Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk as moderator of the trust-loyalty relationship

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the role of perceived risk as a moderator of the key relational mediators of satisfaction and trust, and second, to test the influence of perceived product value and social bonding as antecedents of brand satisfaction and brand trust to understand their effectiveness under different risk conditions. Palmatier et al. (2006) call for the study of moderators of relational mediators, such as trust and satisfaction, which may determine the effectiveness of different relationship marketing strategies. Design/methodology/approach – This study investigates business-to-consumer relationships between a car brand and its customers, applying structural equation modeling. Findings – Results show that perceived risk moderates the mediating role of both brand trust and brand satisfaction on relationship outcomes. When perceived risk is low, brand satisfaction alone determines brand loyalty, whereas when perceived risk is high, brand trust exclusively .
Increased excitability of medium‐sized dorsal root ganglion neurons by prolonged interleukin‐1β exposure is K+ channel dependent and reversible

Neuropathic pain resulting from peripheral nerve injury is initiated and maintained by persistent ectopic activity in primary afferent neurons. Sciatic nerve injury increases the excitability of medium‐sized dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons. Levels of the inflammatory cytokine interleukin 1β (IL‐1β) increase and peak after 7 days. Five to six days of exposure of medium sized DRG neurons to 100 pm IL‐1β promotes persistent increases in excitability which abate within 3–4 days of cytokine removal. This is associated with a profound attenuation of K+ channel currents but only modest increases in function of cyclic nucleotide‐sensitive hyperpolarization‐activated channels (HCNs) and of voltage‐gated Na+ and Ca2+ channel currents. It is unlikely, therefore, that direct interaction of IL‐1β with DRG neurons is capable of initiating an enduring phenotypic shift in their electrophysiological properties that follows sciatic nerve injury. The findings also underline the importance of K+ channel modulation in the actions of inflammatory mediators on peripheral neurons.
Relationships in Franchised Distribution System: the Case of the Spanish Market

The purpose of this article is to examine long-term inter-firm relationship management and to investigate empirically if trust and commitment are essential variables for relationship success. This study analyses both the relationship between two behaviours (cooperation and exchange information) and the development of trust and commitment as well as their effects on long-term orientation, satisfaction and performance. The unit of analysis is the dyadic relationship, assessing separately franchisor's and franchisees' perspectives, and comparing similarities and differences across perspectives (Anderson & Narus, 1990; Jap, 1999). The model proposed has been tested with 107 franchisors and 102 franchisees operating both in the retail (food and beverages, fashions, furniture …) and the service sector (estate agencies, education, dry-cleaner's, diverse services …) in the Spanish franchised distribution system. Results show that both commitment and trust are key variables for long-term relationship success from the franchisors perspective, but that from the franchisees side, trust is the key variable for relationship success.
M/M/1/N Queuing System with Retention of Reneged Customers

The concept of customer reneging has been exploited to a great extent in recent past by the queuing modelers. Economically, if we see, the customer reneging leads to loss of potential customers and thereby results into the loss in the total revenue. Taking into consideration this customers’ loss due to reneging, a new queuing model has been developed that deals with customer retention. According to this model, a reneged customer can be convinced in many cases by employing certain convincing mechanism to stay in the queue for completion of his service. Thus, a reneged customer can be retained in the queuing system with some probability (say, q) and it may leave the queue without receiving service with probability p (=1-q). This process is referred to as customer retention. We consider a single server, finite capacity queuing system with customer retention in which the inter-arrival and service times follow negative-exponential distribution. The reneging times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. The steady state solution of the model has been obtained. Some performance measures have been computed. The sensitivity analysis of the model has been carried out. The effect of probability of retention on the average system size has been studied. The numerical results show that the average system size increases steadily as the probability of retention increases. Some particular cases of the model have been derived and discussed.
Achievability Performance Bounds for Integer-Forcing Source Coding

Integer-forcing source coding has been proposed as a low-complexity method for compression of distributed correlated Gaussian sources. In this scheme, each encoder quantizes its observation using the same fine lattice and reduces the result modulo a coarse lattice. Rather than directly recovering the individual quantized signals, the decoder first recovers a full-rank set of judiciously chosen integer linear combinations of the quantized signals, and then inverts it. It has been observed that the method works very well for “most” but not all source covariance matrices. The present work quantifies the measure of bad covariance matrices by studying the probability that integer-forcing source coding fails as a function of the allocated rate, where the probability is with respect to a random orthonormal transformation that is applied to the sources prior to quantization. For the important case where the signals to be compressed correspond to the antenna inputs of relays in an i.i. d. Rayleigh fading environment, this orthonormal transformation can be viewed as being performed by nature. The scheme is also studied in the context of a non-distributed system. Here, the goal is to arrive at a universal, yet practical, compression method using equal-rate quantizers with provable performance guarantees. The scheme is universal in the sense that the covariance matrix need only be learned at the decoder but not at the encoder. The goal is accomplished by replacing the random orthonormal transformation by transformations corresponding to number-theoretic space-time codes.
The Social Responsibility of Major Shareholders

