Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Demonstration of delayed recovery from fatiguing exercise in chronic fatigue syndrome

Patients with the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) complain consistently of delay in recovery of peripheral muscle function after exercise. The purpose of this study was to try to confirm this observation. A fatiguing exercise test was carried out on the quadriceps muscle group of ten patients and ten control subjects. The test consisted of 18 maximum voluntary contractions (MVCs) with a 50% duty cycle (10 s contraction, 10 s rest), and the force generated by each contraction was recorded using a KinCom dynamometer. This was followed by a recovery phase lasting 200 min in which quadriceps strength was evaluated at increasing intervals, and a follow‐up session at 24 h post‐exercise involving three 10 s MVCs. Throughout the exercise period, the MVCs obtained from the control group were significantly higher than those of the patient group (P = 0.006), but both groups showed a parallel decline in force over the 18 contractions, in keeping with a similar endurance capacity. Recovery was prolonged in the patient group, however, with a significant difference compared to initial MVCs being evident during the recovery phase after exercise (P = 0.001) and also at 24 h (P < 0.001). In contrast, the control group achieved MVCs which were not significantly different from initial values during the recovery phase, and maintained these at 24 h. These findings support the clinical complaint of delayed recovery after exercise in patients with CFS.
Consumer relationship proneness: a reexamination and extension across service exchanges

Purpose – This paper aims to answer two key questions focused on increasing the understanding of consumer relationship proneness (CRP) and its role in customer relationship management. First, is CRP linked to trust and other relationship outcomes (e.g. customer share, adherence)? Second, does the nature of the service exchange (transactional versus relational) affect the association between CRP and commitment and trust? Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected in three contexts: 270 travel industry call center customers, 345 insurance agency clients, and 897 patients responded to our surveys about their business relationships.Findings – Structural modeling analysis and t‐statistic comparisons revealed that CRP is associated with trust and other important outcomes (i.e. share of customer and adherence) and that the nature of the service exchange moderates the association between CRP and commitment and trust. Specifically, as the nature of the service exchange moves from transactional to relational,.
Imaging a spiral dissection of the superficial femoral artery in high resolution with optical coherence tomography—Seeing is believing

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) offers an alternative to intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) for endovascular imaging. Clinical and research applications for OCT have emerged in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), however, OCT has not found similar utility in peripheral arterial interventions. Early generation time‐domain OCT systems required arterial occlusion to create the blood free environment needed for image acquisition and could not reliably scan vessel diameters encountered in the peripheral circulation. However, the frequency‐domain OCT (FD‐OCT) system currently FDA approved for use in the United States does not require arterial occlusion to generate images and permits a greater scan diameter allowing for exploratory use in peripheral arteries. To our knowledge, this is the first report using non‐occlusive OCT imaging to serve as an adjunct to endovascular intervention for femoropopliteal disease. We illustrate the feasibility of acquiring high resolution images of a spiral dissection of the superficial femoral artery following balloon angioplasty that was not adequately visualized by angiography. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Maintaining Academic Integrity in On-Line Education

Online education has come under a great deal of scrutiny over the issue of academic integrity. It is assumed that cheating and plagiarism are a greater problem online than in a traditional class. In reality, maintaining academic integrity is equally a challenge in both delivery modes. However, by the very nature of online education, a case can be made that it is more conducive to both detecting and combating plagiarism than is a traditional class.
Order Effects in Customer Satisfaction Modelling

This research examines the effects ofquestion order on the output of a customer satisfaction model. Theory suggests that locating product attribute evaluations prior to overall evaluations of satisfaction and loyalty should increase the impact of performance drivers in the model, explain more variation in the overall evaluations, and make positive satisfaction and loyalty evaluations more extreme. Our results show that, although customers′ overall evaluations are more extreme and better explained when provided after attribute evaluations, the impact of satisfaction drivers is relatively unaffected. Consistent with expectations, question order does affect the explained variation in satisfaction and the levels of satisfaction and loyalty. Implications for satisfaction modelling are discussed.
Defensible Model Complexity: A Call for Data‐Based and Goal‐Oriented Model Choice

