Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
HOST GROWTH CONDITIONS REGULATE THE PLASTICITY OF HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL TRANSMISSION IN HOLOSPORA UNDULATA, A BACTERIAL PARASITE OF THE PROTOZOAN PARAMECIUM CAUDATUM

Abstract A parasite might be prohibited from investing simultaneously in horizontal (infection of new hosts) and vertical (infection of the current host's offspring) transmission because of developmental, physiological, or evolutionary costs and constraints. Rather, these constraints may select for adaptive phenotypic plasticity, where the parasite uses the transmission pathway that maximizes transmission in the current ecological and epidemiological conditions. By varying environmental conditions for the host's replication, we investigated the plasticity of vertical and horizontal transmission of Holospora undulata, a micronucleus-specific bacterial parasite of the protozoan Paramecium caudatum. We observed a negative correlation between the host's growth rate and the parasite's investment in horizontal transmission. In rapidly dividing hosts, the parasite remained in the reproductive stage and was passed on vertically to the daughter nuclei during mitotic division of the Paramecium. In contrast, at low or negative growth rates of the host, the parasite's reproductive forms differentiated into infectious forms, the agents of horizontal transmission. Furthermore, in treatments that were initiated with a high proportion of individuals harboring horizontally transmitted infectious forms, rapid replication resulted in a switch back from predominantly horizontal to almost exclusively vertical transmission. These results suggest a trade-off between the efficacies of vertical and horizontal transmission, with the parasite switching to horizontal transmission only if conditions for host replication, and thus vertical transmission, deteriorate.
The Impact of Institutional Distance on the Choice of Multinational Enterprise’s Entry Mode: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

Manuscript type: Research paper. Research aims: This study aims to investigate the impact of insti- tutional distance between home and host countries on the choice of multinational enterprise’s (MNE) entry mode into Vietnam. Design/ Methodology/ Approach: Transaction cost theory was adopted to develop the hypotheses. The data of 82 MNE subsidiaries located in Vietnam were extracted from the World Bank Enterprise Survey. Probit regression was employed to estimate the impact of the institutional distance between home and host countries on the choice of the MNE’s entry mode. Research findings: The empirical results support the hypotheses, revealing that MNEs are more likely to enter Vietnam via acquisition investment rather than greenfield investment. This happens when both the formal and informal institutional distance between Vietnam and the home countries is large. Findings also suggest that the institutional distance between a host country with a transition economy and the home countries is an important element to take into account when MNEs decide to invest in a transition economy that contains high level uncertainties. Theoretical contributions/ Originality: The adoption of the trans- action cost theory enables this study to conceptualise the frame- work which is used to empirically test the effect of the institutional distance between Vietnam and home countries on the MNEs’ entry mode decision. This study shows that the transaction cost approach offers insights into how the institutional distance between the host and home countries affect the choice of the MNEs’ entry mode into a transition economy. This study contributes to international business literature by developing theoretical arguments about the role of the national institutional dissimilarities on the choice of the MNEs’ entry mode in a transition economy. Practitioner/ Policy implications: The implication drawn from this study is that MNEs investing through acquired subsidiaries are less burdened by environmental uncertainties since acquired subsidiaries offer more familarity with the formal institutions. This can help the MNEs to establish a close relationship with the local partners and the government. This also increases the MNEs’ cross-cultural communication and knowledge thereby, enhancing the investment. Research limitation: Further research should consider more parent firm characteristics so that implications for the MNEs’ entry strategy are developed. Given the role of the different managers at the different levels, future study should capture the perception of these managers who are based at the headquarters so as to further examine the effect of institutional distance. Keywords: Formal Institutional Distance, Informal Institutional Distance, Entry Mode, MNE, Subsidiary, Transition Economy. JEL Classification: F23, M16
Factors affecting word selection by schizophrenic patients.

Experiments were done to discover some factors relating to word selection by schizophrenic patients. The comprehension of individual words was examined by presenting the subjects with a picture of an object and a number of words containing the name of the object, from which the object name had to be selected. Schizophrenics were distinguished from other groups of patients, from children and from normal controls by accepting associations to the object as well as the object name. The frequency of acceptance was directly related to the proximity of the association. It was also found that schizophrenics accepted associated words more often if the stimuli were presented in an open-ended or single-choice manner than if they were presented in a multiple-choice form. The presentation of other words, with which comparisons could be made, further reduced acceptances. Schizophrenic patients took longer to reject words than control subjects, and when under time pressure increased their acceptance of associated words. It is suggested that although their word store is organized in a normal manner, schizophrenic patients may have greater difficulty than normal people in recognizing the boundaries between associated words, and that this may be the basis for many aspects of their communication difficulties.
Developmental Changes in Brain Function Underlying Inhibitory Control in Autism Spectrum Disorders

