Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Patient-controlled epidural analgesia during labor: the effects of the increase in bolus and lockout interval.

UNLABELLED Most studies use a bolus size of <6 mL of 0.125% bu- pivacaine for patient-controlled epidural analgesia (PCEA) during labor. In this double-blinded, randomized study, we compared the efficacy of a larger bolus injected via a PCEA pump to a conventional PCEA setting. By using a combination of 0.125% bupivacaine with 1:800,000 epinephrine and 0.625 microg/mL sufentanil, the first PCEA setting was typical (4 mL/8 min), whereas the other combined a 12-mL bolus dose and a 25-min lockout interval, i.e., similar maximal hourly dose. Rescue analgesia was provided with 6 mL of 0.25% bupivacaine. Patient satisfaction and pain were scored on verbal and visual analog scales. Data were analyzed from 103 parturients in the 12-mL/25-min group and 100 in the 4-mL/8-min group. In the 12-mL/25-min group, the median pain score on a 0- to 10-cm visual analog scale was lower at 6-cm cervical dilation (1 [range = 0-8] vs 3 [0-8]) and at delivery (1 [0-10] vs 2 [0-10]). Satisfaction was also better (70% vs 38% "excellent" opinions, at 6-cm cervical dilation). Use of the pump (ratio of successful and total demands) was high and similar in both groups. Rescue analgesia was comparable. Doses of analgesics were greater in the 12-mL/25-min group (hourly bupivacaine dose = 13.9 +/- 5.3 [mean+/- SD] vs 9.4 +/- 4.1 mg). No differences were noted between groups for the severity of hypotension, ephedrine requirement, outcome of the delivery, and Apgar scores. IMPLICATIONS A patient-controlled epidural analgesia setting that allows a parturient to receive an increased analgesic dose improves satisfaction with patient-controlled epidural analgesia during labor.
An algorithm of keyword queries over XML streams

The current forms of keywords search over XML data streams are mainly based on SLCA results, which are incompleteness. This paper addresses this problem in another aspect. In this paper, a novel definition of complete ASLCA based on SLCA results is proposed to represent all possible results in the query. A novel kind of query algorithm is proposed. Extensively theoretical analysis and experiments have been performed to verify the better time complexity, space complexity, and recall ratio of the algorithms presented in this study.
The notion of internal market orientation and employee job satisfaction: some preliminary evidence

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Internal Market Orientation (IMO) on the application of internal marketing practices and employee job satisfaction.Design/methodology/approach – Data were secured through personal interviews with hotel managers and employees from 20 different five‐star hotels. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine the hypotheses put forward in the study.Findings – Job satisfaction is positively related with the practice of internal marketing. However, IMO is also a significant variable in explaining employee job‐satisfaction while moderating the relationship between internal marketing and job satisfaction.Research limitations/implications – Drawing the analogy from the market‐orientation research stream, this study reveals the importance of developing an internal‐market orientation before internal marketing practices can be truly effective.Practical implications – Service providers seeking differentiation through customer service and delight hav.
An overview of the main strategies and approaches to CSR

"Globalization has induced increased competition between organizations which have to find new ways to obtain a competitive advantage. Investing in Corporate social Responsibility may be one of them, killing two birds with one stone as it also favours a sustainable development and the welfare of people. This paper examines the different possible approaches of CSR and the results that can be achieved by making CSR part and parcel of the strategy of an organization. "
Reliable network-on-chip based on generalized de Bruijn graph

In this paper, we propose the generalized de Bruijn graph as a reliable and efficient network topology for a Network-on-Chip (NoC) design. We also propose a reliable routing algorithm to detour a problematic (i.e., faulty or congested) link. Our experimental results show that the latency and energy consumption of generalized de Bruijn graph are much less with compared to Mesh and Torus, the two common NoC architectures in the literature. The low energy consumption of de Bruijn graph-based NoC makes it suitable for portable devices which have to operate on limited batteries. Also, the gate level implementation of the proposed reliable routing shows a small area, power, and timing overheads due to the proposed reliable routing algorithm.
A Study on Agricultural Village Tourism Complex Positioning using Analytic Hierarchy Process: The Case of Buyeo-gun

There are many positioning studies utilizing Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in tourism industry. In this study, it was tried to develop new evaluation criteria for positioning and to discuss the importance of evaluation factors, as the development of tourist`s spots was pursued in diversified ways. The purpose of this study was to allow the development of tourist spots more objectively and more efficiently utilizing Analytic Hierarchy Process ("AHP" hereunder) to appoint the best place for the tourism complex in Buyeo. According to AHP analysis procedures, 5 places near Baikje Cultural Block connecting with a ferry in Buyeo-gun were selected as candidates. To perform AHP analysis, evaluation criteria and a survey were used and then weight of evaluation criteria was induced. With the conditions on criteria, standard score of each criterion and candidate was calculated. By multiplying standard score and final weight and then summing up, the candidate place with the highest score shall be appointed as the most optimal place for Buyeo-gun Agricultural Tourism Complex.
Who Cares? Corporate Governance in Today's Equity Markets