Introduction There are passionate debates about the appropriate level of model complexity in groundwater hydrology (e.g., Gómez-Hernández 2006; Hunt et al. 2007; Voss 2011a, 2011b). These debates might give the impression that one should follow a specific modeling or parameterization approach in general. Such a perspective focuses on choosing a model of appropriate type and complexity for a certain modeling goal. An alternative is to adopt a statistical perspective of model choice, which promotes choosing among a set of suitable candidate models with the help of observed data. From that perspective, the available data constrain the appropriate model complexity. This article aims to unify both perspectives of model choice to expand and improve considerations of groundwater model complexity. Following Clement (2011), there are three bases on which to define the appropriate degree of model complexity. First, all models should be constructed to fulfill scientific or practical goals. Second, model complexity will be constrained by the amount and quality of the available data. Finally, for both pure and applied scientific studies, there are practical project constraints that must be considered. Any degree of complexity that fulfills the project goals, satisfies the project constraints and is justified in the light of the available data will be called defensible. Before discussing methods to identify the defensible degree of model complexity, we need to shed light on the definition of model complexity itself. There is no universally accepted definition for this widely used term (Lloyd 2001). A modeler typically has some intuitive
Issues of Competitiveness

Abstract This article investigates the forces that constrain Taiwanese-based corporations from improving quality and introducing and marketing new products. A total of 182 executives from the service and manufacturing sectors participated in the study. The results indicate that Taiwanese-based firms are optimistic about their competitive market position and about their respective industries. Furthermore, executives of these firms prefer to compete in regional and global markets. Absence of pride in a job well done, ineffective performance evaluation systems, and excessive government regulations were found to be the most important factors that may prohibit improvement in product quality. The results also reveal that various factors may hinder the development and marketing of new products. They are inattentiveness to consumer needs, top management's lack of attention to world competition and global opportunities, deterioration of the competitive spirit among employees and managers, absence of a flexible manufacturing strategy, volatile business environment, and too much focus on immediate results.
Trends in food consumptions: what is happening to generation X?

Purpose – Food habits are undergoing profound changes owing to the social, economic and technological transformations. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the food patterns of generation X in the past decade, in view of formulating a reflection on the trends of a fundamental component of society. Design/methodology/approach – Applying latent class clustering to the food spending of a representative sample of Italian consumers has made it possible to identify the principal food patterns and to interpret them in light of demographic characteristics and sociocultural changes. Findings – The results show a strengthening of dietary lifestyles displaying a high content of animal proteins, especially in consumers with low levels of education. The importance of convenience foods emerges, mainly among couples but also among families with children. The role of out of the home consumptions grows, mostly among single males. Parallel to this critical picture, the authors note the birth of a new di.
Does Cash Burn Holes in Their Pockets? – Cash-Rich Acquirers & Method of Payment in M&A

Acquirers paying with shares exhibit significantly lower announcement returns (Andrade et al. (2001)). Further, cash-rich firms tend to make value-decreasing acquisitions due to possible agency conflicts between managers and owners (Harford (1999)). I investigate the interaction effects of cash-richness and method of payment on an international sample of acquirers. I find that there is a positive interaction between share deals and cash-richness. This is counter-intuitive since share deals signal overvaluation (Myers and Majluf (1984)) and cash-richness signals agency conflicts to the market (Jensen (1986)). The effect is even stronger when using the mode of financing instead of method of payment. An explanation might be that cash-rich firms are not overvalued in the first place because of agency problems or that overvaluation is not that high because the market can value cash more accurately than net assets.
Analytics for Customer Engagement

In this article, we discuss the state of the art of models for customer engagement and the problems that are inherent to calibrating and implementing these models. The authors first provide an overview of the data available for customer analytics and discuss recent developments. Next, the authors discuss the models used for studying customer engagement, where they distinguish the following stages: customer acquisition, customer development, and customer retention. Finally, they discuss several organizational issues of analytics for customer engagement, which constitute barriers for introducing analytics for customer engagement.
FragBag, an accurate representation of protein structure, retrieves structural neighbors from the entire PDB quickly and accurately

Fast identification of protein structures that are similar to a specified query structure in the entire Protein Data Bank (PDB) is fundamental in structure and function prediction. We present FragBag: An ultrafast and accurate method for comparing protein structures. We describe a protein structure by the collection of its overlapping short contiguous backbone segments, and discretize this set using a library of fragments. Then, we succinctly represent the protein as a “bags-of-fragments”—a vector that counts the number of occurrences of each fragment—and measure the similarity between two structures by the similarity between their vectors. Our representation has two additional benefits: (i) it can be used to construct an inverted index, for implementing a fast structural search engine of the entire PDB, and (ii) one can specify a structure as a collection of substructures, without combining them into a single structure; this is valuable for structure prediction, when there are reliable predictions only of parts of the protein. We use receiver operating characteristic curve analysis to quantify the success of FragBag in identifying neighbor candidate sets in a dataset of over 2,900 structures. The gold standard is the set of neighbors found by six state of the art structural aligners. Our best FragBag library finds more accurate candidate sets than the three other filter methods: The SGM, PRIDE, and a method by Zotenko et al. More interestingly, FragBag performs on a par with the computationally expensive, yet highly trusted structural aligners STRUCTAL and CE.
Internationalization of SMEs: a challenge for Fiji

