Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards innovation, co-creation and customers’ satisfaction: a banking sector perspective

Co-creation fosters customer’s involvement for innovation in products/services and is used as a tool to develop competitive edge for better entrepreneurship. Based on limited evidence, the study aims to examine the factors contributing to the co-creation and the relationship of co-creation with customer satisfaction. ,A sample of 384 customers from selected banks in Pakistan was selected. The study adopted quantitative, explanatory and cross-sectional research design. Structural equation modeling is used for analysis. ,The results revealed a positive and significant relationship between co-creation with customer satisfaction. Further results revealed that access to information, risk assessment and transparency have a positive relationship with co-creation for innovation. The study is significant for customers and management of banks to understand the implications of co-creation to increase customer satisfaction. ,Few banks with a small number of customers were selected for the study. ,Managers must consider customer’s access to information, risk assessment and transparency of information as necessary factors for co-creation that foster innovation and entrepreneurial opportunities because co-creation strengthens customer satisfaction. ,Adopting the co-creation process brings long-lasting harmony between customers and banks, and customers may consider the banks as being socially responsible by inviting the opinions of their customers. ,Model is re-tested in the context of Pakistani banks with selected variables affecting co-creation for innovation. Moreover, the relationship of co-creation with customer satisfaction is examined.
Weldability of Aluminum-Steel Joints Using Continuous Drive Friction Welding Process, Without the Presence of Intermetallic Compounds

Weldability of aluminum-steel joints has been studied mainly to avoid the formation of IMC. Nowadays, there are two ways to control the effect of FexAly in welding: 1) the elimination of IMCs or 2) the generation of a thin and homogeneous layer of these phases. In this way, the present work explores the first route, manufacturing joints aluminum-steel using solid state welding process. In order to evaluate the effect of the welding parameters, temperature measures were carried out during the process as well as the microstructural evaluation using optical microscopy and SEM. Finally, the welded joints were subject to tensile strength tests to evaluate their mechanical behavior and try to stablish the nature of the interfacial bonding between both metals. The microstructural characterization of the joints does not reveal the formation of IMCs; this is attributed to the low temperature reached during the process, lower than 545 °C. The welded joint failures in the TMAZ, in the low hardness zone, product of the over aging of the precipitates β”. The nature of the bonding in the interface is not clear yet, but it is considered that the atomic diffusion trough the interface and adhesive bonding favors the joint.
Temperature, Test Scores, and Educational Attainment

How does temperature affect educational attainment? Evidence from 4.6 million high school exit exams from New York City suggests that heat stress can significantly diminish exam performance in the short run and reduce educational attainment in the long run. Taking an exam on a 90◦F day relative to a 72◦F day leads to a 0.19 standard deviation reduction in performance, equivalent to a quarter of the Black-White achievement gap, and a 12.3% higher likelihood of failing an exam. Hot days during the school year reduce subsequent exam performance by 2.2% of a standard deviation per day above 80◦F, suggesting that cumulative heat exposure can reduce the rate of learning. This study finds some evidence for protective effects of air conditioning, and strong evidence for “adaptive grading”, whereby teachers partially offset the adverse performance impacts of acute heat stress by manipulating grades near passing thresholds when students have experienced hot exam sittings. These findings may have implications for estimating the social cost of carbon, designing education policy, and our understanding of the role that climatic factors play in explaining income gaps across individuals and nations. ∗The author would like to thank Larry Katz, Robert Stavins, Andrei Shleifer, Geoffrey Heal, Raj Chetty, Joe Aldy, Claudia Goldin, Edward Glaeser, Jim Stock, Martin Feldstein, Jeff Miron, Jeff Liebman, Greg Mankiw, Josh Goodman, David Keith, Peter Huybers, Daniel Schrag, Max Auffhammer, Sol Hsiang, Sean Reardon, Olivier Deschenes and numerous seminar participants at Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Seoul National, Oxford, IZA, the NYC Department of Health, the NBER Summer Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for valuable comments and feedback. Thanks also to the NYC Department of Education for data access, and to Nicolas Cerkez, Rodrigo Leal, Kevin Eskici, and William Xiao for excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are my own. Funding from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Harvard Climate Change Solutions Fund is gratefully acknowledged.
Correlation between Immunohistochemical and Histomorphological Features of Ampullary Carcinomas: A Study on 72 Cases from a Tertiary Health Care Center

Tumors involving the ampulla could be arising primarily in the ampulla or extending from the adjacent. When a neoplasm is centered primarily in the ampulla with or without periampullary mucosal involvement, it is considered a primary ampullary carcinoma. These tumors generally have a better prognosis than duodenal and pancreaticobiliary neoplasms secondarily involving the ampulla. Distinguishing between the two primary types has prognostic implications, as the pancreaticobiliary-type ampullary carcinomas are said to have a poorer prognosis than the intestinal-type. Morphological analysis alone may not suffice in this context. The role of immunohistochemistry has therefore been explored by various groups of workers. The purpose of the present study was to determine the role of morphology and cytokeratin profile in accurate typing of ampullary carcinomas as intestinal and pancreaticobiliary.
Valeurs de référence de la lipoprotéine(a) dans une population française.