This paper investigates the relationship between ownership and corporate social responsibility. There are at least two reasons why ownership may have an impact on corporate social responsibility. First, major shareholders are visible to outsiders and may therefore become the target of activists if they do not prevent their firm's management from making socially irresponsible decisions. Second, high levels of corporate social responsibility may improve financial performance. Corporate social responsibility would then be one of the factors of good management that a major shareholder would enforce in her monitoring effort. Similar to recent studies on the link between financial profitability and corporate social performance, we distinguish between two components of social responsibility: stakeholder management and social issue participation. Hillman and Keim (2001) find that the former has a positive impact on firm value whereas the latter has a negative impact. Using detailed ownership data and data on corporate social responsibility for the S&P500 firms, we analyse whether the existence of a major shareholder increases the level of stakeholder management or social issue participation. Although, we find similar signs and levels of significance to previous studies on the control variables in our regression, none of our ownership variables has an effect on social performance.
Cervical Intradural Disc Herniation and Intradural Gas on CT Scan

Intradural disc herniation has been reported as a rare type of intervertebral disc herniation, only 32 cases reported. It remains difficult to definitively diagnose the disease before surgery. We reported a 55 year-old female patient complaints of nuchal pain and bilateral arm weakness after a trauma accident. MRI revealed a C3-C4 herniated intervertebral disc (HIVD) with a ＂hawk-beak sign. ＂ CT scan image revealing two small gas bubbles in the spinal canal at C3-C4 level. In previous study, the presence of epidural gas on CT scan might suggest the potential presence of an intradural disc herniation in the lumbar spine. To our knowledge, this is the first case of cervical intradural herniated disc with intradural gas on CT scan.
Family Ownership and Firm Performance

Drawing upon agency theory, we examine the impact of interactions among family ownership, firm age, and succession intentions on firm performance. We suggest that family ownership has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm performance in small-to-medium sized family firms. We also suggest that this relationship is interactively moderated by firm age and succession intentions. We further suggest that when family is a majority shareholder, a family firm with succession intention performs better than the one without succession intention and the performance difference between family firms with and without succession intention increases as firms age. The findings support our hypotheses.
Medium-term post-Katrina health sequelae among New Orleans residents: predictors of poor mental and physical health.

AIMS To assess the medium-term post-Katrina mental and physical health of New Orleans residents and to determine demographic, social and environmental factors that predict poor mental and physical health. BACKGROUND Major disasters can have a negative impact on the health of survivors for prolonged periods. Although the initial and short-term impacts of Hurricane Katrina have been well described, the medium-term impacts have not been studied as thoroughly. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey. METHODS A convenience sample (n = 222) of residents in Gentilly area of New Orleans completed questionnaires between 16 and 18 December 2006. Multivariate logistic regression and multiple regression models were employed to determine predictors of poor mental and physical health. RESULTS Poor mental health was reported by 52% of the respondents. Pre-Katrina depression [odds ratio (OR) = 19.1], post-Katrina depression (OR = 7.2), poor physical health (OR = 5.6), feeling unsafe from crime (OR = 4.3) and female gender (OR = 2.6) were significant predictor variables of poor mental health. Twenty-four percent of the variance in number of days of poor mental health was explained by the independent variables (R(2) = 0.24; p < 0.001). Poor physical health was reported by 48% of the respondents. Poor mental health (OR = 3.9), lack of money to buy food (OR = 2.7) and pre-Katrina arthritis (OR = 2.6) were significant predictor variables of poor physical health. Twenty-three percent of the variance in number of days of poor physical health was explained by the independent variables (R(2) = 0.23; p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Approximately half of the New Orleans residents continue to experience poor mental and physical health 15 months after Katrina. The results support focusing post-Katrina efforts to protect residents from crime, improve mental health services to the depressed and improve food supply to the poor. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE Identifying predictors of poor mental and physical health may help clinicians and policy makers to focus their efforts in ameliorating the post-disaster health sequelae.
The phylogenetic relationships of Caulobacter, Asticcacaulis and Brevundimonas species and their taxonomic implications.

