Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring Correlates of Product Launch in Collaborative Ventures: An Empirical Investigation of Pharmaceutical Alliances

This paper examines collaborative ventures leading toward the launch of new products in the pharmaceutical industry. These collaborative ventures are one of the most underresearched areas in the new product literature, yet the preponderance of these collaborative ventures makes it an area of great importance for scholars and practitioners alike. As such, the purpose of the study is to examine why some collaborative projects produce a favorable outcome (the launch of a product) whereas others do not. That is, what characteristics of partner firms in the collaborative ventures and what characteristics of the partnership lead to a successful launch of a new product in the pharmaceutical industry? Secondary data from the pharmaceutical industry are employed in a multinomial logit model. Data from 128 collaborative ventures from 1980 to 2004 are used in the analysis. The partner firms in the collaborative ventures are from various industries ranging from malt beverages to pharmaceutical preparations to electronic and other equipment among others. Of the 128 collaborative ventures, 66 were successful in leading to a new product launch, whereas 62 did not result in the launch of a new product. The results from the multinomial logit analysis suggest that combined marketing resources of parent companies, combined technological intensity of parent companies, and combined asset bases of parent companies contribute to the likelihood of an eventual product launch in a collaborative venture. However, the results of the analysis show that contrary to expectations, technological complementarity of partners in the collaborative venture is not a significant predictor of successful new product launch. The results of the study suggest certain aspects for managers to consider when establishing collaborative ventures. To maximize the possibilities of the collaborative venture leading to the successful launching of a new product, managers should be concerned with the resources potentially available to partners in the collaborative venture from parent firms. These resources are not only of a financial but also of a technological nature. The existence of these resources does not ensure provision of resources to the collaborative venture; however, without the possibility of these resources it appears that successful launch of a product is less likely.
Measuring Engagement in Video Games: A Questionnaire

Video games continue to grown in popularity and presently account for annual revenues in the billions of dollars. Although the technologies underlying a modern video game are well understood, the characteristics of a game that make it a success are not. The Engagement Questionnaire (EQ) is introduced in an attempt to capture those dimensions that are thought to influence the degree to which a user becomes engaged while playing a video game. Our goal was to develop a metric that could be applied to a broad range of video game genres (e.g., action, adventure, strategy, sports) and video game users (e.g., expert/novice, male/female, young/old). Factor analyses of data representing 243 participants suggested the existence of five stable factors among 46 questionnaire items. These dimensions were labeled Interest, Authenticity, Curiosity, Involvement and Fidelity. Though further empirical testing is necessary, we expect that the questionnaire will prove to be a useful tool for the appraisal of video games, as well as for the identification of critical differences between those who play them.
From learning portfolios to personal development plans

Previous articles have focused on the need to recognise and implement modern educational theory in practice, to make learning a continuous, lifelong activity, and to relate learning to outcome measures. For each of these, the medical practitioner has to develop the appropriate tools for these concepts to be implemented and to be successful. But how do practitioners appraise what they have been involved with or map what they intend to carry out in the future, or make themselves ready for a future when accreditation and re-accreditation are realistic outcome measures? In this article we put forward, for discussion, the use of modified learning portfolios, which, when combined with a personal development plan, act as an educationally directed developmental tool to identify educational and training needs, as well as to record individual progress and success. We will draw a comparison between this type of portfolio and the standard curriculum vitae, whilst demonstrating the potential for a learning portfolio to be a useful adjunct to a curriculum vitae.
Competitive Strategy of Private Equity

Is KKR a PE firm or an investment bank? This study analyzes a puzzling phenomenon in the PE sector and initiates strategy research on the corporate level of the PE firm. An empirical investigation of two thirds of the PE universe discovers strategic groups with diametric strategic patterns, ranging from a traditional monolithic PE model to a multi-business PE centered model. The evidence suggests that one strategic group is actually traversing the confines of the strategic space of traditional PE. Recognizing that this group is leading the industry in terms of PE assets under management, capital supply, deal flow, and investment size, this study suggests that the phenomenon should receive more research attention.
Determinants of Direct Marketing Strategy Adoption by Agro SMEs’ in the Greater Accra Region, Ghana

