Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Purchasing strategy of electric energy metering devices: A CVaR-based study

In this paper, we study the purchasing strategy problem when the suppliers' reliability is uncertain. This problem is derived from the real world situation in the power metering device industry. Besides the price and product category each supplier can provide, the purchasing strategy is also influenced by other intangible impacts, i.e. wild fluctuations of suppliers' reliability and lead time can highly damage the supply performance. An efficient supply of power metering devices is vital to the national economy and livelihood and is guaranteed at all cost in the current situation. In this paper, we use the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), which is developed in the finance theory, to evaluate the performance of power meter device supply chain. The objective of our model is to maximize the tangible value added to the purchasing portfolio. Finally, empirical study and extensive experiments are also provided.
Clinical Experience with Trastuzumab (Herceptin)

Abstract: Trastuzumab is a humanized monoclonal antibody against the epidermal growth factor family oncogene, Her‐2/neu. It has revolutionized therapy for the 15–20% of patients with metastatic breast cancer whose tumors have gene amplification for Her‐2/neu. Results of clinical trials with single agent trastuzumab and in combination with paclitaxel, docetaxel, vinorelbine, gemcitabine and platinum salts have been encouraging. Durable remissions in excess of 5 years have occasionally been reported. Subjectively the side effect profile of this novel, targeted therapy, has been mild. Cardiac toxicity, while reported in combination regimens with anthracyclines tend to be easily manageable and not absolute contradictions to continuation of trastuzumab. Outside of clinical trials, however, anthracycline/trastuzumab combinations should be avoided. Preliminary results of trials with various combinations of chemotherapeutic agents have been promising while combinations with hormonal and other biologic therapy are ongoing. Trastuzumab is an exciting new monoclonal antibody with interesting anti‐tumor activity in patients with Her‐2/neu gene amplified breast cancer. We look forward to ongoing clinical trials combining trastuzumab with a broad array of other chemotherapeutic, hormonal and biological agents.
Cosmic-Ray Neon, Wolf-Rayet Stars, and the Superbubble Origin of Galactic Cosmic Rays

We report the abundances of neon isotopes in the Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) using data from the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS) aboard the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). These abundances have been measured for seven energy intervals over the energy range of 84 ≤ E/M ≤ 273 MeV nucleon-1. We have derived the 22Ne/20Ne ratio at the cosmic-ray source using the measured 21Ne, 19F, and 17O abundances as "tracers" of secondary production of the neon isotopes. Using this approach, the 22Ne/20Ne abundance ratio that we obtain for the cosmic-ray source is 0.387 ± 0.007(statistical) ± 0.022(systematic). This corresponds to an enhancement by a factor of 5.3 ± 0.3 over the 22Ne/20Ne ratio in the solar wind. This cosmic-ray source 22Ne/20Ne ratio is also significantly larger than that found in anomalous cosmic rays, solar energetic particles, most meteoritic samples of matter, and interplanetary dust particles. We compare our ACE CRIS data for neon and refractory isotope ratios, and data from other experiments, with recent results from two-component Wolf-Rayet (W-R) models. The three largest deviations of GCR isotope ratios from solar system ratios predicted by these models, 12C/16O, 22Ne/20Ne, and 58Fe/56Fe, are indeed present in the GCRs. In fact, all of the isotope ratios that we have measured are consistent with a GCR source consisting of about 80% material with solar system composition and about 20% W-R material. Since W-R stars are evolutionary products of OB stars, and most OB stars exist in OB associations that form superbubbles, the good agreement of these data with W-R models suggests that superbubbles are the likely source of at least a substantial fraction of GCRs.
Beyond profit: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices amongst hoteliers in Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown exponentially in the last decade and is gradually becoming a rising trend within the hospitality sector. In Pulau Pinang, the hospitality sector is not new and its potential in delivering benefits to the local communities is still a much debated subject. This study investigated the CSR practices amongst the hoteliers with regard to their understanding of CSR, the activities performed in the hotel that affect the wellbeing of communities, the management of CSR, their reasons and challenges in implementing CSR. A series of in-depth interviews were undertaken with eight hoteliers in Pulau Pinang. Two focus group discussions were conducted involving employees and beneficiaries in order to obtain an insight into their prevailing perceptions and underpinning reasons for such perceptions. The study found that CSR practice is still considered to be at its infancy stage and it is a sign of the immaturity of CSR implementation in Pulau Pinang. The hoteliers in Pulau Pinang have failed to facilitate community access to benefits of CSR development in their respective localities, thereby denying them the opportunity to improve their wellbeing and livelihoods. Hoteliers are hindered by poor internal communication and a lack of social consciousness connecting their various programs. The seasonality of CSR activities is due irregular funding and lack of understanding and expertise in this area. The study stressed an urgent need for decisive measures at policy and planning level to achieve the true meaning of CSR. This study also proposed a model of genuine social change for hoteliers to participate successfully in CSR development in Pulau Pinang.
Challenges in the management of community pharmacies in Malaysia