There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of today’s equity markets, where voting rights and cash flow rights are traded. To mitigate some of this confusion, this paper provides both an analytical framework for the role of public policy and a description of the empirical context that influences the conditions for that policy. It underlines the importance of focusing on the overall economic outcome and, in particular, how rules and regulations impact the conditions for companies to grow and create value by accessing public equity markets. In terms of the empirical context, we point to fundamental changes in the functioning of equity markets that may call for a fresh look at the economic effectiveness of corporate governance regulations. Among other things, we document a dramatic shift in listings from developed to emerging markets over the last decade, which means that concentrated ownership at company level has become the dominant form of ownership in listed companies worldwide. We also discuss whether the lack of new listings of smaller companies in developed markets is related to excessive regulatory burdens and unintended consequences of a decade of profound stock market deregulation. The discussion about listings illustrates that corporate governance rules and regulations do not only affect companies that are already listed. From a policy perspective, it is equally important to assess the implications for unlisted companies that may, in the future, require access to public equity markets for growth and job creation. We also document how the lengthened and ever more complex chain of intermediaries between savers and companies may influence the efficiency of capital allocation and the willingness of investors to take an active long-term interest in the companies that they own. It is shown that institutional investors are a highly heterogeneous group and that their willingness and ability to engage in corporate governance primarily depend on the economic incentives that follow from their different business models, investment strategies and trading practices. We provide examples of how regulatory initiatives to increase shareholder engagement may have unintended consequences, and note that the diversity and complexity of the investment chain can render general policies or regulation ineffective.
A hybrid cultural approach for combined economic and emission dispatch

This paper presents a new approach to emission constrained generation scheduling model based on cost optimization. The combined economic and emission dispatch is non-linear optimization problem with several constraints (economic and environmental) subject to reduce the emission of harmful pollutants and the operating cost of the thermal power plant. In this paper the problem of combined economic and emission dispatch problem has been solved using a hybrid cultural algorithm. The proposed approach has been applied on a three generator system to demonstrate its the effectiveness. The results are compared with the solutions obtained by other methods like GA, PSO etc. It is found that the proposed method can produce encouraging results.
Non-Cooperative Entry Deterrence in a Uniform Price Multi-Unit Capacity Auction

Motivated by the development of centralized capacity auctions in the electricity industry, this article characterizes firms’ bidding behavior in a multi-unit capacity auction with allocation externalities. An incumbent is willing to bid below its net marginal cost of new capacity investment to deter entry. Numerical simulations reveal that the incentive to deter entry may cause an incumbent to preempt entry at a substantial loss, resulting in large allocative inefficiencies. In addition, because a less efficient supplier shoulders relatively little of the burden of entry deterrence, it may secure greater profit than its more efficient counterpart.
Protective Effect of Phenolic-Rich Extracts from Different Parts of Opuntia joconostle Fruit against Carbon Tetrachloride-Induced Oxidative Stress in Mice

Opuntia joconostle fruit is a rich source of biocompounds such as polyphenols including gallic, vanilic, 4-hidroxybenzoic, cafeic, and syringic acids, catechin, epicatechin, rutin, and vanillin, besides betalains. The objective of this research was to evaluate the effect of supplementation polyphenols-rich extracts from different parts of Opuntia joconostle against carbon tetrachloride-induced oxidative stress in a mouse model. The animals were treated orally with polyphenols-rich extracts at 50, 100 and 200 mg/kg BW for 30 consecutive days. On day 30th the mice received carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) as hepatoxic agent. Biochemical evaluations were carried out 24 h after induction of the oxidative stress. Data showed that methanolic extracts from different parts of Opuntia joconostle exerting protective effect against the CCl4-induced oxidative stress in mice. Histology examination revealed that the damage decreased in groups treated with polyphenols-rich extracts compared to the group that did not receive any treatment. Opuntia joconostle fruit contains many phenolic compounds, flavonoids and betalains. The protective effect of extracts may be related to the phenolic composition and also by a counteraction with other compounds, such as betalains and flavonoids that increase their antioxidant effect.
Subsystem-interaction restraint in the two-stage DC distributed power systems with decoupling-controlled-integration structure

