Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Relationship Between Situational Crime Prevention Theory and Campus Employee Computer Misuse

Computer misuse is a leading problem for all industry sectors, including higher education. However, much of the current research related to computer misuse has been conducted in the business sector, leaving higher education a relatively unstudied group. Many theories have been addressed in computer security literature, but only one theory offers a more holistic solution to combating computer misuse, Situational Crime Prevention Theory. Situational Crime Prevention Theory encompasses four categories of countermeasures: countermeasures that Increase the Perceived Effort of the offender, countermeasures that Increase the Perceived Risk of the offender, countermeasures that Reduce the Anticipated Rewards of the offender, and countermeasures that Remove the Excuses to offend. This study endeavored to investigate whether a relationship exists between the categories of countermeasures found in Situational Crime Prevention and the actual number of computer misuse incidents reported by CIO’s of public, four-year colleges and universities. Using a web-accessible, anonymous questionnaire, CIO’s of 442 public, four-year colleges and universities were asked to provide information related to the countermeasures that they have in place at their institutions and the number of
AN INVERTED-U THEORY OF TRUST : THE MODERATING ROLE OF PERCEIVED REGULATORY EFFECTIVENESS OF ONLINE MARKETPLACES

Past research has widely regarded trust as unconditionally facilitating transaction behavior, and perceived risk as unconditionally detracting from it. This study advocates the necessity to examine trust and perceived risk within the broader perspective of the societal context. We propose the perceived regulatory effectiveness of online marketplaces to moderate the impact of trust on transaction behavior. More specifically, we hypothesize that the degree to which buyer’s trust affects transaction intentions will vary in an inverted U manner depending on the perception buyers have in the regulatory effectiveness of the online marketplace. The impact of trust on transaction intentions will increase as the buyer’s perceived regulatory effectiveness increases from low to medium levels, but it will decrease as the buyer’s perceived effectiveness increases from medium to high levels. Moreover, the perceived regulatory effectiveness of the online marketplace is also hypothesized to reduce the impact of perceived risk on transaction intentions. These moderating effects were examined and empirically supported in the context of eBay’s and Amazon’s online auction marketplaces. Implications for integrating the perceived regulatory effectiveness of online marketplaces into existing trust and risk models are discussed.
Promoting open source technology to increase productivity of small and medium enterprises

The use of open source software (OSS) offers several advantages such as cost savings, security and the ability to modify the source code [1], which encourages companies to adopt it. Today there is a large number of OSS available that meet different requirements (Feller, and Fitzgerald, 2002) [2] [3], which makes their selection a very difficult stage. The contribution of this work is to develop our national economy, by proposing a new evaluation model that will facilitate to decision- makers of small and medium enterprises in Morocco and in other countries to improve the productivity by enhancing their information system with open source technology. To test and validate our proposed model, we applied it at a Moroccan company that sells heavy equipment and wished to supervise the IT infrastructure of its subsidiaries in Africa using a scalable and free solution, and also at nineteen small and medium companies.
Predictive Modeling of a Batch Filter Mating Process

Quantitative characterizations of horizontal gene transfer are needed to accurately describe gene transfer processes in natural and engineered systems. A number of approaches to the quantitative description of plasmid conjugation have appeared in the literature. In this study, we seek to extend that work, motivated by the question of whether a mathematical model can accurately predict growth and conjugation dynamics in a batch process. We used flow cytometry to make time-point observations of a filter-associated mating between two E. coli strains, and fit ordinary differential equation models to the data. A model comparison analysis identified the model formulation that is best supported by the data. Identifiability analysis revealed that the parameters were estimated with acceptable accuracy. The predictive power of the model was assessed by comparison with test data that demanded extrapolation from the training experiments. This study represents the first attempt to assess the quality of model predictions for plasmid conjugation. Our successful application of this approach lays a foundation for predictive modeling that can be used both in the study of natural plasmid transmission and in model-based design of engineering approaches that employ conjugation, such as plasmid-mediated bioaugmentation.
Particulate Air Pollution and Fetal Health: A Systematic Review of the Epidemiologic Evidence

Background: Research on the potential impact of air pollution on the health of adults and children has grown rapidly over the last decade. Recent studies have suggested that air pollution could also be associated with adverse effects on the developing fetus. This systematic review evaluates the current level of epidemiologic evidence on the association between ambient particulate air pollution and fetal health outcomes. We also suggest further research questions. Methods: Using database searches and other approaches, we identified relevant publications published between 1966 and 2001 in English. Articles were included if they reported original data on birthweight, gestational age at delivery, or stillbirth related to directly measured nonaccidental exposure to particulate matter. Results: Twelve studies met the inclusion criteria. There was little consistency in the evidence linking particulate air pollution and fetal outcomes. Many studies had methodologic weaknesses in their design and adjustment for confounding factors. Even in well-designed studies, the reported magnitude of the effects was small and inconsistently associated with exposure at specific stages of pregnancy. Conclusions: The currently available evidence is compatible with either a small adverse effect of particulate air pollution on fetal growth and duration of pregnancy or with no effect. Further research should be directed toward clarifying and quantifying these possible effects and generating testable hypotheses on plausible biologic mechanisms.
From convergent dynamics to incremental stability

