Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WHAT AFFECTS VOTER TURNOUT

▪ Abstract Why is turnout higher in some countries and/or in some elections than in others? Why does it increase or decrease over time? To address these questions, I start with the pioneer studies of Powell and Jackman and then review more recent research. This essay seeks to establish which propositions about the causes of variations in turnout are consistently supported by empirical evidence and which ones remain ambiguous. I point out some enigmas and gaps in the field and suggest directions for future research. Most of the research pertains to established democracies, but analyses of nonestablished democracies are also included here.
Cyberdemocracy or Potemkin E-Villages? Electronic Governments in OECD and Post-Communist Countries

Abstract The dramatic increase in the use of the World Wide Web and the Internet in government may foreshadow important changes in the nature of governance. A number of theorists have posited that the adoption of networked information systems is accompanied by inevitable shifts toward democratic government. Others argue that technologies are secondary factors in changes in levels of democracy or types of governance. Our article examines the openness of cabinet-level websites in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and post-communist countries as a measure of an important aspect of governance that has only recently been operationalized. It provides a brief review of other studies in this field and the directions in which they are heading. The article analyzes the effects of political, cultural, economic, and technical factors on openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. The question is whether the level of democracy and cultural legacies affect openness of electronic governments. The study employs statistical analysis of a comparative database of national-level public agency websites that is produced by the Cyberspace Policy Research Group (CyPRG). The dependent variable is based on transparency and interactivity scores and availability of cabinet-level websites. The independent variables include Freedom House and Polity indexes of democracy, historical legacy, religious tradition, and the GDP per capita and number of Internet users per 1,000 people. Regression analysis shows that democracy, historical legacies, level of economic development, and religious tradition affect openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. This study demonstrates need to distinguish between cyberdemocracy and “Potemkin e-villages,” that is, window-dressing, in electronic governments.
Attitude Towards Entrepreneurship Education and New Venture Creation

Does an individual's positive attitude towards entrepreneurship education promote the growth of new ventures? It appears that it does. The empirical results presented in this paper support a prima facie claim that a relationship exists between attitude towards entrepreneurial education and business start-up. The aim of this paper is to investigate the hypothesised positive relationship between new venture founding and attitude towards entrepreneurial education (AEE). Limited if any research on new venture founding in the past has explored the contribution of AEE in business start-ups. A survey is carried out on a large sample (more than 15,000) of tertiary students residing in Singapore. In analysing the dataset, we have controlled for various factors in the regression analysis. Due to the limitations of our study, we are cautious not to assert any causal link between these 2 variables. The implications of the results to policy makers and educators are discussed along with suggestions for future research in order to refine our present understanding of these relationships.
Comment: "Professional Team Sports Are Only a Game: The Walrasian Fixed-Supply Conjecture Model, Contest-Nash Equilibrium, and the Invariance Principle"

In a recent article in this journal, Stefan Szymanski develops a generalized version of the two-team diminishing marginal revenue model of win percentage determination and talent allocation. The standard version of this model assumes a fixed supply of talent for a given season, focusing on the allocation of players among teams. Szymanski claims that this assumption is inappropriate and offers his generalized model as a solution. This comment argues, on the contrary, that the fixed supply assumption underlying the standard model is appropriate for its usual applications, given the “peculiar economics” of sports labor markets.
Effect of orexin-A (hypocretin-1) on hyperalgesic and cachectic manifestations of experimentally induced rheumatoid arthritis in rats.

UNLABELLED Orexin-A has been shown to modulate pain sensation and increase appetite. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterized by joint destruction, deformity, hyperalgesia, and weight reduction. AIM Evaluate the possible effect of orexin-A on hyperalgesic and cachectic manifestations in an adjuvant-induced arthritis (AIA) rat model. METHODS Forty adult male Wistar rats were distributed among 4 groups; I, normal controls; II, rats with AIA induced by intradermal injection of Mycobacterium butyricum, but with no other treatment; III, AIA rats treated daily with an intravenous injection of orexin-A for 8 days; and IV, AIA rats treated orally with dexamethasone for 8 days. The parameters we assessed were pain-associated behavior, body mass, hind paw volume, serum levels of nerve growth factor (NGF) and neuropeptide Y (NPY). RESULTS Orexin-A caused a significant reduction in pain sensation and NGF levels, and increased body mass and the levels of NPY, whereas treatment with dexamethasone led to significant reductions in paw swelling and pain sensation. CONCLUSION Orexin-A has hypoalgesic properties and increases body mass, whereas dexamethasone has a potent anti-inflammatory effect. Therefore, the combination of orexin-A and dexamethasone should have a greater effect with respect to attenuating the manifestations and complications associated with RA.
Status of Anthropometry in Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate User Subjects

