Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Employee strain and job satisfaction related to an implementation of quality in a public service organization: A longitudinal study

To date, few studies have focused on employee reactions to the quality-related aspects of the introduction of New Public Management (NPM). The aim of this study was to investigate the effects on employee strain and satisfaction of the implementation NPM in a public service organization. The study was designed as an empirical examination of the 'context-dependent approach' ( Edwards, Collinson, & Rees, 1998 ). This approach suggests that effects of an organizational change depend on the context of the implementation, i.e. organizational aspects (implementation strategies), job content and job context dimensions. They employed a single-case longitudinal design. The case was a large municipal service unit responsible for the public housing system of a city in Austria. The sample consisted of 217 employees. Measurements were taken before the organizational change, and at two different times during the change process. While the implementation of NPM can be considered to have been an organizational success (increase in customer satisfaction), it was accompanied by increases in job strain, and, at the same time, mixed results in job satisfaction. Less qualified employees mainly responsible for the customer interface experienced the organizational change most negatively. Using structural equation modelling, the context-dependent approach was empirically confirmed. Job control, role clarity and information were found to be the most important job and organizational resources.
Retention and Graduation of Students with Disabilities: Facilitating Student Success.

In this longitudinal study of 11,317 students, the retention and graduation rates of students with apparent and nonapparent disabilities were compared to students without disabilities. The annual retention and graduation rates (six years after matriculation) were similar for all students, regardless of the presence or absence of a disability except for variations during years four and five. The mean number of years required to graduate were similar for all students, regardless of the presence or absence of a disability. Examples of institutional interventions for disability services offices are provided to facilitate student success among students with disabilities. As more colleges and universities focus on enrollment management, retention plays an increasingly important role. Retention has been referred to as the painless recruiter (Wright, 1995). Every student that stops attending college, for whatever reason, has to be replaced; thus, making enrollment management more challenging. The Digest of Educational Statistics (Synder, Tan, & Hoffman, 2004) reported that among the more than 19 million students in American colleges and universities, 8.7% of them, 1,669,000 undergraduate and graduate students, had disabilities. deFur, Getzel, and Trossi (1996) said that “the likelihood of earning a degree is decreased by the presence of a disability” (p. 232). Many colleges and universities have disability services offices to help facilitate access to higher education and the academic success of students with disabilities, reducing the number of students with disabilities that drop out of college. Access, Retention, and Attrition The theoretical framework for this study rests in the retention literature, among the college impact models as identified by Pascarella and Terenzini (2005). Tinto’s (1993) interactional theory of individual departure from institutions of higher education focused on the college attrition process. He identified three distinct phases of association with other members of an institution: separation from communities of the past, transition between high school and college, and incorporation into the society of the college. Tinto’s subsequent work addressed effective formal and informal institutional retention interventions that result in persistence to graduation from college. The foundation of Tinto’s work was Van Gennep’s (1909/1960) anthropological study that identified a three-stage model on rites of passage of tribal societies: separation, transition, and incorporation. A revision of Tinto’s student departure theory for residential colleges and universities suggested six influences on social integration that impacted retention: commitment of the institution to student welfare, communal potential, institutional integrity, proactive social adjustment, psychological engagement, and ability to pay (Braxton, Hirschy, & McClendon, 2004). The revision for commuter colleges and universities was more complex with sixteen economic, organizational, psychological, and sociological considerations.
HCV Drug Resistance Challenges in Japan: The Role of Pre-Existing Variants and Emerging Resistant Strains in Direct Acting Antiviral Therapy

Sustained virological response (SVR) rates have increased dramatically following the approval of direct acting antiviral (DAA) therapies. While individual DAAs have a low barrier to resistance, most patients can be successfully treated using DAA combination therapy. However, DAAs are vulnerable to drug resistance, and resistance-associated variants (RAVs) may occur naturally prior to DAA therapy or may emerge following drug exposure. While most RAVs are quickly lost in the absence of DAAs, compensatory mutations may reinforce fitness. However, the presence of RAVs does not necessarily preclude successful treatment. Although developments in hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapy in Asia have largely paralleled those in the United States, Japan’s July 2014 approval of asunaprevir plus daclatasvir combination therapy as the first all-oral interferon-free therapy was not repeated in the United States. Instead, two different combination therapies were approved: sofosbuvir/ledipasvir and paritaprevir/ritonavir/ombitasvir/dasabuvir. This divergence in treatment approaches may lead to differences in resistance challenges faced by Japan and the US. However, the recent approval of sofosbuvir plus ledipasvir in Japan and the recent submissions of petitions for approval of paritaprevir/ritonavir plus ombitasvir suggest a trend towards a new consensus on emerging DAA regimens.
Characterization and Computation of Steiner Routing Based on Elmore's Delay Model

