Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Key issues relating to management information systems from the perspective of managers of Iran's agricultural extension providers

Accepted 26 May, 2011 The purpose of the paper is to investigate issues relating to the management information systems of agricultural extension providers in Iran. A survey study was applied as a methodology of research work. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire that addressed evaluating managers’ responses with regard to management information system (MIS) key issues. All issues had mean score greater than five as perceived by managers. This would suggest that most key issues are moderately important in the present time. To delineate more clearly the relationships between the organizational factors and MIS key issues ratings, a descriptive model is currently under development. Future work is to formulate a research model that more precisely describes the relationship between the organization's factors and the MIS key issues rankings across the countries. The organization factors should extend factors covered in the present study to those that are broadly pertinent to the dimensions of the organization's operating environment. To identification of issues of agricultural extension management information system, and how the managers rate the importance of the MIS issues according to organizational factors. The paper advances a clear plan of action for improving the management information system in the area of agricultural extension providers to all developing countries.
Vestibular rehabilitation and 6-month follow-up using objective and subjective measures

Conclusions. Vestibular rehabilitation improves quality of life by reducing the degree of handicap, improving the ability to perform everyday tasks and providing long-term rehabilitation stability (at 6 months). Recovery of the vestibulo-ocular reflex and the vestibulo-spinal reflex efficiency was proven by the objective results obtained in this study. Vestibular rehabilitation improves both subjective and objective parameters, although no significant correlation between these two indices was found. Objective. To determine the outcome of subjective and objective parameters and long-term rehabilitation stability after vestibular rehabilitation in 43 patients with vestibular disorders. Material and methods. The subjective tests used were the Medical Outcomes Study 36-item Short Form, the Dizziness Handicap Inventory and the Activity-specific Balance Confidence scale. The objective tests used were video-oculoscopy, dynamic visual acuity, the Equitest and the Dynamic Gait Index. All indices were evaluated before and after rehabilitation and at follow-up. Results. All patients showed an improvement in quality of life and a reduction in handicap due to dizziness. Improvement in objective test results was also seen. These results were stable at follow-up. A correlation was found between different subjective measures, but there was no correlation between subjective and objective measures.
A Study of the Impact of Human Resource Development Strategies On Knowledge Sharing And Organizational Effectiveness In Management Institutions In Iran.

Article history: Received 14 November 2013 Received in revised form 16 December 2013 Accepted 20 December 2013 Available online 1 March 2014 Background: Knowledge sharing is not just for transmitting the knowledge but more on the value and the impact of the knowledge itself. Effective knowledge sharing can be achieved through a process of socialization within supportive organizational culture. However people's non-supportive beliefs in sharing knowledge either formal or informal ways can cause knowledge management efforts fail in an organization . Objective: The objective of the study is to understand the nature of sharing knowledge that will lead into the understanding of its awareness and readiness focusing on its perceptions or views in management institutions. Results: The result support that human resource development strategies influences knowledge sharing in step 1.In step 2 upon introduction of mediating variable, human resource development strategies were found significant. Furthermore, knowledge sharing was positively related with organizational and effectiveness. This confirms that knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between organizational culture and organizational effectiveness. Conclusion: The findings of this study have explored the importance of the human resource development strategies towards knowledge sharing practices and organizational effectiveness.
Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths?

Abstract In 1979, Australia abolished federal inheritance taxes. Using daily deaths data, we show that approximately 50 deaths were shifted from the week before the abolition to the week after. This amounts to over half of those who would have been eligible to pay the tax. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that our results are driven by misreporting, our results imply that over the very short run, the death rate may be highly elastic with respect to the inheritance tax rate.
Diagnostic Tests Based on Human Basophils: Potentials, Pitfalls and Perspectives

Human basophils are important tools for studying immediate-type hypersensitivity reactions since they release a variety of mediators (e.g., histamine, leukotriene C4, IL-4 and IL-13) following allergen triggering. Several diagnostic tools have been introduced that measure either leukotriene production or the upregulation of surface markers (CD63 and CD203c) from these cells after antigen stimulation. However, a broad variability in basophil activity exists between different basophil donors and different antigens within one donor. This manifests itself in terms of their reactivity (maximum secretory response), based on the intracellular signaling of the basophils studied, and in terms of their sensitivity. The latter is governed by the number of IgE receptors per basophil, the ratio of antigen-specific IgE to total IgE, and by the number of cell surface antigen-specific IgE molecules for half-maximal responses, termed ‘intrinsic sensitivity’. These variables give rise to shifts in the dose-response curves which, in a diagnostic setting where only a single antigen concentration is employed, may produce false-negative data. Thus, in order to meaningfully utilize the current basophil activation tests for diagnostic purposes, each allergen should be pre-evaluated separately in order to determine a suitable stimulation range. Additionally, anti-IgE or anti-FcΕRIα antibodies should serve as positive controls, bearing in mind that 10–20% of basophil donors are not responsive to IgE-mediated stimulation. Diagnostic studies using CD63 or CD203c in hymenoptera, food and drug allergy are critically discussed. Basophil-based tests are indicated for allergy testing in selected cases but should only be performed by experienced laboratories.
Institutional trust and multilevel government in the European Union: Congruence or compensation?

