Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Where's the Beef? (With Vegans): A Qualitative Study of Vegan-Omnivore Conflict

Introduction In 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme issued a groundbreaking environmental impact report focusing on the causes, rather than effects, of environmental degradation and stressed that agriculture be moved into the spotlight as a main contributor to the rapid depletion of resources. It was cited that agriculture accounts for 70% of the earth's freshwater, 38% of total land use, 19% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Shockingly, half of the crops produced were directed to the raising of livestock (UNEP report, 2010). The dire state of the planet stands as a sobering comparison to human health; the United States spends far more, per capita, on health care than any other society yet ranks dismally low in overall health. Cancer rates have remained consistent since the " War on Cancer " in the 1970's, new cases of type 1 and 2 diabetes appear more frequently and at younger ages, and heart disease has ascended to the leading cause of death in America; it is clear the problem requires a greater overhaul than medicine alone can accomplish (Campbell, 2006). Finally, meeting the massive demand for animal products has required revolutionary changes in the field of animal agriculture. Red barns and rolling pastures have largely been replaced with feedlots and assembly-line slaughterhouses. Many animal welfare activists maintain this shift guarantees a life of confinement, misery, and torture followed by a frightening and excruciating death (Bekoff, 1998). Despite the diversity of pressing issues addressed above, all share a common thread of solution: less production and consumption of animal-based foods. The United Nations Environment Programme's impact report urged for a global diet shift away from meat and dairy products (UNEP report, 2010). Similarly, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and the American Association of Diabetes Educators provide healthy living tips for Guerin 3 treatment and prevention and unanimously advocate more fruits, vegetables, and grains and less meat and dairy products, particularly red meat and whole milk. Finally, capitalist economies propel the production of in-demand products and cease funding, and by nature continuation, for undesirable products. Analysis from the US Department of Agriculture indicates the average meat eater consumes about 33 farm animals per year; it can be assumed that abstaining from these products lessens this demand by a similar amount (Sethu, 2012). For these reasons among others, a small but growing population of vegans in the United States has taken the form of …
Broiler Campylobacter Contamination and Human Campylobacteriosis in Iceland

ABSTRACT To examine whether there is a relationship between the degree of Campylobacter contamination observed in product lots of retail Icelandic broiler chicken carcasses and the incidence of human disease, 1,617 isolates from 327 individual product lots were genetically matched (using the flaA short variable region [SVR[) to 289 isolates from cases of human campylobacteriosis whose onset was within approximately 2 weeks from the date of processing. When there was genetic identity between broiler isolates and human isolates within the appropriate time frame, a retail product lot was classified as implicated in human disease. According to the results of this analysis, there were multiple clusters of human disease linked to the same process lot or lots. Implicated and nonimplicated retail product lots were compared for four lot descriptors: lot size, prevalence, mean contamination, and maximum contamination (as characterized by direct rinse plating). For retail product distributed fresh, Mann-Whitney U tests showed that implicated product lots had significantly (P = 0.0055) higher mean contamination than nonimplicated lots. The corresponding median values were 3.56 log CFU/carcass for implicated lots and 2.72 log CFU/carcass for nonimplicated lots. For frozen retail product, implicated lots were significantly (P = 0.0281) larger than nonimplicated lots. When the time frame was removed, retail product lots containing Campylobacter flaA SVR genotypes also seen in human disease had significantly higher mean and maximum contamination numbers than lots containing no genotypes seen in human disease for both fresh and frozen product. Our results suggest that cases of broiler-borne campylobacteriosis may occur in clusters and that the differences in mean contamination levels may provide a basis for regulatory action that is more specific than a presence-absence standard.
The Price of Freedom: Illegal Drug Markets and Policies in Post-Soviet Russia

In its difficult transition to democracy and a market economy, Russia has experienced a veritable boom of illegal markets, specifically the drug market. Drawing on the results of a study conducted on behalf of the United Nations, the first part of the article reconstructs the expansion of illegal drug consumption and trade in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It points, in particular, to the rapid diffusion of heroin, a substance that was virtually unknown in the former Soviet Union. The second part of the article reviews the measures taken by the Russian government to tackle illegal drug use and trafficking. It concludes that--as much as in the United States--the Russian drug policy is focused on supply reduction, whereas more funds and energies should be invested on the demand side for drug prevention, treatment, and harm reduction.
The Effects of ‘High Commitment’ HRM Practices on Employee Attitude: The Views of Public Sector Workers