SUMMARY As a remarkable development of VLSI technology, a gate switching delay is reduced and a signal delay of a net comes to have a considerable eﬀect on the clock period. Therefore, it is required to minimize signal delays in digital VLSIs. There are a number of ways to evaluate a signal delay of a net, such as cost, radius, and Elmore’s delay. Delays of those models can be computed in linear time. Elmore’s delay model takes both capacitance and resistance into account and it is often regarded as a reasonable model. So, it is important to investigate the properties of this model. In this paper, we investigate the properties of the model and construct a heuristic algorithm based on these properties for computing a wiring of a net to minimize the interconnection delay. We show the eﬀectiveness of our proposed algorithm by comparing ERT algorithm which is proposed in [2] for minimizing the maximum Elmore’s delay of a sink. Our proposed algorithm decreases the average of the maximum Elmore’s delay by 10–20% for ERT algorithm. We also compare our al-gorithm with an O ( n 4 ) algorithm proposed in [15] and conﬁrm the eﬀectiveness of our algorithm though its time complexity is O ( n 3 ).
Trajectory of social mobility: Asian Indian children coming of age in New York City

Contextualized within constructivist paradigm and the phenomenological hermeneutic framework, this minority performance ethnographic study on social mobility and second-generation Asian Indian immigrants examines the intergenerational and intragenerational social mobility of children post-1965 Indian immigrants in the metropolis of New York. This study explores two issues: first, to what extent the current challenges in the US economy hinder upward social mobility of the children of Indian immigrants. Second, how parental messages of taking advantages of both worlds contributes to second-generation Asian Indians' success or failure in American society. While economic and financial globalization facilitated mobilization across national borders the recent economic crisis poses tough challenges for Indian immigrants and their children. Findings indicate that positive ethnic structure, social mobility and the cultural capital provide the younger generation with an adaptive advantage to the meet challenges of mainstream society. The study concludes that despite recent constraints of US economy, in general, there is significant economic gain from the first to the second generation. In the case of second-generation Asian Indians economic and non-economic forms of social mobility compliment each other.
Design of nonlinear H∞ optimal impedance controllers

In this paper, nonlinear H∞ optimal design of impedance controllers is proposed based on the nonlinear robust internal-loop compensator (NRIC) framework. Simply adding PD-type auxiliary input to the original control law, the robust performance and the robust stability are achieved. Nonlinear H∞ optimality is guaranteed by solving Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) equation and the disturbance input-to-state stability (ISS) is guaranteed by finding ISS-Lyapunov function. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed method preserves the passivity of the impedance controllers. The proposed method can be applied to various types of impedance controllers in a unified way. Through simulations and experimental studies, the proposed method is verified.
Dynamics of Networks of Excitatory and Inhibitory Neurons in Response to Time-Dependent Inputs

We investigate the dynamics of recurrent networks of excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) neurons in the presence of time-dependent inputs. The dynamics is characterized by the network dynamical transfer function, i.e., how the population firing rate is modulated by sinusoidal inputs at arbitrary frequencies. Two types of networks are studied and compared: (i) a Wilson–Cowan type firing rate model; and (ii) a fully connected network of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons, in a strong noise regime. We first characterize the region of stability of the “asynchronous state” (a state in which population activity is constant in time when external inputs are constant) in the space of parameters characterizing the connectivity of the network. We then systematically characterize the qualitative behaviors of the dynamical transfer function, as a function of the connectivity. We find that the transfer function can be either low-pass, or with a single or double resonance, depending on the connection strengths and synaptic time constants. Resonances appear when the system is close to Hopf bifurcations, that can be induced by two separate mechanisms: the I–I connectivity and the E–I connectivity. Double resonances can appear when excitatory delays are larger than inhibitory delays, due to the fact that two distinct instabilities exist with a finite gap between the corresponding frequencies. In networks of LIF neurons, changes in external inputs and external noise are shown to be able to change qualitatively the network transfer function. Firing rate models are shown to exhibit the same diversity of transfer functions as the LIF network, provided delays are present. They can also exhibit input-dependent changes of the transfer function, provided a suitable static non-linearity is incorporated.
Navigating the terrain between research and practice: a Collaborative Research Network (CRN) case study in diabetes research.

