Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Hierarchical Study on the Efficiency of the City Commercial Banks in China

City commercial banks have become an important pillar of the banking system in China. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to study the efficiency of city banks at this paper, and evaluate the effects of four indicators profitability, liquidity, security and sustainability on bank efficiency. This paper divides Chinese City Commercial Banks into three categories according to their asset scale and selects those ranking top for analysis. After the regression for all observers, two dummies representing different capital scale are significant, which indicates the effect of data category. Liquidity is significant and higher liquidity leads to lower efficiency. After that, regressions are conducted on banks in different categories respectively. For banks with asset size larger than 100 billion, sustainability indicator is significant. For banks with asset size between 50 billion and 100 billion, liquidity and sustainability are significant. For banks with asset size between 30 billion and 50 billion, profitability is more important in determining efficiency. The paper puts forward some policy suggestions also. Keywords-city commercial banks; hierarchical efficiency; data envelopment analysis; policy suggestion
Irisin is weakly associated with usual physical activity in young overweight women

PURPOSE To determine if irisin plasma levels are associated with regular physical activity, body composition and metabolic parameters in women subjected to calorie restriction. SUBJECTS AND METHODS We studied 42 women aged 34 ± 13 years with a body mass index of 27.7 ± 1.8 kg/m2, who were subjected to a calorie restriction for three months. At baseline and at the end of the study, weight, waist and hip circumference, laboratory parameters, body composition by DEXA, resting and activity energy expenditure by indirect calorimetry and 72 hours actigraphy were measured. Fasting serum irisin was quantified using an ELISA kit. RESULTS After the intervention period, participants lost 1.5 (0.4-3.4) kg and irisin levels did not change. Irisin baseline levels were positively but weakly correlated with the level of physical activity. This association was lost at the end of the intervention. No association was found between irisin levels and body composition or insulin sensitivity or their changes after calorie restriction. No association between serum irisin levels and PGC-1αexpression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells and serum irisin was observed. CONCLUSIONS Fasting serum irisin was weakly associated with usual physical activity and did not change after calorie restriction.
An Efficient Profit-based Job Scheduling Strategy for Service Providers in Cloud Computing Systems

In the cloud computing environment, one of the major activities is Job Scheduling. With the concepts of the existing profitbased scheduling mechanism, we have designed an enhanced model which gives better profits to the cloud service providers. Cloud users deploy the jobs requests on the cloud. A set of jobs which are ready to execute will be picked and arranged in nondecreasing order of their profits before execution. By carrying out these operations in parallel the processing time will be reduced. Thereby, we can guarantee the better profits to the service providers with the better Quality of Service (QoS).
3D Reconstruction of Body Parts Using RGB-D Sensors: Challenges from a Biomedical Perspective

Th e patient 3D model reconstruction plays an important role in applications such as surgery planning or computer-aided prosthesis design systems. Common methods use either expensive devices or require expert personnel which are not available in every clinic. Thus to make patient-specific modelling more versatile, it is required to develop efficient methods together with feasible devices. Body parts such as head and torso present valid challenges with different degrees of complexity, especially because of the absence of relevant and abundant features. Considering Microsoft Kinect, it is a low-cost and widely available sensor, which has been successfully applied in medical applications. Since single depth-map acquired by Kinect is often incomplete and noisy, different approaches have been proposed to perform the reconstruction by merging multiple depth-maps, by registering single view point clouds generated form each point cloud. As human body is a non-rigid model, most of previous reconstruction methods using Kinect fail to perform accurate reconstruction since they do not address non-rigid surfaces. In this paper we present the challenges of using low-cost RGB-D sensors to reconstruct human body. Additionally, we analysed coarse registration stage to understand its impact on the quality of reconstruction on both rigid and non-rigid data. Also comparative research has been performed to study different coarse registration methods such as Spin Image (SI), Curvedness, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Studies showed that the quality of reconstruction is directly related to robustness of reconstruction method to the rotational and translation noise. Regarding analytical comparisons, results indicate the positive impression of applying coarse registration on both rigid and non-rigid data. Moreover, evaluations show PCA presents better results among other considered methods. Finally it is shown that down-sampled models present less error.
DNA motifs detection algorithms in long sequences

