Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Organizational Cultural Differences and Mutual Trust on Contract Management of Nonequity Construction Project Alliances

This study aims to examine the impact of organizational cultural difference and mutual trust on the contract management of nonequity project alliances in the construction industry. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the quantitative data for this study. The relationships between the variables were analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis. It was found that the contractual complexity of nonequity project alliances was impacted by the differences in management style, differences in organizational responsiveness, mutual goodwill trust, and mutual competence trust. It was also found that the relationship between differences in organizational responsiveness and contractual complexity was moderated by mutual goodwill trust. The research may provide theoretical basis for the management when making decisions on the selection of project alliance partners and contracts. The findings imply that when the firms seek to form project alliances, they need to recognize the level of organizational cultural differences and then determine the proper contractual complexity of the project alliance. In addition, the establishment of mutual goodwill trust between alliance partners will not only reduce the costs of making contracts but also the costs of implementing the contracts.
The performance structure of individual competition in biathlon

Individual biathlon competition as an event consists of a number of segments (variables), i.e. cross-country skiing time, range time, so-called time difference, and shooting accuracy. In the research part, the study analysed the interrelations of these variables and their correlations with competitive performance at the Biathlon World Championship individual competition. Regression analysis showed that total cross-country skiing time was the most important determinant of competitive performance (55%). Total shooting performance prone and standing explains 39.5%, total range time accounts for 5% of the criterion variable, and time difference for 0.5%. The contestants hit 80.5% of all targets in this competition. Factor analysis determined seven factors that logically completed the competition outcome in a biathlon individual competition. These factors are: cross-country skiing performance; shooting time and range time; time difference; accuracy shooting 1 and total time in lap 1; accuracy shooting 2 and total time in lap 2; accuracy shooting 4 and total time in lap 4; and accuracy shooting 3 and total time in lap 3. Although we found in this competition a somewhat dominant contribution of the cross- country skiing itself to the final competitive performance, shooting accuracy is also very important in an individual biathlon competition. The results of men’s individual biathlon competitions at the last Olympics and World Championships show that it is still possible to win a medal with only one missed shot (two missed shots can only be afforded by the rare biathletes who are extremely fast skiers).
Eco-Composites from Silkworm Meal and Polycaprolactone: Effect of Formulation and Processing Conditions

The production of green plastic materials from defatted silkworm meal (SW) through a scalable technique (e.g., injection moulding) would permit the revalorization of a by-product of the textile industry. The textile by-product contains an estimable protein content (~50%) which can justify its applicability in the field of eco-materials. Thus, SW-based materials have been processed and characterized, sometimes requiring the addition of another biodegradable polymer, such as polycaprolactone (PCL), in the formulation. Thermomechanical, tensile and water uptake properties have been assessed at different PCL contents (from 0 to 20%). The viscoelasticity of the plastic composites when heated was greatly affected by the melting point of PCL, which also led generally to an increase in their extensibility and resistance. However, this effect of PCL was diminished when composites were processed at higher moulding temperatures. As PCL possesses a hydrophobic character, a decrease in the water uptake was generally detected as PCL content increased, which could also be related to the lower plasticizer content in the formulation. Silkworm meal is an adequate ingredient to consider in the production of green plastic materials that would eventually add value to a main by-product of the sericulture industry.
Racial/ethnic match and student–teacher relationships

This paper explores the role of teacher race/ethnicity in the teacher-perceived relationships with early elementary school students. Employing a model with both student and teacher ﬁxed eﬀects, we discover a positive link between the racial/ethnic match and the teacher-reported relationships with students. Speciﬁcally, minority students tend to have closer and more positive relationships with their teachers than white students when they are taught by a minority teacher. Adapted rank-based tests of discrimination reveal that the favorable teacher-reported relationships with students are not prompted by teachers favoring their own kind or discriminating against opposite-race students. We further show that the estimated favorable impacts are driven by minority students reacting positively when they have a minority teacher but adversely once assigned to a white teacher, which is consistent with the role model eﬀect. Given the importance of the relationships between young children and non-parental adults in their early stages of life, these ﬁndings have crucial policy implications.
Mediating Effect of Brand Image and Satisfaction on Loyalty through Experiential Marketing: A Case Study of a Sugar Heritage Destination