The study investigates the determinants of direct marketing strategy (DMS) adoption and its effect on gross sales of agro SMEs in the wake of the government’s industrialization efforts. A multistage sampling was used to select 120 agro SMEs in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana, and the study took place between August 2011 and June 2012. Out of the 120 Agro SMEs’ sampled, 39 firms were involved in processing level 1, 39 firms processing level 2 and 40 firms in processing level 3. A t-test was used to test the means of gross sales over the study period, of DMS adopting firms and non adopting firms. The double hurdle approach was used first to determine factors that influence SMEs adoption of DMS and second, to assess the effect of adoption on the gross sales of adopting firms. The results showed that DMS enhances growth in sales, since DMS adopting SMEs increased their gross sales significantly as compared to non adopting SMEs. The factors identified to influence the adoption of a DMS positively were, the processing level of product, location, organised structure of firm, type of packaging; whilst free zones status, Research Article Setsoafia et al.; AJAEES, Article no. AJAEES.2013. 001 106 use of wholesaler/distributors and internet use, negatively influenced adoption. The impacts of processing level engaged in, age of owner, packaging, and organized structure of firm; on the gross sales from DMS were estimated. Conclusion: In conclusion, the adoption DMS enhances growth of Agro SMEs’, when it is undertaken by organized firms involved in level 3 processing, located in urban areas. The study, recommends among others, encouragement in the adoption of DMS by stake holders such as MoFA, MoTI, NGOs, and DMS specific training should be given to agro SMEs.
Conference on Surface Integrity ( CIRP CSI ) Thermally induced surface integrity changes of ground WCCo hardmetals

Ground hardmetals are exposed to high temperatures during both processing (e.g. coating deposition) and use (e.g. as a cutting tool). However, studies on thermally induced changes of surface integrity are limited. Here we address this by means of FIB/FESEM and EBSD investigation, with special focus on the binder phase characterization. Our findings indicate that thermal treatment causes two main surface modifications. First, an unexpected microporosity appears in the binder within the subsurface layer when ground surfaces are heated. Second, the metallic phase underneath the ground surface experiences metallurgical changes, in terms of grain and crystallographic phase structures. The mechanisms responsible for these modifications of the binder are discussed in terms of grinding-induced and thermally-reversed phase transformation as well as recrystallization phenomena. We also note that no additional heat treatment related changes such as microcracking and carbide fragmentation in the subsurface layer, are discerned. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 3rd CIRP Conference on Surface Integrity (CIRP CSI)
Draft Genome Sequence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Strain RB, a Bacterium Capable of Synthesizing Cadmium Selenide Nanoparticles

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain RB is a bacterium capable of synthesizing cadmium selenide (CdSe) nanoparticles and was isolated from a soil sample. Here, we present the draft genome sequence of P. aeruginosa strain RB. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of a draft genome of a CdSe-synthesizing bacterium.
The Relevance of Qualitative Variables in Insolvency: The Case of Spanish Small and Medium Entities

The objective of this study is to analyze the factors that influence the insolvency of small and medium entities. In order to do this, a sample of Small and Medium Entities were gathered and analysed. The main conclusions of this paper allows us to state that in line with previous research, financial ratios are the most significant variables in the models and particularly those which represent resource generation and self-financing. Also, the qualitative information is also meaningful in order to evaluate the solvency of firms and adds accuracy to the models only based on ratios. Specifically, the number of shareholders and managers and the familiar relation in the board seem to be meaningful variables in order to identify the risk of insolvency. The main contribution of this paper consists of considering these factors for very small entities and to shed light about which qualitative traits may be relevant in insolvency detection.
Phase Symmetry Approach Applied to Children Heart Chambers Segmentation: A Comparative Study

Segmentation of echocardiographic images presents a great challenge because these images contain strong speckle noise and artifacts. Besides, most ultrasound segmentation methods are semiautomatic, requiring initial contour to be manually identified in the images. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on the phase symmetry approach and level set evolution, in order to extract simultaneously all heart cavities in a fully automatic way. The level set evolution uses a new logarithmic-based stopping function, which demonstrates to perform well in the boundary extraction. We compared our method with other level set approaches, the watershed technique, and the manual segmentation made by two physicians. The experimental work was based on echocardiography images of children. Similarity metrics, namely Pratt function, pixel mean error, and similarity angle have been used for the performance evaluation of the different methods. The results indicate that our method has a performance of at least 4% superior to the other methods able to segment the four chambers. Even for the two worst boundary extraction cases (right ventricle and left atrium), the performance of the proposed method is still better than the other techniques.
Acetate Utilization in Lactococcus lactis Deficient in Lactate Dehydrogenase: a Rescue Pathway for Maintaining Redox Balance

ABSTRACT Acetate was shown to improve glucose fermentation inLactococcus lactis deficient in lactate dehydrogenase.13C and 1H nuclear magnetic resonance studies using [2-13C]glucose and [2-13C]acetate as substrates demonstrated that acetate was exclusively converted to ethanol. This novel pathway provides an alternative route for NAD+ regeneration in the absence of lactate dehydrogenase.
Permutation Entropy: Too Complex a Measure for EEG Time Series?