Although there is a growing body of evidence demonstrating positive effects of ‘high commitment’ HRM practices on organizational performance, there is less evidence evaluating their effects on individual workers, especially within the public sector. Therefore the implications of applying ‘high commitment’ practices in the public sector needs to be considered. This paper seeks to address this gap by reporting the results of a staff survey and follow-up interviews conducted on a cross-section of local government employees. The results showed that eight of the ten ‘high commitment’ practices had significant effects on worker attitudes. The results are discussed in light of HRM theory together with the implications for public sector managers.
Tourism, an ecological approach in protected areas: Karagöl-Sahara National Park, Turkey

Protected areas are important potential areas from the point of view of ecological tourism because of their natural, historical and cultural richness. In this study, the environmental sustainability of protected areas has been investigated within a sample of the Karagöl-Sahara National Park in Turkey. This national park has, so far, had little exposure to recreational and tourism activities. However, an increase in the number of tourists visiting the park has been observed as a result of the demands of ecological tourism. This area was investigated with respect to ecological planning to prevent intensive usage from causing future damage, as a result of human thoughtlessness, and to protect the park. Additionally, the aim was to determine the usage potential using ecological planning and to propose variations of ecotourism thought to be helpful for the public. The Karagöl-Sahara National Park has valuable natural and cultural resources, and is an area whose recreation-tourism potential has been strongly protected. The national park also has major economic potential for ecotourism.
A New Test of the Three-Moment Capital Asset Pricing Model

Abstract This paper tests the Kraus-Litzenberger (1976) three-moment capital asset pricing model using Hansen's (1982) generalized method-of-moments (GMM). The GMM approach does not impose strong distributional assumptions on the asset returns. This is an interesting issue since there is no obvious multivariate distribution for returns that also exhibits co-skewness. Using monthly stock returns to test the model, there is some evidence that systematic skewness is priced.
The electrocardiographic T wave changes in highly trained athletes during training. An old problem revisited.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the T-wave pattern alterations during vigorous training in elite athletes. SETTING Institute of Sport Science in Rome and National Rowing Center in Piediluco, Italy. STUDY POPULATION Nine male and 7 female rowers of the national team were examined prospectively at different times of their conditioning period. METHODS All athletes underwent electrocardiography and echocardiography; the ecg was analyzed for QRS voltages and axis, T-wave pattern and QTc interval; from echocardiography the left ventricular (LV) cavity dimension, wall thickness and mass were calculated. From Doppler-echocardiography the transmitral diastolic LV filling pattern was evaluated. RESULTS Variation of T-wave voltages was seen in all the athletes. Specifically, during the low-intensity training period the T-wave pattern was positive and increased in voltage (T-wave max amplitude in V6 increased to 130% in male and 100% in female than pretraining values). During the peak training a variety of patterns was observed, and a transient flattening was present in 50% of subjects. No concomitant alteration of heart rate, QRS and T-wave axis and QTc duration were observed. No significant changes of cavity dimension, wall thickness, LV mass index and Doppler-derived diastolic peak flow velocities were detected during the study period. CONCLUSIONS Transient changes of T-wave pattern may occur in athletes as an effect of athletic conditioning, without changes of cardiac dimension or alteration of indexes of LV function. This finding supports the role of ecg monitoring to follow-up the individual athletes response to training exercise load.
Factor VIII inhibitors: role of von Willebrand factor on the uptake of factor VIII by dendritic cells

Summary In patients with haemophilia A, factor VIII (FVIII) therapy leads to the development of anti‐FVIII alloantibodies that inhibit FVIII pro‐coagulant activity, in up to 25% of the cases. At a time when efficient viral screening procedures are at place, development of inhibitors poses the greatest threat to haemophilia A patients. Various risk factors, both patient and product‐related, are responsible for the development of inhibitory antibodies. The role of FVIII‐specific CD4+ T lymphocytes in the initiation of the humoral immune response to exogenous FVIII has been well. In view of their capacity to stimulate naïve T cells, dendritic cells (DCs) play a central role in the initiation of the primary immune response. Thus, in the context of a primary alloimmunization against FVIII, i.e. when FVIII‐specific B lymphocytes are not there to take up FVIII from the circulation and to serve as antigen presenting cells (APCs), DCs are the only cell type that internalize FVIII, leading to activation of FVIII‐specific CD4+ T lymphocytes. von Willebrand factor (VWF) present in plasma‐derived FVIII therapeutic concentrates, is known to act as a chaperone molecule for procoagulant FVIII. In addition to its role in reducing the ‘antigenicity’ of FVIII, the role of VWF in the reduction of the ‘immunogenicity’ of therapeutic FVIII in patients with haemophilia A has also been suggested. We have recently demonstrated that VWF protects FVIII from being endocytosed by human DCs and subsequently being presented to FVIII‐specific T cells. We propose that VWF may reduce the immunogenicity of FVIII by preventing, upstream from the activation of immune effectors, the entry of FVIII in professional antigen presenting cells.
Ipratropium bromide treatment of experimental rhinovirus infection

