Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antecedents of Customer Satisfaction In Internet Banking: Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) Redefined

In the banking sector, various electronic delivery channels are increasingly used for delivering products and services for the convenience of customers at low cost. Internet banking (IB) is one among them. IB is a product of e-commerce in the field of banking and financial services. The present study has been carried out to use the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) from the Information Technology (IT) literature to investigate the effect of TAM variables on customer satisfaction in the internet-banking context. The model was constructed by incorporating Perceived Risk (PR) to the twin traditional TAM constructs, Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU). The model has been empirically validated using 406 IB users selected from the state of Kerala, India. It is found that the constructs PEOU and PU have positive effect on customer satisfaction and PR has negative effect on customer satisfaction. A profile analysis of the respondents revealed that young males, well-educated employees with a moderately high level of monthly income are the major users of IB in Kerala.
On the Clustering of Small Firms

Summary This article is concerned with the viability of small‐scale manufacturing in LDCs. Its purpose is to put forward a few categories which may help to disentangle the issue and to suggest a line of research. The starting point is the distinction between dispersed and clustering producers, since there is a substantial difference in the dynamic governing their viability. Clustering facilitates gains in efficiency and flexibility which are rarely attainable by dispersed small firms. The concept of collective efficiency is put forward to capture these gains. In future research it is suggested to distinguish between clusters which are hierarchical and those in which equals compete or cooperate; and between stages in which collective efficiency comes about spontaneously and those in which it results from planned action. Resume Etude sur le regroupement des entreprises de petite envergure Le present article se concerne de la rentabilite de la fabrication de petite echelle dans les pays moins developpes. L'auteur a pour objet d'offrir de nouvelles categories qui pourraient demeler les grandes lignes du debat et dans un meme temps, suggerer une ligne de recherche. Un point de depart serait de distinguer entre producteurs disperses et regroupes, etant donne qu'il existe des differences cruciales dans la dynamique qui determine leur rentabilite. Le regroupement a tendance a faciliter les gains d'efficacite et de souplesse qui ne sont que rarement realisables parmi les petites entreprises dispersees. Le concept de l'efficacite collective est propose comme moyen de capter ces gains. Dans une recherche ulterieure, il est propose de distinguer entre les regroupements qui sont hierarchiques et ceux au sein desquels les individus peuvent concourrir ou cooperer sur des bases d'egalite; et de distinguer egalement entre les stades ou l'efficacite collective se produit spontanement et les stades dans lesquels celle‐ci resulte d'une action planifiee. Resumen El agrupamiento de empresas pequenas Este trabajo muestra inquietud respecto a la viabilidad de la manufacturacion de pequena escala en paisas en vias de desarrollo. Su proposito es indicar algunas categorias que pueden ayudar a desenredar el tema y sugerir una linea de investigacion. El punto de partida es la distincion entre los productores agrupados y los dispersos, dado que hay una diferencia sustancial en las dinamicas que manejan su viabilidad. El agrupamiento facilita incrementos de eficiencia y flexibilidad que raremente son alcanzados por pequenas empresas dispersas. El concepto de la eficiencia colectiva es ideal para capturar esos incrementos. Se sugiere que en futuras investigaciones de distinga entre grupos jerarquicos y grupos donde hay competencia o cooperacion entre iguales; y tambien entre fases de eficiencia colectiva espontanea y fases en donte esta es el resultado de una accion planeada.
Coping with cancer: psychological dimensions

ABSTRACT– Cancer has a profound psychological impact upon the patient and his family, and the psychological responses, primarily of the patient himself, the close family, physician and nursing personnel, but also of the extended family, and society in general, become a complex interrelationship. Some of the most important psychological aspects of cancer are reviewed. These include the psychological responses of the patient, such as denial, vulnerability, coping strategies, hope, depression, suicide, reaction to diagnosis, and the management of the family, and the psychological responses and attitudes of the physician and nursing personnel. Based on the above psychological analysis some guidelines are offered to help in coping with cancer.
Role of trust in explaining repurchase intention

