Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Menstrual cycle phase does not affect sympathetic neural activity in women with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome

Women with the postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) report fluctuations in orthostatic tolerance throughout the menstrual cycle. The mechanism(s) underlying blood pressure control across the menstrual cycle in women with POTS are unknown. The findings of the present study indicate that the menstrual cycle does not affect muscle sympathetic nerve activity but modulates blood pressure and vasoconstriction in POTS women during orthostatic stress. Factors other than sympathetic neural activity are likely responsible for the symptoms of orthostatic intolerance across the menstrual cycle in women with POTS.
Applying Band-Pass Filter Techniques to the Design of Small-Aperture Evanescent-Mode Waveguide Antennas

A design methodology is presented which applies band-pass filter principles to form wideband small-aperture evanescent-mode waveguide antenna designs. This approach permits matching of the complex antenna aperture admittance of an evanescent-mode open-ended waveguide to a real impedance generator, and thereby to an SMA coaxial feeding probe. A reflection coefficient of less than -10 dB was obtained over a measured bandwidth of 15%, from 2.30-2.68 GHz, in 2.72 GHz cutoff waveguide. Capacitive posts and evanescent-mode waveguide sections are used to form the resonators/coupling elements of the antenna's filtering sections. Measured realised gain variation from 3.5-4.7 dBi is observed across the bandwidth. The antenna's maximum aperture dimension is <; 0. 5λ0 at the upper frequency in the bandwidth and so it is suitable for use in a wide angle scanning phased array.
The “LIFO Reserve” and the Value of the Firm: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Abstract. A valuation approach is used to examine the effect of the LIFO inventory method on the relation between the market value of a firm's stock and the book value of equity. The paper develops three competing hypotheses that have different predictions regarding the relation between the LIFO reserve and the market value of equity. Results indicate a significant negative relation between the LIFO reserve and the value of equity, inconsistent with the pricing of LIFO reserves as unbooked assets, but consistent with a model that views the LIFO reserve as a measure of the effect of increases in factor input prices on firm value. RA©sumA©. Les auteurs ont recours A une A©valuation pour examiner l'incidence de la mA©thode DEPS de dA©termination du coA»t des stocks sur la relation entre le cours de l'action d'une sociA©tA© et sa valeur comptable. Ils A©laborent trois hypothA¨ses concurrentes qui dA©bouchent sur des prA©dictions diffA©rentes en ce qui a trait A la relation entre la rA©serve rA©sultant de l'utilisation de la mA©thode DEPS et la valeur marchande de l'entreprise. Les rA©sultats indiquent une relation nA©gative significative entre cette rA©serve et la valeur comptable de l'entreprise, relation qui ne concorde pas avec le prix de ladite rA©serve que l'on voudrait assimiler A un actif non comptabilisA©, mais qui cadre avec un modA¨le selon lequel la rA©serve rA©sultant de l'utilisation de la mA©thode DEPS est considA©rA©e comme une mesure de l'incidence des hausses du prix des intrants sur la valeur de l'entreprise.
Clinical Features of Vascular Disorders Associated with Chronic Hepatitis Virus Infection

Hepatitis virus infections can be accompanied by extrahepatic manifestations that may be caused by the host's immune reaction to the viral infection. Vascular involvement is one of these manifestations and is occasionally associated with life-threatening conditions due to systemic organ failure. The unique profile of hepatitis-related vascular involvement is associated with infection by different types of hepatitis viruses. For example, polyarteritis nodosa is more frequently reported in patients with chronic hepatitis B than those with chronic hepatitis C. Similarly, membranous nephropathy is a notable manifestation among hepatitis B virus-positive patients. In contrast, patients infected with hepatitis C virus are at risk for cryoglobulinemia and membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis. Antiviral therapy is necessary to control these kinds of vasculitis related to hepatitis virus infections; however, immunosuppressive agents may be required to treat severe cases. New antiviral drugs for viral hepatitis could improve the prognosis of vascular and renal involvement.
Power Consumption-based Detection of Sabotage Attacks in Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM), a.k. a. 3D Printing, is increasingly used to manufacture functional parts of safety-critical systems. AM's dependence on computerization raises the concern that the AM process can be tampered with, and a part's mechanical properties sabotaged. This can lead to the destruction of a system employing the sabotaged part, causing loss of life, financial damage, and reputation loss. To address this threat, we propose a novel approach for detecting sabotage attacks. Our approach is based on continuous monitoring of the current delivered to all actuators during the manufacturing process and detection of deviations from a provable benign process. The proposed approach has numerous advantages: (i) it is non-invasive in a time-critical process, (ii) it can be retrofitted in legacy systems, and (iii) it is airgapped from the computerized components of the AM process, preventing simultaneous compromise. Evaluation on a desktop 3D Printer detects all attacks involving a modification of X or Y motor movement, with false positives at 0%.
Canadian Mining Companies and Corporate Social Responsibility: Weighing the Impact of Global Norms

