Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Culture-specific management and the African management movement: Verifying the premises

Lessem's proposals which purport to predict the key differences between black managers and white managers in South Africa have been widely adopted by writers within the African management movement. This article investigates the validity of Lessem's relevant proposals. The research found no support for the use of Lessem's model in helping to define African management, but the data were indicative of the prevalence of two forms of organisational culture, reminiscent of Schein's 'operator culture' and Handy's 'club culture', in the organisations researched, and supported the view that organisational culture can have a strong modifying effect on the values of employees, regardless of national or ethnic culture.
Reasons for encounter and diagnosis in patients seen in Frances Baard District public primary care: a prospective cross sectional study

Background: Information on the patient provider encounter, in terms of the most prevalent reasons for encounter and diagnoses at the primary care level, may help not only to improve the quality and efficiency of primary care service delivery, but also to develop training programmes for primary care providers. This study aimed to determine the range and prevalence of the reasons for encounter and diagnoses resulting form provider-patient encounters in public sector primary care facilities in the Frances Baard District. Methods: This descriptive cross sectional survey was conducted in the Frances Baard district situated in the Northern Cape Province. The study aimed to include 6000 consultations. This sample size was allocated to the sub-districts based on their respective populations. The facilities in each sub-district were then listed and divided into community health centres, fixed clinics or mobile clinics. Following this stratification, the required number of health centres, fixed clinics and mobile clinics were then randomly selected. In order to account for seasonality and pattern of attendance throughout the week, the 5 days on which patients were sampled were divided over a 12 month period and between different days of the week. Vertical programmes were excluded from this study as well as clinics attending to only one type of patients. Data were coded according to the International Classification of Primary Care-Version 2. Results: In total 1504 consultations were captured and resulted in 2930 RFE and 1958 diagnoses. Among these consultations 1491(99.1%) were conducted by nurses versus 13(0.9%) by doctors. Overall the sex ratio showed 591(39.3%) male to 902(59.9%) female patients. There was no significant difference between males and females in the number of RFEs (p=0.36) or diagnoses (p=0.35). Age was not related to the number of RFEs (p=0.77) but was significantly related to the number of diagnoses (p<0.01). Older clients had a significantly lower number of diagnoses in comparison to younger patients. The top 20 RFE and top 20 diagnoses are presented overall, by gender and separately for children. Conclusion: Cough, fever and throat symptoms emerged as the main RFE. In adults hypertension, acute URTI/tonsillitis, tuberculosis and HIV were the most prevalent diagnoses. Children were primarily seen for respiratory tract infection, gastrointestinal infection and immunizations. Nurses were seeing 99% of all patients and their practice was dominated by non-communicable chronic diseases and infectious diseases. Delivering quality public primary care would require a comprehensive support system for nurses to improve their capacity to respond appropriately to the common reasons for encounter and conditions identified in this survey. In particular there is a need to improve the recognition of mental health disorders and to foster a more bio-psycho-social approach.
Tamoxifen can reverse multidrug resistance of colorectal carcinoma in vivo

