Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relation of Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders and Over-commitment of Rehabilitation Staff in Saudi Arabia

Background: Physical and occupational therapy professions are perceived as physically demanding. Occupational positions, patients handling techniques and therapeutic applications may result in job-related and postural stresses. Objectives: The research aimed at identifying the musculoskeletal disorders reported by physical and occupational therapists in the region of Jeddah and the relation to the level of Over-commitment and work factors. Demographic variables, productivity and job stress were studied in correlation with the musculoskeletal problems expressed by the therapists. Methods: A cross sectional survey approach by questionnaire identified the musculoskeletal disorders and related Effort-Reward Imbalance and over-commitment amongst therapists in various physical rehabilitation departments of public, profit making and teaching hospitals. Results: Results indicated that 50.6 % of the surveyed staff (N=166) reported to experience physical stress related to their work and whilst 39 % of the staff claimed to suffer from physical symptoms regularly after their working day. It was found that 56.6 % of the staff felt their symptoms were proportional with the workload intensity and severe enough to force them to take time off work. The main workrelated complaints were back, neck and shoulder pain and for 25 % of the staff myalgia in different areas of the body. Complaints were significantly correlated to the Over-commitment score and to the number of patients treated when associated to absences from work. The incidence of the musculoskeletal problems appeared higher amongst males and in teaching and private rehabilitation departments. Conclusion: Musculoskeletal disorders expressed by rehabilitation staff in the area of Jeddah appeared to be strongly related to the level of Over-commitment in work. The work-related complaints varied according to gender, age and hospital type. The main symptoms were back pain and generalized myalgia which were severe enough to lead to sick leave and medical consultations. The prevention of exaggerated efforts at work and recognition of the hardship related to the professional occupation could be emphasized in management strategies of physical rehabilitation services. [Isabelle C.N. Devreux, Bahjat Al-Awa, Khaled Mamdouh, Enas Elsayed. Relation of Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders and Over-commitment of Rehabilitation Staff in Saudi Arabia. Life Sci J 2012;9(3):781-785]. (ISSN: 1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite. com. 111
The Relationship Between Spiritual Well-Being and Quality of Life Among Elderly People

This study aims to identify the relationship between spiritual well-being and quality of life among elderly people residing in Kahrizak Senior House, Tehran, Iran. It was an analytical study. After obtaining approval from the ethics committee of the Iran University of Medical Sciences Research Deputy; the 141 elderly people residing in Kahrizak Senior House who signed the inform consent were recruited by census. Data were collected by Ellison & Palutzian Spiritual Well-Being Index and Short Form Quality of Life (SF-36). The mean score of quality of life was (50.36 ± 11.3). The mean score of spiritual well-being was (96.26 ± 17.93). There was a positive correlation between spiritual well-being and quality of life (P = .008). According to positive correlation between spiritual well-being and quality-of-life scores, awareness of the importance of spiritual well-being in caring of these people is recommended.
HRM Practices and Employee Performance in Public Sector Organizations in Pakistan : An Empirical study

Purpose This paper undertakes the analysis of declining performance in Pakistani public sector organizations. The survey was conducted to examine the implementation of HR practices and determine their relationship/impact with/on employees‘ performance efficiency in organization. Design/Methodology/Approach The present study is based on the idea that HR practices affect performance all the way to inculcate with modern HR practices for organizational performance. A questionnaire based on 27 items was adapted for data collection from 120 managers of Lahore based eleven public organizations of Pakistan. Positivist school of thought was conceived for this study. Pearson correlation and regression tests were applied to test the hypotheses. Findings Perceptive measures give a clue of impact of HRM practices on individual and collective performance. Public organizations do not reflect steady performance. There is a dearth of research tools to measure effectiveness of HRM practices and their mutual complementarities. Complementarities and their effects ensure steady performance at individual and collective level to get strategic objectives in the public organizations of Pakistan. Limitations and Future Research Directions Research context was limited to Lahore based eleven public organizations because of limited access to these organizations. Future research may extend this to other cities as well as to provinces to prove more effective. Practical Implications Public organizations should ensure a good degree of employee participation in decision making within their job sphere with a viable compensation plan. If organizations in developing countries are desirous to get escalating performance from the employees, they should develop their indigenous HRM practices to inculcate with modern HR practices. Originality/Value Declining performance is the visible gap in public organizations of Pakistan due to lack of understanding of HRM practices. HRM practices and employees performance is a black box area to investigate.
On-demand generation of background-free single photons from a solid-state source

