Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sustainability Assurance and Cost of Capital: Does Assurance Impact on Credibility of Corporate Social Responsibility Information?

This paper aims to examine the credibility value of sustainability assurance and the type of assurance provider on cost of capital. A large sample of international companies from the period 2007–2014 was used to develop our models of analysis. We find a greater decrease in cost of capital for companies that publish and assure their social and environmental reports. Thus, voluntary sustainability disclosures decrease the cost of capital. However, companies also have the opportunity to reinforce this decrease by providing an assurance statement, so increasing the credibility of corporate social responsibility information. In addition, the decrease in the cost of capital is significantly higher when such assurance is provided by a top-tier accountancy firm instead of by engineering or consultancy firms; this result supports also the reputational capital of accountancy firms.
Applications of random sampling in computational geometry, II

We use random sampling for several new geometric algorithms. The algorithms are “Las Vegas,” and their expected bounds are with respect to the random behavior of the algorithms. These algorithms follow from new general results giving sharp bounds for the use of random subsets in geometric algorithms. These bounds show that random subsets can be used optimally for divide-and-conquer, and also give bounds for a simple, general technique for building geometric structures incrementally. One new algorithm reports all the intersecting pairs of a set of line segments in the plane, and requiresO(A+n logn) expected time, whereA is the number of intersecting pairs reported. The algorithm requiresO(n) space in the worst case. Another algorithm computes the convex hull ofn points inEd inO(n logn) expected time ford=3, andO(n[d/2]) expected time ford>3. The algorithm also gives fast expected times for random input points. Another algorithm computes the diameter of a set ofn points inE3 inO(n logn) expected time, and on the way computes the intersection ofn unit balls inE3. We show thatO(n logA) expected time suffices to compute the convex hull ofn points inE3, whereA is the number of input points on the surface of the hull. Algorithms for halfspace range reporting are also given. In addition, we give asymptotically tight bounds for (≤k)-sets, which are certain halfspace partitions of point sets, and give a simple proof of Lee's bounds for high-order Voronoi diagrams.
Evaluating the intrinsic dimension of evolving data streams

Data streams are fundamental in several data processing applications involving large amount of data generated continuously as a sequence of events. Frequently, such events are not stored, so the data is analyzed and queried as they arrive and discarded right away. In many applications these events are represented by a predetermined number of numerical attributes. Thus, without loss of generality, we can consider events as elements from a dimensional domain. A sequence of events in a data stream can be characterized by its intrinsic dimension, which in dimensional datasets is usually lower than the embedding dimensionality. As the intrinsic dimension can be used to improve the performance of algorithms handling dimensional data (specially query optimization) measuring it is relevant to improve data streams processing and analysis as well. Moreover, it can also be useful to forecast data behavior. Hence, we present an algorithm able to measure the intrinsic dimension of a data stream on the fly, following its continuously changing behavior. We also present experimental studies, using both real and synthetic data streams, showing that the results on well-understood datasets closely follow what is expected from the known behavior of the data.
An examination of Elliot's hierarchical model of approach and avoidance achievement motivation in athletes returning to sport following serious injury

Sport injury is both a physical and psychological event. Some athletes may still be recovering psychologically even after their bodies have healed. Research has found that athletes who return to sport before they are psychologically ready may be at risk of experiencing maladaptive appraisals and performance outcomes. On the other hand, research has also shown that athletes may experience adaptive outcomes after injury such as improved performance and personal growth. In an effort to determine possible factors contributing to the disparity between these postinjury appraisals and experiences, the purpose of this study was to retrospectively explore the potential mediating effect of achievement goals on perceived competence and return-to-sport outcomes among college athletes who have recovered from a serious sport injury. The sample consisted of 75 male and female college athletes who returned to sport after having missed at least 3 weeks due to injury. Participants completed a survey measuring perceived competence, achievement goals, and return-tosport outcomes. Results indicated that task-approach goals significantly mediated the relationship between perceived competence and a renewed perspective. These findings suggest that athletes who believed themselves to be capable and proficient in their sport after having recovered from injury were motivated by goals to perform well, to be effective, and to
COLUMBUS : Feature Selection on Data Analytics Systems

