Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing outcomes in liver disease patients: reliability and validity of the Spanish version of the Liver Disease Quality of Life Questionnaire (LDQOL 1.0).

OBJECTIVE To assess the reliability and validity of a Spanish version of the LDQOL 1.0 (Liver Disease Quality of Life questionnaire). METHODS Observational, cross-sectional study in Spanish patients awaiting liver transplantation (LT). Feasibility was assessed by analyzing administration times and missing responses. Ceiling and floor effects were calculated and reliability was tested by examining internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha). Convergent validity was tested by examining correlations between LDQOL disease-specific and Short Form health survey with 36 questions (SF-36) dimensions. Known groups' validity was tested by examining the LDQOL's capacity to discriminate between groups defined by etiology and Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CTP) scores. RESULTS A total of 200 patients were included for analysis. Mean age (SD) was 52.6 (9.8) years and 73% of the sample were male. The most common indication for LT was liver cancer (34%). Mean (SD) time to complete the questionnaire was 35.8 minutes (21.2 minutes). Missing responses were highest on the dimensions of sexual functioning and symptoms of liver disease. Ceiling effects were over 20% on 7 of the LDQOL's 12 disease-specific scales. Cronbach's alpha coefficients were over 0.70 on all but 2 dimensions. Correlations between SF-36 and LDQOL disease-specific dimensions generally fulfilled the hypotheses, with 35 of the 40 highest and lowest correlations (87.5%) being in the expected direction. The LDQOL discriminated well between patients in CTP class A and C, and as hypothesized, hepatocarcinoma and alcoholic cirrhosis patients scored better on most dimensions than patients with hepatitis C virus or other etiologies. CONCLUSIONS The Spanish version of the LDQOL 1.0 has shown satisfactory reliability and validity.
A study on the implementation of talent management practices at Malaysia companies.

This research was carried out using method of interview among selected human resource practitioners of six Malaysian companies. This research explores talent management practices particularly on the implementation and the effect of the practices on employee engagement and retention. It was found that talent management is considered as the strategy of organization to retain employees. The strategy involves the human resource activities such as recruitment, selection, training and development and performance management. The engagement and retention talented employees needed in order for an organization to success and improve performance. In highly competitive market, having the right employees is the way to ensure organizational succeed. The impact of this research will create an opportunity to develop talent management strategy. It is expected that the identification and development of talent management strategy would result in additional benefits for the organization and its employees.
A typology of music distribution models

A typology of music distribution models is proposed consisting of the ownership model, the access model, and the context model. These models are not substitutes for each other and may co‐exist serving different market niches. The paper argues that increasingly the economic value created from recorded music is based on con‐text rather than on ownership. During this process, access‐based services temporarily generate economic value, but such services are destined to eventually become commoditised.
Genetic consequences of interbreeding between farmed and wild Atlantic salmon: insights from the transcriptome

Large annual escapees of farmed Atlantic salmon enhance the risk of extinction of wild populations through genetic and ecological interactions. Recently, we documented evolutionary change in gene transcription between farmed and wild Atlantic salmon after only five generations of artificial selection. While differences for most quantitative traits are expected to gradually dilute through repeated backcrossing to wild populations, the genetic basis of gene transcription has been shown to be largely nonadditive and hybrid crosses may display unexpected inheritance patterns. This makes it difficult to predict to what extent interbreeding between farmed and wild individuals will change the genetic makeup of wild salmon populations. Here, we compare the genome‐wide gene transcription profiles of Norwegian wild salmon to that of a second generation hybrid cross [backcross: (Farmed X Wild) X Wild]. Over 6% (298, q‐value < 0.01) of the detected genes exhibited highly significantly different transcription levels, and the range and average magnitude of those differences was strikingly higher than previously described between pure farmed and wild strains. Most differences appear to result from nonadditive gene interactions. These results suggest that interbreeding of fugitive farmed salmon and wild individuals could substantially modify the genetic control of gene transcription in natural populations exposed to high migration from fish farms, resulting in potentially detrimental effects on the survival of these populations. This further supports the idea that measures to considerably reduce the number of escaped farmed salmon and their reproduction in the wild are urgently needed.
Understanding the Non-Linear Relation between Mutual Fund Performance and Flows

We examine gross flows to mutual funds and find that existing investors punish poorly performing funds by increasing outflows. We also find that existing and potential investors punish poorly performing funds by reducing inflows. Finally, we uncover that current investors respond to poor performance with the same intensity as they do to good performance. Overall, we conclude that new investors must drive the observed non-linearity between mutual fund performance and net flows. This conclusion runs contrary to the extant literature which generally ascribes the absence of net outflows in the face of poor performance to inactivity by existing fund investors (i.e., they do not exit).
Consumer perceived brand innovativeness

