Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-financial measurements in banking industries of Sweden, Romania and Ukraine

Our study explored the use of non-financial measurements in financial services industries in Sweden, Romania and Ukraine. The countries were selected on grounds of the authors' nationality and the masters program. The analysis was focused on the use in practice of the latest theoretical developments, the non-financial indicators link with the banks’ strategies and the financial measurements and the differences in use between the three countries found at different economic development levels. The findings indicate that Swedish banks use a more mature and developed performance measurement system, which includes non-financial measurements besides financial ones. The study indicates that banks from the other two countries use a performance measurement system in its early development stages with strong influences from traditional accounting systems. The results also indicate a possible further development of the performance measurement system in Romania and Ukraine considering mainly the great influence of the foreign ownership, latest theoretical developments exposure and also the interest showed at declarative level for the non-financial dimensions.
Roles of putative Rho-GEF Gef2 in division-site positioning and contractile-ring function in fission yeast cytokinesis

How Rho-GEFs and Rho GTPases regulate division-site selection during cytokinesis in fission yeast is unknown. The Rho-GEF Gef2 interacts with the anillin Mid1 to regulate contractile-ring positioning and assembly in coordination with the polo kinase Plo1. In addition, Gef2 is involved in contractile-ring stability and disassembly.
Using Fourier Transform Near-Infrared Spectroscopy to Predict the Mechanical Properties of Thermally Modified Southern Pine Wood

This study seeks to estimate the mechanical properties of thermally modified wood (TMW) using near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy to measure 80 samples in three-point bending tests. Near-infrared spectra collected from the transverse, radial, and tangential sections of wood, coupled with chemometric techniques, were used to predict the mechanical properties of southern pine wood, from which NIR models were constructed based on partial least squares and corresponding cross-validation. The coefficient of determination between NIR transverse section spectra, as well as two mechanical properties of wood samples, modulus of rupture (MOR) and modulus of elasticity (MOE), were above 0.92 and greater than values for other sections. Spectral data from the transverse sections were richer than data from other sections, and thus, a model based on transverse sections better predicts the mechanical properties of wood. A close relationship between the values for mechanical properties (MOE and MOR) and the NIR spectra of thermally modified southern pine wood can be demonstrated, which provides the potential to predict the mechanical properties of untreated and thermally modified wood.
Doppler frequency sidelobes level control for WiFi-based Passive Bistatic Radar

In this paper the problem of Doppler frequency sidelobes control is addressed with reference to a WiFi-based Passive Bistatic Radar (PBR). In particular we show that the Ambiguity Function of typical WiFi transmissions usually yield a high sidelobes level which might strongly limit the detection capability of the PBR. Conventional weighting networks are shown to be ineffective against such Doppler sidelobes structures. Thus an innovative method is introduced to design effective weighting networks based on the solution of a constrained optimization problem. The performed analysis against both simulated and real data demonstrates that the proposed technique allows a significant improvement in terms of Peak to Sidelobes Ratio thus making the considered waveform more attractive for passive local area surveillance.
Impact of foreign direct investment on Thailand's trade and domestic private investment : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Applied and International Economics at Massey University