The development of inhibitory control—the ability to suppress inappropriate actions in order to make goal‐directed responses—is often impaired in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In the present study, we examined whether the impairments in inhibitory control evident in ASD reflect—in part—differences in the development of the neural substrates of inhibitory control from adolescence into adulthood. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study on the anti‐saccade task, a probe of inhibitory control, in high‐functioning adolescents and adults with ASD compared to a matched group of typically developing (TD) individuals. The ASD group did not show the age‐related improvements in behavioral performance from adolescence to adulthood evident in the typical group, consistent with previous behavioral work. The fMRI results indicated that much of the circuitry recruited by the ASD group was similar to the TD group. However, the ASD group demonstrated some unique patterns, including: (a) a failure to recruit the frontal eye field during response preparation in adolescence but comparable recruitment in adulthood; (b) greater recruitment of putamen in adolescence and precuneus in adolescence and adulthood than the TD group; and (c) decreased recruitment in the inferior parietal lobule relative to TD groups. Taken together, these results suggest that brain circuitry underlying inhibitory control develops differently from adolescence to adulthood in ASD. Specifically, there may be relative underdevelopment of brain processes underlying inhibitory control in ASD, which may lead to engagement of subcortical compensatory processes. Autism Res 2015, 8: 123–135. © 2014 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Improving Entrepreneurial Innovations for Sustaining Small Medium Hospitality Industry Growth in Ghana

This study talks about improving entrepreneurial innovations of small medium hospitality industry (SMHI) in other to sustain it growth in Ghana. Successful stories about SMEs exist but are rare and this causes pauses for concern. Many researchers have established that innovations bring several benefits in countries that are industrialized. Responses from SMHI managers/owners indicate they totally agree small medium hospitality industry is better in relation to one's determination to introduces new service styles and product, good customer service, innovative in selling/ marketing and confidence in trying new service styles. We therefore, recommend management step up their innovative abilities by taking pride in customer needs /customer satisfaction as this will earn small medium hotels new and repeat customers in a highly perishable and competitive business environment.
The effect of force and electrode material on electrode-to-skin impedance

This paper studies the influence of electrode coating material and contact force on the electrical contact impedance between such electrodes and skin. The electrical interface that exists between the electrode and the skin was modeled, and the modeling parameters as a function of force and material were derived. Increasing force from 80g to 350g decreased the overall resistance from 342k to 75k for AgCl and from 9. 6MΩ to 0. 9MΩ for gold electrodes, while capacitance increased from 2. 3μF to 18μF and from 1. 1μF to 5. 1μF, respectively. By increasing force the variance of estimated resistance and capacitance values is reduced. This demonstrated that the AgCl electrodes are the preferred candidate for EEG recordings due to better properties in the lower end of the frequency range of interest (0.1 - 100Hz), and that with the higher contact force they can lead to stable and reproducible EEG measurements.
Trinocular Calibration Method Based on Binocular Calibration

In order to solve the self-occlusion problem in plane-based multi-camera calibration system and expand the measurement range, a tri-camera vision system based on binocular calibration is proposed. The three cameras are grouped into two pairs, while the public camera is taken as the reference to build the global coordinate. By calibration of the measured absolute distance and the true absolute distance, global calibration is realized. The MRE (mean relative error) of the global calibration of the two camera pairs in the experiments can be as low as 0.277% and 0.328% respectively. Experiment results show that this method is feasible, simple and effective, and has high precision. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/telkomnika.v10i6. 1417 Full Text: PDF
Moderating the Service Quality-Customer Loyalty Relation through Customer Satisfaction, Gender and Banking Status: Evidence from Mobile Money Users in University Of Cape Coast, Ghana

The study was conducted to assess the impact of service quality on customer loyalty for mobile money services among university students when the effect of customer satisfaction, gender and banking status are statistically controlled for. The study targeted first degree students who were offering different programs in University of Cape Coast, Ghana. A total of 18498 students were targeted. Through the explanatory research design, structured questionnaires were personally administered to 377 participants who provided the primary data. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for the primary data analysis. Internal consistency of 0.759 was obtained for the instrument. Multiple regression, correlation and moderation analysis were conducted to test the hypotheses in the study. It was discovered that service quality predicted a significant positive variance in customer loyalty. Again, foreign remittance, ease of mobile money registration, interest on savings and airtime purchases made a significant contribution to the 17% variance in customer loyalty. The study proved that, gender and customer satisfaction, significantly moderated the predictive relation between service quality and customer loyalty whilst banking status did not. Security threats, high service charges, low interest on savings, and network failure were major challenges associated with mobile money services.
Isolation and characterization of 13 microsatellite loci for Percichthys trucha (Percichthyidae)