This paper advocates that the convergent systems property and incremental stability are two intimately related though different properties. Sufficient conditions for the convergent systems property usually rely upon first showing that a system is incrementally stable, as e.g. in the celebrated Demidovich condition. However, in the current paper it is shown that incremental stability itself does not imply the convergence property, or vice versa. Moreover, characterizations of both properties in terms of Lyapunov functions are given. Based on these characterizations, it is established that the convergence property implies incremental stability for systems evolving on compact sets, and also when a suitable uniformity condition is satisfied.
Emotional Exhaustion and Its Role in Service Sabotage among Retail Sales Employees (pp. 328-331)

Retail sales employees are subject to pressures and strains not found in other positions in the organization (Mulki, Jaramillo and Locander 2006; Choo, Rutherford and Park 2013). Research has found that retail sales employees are subject to a great deal of stress because they “are caught in a difficult position when they perceive that client demands cannot or will not be met by the organization” (Cordes and Dougherty 1993, p. 644). If retail sales employees do not have the ability to get rid of the conflict between customer and organizational demands, the employees may engage in service sabotage as a way to show their unhappiness with the organization.
Segmentation of urban built up area using Fisher discriminant analysis , intensity and vegetation strength of Landsat images

A series of studies in urban growth involve the segmentation of urban built up area. This segmentation may used as input to geospatial models to quantify and map urban growth. The segmentation may be used as well to study the dynamics of urban growth on a certain time span. We present in this work a method to segment urban built up area from Landsat multi-spectral images. Our method uses the expansion of the image in terms of three variables: intensity, vegetation strength and fisher discriminant analysis. These variables are input into a c-means fuzzy classier. From this classifier, a binary image, named the bitmap, is derived. The bitmap is a logic state image where the state ON is related to city pixels, and the state OFF to non-city pixels. A case of study is presented that comprised one of the largest cities of the world with a high dynamic growth and high urban built up density: México City. A set of images that cover a time span of eleven years is considered. The field data consist of a detailed map and field work. Key-Words: Segmentation, urban built-up, urban morphology
Delay-capacity tradeoffs for mobile networks with Lévy walks and Lévy flights

This paper analytically derives the delay-capacity tradeoffs for Lévy mobility: Lévy walks and Lévy flights. Lévy mobility is a random walk with a power-law flight distribution. α is the power-law slope of the distribution and 0 &#60; α ≤ 2. While in Lévy flight, each flight takes a constant flight time, in Lévy walk, it has a constant velocity which incurs strong spatio-temporal correlation as flight time depends on traveling distance. Lévy mobility is of special interest because it is known that Lévy mobility and human mobility share several common features including heavy-tail flight distributions. Humans highly influence the mobility of nodes (smartphones and cars) in real mobile networks as they carry or drive mobile nodes. Understanding the fundamental delay-capacity tradeoffs of Lévy mobility provides important insight into understanding the performance of real mobile networks. However, its power-law nature and strong spatio-temporal correlation make the scaling analysis non-trivial. This is in contrast to other random mobility models including Brownian motion, random waypoint and i.i. d. mobility which are amenable for a Markovian analysis. By exploiting the asymptotic characterization of the joint spatio-temporal probability density functions of Lévy models, the order of critical delay, the minimum delay required to achieve more throughput than Θ(1/√n) where n is the number of nodes in the network, is obtained. The results indicate that in Lévy walk, there is a phase transition that for 0 &#60; α &#60; 1, the critical delay is constantly Θ(n<sup>1/2</sup>) and for 1 ≤ α ≤ 2, is Θ(n<sup>α/2</sup>). In contrast, Lévy flight has critical delay Θ(n<sup>α/</sup>2) for 0 &#60; a ≤ 2.
Proactive remote healthcare based on multimedia and home automation services

In the context of healthcare and the assistance of dependent people, this paper describes an original proactive solution for home monitoring. Our approach does not use any additional sensors and is only based on the observation of existing home automation events. An analysis of user habits is proposed to offer automatic scenarios which adapt to user capabilities. The simulation results, issued from previous experiments, show that our approach helps improve user autonomy while facilitating their use of daily services.
Beam Configuration and Client Association for Access Points with Switched Beam Antennas