There is an arms race in the data management industry to support analytics applications over large data. Recent systems from IBM, Oracle, and SAP enable one to run R scripts over data stored in a data processing system. A key step in analytics applications is feature selection, which is an iterative process that involves statistical algorithms and data manipulations. From conversations with analysts at enterprise settings, we learned that feature selection is often described using logical operations, e.g., adding or removing a feature, and evaluating a set of features. But this level of abstraction for feature selection is not present in current R-based data processing systems. Building on the literature on feature selection in practice, we organize a set of common operations for feature selection and build a prototype usable in the Oracle R Enterprise environment. We study two benefits of this level of abstraction for feature selection – performance optimizations and provenance tracking. We show how two classical database-style ideas – batching and materialization – can improve the performance of feature selection operations significantly but raise non-obvious tradeoffs. We formalize our optimizations and show that, while they are NPHard in general, we can obtain optimal solutions efficiently in some cases that we observed in real feature selection workloads. We empirically validate that our optimizations can improve performance by over an order of magnitude on real feature selection workloads. We then show how our framework enables us to easily track the provenance of feature selection processes and validate that the runtime overhead for capturing provenance is less than 5% on the feature selection workloads that we studied. We also discuss how we can reuse captured provenance to further improve performance.
ASD, a Psychiatric Disorder, or Both? Psychiatric Diagnoses in Adolescents with High-Functioning ASD

Varied presentations of emotion dysregulation in autism complicate diagnostic decision making and may lead to inaccurate psychiatric diagnoses or delayed autism diagnosis for high-functioning children. This pilot study aimed to determine the concordance between prior psychiatric diagnoses and the results of an autism-specific psychiatric interview in adolescents with high-functioning autism. Participants included 35 predominantly Caucasian and male verbal 10- to 17-year-olds with a confirmed autism spectrum disorder and without intellectual disability. The average age of autism spectrum diagnosis was 11 years old. Lifetime psychiatric diagnoses were established via the Autism Comorbidity Interview, developed to identify comorbid conditions within the context of autism. Autism Comorbidity Interview results were compared to parent report of prior community psychiatric diagnoses. Approximately 60% of prior psychiatric diagnoses were not supported on the Autism Comorbidity Interview; the lowest diagnostic concordance was for prior bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnoses. Although 51% of children met Autism Comorbidity Interview criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder, rates of prior diagnoses were much higher, with 77% having at least one prior psychiatric diagnosis and 60% having two or more. Although many participants met criteria for comorbid psychiatric disorders, the majority of previous psychiatric diagnoses were not supported when autism-related manifestations were systematically taken into account. These findings require replication and may not generalize to lower functioning and earlier diagnosed children with autism spectrum disorder. Results emphasize the importance of increasing awareness of the manifestations of high-functioning autism in order to improve accuracy of diagnosis and appropriateness of interventions.
Rendezvous: an architecture for synchronous multi-user applications

Rendezvous is an architecture for creating synchronous multi-user applications. It consists of two parts: a run-time architecture for managing the multi-user session and a start-up architecture for managing the network connectivity. The run-time architecture is based on a User Interface Management System called MEL, which is a language extension to Common Lisp providing support for graphics operations, object-oriented programming, and constraints. Constraints are used to manage three dimensions of sharing: sharing of underlying information, sharing of views, and sharing of access. The start-up architecture decouples invoking and joining an application so that not all users need be known when the application is started. At present, the run-time architecture is completed and running test applications. As a first test of the complete Rendezvous architecture, we will implement a multi-user card game by the end of the summer.
Vibrissal Responses of Thalamic Cells That Project to the Septal Columns of the Barrel Cortex and to the Second Somatosensory Area

The rodent somatosensory cortex contains barrel-related and septa-related circuits representing two separate streams of vibrissa information processing that differ in their response patterns and anatomical connections. Whereas barrel-related circuits process lemniscal inputs that transit through the thalamic barreloids, septa-related circuits process paralemniscal inputs and inputs that are relayed through the ventral lateral part of the ventral posterior medial nucleus (VPMvl). Septa-projecting thalamic afferents also target the secondary somatosensory cortical area. Although a number of studies have examined response properties in the lemniscal pathway, and demonstrated that barreloids receive feedback from specific sets of corticothalamic and reticular thalamic neurons, such information is currently lacking for the VPMvl. In the present study, we show that in sharp contrast to the relay cells of the barreloids VPMvl neurons exhibit large multiwhisker receptive fields that are independent of input from the principal trigeminal nucleus. Results also suggest that the topography of receptive fields and response properties in VPMvl rely on converging input from neurons of the interpolaris trigeminal nucleus. Tracer injection and single-cell labeling further reveal that the VPMvl receives input from specific populations of reticular thalamic and corticothalamic neurons. Together, these results confirm the status of the VPMvl as a thalamic relay of an independent parallel pathway of vibrissa information processing. They further indicate that a sensory pathway does not merely consist on a three-neuron chain that links the vibrissae to the cerebral cortex, but that it also involves specific sets of topographically related corticothalamic and reticular thalamic projections.
Superior exploration-exploitation balance with quantum-inspired hadamard walks

