Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Systematics, Evolution, and Anthropology in the Light of Immunology

PR ROBLEMS of systematics and taxonomy have long had an interest for biologists, and will probably continue to claim their share of attention. In the absence of paleontological evidence, decisions regarding the interrelationships among animals are based upon peculiarities of distribution, development, and upon similarities of structure in forms which exist today. The verdicts about relationships of different authorities on morphology do not always agree and have not always agreed in the past. A criterion of relationship independent of morphology is clearly desirable, and it was therefore a significant contribution when Nuttall (1904) introduced the use of serological methods, which detect chemical rather than morphological differences, into tests of zoological relationship. Nuttall based his work on the discovery of von Behring (1890) that the serum of an animal which had been immunized against diphtheria was capable, when injected into a fresh animal, of conferring immunity upon the latter, which without the benefit of the use of the immune serum soon died from the effect of the diphtheria toxin it received as a test. Soon afterward von Behring and Kitasato (1890) obtained similar results with tetanus. The protective effects of these sera were attributed to substances called antibodies. These antibodies were called neutralizing antibodies because they have the power of neutralizing toxins. The chief work of Nuttall was based upon the use of precipitins, that is, those antibodies which, when mixed with their antigens, have the power of producing precipitation.
Human Factors in Information Security and Privacy

Many measures that enhance information security and privacy exist. Because these measures involve humans in various ways, their effectiveness depends on the human factor. This chapter reviews basic components of information security and privacy with an emphasis on human factors issues. It provides an overview of empirical investigations that have been conducted regarding the usability of security and privacy measures. These studies show that users have difficulty interacting with complex interfaces and that users’ performance can be improved by incorporating human factors principles into the designs. The authors conclude by discussing how human factors analyses can lead to the design of usable systems for information security and privacy assurance.
Rapid and Sensitive Quantification ofBorrelia burgdorferi-Infected Mouse Tissues by Continuous Fluorescent Monitoring of PCR

ABSTRACT The quantity of Borrelia burgdorferi organisms in tissue samples is an important determinant for infection studies in the mouse model of Lyme disease. This report presents the development of a rapid and sensitive external-standard-based PCR assay for the absolute quantification of B. burgdorferi in mouse tissue samples. The assay uses a double-stranded DNA dye to continuously monitor product formation and in less than an hour was able to quantify samples ranging up to 6 log units in concentration. The PCR efficiencies of the sample and the standard were matched by using a standard composed of purified B. burgdorferi chromosome mixed with tissue-matched mouse genome lacking bacterial DNA. Normalization ofB. burgdorferi quantities to the mouse nidogengene allowed comparison of B. burgdorferi numbers in samples isolated from different tissues and strains. PCR analysis of the chromosomal gene recA in cultured B. burgdorferi was consistent with a single recA per bacterium. The parameters defined in this assay should be applicable to quantification of other organisms, even infectious agents for which no ready source of DNA standard is available. In summary, this report presents a rapid external-standard-based PCR method for the quantification of B. burgdorferi in mouse DNA samples.
A Test of the Relationship Between Stakeholder Attributes and Stakeholder Salience

The stakeholder model articulated by Freeman (1984) has seen significant theoretical development in the past few years. This study seeks to provide empirical insights to this burgeoning body of theory. Using a unique sample of 78 large U.S. firms with primary data provided by the CEO, it examines relationships between stakeholder at­ tributes of Power, Legitimacy, Urgency, and Salience (Mitchell, Agle, Wood, 1997).
Impact of Legal Environment on Bank Performance: An Empirical Study from a Developing Country

In recent years, a number of studies have highlighted the effects of the institutional environment on the performance of business organizations through empirical evidence across both developed and developing countries. In the pursuit of this type of evidence, this paper clarifies the nature of the relationship between the banking regulatory framework and bank performance in the case of Vietnam. With this objective, the study uses cross-section data from 152 Vietnamese banks. In the model of this study, bank performance is a dependent variable. The reform of capital adequacy requirements, the reform of government intervention and supervision, and the prudent implementation in monetary policy are independent variables. To examine the relationship between the regulatory framework and bank performance, this study uses confirmative factor analysis to test the reliability and validity of this correlation. By using the ordinary least squares technique, the hypothesis on the relationship between the regulatory framework and bank performance is measured. Results are consistent with the hypothesis: the regulatory framework has a positive impact on the performance of banks in the case of Vietnam. In order to test the robustness of the outcomes of the study, the presence of autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity in the model is also tested. And then, implications for macroeconomic and macro-finance policies are drawn for the case of Vietnam.
VALUES-BASED PUBLIC-PRIVATE NETWORKS BEST PRACTICES IN ITALIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT: THE CASE OF “REGIONE MARCHE”