AIM: To investigate the effect of tamoxifen (TAM) on multidrug resistance (MDR) of colorectal carcinoma in vivo and its relationship with estrogen receptor (ER). METHODS: Multidrug resistance was determined by means of semi-quantitative retro-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to test mdr1 gene mRNA and ER expression was studied by immunohistochemistry. Tumor tissues from three cases of human colon carcinoma, which had mdr1( + )/ER(+ ), mdr1( + )/ER(-), mdr1(-) expressions,were planted subcutaneously in the neck of nude mice to establish three xenograft models. These models were subdivided into four subgroups randomly: Doxorubicin(DOX)-treated group, TAN-treated group, DOX and TAM group and control group. The dimensions of these xenografts were measured after each course of treatment and the xenografts were removed at the end of the experiments for measurements of weight and the variation of mdr1 mRNA level with RT-PCR. In each course, TAM[15 mg/(kg/d)] was administrated orally per day in the first seven days and DOX (3.6 mg/kg) was injected peritoneally on the first day. Data was evaluated by q and ttests.RESULTS: In the animal models with mdr1(-) tumor, the weights and volumes of the planted tumor in DOX group[(39.1±2.29) mg, (31.44±1.61) mm3] and TAM and DOX group [(38.72±2.56) mg, (31.31±1.74) mm3], which were lesser than that of control group [(45.48±3.92) mg,(36.42±2.77) mm3, P = 0.037, P = 0.016 respectively]significantly. In the animal models with mdr1(+)/ER(+)tumor, the weights and volumes of planted tumor were not affected by DOX or TAM treatment; however, in TAM and DOX group [(425.5±28.58) mg, (340.35±22.28) mm3],they were significantly less than that of control group[(634.23±119.41) mg, (507.45±93.34) mm3, P = 0.022,P = 0.045 respectively], which are similar to that in the models with mdr1(+)/ER(-) tumor. No significant changes were found in the expressive level of mdr1 mRNA following these treatments.CONCLUSION: The expression of mdr1 gene corresponds to the sensitivity of col
Prevalence of obesity among adult Kuwaitis: a cross-sectional study.

OBJECTIVE: The association between obesity and different diseases is well documented, especially with non-insulin dependent diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. To prevent proliferation of these and other obesity-related diseases, and to plan adequate health education programmes for the control of obesity, base-line data are required on the prevalence of this condition. The present study is concerned with this need and its purpose is the determination of the prevalence of obesity among adult Kuwaitis. METHOD: A cross-section of 3435 Kuwaiti adults forms the study sample. Corpulence was assessed from body mass index (BMI kg/m2) and the mean BMI (+/- standard deviation) was 28.3 (+/- 5.3). RESULTS: According to the WHO BMI criteria, the prevalence of obesity was found to be 70.2% (Grade 1) and 36.4% (Grade 2) with BMI as > 25 and > 30, respectively, and was significantly higher (P < 0.001) among women. Obesity among Kuwaitis was found to be higher than reported elsewhere in the world.
CLINICAL PROFILE OF REFERRED OTALGIA IN A TERTIARY HEALTH CENTRE – A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY -

Objectives: Assessment of age and gender distribution amongst otalgia cases, identification and categorization of referred nerve pathways, etiological factors, and analysis of significance by statistically correlating occurrence of cervical spine degenerative disease (CSDD) with respect to age and gender factors. Methods: The study conducted is retrospective, which included otalgia cases examined between April 2010 and April 2014. A total of 693 cases of otalgia were identified by ENT (Ear Nose Throat) and head and neck examination, dental and orthopedic data from the respective in and out patient departments. Radiographic records were referred wherever relevant. Patients were separated into two cohorts. Group I included Cervical Spine Degenerative Disease cases (CSDD) and Group II, Noncervical spine degenerative disease cases. The data collected was tabulated and statistically analyzed. Results: Of total 693 otalgia cases, referred otalgia (n=169 cases) accounted for 24.4%. Females outnumbered males, accounting for 66.9% of the cases. Age group 20-40 years was affected the most (48.5%), followed by 40-60years age group (29.6%). Dental pathology outnumbered the etiological factors (30.8%), followed by cervical spine degenerative disease (CSDD) [26.6%] and Temporo Mandibular joint dysfunction (TMJD) [19.5%]. Conclusion: Middle age group involvement in Group I (cervical spine degenerative disease cases) was in contrast to most other studies, where, elderly age group was most commonly affected. Therefore, high index of suspicion should be borne in mind to diagnose referred otalgia due to cervical spine degenerative disease in younger to middle age groups, without which, many such cases could be misdiagnosed or undiagnosed.
The Effect of Tunisian Cyclical Fiscal Policy on Economic Volatility: Understanding the Role of Institutional Quality

