Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Work readiness, career self-efficacy and career exploration: A correlation analysis

The objective of this paper is to investigate the interrelationship between work readiness, career-self-efficacy and career exploration among final year engineering graduates in Malaysia. Data were collected from 325 respondents with a response rate of 45%. Pearson correlation analysis was performed to answer the research question. The results indicate a positive significant relationship between work readiness skills, career self-efficacy and career exploration among engineering graduates in Malaysia. The findings of this paper strengthen our argument that acquiring adequate work readiness skills, foster graduates' beliefs in their capabilities and competencies, will lead them toward effective exploration of career choices. Managerial and research implications are discussed.
Reinventing the rattling tin: How UK charities use Facebook in fundraising

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Using a multicase study approach, this paper explores how the three biggest UK cancer charities by donations use Facebook in their fundraising campaigns, in order to facilitate understanding of the dynamics of philanthropic asking in a social networking site-mediated environment. The analysis reveals that Facebook is primarily used to strengthen relationships with supporters, mainly via humanising the brand, fostering obligations, and encouraging social interaction. The mobilization of these relationships in fundraising is facilitated by persuasive strategies, including public recognition, authority, and the fostering of a sense of efficacy among fans, and the most common outcome of this mobilization is public endorsement of charities' fundraising campaigns via sharing. At a time when harsh public spending cuts have left gaps in charity funding that need to be filled by philanthropy, this study aims to make a practical contribution to knowledge by examining what works and how in Facebook fundraising.
Nutritional supplementation for stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

BACKGROUND Low body weight in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with an impaired pulmonary status, reduced diaphragmatic mass, lower exercise capacity and higher mortality rate when compared to adequately nourished individuals with this disease. Nutritional support may therefore be a useful part of their comprehensive care. OBJECTIVES To conduct a systematic review of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to clarify whether nutritional supplementation (caloric supplementation for at least 2 weeks) improved anthropometric measures, pulmonary function, respiratory muscle strength and functional exercise capacity in patients with stable COPD. SEARCH STRATEGY Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were identified from the Cochrane Airways Group register of RCTs, a hand-search of abstracts presented at international meetings and consultation with experts. Searches are current as of March 2004. SELECTION CRITERIA Two reviewers independently selected trials for inclusion, assessed quality and extracted the data. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Within each trial and for each outcome, we calculated an effect size. The effect sizes were then pooled by a random-effects model. Homogeneity among the effect sizes was also tested. MAIN RESULTS Eleven studies recruiting 352 participants met the inclusion criteria. Eight papers were considered as high quality. Two studies were double-blinded. For each of the outcomes studied, the effect of nutritional support was small: the 95% confidence intervals around the pooled effect sizes all included zero. The effect of nutritional support was homogeneous across studies. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Nutritional support had no significant effect on anthropometric measures, lung function or exercise capacity in patients with stable COPD.
Service quality in Libyan commercial banking sector from customers' and bankers' standpoints : a comparative study between the public and private sector

Service quality plays an important role in the success of any organization generally but especially in the banking sector. This importance increased after a link was found between service quality and customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and financial performance. The Libyan banking sector is one of the most important sectors in the Libyan economic. The importance of this sector increased after the lifting of the United Nations sanctions in 2004 which resulted in the entry of numerous domestic and multinational firms to engage in this sector. However, these banks still suffer from a low level of service quality. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to examine and compare the service quality provided by Libyan commercial public and private banks from the standpoint of customers, employees and managers in order to help these banks to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the market place and to helps these banks to attain a high level of customer satisfaction as well as to attract new customers. After an extensive review of the extant literature related to the Parasurman, Berry and Zeithaml (1985) Gap Model and the use of the SERVQUAL instrument to measure service quality, this study found that there was a gap in the literature regarding empirical research using the extended Gap Model to evaluate service quality in the banking sector. Therefore, the extended Gap Model has been used to examine service quality in Libyan commercial banks and SERVQUAL used to measure the service gaps. The main findings of the research indicated that there are differences from customers' and bankers' standpoints with regard to levels of service quality provided by both public and private banks. It revealed that customers' expectations and perceptions of service quality in private banks are higher than in public banks. With regard to the relative importance of the five SERVQUAL dimensions, unlike previous studies, the results of this study indicated that the tangibles dimension was more prominent. Therefore, further research in this area should be important to investigate whether or not the Libyan context has caused tangibles to be so prominent compared to previous studies.
Health Service and Medication Use Among Veterans With Persistent Postconcussive Symptoms