Abstract. This study analyzes the factors that led two Canadian mining companies, Noranda and Placer Dome, to adopt polices on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although much has been written on CSR in the business and organization fields, there has been little scholarly treatment of the topic from a social sciences perspective. A common assumption is that companies are merely reacting to societal pressures from transnational non-governmental organizations. This study challenges that assumption, by weighing the impact of emerging global norms of CSR against influences internal to the companies themselves, and domestic influences operating in Canada. The research findings point to the decisive influence of internal company dynamics and the experience of operating mines in Canada. While emerging global CSR norms are important, their role is more complex than is often assumed, as mining companies have been proactive in their efforts to shape those norms. Résumé. Cette étude analyse les facteurs qui ont amené deux sociétés minières canadiennes, Noranda et Placer Dome, à adopter des politiques concernant la responsabilité sociale de l'entreprise (RSE). La RSE a fait couler beaucoup d'encre dans le domaine des affaires et de l'organisation, mais peu de chercheurs s'y sont intéressés dans la perspective des sciences sociales. On part très souvent de l'hypothèse que les sociétés se contentent de réagir aux pressions sociales exercées par les organisations non-gouvernementales transnationales. Cette étude remet cette hypothèse en question en comparant l'impact des normes globales émergentes de la RSE aux influences internes aux sociétés elles-mêmes, et aux influences domestiques qui s'exercent au Canada. Les résultats révèlent l'influence décisive des dynamiques internes des sociétés et celle de l'expérience dérivée de l'exploitation des mines au Canada. Les normes globales émergentes en matière de RSE sont certes importantes, mais leur rôle est plus complexe qu'on ne l'admet souvent car les sociétés minières ont joué un rôle très actif dans leur élaboration.
Heuristics for Motion Planning Based on Learning in Similar Environments

This paper discusses computer-generated heuristics for motion planning. Planning with many degrees of freedom is a challenging task, because the complexity of most planning algorithms grows exponentially with the number of dimensions of the problem. A well-designed heuristic may greatly improve the performance of a planning algorithm in terms of the computation time. However, in recent years, with increasingly challenging high-dimensional planning problems, the design of good heuristics has itself become a complicated task. In this paper, we present an approach to algorithmically develop a heuristic for motion planning, which increases the efficiency of a planner in similar environments. To implement the idea, we generalize modern motion planning algorithms to an extent, where a heuristic is represented as a set of random variables. Distributions of the variables are then analyzed with computer learning methods. The analysis results are then utilized to generate a heuristic. During the experiments, the proposed approach is applied to several planning tasks with different algorithms and is shown to improve performance.
ASSESSMENT OF AGRICULTURAL STUDENTS OF UNIVERSITY FOR DEVELOPMENT STUDIES INTENTION TO TAKE UP SELF- EMPLOYMENT IN AGRIBUSINESS

The success of Ghana’s drive to modernize agriculture cannot be realized without harnessing the quality human resource base of the youth, especially graduates from agricultural faculties. This paper therefore examined factors influencing agricultural students of the University for Development Studies (UDS) Intention to take up agribusiness as an avenue for future self-employment. Data for this paper was obtained from a field survey of 292 final year students of the University. A descriptive and Chi-square statistics were used to analyse the data obtained. Results of the analysis found students’ perception regarding the prospects of agribusiness enterprises in Ghana to have a statistical significant influence at both 1% and 5% levels of significance on students’ intention to take up agribusiness as a future self-employment avenue. Also age, marital status, place of domicile, parental educational background of students, practical agricultural experience and risks tolerance were found to have significant influence on students’ intention to take up agribusiness as a source of future self-employment avenue or not. It is recommended that tertiary students pursuing agriculture and agricultural related programmes should be exposed to practical training in agriculture and be properly oriented on the prospects of agriculture as an avenue for selfemployment upon graduation.
PREFERENCE FOR SKEW IN GAMBLING, LOTTERIES AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to investigate how the skew of a payoff distribution influences choices under risk. We find a statistically significant preference for positive skew under low and high stakes. We find that rank-dependent utility (RDU) combined with hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) explains subjects' lottery choices better than expected utility theory (EUT) and better than RDU combined with power or expopower utility functions. We discuss the economic implications of our findings for gambling in state lotteries, entrepreneurship, and inventive activity. We argue through calibrations that RDU combined with HARA is able to explain (i) why people buy public lottery tickets, and (ii) why most individuals buy only one or a few tickets. We show that RDU combined with HARA can also explain entrepreneurship and inventive activity. In contrast, EUT and prospect theory are not able to explain these choices.
Implementation of a Large-Scalable Social Data Analysis System Based on MapReduce