While the value of industrial heritage tourism has been recognized, less is known about visitors’ experience formation process and its role along with brand image and satisfaction in predicting their loyalty towards industrial heritage destinations. This study adopted the experiential marketing approach to unveil the experience formation process. It also examined the decisive factors of loyalty, by further exploring the mediating effects of brand image and satisfaction on the relationship between experiences and loyalty. A survey questionnaire method was used to collect data from 399 visitors to a sugar heritage destination in Taiwan. The results supported the application of experiential marking in a sugar heritage destination and suggested that visitors’ experiences are most driven by how they feel, think, and act. The findings also confirmed the causal relationship and indicated the importance of brand image on loyalty formation and its mediating role between experience and loyalty.
The Efficacy of Ginseng (Panax) on Human Prediabetes and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Results from different clinical trials on the effects of ginseng on prediabetes and type 2 diabetes (T2DM) are still inconsistent. To fill this knowledge gap, we investigated the overall effects of ginseng supplementation on improving cardiometabolic biomarkers among these patients. A systematic literature search was conducted on PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, and Cochrane library. A random-effect model was applied to estimate the weighted mean difference and 95% CI for each outcome. Overall, 20 eligible RCTs were included. Meta-analyses revealed that ginseng supplementation significantly reduced serum concentration of FPG, TC, IL-6, and HOMA-IR values. It also increased HR and TNF-α levels. Ginseng supplementation changed HOMA-IR and HDL-C significantly based on dose and changed HOMA-IR and LDL-C significantly based on study duration in a non-linear fashion. Furthermore, meta-regression analyses indicated a linear relationship between ginseng dose and absolute changes in HDL-C. Moreover, subgroup analyses showed that ginseng supplementation changed TC and LDL-C when the supplementation dose was ≥2 g/day. Our findings suggest that ginseng supplementation may be an effective strategy for improving cardiometabolic profiles in individuals with prediabetes and T2DM.
Cascaded-Recalibrated Multiple Instance Deep Model for Pathologic-Level Lung Cancer Prediction in CT Images

Lung cancer accounts for the greatest number of cancer-related mortality, while the accurate evaluation of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) images can significantly increase the 5-year relative survival rate. Despite deep learning methods that have recently been introduced to the identification of malignant nodules, a substantial challenge remains due to the limited datasets. In this study, we propose a cascaded-recalibrated multiple instance learning (MIL) model based on multiattribute features transfer for pathologic-level lung cancer prediction in CT images. This cascaded-recalibrated MIL deep model incorporates a cascaded recalibration mechanism at the nodule level and attribute level, which fuses the informative attribute features into nodule embeddings and then the key nodule features can be converged into the patient-level embedding to improve the performance of lung cancer prediction. We evaluated the proposed cascaded-recalibrated MIL model on the public Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative (LIDC-IDRI) benchmark dataset and compared it to the latest approaches. The experimental results showed a significant performance boost by the cascaded-recalibrated MIL model over the higher-order transfer learning, instance-space MIL, and embedding-space MIL models and the radiologists. In addition, the recalibration coefficients of the nodule and attribute feature for the final decision were also analyzed to reveal the underlying relationship between the confirmed diagnosis and its highly-correlated attributes. The cascaded recalibration mechanism enables the MIL model to pay more attention to those important nodules and attributes while suppressing less-useful feature embeddings, and the cascaded-recalibrated MIL model provides substantial improvements for the pathologic-level lung cancer prediction by using the CT images. The identification of the important nodules and attributes also provides better interpretability for model decision-making, which is very important for medical applications.
Duality Between Source Coding With Quantum Side Information and Classical-Quantum Channel Coding

In this paper, we establish an interesting duality between two different quantum information-processing tasks, namely, classical source coding with quantum side information, and channel coding over classical-quantum channels. The duality relates the optimal error exponents of these two tasks, generalizing the classical results of Ahlswede and Dueck [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 28(3):430–443, 1982]. We establish duality both at the operational level and at the level of the entropic quantities characterizing these exponents. For the latter, the duality is given by an exact relation, whereas for the former, duality manifests itself in the following sense: an optimal coding strategy for one task can be used to construct an optimal coding strategy for the other task. Along the way, we derive a bound on the error exponent for classical-quantum channel coding with constant composition codes which might be of independent interest. Finally, we consider the task of variable-length classical compression with quantum side information, and a duality relation between this task and classical-quantum channel coding can also be established correspondingly. Furthermore, we study the strong converse of this task, and show that the strong converse property does not hold even in the i.i. d. scenario.
Resolving glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) in response to modern and future ice loss at marine grounding lines in West Antarctica