Does trust in national institutions foster or hinder trust in the institutions of the European Union (EU)? There is no agreement in the literature on popular support for the EU about the direction of the relationship between trust in national and European institutions. Some scholars argue that both will be positively related, others have proposed the opposite hypothesis: low levels of trust in national institutions will lead citizens to higher levels of support for the EU. We argue that both hypotheses are true but operate at different levels: whereas more trusting citizens tend to be so in both the national and the European arenas, we also find that at the country level the relationship is negative: living in a country with highly trusted and well-performing institutions hinders trust in the European Parliament. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Survey and Hierarchical Linear Modeling.
The Valuation of the Foreign Income of U.S. Multinational Firms: A Growth Opportunities Perspective

This paper demonstrates the value-relevance of foreign earnings for U.S. multinational firms by examining the associations between annual abnormal stock performance and changes in firms' domestic and foreign incomes disclosed through SEC Regulation ? 210.4-08(h). For 2570 firm-year observations between 1985 and 1993, both foreign and domestic earnings changes have significant positive associations with annual excess returns measures; however, the association coefficient on foreign income is significantly larger than the association coefficient on domestic income. This indicates that foreign earnings disclosures are value-relevant and suggests that firm value is more sensitive to foreign earnings than domestic earnings. We demonstrate that this larger foreign association coefficient is consistent with differences in growth opportunities between domestic and foreign operations. To further support the growth opportunity interpretation of the results, we demonstrate that larger foreign association coefficients are not due to the influence of exchange rate changes or the result of methodological problems such as differences in the timing of foreign versus domestic earnings recognition or misspecification in the earnings expectation process.
A Convenient Scapegoat: Fair Value Accounting by Commercial Banks during the Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT: Critics argue that fair value provisions in U.S. accounting rules exacerbated the recent financial crisis by depleting banks' regulatory capital, which curtailed lending and triggered asset sales, leading to further economic turmoil. Defenders counter-argue that the fair value provisions were insufficient to lead to the pro-cyclical effects alleged by the critics. Our evidence indicates that these provisions did not affect the commercial banking industry in the ways commonly alleged by critics. First, we show that fair value accounting losses had minimal effect on regulatory capital. Then, we examine sales of securities during the crisis, finding mixed evidence that banks sold securities in response to capital-depleting charges. However, the sales that potentially resulted from the charges appear to be economically insignificant, as there was no industry- or firm-level increase in sales of securities during the crisis. JEL Classifications: M41; M42; M44. Data Availability: Data are available fro.
What do Australian consumers think about current advertising standards

The concept of community standards is the cornerstone of advertising self-regulation in Australia. However, there is a dearth of research on current attitudes towards advertising and a virtual absence of such data in an Australian context. A questionnaire was developed to assess consumer attitudes towards advertising; respondents were 872 adults residing in New South Wales. We found high levels of concern regarding advertising standards in general and a consistent perception that advertising should not, for example, use coarse language or violent images, portray women or men as sex objects or show nudity, stereotype or make fun of groups of people, or convey messages that undermine parental authority. In relation to specific appeals and executional elements, although we identified numerous statistically significant demographic differences, there was a clear majority view as to what elements are unacceptable. That is, rather than the posited vocal ‘moral minority’, there is a consistency of views across the community on key issues of advertising standards. The finding that only a very small proportion of community-based respondents knew how to make a complaint to the correct organisation suggests that studies utilising complainant samples are unlikely to be representative of those who are concerned about advertising. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
On the path of integration in the Gulf region

It is examined whether the six countries comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are sufficiently compatible to form a viable economic and financial block in the Gulf region. Despite long and numerous governmental attempts since the mid 1980s, and in spite of public pressures to expedite the process, these countries have thus far failed to achieve full economic and financial integration. Empirical evidence suggests that this apparent failure is unlikely the outcome of economic or financial incompatibility among the countries in the region. The results imply that more efforts should be directed at resolving possible sociopolitical differences that may have hampered real progress toward the emergence of a genuine and effective bloc in the Gulf region.
Why Do Emitters Trade Carbon Permits? Firm-Level Evidence from the European Emission Trading Scheme

