children's services in the iron cage of performance management : street-level bureaucracy and the spectre of Švejkism

Recent UK government reforms have introduced a range of measures to regulate practice in child welfare, with professional work increasingly structured into formal processes embedded in information technology. This prompts obvious anxieties about the erosion of professional discretion. Using Lipsky's concept of the street-level bureaucrat, we report on an ethnographical study examining how social workers organise their practice in an atmosphere of performance management. Clear indications of attenuated discretion are revealed, reflecting the shift to a managerial model of control. Of concern is the emergence of a pattern of formally conformant behaviour in which the letter of the organisational law is obeyed but without genuine commitment. Drawing on the anti-hero of Hasek's celebrated satire, we denote this form of passive resistance ‘Svejkism’. While showing up the absurdities of excessive managerial power, such behaviours are ultimately dysfunctional for the organisation; an alternative governance paradigm, based on professional values, is briefly outlined.
Quality management: A comparison of cultural differences

In this article we study the way the quality of leadership, human resource (HR) systems, manufacturing system and company performance are related and whether this relationship is dependent upon a specific business culture. Using data from UK, representing one culture, and Australia and New Zealand representing another, we have indicated that a universal structure between the mentioned four business components exists and that this structure is independent of the cultural setting within the areas we have chosen for this study. The main hypothesis is that the quality of leadership is unconditional, while the probability of both a high-quality HR system and a highquality manufacturing system is conditional upon leadership quality. Finally, the level of performance is conditional upon the joint effect of the quality of the HR system and the quality of the manufacturing system. This hypothesis is clearly supported by the data and, furthermore, data support that the structure is independent of country. These conclusions mean, as we have also seen from a number of other studies, that the choice of leadership style is crucial to the success of business operations and, hence, to the ultimate performance of the company.
The Pareto Differential Evolution Algorithm

The use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to solve problems with multiple objectives (known as Vector Optimization Problems (VOPs)) has attracted much attention recently. Being population based approaches, EAs offer a means to find a group of pareto-optimal solutions in a single run. Differential Evolution (DE) is an EA that was developed to handle optimization problems over continuous domains. The objective of this paper is to introduce a novel Pareto Differential Evolution (PDE) algorithm to solve VOPs. The solutions provided by the proposed algorithm for five standard test problems, is competitive to nine known evolutionary multiobjective algorithms for solving VOPs.
Mancur Olson and structural economic change: Vested interests and the industrial rise and fall of the great powers

ABSTRACT The article examines Mancur Olson's claim that the rise and decline of nations is intrinsically intertwined with the build-up of vested interests in the economy. I contend that Olson must be supplemented with Joseph Schumpeter for a theoretical framework that enables us to examine processes of long-term structural economic change. The specific focus is on technological progress and industrial growth, with a view to analyzing why certain nations have been better able to rise to industrial leadership, and staying there, than others. The framework yields one theoretical proposition, which receives broad empirical support: In order to rise to industrial leadership, states must prevent vested interests from blocking structural change. States that are unable to do this will get locked into yesterday's technologies and industries, and will effectively have consigned themselves to long-term stagnation and decline. The empirical support is derived from the second part of the article, where paired comparisons between Britain, France, Germany, the US and Japan for five core industries during five periods of industrial leadership, from the Industrial Revolution until today, provide a qualitative test of the theory.
Classification of High-Mountain Vegetation Communities within a Diverse Giant Mountains Ecosystem Using Airborne APEX Hyperspectral Imagery

Mapping plant communities is a difficult and time consuming endeavor. Methods relying on field surveys deliver high quality data but are usually limited to relatively small areas. In this paper we apply airborne hyperspectral data to vegetation mapping in remote and hard to reach areas. We classified 22 vegetation communities in the Giant Mountains on 3.12-m Airborne Prism Experiment (APEX) hyperspectral images, registered in 288 spectral bands (10 September 2012). As the classification algorithm, Support Vector Machines (SVM) was used. APEX data were corrected geometrically and atmospherically, and three dimensionality reduction methods were performed to select the best dataset. As reference we used a non-forest vegetation map containing vegetation communities of Polish Karkonosze National Park from 2002, orthophotomap and field surveys data from 2013 to 2014. We obtained the post-classification maps of 22 vegetation communities, lakes and areas without any vegetation. Iterative accuracy assessment repeated 100 times was used to obtain the most objective results for individual communities. The median value of overall accuracy (OA) was 84%. Fourteen out of twenty-four classes were classified of more than 80% of producer accuracy (PA) and sixteen out of twenty-four of user accuracy (UA). APEX data and SVM with the use of iterative accuracy assessment are useful for the mountain communities classification. This can support both Polish and Czech national parks management by giving the information about diversity of communities in the whole transboundary area, helping with identification especially in changing environment caused by humans.
The Impact of Recession on the Prediction of Corporate Failure

In this paper, we hypothesize that recessionary business cycles can contribute to corporate failure. Specifically, we test for a relationship between failure and (1) knowledge that failure occurred during a recession and (2) knowledge that the predictor variables were measured during a recession. We are able to show that accounting-based logistic regression models used to predict corporate failure are sensitive to the occurrence of a recession. Furthermore, our results indicate that such models are sensitive to knowledge that the predictor variables were generated during a recession and to knowledge that failure ultimately occurred during a recession. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
PSA-based parameters and their diagnostic performances in patients with prostate cancer and benign prostatic hyperplasia