Background: The provision of professional pharmacy services by community pharmacists continues to be limited, particularly in low and middle income countries. It was postulated that multiple management challenges faced by community pharmacists contribute to this situation. Objective: The primary aim of the research was to determine the challenges faced in the management of community pharmacies in Sarawak (the largest state in Malaysia), and practical strategies to cope and overcome the challenges. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with community pharmacists practising in Sarawak. Purposive and snowball sampling were employed to ensure a diverse group of informants. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, with the resultant data analysed using thematic analysis. Data collection, coding, interpretation were carried out iteratively until theoretical saturation. Results: Twenty respondents from different demographic characteristics were recruited. Six major themes were identified. Management challenges faced by community pharmacists traverse five major domains: market competition, legislative issues, customers’ knowledge and expectations, macroeconomic impacts and operational challenges. Most of these challenges require government intervention to be resolved. In the meantime, improving customer service and expanding the range of professional services were seen as the most viable strategies to cope with existing challenges. The main concern is that current legislative and economic landscape may hinder these strategies. Enactment of dispensing separation and more protective measures against market competition were suggested to alleviate the challenges faced. Conclusion: Numerous management challenges faced by community pharmacists that distract them from delivering professional pharmacy services have been highlighted. Urgent affirmative actions by the government are warranted in supporting community pharmacists to realise and maximise their potentials.
Benchmarking : An International Journal Human competences for sustainable strategic management : evidence from Brazil

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify how human competences are associated with sustainable strategic management (SSM) within organisations. Design/methodology/approach – This is a qualitative study in two phases: first, a theoretical phase is developed, resulting in a proposal for the role of human competences in organisational sustainability; second, an empirical phase including instrumental case studies of two large, sustainability-oriented Brazilian companies. Data were obtained from interviews and companies’ reports. The authors used Atlas.ti software to perform the thematic content analysis. Findings – Despite the importance of human competences in SSM, the authors find evidence that this concept has not been developed, even for companies with a consolidated position in sustainability. Human competences are a requirement for effective SSM. Research limitations/implications – Coexisting elements within an organisation, often referred to as elements of organisational and human behaviour, can influence the dynamics of the expected interrelationships between human competences and sustainability management, in addition to the influencing factors presented in this study. Originality/value – In general, studies advocate that the relationships among organisational competences, human competences and organisational strategies must be aligned and reinforced. Nevertheless, these relationships are not that solid as they should be as stated in both the literature and the conventional discourse of practitioners.
An improved Latent Dirichlet Allocation method for service topic detection

Service topic detection is one of the most important techniques in service information extraction, clustering and recommendation. Comparing with short text corpus in social network, service description corpus possesses higher dimensionality and more diversity. It is difficult to detect topics from a large number of service descriptions. To address these challenges, we proposed a new LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) model based topic detection method, referred to as CV-LDA (Context sensitive word Vector based LDA). It utilizes a word embedding based method that generate context sensitive vector to cluster the words for decreasing dimensionality. Through topic perplexity analysis in the real-world dataset, it is obvious that topics detected by our method has a lower perplexity, comparing with word frequency weighing based vectors.
Age-related changes in the default mode network are more advanced in Alzheimer disease

Objective: To investigate age-related default mode network (DMN) connectivity in a large cognitively normal elderly cohort and in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) compared with age-, gender-, and education-matched controls. Methods: We analyzed task-free–fMRI data with both independent component analysis and seed-based analysis to identify anterior and posterior DMNs. We investigated age-related changes in connectivity in a sample of 341 cognitively normal subjects. We then compared 28 patients with AD with 56 cognitively normal noncarriers of the APOE ϵ4 allele matched for age, education, and gender. Results: The anterior DMN shows age-associated increases and decreases in fontal lobe connectivity, whereas the posterior DMN shows mainly age-associated declines in connectivity throughout. Relative to matched cognitively normal controls, subjects with AD display an accelerated pattern of the age-associated changes described above, except that the declines in frontal lobe connectivity did not reach statistical significance. These changes survive atrophy correction and are correlated with cognitive performance. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that the DMN abnormalities observed in patients with AD represent an accelerated aging pattern of connectivity compared with matched controls.
On the frequency spectrum of Amplitude Modulation Following Responses