This article scrutinizes the challenges and impediments in the South Pacific context particularly in a small developing nation like Fiji and the research problem pinpoints that the problem lies in evaluating the nature of issues affecting internationalization of SMEs. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from a sample of 118 SMEs in Fiji. The research that has been conducted in the past was mostly confined to Asian countries, with very little in the area of SME internationalization and its impediments. Therefore, this research should seek to bring to the attention of policy makers the major obstructions and how these can be conquered and should even further set the impetus for further research in this area. (116 words)
The Relation between Share Repurchases and Dividends in an Imputation Tax Environment

This paper examines the relationship between share repurchases and dividend changes in a non-classical tax environment, where dividends are not tax disadvantaged relative to capital gains. Using a sample containing on- and off-market repurchases conducted by Australian companies over the 1996-2003 period we explore the determinants of repurchase yield. We find that repurchase yield is positively related to dividend increases, suggesting that firms are not buying back shares with funds generated by altering dividend policy. In the US, which operates a classical tax system, Grullon and Michaely (2002) find that firms are financing repurchases with funds that would otherwise have been used to increase dividends. In contrast our findings indicate that Australian firms are not substituting from dividends towards repurchases.
Sustainable brand extensions of fast fashion retailers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of a potential sustainable line extension introduced by a specific fast-fashion retailer. Following brand-extension theory, the study seeks to identify the influences of knowledge of and involvement with the cause of sustainability, as well as knowledge and affect toward brand, on the evaluation of a sustainable line extension. Design/methodology/approach – Participation was limited to those with in-store browsing experience with either Zara or H&M in the past 12 months. A self-administered online survey was developed using the written scenario approach. After several screening processes, 598 completed surveys were deemed usable for statistical analysis. Findings – Findings identified significant cause and brand effects on brand-cause fit and brand-extension fit. In turn, brand extension was significantly predicted by brand-cause fit and brand-extension fit. In addition, the results of the study indicated that consumers do view sustain.
The Timing of CEO Stock Option Grants: Scheduled Versus Unscheduled Awards

This study seeks to provide insights into companies' decisions to issue stock options to CEOs on a scheduled or an unscheduled basis. We first document that unscheduled option awards provide CEOs with greater flexibility to influence the grant date stock price that leads to a lower exercise price of options and a higher accreted value realized at exercise. We then investigate whether the choice between unscheduled and scheduled awards is affected by the degree of CEO influence and the importance of stock options in CEO compensation. Consistent with expectations, we find that firms with greater CEO influence over compensation committees and boards and firms with greater use of stock options in CEO compensation are more likely to issue options to CEOs on an unscheduled basis. We also examine whether compensation committees and boards are effective in limiting CEOs' option timing manipulation for unscheduled awards and information timing manipulation for scheduled option awards. We find that, for firms that issue unscheduled options, boards that are less independent of management and that receive a greater proportion of director compensation from stock options allow greater management opportunism with respect to the timing of option awards. In contrast, for firms that issue scheduled options, we find no significant impact of board independence and director option compensation on the extent of management opportunism with respect to the timing of information releases around option awards.
The Difficulty of Obtaining a Child Care Subsidy: Implications for Policy and Practice

Single mothers leaving welfare face a web of obstacles in accessing child care subsidies. This paper develops a model of child care selection and subsidy use among welfare leavers. Findings suggest that the level of trust between parents and child care providers and the availability of information about facilities were important decision-making criteria. Efforts to work with this population need to address their lack of information about subsidies to increase the range of child care alternatives and quality and also to promote trusting relationships between social workers and welfare leavers. Specific recommendations include combining ongoing case management with education about child care alternatives and subsidies. However, child care information services should be separated from subsidies to promote trust in relationships with clients.
RF-based monitoring and classification of partial discharge on wet silicone rubber surface

The main objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using an RF antenna to detect and classify partial discharges on polymer insulation surfaces. The detected discharges are identified based on their originating sources, employing a cascade of feature extraction, feature selection and the standard artificial neural network classifier. Both statistical and spectral analyses have been used for feature extraction. Feature extraction is followed by a feature selection stage with a novel implementation of stepwise regression method in order to derive representative feature vectors, yet with minimum dimensionality. Suppression of redundant features is therefore achieved, thereby enhancing the classification reliability. Finally, classification is performed using a standard feed forward neural network with back propagation training algorithm. The proposed method is found to be successful in classifying different types of partial discharge with recognition accuracy exceeding 96%. The proposed method can be an essential stage towards overhead line inspection to assess the status of outdoor polymer insulators, where partial discharges could be initiated from surface discharges due to pollution and/or from corona discharges from energized ends.
DSCC 2016-9913 SAFETY-CRITICAL CONTROL OF A 3 D QUADROTOR WITH RANGE-LIMITED SENSING