The recent decades have been marked by major instabilities that have increased the sensitivity of Tunisian business cycles to internal and external shocks. The economists must take this structural problem into account in their current decisions. Therefore, most institutional reforms were made in response to those instabilities after the Tunisian revolution. In addition, several fiscal indicators are partly intended to stabilize Tunisian economic fluctuations and avoid excessive government deficits. The influence of fiscal policy can be examined by distinguishing between cyclical and discretionary policies. Accordingly, it is interesting to investigate the impact of institutional quality on Tunisian fiscal policy conduct. This paper measures the effect of cyclical fiscal policy on Tunisian volatility. It analyzes the role of four fiscal indicators such as total government expenditure, administrative expenditure, capital expenditure, and loan expenditure. In addition, this paper tests the role of institutional variables on the stabilizing effect of fiscal policy. Indeed, the results are significant, and a tendency to apply a cyclical fiscal policy proved to be possible to reduce Tunisian volatility. Tunisian's experience is likely to be of interest to other developing countries.
Statistical Language Models Based on Neural Networks

Statistical language models are crucial part of many successful applications, such as automatic speech recognition and statistical machine translation (for example well-known Google Translate). Traditional techniques for estimating these models are based on N gram counts. Despite known weaknesses of N -grams and huge efforts of research communities across many fields (speech recognition, machine translation, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, data compression, psychology etc.), N -grams remained basically the state-of-the-art. The goal of this thesis is to present various architectures of language models that are based on artificial neural networks. Although these models are computationally more expensive than N -gram models, with the presented techniques it is possible to apply them to state-of-the-art systems efficiently. Achieved reductions of word error rate of speech recognition systems are up to 20%, against stateof-the-art N -gram model. The presented recurrent neural network based model achieves the best published performance on well-known Penn Treebank setup. Kĺıčová slova jazykový model, neuronová śıt’, rekurentńı, maximálńı entropie, rozpoznáváńı řeči, komprese dat, umělá inteligence
Reducing Passenger Delays by Rolling Stock Rescheduling

Delays are a major nuisance to railway passengers. The extent to which a delay propagates, and thus aects the passengers, is in uenced by the assignment of rolling stock. We propose to reschedule the rolling stock in such a way that the passenger delay is minimized and such that objectives on passenger comfort and operational eciency are taken into account. We refer to this problem as the Passenger Delay Reduction Problem (PDRP). We propose two models for this problem, which are based on two dominant streams of literature for the traditional Rolling Stock Rescheduling Problem. The rst model is an arc formulation of the problem, while the second model is a path formulation. We test the eectiveness of these models on instances of Netherlands Railways (NS). The results show that the rescheduling of rolling stock can signicantly decrease the passenger delays in the system. Especially allowing exibility in the assignment of rolling stock at terminal stations turns out to be eective in reducing the delays. Moreover, we show that the arc formulation based model performs best in nding high-quality solutions within the limited time that is available in the rescheduling phase.
Exploring local knowledge and socio‐economic factors for touristic attractiveness and sustainability

Int J Tourism Res. 2019;1–19. Abstract The present study investigates residents' perception of tourism as a sustainable development driver and explores the reasons why residents recognize their own place of residence as an attractive tourism destination. The work considers one of Italy's most visited tourist destinations (Puglia) and uses quantitative (i.e., inferential and text mining) and qualitative (i.e., survey) approaches. Main results reveal that socio‐economic and environmental factors positively affect residents' perception of tourism as a driver of sustainable development. Furthermore, the spatial dimensions of the territories of Puglia, perceived by indigenous local knowledge, are key elements for tourist attractiveness of its destinations.
No deficit in hip isometric strength or concentric endurance in young females with mild patellofemoral pain