Foreign investment not only brings along the direct benefits to the host country in the form of technological progress, but it also stimulates domestic activities through the linkage effects. This study investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on Thailand's imports, exports, and domestic private investment, covering the period 1965 to 1997. By using the method of autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) that minimises the possibility of estimating spurious relations while retaining long-run relationship information, the empirical results indicate that FDI does have significant effects on imports and domestic private investment, but not on exports. The vector error correction model (VECM) analysis, variant of the vector autoregression (VAR) analysis, is applied to investigate the inter-relation between trade (imports and exports), domestic private investment, and FDI. Through the impulse response approach, the results show that an increase in one variable does have an impact on others. On average, the impact will last for eight years . The empirical results from forecast error variance decomposition analysis also indicate that imports, exports, domestic private investment, and foreign direct investments have inter-relations between themselves.
Challenges of imaging structure and function with MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a tomographic imaging technique based on the well-known nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) phenomenon first observed in bulk materials independently by Edward Purcell’s group at Harvard [1] and Felix Bloch’s group at Stanford in 1946 [2]. The fundamental MRI concept was proposed by Paul Lauterbur in 1972 [3]. Since then, MRI has developed into a premier tool for imaging objects and, specifically, for imaging the human body in vivo [4]. MRI experiments are generally designed in a way to collect data that represent the Fourier transform of the object being imaged. This means that any method developed for improved image reconstruction and processing in any other field such as optics or astronomy, for example, could be used here as well. Likewise, new concepts introduced through advances in MRI may have applications to these other fields. For more information about the basics of MR and related reconstruction issues, we refer the reader to three recent texts in the field [5-7]. This article deals with current image reconstruction and processing issues in MRI for the study of tissue structure and function. In image reconstruction, we discuss the need for new algorithms that can produce high-resolution images with good signal-to-noise ratio from reduced amounts of data. In image processing, we describe outstanding problems in automatic image registration and segmentation.
Interchange Fees: The Economics and Regulation of What Merchants Pay for Cards

This volume consists of seven articles on the economics and regulation of interchange fees. All rely on the multi-sided platform framework. The first two chapters examine whether there is a market failure in setting interchange fees and present principles for considering correction to a market failure. One of the themes of these articles is that regulating one side of a two-sided market necessarily has effects on the other side of the market: lower prices for merchants means higher prices for consumers. Chapters 3-5 address that tradeoff which is sometimes called a “waterbed effect”. Chapter 3 presents an empirical study of what happened following the imposition of price controls on interchange fees in Australia in the mid 2000s. Chapters 4 and 5 estimate the prospective impact on consumers in the US and EU of interchange fee caps. These chapters rely heavily on the economic concept of pass-through, which concerns the extent to which business change their prices in response to changes in costs. The net impact of reductions in interchange fees on consumers depends on the extent to which issuing banks raise fees and merchants lower prices in response to a reduction in interchange fees which are revenues to banks and ultimately costs to merchants. Chapter 6 examines a related question: how do interchange fee price caps affect investment and innovation for payment systems. Chapter 7 examines arguments that merchant representatives have made concerning debit card interchange fee regulation. That is followed by a short chapter with a few concluding thoughts.
Uterine blood flow and myometrial activity at menstruation, and the action of vasopressin and a synthetic antagonist

Summary. Local endometrial blood flow was measured by a thermistor technique and myometrial activity by intrauterine pressure recording in 10 women before and during menstruation. The effect of lysine vasopressin infusion (1 pmol/kg body‐weight per min) and of bolus injection of a synthetic oxytocin analogue, l‐deamino‐2‐d‐Tyr(OEt)‐4‐Thr‐8‐Orn‐oxytocin (10 nmol/kg body‐weight), were studied. Spontaneous variations in blood flow were seen synchronous with clearly demarcated uterine contractions, the myometrial activity being significantly increased in early (day – 1 to day +2) compared with late (day +3 to day +5) menstrual phase. The vasopressin infusion decreased blood flow, stimulated uterine activity and caused slight to moderate dysmenorrhoea‐like pain. These effects were completely inhibited by the injection of the oxytocin analogue. In‐vitro studies on uterine arteries confirmed that the analogue also inhibited the vasopressin‐induced constriction of the uterine arteries. This antagonist was more effective than two other analogues, l‐deamino‐2‐d‐Tyr(OEt)‐4‐Val‐8‐Orn‐oxytocin and l‐deamino‐2‐Tyr(OEt)‐oxytocin. The counteracting effect of l‐deamino‐2‐D‐Tyr(OEt)‐4‐Thr‐8‐Orn‐oxytocin on the vasopressin‐induced decrease of blood flow and increase of contractions supports the therapeutic value of the drug in primary dysmenorrhoea and preterm labour.
Shlaer-Mellor Method: The OOA96 Report

ing the various roles allows us to model the meaning of an Employee SUPERVISES Employee (1:Mc) relationship explicitly between the differentiated role objects. In our example this meaning is now cast as Employee As Supervisor SUPERVISES Employee As Supervisee. Note that we can now capture the desired conditionality and multiplicity very directly and clearly. EMPLOYEE * Name works with R2 WORK PARTNER * * Employee 1 (R2) Employee 2 (R2) C
An Intelligent Autopilot System that learns piloting skills from human pilots by imitation