OBJECTIVES The aim of this work is to study the effect of different biological factors that could affect Lp(a) level in a presumably healthy population and to establish reference limits. METHODS We selected 723 subjects (367 men and 356 women) for the age interval 4 to 64 years for evaluation. RESULTS The distribution of Lp(a) is not Gaussian; 50.5% of subjects had Lp(a) concentrations under 0.10 g/l and the value for the 75th percentile was 0.27 g/l and 0.57 g/l for the 90th percentile. No relationship was observed between Lp(a) concentration and cholesterolaemia, triglyceridaemia, glycaemia, inflammatory proteins (orosomucoide and CRP), overweight, tobacco consumption and oral contraceptive use. The menopause state in women was a factor correlated with increased Lp(a) but this increase was not significant. Moreover, alcohol consumption (more than 44 g per day in men and more than 22 g per day in women) was associated with lower Lp(a) values. Among familial cardiovascular risks, only paternal listing of hypertension was associated with Lp(a) concentration in men. CONCLUSION The measurement of Lp(a) in a young subject could be used as a genetic marker of cardiovascular risk associated with abnormal lipid metabolism and thrombosis phenomena.
Opinions of women from deprived communities on national tobacco control measures in England

Abstract Objective: To ascertain the perceptions of women from deprived communities on national tobacco control measures in England. Methods: A qualitative study of 11 women, smokers and ex-smokers, from disadvantaged areas, who had used the National Health Service (NHS) Stop Smoking Service. Data were collected through a focus group and semi-structured interviews, and subjected to thematic analysis. Results: The ban on smoking in confined public places was perceived as an effective measure for tobacco control. Methods to restrict accessibility – including removing point-of-sale displays, raising the price, and preventing sales in certain places – were perceived as effective techniques to deter smoking initiation and prevent triggering temptation to smoke for someone motivated to quit, but not helpful to change attitudes or behaviors among current smokers. Women felt desensitized to health warnings used on tobacco products. Public health campaigns with gain-framed messages were more likely to engage smokers to want to quit. Of the loss-framed messages, participants felt that focusing on personal appearance and children was effective. Conclusions: Strategies that are tailored to attitudes and beliefs among women smokers should consider gain-framed messages and messages that focused on the effects to appearance and children to promote cessation and prevent relapse.
Global Imbalances and Policy Wars at the Zero Lower Bound

This article explores the consequences of extremely low real interest rates in a world with integrated but heterogeneous capital markets, nominal rigidities, and an effective lower bound [a zero lower bound (ZLB) for simplicity]. We establish four main results: (1) At the ZLB, creditor countries export their recession abroad, which we illustrate with a new Metzler diagram in quantities; (2) Beggar-thy-neighbour currency and trade wars provide stimulus to the undertaking country at the expense of other countries; (3) (Safe) public debt issuances and increases in government spending anywhere are expansionary everywhere; and (4) When there is a scarcity of safe assets, net issuers of these assets import the recession from abroad.
SLEMI: Equivalence Modulo Input (EMI) Based Mutation of CPS Models for Finding Compiler Bugs in Simulink

Finding bugs in commercial cyber-physical system development tools (or “model-based design” tools) such as MathWorks's Simulink is important in practice, as these tools are widely used to generate embedded code that gets deployed in safety-critical applications such as cars and planes. Equivalence Modulo Input (EMI) based mutation is a new twist on differential testing that promises lower use of computational resources and has already been successful at finding bugs in compilers for procedural languages. To provide EMI-based mutation for differential testing of cyber-physical system (CPS) development tools, this paper develops several novel mutation techniques. These techniques deal with CPS language features that are not found in procedural languages, such as an explicit notion of execution time and zombie code, which combines properties of live and dead procedural code. In our experiments the most closely related work (SLforge) found two bugs in the Simulink tool. In comparison, SLEMI found a super-set of issues, including 9 confirmed as bugs by MathWorks Support.
Using Meaningful Gamification to Design an Integrated Unit of Work