The identification of DNA motifs remains an active challenge for the researchers in the bioinformatics domain. A considerable effort in this area was concentrated on understanding the evolution of the genome by identifying the DNA binding sites for transcription factors. The evolution in genome sequencing has led to the appearance of numerous computational methods for finding the short DNA segments, known as motifs. In this study, we present some of the computational methods that exist and try to evaluate their performance in case of long sequences.
Evaluating ecological sustainable performance measures for supply chain management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology to help evaluate, select, and monitor sustainable supply chain performance measurement that can be integrated into a performance management system (PMS). Design/methodology/approach – Grey‐based neighborhood rough set theory is used to help arrive at a core set of important business and environmental performance measures for sustainable supply chains. The supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model is used to develop both business and environmental measures for supply chain sourcing.Findings – A case illustration shows the applicability of the methodology. A sensitivity analysis shows that variations in outcome considerations may greatly influence the set of key performance measures for a sustainable supply chain PMS.Research limitations/implications – The methodology and presentation is conceptual, yet the tool can provide very useful interpretations for both researchers and practitioners.Practical implications – The tool can be valuable.
Effect of parameter and sensing errors on DTC IM drive operation

The direct torque control (DTC) of an induction motor drive carries out the closed-loop control of the stator flux magnitude and the motor torque. The feedback values are estimated by processing the inverter dc-link voltage and the stator currents through the motor voltage model. Any error in the model parameter (i.e. the stator resistance) and in transducing voltage and currents yields an incorrect estimation of the controlled variables, thus altering the drive operation. In this paper the various errors are considered and their effect on the drive operation is studied analytically. The study shows that some errors lead to instability of the drive whilst some others deteriorate its steady-state performance. The theoretical findings are substantiated by experimental results.
The funding of new technology firms in a pre-commercial industry – the role of smart capital

In this article, we focus on how investors add value, in addition to finances, to resource-constrained young technology companies in a pre-commercial and capital-intensive industry. Based on a review of the entrepreneurial finance literature, we group investors' value-added contributions into four categories: ‘Business development’, ‘Technology development’, ‘Investor's outreach’ and ‘Legitimacy’. We build our study on six case studies of firms in the pre-commercial and emerging marine energy industry. Our case companies have received investments from business angels (BAs), venture capital (VC) firms and larger corporations (CVCs). We observed that the contributions from the investors clearly differ and that CVC investors appear to be especially important as their involvement helps increase young technology firms' credibility, which could be a crucial factor in pre-commercial and emerging industries. Overall, by engaging ‘smart capital’, a company can move from a situation of true uncertainty to one of manageable risk.
Co‐circulation of genetically distinct human metapneumovirus and human bocavirus strains in young children with respiratory tract infections in Italy†

The discovery of human Metapneumovirus (hMPV) and human Bocavirus (hBoV) identified the etiological causes of several cases of acute respiratory tract infections in children. This report describes the molecular epidemiology of hMPV and hBoV infections observed following viral surveillance of children hospitalized for acute respiratory tract infections in Milan, Italy. Pharyngeal swabs were collected from 240 children ≤3 years of age (130 males, 110 females; median age, 5.0 months; IQR, 2.0–12.5 months) and tested for respiratory viruses, including hMPV and hBoV, by molecular methods. hMPV‐RNA and hBoV‐DNA positive samples were characterized molecularly and a phylogenetical analysis was performed. PCR analysis identified 131/240 (54.6%) samples positive for at least one virus. The frequency of hMPV and hBoV infections was similar (8.3% and 12.1%, respectively). Both infections were associated with lower respiratory tract infections: hMPV was present as a single infectious agent in 7.2% of children with bronchiolitis, hBoV was associated with 18.5% of pediatric pneumonias and identified frequently as a single etiological agent. Genetically distinct hMPV and hBoV strains were identified in children examined with respiratory tract infections. Phylogenetic analysis showed an increased prevalence of hMPV genotype A (A2b sublineage) compared to genotype B (80% vs. 20%, respectively) and of the hBoV genotype St2 compared to genotype St1 (71.4% vs. 28.6%, respectively). Interestingly, a shift in hMPV infections resulting from A2 strains has been observed in recent years. In addition, the occurrence of recombination events between two hBoV strains with a breakpoint located in the VP1/VP2 region was identified. J. Med. Virol. 83:156–164, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata

We investigate the state complexity of the cut and iterated cut operation for deterministic finite automata (DFAs), answering an open question stated in [M. Berglund, et al.: Cuts in regular expressions. In Proc. DLT, LNCS 7907, 2011]. These operations can be seen as an alternative to ordinary concatenation and Kleene star modelling leftmost maximal string matching. We show that the cut operation has a matching upper and lower bound of \((n-1)\cdot m+n\) states on DFAs accepting the cut of two individual languages that are accepted by n- and m-state DFAs, respectively. In the unary case we obtain \(\max (2n-1,m+n-2)\) states as a tight bound. For accepting the iterated cut of a language accepted by an n-state DFA we find a matching bound of \(1+(n+1)\cdot \mathsf {F}(\,1,n+2,-n+2;n+1\mid -1\,)\) states on DFAs, where \(\mathsf {F}\) refers to the generalized hypergeometric function. This bound is in the order of magnitude \(\varTheta ((n-1)! )\). Finally, the bound drops to \(2n-1\) for unary DFAs accepting the iterated cut of an n-state DFA and thus is similar to the bound for the cut operation on unary DFAs.
Protection of mice from herpes simplex virus-induced retinitis by in vitro-activated immune cells