BACKGROUND Clinical trials conducted in real world settings can improve the translation of research into practice. Although many experts have outlined strategies to conduct effectiveness research in primary care practices, there are few case studies describing how decisions and trade-offs influence the design and implementation of practical clinical trials. METHODS This paper outlines the IDEALL (Improving Diabetes Efforts Across Language and Literacy) Project, a study of self-management support strategies for diabetes. We present a case study about translational diabetes research. We explore patient, clinician, and practice recruitment; which interventions to study; and decisions about the level of integration of interventions into practices. RESULTS Recruitment strategies needed to take into account Institutional Review Board restrictions not allowing direct patient contact outside of the clinic. Patient diversity was increased by using a population-based database to identify eligible patients; clinic diversity was increased by including neighborhood and hospital-based clinics. An adjunctive model of care to provide interventions was used to avoid burdening clinics with integrating the interventions into clinical practice, but did not address the importance of sustainability in primary care settings. CONCLUSION Practical clinical trials involve complex strategies, decisions, and trade-offs. Researchers engaging in translational research should continue to describe how design decisions may influence the interpretation of results.
Enumeration of Extractive Oracle Summaries

To analyze the limitations and the future directions of the extractive summarization paradigm, this paper proposes an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to obtain extractive oracle summaries in terms of ROUGE-N. We also propose an algorithm that enumerates all of the oracle summaries for a set of reference summaries to exploit F-measures that evaluate which system summaries contain how many sentences that are extracted as an oracle summary. Our experimental results obtained from Document Understanding Conference (DUC) corpora demonstrated the following: (1) room still exists to improve the performance of extractive summarization; (2) the F-measures derived from the enumerated oracle summaries have significantly stronger correlations with human judgment than those derived from single oracle summaries.
Co-Clinical Trials Demonstrate Superiority of Crizotinib to Chemotherapy in ALK-Rearranged Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer and Predict Strategies to Overcome Resistance

Purpose: To extend the results of a phase III trial in patients with non–small cell lung cancer with adenocarcinomas harboring EML4-ALK fusion. Experimental Design: We conducted a co-clinical trial in a mouse model comparing the ALK inhibitor crizotinib to the standard-of-care cytotoxic agents docetaxel or pemetrexed. Results: Concordant with the clinical outcome in humans, crizotinib produced a substantially higher response rate compared with chemotherapy, associated with significantly longer progression-free survival. Overall survival was also prolonged in crizotinib- compared with chemotherapy-treated mice. Pemetrexed produced superior overall survival compared with docetaxel, suggesting that this agent may be the preferred chemotherapy in the ALK population. In addition, in the EML4-ALK–driven mouse lung adenocarcinoma model, HSP90 inhibition can overcome both primary and acquired crizotinib resistance. Furthermore, HSP90 inhibition, as well as the second-generation ALK inhibitor TAE684, demonstrated activity in newly developed lung adenocarcinoma models driven by crizotinib-insensitive EML4-ALK L1196M or F1174L. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that crizotinib is superior to standard chemotherapy in ALK inhibitor–naïve disease and support further clinical investigation of HSP90 inhibitors and second-generation ALK inhibitors in tumors with primary or acquired crizotinib resistance. Clin Cancer Res; 20(5); 1204–11. ©2013 AACR.
A Probabilistic Analysis of a New Satisfiability Algorithm

Résumé. — Un algorithme pour le problème de la satisfabïlitè a été développé et une analyse probabilis tique montre que, dans Vhypo thèse de pleine randomicité sur les variables logiques, un temps polynomial, mais non « presque partout », est demandé en moyenne par Valgorithme. Cet algorithme est comparable avec celui qui descend de la méthode de V arbre de Galil, celui-là étant le plus rapide que nous connaissons, celui que nous proposons est en moyenne encore plus rapide. Abstract. — An algorithm has been developed for the satisfiability probtem, wher e probabilis tic analysis shows average polynomial time cost, but not "almost everywhere", with respect to input lenght for full randomness in the logical variables. The average running time of this algorithm compares favourably with the Galil tree method which is the fastes t y et known.
Connective Tissue Growth Factor Promotes Pulmonary Epithelial Cell Senescence and Is Associated with COPD Severity

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to determine whether expression of connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) protein in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is consistent in humans and animal models of COPD and to investigate the role of this protein in lung epithelial cells. CTGF in lung epithelial cells of ex-smokers with COPD was compared with ex-smokers without COPD by immunofluorescence. A total of twenty C57Bl/6 mice and sixteen non-human primates (NHPs) were exposed to cigarette smoke (CS) for 4 weeks. Ten mice of these CS-exposed mice and eight of the CS-exposed NHPs were infected with H3N2 influenza A virus (IAV), while the remaining ten mice and eight NHPs were mock-infected with vehicle as control. Both mRNA and protein expression of CTGF in lung epithelial cells of mice and NHPs were determined. The effects of CTGF overexpression on cell proliferation, p16 protein, and senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-β-gal) activity were examined in cultured human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs). In humans, CTGF expression increased with increasing COPD severity. We found that protein expression of CTGF was upregulated in lung epithelial cells in both mice and NHPs exposed to CS and infected with IAV compared to those exposed to CS only. When overexpressed in HBECs, CTGF accelerated cellular senescence accompanied by p16 accumulation. Both CTGF and p16 protein expression in lung epithelia are positively associated with the severity of COPD in ex-smokers. These findings show that CTGF is consistently expressed in epithelial cells of COPD lungs. By accelerating lung epithelial senescence, CTGF may block regeneration relative to epithelial cell loss and lead to emphysema.
Effective behavior and field statistics in elasto-( visco ) plastic composites