In recent years, rapid advancement of internet and communication technologies as a way of social communications has emerged as the SNS. This way of communication needs social data analysis method for the meaningful information. In addition, rapidly increasing social data causes the lack of reliability of the information in the community. Therefore, an effective semantic analysis method is required. This paper proposed a Large-scalable Social Data Analysis System and evaluated it. The proposed system consists of two parts: social data gathering agent module and social data analysis module. The main role of gathering agent is to collect text type's data from SNS with gigabyte unit. Improved TF_IDF and Weighted-MINAX are used for semantic analysis of collected social data from the gathering agent. Thus, the improved social data analysis module supports meaningful information service which contains high priority words. We implemented the improved social data analysis module that uses Hadoop MapReduce programing model. In addition, we evaluated large-scalable social data analysis system in terms of processing time and accuracy.
Civil War Settlements, Size of Governing Coalition, and Durability of Peace in Post–Civil War States

We examine the ways in which the size of the governing coalition in a post–civil war state affects the durability of the peace. Previous studies relate the durability of the peace to the outcome of the civil war, the extent and forms of power-sharing arrangements, and the role of third-party security guarantors. We argue that the way conflict terminates and the power-sharing agreements between former protagonists structure the composition of governing coalition in the post–civil war state. Any settlement to civil war that broadens the size of the governing coalition should increase actors' incentives to sustain the peace rather than renew the armed conflict. Peace is more likely to fail where the governing coalition is smaller because those excluded from the governing coalition have little to lose from resuming armed rebellion. To test these propositions, we analyze data on post–civil war peace spells from 1946–2005.
Better Monetary Control May Increase the Inflationary Bias of Policy

textabstractExplores the implications of imperfect monetary control and uncertainty about the trade-off between output and inflation to discretionary policy. Impact of imperfect control of money growth on policymakers' incentive to create surprises; Consequences of imperfect control of money growth for optimal monetary policy; Welfare effects of uncertainty about the extent to which inflation affect output.
Exponentially Modified Protein Abundance Index (emPAI) for Estimation of Absolute Protein Amount in Proteomics by the Number of Sequenced Peptides per Protein*S

To estimate absolute protein contents in complex mixtures, we previously defined a protein abundance index (PAI) as the number of observed peptides divided by the number of observable peptides per protein (Rappsilber, J., Ryder, U., Lamond, A. I., and Mann, M. (2002) Large-scale proteomic analysis of the human spliceosome. Genome. Res. 12, 1231–1245). Here we report that PAI values obtained at different concentrations of serum albumin show a linear relationship with the logarithm of protein concentration in LC-MS/MS experiments. This was also the case for 46 proteins in a mouse whole cell lysate. For absolute quantitation, PAI was converted to exponentially modified PAI (emPAI), equal to 10PAI minus one, which is proportional to protein content in a protein mixture. For the 46 proteins in the whole lysate, the deviation percentages of the emPAI-based abundances from the actual values were within 63% on average, similar or better than determination of abundance by protein staining. emPAI was applied to comprehensive protein expression analysis and to a comparison study between gene and protein expression in a human cancer cell line, HCT116. The values of emPAI are easily calculated and add important quantitation information to proteomic experiments; therefore we suggest that they should be reported in large scale proteomic identification projects.
A pilot trial of docetaxel and nedaplatin in cisplatin-pretreated relapsed or refractory esophageal squamous cell cancer.

BACKGROUND/AIMS This study documents the clinical efficacy and toxicity of docetaxel and nedaplatin in cisplatin-pretreated relapsed or refractory esophageal squamous cell cancer. METHODOLOGY From February 2002 to February 2007, 20 patients with metastatic or locally recurrent or residual disease previously treated with cisplatin-based chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy were included. The median age was 66.0 (range 52-74) years, and 17 patients had undergone a previous esophagectomy. A total of 36 cycles with docetaxel 60 mg/m2 plus nedaplatin 80 mg/m2 were administered. RESULTS The response rate was 25% including one complete response, and the rate of disease stabilization (% of complete response, partial response and stable disease) was 80%. The median progression-free survival was 14 weeks and the median overall survival was 26 weeks. Severe neutropenia occurred in 12 patients (grade 3/4 = 4/8) and 5 out of 20 patients showed severe febrile neutropenia (grade 3/4 = 4/1), whereas no severe non-hematological toxicity was observed. CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, the combination chemotherapy of docetaxel and nedaplatin did not show drastic clinical efficacy. However, it was considered to be a feasible regimen as tumor dormancy therapy in CDDP-pretreated esophageal cancer, and to have a potent possibility to become a useful second-line chemotherapy for relapsed or refractory esophageal cancer. The control and prevention of severe neutropenia and febrile neutropenia is also very important in use of this regimen.
Multi-parametric MR-guided PET image reconstruction