An Intelligent Autopilot System (IAS) that can learn piloting skills by observing and imitating expert human pilots is proposed. IAS is a potential solution to the current problem of Automatic Flight Control Systems of being unable to handle flight uncertainties, and the need to construct control models manually. A robust Learning by Imitation approach is proposed which uses human pilots to demonstrate the task to be learned in a flight simulator while training datasets are captured from these demonstrations. The datasets are then used by Artificial Neural Networks to generate control models automatically. The control models imitate the skills of the human pilot when performing piloting tasks including handling flight uncertainties such as severe weather conditions. Experiments show that IAS performs learned take-off, climb, and slow ascent tasks with high accuracy even after being presented with limited examples, as measured by Mean Absolute Error and Mean Absolute Deviation. The results demonstrate that the IAS is capable of imitating low-level sub-cognitive skills such as rapid and continuous stabilization attempts in stormy weather conditions, and high-level strategic skills such as the sequence of sub-tasks necessary to pilot an aircraft starting from the stationary position on the runway, and ending with a steady cruise.
Factors affecting bank staff attitude towards E‐banking adoption in Libya

E‐banking technology is gaining widespread adoption in the banking industry across developed countries. The case, however, is different in less developed nations, such as Libya. Libyan banks, for example, despite recently acknowledging the benefits of e‐banking technology in improving banking services, have not adopted and integrated this innovation within its banking delivery strategy. Instead, they continue to deliver most of their banking services and products using traditional banking delivery channels, notably paper‐based branch networks. This is largely due to bank staff resistance to new banking technologies. A review of literature on ICT adoption shows that there has only been a few studies about ICT adoption in developing countries compared to the developed world, and even less so about the Middle East, including Libya. Thus, this paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the key factors affecting bank staff's attitude towards e‐banking technology, a step necessary to understand what makes effective the introduction of e‐banking projects in Libya. This paper draws on existing literature on technological developments in the banking industry and the findings from semi–structured interviews with key bank staff of a leading commercial bank in Libya. A number of factors of e‐banking technology adoption are identified that affect adoption. Finally, we identified lessons that can guide future e‐banking implementation projects in Libyan banks. Lessons can be taken for other Arab countries.
Identifying R&D partners through Subject-Action-Object semantic analysis in a problem & solution pattern

ABSTRACT Today’s companies still rely heavily on expert knowledge rather than quantitative data with a systematic approach to effectively identify and choose Research and Development (R&D) partners. It is advantageous to identify and select potential R&D partners using a Problem & Solution (P&S) pattern. This paper presents a novel process for identifying R&D partners on the basis of solution similarities that assist technology managers in understanding the relationships between research targets. First, we choose a thematic dataset that contains problems and quantitative data with relative topic terms. Then, we extract Subject-Action-Object semantic structures in a P&S pattern from the dataset, and identify various solutions to a technical problem, with each as a subject. In addition, we provide correlation mapping to visualise the text characters and identify R&D partners. Finally, we validate the proposed method through a case study of the dye-sensitized solar cells sector.
Attribute reduction approach based on modified flower pollination algorithm

Attribute reduction approach is proposed in this paper based on a modified version of the flower pollination algorithm optimization (FPA). Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is one of recently evolutionary computation technique, inspired by the pollination process of flowers. The modified FPA algorithm adaptively balance the exploration and exploitation to quickly find the optimal solution through using local searching with adaptive search diversity. The modified FPA can quickly search the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The proposed fitness function used incorporate both classification accuracy and feature reduction size. The proposed system is applied on a eight dataset from the UCI machine learning data sets and proves a good performance in comparison with the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO), that commonly used in this context.
Re-Ordered FEGC and Block Based FEGC for Inverted File Compression