The phylogenetic relationships among the species of Caulobacter, Asticcacaulis and Brevundimonas were studied by comparison of their 16S rDNA sequences. The analysis of almost complete sequences confirmed the early evolutionary divergence of the freshwater and marine species of Caulobacter reported previously [Stahl, D. A. , Key, R. , Flesher, B. & Smit, J. (1992). J Bacteriol 174, 2193-2198]. The freshwater species formed two distinct clusters. One cluster contained the species Caulobacter bacteroides, Caulobacter crescentus, Caulobacter fusiformis and Caulobacter henricii. C. bacteroides and C. fusiformis are very closely related (sequence identity 99.8%). The second cluster was not exclusive and contained the specis Caulobacter intermedius, Caulobacter subvibrioides and Caulobacter variabilis, as well as Brevundimonas diminuta and Brevundimonas vesicularis. The marine species Caulobacter halobacteroides and Caulobacter maris were very closely related, with a sequence identity of 99.7%. These two species were most closely but distantly related to the marine hyphal/budding bacteria Hyphomonas jannaschiana and Hirschia baltica, which formed a deep phylogenetic line with Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Rhodobacter capsulatus. Caulobacter leidyia is unrelated to the other species of Caulobacter and belongs to the alpha-4 subclass of the Proteobacteria, forming a distinct cluster with Asticcacaulis excentricus and Asticcacaulis biprosthecium. The taxonomic implications of the polyphyletic nature of the genus Caulobacter and the absence of a type culture for the type species of the genus Caulobacter vibrioides, are discussed.
A model of consumer relationships with store brands, personnel and stores in Spain

Abstract Relationship Marketing is an important approach to the study of exchanges. This approach puts emphasis on the development of trust, satisfaction and relational norms to obtain parties' commitment. However, there are very few studies that consider the different levels the consumer relates with. Moreover, a limited number of marketing studies include variables that are often used in economic approaches such as signalling theory, which can enrich the understanding of commercial relationships. Therefore, the proposed multidisciplinary model relates economic variables—the signals that firms send to the market—and key relational variables—satisfaction and trust—considering three relationship levels of trust and satisfaction—store brands, personnel and stores. Results show a transference process among the three levels of trust and confirm that satisfaction and signals are important antecedents of each trust level.
Effect of a Memory‐Enhancing Drug, AIT‐082, on the Level of Synaptophysin

Abstract: Our objective is to study the effect of AIT‐082 on the level of synaptophysin in cultured pheochromocytoma (PC12) cells. The drug AIT‐082, a unique purine hypoxanthine derivative, is under development for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD). We analyzed synaptophysin protein as an index of synaptic numbers and density and indirectly neuronal transmission. PC12 cells were treated with nerve growth factor (NGF) (50 ng/ml) and/or different doses of AIT‐082 (5–50 ng/ml) obtained from NeoTherapeutics, CA. In the western immunoblots of conditioned media and cell lysates, we detected synaptophysin as 36–40 kDa protein bands. When PC12 cells were treated with NGF and samples were analyzed at 24 or 48 hours after treatment, the secretion of synaptophysin was drastically reduced in the conditioned medium. A significant reduction in the intracellular level of synaptophysin in NGF‐treated samples was also noted. By contrast, when PC12 cells were treated with AIT‐082, the secretion of synaptophysin was increased in the conditioned medium as compared to the control. There was also a significant increase in the intracellular levels of synaptophysin in AIT‐082‐treated cultures. NGF treatment resulted in sympathetic neuronal phenotypes in PC12 cells. As it is known that the immunoreactivity of the synaptophysin protein correlates with the density of the synaptic terminal, our results suggest that treatment by AIT‐082 could enhance neurotransmitter release at the presynaptic terminal, which may play a role in the improvement of cognition seen in AD subjects.
Pricing plans for a financial advisory service

Purpose – In cooperation with a German online retail bank, the aim of this paper is to investigate how the bank should price a new fee-only financial advisory service. Two types of pricing plans differ in terms of their strategies for determining monthly prices: a fixed monthly price that is identical for all clients (i.e. a flat pricing plan) or a monthly price that varies as a function of each client's assets under management (i.e. a volume pricing plan). Design/methodology/approach – With a discrete choice experiment, this article studies client preferences for the two types of plans. To ensure that the respondents understood the financial consequences of their decisions, a price calculator was embedded into the discrete choice experiment to enable the respondents to determine their individual monthly prices based on their assets under management. Findings – Methodologically, the price calculator is useful for simplifying mathematically complex decisions, and it provides additional valuable information.
Ultrastructural evaluation of enamel surface morphology after tooth bleaching followed by the application of protective pastes.