Thirteen polymorphic microsatellite loci are described for the South American freshwater fish Percichthys trucha. Number of alleles per locus ranged from two to 21 and observed heterozygosities ranged from 0.304 to 0.915 in a sample of 47 individuals from four different sampling locations.
Improving qualities of e‐government services in Rwanda: A service provider perspective

E‐government implementation is growing worldwide. In the context of developed countries, as well as some developing ones, research provides tools to evaluate e‐government services and reflect on e‐government performance. However, in the least developed countries (LDCs), where the preconditions are in many ways more challenging, little is known about those services. While information technology can be imported, social, organizational, and infrastructural arrangements conducive to high‐quality service delivery must be developed locally. In contributing to understanding the challenges as well as opportunities involved, this paper explores the qualities of e‐government services in Rwanda, an East African LDC. The investigation focuses on service providers' views of the qualities, as it is only through their understanding of the situation that service quality can be improved. This is a qualitative study based on interviews with employees of government organizations and document analysis. We identify and discuss 28 e‐government service quality factors, which are grouped into nine quality dimensions—accessibility, availability, awareness, responsiveness, information quality, information security, ease of use, support, and cost. This research contributes to raising awareness about the qualities of e‐government services in Rwanda in particular but may also have relevance for other LDCs.
Execution Leadership in a Multi-unit Firm

This study shows that execution leadership is closely related to capacity and strategy enactment. Execution leaders are able to scale capacity within a global network, regardless of volume trends. This includes the ability to take spikes in a pooled capacity construct. Furthermore, when action is focused and supported across the organizational construct, the enterprise can expect sustained corporate advantage. Executing collaboratively presents limitless possibilities for operational excellence and the opportunity for a competitive advantage. This study provides eighteen propositions that enhance theory of execution leadership in multi-unit firm.
System abstractions for resource scaling on heterogeneous platforms

ion to mitigate performance interference effects in shared virtualized platforms [75]. Further, market based allocation methods for datacenter applications have also been analyzed [31, 103]. These techniques can be incorporated into the design of elasticity drivers to generate interference-aware or revenue-aware resource bids. AutoPilot, CloudScale, and VirtualPower proposed hypervisor-level mechanisms for elastic scaling of cloud resources [76, 81, 93]. All of these techniques motivate the need for adaptive resource usage for maximizing efficiency. However, none of these address the presence of platform heterogeneity. 5.7. 2 Heterogeneous Processor Scheduling Heterogeneous multicore processors have been proposed to achieve higher energyefficiency than symmetric multicore processors [30, 55]. Earlier work has demonstrated the need for compute heterogeneity in datacenters to efficiently support a wide variety of applications [6, 10, 48, 59, 105] and shown its presence in commercial cloud platforms like EC2 [79]. Several implementations of heterogeneous processor architecture have been released by CPU vendors [18, 29, 78, 45]. In order to manage these platforms, appropriate techniques have been developed to efficiently run applications on heterogeneous cores [32, 54, 64, 92]. Further, mechanisms to effectively virtualize heterogeneous multicore platforms have also been investigated [52]. HeteroVisor adopts an alternative approach by hiding heterogeneity from the OS scheduler, exposing a homogeneous scalable resource interface. Finally, several cloud schedulers have also been proposed to incorporate heterogeneity [19, 74]. These cluster-level techniques are complementary to HeteroVisor that works at the platform level.
Consequences of Sharing Invisible Chronic Health Conditions at Work: Implications for Business Communication Education and Training

Objectives: The present investigation sought to identify whether there was a need to add health diversity training into business communication curriculum and workplace trainings. Methods: Individuals in the United States with chronic invisible illnesses, lifelong illnesses which are concealable, were surveyed to understand their experiences disclosing their health conditions at work. Qualtrics was used to obtain a random sample and distribute the online questionnaire. This method of solicitation resulted in 298 participants. Results: Nearly half of the participants (48.99%) reported negative experiences, ranging from social faux pas to bullying, after disclosing their health condition to a colleague. This paper provides a typology of eight negative experiences these individuals were subjected to after the disclosure of their health condition. Further, statistically significant patterns were identified that revealed that women and individuals with “other” invisible chronic illnesses were most likely to experience resentment from coworkers after their condition became known, individuals with musculoskeletal conditions were likely to experience an unwanted reduction of work, individuals in the medical field were more likely to experience bullying and social withdrawal by colleagues, and individuals in sales were more likely to have their abilities questioned. Conclusions: The data suggests the need to add health diversity training into business communication courses and workplace training. In particular, it seems that there is a need to train individuals on the management of coworkers’ health information and the treatment of individuals who have revealed an illness.
The retail bank of tomorrow: a platform for interactions and financial services. Conceptual and managerial challenges