This paper extends the analogies employed in the development of quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms by proposing quantum-inspired Hadamard walks, called QHW. A novel quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm, called HQEA, for solving combinatorial optimization problems, is also proposed. The novelty of HQEA lies in it's incorporation of QHW Remote Search and QHW Local Search - the quantum equivalents of classical mutation and local search, that this paper defines. The intuitive reasoning behind this approach, and the exploration-exploitation balance thus occurring is explained. From the results of the experiments carried out on the 0,1-knapsack problem, HQEA performs significantly better than a conventional genetic algorithm, CGA, and two quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms - QEA and NQEA, in terms of convergence speed and accuracy.
Do We Understand the Field Transformations in Classical Electrodynamics

This paper considers a number of physical problems, dealing with transformation of the non-radiating electric and magnetic fields between different inertial frames, and analyses an origin of these fields through their sources and the laws of electrostatics and magnetostatics. It has been found that, in all problems of classical electrodynamics dealing either with single space-time transformations or with successive spacetime transformations with collinear velocities, a relationship between the fields and their sources in terms of the electrostatic and magnetostatic laws can be established. In problems dealing with successive field transformations with non-collinear relative velocities, relativity theory fails to indicate an origin of the fields obtained formally via such transformations. This can be done in covariant ether theories, and some physical inferences from the obtained results are discussed.
Management and survival of patients with lung cancer in Scotland diagnosed in 1995: results of a national population based study

BACKGROUND The prognosis of patients with lung cancer in Scotland is poor and not improving. This study was designed to document factors influencing referral, diagnostic evaluation, treatment, and survival in patients with lung cancer. METHODS Patients diagnosed during 1995 were identified from the Scottish Cancer Registry and their medical records were reviewed. Adequate records were available in 91.2% of all potentially eligible cases. RESULTS In 1995, patients in Scotland with lung cancer had a high rate of microscopic verification (74.1%) and 75.3% were assessed by a respiratory physician; however, only 56.8% received active treatment (resection 10.7%, radiotherapy 35.8%, chemotherapy 16.1%) and 2.9% participated in a clinical trial. Survival was poor with a median of 3.6 months; 21.1% (95% CI 19.8% to 22.4%) were alive at 1 year and 7.0% (95% CI 6.2% to 7.8%) at 3 years. Management by respiratory physician, oncologist, or thoracic surgeon was an independent predictor of access to potentially curative treatment and better survival. CONCLUSION This national population based study demonstrates low use of treatment, poor survival, and the influence of process of care on survival. Implementation of evidence-based guidelines will require substantial changes in practice. Increasing the number of patients who receive treatment may improve survival.
Improving the Performances of Asynchronous Algorithms by Combining the Nogood Processors with the Nogood Learning Techniques

The asynchronous techniques that exist within the programming with distributed constraints are characterized by the occurrence of the nogood values during the search for the solution. The nogood type messages are sent among the agents with the purpose of realizing an intelligent backtrack and of ensuring the algorithm's completion. In this article we analyzed the way in which a technique of obtaining efficient nogood values could combine with a technique of storing these values. In other words we try combining the resolvent-based learning technique introduced by Yokoo with the nogood processor technique in the case of asynchrounous weak-commitment search algorithm (AWCS). These techniques refer to the possibility of obtaining efficient nogoods, respectively to the way the nogood values are stored and the later use of information given by the nogoods in the process of selecting a new value for the variables associated to agents. Starting from this analysis we proposed certain modifications for the two known techniques. We analyzed the situations in which the nogoods are distributed to more nogood processors handed by certain agents. We proposed a solution of distributing the nogood processors to the agents regarding the agents' order, with the purpose of reducing the storing and searching costs. We also analyzed the benefits the combining of nogood processor technique with the resolved-based learning technique could bring to the enhancement of the performance of AWCS technique. Finally, we analyzed the behavior of the techniques obtained in the case of messages filtering.
In vivo analysis of the role of aberrant histone deacetylase recruitment and RARα blockade in the pathogenesis of acute promyelocytic leukemia