True on-demand high-repetition-rate single-photon sources are highly sought after for quantum information processing applications. However, any coherently driven two-level quantum system suffers from a finite re-excitation probability under pulsed excitation, causing undesirable multi-photon emission. Here, we present a solid-state source of on-demand single photons yielding a raw second-order coherence of g(2)(0)=(7.5±1.6)×10−5 without any background subtraction or data processing. To this date, this is the lowest value of g(2)(0) reported for any single-photon source even compared to the previously reported best background subtracted values. We achieve this result on GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots embedded in a low-Q planar cavity by employing (i) a two-photon excitation process and (ii) a filtering and detection setup featuring two superconducting single-photon detectors with ultralow dark-count rates of (0.0056±0.0007) s−1 and (0.017±0.001) s−1, respectively. Re-excitation processes are dramatically suppres.
Greek Crisis, Stock Market Volatility and Exchange Rates in the European Monetary Union: A VAR-GARCH-Copula Model

The main objectives of this study are twofold. The first objective is to examine the volatility spillover between seventeen European stock market returns and exchange rate, over the period 2007-2011, in a multivariate setting, using the VAR (1)-GARCH (1,1) model which allows for transmission in returns and volatility. The second is to investigate the dependence structure and to test the degree of the dependence between financial returns using two measures of dependence: correlations and copula functions. Five candidates, the Gaussian, the Student’s t, the Frank, the Clayton and the Gumbel copulas, are compared. Our empirical results for the first objective suggest that past own volatilities matter more than past shocks (news) and there are moderate cross market volatility transmission and shocks between the markets. Moreover, the result on the second objective implies that, considering all the financial returns together, the Student-t copula seems the best fitting model, followed by the Normal copula, both for the two sub-period. The dependence structure is symmetric and has non-zero tail dependence. However, if we examine the relationship between each pair of stock-FX returns, both of the degree of the dependence and the dependence structure vary when the financial Greek crisis occurs. Our findings have important implications for global investment risk management by taking into account joint tail risk.
Novel Biomarkers in Risk Assessment and Management of Cardiovascular Disease

Measurement of any of the following novel lipid and nonlipid risk factors as an adjunct to lowdensity lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the risk assessment and management of cardiovascular disease is considered investigational. • Apolipoprotein AI • Apolipoprotein B • Apolipoprotein E • B-type natriuretic peptide • Cystatin C • Fibrinogen • High-density lipoprotein (HDL) subclass • Leptin • Lipoprotein (a) • Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) subclass
Sudden Death in Patients With Severe Aortic Stenosis: Observations From the CURRENT AS Registry

Background The annual incidence of sudden death has been reported to be low (<1%/year) in asymptomatic patients with severe aortic stenosis (AS), and there is a paucity of data on the risk factors of sudden death in patients with severe AS. Methods and Results We evaluated the incidence and risk factors of sudden death during the median follow‐up period of 1334 days in the Contemporary Outcomes After Surgery and Medical Treatment in Patients With Severe Aortic Stenosis (CURRENT AS) registry enrolling 3815 consecutive patients with severe AS between 2003 and 2011. The mean age was 78 years, and the prevalences of male sex and prior myocardial infarction were 38% and 8%, respectively. Sudden death occurred in 175 patients without aortic valve replacement. The cumulative 5‐year incidences of sudden death, censored at aortic valve replacement, which accounted for the competing risk, were 9.2% in symptomatic patients and 7.2% (1.4%/year) in asymptomatic patients (P<0.001). Among 82 asymptomatic patients experiencing sudden death, 54 patients (66%) died abruptly without any preceding symptoms, and 35 (65%) of these sudden deaths occurred within 3 months of the last clinical follow‐up visit. Independent risk factors for sudden death were hemodialysis (hazard ratio [HR] 3.63; 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.42‐5.43), prior myocardial infarction (HR 2.11; 95% CI 1.28‐3.50), body mass index <22 (HR 1.51; 95% CI 1.03‐2.21), peak aortic jet velocity ≥5 m/s (HR 1.76; 95% CI 1.12‐2.78), and left ventricular ejection fraction <60% (HR 1.52; 95% CI 1.08‐2.14). Conclusions The incidence of sudden death in asymptomatic patients with severe AS might be higher than that reported in previous reports. Several baseline clinical and echocardiographic characteristics were associated with increased risk of sudden death. Clinical Trial Registration URL: http://www.umin. ac.jp/ctr/index.htm. Unique identifier: UMIN000012140.
Strategic Planning in Saudi SMEs: Case Studies in the Private Health Insurance Sector