Unlike conventional omnidirectional antennas, switched beam antennas exploit antenna arrays and signal processing techniques to focus energy in a specific beam-width and orientation. Recent research has shown that access points of a WLAN can exploit such switched beam antennas to increase the overall network capacity. The achievable sum rate of a WLAN with switch beam antennas is however mainly determined by how each AP selects its beam, including the orientation and width, and how each client associates with a proper AP. The goal of this paper is to solve the Joint Beam configuration and Client association (JBC) problem such that the sum rate of all clients in the network can be maximized. We formulate the JBC problem as a mixed integer linear programming model, and propose a 2-approximation algorithm to solve it. Our proposed algorithm has two distinctive properties: 1) it can be realized as a distributed protocol that allows the APs to configure their beams without the help of a central coordinator, and 2) it can be generally applied both in specific scenarios, where exact client locations are known, and in uncertain scenarios, where only geographic client distribution is given. Finally, we adjust the sum-rate maximization algorithm to the throughput maximization algorithm, which further takes medium sharing among clients into account. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms both WLANs using omnidirectional antennas and other heuristics using switched beam antennas.
Re-Educating European Management: The Marshall Plan's Campaign Against Restrictive Business Practices in France, 1949-1953

"When the French Mission of the European Recovery Program totted up its results at the end of the first year of operation," David Landes noted in an essay he wrote for the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), it discovered that "the contribution of so many new machines plus so many tons of coal and raw materials had not added up to the sum of products anticipated. " The reason for this, Landes suggested, was that French businessmen favored stability and security to competition and growth, and preferred to "limit production and spread profits" [30e, 8, 23, 26]. Landes's theory of entrepreneurial failure strengthened the American Marshall planners' conviction that restrictive business practices were the principal reason for what they considered the ineffective use of U.S. aid in France [30c, 7, 9/1951]. As American officials used the term, "restrictive practices" referred to all the traditional economic behavior and social attitudes that limited competition and impeded growth, ranging from oligopolistic practices such as price fixing and production quotas to foreign trade controls. Landes's analysis suggested that a virtually monolithic business class, bound together by its "pre-capitalist ethos," was the main barrier to the introduction of genuine competition in France. This essay addresses two facets of the American campaign to promote competition in France: its support for domestic French antitrust legislation and its attempt o persuade industrialists todisband their cartels topics that have received scant attention from scholars, with the notable exception of Matthias Kipping's recent work [18]. Like Kipping I argue that national efforts to curb the cartels' power in France largely failed, although our depictions of the American role differ, partly because our concerns are somewhat different. This paper argues that whereas American policy-makers treaded rather cautiously in the public French debates over cartel legislation, they were anything but prudent and restrained in their direct dealings with French industrialists. Indeed, the dogmatism and the missionary zeal many Americans displayed in that educational campaign, fed in part by Landes's theory of entrepreneurial failure, was one important reason why success in reforming French business practices proved elusive. ECA officials had warned ever since the aid program's inception that restrictive practices might act as a brake on European economic recovery. In fact, they had anticipated a resurgence of producers' arrangements a Europe's economies revived and as its markets grew more competitive [30a, 4, 8/9/1948]. Yet restrictive practices were not a major concern in the ECA, at least not until the fall of 1949. Before then, Washington tended to assume that the Marshall Plan's trade
Promoting Dignity through Design:A Grounded Analysis of Stakeholders' Views on the Role of Disability Organizations in Inclusive Design

Inclusive design promotes the involvement of users with diverse needs in the design process. The possibility of disability organizations collaborating with businesses to enhance accessibility through inclusive design was explored in this major research project. Open-ended interviews were held with twelve participants representing interactions with disability organizations as clients, employees, volunteers, supporters, or business associates. The data were gathered and analyzed using a grounded approach. The analysis revealed the complexity of accessibility and the value associated by the participants with dignity. A model focused around dignity and a potential application was proposed as a supportive tool to illustrate the concepts further. A core idea proposed by this research is that design, when directed at promoting the dignity of the users, could enhance their experience and create more inclusive systems.
Planar Ramsey Numbers

The planar Ramsey number PR(G, H) is defined as the smallest integer n for which any 2-colouring of edges of Kn with red and blue, where red edges induce a planar graph, leads to either a red copy of G, or a blue H. In this note we study the weak induced version of the planar Ramsey number in the case when the second graph is complete.
Morphological Analysis of Mammograms Using Visualization Pipelines

: The aim of this study is to detect masses in mammograms through pipelining sequences of visualization operators. Such sequences act as morphological filtering operators for identifying objects of interest. This is done using series of rendering operators including edge detection, smoothing, filling small holes, coloring various densities, joining broken boundaries and eliminating small projections.
Random Walk Model for Spontaneous Neural Firing