The promyelocytic leukemia–retinoic acid receptor α (PML-RARα) protein of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is oncogenic in vivo. It has been hypothesized that the ability of PML-RARα to inhibit RARα function through PML-dependent aberrant recruitment of histone deacetylases (HDACs) and chromatin remodeling is the key initiating event for leukemogenesis. To elucidate the role of HDAC in this process, we have generated HDAC1–RARα fusion proteins and tested their activity and oncogenicity in vitro and in vivo in transgenic mice (TM). In parallel, we studied the in vivo leukemogenic potential of dominant negative (DN) and truncated RARα mutants, as well as that of PML-RARα mutants that are insensitive to retinoic acid. Surprisingly, although HDAC1-RARα did act as a bona fide DN RARα mutant in cellular in vitro and in cell culture, this fusion protein, as well as other DN RARα mutants, did not cause a block in myeloid differentiation in vivo in TM and were not leukemogenic. Comparative analysis of these TM and of TM/PML −/− and p53 −/− compound mutants lends support to a model by which the RARα and PML blockade is necessary, but not sufficient, for leukemogenesis and the PML domain of the fusion protein provides unique functions that are required for leukemia initiation.
The Effect of marketing planning and market orientation on higher education performance

There is limited literature on market orientation in higher education (hereafter called HE) and discussion on this issue has been mixed. This research focuses on a revival of interest in market orientation in HE and what that involves in terms of marketing planning as an antecedent to market orientation and institutional performance as a consequence of market orientation. A total number of 700 survey questionnaires were distributed to key persons such as heads or secretaries of departments within bachelor degree programs in public institutions, autonomous institutions and private institutions in the western and central parts of Indonesia. The results indicate that marketing planning and market orientation can assist Indonesian HE institutions to achieve a higher level of institutional performance.
Computational Methods for Testing Adequacy and Quality of Massive Synthetic Proximity Social Networks

Social contact networks play an increasingly important role in computational epidemiology. We focus on massive social contact networks that cover an urban region comprising of millions of individuals and billions of time varying interactions. It is impossible to obtain such networks by simply measuring social interactions. As a result, such networks are often synthesized using a diverse set of real-world data. The synthesis method can be viewed as a complex stochastic process that outputs one realization of such a network. The resulting networks are extremely large, dynamic and unstructured. Any meaningful description of such networks is usually done in terms of structural properties. Building on our earlier work, we synthesize a detailed social contact network for the National Capital Territory (NCT) of India. We first synthesize a social visitation network, representing people visiting locations during different time intervals. We then project it to synthesize a people-people contact network. We are not aware of other works on synthesizing the NCT network. Two important questions arise when synthesizing such massive dynamic social contact networks: (i) how does one compare the networks that span the same region and (ii) when is the synthesized network adequate. To address them, we compute a number of network measurements: some of which are classical, while others capture the semantics of social contact networks. These metrics are used to study the similarities and differences between two networks representing the same urban region. For question (ii), we study our ability to understand the dynamics and control of epidemics. Dynamical measures that capture the joint interaction between the local dynamical process and the network structure are presented and used to analyze the NCT networks.
An examination of initiation rituals in a UK sporting institution and the impact on group development

ABSTRACT Research question: This study investigates the impact of initiation rituals on group development. Through the application of chaos theory, we examine how the trajectory of team development is inherently unpredictable due to the complex nature and uncertainty of initiation rituals. Research methods: The paper draws upon 42 interviews with student athletes from a UK university. The UK context provides a new perspective on initiation activities that are currently dominated by studies in a US setting. Results and findings: From our coding of interview data four themes emerge: Forced assimilation, Dejection, Commitment, and Performance. The results find initiation rituals force sport teams into a period of chaos where outcomes can vary from improved performance to dejection. Thus, sports teams can experience any, or all of the themes present in our findings, and previous group cohesion is an unreliable predictor for successful group development post-initiation. Implications: Theoretically, we further understanding of group development as an unpredictable system due to the nuances and complexities associated with initiations that stimulate periods of chaos. Practically we find administration of bureaucratic control is an ineffective mechanism for constraining initiation activities, and instead it is team leaders and captains who should guide behaviour towards constructive and enjoyable initiations associated with improved commitment and performance of sporting teams.