Introduction nthropometric parameters and their derived indices are frequently used by physicians and health workers as a valuable instrument to determine health and disease, to define nutritional status, to assess growth and development, to determine differences in body proportion between populations as well as to optimize diagnosis and treatment. DMPA is a synthetic steroid similar to progesterone, a hormone normally produced by the ovaries each month as a part of the menstrual cycle and used as a long acting hormonal contraceptive method. DMPA was developed in 1954 by the Upjohn Company, USA for the treatment of endometriosis and habitual or threatened abortions. In the early 1960’s it was noted that women receiving DMPA for premature labor, subsequently had a marked delay in return of fertility following delivery. This observation led to the development of DMPA as a fertilityregulating agent. In the mid 1960’s, Upjohn recommended a contraceptive product license for DMPA in many countries.
Job embeddedness in China: how HR practices impact turnover intentions

This study explores the process by which human resource (HR) practices embed employees in organisations and reduce turnover intentions. In particular, we investigate the mediating effects of the organisational job embeddedness dimensions (links, fit and sacrifice) in the relationship between HR practices and employee turnover intentions. Hypotheses are tested using data from 308 professional staff in China. As predicted, performance appraisal and organisational rewards increased fit and decreased turnover intentions. Employee development activities increased employees' perceptions of sacrifice but greater awareness of sacrifice was associated with greater turnover intentions. The results suggest that organisations hoping to use HR practices to deter turnover may experience the greatest success by using performance management and reward systems to increase perceptions of organisational fit.
INTEREST IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON ENGINEERING AND TECHNICAL STUDENTS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION AND CHOOSING ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS A CAREER.

Entrepreneurship is often thought to be a likely subject for business discipline students but not for technical students. Enterprising elements of entrepreneurship such as evaluating opportunity, developing new products, and handling start-ups are part and parcel of most business management curriculum. As for technical discipline students interested in creating their own organization after graduation, they seem to be left in dark although in many cases they are originators of product ideas. In Malaysia, there is a growing concern that technical students do not have sufficient entrepreneurial skills to venture in business particularly running small and medium enterprise (SME) set-ups. There are comments that these students have narrow business perspectives, less flexible to branch in other working areas and foresee themselves as only job seekers and not job creators. This spells the need for universities to introduce entrepreneurship subjects to non-business disciplines. The research project will concentrate on the topic of entrepreneurship education, with specific emphasis on how this education can be promoted and fostered to technical students. To best help students prepare for these new challenges, this research sought to identify an appropriate set of undergraduate courses for introduction of entrepreneurship elements to technical students and to indicate the level of student interest in these courses. Final year technical students from several public higher learning institutions of Malaysia (IPTAs) were chosen as respondents for the survey. The result shows entrepreneurship education should be incorporated into the non-business disciplines. The implication of the results led to an import set of guidelines, which can be used by educators when designing programs to suit different needs and demands of the technical students.
Cultural Convergence in Emerging Markets: The Case of McDonald's in China and India

It is a truism that successful organizations of any type adapt and conform to the idiosyncracies of their target consumer groups as it is their customers that embody their raison d'etre. This is especially important for small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises because they lack the requisite experiential treasure trove or elaborate corporate bureaucracies to accomplish this task typically available to established large firms. In fact, textbooks on international business are full of examples of business failures when consumer proclivities have been ignored by businesses. Informed by this admonition, this manuscript seeks to investigate the psyche of Chinese and Indian consumers of a global franchise system, onald's. It advances the premise of cultural convergence of hinese and Indian consumers through the lenses of organizational socialization theory. We examine whether the franchise system's universal culture and the social values of egalitarianism and democratization enshrined in the system are linked to consumers' patronage of onald's in the world's two largest emerging markets. Using multivariate analysis of variance, we evaluate cross‐country differences in perceptions of egalitarianism and democratization as well as patronage frequency. Both country‐specific effects and cross‐cultural effects are discussed, and managerial implications for franchisee‐entrepreneurs in each country are outlined.
Sometimes Less Is More – The Influence of Information Aggregation on Investment Decisions

