Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biopsychosocial correlates of hope in Asian patients with cancer: a systematic review

Objective To examine the factors associated with hope and hopelessness in patients with cancer in Asian countries, and the instruments used to measure hope and hopelessness. Methords A comprehensive systematic review was conducted with search terms, including cancer, hope, hopelessness and individual Asian country names, on CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, PubMed and Scopus databases. Only quantitative studies on adult cancer populations in Asia examining hope or hopelessness were included. Results A total of 2062 unique articles were retrieved from the databases, and 32 studies were selected for inclusion in this review. Hope and hopelessness were most frequently measured with the Herth Hope Index and the Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale, respectively. The biopsychosocial factors that were most consistently associated with hope and hopelessness included sociodemographic variables (education, employment and economic status); clinical factors (cancer stage, physical condition and symptoms); and psychosocial factors (emotional distress, social support and connections, quality of life, control or self-efficacy, as well as adjustment and resilience). Discussion There is a need for more studies from South and Southeast Asia as most studies hailed from East Asia. This review highlighted the possibility of cultural differences influencing factors related to hope, suggesting that cross-cultural studies specifically would facilitate understanding behind these variations, although future reviews on hope should also include studies on hopelessness for a comprehensive understanding of the concept. Finally, more longitudinal research could be conducted to assess whether the factors associated with hope and hopelessness change over time and disease progression.
Effect of Two Connector Designs on the Fracture Resistance of All-Ceramic Core Materials for Fixed Dental Prostheses: An In-Vitro Study

Background : The aim of this study was to test the difference in fracture resistance of 3 ceramic core materials used for simulated 3-unit all-ceramic FPDs with 2 fabrication techniques (lost-wax/heat-pressing and CAD/CAM methods) and 2 connector designs (round and sharp). Material and method : The present in vitro study was conducted in the Department of Prosthodontics and Crown & Bridge, Subharti Dental College & Hospital, Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. For the purpose of this study, 3 all ceramic core materials were selected viz. Yittrium-tetragonal zirconia polycrystals, Milled Lithium disilicate glass ceramic and Lost-wax/heat-pressed lithium disilicate glass ceramic. A total of 10 rectangular bars of dimensions 30 mm (L) x 5 mm (W) x 5 mm (H) from each material were manufactured. Of these 10 bars, 5 bars were fabricated with sharp notch connector and 5 bars were fabricated with round notch connector. The dimensions of all specimens were measured and verified individually by an electronic caliper with an accuracy of 0.05 mm. The radius of each connector was measured with a measuring tool. Results : The failure load was more in Press-R in comparison to Press-S and the difference was found to be statistically significant. The FS was more in CAD-R in comparison to CAD-S and the difference was found to be statistically significant. Conclusion : The round connector design in yittrium stabilized zirconia and heat pressed lithium disilicate both may be considered to be the all-ceramic core material of choice for FDP’s as they have highest failure load and flexural strength.
A Bayesian Approach to Informed Spatial Filtering With Robustness Against DOA Estimation Errors

A Bayesian approach to spatial filtering is presented, which is robust to uncertain or erroneous direction-of-arrival (DOA) information. The proposed framework aims to capture multiple sound sources at each time-frequency instant with an arbitrary direction-dependent gain, while attenuating diffuse sound and noise. For robustness, the DOA corresponding to each sound source is assumed to be a discrete random variable with a prior defined on a discrete set of candidate DOAs over the whole DOA space. With this assumption, the desired spatial filter is given as a weighted sum of spatial filters corresponding to a specific combination of probable DOA values, where the weights are given by the joint posterior probabilities of the combination of DOA values. Assuming the whole DOA space as the support for each random variable results in redundant computations and contributes to a high computational cost. To alleviate this problem, a narrowband DOA estimate-based posterior probability approximation method is proposed, which isolates regions in the DOA space with high probability of containing the actual source DOAs to compute time-adaptive supports for each random variable. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework against DOA estimation errors. Experimental evaluation with simulated and measured room impulse responses, in terms of objective performance measures, demonstrates the effectiveness of the framework to perform spatial filtering in noisy and reverberant acoustic environments.
LMI-based design of PI controllers for micropositioning dielectric electro-active polymer membranes

This paper develops a control system for a bi-stable positioning system based on a dielectric electro-active polymer membrane. The motion is generated by the deformation of the membrane caused by the electrostatic compressive force between two compliant electrodes applied on the surface of the polymer. A bi-stable spring is used to pre-load the membrane, allowing high stroke but producing at the same time a strong non-linear behavior. The paper proposes a detailed electro-mechanical model of the system, which is subsequently used to develop a model-based PI control law providing precise tracking and worst-case performance guarantees. The design strategy is validated both in simulations and experiments.
Hotel Environmental Management Decisions: The Stakeholder Perspective