A random walk model of spontaneous activity in neurons is analyzed using the theory of discrete time, discrete space Markov chains. The model has been shown to replicate some observed behavior in neurons in the cochlear nucleus of cats. Here, we compute limiting probabilities and the distribution of first passage times to model firing rate and interspike interval histograms, respectively. These theoretical results are then compared to the outcomes of numerical simulations of the random walk process.
Probabilistic Classification of Age by Third Molar Development: The Use of Soft Evidence

Abstract: This study introduces a method to classify individuals according to an age threshold, given sex and third molars’ dental maturity measured on the Demirjian scale by expressing uncertainty on dental evidence (soft evidence). We introduced a procedure to learn the parameters of the Naïve Bayes model, and we discussed two classification rules. The model was estimated and tested on 559 Italians aged 16–22. Two experts provided the dental evaluations, and the model was estimated for each of them. We evaluated the coherence of the evidence provided by the experts. Some indexes have been proposed to evaluate the effectiveness of the models, emphasizing how the experts’ ability and the technology affect the results. We introduced two benchmarks, one based on the sample distribution per sex and age: in this case, probability of correct classification increases 22% and the proportion of false adults impressively decreases 80.2%; the other benchmark, obtained by simulating hard evidence, shows how the use of soft evidence increases the proportion of correct classification 3.1% and decreases the crucial proportion of false adults about 20%. Similarly, the proportion of false minors decreases about 5.3%.
Voice Recording in second language outside the classroom: Process and product

In Vietnam, English is a foreign language. Therefore, students do not have many opportunities to practise speaking outside the classroom. Inside the classroom, teachers focus on teaching grammar explicitly. To enable students to practise their speaking skills, Facebook closed groups were employed as a learning platform. Seventeen students were asked to record their speech on suggested topics, post them on Facebook closed groups and comment on their friends’ works within six weeks. The first and final recordings were employed to analyse in terms of fluency and complexity. These students were also interviewed after the course. They supposed that voice recording enabled them to have opportunities to practise their speaking skills. The first and final recordings showed that students improved their fluency and lexical complexity but not for syntactic complexity.
Learning to Detect Different Types of Cells under Phase Contrast Microscopy

— We propose a learning-based algorithm to detect various types of cells in phase contrast microscopy images. The algorithm automatically adapts to different cell types by learning variations in cell appearances and shapes, while staying discriminative against non-cell distractions in the background. Benefiting from a rich set of carefully designed feature descriptors, the proposed algorithm is able to detect considerably different types of cells with high accuracy. With experimental results achieving an average detection F-measure of 90%, the statistical learning framework proposed in this paper has proven to be promising in evolving into a highly adaptive and robust cell detection system.
Rapid Evaluation of Regular Quad-mesh Interpolatory Subdivision Surfaces Based on Parametric Decomposition

Two algorithms for evaluation of regular quad-mesh interpolatory subdivision surfaces are proposed. Algorithms are designed based on the parametric m-ary decomposition and construction of matrix sequence. The weights of the control points on the initial mesh can be obtained, through direct computation of the basic function values by multiplying the finite matrix sequence corresponding to the decomposition number sequence. Algorithm-I is based on 2D subdivision masks while the other is based on tensor-product. Numerical experiments show that algorithms are efficient with low storage cost.
A heterodimeric coiled-coil peptide pair selected in vivo from a designed library-versus-library ensemble.

Novel heterodimeric coiled-coil pairs were selected simultaneously from two DNA libraries using an in vivo protein-fragment complementation assay with dihydrofolate reductase, and the best pair was biophysically characterized. We randomized the interface-flanking e and g positions to Gln, Glu, Arg or Lys, and the core a position to Asn or Val in both helices simultaneously, using trinucleotide codons in DNA synthesis. Selection cycles with three different stringencies yielded sets of coiled-coil pairs, of which 80 clones were statistically analyzed. Thereby, properties most crucial for successful heterodimerization could be distinguished from those mediating more subtle optimization. A strong bias towards an Asn pair in the core a position indicated selection for structural uniqueness, and a reduction of charge repulsions at the e/g positions indicated selection for stability. Increased stringency led to additional selection for heterospecificity by destabilizing the respective homodimers. Interestingly, the best heterodimers did not contain exclusively complementary charges. The dominant pair, WinZip-A1B1, proved to be at least as stable in vitro as naturally occurring coiled coils, and was shown to be dimeric and highly heterospecific with a K(D) of approximately 24 nM. As a result of having been selected in vivo it possesses all characteristics required for a general in vivo heterodimerization module. The combination of rational library design and in vivo selection presented here is a very powerful strategy for protein design, and it can reveal new structural relationships.