We study the effect of information aggregation on individual investors’ risk-taking behavior in two experiments, each having three different treatments. Subjects in the control group were given hypothetical returns for both the risk-free and the risky asset. Subjects in the account group were also given information about returns separately for each of the two assets. However, this information was scaled according to a subject's chosen investment amount. Subjects in the portfolio group could observe returns on a portfolio level, which constitutes the highest level of information aggregation in our study. Results show that a higher degree of information aggregation results in greater risk-taking. Increased risk-taking is associated with a lower risk perception and a more accurate estimation of the probability of a loss. Furthermore, reporting aggregated returns might lead investors to evaluate the aggregated outcome relative to a different reference point (the overall portfolio instead of the amount invested in risky assets), which makes them less likely to experience a loss and therefore increases the willingness to invest in the risky asset. Thus, aggregating information seems to reduce mental accounting, namely having one account for risky and one account for risk-free investments. Ex post, our findings show that the portfolio group also makes consistent subsequent allocation decisions and shows a lower dissatisfaction with outcomes in the loss domain. The results were consistent across both experiments despite the use of different subject pools and investment amounts.
GOVERNMENT SPENDING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Trends, Causes, and Consequences

Throughout the twentieth century governments have been spending ever larger proportions of national income. Three issues arise in discussions about the growth of such spending as it pertains to developing countries: How does it compare with expenditure in industrial nations? What explains the growth in spending by developing country governments? And what are the effects on economic growth? Government expenditure as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in low- and middle income countries, on average, is lower than comparable shares in industrial market economies and, with few exceptions, is growing. Many factors, including ideology, demographics, a positive income elasticity for public goods, the rising cost of public goods relative to private goods, and perhaps development theory and practice, explain this growth. As for the relationship between government expenditure and economic growth, the empirical evidence does not reveal any strong correlation. The size of government may engender strong ideological debate, but the position that the aggregate level of government expenditure is a significant determinant of growth rates receives little support.
Trust: Missing Piece(s) in the Safety Puzzle

While trust is increasingly recognized as a factor that impacts on safety behavior, the exact nature of trust and its role in shaping organizational safety is poorly understood. This special issue contains six articles that examine the relationship between trust and safety behavior in a range of high‐risk work contexts. The issue begins with two articles that introduce the complex nature of trust and the positive and negative roles that trust can play in shaping an organization's safety culture. This background is then developed by two articles that explore the role of trust and distrust in safety performance, and uncover a range of significant but often counterintuitive relationships between forms of trust and safe behavior. Finally, the issue concludes with two articles that examine the role that leadership may play in developing trust. These articles examine the conditions important for the development of trust in leaders, and the trust‐promoting actions that leaders can employ to influence employees' engagement in safety participation.
Defining AIDS competence: a working model for practical purposes

This paper addresses the challenge of reducing HIV infection through creating AIDS-competent societies. A working model is presented based on extensive international practical experience pooled by facilitators in 10 African countries and Thailand. The main underlying theme is that community members can be empowered to develop their own individual and collective plans of action that will: (i) reduce the likelihood of them becoming infected by HIV; (ii) maintain the quality of their lives through appropriate care and support to those who are infected, and to those who have developed AIDS and their families; and (iii) become autonomous, by monitoring and evaluating their progress in becoming fully AIDS-competent and learning from each other about how best to move forward in this process, using methods and a strategy that is acceptable to the wider community. A further component of the working model would be the inclusion of People Living with HIV|AIDS (PLWA) in such activities. This successful bottom-up process is permeating upwards from the grassroots to professionals in many sectors at district and national levels. It promises to provide a powerful, tailor-made method for the containment of HIV infection. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Association Between Auditor Changes and Reporting Lags