Enforcing safety is critical for aerial robotics. In this paper we consider the safety control problem for a 3D quadrotor with limited sensing range subject to avoiding collisions with timevarying obstacles. By using the concepts of Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) and Control Barrier functions (CBFs), we propose a control algorithm that explicitly considers the nonlinear and underactuated dynamics of a quadrotor to strictly guarantee time-varying safety-critical constraints. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed control design through numerical validation of (a) aerial flight through a region of dense cluttered obstacles, and (b) aerial flight through a dense time-varying obstacle field.
Firm-Specific Factors Affecting the Private Benefits of Control in Concentrated Ownership Economies(מ�?פייני�? של הפירמה המשפיעי�? על טובות ההנ�?ה הפרטיות של גרעין השליטה בכלכלות ע�? שליטה ריכוזית)

We examine 54 large transactions in Israel - a concentrated ownership economy, and estimate the private benefits of control implied in the block price via an elaborated Barclay and Holderness (1989) methodology. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that private benefits, as a proportion of firm's market value, decrease wit firm's size, leverage and profitability, and increase when an individual or family control the firm. In general, our results are stronger and more significant than Barclay and Holderness (1989) findings in the U.S., possibly because the magnitude of private benefits in our sample is much higher than in a disperse-ownership economy such as the U.S.אנו מעריכים את טובות ההנאה הפרטיות של גרעין השליטה המשתמעות מ -54 עסקאות גושי מניות גדולות בישראל - כלכלה עם שליטה ריכוזית, באמצעות גרסא משופרת של מתודולוגיית (1989) Barclay and Holderness. רגרסיות חתך מצביעות על כך שטובות ההנאה הפרטיות, כאחוז מתוך ערך השוק של הפירמה, קטנות עם גודל החברה, מינופה ורווחיותה, וגדלות כאשר פרט או משפחה שולטים בפירמה. התוצאות שלנו מחזקות ואף חזקות יותר ומובהקות יותר מאשר העדויות מארה"ב של (1989) Barclay and Holderness, כנראה כי שיעור טובות ההנאה הפרטיות בכלכלות ריכוזיות הוא גבוה בהרבה מאשר בכלכלות ללא גרעין שליטה, כמו בארה"ב.
Association of Gln 223 Arg Polymorphism of the Leptin Receptor with Hypertensive Left Ventricular Hypertrophy ( leptin receptor / hypertension / polymorphism / left ventricular hypertrophy )

Abbreviations: BSA – basic surface area, H-LVH – hypertension with left ventricular hypertrophy, H­NLVH – hypertension with­ out left ventricular hypertrophy, IVST – interventricular septum thickness in diastole, LEPR – leptin receptor, LVDd – left ven­ tricular end­diastolic diameter, LVH – left ventricular hypertro­ phy, LVM – left ventricular mass, LVMI – left ventricular mass index, PVST – posterior ventricular septum thickness in diastole. Abstract. This study was aimed to determine whether the leptin receptor Gln223Arg polymorphism has an effect on plasma leptin levels and left ventricular hypertrophy in hypertension. The genotypes and allelic frequencies of the leptin receptor Gln223Arg were examined using the polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism in 190 hypertensive patients and 88 healthy controls. Logarithmic (log) transformation of the plasma leptin level was carried out before performing comparison and regression analysis. The values of log(plasma leptin levels) in the hypertensive patients were higher than those of controls and they were higher in hypertensive patients with left ventricular hypertrophy than those without it (P < 0.05). The genotype (AA, AG, and GG) distribution of Gln223Arg polymorphism was 6.8, 33.8, and 59.4% in hypertensive patients with left ventricular hypertrophy, 4.3, 27.6, and 68.1% in patients without left ventricular hypertrophy, and 2.3, 26.1, and 71.6% in the controls, respectively. A significant difference was found among these three groups (P < 0.05). The frequency of allele A was higher in patients with left ventricular hypertrophy than in patients without it (23.6 vs. 18.1%; P < 0.05). Log(plasma leptin levels) and left ventricular mass index were higher in patients with the AA genotype than those with the AG or GG genotype in hypertensive patients (P < 0.05). In multivariate regression analysis, the AA genotype as an independent predictor had statistically significant effects on the left ventricular mass index. Our results suggest that the Gln223Arg polymorphism of the leptin receptor is significantly associated with plasma leptin levels and left ventricular hypertrophy in hypertension.