Banking without boundaries will grow in the future, most of this because of digital business transformation. Banks need to re-interpret their business and look for a different managerial approach. A bright future for retail banks will depend above all on taking today the right actions for a long profitability, which are based on developing and reinforcing customer trust. The current account is the hook service for a bank to defend and reinforce from the competition, because it is the bank’s platform for entering and developing its business . At the beginning, the retail bank of tomorrow should look at developing value in core contents as well as orchestrating a platform strategy, but moving from a technology idea of platform towards managerial and economic dimensions of it. Because technology is nothing without a strategy.
Fault Diagnosis Methods for Wind Turbines Health Monitoring : a Review

Recently, the rapid expansion of wind energy activity has led to an increasing number of publications that deal with wind turbine health monitoring. In real practice, implementing a prognostics and health management (PHM) strategy for wind turbines is challenging. Indeed, wind turbines are complex electro-mechanical systems that often work under rapidly changing environment and operating load conditions. Although several review papers that address wind turbines fault diagnosis were published, they are mostly focused on a specific component or on a specific category of methods. Therefore, a larger snapshot on recent advances in wind turbine fault diagnosis is presented in this paper. Fault diagnosis approaches could be grouped in three major categories according to the available a priori knowledge about the system behavior: quantitative/qualitative model, signal analysis and artificial intelligence based approaches. Each of the proposed methods in the literature has its advantages and drawbacks. Therefore, a comparison between these methods according to some meaningful evaluation criteria is conducted.
Genetic polymorphisms in the MMP‐7 gene and breast cancer survival

Matrix metalloproteinase‐7 (MMP‐7) is a small secreted proteolytic enzyme with broad substrate specificity. Its expression has been shown to be associated with tumor invasion, metastasis and survival for a variety of cancers. We systematically evaluated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in MMP‐7 in relation to breast cancer survival in a large follow‐up study. Included were 1,079 breast cancer cases that were recruited from 1996 to 1998 and followed for a median of 7.1 years as part of the Shanghai Breast Cancer Study (SBCS). Eleven SNPs, including 2 known functional promoter SNPs, were analyzed using the Affymetrix Targeted Genotyping System. Associations with survival were evaluated by Cox proportional hazards regression and Kaplan‐Meier functions. Statistically significant associations with disease‐free and/or overall survival (OS) were found for 5 polymorphisms; these associations were explained primarily by 2 SNPs (rs11568818 and rs11225297) that were in high linkage disequilibrium (LD) with the others. Patients homozygous for the rs11568818 rare allele (G) had a significantly worse prognosis (OS HR: 6.7, 95% CI: 2.4–18.6) than patients homozygous for the common allele (A). Significantly improved survival was seen for patients with the rs11225297 T allele, and this association occurred in a dose‐response manner; patients with AT (OS HR: 0.7, 95% CI: 0.5–0.9) and TT (OS HR: 0.3, 95% CI: 0.1–0.8) fared better than patients with AA (p‐value for trend: 0.001). Thus, common MMP‐7 genetic polymorphisms were found to be significant determinants of survival among Chinese women with breast cancer. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Neural Network Learning - Theoretical Foundations

This important work describes recent theoretical advances in the study of artificial neural networks. It explores probabilistic models of supervised learning problems, and addresses the key statistical and computational questions. Chapters survey research on pattern classification with binary-output networks, including a discussion of the relevance of the Vapnik Chervonenkis dimension, and of estimates of the dimension for several neural network models. In addition, Anthony and Bartlett develop a model of classification by real-output networks, and demonstrate the usefulness of classification with a "large margin. " The authors explain the role of scale-sensitive versions of the Vapnik Chervonenkis dimension in large margin classification, and in real prediction. Key chapters also discuss the computational complexity of neural network learning, describing a variety of hardness results, and outlining two efficient, constructive learning algorithms. The book is self-contained and accessible to researchers and graduate students in computer science, engineering, and mathematics.
Adaptive Treemap Based Navigation Through Web Portals

An improved combined weighing apparatus is provided for weighing vegetables and fruits, confectionary articles, secondary products, perishables and other articles having high variations in single weight with high accuracy to produce packages having a predetermined weight. System for measurement of feeded products and for combination of weights which is equal or most approximate to the target value are improved in a way to eliminate the dead time of combining operation during weighing time for increasing the speed of combining operation while maintaining high accuracy.