Subsystem interaction is an important issue in the two-stage dc distributed power system (DPS) featuring many individually regulated subsystems well designed in their standalone mode. This paper investigates not only the mechanism of realizing the subsystem-interaction restraint with the decoupling-controlled-integration (DI) structure, but also the improvement of DPS's small-signal stability and the regulated load converter's input impedance consequent on the subsystem-interaction restraint dependent on DI. DI is different from the conventional integration (CI) structure in that the so-called decoupling operators are developed to map the regulation signal of a source subsystem into the regulation loops of load subsystems. Through classifying the interaction loops in DPS into static and dynamic ones, it is revealed that DI is efficient in eliminating the dominant dynamic-interaction terms in the quasi-static state. Furthermore, with the aid of a three-step impedance criterion, two additional stability-enhancement terms in DPS with DI are picked up. The existence of the stability-enhancement term interprets why an original unstable DPS with CI is possible to become a stable one, provided that the subsystem interaction is restrained through substituting CI with DI. Moreover, as DI is able to improve the low-frequency input impedance character of a tightly regulated load converter, that is, to decrease the negative resistance value or even transform it to a positive one, the possibility of negative impedance instability is definitely decreased.
Meaning-Making and Client Empowerment: The Basic Needs Incentive Model

Client empowerment program designers often find it difficult to induce long-term change necessary to produce significant client outcomes. Authors propose that program failure may arise from diverging self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986) and basic needs (Maslow, 1998) contexts that cause a meaning-making gap between program designers and their clients. To bridge this gap, clients may be recruited and retained in empowerment programs via the proposed basic needs incentive model. This paper presents the development of a basic needs incentive model in three parts. First, authors conduct a rigorous experimental investigation into causes of client empowerme nt program failure for difficult-to-change lowincome populations. Secondly, authors identify strategic (long-term) and tactical (short-term) elements of successful programming for lowincome clients and document the program innovation process. Third, success of a field trial of the basic needs incentive model is documented, with unexpected positive consequences. Measurable and significant outcomes were obtained by leveraging clients’ interest in immediate gratification as a means to gain compliance in a previously unpopular behavior-change program. Implications for diffusion of the basic needs incentive model are of interest to public servants at all levels of government and international agencies, academics, consultants, students, and citizens interested in improvement of the public sector programs.
Providing concurrent implementations for Event-B developments

The Event-B method is a formal approach to modelling systems which incorporates the notion of refinement. This work bridges the abstraction gap between the lowest level of Event-B refinement and a working implementation. We focus on the link between Event-B and concurrent, object-oriented implementations and introduce an intermediate, object-oriented style specification notation called Object-oriented Concurrent-B (OCB). The OCB level of abstraction hides implementation details of locking and blocking, and provides the developer with a clear view of atomicity using labelled atomic clauses. OCB non-atomic clauses are given Event-B semantics, and OCB atomic clauses map to atomic events. Automatic translation of an OCB specification gives rise to an Event-B model and Java source code. The Java program will have atomicity that corresponds to the formal model (and therefore OCB clauses), and structure that is derived from the OCB model. We introduce process and monitor classes. Process classes allow specification of interleaving behaviour using non-atomic constructs, where atomic regions are defined by labelled atomic clauses. Monitor classes may be shared between the processes and provide mutually exclusive access to the shared data using atomic procedure calls. Labelled atomic clauses map to events guarded by a program counter derived from the label. This allows us to model the ordered execution of the implementation. The approach can be applied to object-oriented systems in general, but we choose Java as a target for working programs. Java's built-in synchronisation mechanism is used to provide mutually exclusive access to data. We discuss some problems related to Java programming, with regard to locking and concurrency, and their effect on OCB. The OCB syntax and mappings to Event-B and Java are defined, details of tool support and case studies follow. An extension to OCB is described in which a number of objects can be updated within a single atomic clause; facilitated by Java SDK 5.0 features. The extension allows direct access to variables of a monitor using dot notation, and multiple procedure calls in a clause. We also introduce new features to atomic actions such as a sequential operator, and atomic branching and looping.
On latest application developments for dental 3D printing

The newly emerging technology of 3D printing when applied for the production of dental devices is significantly limited by the availability of photo curable materials. This manufacturing technique is used nowadays only for small dental bridges. In this paper we introduce an improved polymeric nanocomposite as specific material for manufacturing 3D printed dental prosthesis. Based on the proposed nanocomposite: poly(methyl methacrylate) - TiO2 nanoparticles, it was possible to manufacture a complete denture.
In-vitro activity of OPC-17116 against more than 6000 consecutive clinical isolates: a multicentre international study.