Abstract. Accurate glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) modelling in the cryosphere is required for interpreting satellite, geophysical and geological records and for assessing the feedbacks of Earth deformation and sea-level change on marine ice-sheet grounding lines. GIA modelling in areas of active ice loss in West Antarctica is particularly challenging because the ice is underlain by laterally varying mantle viscosities that are up to several orders of magnitude lower than the global average, leading to a faster and more localised response of the solid Earth to ongoing and future ice-sheet retreat and necessitating GIA models that incorporate 3-D viscoelastic Earth structure. Improvements to GIA models allow for computation of the viscoelastic response of the Earth to surface ice loading at sub-kilometre resolution, and ice-sheet models and observational products now provide the inputs to GIA models at comparably unprecedented detail. However, the resolution required to accurately capture GIA in models remains poorly understood, and high-resolution calculations come at heavy computational expense. We adopt a 3-D GIA model with a range of Earth structure models based on recent seismic tomography and geodetic data to perform a comprehensive analysis of the influence of grid resolution on predictions of GIA in the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) in West Antarctica. Through idealised sensitivity testing down to sub-kilometre resolution with spatially isolated ice loading changes, we find that a grid resolution of ∼ 13 of the radius of the load or higher is required to accurately capture the elastic response of the Earth. However, when we consider more realistic, spatially coherent ice loss scenarios based on modern observational records and future ice-sheet model projections and adopt a viscoelastic Earth, we find that predicted deformation and sea-level change along the grounding line converge to within 5 % with grid resolutions of 7.5 km or higher, and to within 2 % for grid resolutions of 3.75 km and higher, even when the input ice model is on a 1 km grid. Furthermore, we show that low mantle viscosities beneath the ASE lead to viscous deformation that contributes to the instrumental record on decadal timescales and equals or dominates over elastic effects by the end of the 21st century. Our findings suggest that for the range of resolutions of 1.9–15 km that we considered, the error due to adopting a coarser grid in this region is negligible compared to the effect of neglecting viscous effects and the uncertainty in the adopted mantle viscosity structure.
Phenolic extracts from colored-walnut pellicles: antioxidant efficiency in walnut oil preservation

ABSTRACT The phenolic extracts of walnut cultivars with a red pellicle (HWE), a purple pellicle (ZWE) and a yellow pellicle (WWE) were compared. The total contents of phenolics, flavonoids and condensed tannins, as well as in vitro antioxidant activities (ABTS and DPPH) of the phenolic extracts were evaluated. The results showed that 25 phenolic compounds were identified in three colored walnuts. The HWE contained the highest contents of total phenolics and condensed tannins, while the ZWE contained the highest content of flavonoids. The DPPH and ABTS assays indicated that the phenolic extracts of colored-walnut pellicles showed a higher free radical scavenging ability than butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) at the same concentration. Phenolic extracts of colored walnuts were also evaluated as natural antioxidants in walnut oil, substituting for BHT. The efficacy of phenolic extracts in walnut oil preservation was evaluated using accelerated storage (60 °C) for 12 days. After accelerated storage, walnut oil enriched with the phenolic extracts kept better qualities, with significantly lower peroxides, p-anisidine, and TOTOX values. The volatiles were measured and identified using the headspace solid phase micro-extraction gas chromatography to further assess oil quality. Aldehydes such as hexanal and 2-heptenal were identified as representative oxidative volatiles. Hexanal and 2-heptenal content indicated that adding phenolic extracts could prevent flavor deterioration of the oil. This study suggested that phenolic extracts of walnut pellicles could offer an effective alternative to synthetic antioxidants for walnut oil preservation.
A precise spacing-control method in MEMS packaging for capacitive accelerometer applications

Capacitive micro accelerometers with high sensitivity have found wide applications in geophysics. Reducing the interelectrode spacing, which is determined by the thickness difference between the electrodes and the solder bumps in flip-chip eutectic bonding, is an efficient way to improve the sensitivity of area-varying capacitive transducers in micro accelerometers. Traditional methods require extra materials and processes, and precise control of the thickness of both the solder pumps and the electrodes is necessary. This work introduces a novel method for the precise control of the interelectrode spacing using a three dimensional (3D) electroplating process. Standoff pillars and electrodes are deposited by a single electroplating process with a constant thickness difference, which is only determined by the gap of the seed features that can be precisely determined by photolithography. The standoff pillars are used to define the thickness of the solder bumps in the packaging process. The 3D electroplating process is studied, characterized and applied to a typical high-precision micro capacitive area-varying accelerometer. Experimental results show that the variation of the interelectrode spacing is decreased by more than 6.5 times, when compared to that without the 3D electroplating process. Benefitting from the reduced interelectrode spacing, the sensitivity is increased by more than 3 times, while the resolution is 10 ng (√Hz)−1, which is 2.5 times better. It is believed that such a method can be applied to MEMS devices where interelectrode spacing needs to be precisely controlled.
Bispecific Antibodies in Cancer Immunotherapy: A Novel Response to an Old Question