L’objectif de cette étude est d’estimer le comportement effectif ainsi que les statistiques des champs locaux de composites élasto-(visco)plastiques avec écrouissage isotrope par une méthode en champs moyens. A l’issue d’une discrétisation temporelle, les équations constitutives nonlineaires du composite sont remplacées par celles d’un composite linéaire. On montre que la réponse effective ainsi que certaines statistiques des champs (premier et second moments et fluctuations intra-phase) du composite linéaire permettent d’estimer les mêmes quatités du composite élasto-(visco)plastique. La précision du modèle est vérifiée à l’aide de résultats de référence exacts ou obtenus par des modélisations en champs complets. Le modèle donne des estimations de très bonne qualité (pour la réponse effective mais aussi pour les fluctuations intra-phase du champ de contrainte) et permet de prédire l’effet Bauschinger dans le cas des composites élasto-plastiques.
'Race', Racism and Anti-racism: Challenging Contemporary Classifications

This argues for the revisiting of classificatory concepts currently in use in the study of 'race', racism and anti-racism. It examines the proposition that racist movements no longer promote discrimination on the grounds of a belief in biological differences but espouse a 'differentialist' racism based on a conviction in the fixity of culture, paradoxically 'borrowed' from culturally relativist anti-racist arguments. A critique of the differentialist thesis developed by Pierre-Andre Taguieff is presented based upon the writings of Etienne Balibar and Paul Gilroy. The former, by grounding modern racism in the ideological universalism of the European Enlightenment project, argues that the apportioning of blame to anti-racism for abetting the advent of culturalist racism is unhelpfully conceived from a perspective which seeks to deny the legitimacy of black and ethnic minority led alliances as a basis for anti-racist struggles. The novel connection is made between these arguments and those of Paul Gilroy (1998) who proposes the redundancy of the term 'race', even from pragmatist perspectives, in the revitalisation of anti-racism as a viable opposition to contemporary racist discourses. The argument is made that in order to dissect normative understandings of 'race' it is necessary to follow the historical trajectory taken by racism in becoming an inextricable component of the modern project. Anti-racism, thus, must be seen as a multi-layered conflict and, therefore, separate from its anti-fascist, anticolonialist, leftist and institutionalised forms. Evidence from recent interviews with anti-racist activists points to their rejection of both 'culturalist' and 'biological' approaches to racism and towards broad alliances of community-led activists against overt but also covert, institutionalised racist discrimination.
Reduced insulin sensitivity in childhood survivors of haematopoietic stem cell transplantation is associated with lipodystropic and sarcopenic phenotypes

Survivors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) treated with haematopoietic stem cell transplantation and total body irradiation (HSCT/TBI) have a high cardiometabolic risk despite lacking overt clinical obesity. This study characterised body composition using different methodologies and explored associations with reduced insulin sensitivities in a group of ALL survivors treated with/without HSCT/TBI.
Inflation Forecasts and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We examine the ability of the New Keynesian Phillips curve to explain U.S. inflation dynamics when inflation forecasts (from the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook and the Survey of Professional Forecasters) are used as a proxy for inflation expectations. The New Keynesian Phillips curve is estimated against the alternative of the hybrid Phillips curve, which allows for a backward-looking component in the price-setting behavior in the economy. The results are compared with those obtained using actual data on future inflation as conventionally employed in empirical work under the assumption of rational expectations. The empirical evidence provides, in contrast to most of the relevant literature, considerable support for the standard forward-looking New Keynesian Phillips curve when inflation expectations are measured using inflation forecasts that are observable in real time. In this case, lagged-inflation terms become insignificant in the hybrid specification. The evidence in favor of the New Keynesian Phillips curve becomes even stronger when real-time data on lagged inflation are used instead of the final inflation data used in standard specifications. Our work is closely related to the work of Roberts (1997), who used survey measures of inflation expectations in an empirical inflation model and found evidence that it is less-than-perfectly rational expectations and not the underlying structure of the economy that account for the presence of lagged inflation in empirical estimates of the New Keynesian model.