The creation of the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has turned the right to emit CO2 into a positively priced intermediate good for the affected firms. Firms thus face the decision whether to source compliance with the EU ETS within their boundaries or to acquire it through the permit trade. However, a combination of internal abatement, free permit allocation and exibility to shift the use of their allocation across time creates opportunities to achieve compliance with the EU ETS without entering the permit trade. This paper aims to identify firm-level determinants of participation in and the extent of the permit trade while recognizing the possibility of zero trade flows leading to selection bias if unaccounted-for. We construct a firm-level dataset incorporating transaction-level information from both EU ETS operator and person holding accounts, thus representing the entire system-wide permit trade by CO2 emitters. We cover the supply and demand sides of the permit trade, both inter- firm and intra-firm, and account for a wide set of firm-level characteristics using firms' balance sheet information. A detailed descriptive analysis documents salient features of the firm-level permit trade. We then jointly model firms' participation and amount decisions while allowing for possible self-selection into trading. Our results suggest that participation in the permit trade is driven by a combination of firm-specific factors existing independently of the EU ETS, such as size, sector and ownership structure, and market-specific characteristics resulting from the firms' inclusion in the EU ETS, such as the value of the firms' free permit endowment and their relative allowance position. We find that amounts traded are mostly driven by market-specific factors. In contrast to the literature on the firm-level determinants of the general goods trade we do not find self-selection into trading.
POTENTIATION OF THE EFFECTS OF ADENOSINE ON ISOLATED CARDIAC AND SMOOTH MUSCLE BY DIAZEPAM

1 Adenosine (10−7 to 3 times 10−4 m) or 2‐chloroadenosine (10−8 to 10−5 m) produced concentration‐dependent inhibition of the responses of the rat isolated vas deferens to electrical field stimulation. In electrically driven (2 Hz) guinea‐pig isolated left atria, adenosine (10−6 to 10−3 m) or 2‐chloroadenosine (10−8 to 10−7 m) produced concentration‐dependent decreases in isometric tension. 2 Diazepam (10−6 and 10−5 m) had no direct effect per se, but significantly potentiated the inhibitory action of adenosine on both tissues without altering the inhibitory effect of 2‐chloroadenosine. 3 The adenosine uptake inhibitors, hydroxynitrobenzylthioguanosine (HNBTG, 10−5 m) and dipyridamole (10−5 m) also potentiated the inhibitory actions of adenosine in rat vas deferens, but not those of 2‐chloroadenosine. 4 Following adenosine uptake inhibition in rat vas deferens by HNBTG (10−5 m), diazepam (10−5 m) failed to produce any significant further potentiation of the inhibitory action of adenosine. 5 It is concluded that the potentiation of adenosine by diazepam is possibly due to an inhibition of adenosine uptake.
Has Job Stability Declined Yet? New Evidence for the 1990s

We update the evidence on changes in job stability through the mid‐1990s, using recently released Current Population Survey data for 1995 that parallel earlier job tenure supplements. In the aggregate, job stability declined modestly in the first half of the 1990s. Moreover, the relatively small aggregate changes mask rather sharp declines in stability for workers with more than a few years of tenure. Nonetheless, the data available to this point do not support the conclusion that the downward shift in job stability for more tenured workers, and the more modest decline in aggregate job stability, reflect long‐term trends.
Teaching out-of-field in Western Australia

A former head of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, once called out-of-field teaching education's "dirty little secret" (Ingersoll, 2003, p. 5). The practice of allowing or assigning teachers to teach subjects or year levels for which they do not have any formal Qualifications has lead to considerable debate within the educational community. Such concerns over the possible negative impact of out-of-field Teaching on students, teachers and the broader school community led the Western Australian College of Teaching (WACOT) to commission an exploratory empirical study of the extent of the phenomenon in Western Australia. This paper presents the main findings from the empirical study And literature review and seeks to contribute to a greater understanding of The extent, causes, impact and possible solutions to the phenomenon of out-of-field teaching.
Investigations into phonological attribute classifier representations for CRF phone recognition

Classiﬁer combination has long been a staple for improving robustness of ASR systems; we present an experiment where introducing phonological feature scores from another lab’s system [1] into our system gives a statistically signiﬁcant improvement in Conditional Random Field-based TIMIT phone recognition, despite a standalone system based on their features performing signiﬁcantly worse. The second part of the paper explores the reasons for this improvement by examining different representations of phonological attribute classiﬁers, in terms of what they are classifying (binary versus n-ary features) and representation of scoring functions. The analysis leads to the conclusions that while binary phonological feature estimates usually are worse than n-ary features, the combination of the two can be quite good if there are also differences in the feature deﬁni-tions or training paradigm.
Heuristic Data Placement for Data-Intensive Applications in Heterogeneous Cloud