Immunotherapy has redefined the treatment of cancer patients and it is constantly generating new advances and approaches. Among the multiple options of immunotherapy, bispecific antibodies (bsAbs) represent a novel thoughtful approach. These drugs integrate the action of the immune system in a strategy to redirect the activation of innate and adaptive immunity toward specific antigens and specific tumor locations. Here we discussed some basic aspects of the design and function of bsAbs, their main challenges and the state-of-the-art of these molecules in the treatment of hematological and solid malignancies and future perspectives.
The Role of Zr on Monoclinic and Orthorhombic HfxZryO2 Systems: A First-Principles Study

HfO2 shows different polymorphs, including monoclinic and orthorhombic ones, that exhibit singular properties. Moreover, the character of HfO2 is also influenced by the Zr atoms as a doping agent. Here, an extensive study of the monoclinic P21/c and the orthorhombic Pca21 polymorphs of HfO2, Hf0.75Zr0. 25O2, and Hf0.5Zr0. 5O2 is reported. For all six systems, density functional theory (DFT) methods based on generalized gradient approximations (GGAs) were first used; then the GGA + U method was settled and calibrated to describe the electrical and optical properties of polymorphs and the responses to the oxygen vacancies. Zr had different effects in relation to the polymorph; moreover, the amount of Zr led to important differences in the optical properties of the Pca21 polymorph. Finally, oxygen vacancies were investigated, showing an important modulation of the properties of HfxZryO2 nanostructures. The combined GGA and GGA + U methods adopted in this work generate a reasonable prediction of the physicochemical properties of o- and m-HfxZryO2, identifying the effects of doping phenomena.
Volatile Organic Compounds and Physiological Parameters as Markers of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Infection with Phytopathogens

The feasibility of early disease detection in potato seeds storage monitoring of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and plant physiological markers was evaluated using 10 fungal and bacterial pathogens of potato in laboratory-scale experiments. Data analysis of HS-SPME-GC-MS revealed 130 compounds released from infected potatoes, including sesquiterpenes, dimethyl disulfide, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, 2,6,11-trimethyldodecane, benzothiazole, 3-octanol, and 2-butanol, which may have been associated with the activity of Fusarium sambucinum, Alternaria tenuissima and Pectobacterium carotovorum. In turn, acetic acid was detected in all infected samples. The criteria of selection for volatiles for possible use as incipient disease indicators were discussed in terms of potato physiology. The established physiological markers proved to demonstrate a negative effect of phytopathogens infecting seed potatoes not only on the kinetics of stem and root growth and the development of the entire root system, but also on gas exchange, chlorophyll content in leaves, and yield. The negative effect of phytopathogens on plant growth was dependent on the time of planting after infection. The research also showed different usefulness of VOCs and physiological markers as the indicators of the toxic effect of inoculated phytopathogens at different stages of plant development and their individual organs.
Love as an energizing feature of action research for territorial development

In the face of today’s urgent societal challenges, there are constant calls for regional governments to respond to them. Yet, policies, including those developed through action research, appear to be transforming too slowly. This paper focuses on love as a methodological dimension of action research that can energize these responses. One of the main features of love is that it requires mastering the interplay between reason and emotion, and I use art-based action research as a vehicle to explore this interplay. More specifically, my data in this paper are the poems I wrote when I participated in an experiment led by an artist on social media. The discussion of the case focuses on how we can use the lessons learnt in the experiment to integrate love in action research for territorial development.
Impact of Particles on Pulmonary Endothelial Cells

According to the WHO, air quality affects around 40 million people, contributing to around 21,000 premature deaths per year. Severe respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, can be promoted by air pollution, which has already been documented; this is one of the reasons why air quality is a very relevant factor for human health and well-being. Aerosols are an aggregation of solid or liquid particles dispersed in the air and can be found in the form of dust or fumes. Aerosols can be easily inhaled or absorbed by the skin, which can lead to adverse health effects according to their sizes that range from the nanometre to the millimetre scale. Based on the PRISMA methodology and using the Rayyan QCRI platform, it was possible to assess more than four hundred research articles. This systematic review study aimed to understand the impact of particles on pulmonary endothelial cells, namely particulate matter in different sizes, cigarette smoke, diesel exhaust particles and carbon black. The main conclusions were that particles induce multiple health effects on endothelial cells, namely endothelial dysfunction, which can lead to apoptosis and necrosis, and it may also cause necroptosis in lung structure.