Objective: The aim of this study is to evaluate the diagnostic performance of PSA- based parameters in prostate cancer (PCa) and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and to determine the relation between serum PSA and histopathological grade in PCa. Methods: This retrospective study includes data of 320 patients with PCa (n: 155) and BPH patients (n: 165). Serum PSA levels and Gleason scores of patients were determi- ned by examining the records of Clinical Biochemistry and Pathology Laboratory. We classified the patients according to total PSA (tPSA) levels to determine diagnostic per- formance of PSA-based parameters at different cut-off levels. Serum tPSA, free PSA (fPSA) and complexed PSA (cPSA) were analyzed with chemiluminometric method. Results: There were significant differences between BPH and PCa patients in tPSA, fPSA, cPSA and f/tPSA values (p<0.05) in whole group (WG). There were significant differences between BPH and PCa patients in cPSA and f/tPSA in group with tPSA<4 ng/mL (LG); in f/tPSA values in group with tPSA 4-10 ng/mL (intermediate group, IG). According to histopathological classification, all of the parameters except f/tPSA were significantly dif- ferent between groups in PCa (p<0.001). Significant positive correlations were found bet- ween Gleason scores and tPSA (r=0.577), fPSA (r=0.491) and cPSA (r=0.562) (p<0.001). Conclusion: We suggest the use of f/tPSA to improve the differentiation of BPH and PCa in IG. The best cut-off points for tPSA, fPSA, cPSA and f/tPSA were 4.0, 2.21, 3.16 ng/mL and 0.17 respectively. Based on the results of ROC analysis, a cut-off value of 0.17 for f/tPSA and 3.16 ng/mL for cPSA may be acceptable.
Encoding of Sucrose's Palatability in the Nucleus Accumbens Shell and Its Modulation by Exteroceptive Auditory Cues

Although the palatability of sucrose is the primary reason for why it is over consumed, it is not well understood how it is encoded in the nucleus accumbens shell (NAcSh), a brain region involved in reward, feeding, and sensory/motor transformations. Similarly, untouched are issues regarding how an external auditory stimulus affects sucrose palatability and, in the NAcSh, the neuronal correlates of this behavior. To address these questions in behaving rats, we investigated how food-related auditory cues modulate sucrose's palatability. The goals are to determine whether NAcSh neuronal responses would track sucrose's palatability (as measured by the increase in hedonically positive oromotor responses lick rate), sucrose concentration, and how it processes auditory information. Using brief-access tests, we found that sucrose's palatability was enhanced by exteroceptive auditory cues that signal the start and the end of a reward epoch. With only the start cue the rejection of water was accelerated, and the sucrose/water ratio was enhanced, indicating greater palatability. However, the start cue also fragmented licking patterns and decreased caloric intake. In the presence of both start and stop cues, the animals fed continuously and increased their caloric intake. Analysis of the licking microstructure confirmed that auditory cues (either signaling the start alone or start/stop) enhanced sucrose's oromotor-palatability responses. Recordings of extracellular single-unit activity identified several distinct populations of NAcSh responses that tracked either the sucrose palatability responses or the sucrose concentrations by increasing or decreasing their activity. Another neural population fired synchronously with licking and exhibited an enhancement in their coherence with increasing sucrose concentrations. The population of NAcSh's Palatability-related and Lick-Inactive neurons were the most important for decoding sucrose's palatability. Only the Lick-Inactive neurons were phasically activated by both auditory cues and may play a sentinel role monitoring relevant auditory cues to increase caloric intake and sucrose's palatability. In summary, we found that auditory cues that signal the availability of sucrose modulate its palatability and caloric intake in a task dependent-manner and had neural correlates in the NAcSh. These findings show that exteroceptive cues associated with feeding may enhance positive hedonic oromotor-responses elicited by sucrose's palatability.
Science in brief: Highlights from the equine abstracts at the Eighth International Conference on Canine and Equine Locomotion.

The Eighth International Conference on Canine and Equine Locomotion (ICEL8) coincided with the 2016 Olympics, a context that served both as a prominent reminder of our progress in equine biomechanics and as inspiration for the future. Hilary Clayton’s keynote lecture echoed this sentiment by gazing back at common misconceptions in equine gait analysis and looking forward to further elucidating the drivers of equine locomotion. The Olympics also provided a timely reminder that the application of gait analysis in horses differs from that in the human field. Here, there are lessons to learn with reference to the longitudinal monitoring of individuals that allows for the early detection of gait abnormalities [1]. This can only serve to improve both horse welfare and athletic performance. The winning of equestrian Olympic medals represents the culmination of many factors, including horse soundness, and horse–rider and foot–surface interactions, coupled with excellent veterinary care. These areas were all well represented at ICEL8 and this editorial aims to share the findings of the most clinically relevant presentations of the meeting.
A Randomized Study of Tobramycin Plus Ticarcillin, Tobramycin Plus Cephalothin and Ticarcillin, or Tobramycin Plus Mezlocillin in the Treatment of Infection in Neutropenic Patients with Malignancies

Two hundred twenty-five patients with 358 febrile episodes were treated with tobramycin and ticarcillin (TT), tobramycin and mezlocillin (TM), or tobramycin, ticarcillin and cephalothin (TTC). There were no satistically significant differences in the response rates for patients who were proven to have infection (67% with TT, 69% with TTC and 53% with TM). Patients were more often cured of their infection if their neutrophil count rose during therapy. In this study, the addition of cephalothin to TT did not increase the frequency of azotemia (10% and 12%, respectively). Although mezlocillin has a broader spectrum of activity in vitro than ticarcillin, it was not more efficacious when combined with tobramycin than ticarcillin plus tobramycin for the treatment of infections in neutropenic patients.