The aim of the present in vitro study was to evaluate the morphology of bleached enamel surface followed by the application of different protective pastes. Specimens were prepared from 50 human incisors free of caries and defects. The bleaching procedure was performed with 35% hydrogen peroxide (Perfect Bleach Office+). For the remineralization treatment, different protective pastes (Tooth Mousse, MI Paste Plus, Remin Pro, and Profluorid Varnish) were evaluated. Specimens were randomly assigned to 10 groups of 5 specimens each. The specimens were analyzed under scanning electron microscopy. The superficial morphology of enamel was examined and scored as follows: 0, enamel with smooth surface morphology; 1, enamel with slight irregularities; 2, enamel with moderate irregularities; 3, enamel with accentuated irregularities. The photomicrographs were evaluated in a double-blind manner by three examiners, previously calibrated. Results were analyzed by a Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric test, at the significance level of 0.05. Dunn method posttest was applied for multiple comparisons. A different superficial morphology was observed among control group specimens and specimens treated with bleaching agent and protective pastes (p < 0.05). Enamel bleached showed pronounced surface changes and irregularities, significantly different from other groups except for groups 8 (enamel + Perfect Bleach Office+ + Remin Pro) and 10 (enamel + Perfect Bleach Office+ + Profluorid Varnish) (p > 0.05). The application of the tested pastes after bleaching is effective on repairing enamel surface morphology, demonstrating a higher efficacy for the CPP-ACP products compared to fluoridated ones. SCANNING 38:221-226, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Effects of recombinant human interleukin-6 administration on bone in rhesus monkeys.

The role of interleukin-6 in the bone microenvironment is controversial. We studied the effect of recombinant human interleukin-6 (rhIL-6) administration on bone metabolism in 10 adult female rhesus monkeys (age 12-27 years). Monkeys received rhIL-6 (15 micrograms/kg/day) daily by subcutaneous injection for 28 days. Serum alkaline phosphatase, osteocalcin, and 24 h urinary calcium excretion were determined before, during (at weeks 2 and 4), and after (at week 6) treatment. Transilial biopsies (right and left) were obtained before treatment was initiated and just after the final (28th) dose at week 4. The serum alkaline phosphatase significantly increased at 2 and 4 weeks of rhIL-6 administration. Osteocalcin and urinary calcium excretion significantly decreased at week 2. Upon treatment with rhIL-6 significant reductions in OS/BS and Ob.S/BS were observed without changes in other static histomorphometry parameters. The reductions in urinary calcium excretion, serum osteocalcin, and the static bone parameters are consistent with an IL-6 induced reduction in bone formation or turnover. Whether this pharmacologic effect is relevant at the physiologic level remains to be determined.
Analysis of Serpulina hyodysenteriae strain variation and its molecular epidemiology using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis

Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) was applied as a molecular typing tool for the spirochaete Serpulina hyodysenteriae, the agent of swine dysentery. Analysis of a collection of 40 mainly Australian isolates, previously characterized by other methods, divided these into 23 PFGE types. This confirmed that there are many strains of the spirochaete in Australia. PFGE was more discriminatory for strain typing than both multilocus enzyme electrophoresis and serotyping. It had similar discriminatory power to restriction endonuclease analysis, but the results of PFGE were easier to interpret. When applied to 29 isolates collected from 4 farms over periods of up to 8 years, 2 PFGE patterns were found on 3 farms, and a single pattern on the other. In each case a new strain had apparently emerged as a variant of an original parent strain. PFGE was found to be a powerful technique for investigating the molecular epidemiology of swine dysentery outbreaks.
In vitro development of goat parthenogenetic and somatic cell nuclear transfer embryos derived from different activation protocols

Summary Oocyte activation is an essential step in animal cloning to allow subsequent development of the reconstructed embryos. A special activation protocol is required for different animal species. The present study investigated low temperature, electrical pulses, ethanol, ionomycin and strontium for goat oocyte activation in order to optimize the protocols. We found, as a result, effective activation and parthenogenetic development of goat oocytes that had been derived from ionomycin, strontium and electrical pulse groups. Within each group 79.3–81.6%, 2.2–78.8% and 65.5% of the oocytes cleaved and 16.2–24.8%, 0–15.6% and 11.1% of the cleaved embryos developed into blastocysts when the oocytes were activated by ionomycin combined with 6-dimethylaminopurine, strontium plus cytochalasin B and electrical pulses combined with cytochalasin B, respectively. However, low temperature and ethanol were both unable to activate goat oocytes under our experimental conditions. When ionomycin combined with 6-dimethylaminopurine and strontium plus cytochalasin B was applied to activate somatic cell nuclear transfer embryos derived from cultured cumulus, 51.0% and 72.5% of the embryos cleaved, respectively. After transfer of 4-cell embryos into recipients, one (1/19 and 1/7) of the recipients from each group was found to be pregnant as detected by ultrasound, but both of these recipients lost the embryos between 45 and 60 days of pregnancy.
Distribution Channel Relationships in Diverse Cultures

One of the main functions of culture is division of labour among various actors in society. Since the global environment is characterised by diverse and deep‐rooted cultural norms and value systems, the nature of this division of labour across cultures should exhibit systematic differences. Channels of distribution are primarily designed to facilitate division of labour, and channel relationships should therefore reflect the underlying cultural tenets of society. Using Hofstede′s schemata to classify various national cultures, a series of propositions is generated on how distribution channel relationships will vary across countries based on their positions on Hofstede′s four dimensions of culture.