Previous research has linked deficits in hip muscle strengt h and endurance to patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS). This study investigated if females with mild PFPS displayed hip isometric strength and endurance deficits compared to un injured controls. Hip abduction, internal rotation (IR) and extern al rotation (ER) were assessed using an isokinetic dynamometer in 12 females with PFPS and 12 age- and gender-matched controls. Independent t-tests were used to examine between-group differences and Pearson's Correlation Coefficient examine d the relationship between isometric strength and endurance. No significant between-group differences for IR, ER and abduct ion strength or endurance were found (all p > 0.05). Strength and endurance measurements showed significant moderate correl ations for abduction (R = 0.496, p = 0.014) and ER (R = 0.592, p = 0.002) only. The PFPS subjects had mild pain (Numerical Rating Scale: mean 1.3 cm) and disability (Anterior Knee Pain Scale: mean 81/100), which may partly explain the lack of significant between-group differences. The results suggest th at female subjects with PFPS associated with mild pain and disability do not demonstrate hip IR, ER or abduction endurance or isometric strength deficits. Further research is required to clarify t he role of factors including hip strength and endurance in the management of more severe PFPS.
Villagers’ Perceptions of Tourism Activities in Iona National Park: Locality as a Key Factor in Planning for Sustainability

Local people’s perception of nature-based tourism evolution and consequent impacts on their well-being are crucial in promoting ecotourism and achieving sustainable development. This study focused on indigenous populations’ attitudes concerning tourism activities taking place in the Iona National Park, located in the Namibe Province of Angola, where ecotourism is considered an anchor product and is expected to become an economic driver of major importance. To obtain information that is useful for a changing tourism management in order to increase rural communities’ well-being, we conducted a survey addressing local people’s perceptions about the following main topics: perception of the presence of visitors and of their activities; present and prospective positive and negative effects of the park; and government policies that should be developed in the near future. The research shows that most respondents’ perceptions strongly vary according to locality. The level of urbanization and the distance to the core areas of touristic activities appear to be the main factors driving the villagers’ perception polarization. Thus, conflicting interests between nature conservation and local populations’ well-being should be addressed and managed according to locality profiles, with some exceptions, such as ensuring the entire population has access to pastoral lands.
How Does the Implementation of the New Environmental Protection Law Affect the Stock Price of Heavily Polluting Enterprises? Evidence from China’s Capital Market

ABSTRACT This paper puts forward “attention hypothesis” and “information revelation hypothesis” in terms of the strong market response to the implementation of the updated China Environmental Protection Law (hereinafter referred to as “the new EPL”) in 2015, which verifies the effectiveness of China’s capital market in identifying dynamic changes of company fundamental information by selecting listed heavily polluting enterprises in China as research samples. The “attention hypothesis” interprets the slump in stock due to investors’ attention attracted by media coverage about implementation of “the new EPL”, while the “information revelation hypothesis” focuses on the investors’ information acquisition during the hiatus from promulgation to implementation of “the new EPL”. This paper is of great significance to help understand the behavioral characteristics, decision-making process and influencing mechanism of investors.
Smoking reduction in COPD patients in the Medical Spectrum Twente hospital : a review of the REDUQ study

Objective: This study examines to what extent smoking reduction in COPD patients is achieved through the REDUQ program and how smoking reduction can be explained. Design: Randomized, controlled multicenter trial. Subjects: For the REDUQ study participated 110 COPD patients of Medical Spectrum Twente hospital [MST] and the University Medical Centre Groningen [UMCG]. Of those 110 86 were from the MST and 24 patients from the UMCG. Method: Validity of self-reported measures was analyzed. An Intention-to-treat analysis to compared the reduction of ≥50% between the intensive intervention and the placebo self help intervention after 6 and 12 months. A univariate Analysis of Variance is conducted to determine the effect of successful smoking reduction on stage of change regarding smoking cessation. A hierarchical logistic regression is conducted to determine possible predictive determinants of smoking reduction. Results: The self-reported measures were found to be incongruent. The intention-to-treat analysis showed statistically significant effects for 6 months, but no statistical significance for 12 months. The effect of successful smoking reduction on stage of change regarding smoking cessation was statistically not significant. Determination of possible predictive determinants show that self-efficacy after 6 months increases the chance of smoking reduction. Craving and anxiety regarding to withdrawal after 12 months decreases the chance of smoking reduction after 12 months. Conclusion: Objective measures remain the golden standard. A smoking reduction can be achieved through the REDUQ program after 6 months. Successful smoking reduction does not lead to a progression of stage of change and a prospective determinant for smoking reduction after 6 month is self-efficacy and for smoking reduction after 12 months are craving and anxiety regarding to withdrawal.
Should Congestion Tolls Be Set by the Government or by the Private Sector? The Knight–Pigou Debate Revisited