: Permutation entropy (PeEn) is a complexity measure that originated from dynamical systems theory. Speciﬁcally engineered to be robustly applicable to real-world data, the quantity has since been utilised for a multitude of time series analysis tasks. In electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis, value changes of PeEn correlate with clinical observations, among them the onset of epileptic seizures or the loss of consciousness induced by anaesthetic agents. Regarding this ﬁeld of application, the present work suggests a relation between PeEn-based complexity estimation and spectral methods of EEG analysis: for ordinal patterns of three consecutive samples, the PeEn of an epoch of EEG appears to approximate the centroid of its weighted power spectrum. To substantiate this proposition, a systematic approach based on redundancy reduction is introduced and applied to sleep and epileptic seizure EEG. The interrelation demonstrated may aid the interpretation of PeEn in EEG, and may increase its comparability with other techniques of EEG analysis.
Transcription Factor SOX9 Plays a Key Role in the Regulation of Visual Cycle Gene Expression in the Retinal Pigment Epithelium*

Background: The visual cycle is an enzymatic cascade that regenerates the visual chromophore. Results: Visual cycle gene expression is regulated by SOX9 in combination with OTX2 or LHX2 and can be modulated by common microRNAs. Conclusion: A core transcriptional network involving SOX9 regulates visual cycle genes. Significance: Understanding visual cycle gene regulation may have implications for treating retinal degenerative diseases. The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) performs specialized functions to support retinal photoreceptors, including regeneration of the visual chromophore. Enzymes and carrier proteins in the visual cycle function sequentially to regenerate and continuously supply 11-cis-retinal to retinal photoreceptor cells. However, it is unknown how the expression of the visual cycle genes is coordinated at the transcriptional level. Here, we show that the proximal upstream regions of six visual cycle genes contain chromatin-accessible sex-determining region Y box (SOX) binding sites, that SOX9 and LIM homeobox 2 (LHX2) are coexpressed in the nuclei of mature RPE cells, and that SOX9 acts synergistically with orthodenticle homeobox 2 (OTX2) to activate the RPE65 and retinaldehyde binding protein 1 (RLBP1) promoters and acts synergistically with LHX2 to activate the retinal G protein-coupled receptor (RGR) promoter. ChIP reveals that SOX9 and OTX2 bind to the promoter regions of RPE65, RLBP1, and RGR and that LHX2 binds to those of RPE65 and RGR in bovine RPE. ChIP with human fetal RPE cells shows that SOX9 and OTX2 also bind to the human RPE65, RLBP1, and RGR promoters. Conditional inactivation of Sox9 in mouse RPE results in reduced expression of several visual cycle genes, most dramatically Rpe65 and Rgr. Furthermore, bioinformatic analysis predicts that multiple common microRNAs (miRNAs) regulate visual cycle genes, and cotransfection of miRNA mimics with luciferase reporter constructs validated some of the predicted miRNAs. These results implicate SOX9 as a key regulator of visual cycle genes, reveal for the first time the functional role of LHX2 in the RPE, and suggest the possible regulation of visual cycle genes by common miRNAs.
Rivalry, Strategic Groups and Firm Profitability

An analysis of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry during the period 1963–82 finds that a substantial decline in industry profitability is not explained by changes in the number and size distribution of firms, in segment interdependence and in strategic distance. In contrast, declining industry profitability is strongly associated with increasing rivalry. This increasing rivalry is associated with changes in strategic group structure and a concomitant shift from within group rivalry to between group rivalry.
Robust Beamforming for BDMA Massive MIMO

In this paper, we design robust downlink beamforming against the imperfect channel state information (CSI) for beam division multiple access (BDMA) massive multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Different from conventional approach, the optimality of semi-definite relaxation (SDR) is strictly proved by showing the rank-one property of the optimal beamforming with the orthogonal BDMA massive channels, where globally optimal robust beamforming solutions are derived. More importantly, we make one step further by deriving the optimal beamforming directions and optimal beamforming power allocation of the SDR in closed-form, which greatly reduces the optimization complexity and makes the proposed design practical for a real word massive MIMO system. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
Disentangling location-based advertising: the effects of location congruency and medium type on consumers' ad attention and brand choice