Objective detection of Amplitude Modulation Following Responses (AMFR) is based on statistics applied after signal transformation from the time to the frequency domain by means of Discrete Fourier Transformation. In theory the frequency resolution of such transformation depends only on the analysed time window. In practise frequency resolution is also limited by the error caused by minimal difference between the clocks used for stimulus generation and Analogue/Digital-conversion. Small differences in clock frequencies may cause a spread of energy to neighbouring bins. In order to avoid this error we derived the sample clock for the A/D-conversion from the stimulator clock. By means of this technique the frequency structure of the AMFR was investigated. It is shown that if technical induced errors are excluded, the energy of the AMFR-response is limited to a very narrow frequency band. No physiologically induced disturbances of the phase locking of the AMFR to the modulation frequency could be observed. Additionally it is demonstrated that an increase of frequency resolution leads to an improved signal to noise ratio similar to the increase of averages in the time domain.
Self-service banking and financial literacy as prognosticators of business performance among rural small and medium-sized enterprises in Zimbabwe

Background: This investigation breaks new ground by examining an inventive monetary approach (the utilisation of technology-based self-service banking, borrowing financial literacy and budgeting financial literacy) that, if embraced by rural small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), can enhance business performance. Despite the expanded readiness of technology, the significance of rural SMEs has largely been overlooked, particularly in developing countries of Southern Africa. Therefore, the principal objective of this study is to fill this void. Aim: The current study aims to investigate the impact of technology-based self-service banking, borrowing financial literacy and budgeting financial literacy on the business performance of rural SMEs within the agricultural sector of Zimbabwe. Setting: In this study, data were collected in the rural area of Bindura, Zimbabwe. Method: The study utilised a quantitative research design using a structured questionnaire. Data was collected from 151 managers, SME owners and heads of accounting departments within rural SMEs that are operating in the rural area of Bindura. Smart partial least squares was used to analyse the data. Results: Technology-based self-service banking, borrowing financial literacy and budgeting financial literacy had a positive and a significant impact on business performance. Therefore, all three hypotheses were supported. Hence, the study’s findings validate the assertion that prognosticators such as technology-based self-service banking, borrowing financial literacy and budgeting financial literacy are instrumental in stimulating business performance among rural SMEs in Zimbabwe. A robust relationship was also found between budgeting financial literacy and business performance. Conclusion: This study offers fruitful implications to academics by making a significant contribution to finance, accounting and small business management literature by systematically exploring the impact of technology-based self-service banking, borrowing financial literacy and budgeting financial literacy on business performance. This study stands to add new knowledge to the present body of finance, accounting and small business management literature in Africa – a context that is often ignored by academics in developing countries.
Evaluation of Soluble Fas Ligand as a Serological Marker for Melanoma

Background: Fas ligand (Fas-L), which is expressed by melanoma cells, can be cleaved from cell membranes and become soluble (soluble Fas-L, sFas-L). No previous study examined sFas-L levels in patients affected with all clinical stages of melanoma. Objective: To investigate if sFas-L can be considered a serological marker for melanoma. Methods: Serological sFas-L values in 114 patients with melanoma and 25 controls were measured by using ELISA. Results: sFas-L values in patients were not significantly higher than in controls. They were not significantly different, moreover, when patient groups belonging to different clinical stages were compared with the control group. Two patients affected with distant metastases had the highest sFas-L values. Conclusion: sFas-L cannot be considered, within the limits of this study, as a serological marker for the detection of melanoma. Further studies are needed to evaluate whether sFas-L can be used as a marker for disease progression and/or prediction of therapy outcome.
The role of workplace spirituality as moderator the effect of soft total quality management on organization effectiveness

Soft TQM generally concern with human resource management and concentrate on behavior as employee training, leadership, and teamwork to achieve customer satisfaction. Leadership plays an important role to introduce and facilitating the implementation of TQM by creating a cooperative learning environment and leads to customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. Spirituality is considered as an important foundation for effective business leadership. Therefore, discourse of spiritual leadership becomes important to be integrated with application of workplace spirituality. This study aim is to examine the direct and indirect effect of spiritual leadership on organizational performance, testing the role of workplace spirituality as a moderation variable, and examining the role of job satisfaction as a mediation variable. The study was conducted in BRI Syariah Sidoarjo. The study population was all 141 employees. Data was collected by questionnaires and tested by path analysis and Moderate Regression Analysis (MRA). The research proves that Spiritual leadership directly and indirectly affect on organizational performance, workplace spirituality has moderation effect of spiritual leadership on employee job satisfaction, job satisfaction mediates the affect of spiritual leadership on organizational performance. These mean that every member of organization should be able to create and maintain a conducive working environment to make employees feel safe and comfortable to perform activities related to organization objectives. They do not hesitate to do the activities to improve job satisfaction which will ultimately affect on organizational performance.
Role of peripherally inserted central catheters in home parenteral nutrition: a 5-year prospective study.