Abstract Persistent postconcussive symptoms (PPCS) are noted when a series of cognitive, emotional, and somatosensory complaints persist for months after a concussion. Clinical management of PPCS can be challenging in the veteran population because of the nonspecific nature of symptoms and co-occurrence with affective disturbances such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic pain. In this study, we compared health service and medication use patterns in a sample of 421 veterans with PPCS with an age-matched cohort of case controls. The results suggest that the veterans with PPCS showed high rates of medical and mental health service utilization during a mean treatment period of 2 years. Although chronic pain commonly co-occurs with PPCS in veterans, service use and medication prescribing trends seem to have been influenced more by the presence of PTSD than chronic pain. Our findings reinforce the overlap among PPCS, PTSD, and chronic pain and demonstrate the complexity inherent in treating these conditions in veterans.
Technical interventions to increase adenoma detection rate in colonoscopy

ABSTRACT Introduction: Adenoma detection rate (ADR) is the most robust colonoscopy quality metric and clinical studies have adopted it as the ideal method to assess the impact of technical interventions. Areas covered: We reviewed papers focusing on the impact of colonoscopy technical issues on ADR, including withdrawal time and technique, second evaluation of the right colon, patient positional changes, gastrointestinal assistant participation during colonoscopy, water-aided technique, optimization of bowel preparation and antispasmodic administration. Expert commentary: Overall, technical interventions are inexpensive, available worldwide and easy to implement. Some of them, such as the adoption of split dose regimen and slow scope withdrawal to allow a careful inspection, have been demonstrated to significantly improve ADR. Emerging data support the use of water-exchange colonoscopy. According to published studies, other technical interventions seem to provide only marginal benefit to ADR. Unfortunately, the available evidence has methodological limitations, such as small sample sizes, the inclusion of expert endoscopists only and the evaluation of single technical interventions. Additionally, larger studies are needed to clarify whether these interventions might have a higher benefit on low adenoma detectors and whether the implementation of a bundle of them, instead of a single technical maneuver, might have a greater impact on ADR.
Effect of Syllable Congruency in Sixth Graders in the Lexical Decision Task With Masked Priming

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the syllable in visual recognition of French words in Grade 6. To do so, the syllabic congruency effect was examined in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming. Target words were preceded by pseudoword primes sharing the first letters that either corresponded to the syllable (congruent condition) or not (incongruent condition). A reliable syllable congruency was found. Children were faster to recognize words when the prime matched for the first syllable. These results are discussed in interactive activation models including syllables and in the dual-route approach.
Elementary Aspects for Circuit Implementation of Reconfigurable Nanowire Transistors

A feasibility and performance study of electrically reconfigurable nanowire transistors with selectable pFET and nFET operations is presented. The challenges toward circuit implementation are evaluated based on transient simulations of logic circuits. A novel physical structure capable of computing a NAND as well as NOR function is introduced. The new approach provides a flexible platform to develop and test fine-grain reconfigurable circuits and systems.
Skill Requirements across Firms and Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings for Professionals

We study variation in skill demands for professionals across firms and labor markets. We categorize a wide range of keywords found in job ads into 10 general skills. There is substantial variation in these skill requirements, even within narrowly defined occupations. Focusing particularly on cognitive and social skills, we find positive correlations between each skill and external measures of pay and firm performance. We also find evidence of a cognitive social skill complementarity for both outcomes. As a whole, job skills have explanatory power in pay and firm performance regressions beyond what is available in widely used labor market data.
Earnings management and corporate social responsibility : the case of UK