Recently, the Saudi government is giving a renewed attention to promoting SME's, as well as the insurance sector, which faces additional challenges of stiff competition, and the need to satisfy customers' high standards and expectations. This study sought to provide insight into how SME managers in the Saudi health insurance sector deal strategically with the issues they face. Five case studies were made, and the selected firms were analysed based on Mazzarol's strategic management framework, which involved identifying characteristics pertaining to entrepreneurship, innovation, strategic networking, growth vector, and the strategic triangle. All of the firms are exhibiting growth, the newer ones had relatively more dynamic entrepreneurship and innovation, and there is evidence of more long-term strategic planning in two of the latter. None of the selected firms appear to be struggling in the way that is commonly described for SME's generally, as they were found to be strategically prepared to cope with the challenges.
Living Large: Evolving Consumer Credit Institutions and Privately Induced Transfer Payments

Between 1980 and 2003, real per capita personal income in the United States grew by 59 percent. Meanwhile, real outstanding consumer debt per adult over age fifteen (revolving debt, 2003 dollars) grew from $712 in 1980 to $3,261 in 2003, an increase of 358 percent. The household debt service burden, measured as the ratio of consumer debt payments to income, rose from 11.5 percent in 1983 to 12.5 percent in 2001. Not surprisingly, the number of nonbusiness bankruptcies rose from 127 to 566 per 100,000 of population in the same period. 1 American consumers continue to fall deeper into debt and often find it difficult to service the debt they have. There are many reasons for the expansion of consumer credit (Watkins 2000) and the increase in bankruptcies. This paper offers an explanation not evident elsewhere in the literature, that evolving consumer credit institutions have created an environment in which individuals can choose to transfer consumption from society to themselves with few consequences and little public scrutiny. The paper begins by examining the basics of consumer theory from both the institutionalist and neoclassical perspectives. This examination will establish that, from either perspective, the typical consumer's motives are consistent with the desire to consume beyond their income constraint. The second section provides a brief overview of the evolution of bankruptcy and debt collection institutions. Finally the paper will discuss how institutional evolution has created the opportunity for privately induced transfer payments.
Defining and Mitigating the Governance Challenges of Infrastructure Project Development and Delivery

Abstract Prior research on the governance of large infrastructure projects has emphasized the question of who should own and operate long-lived infrastructure assets, comparing public and private organizations with respect to productive efficiency or the distribution of welfare. Our ongoing research seeks to shift the focus of this research to the question of how public or private organizations can best manage two distinct kinds of governance challenges that occur systematically during the project shaping, implementation and operation phases of such projects: (1) opportunism in the presence of displaced agency – i.e., conflicts between the incentives of parties leading decision making in each of the successive and interdependent phases of design, construction and operations that lead to sub- optimal investment and may lead them to pursue their self-interest with guile; and (2) political and regulatory risk – i.e., ex post political interventions in operational decisions. A model that incorporates the efficiency and legitimacy consequences of governance decisions over the life of an infrastructure project thus offers substantial gains on more piecemeal disciplinary approaches. We seek to develop a new typology of hybrid governance mechanisms designed to alter the incidence of opportunism by counterparties or stakeholders to a series of interconnected transactions. This paper lays out the two key governance challenges of infrastructure projects in some detail, with examples of each, and points the way toward research on a broader governance framework for such projects. Our conference presentation and future publications will focus in greater depth on examples of both existing and proposed new hybrid governance arrangements that must be studied, refined and implemented to address these challenges.
Intake, digestibility and ruminal parameters of dairy cows fed pelleted diets and treated with lignosulfonate-containing sunflower seeds

The objective of this study was to evaluate intake, in vitro and apparent digestibility and ruminal parameters of Holstein cows that were confined and fed corn silage and concentrate containing: ground sunflower seeds (GS); ground sunflower seeds treated with 5% lignosulfonate (GSL); pelleted sunflower seeds (PS); or ground and pelleted sunflower seeds treated with lignosulfonate (PSL). Four lactating cows with 130±28 days of lactation and body weights of 569±63 kg were used. These animals were distributed in a Latin square design with four diets and four periods of 21 days each. There were no differences in the intakes (% body weight) of dry matter (DM), organic matter (OM), mineral matter (MM), crude protein (CP), neutral detergent fiber (NDF) or acid detergent fiber (ADF). The apparent digestibility of DM, OM, CP, EE, NDF, ADF and NFC were similar for all the diets, with a tendency towards decreased CP digestibility for all the pelleted diets (65.79%) compared with the non-pelleted diets (69.66%). A negative effect of lignosulfonate was observed for the in vitro digestibility (IVD) of DM, and a negative tendency was observed for the IVD of OM. Pelleting decreased the concentration of acetic acid (55.95 × 58.82 mM) in rumen fluid. There was no effect of diet on pH (6.17) or ammonia nitrogen concentration (18.19 mg/dL). Pelleting and lignosulfonate do not promote the protective effect of sunflower seed nutrients as expected, and it may be more feasible to provide ground sunflower seed.
Mapping stochastic processes onto complex networks