A form of acute retinal necrosis occurred in the contralateral eyes of susceptible mice 1 week after each received a uniocular injection of live herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) in the anterior chamber. Although these mice did not develop systemic delayed hypersensitivity to virus antigens, their sera contained virus-specific antibodies at the time contralateral retinitis occurred. These findings suggest that systemic immunity might not be able to protect against contralateral retinitis. To explore this possibility further, we examined lymph nodes and spleens of intraocularly infected mice to determine whether their lymphoid tissues contained primed HSV-1-specific cytotoxic T cells. Virus-specific cytotoxic T cells were readily identified in these mice. We wondered why successful immune priming did not confer protection against HSV-1 retinitis. We examined this issue by evaluating the capacity of in vitro-generated, HSV-1-specific effector T cells to prevent retinitis by infusing these cells by various routes and at various times into mice that received an intracameral injection of HSV-1. The results revealed that virus-specific effector cells could prevent contralateral retinitis if injected intravenously or into the anterior chamber of the contralateral eye at the same time that virus was injected into one eye. However, the effector cells failed to prevent retinitis if they were injected into the same eye that received HSV-1 or if their intravenous administration was delayed until 24 h after the HSV-1 injection into the eye. We concluded that immune T cells can protect against contralateral retinal necrosis caused by uniocular injection of HSV-1 into the anterior chamber but only if they are administered during the first 24 h after virus infection. We propose that a retinitis-inducing process is set in motion during this early time interval postinfection. Once the process has been initiated and established, it is no longer susceptible to immune intervention. It would appear that mice that are susceptible to contralateral retinitis fail to mobilize a protective response quickly enough to ward off the establishment of the retinitis-inducing process and its disastrous eventuality.
A Framework for Analyzing Customer Service Orientations in Manufacturing

The proposed framework first clarifies the concept of customer service in a manufacturing context. Then the key strategic choices associated with emphasizing a customer service–oriented strategy are specified. Next, the organizational arrangements necessary to implement these strategic choices are described. Finally, alternative effective configurations of the strategic choices, organizational arrangements, and customer service activities are proposed. Research propositions are presented that focus on the relationship between central contingencies in the strategic management literature and customer service in manufacturing.
Online Buzz and Searches as Telecoms Brand Performance Indicators

The Web has become a major laboratory of what consumers search, comment upon, and purchase in the real economy. This paper leverages a mash-up of online Google search and of social media (Twitter, Facebook, and others) to “nowcast” the relative product sales performance of telecoms companies in Belgium in the last 12 months. Three findings stand out: first, both online buzz and searches exhibit significant correlation with telecom product sales; second, while Google search explains a larger part than social media of the variance of brand telecoms sales, elasticity to sales is larger for social buzz than for search, except for fixed telephony product; third, in all cases, both data add useful information to nowcast telecoms brand performance.
How Do Venture Capital Partners Match with Startup Founders?

The venture capital market is characterized by personal interactions between VC firms and the startups they finance. Yet we have little systematic evidence of how startup founders get matched with partners at VC firms. By assembling data at the individual partner and founder level, we compare personal similarity-based rationale with resource complementarity-based reasons explaining the likelihood of an investment match. We find that a match is more likely if the two parties share a common ethnicity or have both attended a top ranked university, and particularly so when information problems are more severe. With such similarities, the VC’s investment also represents a larger fraction of her total investments. We interpret personal similarity as reducing transactions costs in VC matching rather than proxying quality-based matching. Matching based on VC partner’s professional expertise appears to be less determined by their complementarity with the founder’s background and more by the current lifecycle stage of the startup. In particular, VC partners with finance or operational capabilities are more likely to match with mature ventures. Our findings shed new light on how personal characteristics and professional expertise can be important in financing situations where informational frictions are severe and investors are actively involved with their borrowers.
Consumers’ behavioral intention to use internet shopping: an integrated model of TAM and TRA