In this study, we investigated the utilization of multi-contrast MRI as well as PET information to guide PET image reconstruction with the aim of addressing the pitfalls of conventional MR-guided PET image reconstruction methods. We studied the conventional Tikhonov and total variation (TV) priors, and the anatomical priors such as Kaipio, non-local Tikhonov with Gaussian and Bowsher similarity kernels and a local joint Burg entropy together with their extended multi-parametric versions. Our simulation results showed that joint Burg entropy far outperforms the conventional anatomical priors in the preservation of PET unique lesions and in the reconstruction of functional boundaries with matched MR anatomical boundaries. It was found that the multi-parametric extension of the priors leads to enhanced preservation of edge and PET unique features. The clinical reconstructions showed that the Gaussian similarity kernels with voxel-based feature vectors, the Bowsher method and the Burg prior are the best performing priors and their multi-parametric extensions led to the improved recovery of the PET unique features.
Foreign Trade, Human Capital and Economic Growth: An Empirical Approach for the EU Countries.

While neoclassical growth theory does not consider external demand to be a constraint to growth, the Keynesian approach emphasizes that demand forces are actually the key factors determining growth. In this paper an attempt is made to introduce the balance-of-payments constraint hypothesis into the neoclassical growth model through a consideration of a sample of 14 EU countries over the period 1980-2004. A panel data model is estimated using different proxies for human capital and foreign trade as conditioning factors to explain growth. The income-elasticity ratio with respect to exports and imports and the degree of openness are also used to capture the effects of (non-price) competitiveness and trade intensification on growth. The regression analysis shows that the inclusion of human capital, external trade and interaction terms between them have significant effects on growth. Depending on the combination of variables used, the constraining factor to growth can be shown to be due to foreign trade, human capital or both.
Mutuality Ownership Form and Professional Sports

Mutuality is a longstanding successful model of ownership within European professional football. There was little understanding of mutuality as a form of ownership in British football until it emerged during the past decade, albeit, confined to lower leagues. It now merits further investigation. Focusing on Exeter City FC, operating as a nonprofit organization, this research examines the range of business and financial management issues facing the club. The main findings reveal that supporter ownership allowed a greater sense of “buy in” and inclusion of a wider cross-section of stakeholders. However, evidence shows limitations to mutuality in identifying alternative revenue streams, overly bureaucratic decision making, and ability to developing capabilities to compete. The case of Exeter City FC offers lessons for others considering mutuality as a form of ownership. This study contributes to understanding mutuality in this specific context and within the broader discussion of corporate governance issues in the nonprofit sector.
Translation between English and Mauritian Creole: A statistical machine translation approach

Translation between one language and another is extensively carried out by students, tourists and business persons. The importance of translation cannot be underestimated, especially with the number of translation devices in use by travellers. Google Translate has set up a multilingual translation system and it is regularly used by people all over the world. In Mauritius, translation of the Mauritian Creole language is not available from Google Translate as the available size of the parallel corpora is quite small. The objective of this study is, therefore, to develop a web-based system for the translation between English language and the Mauritian Creole language for learning the two languages. This project on machine translation for the Mauritian Creole language is a starting point that will benefit the Mauritian population at large as well as the Tourism and Business sectors. Statistical Machine Translation, which is the state of-the-art technique, has been adopted for translation between English and Mauritian Creole language. In this paper, the translation between English and Mauritian Creole language is explored.
The Right Mix? Gender Diversity in Top Management Teams and Financial Performance

Recent research has illustrated that demographic diversity influences the outcomes of public sector organizations. Most studies have focused on workforce diversity; by comparison, little is known about how managerial diversity affects organizational outcomes. This article focuses on gender diversity in the top management teams of public organizations and its relationship to financial performance. Theory suggests that management diversity can be a positive asset for organizations, allowing for the use of more diverse knowledge and human skill sets. Results of this study, however, suggest that organizations may only be able to leverage these advantages if they have a supporting management structure. In a longitudinal study of top management teams in Danish municipalities, the authors find that gender diversity in top management teams is associated with higher financial performance, but only in municipalities with a management structure that supports cross-functional team work. These results are interpreted in light of existing theory, and implications are suggested.