We introduce a method by which stochastic processes are mapped onto complex networks. As examples, we construct the networks for such time series as those for free-jet and low-temperature helium turbulence, the German stock market index (the DAX), and white noise. The networks are further studied by contrasting their geometrical properties, such as the mean length, diameter, clustering, and average number of connections per node. By comparing the network properties of the original time series investigated with those for the shuffled and surrogate series, we are able to quantify the effect of the long-range correlations and the fatness of the probability distribution functions of the series on the networks constructed. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the time series can be reconstructed with high precision by means of a simple random walk on their corresponding networks.
A Survey on Mining of Weakly Labeled Web Facial Images and Annotation

: Now-a-days, lots of images are generated and uploaded on the internet due to the popularity of digital cameras and social media tools. Some of these facial images are tagged correctly, but most of them are not tagged correctly, so facial annotation came into the picture. There are many applications found in online photo album management, real world management system and in multimedia to correctly identify the person in the video domain. On the World Wide Web (WWW), most images are wrongly labeled so it asserts towards a strong need of a system that strongly performs mining and annotation of these weakly labeled images. Face annotation associated with face detection and recognition recently researcher’s interests in mining weakly-labeled facial pictures on the net to resolve research challenges in computer vision and image understanding. This paper provides varied techniques or ways that are used for annotating facial images. One testing issue problem for search-based face annotation plan is the way to effectively perform tagging by retrieving the list of most comparative facial pictures and their weak labels that are frequently noisy and deficient. The main objective of the proposed system is to assign right name labels to a given query facial picture.
Decision support tool on investments in life safety based on sampling theory

Abstract For decisions related to investments in societal safety and health, it is often difficult to balance the discretionary competence of decision-makers with theoretical optimum levels of investment. While removing day-to-day decisions about risk from the political arena would arguably result in better decisions, a full depoliticisation is not desirable since public and private risk preferences cannot simply be neglected without negatively affecting the perception of risk and inducing a democratic deficit. Therefore, a decision-making tool has been developed which allows for narrowing the scope of possible decisions for the decision-maker, based on predetermined maximum acceptable deviations from the theoretic optimum investment level. These maximum acceptable deviations should be established upfront on a general basis and may subsequently be applied on a case-by-case basis. In this paper, the basic calculation concepts are explained and a detailed example study is presented in which limits for the target safety level of concrete slabs are determined under some specific considerations.
Cornea Automated Tear Film Surface Quality Breakup Time as a Novel Clinical Marker for Tear Hyperosmolarity in Dry Eye Disease

Citation: Downie LE. Automated tear film surface quality breakup time as a novel clinical marker for tear hyperosmolarity in dry eye disease. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2015;56:7260– 7268. DOI:10.1167/iovs.15-17772 PURPOSE. To assess the diagnostic performance of a novel, automated, noninvasive measure of tear film stability derived from Placido disc videokeratography, the tear film surface quality breakup time (TFSQ-BUT), as a clinical marker for diagnosing dry eye disease (DED) relative to a standard of tear hyperosmolarity.
Day and night warming have different effect on root lifespan

Abstract. Roots are key components of C cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and play an important role in the regulation of response of terrestrial ecosystems to global climate warming, which is predicted to occur with greater warming magnitudes at night than during daytime across different regions on the Earth. However, there has been no detailed study to investigate the effect of asymmetrical warming on root dynamics at the level of terrestrial ecosystems. To understand the effects of day and night warming on root lifespan in the semiarid temperate steppe in northern China, a field study with a full factorial design including control, day warming, night warming and continuous warming was conducted using modified rhizotron technique during three growing seasons in 2007–2009. Our results show that day, night and continuous warming had different effects on longevity of roots born in spring, summer and autumn, and that day warming significantly prolonged overall lifespan for the roots born in the three growing seasons, while night warning had no effect on overall lifespan. Day and night warming had different effects on root non-structural carbohydrate content, suggesting that allocation of photoassimilate may account for the differential responses of root lifespan to day and night warming. These results differ from other processes associated with ecosystems C cycle such as total ecosystem productivity, net ecosystem productivity and soil respiration. Our findings highlight that it is essential to incorporate the differential effects of day and night warming on root dynamics into simulating and predicting the responses and feedbacks of terrestrial ecosystems C cycling to global warming.