Internationally, the theme of territorial social responsibility, or territorial networks (CSR-oriented partnerships between local public and private partners) aimed to promote a model of sustainable economic growth, is still little noted. The movement of collective responsibility sees institutions and organisations (public and private, for profit and non-profit) participating in a form of economic development that is socially and environmentally sustainable. In these territories where deeply rooted actors are stimulated to cooperate for the responsible development of the productive system, their combined actions become an effective instrument in the sustainable government of the territory. Based on this consideration, the aim of our research is the evaluation of Italian local governmental initiatives to promote corporate social responsibility through public-private networks (specially focusing on the “Marche Region” casestudy). Local governance based on the subsidiarity and the shared values of a spatial and socio-economic community can therefore be interpreted as a possible form of “managing publicly” which is focused on creating values and following the public interest, and operates through their motivations and values. This triggers a path of human governance in which participation, co-planning, and dialogue are not merely slogans but the modus operandi in actors‟ processes of creating value.
Different pathways leading to cutaneous leukocytoclastic vasculitis in mice

Abstract: To investigate the pathomechanisms of leukocytoclastic vasculitis (LcV) we compared mouse models of LcV with non‐vasculitic irritant contact dermatitis (ICD). Criteria for LcV as met by the immune complex‐mediated Arthus reaction (Art‐r) were also fulfilled by the localized Shwartzman reaction (Shw‐r) and by cutaneous Loxoscelism (Lox) (injection of venom from Loxosceles reclusa containing sphingomyelinase D). After depletion of PMN (by γ‐irradiation) vessel damage could not be elicited in these models, distinguishing them from models of direct endothelial insult (necrotizing ICD). Depletion of complement could only delay, but not inhibit the Art‐r, and did not change ICD, Lox or the Shw‐r. The Shw‐r exclusively revealed a sustained local expression of vascular adhesion molecules for 24 h in the preparatory phase (LPS s.c.), not observed in the Art‐r, in Lox or ICD. Subsequent challenge with LPS i.p. was associated with upregulation of Mac‐1 and ICAM‐1 on PMN, but not of VLA‐4 or LFA‐1 (FACS analysis). Cytokines which were able to replace LPS in priming for LcV in the Shw‐r (TNF‐α and IL‐1β) also induced sustained expression of adhesion molecules, whereas IL‐12 and IFN‐γ did neither. Neutralizing IL‐12 or IFN‐γ also inhibited neither LcV nor sustained expression of adhesion molecules, whereas anti‐TNF‐α inhibited both. Anti‐TNF‐α had no marked inhibitory effects in the Art‐r, in Lox or ICD. Combined (but not separate) neutralization of both E‐selectin and VCAM‐1 by antibodies suppressed LcV independent from reducing influx of PMN, proving that their sustained expression is decisive for the Shw‐r and interferes with normal diapedesis. Since Loxosceles venom is known to dysregulate diapedesis and degranulation of PMN in vitro, since adherent immune complexes activate PMN at the vessel wall, and since adhesion molecules are dysregulated in the Shw‐r, we suggest that LcV develops when activation of PMN coincides with vascular alterations which interfere with normal diapedesis.
Writing the Social Contract: Integrating the U.N. Global Compact into Mining CSR

Abstract Purpose This chapter discusses the influence of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) 10 Principles on multinational mining companies’ (mining multinational enterprise (MNE)) corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and strategies. Design/methodology/approach Business ethics, mining management, CSR, stakeholder, and social contracting literatures are integrated with case vignettes to examine the UNGC’s role in motivating efficacious, benevolent CSR in mining. Findings Mining industry groups and some mining MNEs have adopted and fully implemented UNGC principles while other mining MNEs have not. The variation manifests as a gap between CSR form and CSR substance. Mining industry bodies such as International Council for Mining and Minerals, stakeholders, and private monitors have increased pressure to narrow this gap. The UNGC acts as a catalyst to create and codify valid hypernorms and to build trust and managerial buy-in in mining MNEs’ CSR. Research limitations/implications Reliance on selected cases and extant literature indicates, but does not fully support, conclusions. Practical implications Mining MNEs are advised to pursue CSR activities which integrate social contracting and precepts of the UNGC. The results would be happier, less antagonistic to stakeholder communities, and less questioning of mining MNEs’ legitimacy. Originality/value of the chapter This chapter integrates above-mentioned literature and cases to advise academics, governance officials and private monitors, and mining MNE managers on effective integration of the UNGC into mining through social contracting.
Transition to e-invoicing and post-implementation benefits. Exploratory case studies