We reframe an important debate between Pigou and Knight about the need for government intervention in allocating congestible resources like roads. Knight showed that private toll-setting would achieve an efficient allocation if some motorists commuted to work on an alternative route that was uncongestible. Government intervention was unnecessary. Others have shown that Knight's laissez-faire solution fails if the other road was also congestible but marred their demonstration by excluding private toll-setting on that road as well. We consider a game with simultaneous toll-setting on every congestible road. When we discover that the laissez-faire allocation is inefficient, we consider how the government can improve the private allocation by providing motorists an actual or potential alternative to the privately-priced, congestible resources. Our results apply to a wide range of allocation problems involving congestion: simultaneous tuition setting in private (or charter) schools when students can instead attend a public-school or simultaneous prize-setting in contests to cure diseases when researchers can instead work at NIH.
The Structural Determinants and Functional Consequences of Left Ventricular Outflow Tract Obstruction in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the commonest inherited cardiac condition. Many patients have resting or provocable left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) obstruction. Symptoms treated with drugs or surgery may improve. There is a need to improve the clinical assessment in individual patients, because of the often poor correlation between symptoms and LVOT gradient, and the association with complications such as stroke, heart failure and sudden cardiac death. In addition, in a proportion of patients with significant LVOT gradients, relief of obstruction does not adequately improve symptoms. Reduced angulation between the inter-ventricular septum and the aorta is a determinant of LVOT obstruction. However, lack of a standardised method of measurement in HCM without recourse to complex 3-D imaging limits the usefulness of this parameter in routine practice. Transthoracic echocardiography is widely available, and can be used to measure aorto-septal angulation. However, data in HCM are lacking. I validated a simple measurement of aorto-septal angulation using 2-D echocardiography and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging and determined its relation to provocable LVOT obstruction in HCM. I showed this technique to be easy, reproducible, comparable to magnetic resonance imaging, and can be quickly calculated using standard echocardiographic software. Patients have a smaller aorto-septal angle than controls, where it is associated with higher peak LVOT gradient. A reduced aorto-septal angle is highly specific for provocable LVOT obstruction and should prompt further evaluation in symptomatic patients without resting gradients. I used a non-invasive technique for measuring cardiac output to determine the relation between LVOT obstruction, cardiac output and peripheral oxygen utilisation in patients with HCM during exercise. I demonstrated that cardiac output response to exercise is impaired, caused largely by failure to appropriately augment stroke volume. LVOT obstruction is associated with greater impairment of stroke volume at peak exercise and is an independent and modifiable predictor of cardiac output reserve. However, heterogenous responses are seen between patients who otherwise appear similar using standard clinical criteria. There is therefore a strong argument for the individualisation of therapy in patients with LVOT obstruction. Invasive therapies to reduce gradients may work better in those with genuine obstruction to the outflow of blood, rather than for example myocardial ischaemia or mitral regurgitation. The non-invasive measurement of haemodynamic indices during exercise is practical, aids understanding of the complex physiological basis behind symptoms and may help to tailor therapy for HCM, and in particular LVOT obstruction.