Abstract The rapid development of the Internet has increased consumers’ intention to use the Internet and accelerated the growth of online stores which provide much convenience of Internet shopping to consumers. More and more people are thus trying this new shopping method. Based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this paper constructs a research model and hypotheses using factors affecting consumers’ intention to use Internet shopping. Three external factors including privacy, security, and self-efficacy are also added into the model. A questionnaire is developed and administered to consumers with experience of Internet shopping. The collected responses are then analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to find the correlations between research constructs and consumers’ behavioral intentions regarding Internet shopping. Findings indicate that online store operators should endeavor to enhance the “perceived usefulness” and “privacy” of their stores and consumers’ “self-efficacy” for using their stores, so as to increase consumers’ intention to use Internet shopping. Finally, we expect that our research findings can be a reference for online store operators.
Determinants of the need for homophily in referral criteria: The case of clergy referrals to mental health professionals in Singapore

Homophily, the tendency to seek out those who are similar, is a powerful force in structuring the relations that people have in a variety of social settings including the selection of partnerships. Despite this, attitudinal homophily has seldom been discussed in relation to referral practices, an important consideration in health care delivery. In this paper Christian clergy in Singapore are examined as to the extent they impose homophily as a selection criteria for referrals to mental health professionals. This is an important consideration as clergy are popular sources of help though they seldom refer their clients to mental health professionals due to the competition between health sectors. This study based on survey data collected from a representative sample of Singaporean clergymen predicts that those who expect referral partners to be homophilous include those with greater Christian conservatism, professional ideology and beliefs in clergy competence in handling emotional and mental problems. These ministers tended to come from smaller congregations and had more psychological education. In essence clergy who value homophily in referral partners are concerned about the relational risk involved in the referral process and use homophily in the hope that they can find referral partners who do not undermine their authority or jeopardize laymen's faith.
Type III secretion as a generalizable strategy for the production of full‐length biopolymer‐forming proteins

Biopolymer‐forming proteins are integral in the development of customizable biomaterials, but recombinant expression of these proteins is challenging. In particular, biopolymer‐forming proteins have repetitive, glycine‐rich domains and, like many heterologously expressed proteins, are prone to incomplete translation, aggregation, and proteolytic degradation in the production host. This necessitates tailored purification processes to isolate each full‐length protein of interest from the truncated forms as well as other contaminating proteins; owing to the repetitive nature of these proteins, the truncated polypeptides can have very similar chemistry to the full‐length form and are difficult to separate from the full‐length protein. We hypothesized that bacterial expression and secretion would be a promising alternative option for biomaterials‐forming proteins, simplifying isolation of the full‐length target protein. By using a selective secretion system, truncated forms of the protein are not secreted and thus are not found in the culture harvest. We show that a synthetically upregulated type III secretion system leads to a general increase in secretion titer for each protein that we tested. Moreover, we observe a substantial enhancement in the homogeneity of full‐length forms of pro‐resilin, tropo‐elastin crosslinking domains, and silk proteins produced in this manner, as compared with proteins purified from the cytosol. Secretion via the type III apparatus limits co‐purification of truncated forms of the target protein and increases protein purity without extensive purification steps. Demonstrating the utility of such a system, we introduce several modifications to resilin‐based peptides and use an un‐optimized, single‐column process to purify these proteins. The resulting materials are of sufficiently high quantity and yield for the production of antimicrobial hydrogels with highly reproducible rheological properties. The ease of this process and its applicability to an array of engineered biomaterial‐forming peptides lend support for the application of bacterial expression and secretion for other proteins that are traditionally difficult to express and isolate from the bacterial cytoplasm. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2016;113: 2313–2320. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Perverse incentives at the banks? Evidence from a natural experiment

Incentive provision is a central question in modern economic theory. During the run up to the financial crisis, many banks attempted to encourage loan underwriting by giving out incentive packages to loan officers. Using a unique data set on small business loan officer compensation from a major commercial bank, we test the model’s predictions that incentive compensation increases loan origination, but may induce the loan officers to book more risky loans. We find that the incentive package amounts to a 47% increase in loan approval rate, and a 24% increase in default rate. Overall, we find that the bank loses money by switching to incentive pay. We further test the effects of incentive pay on other loan characteristics using a multivariate difference-in-difference analysis.
Using the Internet for Market Research: A Study of Private Trading on the Internet

At first sight the Internet seems to offer the perfect vehicle for the conduct of market research. However, there are challenging methodological difficulties in using this medium and there is much yet to be learned. This paper reviews the potentials and pitfalls involved. It then presents the results of a study of private trading over the Internet and analyses approaches to the risks involved. Even a topic such as one involving a population of e-mail users, which should be ideal for research using the Internet, presents difficulties of sampling and self-selection that are difficult to overcome.