Purpose – This paper aims to examine brand innovativeness. While innovativeness has been studied at the product and firm levels, there is little research at the brand level. This paper argues for why this is needed, develops a conceptualization of consumer perceived brand innovativeness (CPBI) from a theoretical perspective and then develops and validates a measure for CPBI. Design/methodology/approach – Three qualitative studies were conducted to generate an enriched and more detailed understanding of what brand innovativeness means to consumers. Data were collected using free association and open-ended elicitation techniques. Next, a CPBI scale was developed and validated in three quantitative studies. Findings – The results indicate that innovative brands are related with several interesting core and secondary associations that have not been adequately addressed in previous research. CPBI is conceptualized as a unidimensional construct. Altogether six studies show that the proposed CPBI measure is vali.
Unanticipated Defaults and Losses in Canada's Large-Value Payments System, Revisited

Recent work at the Bank of Canada studied the impact of default in Canada's large-value payments system, and concluded that participants could readily manage their potential losses (McVanel 2005). In an extension of that work, the authors use a much larger set of daily payments data - with three times as many observations - to examine the simulated losses of private sector participants and the Bank from defaults in the payments system. They also gauge the upper bound of possible losses in the period April 2004 to April 2006. The authors conclude that losses from a participant failure in the large-value payments system are very likely to be small and readily manageable, as in McVanel (2005). For one or two small participants, under some (probably extreme) conditions, losses could be significant, but not solvency threatening. In sum, the risk controls of the large-value payments system allow and encourage participants to keep potential losses manageable.
Libyan Business Firm Attitudes Towards Islamic Methods of Finance

This paper investigates the attitudes of Libyan business firms towards Islamic methods of finance. A sample of 296 firms is surveyed using phone interviews during December 2007 and January 2008 to gather information on their awareness and perceptions of Islamic finance. The results indicate that most firms have knowledge about the existence of Islamic banking and finance, while more than two-thirds of respondents know the specific products of Musharakah (full-equity partnerships) and Quard Hassan (interest-free benevolent loans), often through personal informal lending. However, many respondents are uninformed regarding most other Islamic financing methods. Factor analysis is used to reduce the large number of explanatory variables used to determine business firm attitudes to just four determinants: namely, religion, profitability, business support, and unique services. Discriminant analysis shows that religion remains the primary motivation for the potential use of Islamic finance among business firms in Libya.
Support Vector Regression of Sparse Dictionary-Based Features for View-Independent Action Unit Intensity Estimation

In this paper, a robust system for viewindependent action unit intensity estimation is presented. Based on the theory of sparse coding, region-specific dictionaries are trained to approximate the characteristic of the individual action units. The system incorporates landmark detection, face alignment and contrast normalization to handle a large variety of different scenes. Coupled with head pose estimation, an ensemble of large margin classifiers is used to detect the individual action units. The experimental validation shows that our system is robust against pose variations and able to outperform the challenge baseline by more than 35%.
SUICIDE, SUICIDE ATTEMPTS, AND WEATHER.

The 67 suicides and 373 suicide attempts occurring in Houston in 1960, in which the time of occurrence could be established, were studied in terms of weather conditions at time of their occurrence. Eleven weather variables (temperature, wind speed, wind direction, barometric pressure, relative humidity, visibility, ceiling height, rain, fog, thunderstorms, and cloudiness) were studied. The distribution of each for all hours of the year was obtained, and this was compared with the distribution during those hours in which a suicide or suicide attempt occurred. No single significant relationship was found. The 28 northerly fronts of 1960 were not found to be associated with any change in rate of suicide or suicide attempts. Month and season likewise showed no significant relationship. It is concluded that suicide and suicide attempts are not significantly related to weather phenomena.
Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers: The Dynamics of Customer Relationships

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing winning and keeping industrial customers the dynamics of customer relationships as the reading material.
Voluntary Disclosure of Segment Information in a Regulated Environment: Australian Evidence

Based on annual report data for a sample of 118 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, this study provides further empirical evidence of the association between the voluntary disclosure of segment information and a firm’s level of diversification; controlling for firm size, industry membership, the level of minority interest, leverage, and ownership diffusion. The period examined falls between the introduction of the first Australian standard on segment disclosure in 1986 and its subsequent revision in 2001. In particular, the study focuses on segment information that was not required to be disclosed in the original standard but which standard setters subsequently felt sufficiently important to include as part of the mandated disclosure requirements in the revised standard. Consistent with expectations, based on both agency theory and proprietary costs theory, our logistic regression results confirm that greater levels of diversification are likely to be associated with additional voluntary segment disclosure.
Poisson integrals for standard weighted Laplacians in the unit disc