This study investigates stakeholder perceptions of the factors that are critical to the adoption of environmental management practices in international tourist hotels in Taiwan. The empirical data were based on 26 semistructured interviews with four types of stakeholders. According to the qualitative results, the themes that emerge associated with hotel owners/managers include economic concerns, top management commitment, and operational challenges to environmental practices. Environmental policies, regulations, and support are identified as the themes associated with government agencies. Moreover, the knowledge, consultancy, and professional assistance provided by academics and non-governmental organizations facilitate the acceptability and implementation of hotel environmental initiatives. The research implications highlight the need for communication and collaboration among stakeholders.
Application-Independent and Integration-Friendly Natural Language Understanding

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) has been a long-standing goal of AI and many related fields, but it is often dismissed as very hard to solve. NLU is required complex flexible systems that take action without further human intervention. This inherently involves strong semantic (meaning) capabilities to parse queries and commands correctly and with high confidence, because an error by a robot or automated vehicle could be disastrous. We describe an implemented general framework, the ECG2 system, that supports the deployment of NLU systems over a wide range of application domains. The framework is based on decades of research on embodied action-oriented semantics and efficient computational realization of a deep semantic analyzer (parser). This makes it linguistically much more flexible, general and reliable than existing shallow approaches that process language without considering its deeper semantics. In this paper we describe our work from a Computer Science perspective of system integration, and show why our particular architecture requires considerably less effort to connect the system to new applications compared to other language processing tools.
Convolutional network for vergence control

We present a biologically-inspired model for the one-shot vergence control of a robotic head, which has been used for an investigation of two vergence control networks. Both networks do not work with explicitly computed disparity, but extract the vergence control signal from the postprocessed response of a population of disparity tuned complex cells, the actual gaze direction and the actual vergence angle. Training and evaluation of the networks are also discussed.
Fair Trade's Dual Aspect

Effective communication strategies are fundamental to achieving sustainable consumption, yet there is a gap in the literature with respect to their design. Moreover, there is considerable debate with respect to the starting point for such strategies: whether the shift to sustainable consumption can be achieved within the dominant social paradigm or whether a new paradigm is required. Fair trade (FT) marketing presents a valuable case study of these issues in practice. Case analysis of a campaign by the Divine Chocolate Company suggests the importance of transcending the polarization of the radical and pragmatic visions of FT and also the within or without dichotomy of macromarketing in terms of moving consumers along a pathway to sustainable development. The campaign's synergism further has significant implications for the design of communication strategies to effect sustainable consumption. These are presented in terms of two working propositions for exploration in alternative contexts.
Testing the Butler-Stokes Model of a Polarization Effect Around the National Swing in Partisan Preferences: England, 1979

In the section of their book Political Change in Britain entitled ‘The Sources of Uniform Swing’, David Butler and Donald Stokes presented a model to account for an apparent paradox in Britain's electoral geography – the relative uniformity of the ‘two party swing’ between elections across all parts of the country. This uniformity is paradoxical because if the national trend in changes of partisan preferences were to apply equally in all areas then the swing against a party experiencing a net loss of votes should be greatest in those areas where it won most votes at the first election: indeed, as Butler and Stokes show, it may even register a net gain of votes where it was weakest, despite the national trend being against it.
Effects of Relationship Marketing on Repeat Purchase and Word of Mouth

This study explores what kinds of relationship marketing activities affect relationship quality between customer-contact employees and hotel guests. In addition, this study investigates whether relationship quality influences relationship consequences such as commitment, repeat purchase, and word of mouth. This study will help hotel managers design guidelines for efficient relationship marketing activities. The effective use of relationship marketing strategies can increase repeat guests and positive word of mouth. To analyze data collected from 27 luxury hotels in Seoul, South Korea, structural equation modeling was used to discover a causal relationship. The empirical results of this study are twofold: Greater guest confidence and communication result in higher relationship quality, and higher relationship quality results in greater guest commitment and more repeat purchase and positive word of mouth.
Relationships between human resource management practices and organizational learning capability: The mediating role of human capital