This paper develops a new research model to examine the role of trust, attitude, communication, image, customer satisfaction and service quality in explaining repurchase intention. Paper survey was distributed to DELL laptop users in Shiraz, Iran. Paper surveys were distributed in ten sales agencies to customers. A total of 731 valid questionnaires were returned. The questions used in this study were taken from the relevant literature, and contained 28 questions addressing all the variables: customer satisfaction (4 items), image (5 items), trust (6 items), attitude (3 items), communication (4 items), service quality (3 items) and repurchase intentions (3 items). Conﬁrmatory factor analysis was conducted to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model, and the structural equation modelling technique was used to test the research model. The findings suggest that trust was most influenced by attitude (42%), communication (35%), and image (29%). This study shows that the most impacts of trust are on customer satisfaction (38%), and service quality (31%). Besides, repurchase intention was most influenced by customer satisfaction (47%), and service quality (44%). This study suggests that to enhance customer repurchase intention, service provider should develop marketing strategies to better address the trustworthiness of services. Key words: Attitude, image, trust, repurchase intention, communication, customer satisfaction, service quality.
Women’s union activism and trade union revitalization: The Polish experience

This article discusses the role of grassroots women’s activism for trade union revitalization in the new capitalist economies in Eastern Europe by examining the case of Poland. The analysis of 23 expert interviews with trade union leaders and 48 biographical interviews with company-level women unionists in private manufacturing and in the public sector suggests that women’s efforts to reclaim control over their occupational lives create a grassroots potential to revitalize trade unions. However, these positive developments are constrained by cultural and organizational factors which limit women’s full access to decision-making bodies in the largest Polish trade union confederations.
What's in a Name? An Experimental Examination of Investment Behavior

A fundamental unresolved issue is whether information asymmetries underlie investors' predisposition to invest close to home (i.e., domestically or locally). The authors conduct experiments in the United States and Canada to investigate agents' portfolio allocation decisions, controlling for the availability of information. Providing participants with information about a firm's home base, without disclosing its specific identity, is not sufficient to change investment behavior. Rather, participants need to know a firm's name and home base. Additional evidence indicates that participants are more familiar with securities in which they chose to invest than other securities. Familiarity is a key determinant of investment behavior.
Dietary nitrate and nitrite intake and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Abstract Although established risk factors such as immunodeficiency and viral infections may be responsible for a portion of cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), the vast majority of cases of NHL remain unexplained. The role of dietary nitrate and nitrite in NHL risk is of interest since they are precursors of N-nitroso compounds, and nitrosoureas have been shown to induce B- and T-cell lymphomas in animal studies. However, few studies have evaluated the potential association between consumption of nitrate and nitrite and NHL by subtype or chromosomal translocation status, and the results of these studies have been inconsistent. We estimated the dietary intake of nitrate and nitrite using a food frequency questionnaire in a population-based, case–control study of 348 cases and 470 controls conducted in Nebraska in 1999–2002. A non-significant excess risk of NHL was found among women who reported an intake of nitrite in the highest quartile compared to the lowest quartile (odds ratio [OR] = 1.6; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.8–2.9), particularly nitrite from animal sources (OR = 1.9; 95% CI: 1.0–3.4). No significant associations were observed for nitrate or nitrite by NHL subtype. Although there were some increases in risk that support the N-nitroso hypothesis, they were not significant and do not confer strong evidence of an association.
Detect-and-Track: Efficient Pose Estimation in Videos

This paper addresses the problem of estimating and tracking human body keypoints in complex, multi-person video. We propose an extremely lightweight yet highly effective approach that builds upon the latest advancements in human detection [17] and video understanding [5]. Our method operates in two-stages: keypoint estimation in frames or short clips, followed by lightweight tracking to generate keypoint predictions linked over the entire video. For frame-level pose estimation we experiment with Mask R-CNN, as well as our own proposed 3D extension of this model, which leverages temporal information over small clips to generate more robust frame predictions. We conduct extensive ablative experiments on the newly released multi-person video pose estimation benchmark, PoseTrack, to validate various design choices of our model. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 55.2% on the validation and 51.8% on the test set using the Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) metric, and achieves state of the art performance on the ICCV 2017 PoseTrack keypoint tracking challenge [1].
The Labor Market Returns to a Private Two-Year College Education

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we offer the first causal estimates of the earnings gains to private two-year colleges, the vast majority of which are for-profit institutions. We rely on data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) to implement an individual fixed effects estimation strategy that allows us to control for time-invariant unobservable characteristics of students. We find that students completing associate’s degrees in private postsecondary institutions experience earnings gains of 15 to 17 percent post-degree, or 8 percent per year of education, gains similar to those experienced by public community college students in our sample. Our point estimates on the differential return to the private sector suggest that private postsecondary students may earn an additional 1 to 2 percentage points per year, but these estimates are not statistically significant. Among a broader set of students who enroll in, but may or may not complete an associate’s degree, we find earnings gains of about 6 percent and no evidence of differential gains for students in the private sector.
FutureDAQ for CBM: on-line event selection