BACKGROUND Home parenteral nutrition (HPN) has become a common therapy, with tunneled central venous catheters (CVCs) being preferred for its administration. Peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) are not currently recommended for long-term HPN, although evidence to support this statement is scarce. The authors aimed to evaluate the outcomes of HPN, focusing on CVC-related complications. MATERIALS AND METHODS All patients attended at the authors' center for HPN from 2007-2011 were prospectively included. HPN composition aimed at 20-35 kcal/kg/d, 3-6 g/kg/d of glucose, 1.0 g/kg/d of amino acids, and <1 g/kg/d of lipids. HPN was infused in an intermittent schedule, mostly at night. Catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs) were confirmed with positive semi-quantitative or quantitative culture of the catheter or simultaneous differential blood cultures drawn through the CVC and peripheral vein. RESULTS Seventy-two patients received HPN, with 79 implanted CVCs (48 PICCs, 10 Hickman, and 21 ports). Mean catheter-days were 129.1 for PICCs, 98.5 for Hickman, and 67.7 for ports (P = .685). When analyzing CRBSIs, ports had 44, Hickman had 20, and PICC had 0 episodes per 1000 catheter-days (P = .078). Only PICCs showed less incidence of CRBSIs vs ports (P = .043). Multivariate logistic regression, correcting by catheter-days, patients' age and sex, underlying disease, and type of catheter, showed that only catheter-days (P = .031) was a predictor for CRBSIs (P = .007, Nagelkerke R= = 0.246). CONCLUSION PICCs are similar in terms of catheter-related complications to other CVCs for the administration of HPN, especially for oncology patients with HPN lasting <6 months.
Zero-Shot Learning of SAR Target Feature Space With Deep Generative Neural Networks

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is of critical importance for practical synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR) as training samples are not always available for all targets and all observation configurations. We propose a novel generative-based deep neural network framework for ZSL of SAR ATR. The key component of the framework is a generative deconvolutional neural network referred to as generator. It learns a faithful hierarchical representation of known targets while automatically constructing a continuous SAR target feature space spanned by orientation-invariant features and orientation angle. It is then used as a reference to design and initialize an interpreter convolutional neural network, which is inversely symmetric to the generator network. The interpreter network is then trained to map any input SAR image, including those of unseen targets, into the target feature space. In a preliminary experiment with the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition data set, seven targets are used in the training of generator and interpreter networks. Then, the eighth target is used to test the interpreter, where it is correctly mapped to the reasonable spot spanned by the previous seven targets and its orientation can also be estimated.
Tris[2-(propyliminomethyl)phenolato-κ2 N,O]cobalt(III)

The title compound, [Co(C10H12NO)3], was synthesized from cobalt(III) fluoride and 2-(propyliminomethyl)phenol in refluxing methanol. The CoIII ion is hexacoordinated by three N and three O atoms from three bidentate Schiff base ligands in an octahedral geometry.
Microtext Processing Microtext Processing

The term “microtext” was proposed by US Navy researchers (Dela Rosa and Ellen 2009) to describe a type of written text document that has three characteristics: (a) it is very short, typically one or two sentences, and possibly as little as a single word; (b) it is written in an informal manner and unedited for quality and thus may use loose grammar, a conversational tone, vocabulary errors, and uncommon abbreviations and acronyms; and (c) it is semi-structured in the NLP sense, in that it includes some metadata such as a time stamp, an author, or the name of a field it was entered into. Microtexts have become omnipresent in today’s world: they are notably found in online chat discussions; online forum posts; user comments posted on online material such as videos, pictures, and news stories; Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter updates; Internet search queries; and phone text messaging (SMS). The expression “microtext processing” refers to the branch of NLP that focuses on handling microtext. The processing tasks found within this branch overlap greatly with those in more traditional text processing areas and include summarization, sentiment analysis, topic detection and classification, question-answering, and information extraction (Ellen 2011). However, new methodologies are being developed to accomplish these tasks by exploiting the unique text features of microtext highlighted above.