Research on location-based advertising (LBA) suggests that the merits of LBA lie in the fact that consumers can be targeted with location-congruent ads on their personal mobile devices. However, LBA consists of two underlying constructs: a mobile (vs. point-of-sales) advertising medium and location congruency (vs. location incongruency). This study aims to disentangle these underlying constructs by showing that they differentially affect the efficacy of an ad. Using a virtual reality lab experiment, this study shows that location-congruent ads result in increased choice for the target brand as compared to location-incongruent ads, independent of medium type. However, in location-incongruent situations, mobile ads attracted more attention than point-of-sales display ads. The advantages of LBA thus do not seem to emanate from medium type, but rather from the congruency between the ad and product location. When the ad is received at a different location than the product, the mobile medium is able to enhance consumers' ad attention.
Analysis of the Digital Divide Between Disabled and Non-Disabled People in South Korea

This article analyses the digital divide between disabled and non-disabled people by comparing their personal information capacity. The personal information capacity consists of four sub-categories: the “access index”, “capacity index”, “quantitative usage index”, and “qualitative usage index”. Using the Oaxaca model, we separate the digital divide into two parts: the digital divide caused by “disability” and that caused by “other individual characteristics” such as education and household income. The main findings of the article are as follows. All four indices are lower for disabled people, and the “usage indices” of disabled people are particularly low compared to that of non-disabled people. As regards young people, “disability” is a much more important factor than “other individual characteristics” in causing a digital divide in their personal capacity index. Regarding middle-aged people, the digital divide between the two groups is mostly caused by “other individual characteristics”, among which education is the most important.
Efficient uplink scheduling policy for variable bit rate traffic in IEEE 802.16 BWA systems

One of the major challenges in the context of transmitting real‐time multimedia data in broadband wireless access (BWA) systems is that the varied bit rate of traffic causes low bandwidth utilization. The conventional uplink scheduling algorithms for variable bit rate (VBR) video traffic transmission in IEEE 802.16 BWA systems have some disadvantages, including waste of uplink bandwidth, MAC overhead, and access delay. To cope with these difficulties, we propose an uplink scheduling algorithm for VBR traffic transmission for IEEE 802.16 BWA systems. In the proposed algorithm, the base station (BS) assigns uplink bandwidth to the video user by considering the traffic state transitions. The uplink bandwidth is equally divided into several intervals where each interval represents a traffic state. Only when the traffic state is changed, the bandwidth request process is incurred. Also, by using two reserved bits in the generic MAC header of IEEE 802.16 BWA systems as piggyback bits, the information about traffic state transition can be sent to the BS without extra overhead. Simulations conducted with QualNet 4.0 show that the bandwidth waste ratio of our proposed algorithm is less than that of the conventional algorithms. That is, the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional algorithms for VBR traffic transmission in IEEE 802.16 BWA systems in terms of bandwidth utilization. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Performance analysis of an internally coded MC-FH-CDMA system

We consider an internally coded scheme for multicarrier frequency-hopping CDMA (MC-FH-CDMA) communication systems. In this method, the total bandwidth is partitioned into Ns1 disjoint bands and each band is also segmented into Ns2, subbands. Based on the super-orthogonal encoder output and a pseudorandom (PN) sequence, one of the Ns1 bands is selected. Then, the data is transmitted in that band in the form of multicarrier frequency-hopping technique using BPSK modulation. At the receiver front end, we use soft detector, then we apply Viterbi decoding algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that our method outperforms the previously presented uncoded and coded MC-FH-CDMA systems without requiring any extra bandwidth.
Three Ways of Talking about Health in Communities Targeted for Regeneration

Interviews were held with nine peripatetic professionals—district nurses, health visitors and social workers—working in New Deal for Communities (NDC) urban areas in the English West Midlands. They spoke of health in the community in three distinct ways: health as individual and family lifestyle; the local environment and health; and `life is a struggle for some'. Those who emphasized the individual and family lifestyle approach expressed frustration in their professional role. The two alternative discourses, while recognizing the influence of social determinants of health, were problematic in different ways, reflecting the lack of a clear alternative to the individual and family lifestyle model for public health professions.
The use of marketing metrics by British fundraising charities: a survey of current practice

Although most large UK fundraising charities have substantial marketing departments and apply high levels of sophistication to their marketing work, little is known about how and to what extent charities measure the consequences of their marketing activities. This empirical study sought to identify (i) the marketing metrics that were most commonly employed within a sample of UK charitable organisations, (ii) which metrics were regarded as the most useful, (iii) which ones were presented to senior managements, and (iv) which were seen as the most important when petitioning governing bodies for increases in marketing budgets. A model was developed to explain the degrees to which charities applied various categories of metrics. It emerged that all the charities in the sample employed at least some basic metrics, with 19% using a wide range of measures. The extents of the sample organisations' employment of marketing metrics were significantly influenced by their levels of prior investment in marketing, the magnitudes and formality of their forward planning systems, their donor and competitor orientations, top management demands for accountability, resource availability, and whether a charity employed academically well-qualified marketing staff.