At the upcoming new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR at GSI the Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment CBM requires a new architecture of front-end electronics, data acquisition, and event processing. The detector systems of CBM are a Silicon Tracker System, RICH detectors, a TRD, RPCs, and an electromagnetic calorimeter. The envisioned interaction rate of 10 MHz produces a data rate of up to 1 TByte/s. Because of the complexity and variability of trigger decisions no common trigger will be applied. Instead, the front-end electronics of all detectors will be self-triggered and marked by time stamps. The full data rate must be switched through a high speed network fabric into a computational network with configurable processing resources for event building and filtering. The decision for selecting candidate events requires tracking, primary vertex reconstruction, and secondary vertex finding in the STS at the full interaction rate. The essential performance factor is now computational throughput rather than decision latency, which results in a much better utilization of the processing resources especially in the case of heavy ion collisions with strongly varying multiplicities. The development of key components is supported by the FutureDAQ project of the European Union (FP6 I3HP JRA1)
Prélèvements et transferts aux ménages : des canaux redistributifs différents en 1990 et 2010

Pris dans leur ensemble, les prelevements et prestations monetaires reposant sur les menages ont-ils en 2010 un caractere progressif plus ou moins prononce que vingt ans plus tot ? Afin d'eclairer cette question, nous appliquons les legislations socio-fiscales de 1990 et 2010 a un meme echantillon representatif des menages francais en 2010. Au total, le cœur du systeme de redistribution monetaire, l'impot sur le revenu et les prestations, ont perdu en progressivite, tandis qu'en amont dans le processus de taxation, les prelevements sociaux ont gagne en progressivite. L'impot sur le revenu a vu son poids diminuer et est devenu nettement moins progressif, cette evolution etant tres largement imputable a l'evolution de son bareme, et plus marginalement a la multiplication des " niches fiscales ". Dans le meme sens, les prestations sociales apparaissent moins redistributives qu'elles ne l'etaient en 1990. Elles ont ete le plus souvent revalorisees selon l'inflation, et ont donc evolue moins vite que les revenus moyens de la population, ce qui a affecte leur capacite a reduire les inegalites. A l'inverse, le financement de la protection sociale a ete profondement remanie, et ces changements ont joue en faveur de la progressivite. Des contributions (CSG et CRDS), assises sur l'ensemble des revenus, ont ete substituees aux cotisations, assises uniquement sur les revenus du travail. Les exonerations de cotisations sociales sur les bas salaires ont egalement ete progressivement renforcees. Selon les hypotheses retenues dans les quatre scenarios elabores dans cet article, la progressivite d'ensemble du systeme socio-fiscal n'aurait pas connu d'inflexion majeure entre 1990 et 2010. Toutefois, l'analyse presentee ici ne tient compte ni des prelevements sur le patrimoine, ni des prelevements pesant sur les entreprises, alors que leur evolution pourrait avoir davantage affecte les menages ayant de hauts revenus.
Can the Current Aid to Latin America Contribute to Economic Growth and Poverty Alleviation

This paper analyzes whether the foreign aid recently provided for Latin America and the Caribbean(LAC)is efficiently distributed or not. Despite the substantial progress attained in LAC, economic growth and poverty reduction in countries of this region lag behind countries in other regions, especially East Asia. Moreover, recent studies indicate that when donor countries allocate aid, they increasingly select countries which can use aid effectively for economic growth and poverty reduction. For this reason, we suspect that foreign aid for LAC has been less effective in promoting growth and reducing poverty mainly because it was allocated to countries in LAC inefficiently For this study, we consider both recipient countries’ development needs and donor countries’ economic interests in allocating foreign aid at the same time. We analyzed relevant data from 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC)member countries and 32 LAC countries during 2005-2009. In addition, we also considered Korea’s distribution of foreign aid for comparison with aid allocations by other DAC member countries. The results show that foreign aid allocations by Korea and other DAC member states for countries in LAC should be improved substantially so that countries in LAC can use the foreign aid effectively for economic growth and poverty reduction.
Mortality risk via affine stochastic intensities: calibration and empirical relevance