A key feature of games is a reward-based system. To create such a system, game designers must decide what actions within the game are desirable and assign a particular reward/s for those actions. Such a reward system may utilise points, leaderboards and badges. The employment of these features in non-game contexts has come to represent Gamification (Nicholson, 2012). Simply put, Gamification is learning that utilises game features, without being completely housed in a game. We were attracted to the inherent flexibility of Gamification and the ability to blend together online and offline learning tasks.
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE ACCEPTANCE OF DIGITAL BANKING: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN SOUTH AFRICA BASED ON THE ENHANCED TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL

Changing market conditions in the Financial Services Industry accelerated the Digital Transformation of retail banks and expanded the development of innovative and customer centric technologies. As Digital Banking offerings matured and cost pressures increased, changes were made to the operating models of banks and the “digital” concept evolved into more than a channel for accessing services. The author noted the opportunity to expand on the research conducted into mobile and online banking, by considering the factors that would drive acceptance of a fully-fledged Digital Branchless Bank in South Africa. An extended version of the Technology Acceptance Model has been identified as a suitable framework to determine the drivers of technology acceptance and the following significant relationships were identified after collecting data from 252 participants: Compatibility has a significant positive impact on Perceived Usefulness; Perceived Time Risk has a significant negative impact on Attitude; Trust has a significant positive impact on Perceived Usefulness; Perceived Usefulness has a significant positive impact on Attitude; Perceived Usefulness has a significant positive impact on Behavioural Intention; Perceived Ease of Use has a significant positive impact on Trust; Perceived Ease of Use has a significant positive impact on Attitude.
CLAIRE M. GICHUKI

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . vi DEDICATION. vii LIST OF TABLES . xi LIST OF FIGURES . xii LIST OF ACRONYMS . xiii CHAPTER ONE . 1 1.0 INTRODUCTION. 1 1.1 Background of the Study . 1 1.2 Statement of the Problem . 4 1.3 Purpose of the Study . 6 1.4 Research Questions . 7 1.5 Significance of the Study . 7 1.6 Scope of the Study . 8 1.7 Definition of Terms.9 1.8 Chapter Summary . 10 CHAPTER TWO . 11 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW . 11 2.
Documentos de Trabajo N.o 1750. Permissible collateral and access to finance: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

By allowing large classes of movable asstes to be used as collateral, the Property Law reform transformed the secured transactions in China. Difference-in-differences test show fi rms operating with ex-ante more movable assets expand access to bank credit and prolong debt maturity. However, the reform does not seem to improve the effi ciency of credit allocation, as debt capacity of ex-ante low quality fi rms expands the most following the reform. Credit expansion also does not lead to better fi rm performance. These fi ndings are not driven by confounding factors such as improvements in creditor and property rights protection. Our results also cannot be explained by other important reforms which were introduced around the same time as the introduction of the Property Law. These include anti-tunneling and split-share reforms and amendments to the corporate tax structure in China. We conduct explicit robustness tests for these other reforms and hence contribute to the empirical literature on the reform process in China with new fi ndings.
Strategic Exploration in Object-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

Humans learn to play video games significantly faster than state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Inspired by this, we use an object-oriented representation for RL to learn simple dynamics model and do planning with strategic exploration. In contrast to the tabular settings which is the focus of most theoretical analysis of efficient exploration, it is not tractable to perform exact planning. We investigate how various model-based strategic exploration strategies work when combined with the popular Monte Carlo Tree Search approximate planning technique, and find preliminary evidence that optimism-based strategies can be particularly beneficial. We use the resulting technique on perhaps the hardest Atari game Pitfall! and our preliminary results suggest substantially improved exploration and performance over prior methods.
Title of Paper: Do Financial Incentives Affect Fertility and Sex Ratio at Birth? An Impact Evaluation of Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli

Ladli Laxmi Yojana (LLY) is a CCT scheme implemented in Madhya Pradesh in 2006 to encourage birth of girls without increasing the average family size. The financial incentives are akin to a subsidy which decreases the cost of raising first-born and second-born girls and thus can potentially affect the incremental fertility and sex-selection decisions of women who had less than two children at the time of the program’s announcement. I use IHDS2 data to construct a woman-year panel using the retrospective birth history of women and employ a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the causal impact of LLY on the probability of a birth and probability of a female. I find that LLY increases the probability of first birth by 6.1 percentage points and succeeds in increasing the probability of a female birth for women who already have one son by 17.8 percent. However, it fails to do the same for women who have a prior daughter, even though the same magnitude of incentives is offered.
GREEN SYNTHESIS OF COPPER OXIDE NANOPARTICLES BY PHEONIX DACTYLIFERA L LEAVES EXTRACT

a Department of Process engineering, Faculty of Technology, University of Echahid Hamma Lakhdar, El Oued 39000, Algeria b Unit of Renewable Energy Development in Arid Zones (UDERZA), Univ. ElOued, El Oued 39000, Algeria c Laboratory of Valorization and Technology of Saharian Resources (VTRS), Faculty of Technology, Hamma Lakhdar University, 39000, Algeria d Department of Physics, Faculty of Exact Science, university of Echahid Hamma Lakhdar, El Oued 39000, Algeria
AN EXPLORATORY MODEL ON RETIREMENT SAVINGS BEHAVIOUR: A MALAYSIAN STUDY