In this paper a counterpart of the classical Poisson integral formula is found for a class of standard weighted Laplace differential operators in the unit disc. In the process the corresponding Dirichlet boundary value problem is solved for arbitrary distributional boundary data. Boundary limits and representations of the associated solutions are studied within a framework of homogeneous Banach spaces. Special emphasis is put on the so-called relative completion of a homogeneous Banach space. 0. Introduction Let Ω be a domain in the complex plane C equipped with a weight function w : Ω → (0,∞) which provides us with a way to calculate weighted area using the weighted area element (0.1) dAw(z) = w(z)dA(z), z = x+ iy ∈ Ω, where dA(z) = dxdy is the usual planar Lebesgue area measure. By geometric considerations the area element (0.1) is the area element induced by the (Riemannian) metric (0.2) dsw(z) 2 = w(z)|dz|, z ∈ Ω, where |dz| is the usual arclength element of the complex plane. We mention here Kobayashi and Nomizu [24, 25] as an extensive background on differential geometry. A fundamental object of study in complex analysis is the Cauchy-Riemann differential operator ∂̄z = ∂ ∂z̄ = 1 2 ( ∂ ∂x − 1 i ∂ ∂y ) , z = x+ iy ∈ C, which we can think of as a vector field C ∋ z 7→ ∂̄z over the complex plane. The metric (0.2) suggests us to consider the weighted Cauchy-Riemann differential operator ∂̄w,z = w(z) ∂̄z, z ∈ Ω. Date: August 16, 2011. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary: 31A05; Secondary: 35J25.
Performance Consequences of Privatizing Egyptian State-Owned Enterprises: The Effect of Post-Privatization Ownership Structure on Firm Performance

This paper evaluates the financial and operating performance of newly privatized Egyptian state-owned enterprises and determines whether such performance differs across firms according to their new ownership structure. The Egyptian privatization program provides unique post-privatization data on different ownership structures. Since most studies do not distinguish between the types of ownership, this paper provides new insight into the impact that post-privatization ownership structure has on firm performance. The study covers 69 firms, which were privatized between 1994 and 1998. For these newly privatized firms, this study documents significant increases in profitability, operating efficiency, capital expenditures, and dividends. Conversely, significant decreases in employment, leverage, and risk are found, although output shows an insignificant decrease following privatization. The empirical results also show that Egyptian state-owned enterprises, which were sold to anchor-investors and employee shareholder associations, seem to outperform other types of privatization, such as minority and majority initial public offerings.
Common Factors in Stock Market Seasonalities

Well-diversified portfolios of stocks formed by either characteristics or factor loadings have relatively high or low returns every year in the same calendar month. These common seasonalities account for at least 80% of the seasonalities in individual stock returns. The source of seasonalities matters: a trading strategy that tries to profit from seasonalities in individual stock returns is necessarily exposed to common return factors. We develop a model in which seemingly firm-specific seasonalities emerge from stocks amplifying and aggregating small seasonalities in common factors. We demonstrate that this mechanism is a pervasive feature of asset returns at monthly and daily frequencies.
Risk Preference and Investments Quality as Determinants of Efficiency in the Italian Banking System

The Italian banking system is characterized by deep efficiency inequality between banks operating in different regions, with northern banks that largely outperform the southern ones. Moreover the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans is significantly higher in the South than elsewhere. In view of these evidences we asked: is the effi ciency gap of the southern banks (and therefore their lower screening and monitoring ability) the primary source of their higher level of bad loans? Or is the poorer quality of the southern bank loans (due to the adverse macroeconomic environment) that causes lower efficiency? The results offer rather concrete evidence in favour of the hypothesis that is a lower managerial efficiency which causes an increase in non-performing loans, whereas the eects of exogenous environmental shocks are negligible. As a second point to investigate, we recognize that banks have different risk aversion which differently affects the choice of input vector and we expressly take into account the capitalization degree (as a buffer against the risk) in estimating the bank cost stochastic frontier.
Sharing the Risk of Settlement Failure: Synopsis