In this paper, we address the mortality risk of individuals and adopt parsimonious time- homogeneous a±ne processes for their mortality intensities. We calibrate the models to different generations in the UK population and investigate their empirical appropriateness. We find that, in spite of their simplicity, non mean reverting processes with deterministic part that increases exponentially - which generalize the Gompertz law - seem to be appropriate descriptors of human mortality. The proposed models prove to fulfill most of the properties that a good model for stochastic mortality should have. Empirical results show that the generalization is worth explor- ing. Indeed, the variability of number of deaths may increase considerably due to the randomness of the mortality intensity. We show that the models are suitable for mortality forecasting and mortality trend assessment.
Factors associated with depressive symptoms in people living with HIV attending antiretroviral clinic at Fitche Zonal Hospital, Central Ethiopia: cross-sectional study conducted in 2012

Background Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders with the prevalence rate ranging from 5% to 10% in the general population and about 60% in people living with human immunodeficiency virus (PLHIV). It has been reported to be more common among women living with HIV. In HIV patients, depression can have negative impacts on their quality of life. Objective This study was aimed at identifying the prevalence of depressive symptoms and associated factors among PLHIV attending the antiretroviral therapy clinic at Fitche Zonal Hospital. Methods It was a cross-sectional study conducted among PLHIV in Fitche Zonal Hospital from February 15 to March 15, 2012. Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression tool was used to collect data from 390 respondents. Both the bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were carried out and variables with P<0.25 in the bivariate logistic regression analysis were entered into multivariable logistic regression analysis and statistical significance was declared at P<0.05. Results Of the total 390 respondents included in the analysis, the prevalence of depressive symptoms was 76.7%, ranging from mild to moderate (33.6%) to major (43.1%), and the highest proportion was observed among individuals with food insecurity accounting for 287 (79.3%). Food insecurity (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] =3.832 [1.575–9.322]), non-ownership of livestock (AOR =2.17 [1.157–4.104]), and opportunistic infections (AOR =5.20 [1.342–20.156]) were significantly associated with depressive symptoms. Conclusion and recommendations Depressive symptoms were prevalent in PLHIV. Social disparities were important factors of depressive symptoms. Integration of mental health care services with HIV/acquired immune deficiency syndrome-related health care services at all health care levels was necessary. It was recommended that government and non-government organizations should provide assistance to the PLHIV to encourage their involvement in income-generating activities.
Slack in family firms: evidence from Italy (2006-2010)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between available slack and firm performance in Italian family-controlled public firms (FCPFs) from 2006 to 2010. In addition the authors analyze the moderating effects of specific board structure variables on the relationship between slack resources and firms’ performance. Design/methodology/approach – A pooled cross-section of family and non-family publicly traded firms was drawn from COMPUSTAT global and matched with corporate governance and family firm variables hand-collected from companies’ standard profiles from Italy's primary stock exchange, Borsa Italiana. The hypotheses were tested using the feasible generalized least square method in order to analyze the data from 583 firms-observations, controlling for self-selection bias and reverse causality. Findings – The study shows that FCPFs with available slack experience less than proportionate increases in performance, suggesting a concave curvilinear slack-performance relationship.
Impact of Earnings Performance on Price-Sensitive Disclosures Under the Australian Continuous Disclosure Regime

This study examines the relation between accounting earnings and the frequency of price-sensitive corporate disclosure under Australia's statutory continuous disclosure requirements. Despite low litigation threats and excepting loss-making firms, results show that firms with earnings declines (bad news) are more likely to make continuous disclosure than firms with earnings increases (good news). This suggests that market forces and regulators’ scrutiny are sufficient to induce a ‘bad news’ disclosure bias. This study also examines the ‘materiality’ requirement under the continuous disclosure requirements and finds a positive relation between disclosure frequency and the magnitude of earnings news. The earnings–return correlation is positively associated with disclosure frequency for the financial services industry.
Investigating customer satisfaction, loyalty and web usability concerning the use of Word-of-Mouth as a means of referral among internet banking users in Malaysia

In this paper, we present our findings to develop an understanding of the effect of website usability, customer satisfaction on loyalty and positive Word-of-Mouth (WOM) as a means of referral. A survey was conducted among 220 internet banking users in Malaysia who represented the main banking customer base. The results show that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty enhance WOM. However, the effect of web usability is not significant on WOM. Even though the results confirm the findings of earlier studies, they suggest that there is room for improvement.