"Microbiology Laboratory, Hospital Clinic, University of Barcelona, Villarroel 170, 08036-Barcelona, Spain;Department of Pathology, 5232 RCP, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, Iowa 52242, USA; Department of Clinical Microbiology, University of Manitoba, Health Sciences Centre, MS675G-802 Sherbrook Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3A 1R9, Canada; Laboratorios de Pesquisa da Disciplina de Doencas Infecciosas, Escola Paulista de Medicina, Rua Botucatu 740 CEP 04023, Sao Paulo, Brazil; 'Department of Laboratory Medicine, Kumamoto University Medical School, 1-1-1, Honjo, Kumamoto 860, Japan, Kantonsspital Basel, Bacteriology Laboratory, Petersgraben 4, CN-4032 Basel, Switzerland
Collaborative Research Centre 531: Computational Intelligence – Theory and Practice (Sonderforschungsbereich 531: Computational Intelligence – Theorie und Praxis)

Computational Intelligence (CI) is an umbrella term for modern problem solvers such as Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic. These methods have received increasing attention due to their simplicity, robustness and generality. The Collaborative Research Center “Computational Intelligence“ (SFB 531) is concerned with the theoretical foundations and applications of CI methods. This article focuses on two examples from different research domains within SFB 531. First, exemplary results for the runtime analysis of evolutionary algorithms are summarized and evaluated. Second, applied research on mold temperature control is dealt with. Here it is stressed how the wide variety of CI methods leads to very efficient solutions to the problem and how still substantial improvements can be obtained by hybridization with expert's knowledge. Der Begriff Computational Intelligence (CI) umfasst moderne Verfahren wie evolutionäre Algorithmen, neuronale Netze und Fuzzy-Logik, die zur Problemlösung in technischen Systemen angewandt werden. Diese Methoden werden zunehmend populärer, da sie bestechend einfach, robust und allgemein gehalten sind. Der Sonderforschungsbereich „Computational Intelligence“ (SFB 531) befasst sich mit den theoretischen Grundlagen und Anwendungen von CI-Methoden. Im Artikel werden zwei Beispiele aus thematisch unterschiedlichen Projektbereichen herausgehoben. Zunächst werden beispielhafte Ergebnisse bei der Laufzeitanalyse evolutionärer Algorithmen zusammengefasst und bewertet. Anschließend werden Forschungsergebnisse zu Temperierbohrungen im Maschinenbau behandelt. Dabei wird herausgestellt, wie die große Vielfalt an CI-Methoden zu sehr effizienten Lösungen des Anwendungsproblems führt und wie nichtsdestoweniger wesentliche Verbesserungen durch eine Hybridisierung der Ansätze mit Expertenwissen gefunden werden können.
A prototype router for the massively parallel computer RWC-1

The RWC-1 is a massively parallel computer based on a multi-threaded architecture. This architecture requires extremely high communication performance with reasonable hardware cost. ln this paper, we first introduce a new class of direct interconnection networks called MDCE (Multidimensional Directed Cycles Ensemble extension). MDCE has many desirable features for RWC-1 including small degree, low latency, and high throughput. MDCE is thus adopted for a RWC-1 network. We have designed an MDCE router and fabricated an experimental VLSI chip. We explain the design details in this paper. The chip employs operating system support features as well as communication functions, and enables advanced resource management, A prototype chip with about 125,000 gates has been fabricated using 0.6-/spl mu/m CMOS gate array technology. Its clock runs at 50 MHz and a transmission rate of 300 M bytes per second per communication port is achieved.
Personality Traits of Service Providers and Customers' Perceptions of Service Quality: The Case of Air Cargo Services in the United Arab Emirates

The debate of whether personality traits of service providers affect customers’ perceptions of service quality has produced conflicting evidence. This paper examines this issue with an application in the air cargo industry in the UAE. We hypothesized no effect of personality traits on overall service quality or any of its diemsions. We used two questionnaires to collect our data from a sample of 220 service providers and customers of the air cargo industry in the UAE. Collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and regression analysis. While the results of the reliability analysis indicate the soundness of the two questionnaires, the results of the regression analysis failed to reject the hypothesized no relationship between personality traits of service providers and overall customers’ perceiptions of service quality or any of its dimensions in the air cargo industry.
Evaluating the Econometric Evaluations of Training Programs with Experimental Data

This paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment, in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group, and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature. This comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results, and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.
Low‐dose L‐dopa therapy in Parkinson's disease

Thirty-five patients with early mild Parkinson's disease were treated from the outset with small doses of L-dopa (mean dose, 396 to 454 mg daily) and a peripheral decarboxylase inhibitor, for a mean of 6 years. Overall mortality ratio was 1.2:1, worse for women than for men. After 6 years of treatment, only one-third of patients were better, and drug-related complications were common (peak-dose dyskinesias in 54% of patients, off-period dystonia 20%, wearing-off effects 52%, on-off oscillations 6%, visual hallucinations and toxic confusional states 17%). We found no evidence that long-term results were markedly improved with low-dose regimens.