Two policies toward payments-system risk are common, but superficially appear to be contradictory. One policy is to restrict the exposure to risk generated by one participant to other participants who are, by one measure or another, directly concerned with the risky participant. The other policy is to provide a "safety net," typically provided by government and funded by taxes collected from all participants and even from non-participants, to share losses due to "systemic risk. " In this paper, we provide a model in which both of these policies can be constituents of an economically efficient regime of payments-risk management.
Real Estate Investment Trusts: Structure, Performance, and Investment Opportunities

The book provides the investing public, real estates practitioners, regulators, and real estate and finance academics with up-to-date information on what modern scholarly research tells us about Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). REITs are credited to allow institutional and individual investors to invest in real estate via a corporate entity. The increasing interest in REITs as indicated by their growth in market capitalisation and institutional holdings in the United States and around the world suggests that REITs are becoming an increasingly important part of investors' diversified portfolio.
The fissure of Sylvius (1614–72)

Franciscus called Sylvius, was a descendant of a protestant family named Du Bois (changed to de le Boe1) from Cambrai, in France. For religious reasons the family moved to Germany. Sylvius was born in Hanau, Germany. He read medicine at the universities of Sedan and Leiden. He began his studies in June, 1632 at Leiden and offered a disputation Positiones variae medicae in 1634. Sylvius obtained his medical doctorate at the University of Basel on 16 March 1637, defending a thesis De animali motu ejusque laesionibus . According to Haller this is the first description of the lateral cerebral fissure. This fissure and the cerebral aqueduct were not fully described by Sylvius until 1663.1 He practised for a short period but graduated again at Leiden University in November 1638. His skills in teaching anatomy brought him respect and a certain fame: “many students, and certainly not the worst ones, attended his courses, so that it seemed as if only he could understand and explain anatomy. ” One of these students was Thoma Bartholini, son of the famous Danish anatomist Caspar Bartholini. In the 1641 edition of his well known textbook Institutiones anatomicae published by Thoma, 12 years after Caspar's death, it is clear that Caspar with Sylvius had shown and named the cerebral fissure separating …
Cigarette Smoking and Risk of Alcohol Use Relapse Among Adults in Recovery from Alcohol Use Disorders.

BACKGROUND Individuals in recovery from alcohol use disorders (AUDs) frequently continue to smoke cigarettes. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between cigarette smoking status and risk of AUD relapse in adults with remitted AUDs among adults in the United States. METHODS Data were drawn from Wave 1 (2001 to 2002) and Wave 2 (2004 to 2005) of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Analyses included the subsample of respondents who completed both waves of data collection reported a history of alcohol abuse and/or dependence prior to Wave 1 (N = 9,134). Relationships between Wave 1 cigarette smoking status (nonsmoker, daily cigarette smoker, and nondaily cigarette smoker) and Wave 2 alcohol use, abuse, and dependence were examined using logistic regression analyses. Analyses were adjusted for Wave 1 demographics; mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders; nicotine dependence; and AUD severity. RESULTS Both daily and nondaily cigarette smoking at Wave 1 were significantly associated with a lower likelihood of alcohol use and a greater likelihood of alcohol abuse and dependence at Wave 2 compared to Wave 1 nonsmoking. These relationships remained significant after adjusting for demographics, psychiatric disorders, substance use disorders, AUD severity, and nicotine dependence. CONCLUSIONS Among adults with remitted AUDs, daily and nondaily use of cigarettes was associated with significantly decreased likelihood of alcohol use and increased likelihood of alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence 3 years later. Concurrent treatment of cigarette smoking when treating AUDs may help improve long-term alcohol outcomes and reduce the negative consequences of both substances.
Evidence of Public Service Motivation and Job Satisfaction of Public Sector Employees in China

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how generalizable the public service motivation (PSM) is to China and examine the instrumentality through which individual PSM may affect work attitudes in an administrative or public organization. Using the data from the questionnaire among the Provincial Governments in China, the structure of PSM and the effects of PSM on job satisfaction (JS) is explored. The survey is coverage of provincial government departments’ employees in China, and a total of 1027 effective samples were collected. A variety of research methods are used, such as descriptive statistics analysis, exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis and so on. These studies not only explore and examine the constitution and adaptability of PSM, but also produce interesting results that relate to the history and institutional background of Chinese administrative or public organizations.
Emotion as mediators of the relations between perceived supervisor support and psychological hardiness on employee cynicism

Summary In this study we explore whether emotion experienced at work mediates the relationships between perceived supervisor support, psychological hardiness, and employee cynicism. Data were collected from employees working at a medical technology company located in Switzerland. Mediational analyses showed that employees’ positive and negative emotions experienced amidst an organizational crisis fully accounted for the relations between perceived supervisor support and cynicism and psychological hardiness and cynicism. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.