Malaysia is expected to experience the ageing population problem by 2050, which is a cause for concern as Malaysians generally do not practice retirement savings behaviour. If Malaysians fail to address retirement planning early, then the burden of care may fall on their children and taxpayers in general. This study examines the retirement savings behaviour of 160 Malaysians through a multidisciplinary approach by concurrently investigating financial knowledge, quality of financial advisers, perception of health, and social influence as drivers of the behaviour. A conceptual framework is developed for these constructs, underpinned by various theories such as Theory of Planned Behaviour, Continuity Theory, and Social Identity Theory. All constructs, except quality of financial advisers, are found to have an influence on retirement savings behaviour. Financial knowledge is found to mediate the relationship between quality of financial advisers and retirement savings behaviour. Numerous implications from the study are discussed, such as the need for effective professional financial advisers and earlier intervention in financial education, long-term aged care, and other social security
L OCAL VS . G LOBAL INCENTIVE COMPATIBILITY ON ORDINAL TYPE SPACES ∗

We consider locally incentive compatible (LIC) mechanisms with deterministic allocation rules and transfers with quasilinear utility. We use a “uniform” notion of local incentive compatibility. A mechanism is LIC if there is some (small) e > 0 such that it is IC on every pair of types s and t with the (Euclidean) distance between them at most e. We show that LIC and IC are equivalent on a strict ordinal type-space if the ordinal domain satisfies the no-restoration property (Sato (2013)). A large class of strict ordinal type-spaces such as single-peaked, single-dipped, single-crossing, etc., satisfy the no-restoration property. Next, we show that the same does not hold if we allow the type-space to be weak. We introduce the notion of almost everywhere IC. A mechanism is almost everywhere IC if it IC outside a set of (Lebesgue) measure zero. We provide a sufficient condition on weak type-spaces for the equivalence of LIC and almost everywhere IC. Various subsets of single-peaked and single-crossing domains satisfy our sufficient condition. Finally, we provide results on how to check whether a given mechanism is IC or not. It follows from our result that in addition to local types, only a few types on the “boundary” of the type-space needed to be checked additionally. Our results apply to several non-convex type-spaces, and thereby generalize the results in Carroll (2012) considerably.
A Dynamic Network Theory Perspective

Research on social networks has grown exponentially in recent years. However, despite its relevance, the field of psychology has been relatively slow to explain the underlying goal pursuit and resistance processes influencing social networks in the first place. In this vein, this article aims to demonstrate how a dynamic network theory perspective explains the way in which social networks influence these processes and related outcomes, such as goal achievement, performance, learning, and emotional contagion at the interpersonal level of analysis. The theory integrates goal pursuit, motivation, and conflict conceptualizations from psychology with social network concepts from sociology and organizational science to provide a taxonomy of social network role behaviors, such as goal striving, system supporting, goal preventing, system negating, and observing. This theoretical perspective provides psychologists with new tools to map social networks (e.g., dynamic network charts), which can help inform the development of change interventions. Implications for social, industrial-organizational, and counseling psychology as well as conflict resolution are discussed, and new opportunities for research are highlighted, such as those related to dynamic network intelligence (also known as cognitive accuracy), levels of analysis, methodological/ethical issues, and the need to theoretically broaden the study of social networking and social media behavior.
Comparative Risk Assessment for Fossil Energy Chains Using Bayesian Model Averaging

The accident risk of severe (≥5 fatalities) accidents in fossil energy chains (Coal, Oil and Natural Gas) is analyzed. The full chain risk is assessed for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 28 Member States of the European Union (EU28) and non-OECD countries. Furthermore, for Coal, Chinese data are analysed separately for three different periods, i.e., 1994–1999, 2000–2008 and 2009–2016, due to different data sources, and highly incomplete data prior to 1994. A Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) is applied to investigate the risk and associated uncertainties of a comprehensive accident data set from the Paul Scherrer Institute’s ENergy-related Severe Accident Database (ENSAD). By means of BMA, frequency and severity distributions were established, and a final posterior distribution including model uncertainty is constructed by a weighted combination of the different models. The proposed approach, by dealing with lack of data and lack of knowledge, allows for a general reduction of the uncertainty in the calculated risk indicators, which is beneficial for informed decision-making strategies under uncertainty.