Data placement is an important issue which aims at reducing the cost of internode data transfers in cloud especially for data-intensive applications, in order to improve the performance of the entire cloud system. This paper proposes an improved data placement algorithm for heterogeneous cloud environments. In the initialization phase, a data clustering algorithm based on data dependency clustering and recursive partitioning has been presented, and both the factor of data size and fixed position are incorporated. And then a heuristic tree-to-tree data placement strategy is advanced in order to make frequent data movements occur on high-bandwidth channels. Simulation results show that, compared with two classical strategies, this strategy can effectively reduce the amount of data transmission and its time consumption during execution.
Older Adults' Use of Online Health Information - Do They Even Try?

Online health information holds the potential to support older adults in taking active control of their health and well-being. Yet, despite generally using the Internet, many seniors do not make use of health information provided via the Internet. Understanding why older Internet users do not use online health information is consequently of high importance. Drawing on post-adoption research, a model is developed and empirically validated that examines how the interplay of health need, health knowledge, exploratory IT behavior and benefit expectations jointly accounts for seniors’ online health information use. This research contributes to the literature by focusing explicitly on older adults and by providing a better understanding how health need and health knowledge enable and inhibit online health information use.
The Glu27 allele of the β2 adrenergic receptor increases the risk of cardiac hypertrophy in hypertension

Objective Cardiac and vascular remodeling occur in response to hypertension. Genetic background appears to modify the development of target organ damage (TOD). We evaluated the impact on hypertension-associated TOD of a highly polymorphic gene with elevated significance for the regulation of the cardiovascular system, the β2AR gene. Methods We recruited 775 hypertensives (mean ± SE: age 53.5 ± 0.5, from 20 to 84 years; female 32.7%; systolic (SBP)/diastolic (DBP) blood pressure: 159 ± 1.2/101 ± 0.6 mmHg) referred to the departmental outpatient clinic and screened them for the Arg16Gly, Gln27Glu, and Ile164Thr variants of β2AR gene. We performed association analyses on clinical, anamnesis, anthropometrical and biochemical parameters as well as cardiac and vascular ultrasound. Results We found that the three polymorphisms did not affect blood pressure levels. Cardiac TOD appeared to be related to the Glu27 variant. In fact, the Glu27 allele associates with a 1.4-fold higher risk of developing cardiac hypertrophy, and directly correlated with larger systolic and diastolic left ventricle internal diameters. Vascular TOD was not affected by the three polymorphisms. Ancillary to our finding we observed that the Glu27 variant is associated with a higher incidence of dyslipidemia. Conclusions Our data indicate that β2AR gene polymorphisms participate in the determination of cardiac TOD associated with hypertension.
Mobilization of granules in neutrophils from patients with myeloproliferative disorders

Abstract: Neutrophil granule subsets and dynamics were studied in 4 patients with polycythemia vera/myelofibrosis and 2 patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia. Alkaline phosphatase, a marker for the membrane of secretory vesicles (the most readily mobilizable pool of intracellular membranes in neutrophils) was highly elevated in the PV/MF patients and significantly reduced in the CML patients. In spite of this, the amount of secretory vesicles was normal as judged by the content of albumin, and of the membrane protein cytochrome b_245 and CD11b, both partially localized in secretory vesicles. Gelatinase granules were present in all patients. The azurophil granules were lighter than normal in both CML patients. SDS‐PAGE protein profiles indicated absence of defensins from azurophil granules from 1 CML patient. In addition, a 41–42 kD doublet protein band was absent from 2 PV and 1 CML patient, and reduced in the other CML patient. No difference in mobilization of granules was observed between patient neutrophils and control neutrophils. Also, stimulation with 10 8 mol/l N‐formyl‐methionyl‐leucyl‐phenylalanine induced normal increases in intracellular Ca2+ in patient neutrophils. These results indicate that stimulus‐response coupling leading to granule exocytosis is intact in neutrophils from patients with myeloproliferative disorders.
The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian

Early years the "History" politics in the 1760s and 1770s - Catherine Macaulay, John Sawbridge and the revival of English radicalism the Bath period, 1776-1779 after the second marriage, 1779-1791 a woman in a man's world religion, ethics and education the sources and nature of Catherine Macaulay's republicanism Catherine Macaulay, English radicalism and the American Revolution Catherine Macaulay, the French Revolution and Burke.