Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Campylobacter jejuni lipopolysaccharides in Guillain-Barré syndrome

Objective: This study was designed to determine if the presence of specific ganglioside-like moieties in Campylobacter lipopolysaccharides(LPSs) is related to the development of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), and to discover how frequently such moieties, including GM1, are present in these LPSs. Methods: We studied Campylobacter isolates and sera from seven patients with GBS (five acute motor axonal neuropathy, one acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, and one Fisher's syndrome), and compared them with similar specimens from patients with Campylobacter enteritis alone. Results: All GBS patients had antiganglioside antibodies. Anti-GM1 and anti-GD1a titers were significantly elevated in post-Campylobacter GBS, both axonal and demyelinating, compared with normal control subjects or those with uncomplicated Campylobacter diarrhea. Campylobacter isolated from patients with GBS and with enteritis alone had similar ganglioside-like moieties. Conclusions: These results indicate that patients who develop GBS respond differently to the ganglioside-like epitopes on Campylobacter than do non-GBS diarrhea patients. Our findings support a role for host susceptibility as a determinant for the outcome following Campylobacter infection. These findings have important implications for the development of vaccines against Campylobacter jejuni.
On the Determinants of Shift Work and Overtime Work: Evidence from German Establishment Data

Using data from German manufacturing establishments, this article examines the empirical determinants of shift work and overtime. Technology and the organization of work, the managerial environment, the structure of the workforce and industrial relations are important determinants. Despite the similarities in the role of some determinants, a series of important differences exists between the estimations for overtime and shift work. Moreover, using an instrumental variables probit model, the estimates indicate a negative relationship between shift work and overtime.
Availability Payments and Key Performance Indicators

Recent economic problems have led to a potential increase in the adoption of an availability payments approach by U.S. transportation agencies when creating public-private partnerships (P3s). In doing so, the public sector assumes 100% of the demand risk, relying much more heavily on performance management systems that contain key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure optimal private partner performance during operations and maintenance. Many existing performance management systems, however, suffer from a lack of alignment among KPIs chosen to ensure that all P3s meet societal or agency goals as well as project goals. Furthermore, the choice of KPIs and accompanying standards has resulted in standards that are too easily met or inappropriately weighed. Examples are provided from P3 contracts for projects in Australia and Canada.
Aligning Sales Management and Relationship Marketing in the Services Sector

Salespeople, although the emissaries of the firm's marketing message, find themselves caught amidst new developments in the market place without the necessary guidelines for facing the new challenges presented to them. The separate development of the fields of Sales Management and Relationship Marketing has left unexplored the transition of salespeople from the 'close the sale' imperative to 'build long-term customer relationships'. Our study explores the selling job in the relational sales context of the services sector and highlights a number of key issues for the development of the theory and practice of relationship orientated sales management.
Dietary protein oxidation: A silent threat to human health?

ABSTRACT Protein oxidation has become a topic of great scientific interest in the field of food science and nutrition. Food proteins are known to be preferential targets of radical species, and protein oxidation has relevant consequences on protein functionality and food quality. Current trends in this field call attention to the nutritional and health dimensions of oxidized foods. Both lipid and protein oxidation products are accumulated in food during processing and storage and also upon food intake during the subsequent digestion phases. The gastrointestinal tract and internal organs are exposed to the cytotoxic and mutagenic potential of these species. While the molecular basis of the pathogenesis of particular dietary lipid oxidation products is well known, the impact of dietary oxidized proteins on human health has been largely ignored. The well-established association between in vivo protein oxidation and aging and age-related diseases urges scientists to investigate the contribution of dietary protein oxidation to particular pathological conditions. Recent reports indicate the involvement of dietary protein oxidation species on particular health disorders, which emphasizes the link between dietary and in vivo protein oxidation.
THE SUPPLY-DRIVEN INPUT-OUTPUT MODEL - A NEW INTERPRETATION BUT STILL IMPLAUSIBLE

In this reply, I argue that the production function proposed by Gruver provides a theoretical foundation for the supply model only in a most trivial case. He proposes a more general alternative which is, however, still very implausible. Furthermore, against Rose and Allison, I argue that small input-coefficient changes provide an insufficient excuse for using the supply model for impact studies, and I show that employment estimates may be quite different depending on the approach used.
Financial Impacts of Socially Responsible Activities on Airline Companies