The primary focus of this study is to investigate the relation between Earnings Management (EM) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the UK. While there are few studies in the existing literature that examined the relationship between EM and CSR, there is a lack of studies examining this relation in the UK. Furthermore, the existing academic literature appears to provide inconsistent results. These considerations motivate this study to bridge this gap in the literature by providing evidence of whether or not EM and CSR are related in the UK. The present study carried out through three empirical stages based on the data obtained from the FTSE 350 Index between 2008 and 2010. The first stage examined the EM practice using three EM models to estimate discretionary accruals as proxy for EM. The models were the Jones (1991), modified Jones (Dechow et al. 1995) and performance - matched (Kothari et al. 2005) models. Firstly, these models were tested using multivariate analysis; the findings revealed that the performance - marched model has been identified as the model that could most accurately measure the presence of EM. Secondly, by applying univariate analysis, the study has found insignificant differences between the high and low EM practices in UK firms and that the highest and the lowest levels of EM were in 2008. Similar results were discovered when comparing the differences between income - increasing and income - decreasing EM. The second stage tested CSR by applying both content analysis and disclosure index approaches to identify the level of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure (CSD) as proxy of CSR. The findings from the content analysis revealed that the employees (EMP) theme had the highest level of CSR information, followed by community (COM), environment (ENV), others (OTH), products and services (PRO), and customers (CUS). Similar results were obtained when the disclosure index approach was employed. The relationship between EM and CSR was tested in the final stage by using univariate and multivariate analyses. The findings revealed that firms with more CSR information reported lower EM. Further tests were performed to investigate the link between EM and CSR themes and the findings revealed that firms with more information of EMP, COM, EVE and PRO reported lower EM. However, no evidence suggested that CUS and OTH information affect EM. Overall, the findings suggest that the level of CSR improve financial reports’ quality. This study aspires to contribute to our understanding and knowledge on the issue related to the role of CSR regarding the quality of reported earnings.
An Analysis of the Impact of ESG Screening on Financial Performance of Selected Indian Companies

In recent years, increasing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) consciousness has necessitated the need to hold companies accountable for social consequences resulting from their activities. This paper focuses on analyzing the impact of ESG screening on financial performance of the companies. The analysis of stock returns and beta of selected NIFTY 50 companies conducted using Shapiro-Wilk test, Wilcoxon test and Paired Sample t test indicate that there is no impact of ESG screening on financial performance and risk profile of the companies.
Microstructural analysis of osteon orientation in human rib cortical bone

The orientation of osteons in cortical bone has been shown to correlate with the loading condition. The purpose of this study is to determine the orientation of osteons in the rib cage to better understand the behavior of the rib cage under mechanical load. A total of 37 rib specimens were removed from 21 rib locations from a male and female cadaver. Eight histological slides were created from each 5 mm rib section. A custom image analysis algorithm was created in Matlab to track the center of each osteon through the rib section. Results show variations in the osteon direction between samples taken from the anterior, lateral and posterior surfaces of the rib cage. The average offset angle between the osteon direction and the rib axis was determined to be 4.1, 3.2 and 1.9 degrees for the anterior, lateral and posterior surfaces respectively. The average offset angle for the anterior specimens was significantly higher than that of the posterior rib specimens (P=0.01). The lateral specimens also showed a significantly higher average offset angle than the posterior rib specimens (P=0.01). The results indicate a trend in osteon offset angle between the three locations studied. The offset angle is highest in the anterior region, then decreases in the lateral and is lowest in the posterior regions of the rib cage.
Head Circumference Standards for Irish Children

Abstract. A cross‐sectional study measuring head circumference was performed on 3344 Irish Children aged from 5 to 19 years. Comparison with other countries showed a slightly larger head circumference than the 1965 British standards produced by Tanner, but significantly smaller than the Ounsted data from Oxford. There Was no significant difference between the urban and rural children, but the children of non‐manual workers had a significantly larger head than those of manual workers.
Reassessment of von Willebrand factor (VWF), VWF propeptide, factor VIII:C and plasminogen activator inhibitors 1 and 2 during normal pregnancy