This paper aimed at exploring the transition to electronic invoicing in real business settings with a focus on the transition experiences and postimplementation benefits withdrawn up to the present. To obtain detail-rich findings, multiple case study research was preferred over other research methods. The results of the three case studies were analysed through the prism of IT business value literature and compared to other papers on benefits of einvoicing. The cases showed that electronic invoice handling technology enhanced control over company invoicing, allowed better management of payables, and indeed increased labour productivity in invoice handling units. These and other realized benefits, such as processing time and cost savings, reduced interest on over due payments, decreased paper waste, etc., are expected to grow as the level of true e-invoice penetration and the development condition of the technology itself will mature. Due to insufficiency of data, the re-utilization patterns of labour released after the automation of invoicing in other more productive duties across the organization were found indecisive. As a transactional type of IT that is prone to network externalities, electronic invoicing system is posited to aid company financials largely through contracting costs, rather than boosting sales. Besides the theoretical implications, the paper also offers practical considerations for implementation of electronic invoice processing technology and further promotion of e-invoicing.
A New Method for Compressed Sensing Color Images Reconstruction Based on Total Variation Model

A new method based on the total variation model, applicable to reconstruct the compressed sensing color images, is proposed. At first, the compressed sensing color images should be converted form the RGB color space to the CMYK space, and the compressed sensing color images in the CMYK space can match exactly with the quaternion matrix. Next, the amplitude and the different four phase information of the quaternion matrix is treated as the smoothing constraints for the compressed sensing problem in order to reconstruct the color images more effectively. Finally, the gradient projection method is used to solve the compressed sensing problem. Experimental results show that this new method can reconstruct color images better than some traditional methods.
The Importance of Product Market Concerns When Timing of Irreversible Corporate Investment is a Signal

The purpose of this paper is to include product market concerns to state-of-the-art analysis of real options under asymmetric information. Morellec and Schurhoff (2011) introduced a model with one-sided asymmetric information refuting the value of investment timing flexibility. This paper argues that in applications, multi-sided informational setups will often prevail due to e.g. product market concerns, and that using the one-sided setup in such applications, falsely erodes the value of investment timing flexibility. The paper contributes with novel justification of valuing flexibility by recognizing the potential value of keeping private information private due to e.g. the competition-induced cost of revealing information.
Sound Source Separation Using Phase Difference and Reliable Mask Selection Selection

We present an algorithm called Reliable Mask Selection-Phase Difference Channel Weighting (RMS-PDCW) which selects the target source masked by a noise source using the Angle of Arrival (AoA) information calculated using the phase difference information. The RMS-PDCW algorithm selects masks to apply using the information about the localized sound source and the onset detection of speech. We demonstrate that this algorithm shows relatively 5.3 percent improvement over the baseline acoustic model, which was multistyle-trained using 22 million utterances on the simulated test set consisting of real-world and interfering-speaker noise with reverberation time distribution between 0 ms and 900 ms and SNR distribution between 0 dB up to clean.
From being a disorder to dealing with life: an experiential exploration of the association between trauma and psychosis.

I was not yet 20 when my first psychosis emerged. I was convinced that we were on the verge of a world war. The public defense sirens were tested every first Monday of the month. To me, those sirens meant that the cruise missiles had already been launched. We had just minutes to do what had to be done: find each other and wait to die. Sometimes I could actually feel the radiation taking effect. I felt nauseous and believed that my hair was falling out. The rest of the world pretended to carry on as normal, but I could see that everyone was afraid. They knew that we were all about to suffer a slow, painful death, but nobody knew how to prepare for it. And so we all continued our daily lives with stolid determination. I experienced at the time that the world, including myself, began to move in slow motion. Although I could hear extremely well—I heard everything—my body moved very slowly. When I had the will to lift my arm, it took ages before that message reached my arm. It was as if I was in thick water and could only move in slow motion. It was the same for the movement around me: everything moved slower. The strange thing is that time did not exist for me in that situation. Time was also in thick water. It is a kind of vacuum, no-man’s-land. Not in real life, but also not dead. A psychosis is far-reaching and overwhelming. A psychosis involves a severe distortion of meaning. It renders the world unfamiliar, unrecognizable, a threat. Psychosis can turn life into a living hell. Just ‘‘being’’ can no longer be taken for granted.Nothing can be taken for granted. A psychosis is also accompanied by a sense of estrangement. What you have is often closely allied to who you are. The manifestations sometimes dominate your entire personality. The distinction between the individual and the condition is soon lost, and it is very difficult to regain. I have been my disorder for a very long time. I was not yet 20 when I developed severe psychotic complaints. They were accompanied by a lot of powerful noises inside my head and by an unlimited fear. To control both I became addicted to alcohol, drugs, and selfharm. In fact, I was trying not to hear and not to feel. The numbing effect was—although it sounds paradoxical—at the same time both a survival strategy and destruction. It was the intoxication that drew me out of reality. But it also allowed me to withdraw more and more into my own crazy world and to isolate myself from the world around me. One of the few things I can remember from this time is my fear and the smell of destruction that surrounded me. When I finally also stopped eating and moving, I had literally become a living dead. Now I know that traumatic experiences from my past haunted me. But then I was convinced that the inevitable was happening: I was the problem, and the problem had to be solved.
Isopraxis Leadership: Leader Confidence, Managerial Strategy, and Organizational Performance