Although the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been recognized as an important ingredient for business success, the relationship between CSR and companies’ financial performance has been inconclusive and rarely examined in the airline industry. This study examines the impacts of CSR on airline companies’ financial performance in terms of accounting and value performance. In addition, the study investigates linear, quadratic, and cubic relationships between CSR and firm performance. Results show support for a positive and linear impact of CSR on value performance but not on accounting performance for airline companies. The findings can provide airline corporate executives with practical knowledge with which to strategically develop better business plans that incorporate CSR activities.
How local contexts influence the neighbourhood satisfaction of displaced tenants in the Netherlands and France

A number of studies have examined the effects of social mixing policies on tenants who are forced to relocate to make way for more prosperous residents. They found that forced relocations can have both positive and negative effects on displaced tenants’ neighbourhood satisfaction. The present study looked at a potential explanation for these mixed results, namely differences between social housing contexts. As displaced tenants have low incomes, they are generally restricted to moves within the social rented housing sector. Therefore, the availability and allocation of social housing may strongly influence their opportunities to move to a satisfactory neighbourhood. Previous studies have not been able to distinguish the role of different social housing contexts on displaced tenants’ neighbourhood satisfaction, because they focused either on single cases or on multiple cases in the same relocation context. The present study has filled this gap by conducting 109 qualitative interviews with displaced tenants in both the Netherlands – where the social housing context imposes relatively few constraints on tenants – and France, where tenants face many constraints. It was found that, contrary to expectations, constraints did not always lead to tenants being less satisfied with their new neighbourhood, but did reduce their opportunities to move within or outside the neighbourhood.
Modeling the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum

The cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum is a fascinating organism, not only for biologists, but also for physicists. Since the Belousov–Zhabotinskii reaction pattern, a well‐known non‐linear phenomenon in chemistry, was observed during aggregation of Dictyostelium amoebae, Dictyostelium has been one of the major subjects of non‐linear dynamics studies. Macroscopic theory, such as continuous cell density approximation, has been a common approach to studying pattern formation since the pioneering work of Turing. Recently, promising microscopic approaches, such as the cellular dynamics method, have emerged. They have shown that Dictyostelium is useful as a model system in biology. The synchronization mechanism of oscillatory production of cyclic adenosine 3′,5′‐monophosphate in Dictyostelium is discussed in detail to show how it is a universal feature that can explain synchronization in other organisms.
Short-Term Contracts Regulations and Dynamic Labour Demand: Theory and Evidence

We present a dynamic labour demand model where we evaluate the impact of employment regulations on permanent and temporary employment. We consider three different kinds of regulations, namely firing costs, hiring costs and a constraint on temporary contracts. These regulations differently affect the size and composition of employment. The theoretical results are interpreted and questioned on the basis of empirical evidence on the employment effects of the regulation reforms that occurred in the major European countries in the period 1983–1999. The empirical analysis is based on a new set of time‐varying indicators on permanent employment protection, fixed‐term contracts and temporary agency work regulations. We find evidence in support of the hypothesis that fixed‐term contracts have been effective stepping‐stones to permanent jobs during the period under observation. On the contrary, flexible temporary agency work regulations seem to induce a substitution of permanent with temporary contracts.
Post‐merger integration and change processes from a complexity perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse change processes in the post‐merger integration (PMI) phase from a complexity theory perspective. Therefore, it looks at the merged organisation as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Design/methodology/approach – Post‐merger situations borrowed from literature and a one‐day expert workshop with integration managers are related to the characteristics of CASs. During the workshop, data of the change process in different PMI phases are collected and the integration activities are analysed with a coded event history analysis.Findings – Change processes in the PMI phase are very complex and the newly merged organisations experience tension and non‐linear behaviour, but positive self‐organisation, a major property of CASs, cannot always emerge as the required prerequisites are sometimes not given.Research limitations/implications – Insights of the workshop are limited to personal statements of the participants. In order to further investigate the PMI process under .
The effects of ethnicity and educational attainment on Jewish marriage patterns: Changes in Israel, 1957–1995