This paper examines audit report lags and earnings announcement lags for a sample of firms that switched auditors. We investigate whether audit report and earnings announcement lags are associated with the timing of auditor changes in relation to firms' fiscal year-ends. It is hypothesized that firms which replace their auditor early (late) in the fiscal year do so for positive (negative) reasons and experience shorter (longer) reporting lags. Conflicts over reporting issues can be difficult to resolve and consequently lead to reporting delays. In other cases, clients may be more concerned about adhering to customary reporting practices or improving reporting timeliness. These are likely to be considerations in auditor realignment decisions and are predictably reflected in the timing of the auditor change. The empirical findings for both audit report and earnings announcement lags are consistent with the hypotheses. Despite the increase in reporting lags for late switchers, we observe a higher incidence of switching in the fourth quarter than in any other quarter. Additionally, we detect a higher percentage of losses and modified opinions for late switchers in the year of the auditor change, which is consistent with the negative circumstances hypothesis. However, we find no evidence of a significant market reaction to announcements of early or late auditor changes. Given the importance of timely reporting, the findings suggest that the timing of an auditor change can convey distinct benefits or costs to switching firms, as measured by its effect on reporting lags. These findings also suggest that additional monitoring of auditor changes occurring around firms' fiscal year-ends can be beneficial because of their potentially negative antecedents and consequences.
Classification of clinical subtypes, patient survival, kidney prognosis, and relapse in patients with MPO-ANCA-associated vasculitis: a single-center experience

Myeloperoxidase-type antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (MPO-ANCA)-associated vasculitis may manifest various organ symptoms. Treatment allows recovery from early, but severe, organ involvement. However, the relationship between the initial organ involvement and the eventual clinical course has not been studied in this disease. Therefore, the current study evaluated 30 patients who were hospitalized and then categorized into ten clinical subtypes based on organ involvement. The relationship of these subtypes to development of clinical features, patient survival, kidney prognosis, and relapse were evaluated over an average observation period of 4.3 years. During this study, the most common clinical features were lung and kidney involvement. Twenty-one patients already manifested clinical features around the time of admission and did not commonly present new symptoms as long as they were receiving the treatment for vasculitis. In contrast, as far as pulmonary involvement type at the initial time was concerned and in those not being treated for vasculitis, 7 of the 12 patients progressed to pulmo-renal involvement and 5 of them went onto renal failure. Progression to renal failure also occurred frequently in patients with pulmo-renal type manifesting at the initial time. Thirteen patients died, including three patients due to vasculitis of systemic type, seven due to infections, and three due to malignancy. Death due to vasculitis occurred in the early phase of treatment and was associated with either pulmonary hemorrhage or gastrointestinal bleeding. Infectious death occurred throughout the entire course of treatment, mostly in patients with pulmo-renal or pulmonary type, and tended to be associated with opportunistic organisms. Death with malignancy was observed after several years of treatment. Regarding renal prognosis, ten patients underwent hemodialysis. At initiation of hemodialysis, nine patients had pulmo-renal type and only one had renal type. A relapse was observed in ten patients, mainly in patients with pulmo-renal or pulmonary type, and it occurred after about 2.7 years, even with treatment. Such relapses manifested in a similar manner to their initial clinical subtypes. These results suggest that pulmo-renal type as well as pulmonary type have a high chance to progress to renal failure or systemic type, and they were fairly commonly associated with vasculitic or infectious death. Therefore, classification of clinical subtypes at the initial time and on admission is meaningful to some extent for predicting patient survival, kidney prognosis, and relapse, in addition to indicating the appropriate treatment regimen.
Russia’s forests in a global economy: how consumption drives environmental change

The forests of Russia comprise roughly one-fifth of Earth’s total forest cover and one-quarter of its remaining “frontier” forests. The quality (i.e. natural productivity) of these forests continues to decline, however, with timber harvest a major underlying cause. Efforts to ameliorate forest degradation have been production centric, with a focus on the infusion of technology to improve manufacturing capacity, revision of the Forest code for better forest governance, and strategies to control illegal logging. However, consumption also drives forest change. Using production and trade flow data from 1946 to 2012, this paper assesses the state of Russia’s forest resources and demonstrates how sweeping changes ushered in by perestroika and globalization have forged a highly export-dependent forest sector. Once consumed internally (approx. 90% of total production), wood from Russia’s forests is now a global resource – the country annually exports approximately two-thirds of its sawnwood production. In tracking these flows through China to US urban centers, with timber becoming furniture and flooring sold in big-box stores, we demonstrate how consumption patterns affect ecosystems and socioeconomic relations in resource and manufacturing peripheries far beyond regional and national borders. The “ecological shadow” of forest change and degradation in post-Soviet Russia, therefore, is a confluence of factors related to both consumption and production: globalized shifting external market demand; the spatial fracturing of the industry; inefficient production; internal corruption; and weak forest governance. The Russian forest case provides evidence that we need to approach complex environmental (and development) issues as a coupled production–consumption dynamic. More broadly, the research is illustrative of how Russia has become embedded within the global economy through a constellation of resource flow linkages and networks.