Purpose – This paper has three purposes: first, to study whether organizational learning capability (OLC) is related to human resource management (HRM) practices such as selection, development, appraisals and rewards; second, to assess to what extent the value and uniqueness of human capital is associated with OLC; and lastly, to consider the possible mediating role of human capital in the relationships between HRM practices and OLC.Design/methodology/approach – This research was conducted with a sample of companies in the most innovative sectors of Spanish industry, applying the partial least squares (PLS) technique.Findings – The results in this paper demonstrate the direct association of selection and appraisals practices and both dimensions of human capital with learning. Furthermore, developmental practices are associated with the value of human capital, and the selection and appraisal practices are related to uniqueness. Therefore, human capital is partially mediating the relationships between HRM p.
Enhancing Trust – Software Vulnerability Analysis Framework

Open source projects and the globalization of the software industry have been a driving force in reuse of system components across traditional system boundaries. As a result, vulnerabilities and security concerns are no longer only impact individual but now also global software ecosystems. Known vulnerabilities and security concerns are reported in specialized vulnerability databases, which often remain information silos. In my PhD research, I introduce a modeling approach, which eliminates these information silos by linking the security knowledge with other software artifacts to improve traceability and trust in software products.
Circulating Tumor DNA and Circulating Tumor Cells for Cancer Diagnosis and Management ( Liquid Biopsy )

Liquid biopsy is a when a blood sample (rather than a piece of tissue) is used to test for cancer cells or small genetic cancer pieces mixing in the blood. The blood sample is taken from the arm and is tested for cells or genetic pieces that cancers shed into the bloodstream. Identifying tumor cell material in the blood might help to diagnose cancer, track changes in a cancer over time or help select the right type of cancer treatment. However, there is not enough information from clinical studies to be certain that this works as well as a tissue biopsy in most people, because we don’t yet know that this works as well as tissue biopsy. This treatment is not yet proven.
Valuing Asian and Portfolio Options by Conditioning on the Geometric Mean Price

The valuation of Asian, or a average price, options and of European options on portfolios in a "Black-Scholes" environment has given researchers trouble. The difficulty with these problems is that the probability distribution of the variable which determines the option payoff at expiration, a sum of correlated lognormal random variables, has no closed-form representation. For the Asian case the approach generally taken has been to approximate the distribution of the arithmetic average price, while for the portfolio option case, attempts have focused on discretizing the joint distribution of the terminal prices of the assets comprising the portfolio and approximating the expected risk-neutral option payoff with a discrete sum. These approaches are not entirely satisfactory. The distribution-approximating procedures for Asian options are not very accurate for some cases, while the computational requirements for obtaining a reasonably accurate estimate using the discretizing or multinomial approaches for portfolio options become excessive as the number of assets rises above four or five, because the computation time is exponential in the number of assets. This paper presents a method based on conditioning on the geometric mean price which results in a far more efficient technique for valuing these options.
Coverage performance of heterogeneous cellular networks with dependent cell deployment

To offload congested base stations (BSs) in the cellular network, deploying low-power BSs overlaid with existing high-power BSs that forms the heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) with multiple tiers, has been widely considered in the literature. For analytical tractability, the locations of BSs are often modeled as the independent Poisson point process (PPP). However, the independence assumption may lead to arbitrarily small distances between low-power and high-power BSs. In practice, low-power BSs should not be placed too close to the high-power BSs because otherwise their mutual interference will diminish the gain provided by offloading. Besides, previous work often ignores the actual load of each BS but assuming that all BSs are fully loaded. For the emerging HCN, an analytical model that characterizes the dependent cell deployment with the use of cell range extension (CRE) technique is proposed in this paper. The proposed model avoids the BSs of different tiers being arbitrarily close in distance and takes into account the BS load as a function of resource utilization. Based on the proposed modeling approach, we derive the coverage probabilities and the average user rates of different tiers. Numerical results are presented to verify the analysis accuracy and demonstrate the interplay between key system parameters and the resultant performance.
Key Aspects of Global Climate Change

As a contribution to the World Climate Change Conference (WCCC 2003, Moscow September 29 – October 3), an analysis was made of the key issues in the scientific understanding of contemporary global climate change. The focus of this analysis is a discussion of the uncertainties relating to existing observational data and of the results of numerical modelling. The necessity for analysing current models for their ability to simulate real climate change is emphasized. Real climate change results from the non-linear interactions between numerous components of the climatic system, also taking into account potential contributions from cosmic factors such as solar activity. It is concluded that current models are unable to simulate real climate adequately and should not be used for policy-making predicated on future ‘predicted’ climate.
HIGHEST REDSHIFT IMAGE OF NEUTRAL HYDROGEN IN EMISSION: A CHILES DETECTION OF A STARBURSTING GALAXY AT z = 0.376