Abstract. This paper presents a study of changes in marriage patterns among the Jewish population of Israel over nearly 40 years. Using data from four Israeli Censuses spanning experience from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s, we employ Schoen's harmonic mean model in a multivariate framework to consider, simultaneously, changes over time in age-specific marriage rates by ethnicity and educational attainment. Our analyses point to a number of clear and interesting findings: (1) an increasingly positive association between marriage and educational attainment, especially for women; (2) the continuing central role of ethnicity in mate selection, despite important declines in ethnic endogamy over the period; (3) a decrease in the prominence of unions of ‘exchange’; (4) some evidence of increasing ‘block’ endogamy among Jews of Asian and African origin; and (5) a small increase in educational homogamy over the period. Interpretations and implications of these findings are discussed.
How Do Monetary and Fiscal Policy Shocks Explain US Macroeconomic Fluctuations?-A

This paper analyses the role monetary and …scal policy shocks play in explaining US macroeconomic ‡uctuations using a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) framework. Identi…cation is achieved via the sign restrictions methodology as in Dungey and Fry (2009) and Fry and Pagan (2007), with the federal funds rate ordered last. Several …ndings emerge from this study. The impact of the government spending shock on output is longer lasting and explains more variability in macroeconomic variables compared to a government taxation revenue shock or monetary policy shock. There is also evidence of an increase in government spending crowding out private activity, leading to an
The Labour Force Dynamics of the Marginally Attached

One of the most important measures of the state of the labour market is the unemployment rate. However, the standard definition of unemployment ignores an important group of people who are not employed but who want to work - the marginally attached workforce. The marginally attached are defined as those who are not employed, want to work but are not actively seeking work and therefore not classified as unemployed. The paper uses longitudinal data from the Survey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns (SEUP) to test whether the marginally attached are behaviourally distinct from the unemployed or those who are not attached to the labour force. We find that the labour force transitions of the marginally attached, on the whole, are between those of the unemployed and the unattached. Another finding is that the length of time over which the labour market dynamics are considered is crucial to our understanding of the labour market dynamics of the marginally attached. An implication of the findings of this paper is that a range of measures of potential labour supply should be considered, and that the measure used should depend on the specific question being asked. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/ University of Adelaide and Flinders University 2005.
The Effect of Unionism on Workers' Valuation of Future Pension Benefits

This paper investigates the impact of unionism on the pension benefits workers expect to receive on retirement. The valuation of future benefits by workers, rather than actual employer expenditures on pensions, is examined because expected benefits should be the more important variable in explaining the labor market behavior of individual workers. Analysis of data for middle-aged men, taken from the National Longitudinal Surveys, suggests that union workers are more knowledgeable than nonunion workers about their retirement benefits, and also the average union worker expects to receive a pension higher than that expected by the average nonunion worker. More specifically, among firms providing pensions, the expected benefits are actually lower in union firms than in nonunion firms, but that difference is outweighed by the fact that nonunion firms are much more likely than union firms to have no pension plan at all.
Queuing Network Modeling of Driver EEG Signals-Based Steering Control

Directly using brain signals rather than limbs to steer a vehicle may not only help disabled people to control an assistive vehicle, but also provide a complementary means of control for a wider driving community. In this paper, to simulate and predict driver performance in steering a vehicle with brain signals, we propose a driver brain-controlled steering model by combining an extended queuing network-based driver model with a brain–computer interface (BCI) performance model. Experimental results suggest that the proposed driver brain-controlled steering model has performance close to that of real drivers with good performance in brain-controlled driving. The brain-controlled steering model has potential values in helping develop a brain-controlled assistive vehicle. Furthermore, this study provides some insights into the simulation and prediction of the performance of using BCI systems to control other external devices (e.g., mobile robots).
A Temporal Texture Characterization Technique Using Block-Based Approximated Motion Measure

Characterized by their distinctive motion patterns, temporal textures are natural phenomenon exhibiting spatio-temporal regularity with indeterminate spatial and temporal extent. This paper presents a real-time motion-based temporal texture characterization technique for the first time using block-based motion measures with very high classification accuracy against the popular opinion that such an accurate characterization is only possible using pixel-based measures. Finding an optimal weight ratio between space and time domain features where the accuracy of this block-based technique peaks has been the essence of this success. Computational complexity analyses and classification results clearly demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique in producing comprehensive classification results comparable to the best pixel-based technique with overwhelming reduction in computational complexity.
[Nurses' professionalism as a component of evaluation of parents/caregivers satisfaction with nursing care].