Attention has been given to the notion that organizational leaders’ expressed confidence and optimism regarding their organizations’ performance can affect that performance by increasing the motivation and/or self-efficacy of subordinates. This idea, a part of various leadership theories, we call “isopraxis leadership. ” This paper examines the logic of the claim, reviews and critiques extant evidence, develops a measure of leader confidence (the starting point for isopraxis leadership), undertakes initial validation of the measure, and then tests for the link between leader confidence and performance among several hundred public organizations. Leader confidence is found to be largely unrelated to performance; some evidence indicates that it can help only for those organizations that are already doing well or have more resources than average – that is, where it is least needed.
Determine the Entity Number in Hierarchical Clustering for Web Personal Name Disambiguation

user is often frustrated by the ambiguous names in the web search results when the user is trying to find information about some person. Hierarchical clustering methods are often used to cluster the personal names referred to the same entities. As the correct number of the entities for a given personal name can not be accessed, we are required to determine the cut points in the dendrogram to gain high disambiguation accuracy. In this paper, we explore the appropriate cut points in hierarchical clustering for web personal name disambiguation. We first measure the similarity and density distribution of the search result pages, and then we propose an approach that combines the global distribution features and local features from cut points to explore the appropriate cut points. Finally, we perform experiments on real-world datasets and the results show that our method is effective.
The Impact of Food Trends on Menu Innovation

The search for the right 'pedigree' of innovative menus is endless. As the consumer foodservice markets are converging to one global market, increasingly demand for new menus is evitable. In today's global foodservice markets, the fast changing trend of consumers' preferences and acceptances poses a huge challenge for restaurateurs in managing their new menu innovation. Empirically, little is known the trendsetting in managing menu innovation amid facing market uncertainty. While there are several attributes that have been known to impact menu innovation, this chapter specifically aims to provide empirical evidence of the moderating effect of food trends on the link between innovation orientations and new menu development (NMD) process in a recently concluded research study of chain restaurants in Malaysia.
Unintended consequences in demarketing antisocial behaviour: project Bernie

ABSTRACT Unintended consequences are recognised as a potential risk for well-intentioned social marketing interventions and as a comparatively under-researched topic in the field. This case study uses an intervention tackling deliberate grassfires to explore the application of social marketing in a novel context, its potential effectiveness in demarketing antisocial behaviours and the potential of such interventions to generate positive and negative unintended consequences. The intervention’s evaluation confirms social marketing’s potential value in tackling ingrained antisocial behaviours within communities. It also revealed unexpected benefits accruing from changes within the target community, within the sponsoring fire service and in the relationship between the two. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of potential unexpected and unplanned consequences for intervention planning, conduct and evaluation.
Predicting Performance of Collaborative Storytelling Using Multimodal Analysis

This study focuses on modeling the storytelling performance of the participants in a group conversation. Storytelling performance is one of the fundamental communication techniques for providing information and entertainment effectively to a listener. We present a multimodal analysis of the storytelling performance in a group conversation, as evaluated by external observers. A new multimodal data corpus is collected through this group storytelling task, which includes the participants’ performance scores. We extract multimodal (verbal and nonverbal) features regarding storytellers and listeners from a manual description of spoken dialog and from various nonverbal patterns, including each participant’s speaking turn, utterance prosody, head gesture, hand gesture, and head direction. We also extract multimodal co-occurrence features, such as head gestures, and interaction features, such as storyteller utterance overlapped with listener’s backchannel. In the experiment, we modeled the relationship between the performance indices and the multimodal features using machine-learning techniques. Experimental results show that the highest accuracy (R2) is 0.299 for the total storytelling performance (sum of indices scores) obtained with a combination of verbal and nonverbal features in a regression task. key words: storytelling performance, multimodal interaction, inference, data mining, small group, conversation analysis