The importance of parasympathetic-cholinergic mechanisms in the production of common cold symptoms is not clear. The quaternary ammonium anticholinergic antagonist ipratropium bromide was intranasally administered under double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled conditions to assess its tolerance and efficacy in reducing nasal hypersecretion in adult volunteers with experimental rhinovirus colds. Ipratropium was sprayed intranasally three times daily (80 micrograms per treatment) for 5 days beginning 24 h after intranasal inoculation of rhinovirus type 39. Clinical colds occurred in 50% of 30 infected ipratropium recipients and in 76% of 33 infected placebo recipients (P = 0.04). The nasal mucus weights tended to be lower for ipratropium-treated persons (mean +/- standard deviation, 14.7 +/- 15.1 g/5 days) than for placebo-treated recipients (24.7 +/- 28.0 g/5 days; P = 0.076). Whereas total nasal symptom scores were similar between the two groups, the rhinorrhea score analyzed for each day of treatment showed nonsignificant trends favoring the ipratropium group over the last 4 days of treatment. Ipratropium was generally well tolerated. The results suggest that cholinergic mechanisms are at least partially responsible for nasal mucus production in rhinovirus colds but that the effect of anticholinergic compounds alone is insufficient to be of practical use in treatment, although they may have value as components of multi-ingredient preparations.
Nonlinearity and Low Deterministic Chaotic Behavior in Insurance Portfolio Stock Returns

This article presents new empirical evidence indicating a deterministic component in the portfolio return dynamics of life-health and property-liability insurance company stocks. Our research is motivated by the fact that nonlinearities are a fact of economic life for many financial applications the source of which is logically apparent, yet empirical evidence of their existence is at best weak. The primary reason attributed to the weak findings of nonlinearities reported in previous research is the use of aggregate data that can hide nonlinearities at the micro level. Insurance sector stock returns are analyzed because unique institutional characteristics indicate the possibility of identifying nonlinear dynamics. Tests based on the correlation dimension partially confirm the presence of nonlinearity. However, the more powerful Brock, Dechert, and Scheinkman (BDS) statistic strongly suggests the presence of nonlinearities in the insurance stock portfolio data. The BDS statistic applied to the standardized residuals of exponential generalized auto regressive conditional heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) models strongly rejects the null of independent and identically distributed, indicating that conditional heteroskedasticity is not responsible for the presence of the nonlinear structures in the data. In addition, tests for chaos based on locally weighted regressions indicate that insurance stock portfolio returns indicate low-complexity chaotic behavior. This is an important result since most previous research has failed to report evidence of chaotic behavior in the time series of stock returns. Important contributions of this article are the application of tests of nonlinearities and chaos to more desegregated data sets and the findings of statistically significant evidence indicating nonlinearities and low-deterministic chaotic behavior in insurance stock portfolio returns.
Nurse managers' conceptions of quality management as promoted by peer supervision.

AIM The aim of the study was to describe nurse managers' conceptions of quality management in their work as promoted by peer supervision. BACKGROUND Quality management is one of the topical issues in a nurse manager's demanding and changing work. As first-line managers, they have a key role in quality management which is seen to create the system and environment for high quality services and quality improvement. Despite the official recommendations and definitions of quality management, several published reports have shown that there is no single solution for quality management. Peer supervision or the support provided by it to nursing managers have rarely been a subject of study. This study was carried out at Tampere University Hospital between 1996 and 1998. The peer supervision intervention was organized once a month, 2 hours at a time and in closed supervisor-led groups of nine nurse managers. METHODS Data were collected by themed interviews. Fifteen nurse managers participated in the study. The data were analysed using the phenomenographic method. FINDINGS Two main categories were formed of nurse managers' conceptions. The first described supportive and reflective characteristics of peer supervision. This main category was described by horizontal, hierarchical categories of support from peer group and reflection. The second main category described nurse managers' conceptions of individual development of leadership during peer supervision. This main category was also described by three horizontal categories: personal growth, finding psychological resources and internalization of leadership. CONCLUSION The finding of this study show that peer supervision benefited nurse managers in quality management through reflection and support. The reflective and supportive characteristics of peer supervision promoted the nurse managers' individual development, but also that of leadership. It can be concluded that peer supervision promotes quality management in nurse managers' work.
Labor Income Taxation, Human Capital, and Growth: The Role of Childcare