BACKGROUND Professionalism in nursing means the provision of medical and nursing services based on the best knowledge and skills, as well as on great responsibility for the undertaken actions. The opinions of patients and their families concerning professionalism, reflected in the level of satisfaction, contribute to the improvement of the quality of services offered. MATERIAL AND METHODS The study covered 120 parents/caregivers of children hospitalized in a pediatric ward. Diagnostic survey method was applied in the research. The standardized questionnaire for evaluation of the level of parents/caregivers satisfaction with nursing care (Latour et al.) adjusted to the conditions of Polish pediatric hospital services and subjected to validation was adopted as a research tool. Statistical analysis was performed using the Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis test. A value of p≤0.05 was considered to indicate statistical significance. The respondents were selected at random. The parents/caregivers received the questionnaire the day before the child's discharge. RESULTS The parents/caregivers generally evaluated the professionalism of nursing care in positive terms (4.3). They expressed higher satisfaction with respect showed by nurses for patients (4.7), while lower satisfaction with nurses introducing themselves (3.2). A high level of satisfaction was obtained with respect to the parents/caregivers' opinions pertaining to cooperation within a therapeutic team (4.6), organization of nurses' work (4.6), and quality of nursing care (4.6). CONCLUSIONS Parents/caregivers expressed their satisfaction with the professionalism of nursing care. Education of respondents, frequency and reasons for hospitalization among children proved to be the variables that significantly differed the opinions of parents/caregivers concerning the selected criteria for professionalism of nursing care. No correlation was found between the duration of hospitalization, children's age, place of parents/caregivers residence, and the level of satisfaction with professionalism of nursing care.
Pattern of cardiac sympathetic denervation in idiopathic Parkinson disease studied with 11C hydroxyephedrine PET.

PURPOSE To determine whether cardiac sympathetic denervation in idiopathic Parkinson disease (IPD) affects the left ventricle in a distinct regional pattern versus a more global pattern with use of carbon 11 (11C) meta-hydroxyephedrine (HED) positron emission tomography (PET). MATERIALS AND METHODS This prospective study was approved by the institutional review board and was compliant with HIPAA. Informed consent was obtained from all subjects. Cardiac PET was performed with 11C HED in 27 patients with IPD (20 men and seven women aged 50-74 years; mean age, 62 years±6 [standard deviation]). 11C HED retention indexes (RIs), which reflect nerve density and integrity, were determined. RIs for 33 healthy control subjects (15 men and 18 women aged 20-78 years; mean age, 47 years±17) were used as a control database. Patients with IPD were compared with control subjects by using z score analysis. Global and segmental measurements of sympathetic denervation were expressed as percentage extent, z score severity, and severity-extent product (SEP). Group comparisons were performed with the Student t test. RESULTS The mean 11C HED RI was 0.086 mL of blood per minute per milliliter tissue±0.015 for control subjects and 0.043 mL of blood per minute per milliliter tissue±0.016 for patients with IPD (P<0001). When compared with normative data from the control database, profound cardiac denervation (global extent>50%) was seen in most patients (19 of 27 patients, 70%). Four patients had normal 11C HED studies and four had mild denervation (global extent<25%). The mean global denervation extent was 62%±38, the mean severity z score was -2.7±1.2, and the mean SEP was -202±131 (range, -358 to 0). Segmental analysis revealed relative sparing of anterior and proximal septal segments (mean extent, 48%-51%; mean severity z score, -2.47 to -2.0; mean SEP, -167 to -139), with lateral and proximal inferior segments more severely affected (mean extent, 68%-73%; mean severity z score, -2.8 to -2.62; mean SEP, -271 to -230). Patients with normal findings or preserved denervation did not significantly differ in mean age (t=1.09) or disease duration (t=0.44) compared to patients with severe sympathetic denervation. CONCLUSION Cardiac sympathetic denervation in IPD is extensive, with a segmental pattern that involves the proximal lateral left ventricular wall most severely, with relative sparing of the anterior and proximal septal walls.
Strategic marketing planning for opportunity exploitation in young entrepreneurial companies

Both entrepreneurship and marketing theory and practice are opportunity driven. To exploit opportunities, entrepreneurial companies need to apply so-called professional management instruments, such as strategic marketing planning (SMP). SMP seems to be especially important for young companies in growth industries market. However, research has not addressed whether entrepreneurial companies use SMP, under what conditions and with what effect on performance. In this study we identified and tested antecedents of SMP in young companies in Germany. In our model, we developed a multidimensional model of SMP and tested a series of hypotheses using data gathered from 157 entrepreneurial companies. We found out that environmental uncertainty, external capital and managerial experience and, to some extent, top management team size and intentions to change are linked positively to the use of SMP in such firms.