Summary. The use of von Willebrand factor [VWF antigen (WF:Ag)] measurement as a marker of endothelial cell activation for monitoring hypertensive pregnancies is limited by the poor definition of reference values. We reassessed these reference values using different assays, and those of the propeptide (VWF:Ag II) and factor VIII coagulant activity (factor VIII:C), in a large population of normal pregnancies, at 3‐week intervals of gestational age. Plasminogen activator inhibitors (PAI‐1 and PAI‐2) were measured in parallel. Blood was collected at single time points between 12 weeks and delivery in 306 women undergoing normal singleton pregnancy. For clinical purposes, the VWF:Ag reference values were assay independent and the influence of ABO blood group on VWF:Ag or factor VIII:c was found to be limited during the third trimester. VWF:Ag II was not influenced by the ABO blood group. The ratio, VWF:Ag/factor VIII:C was close to 1·0 throughout pregnancy. In contrast, VWF:Ag II increased more slowly than VWF:Ag and the ratio of VWF:Ag II to VWF:Ag in plasma decreased from 1·00 to 0·5 at term. PAI‐1 and PAI‐2 increased with gestational age, but PAI‐2 decreased during the last 2 weeks, indicating physiological placental regression at the very end of pregnancy.
Using group‐based latent class transition models to analyze chronic disability data from the National Long‐Term Care Survey 1984–2004

Latent class transition models track how individuals move among latent classes through time, traditionally assuming a complete set of observations for each individual. In this paper, we develop group‐based latent class transition models that allow for staggered entry and exit, common in surveys with rolling enrollment designs. Such models are conceptually similar to, but structurally distinct from, pattern mixture models of the missing data literature. We employ group‐based latent class transition modeling to conduct an in‐depth data analysis of recent trends in chronic disability among the U.S. elderly population. Using activities of daily living data from the National Long‐Term Care Survey (NLTCS), 1982–2004, we estimate model parameters using the expectation–maximization algorithm, implemented in SAS PROC IML. Our findings indicate that declines in chronic disability prevalence, observed in the 1980s and 1990s, did not continue in the early 2000s as previous NLTCS cross‐sectional analyses have indicated. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Supporting distributed meetings using cooperative, visual, process-enabled hypermedia

This work tries to bring hypermedia out of our multiple research-oriented cooperative hypermedia systems into the kinds of systems people in the real world can use. Meeting support for distributed teams is one of these and process support is another. The practical challenges include how to develop a (whiteboard-like) structure-rich visual hypermedia space that is accessible from the Web, how to integrate Microsoft office applications into the system for managing documents in a (visual hypermedia represented) meeting process, and how to set up A/V and application sharing connections easily for all the meeting participants. The system described in this paper has been used in three use cases and initial feedback indicates that it has successfully addressed several such practical challenges.
All in the family: Economies of scale in retail and institutional investment management

This paper examines the (dis)economies of scale related to the joint management of retail mutual funds and institutional funds (i.e., investment portfolios catering to institutional clients). Similar to well-known observations for mutual funds, the performance of institutional funds is negatively related to fund size but positively related to fund family size, suggesting diseconomies of scale at individual fund level and economies of scale at fund family level. More importantly, there is spillover of the family size effect -the performance of mutual funds (institutional funds) is positively related to the total institutional assets (mutual fund assets) managed by the same firms. We also find that certain types of funds -e.g., larger mutual funds and institutional funds with higher fees -benefit more from this spillover effect, suggesting that large investment firms are able to deploy firm-wide resources to favor a subset of funds that are of high value to the firms. However, there is no evidence that jointly managed funds, either retail or institutional, perform worse than independently managed ones. Overall, our findings suggest that the prevalence of jointly managed retail and institutional funds is consistent with economies of scale in the investment management industry.
Scoring Live Tweets on the Beat

Newspaper sports beat reporters have experienced challenges to their workflow as social media, such as Twitter, has emerged as an essential tool in the reporting of live-game events. The purpose of this study was to assess the ways newspaper sports beat reporters meet consumers’ needs for information during these live events. Using retweets and likes as measures of engagement, this study found that newspaper sports beat reporters’ Twitter content during live-game coverage was liked and retweeted more frequently when it included analysis, opinion, entertainment, and visual content. By contrast, tweets containing only play-by-play outcomes were retweeted and liked significantly less than average. This study suggests that newspaper sports beat reporters should capitalize on their exclusivity and insider access to create Twitter content beyond mere play-by-play results that are typically available to those following the game through more traditional means such as television, radio, or in person. These strategies could distinguish newspaper sports beat reporters in an increasingly crowded sports media landscape. These findings may also be applied to the work of journalists beyond the sports realm.