This paper studies the effects of labour income taxation on growth in an OLG model where both formal schooling and child care enter the human capital production function as complements. We compare them with the effects obtained in a model where only formal schooling matters for skill formation. Using a numerical analysis we find that the omission of child care from the technology of skills' formation can significantly bias the results related to the effects of labour income taxation on growth.
Measuring to understand intangible performance drivers

The present qualitative study explores what eleven Swedish organizations have systematically worked at to increase the understanding of the importance of intangibles as performance drivers. The present analysis is accomplished using a combination of evolutionary theory, knowledge-based theory and organizational learning. The results indicate that assets in an accounting sense seem to be of less interest than perceptions of activities that enable future performance. These “enablers” are often customer and employee perceptions of individual, organizational and relational competence. The way for the firms to ascertain a continuous organizational learning process with respect to the value creation chain is to measure intangibles as well as to maintain organizational routines that ensure the transformation of measurement results into action.
Real-time estimation of arterial travel time under congested conditions

It is well-known that accurate estimation of arterial travel time on signalised arterials is not an easy task because of the periodic disruption on traffic flow by signal lights. It becomes even more difficult when the signal links are congested with long queues because under such situations the queue length cannot be estimated using the traditional cumulative input–output curves. In this article, we extend the virtual probe model previously proposed by the authors to estimate arterial travel time with congested links. Specifically, we introduce a new queue length estimation method that can handle long queues. The queue length defined in this article includes both the standing queue, i.e. the motionless stacked vehicles behind the stop line, and the moving queue, i.e. those vehicles joining the discharging traffic after the last vehicle in the standing queue starts to move. The moving queue concept is important for the virtual probe method because moving queue also influences the manoeuvre behaviour of a virtual probe. We show that, using the ‘event’ data (including both time-stamped signal phase changes and vehicle-detector actuations) collected from traffic signal systems, time-dependent queue length (including both standing queue and moving queue) can be derived by examining the changes in an advance detector's occupancy profile within a cycle. The effectiveness of the improved virtual probe model for estimating arterial travel time under congested conditions is demonstrated through a field study at an 11-intersection corridor along France Avenue in Minneapolis, MN.
AN ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF INVESTMENT RISK

DESPITE THE THEORETICAL and empirical difficulties in defining and measuring risk, the investment community is concerned with the "investment risk" of alternative securities and firms. This study restricts itself to an analysis of the similarity between two widely employed measures of investment risk: common stock systematic risk and corporate bond ratings. ' The capital asset pricing model [11, 14, 21] specifies that in a properly diversified portfolio, the relevant measure of risk is the covariance of the asset return with the market return divided by the variance of the market return-known as systematic risk or beta. In an efficient market an investor is rewarded only for bearing systematic (i.e., market-wide or non-diversifiable) risk. Systematic risk information is now routinely provided investors by many investment advisory agencies on a large number of common stocks. A number of recent studies [2, 4, 7] have indicated varying relationships between systematic risk and financialor firm-related estimates of risk. Corporate bond ratings provide a simple indication of the relative investment risk associated with the fixed income offerings of a large number of publicly owned firms. These ratings, which attempt ". to look at 'worst' potentialities in the 'visible' future. " [13, p.v. ], appear to be based on a combination of objective and subjective factors [16]. Earlier studies have indicated a consistent relationship between bond ratings and actual rates of default [1, 9]. In recent years a number of models for predicting ratings, incorporating a combination of bondrelated and financialor firm-related variables, have been developed [10, 15, 17, 22]. While bond rating agencies do not claim complete precision, the ratings seek ". to provide the American investor with a simple system of gradation by which relative investment qualities of bonds may be noted" [13, p.v. ]. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between these two different measures of investment risk that are readily available to virtually all investors. Given the high level of efficiency in our capital markets [5], and the fact that previous studies of both common stock systematic risk and bond ratings have indicated definite relationships with certain financial variables, we hypothesize that common stock sys-