Our current understanding of galaxy evolution still has many uncertainties associated with the details of the accretion, processing, and removal of gas across cosmic time. The next generation of radio telescopes will image the neutral hydrogen (H i) in galaxies over large volumes at high redshifts, which will provide key insights into these processes. We are conducting the COSMOS H i Large Extragalactic Survey (CHILES) with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, which is the first survey to simultaneously observe H i from z = 0 to z ∼ 0.5. Here, we report the highest redshift H i 21 cm detection in emission to date of the luminous infrared galaxy COSMOS J100054.83+023126.2 at z = 0.376 with the first 178 hr of CHILES data. The total H i mass is (2.9 ± 1.0) × 1010M⊙ and the spatial distribution is asymmetric and extends beyond the galaxy. While optically the galaxy looks undisturbed, the H i distribution suggests an interaction with a candidate companion. In addition, we present follow-up Large Millimeter Telescope CO observations that show it is rich in molecular hydrogen, with a range of possible masses of (1.8–9.9) × 1010M⊙. This is the first study of the H i and CO in emission for a single galaxy beyond z ∼ 0.2.
Audit quality and the going-concern decision-making process: Spanish evidence

In this study, we attempt empirically to investigate the relationship between audit quality and the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. Auditor decision-making in the presence of going-concern uncertainties may be characterized as a two-stage process. The first stage is the identification of a potential going-concern problem and the second stage is to determine whether the particular company should receive a qualified going-concern opinion. A sample of 1,199 non-financial Spanish company-years has been obtained from the database issued by the Stock Exchange National Commission for the fiscal years ending between December 1991 and December 2000. The results indicate that audit quality (measured by the auditor's level of independence and knowledge) affects the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. This probability is influenced not only by the auditor's ability to detect financial uncertainties, but also by the auditor's decision-making as to what type of opinion should be finally issued.
Optimising creativity management: problems and principles

This paper explores the problem of optimal management of creativity to develop and mobilise employee creativity in more effective ways. Optimising creativity management presumes interventions for employee creativity development and the improvement of the work environment for creativity, which are most relevant to the specific organisation, its goals, objectives and resources. This paper identifies the main principles and problems of optimising creativity management, as well as cognitive blocks to such optimisation. This study also allocates specific functions of creativity management research and development management and innovation management to define where these functions overlap and can be coordinated. Optimising approaches to managing creativity indicate prospective directions both for theoretical investigations and practical techniques to manage employee creativity more systematically and methodically.
Making the IMF and the World Bank more Accountable

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (the Bank) are now regularly accused of being secretive, unaccountable and ineffective. Not only radical non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but equally their major shareholders are demanding that the institutions become more transparent, more accountable and more participatory. Accountability, in particular, has become the catchcry of officials, scholars and activists in discussing the reform of the institutions. Yet few attempts have been made to dissect the existing structure of accountability within the international financial institutions (IFIs), to explain its flaws and to propose solutions. That is the aim of this article. The first section examines the structure of accountability planned by the founders of the IMF and the World Bank. The second section discusses the defects in this structure. Section three analyses recent attempts to make the institutions more accountable. The conclusion offers some recommendations for improving the institutions, and a warning about the limits of accountability at the international level.
Changes in soil CH4 fluxes from the conversion of tropical peat swamp forests: a meta-analysis

Currently, 25% of all deforestation in insular Southeast Asia occurs in peat swamp forests. When peatlands are deforested, drainage ditches are often constructed to lower the ground-water level, which may result in changes in peat methane (CH4) fluxes. Our aim was to evaluate how tropical peat swamp forest conversion affected these fluxes. Average CH4 fluxes, water table depths and the relationship between both were established for common land uses (LU) of Southeast Asia. We also compared peat CH4 fluxes before and after land-use change (LUC) using a meta-analysis. Average soil CH4 emissions amounted to 28.6 ± 9.7 and 107.6 ± 60.2 kg C ha−1 y−1 in virgin peat swamp forests and rice fields, respectively. In the other land uses the emissions (9.5 ± 6.1 kg C ha−1 y−1) were significantly lower. Methane fluxes displayed an exponential response to water table depth changes across LU ranging from dry-drained to wet-undrained situations. The significant overall effect size of LUC on CH4 emissions (−0.4 ± 0.2) indicated a small decrease of CH4 emissions with peat swamp forests conversion to another land use, including rice cultivation. It's important to stress, however, that the overall decrease in CH4 emission from peat swamp forests conversion would never offset the simultaneous increase in soil CO2 emissions due to accelerated peat decomposition.