Data compression has been widely used in many Information Retrieval based applications like web search engines, digital libraries, etc. to enable the retrieval of data to be faster. In these applications, universal codes Elias codes EC, Fibonacci code FC, Rice code RC, Extended Golomb code EGC, Fast Extended Golomb code FEGC etc. have been preferably used than statistical codes Huffman codes, Arithmetic codes etc. Universal codes are easy to be constructed and decoded than statistical codes. In this paper, the authors have proposed two methods to construct universal codes based on the ideas used in Rice code and Fast Extended Golomb Code. One of the authors' methods, Re-ordered FEGC, can be suitable to represent small, middle and large range integers where Rice code works well for small and middle range integers. It is also competing with FC, EGC and FEGC in representing small, middle and large range integers. But it could be faster in decoding than FC, EGC and FEGC. The authors' another coder, Block based RFEGC, uses local divisor rather than global divisor to improve the performance both compression and decompression of RFEGC. To evaluate the performance of the authors' coders, the authors have applied their methods to compress the integer values of the inverted files constructed from TREC, Wikipedia and FIRE collections. Experimental results show that their coders achieve better performance both compression and decompression for those files which contain significant distribution of middle and large range integers.
Global Mapping Analysis: Stochastic Gradient Algorithm in Multidimensional Scaling

SUMMARY In order to implement multidimensional scaling (MDS) e ﬃ ciently, we propose a new method named “global mapping analysis” (GMA), which applies stochastic approximation to minimizing MDS criteria. GMA can solve MDS more e ﬃ ciently in both the linear case (classical MDS) and non-linear one (e
The role of risk perception in Internet purchasing behaviour and intention

In recent years the importance and number of users of electronic commerce and its medium, the Internet, have grown substantially. Despite this, the Business-toConsumer sector has shown slow expansion and limited growth, with the majority of consumers slow to adopt the Internet as a medium for purchase. A probable factor affecting the purchasing behaviour of individuals is the perception of risk of a breach in (credit card) security and/or a violation of privacy. The research discussed here indicates that two closely related constructs, namely perceived privacy risk and perceived security risk exerts an influence on the Internet purchasing behaviour of Internet users, and more importantly, the intention to purchase. In addition, the role of social pressures regarding the provision of personal and credit card information is indicated to be of considerable importance.
The crippled bottom line: Measuring sustainability

PurposeGlobal development is not sustainable. Yet, both academia and practitioners are struggling with making sense of what sustainable development is. Sustainability can be assessed in the dimensions Profit, Planet and People. One of the problems with the approach is that these dimensions cannot be added while there are conflicting priorities. Another problem is that performance seldom is related to global system boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to study how sustainability on an organizational level could be operationalized while being linked to global boundaries. MethodologySustainable Development and sustainability definitions are reviewed to identify main stakeholders. Main processes required for sustainability are identified based on People and Planet as stakeholders. People value defined as utility is compared to Planet harm as carbon emissions and People harm as prices of products. The proposed theoretical concept is examined on the business level looking at the process of providing housing and cement manufacturing. FindingsThe relative indicators with focus on People utility compare to Planet and People harm seem to be relevant for measuring the level of sustainability. Practical implicationsThe practical implications of the results could be important in that the proposed approach with relative indicators linked to global limits could help companies work with sustainability. OriginalityIn spite of the inherent logic of adjusting consumption to existing means there is little written about the practical implications for organizations. Keywords: Sustainability reporting; Sustainability KPI; Triple Bottom Line; Profit-People-Planet; Eco Efficiency; Relative KPI; Value per harm. Research paper
Psychological well-being of patients with insomnia and its relationship with anxiety and depression

The aims of the present study are to evaluate the impact of insomnia on psychological well-being and to examine the associations of insomnia and psychological well-being with anxiety and depression. Forty-one patients attending our hospital-based Centre for sleep medicine were administered scales for the evaluation of insomnia (ISI), anxiety (STAI-Y), depression (BDI-II) and psychological well-being (PWB). The scores were compared to those of a control group of 68 subjects attending the hospital for routine examinations or as accompanying persons. Significant differences between patients and controls were detected for anxiety and depression, as well as for psychological well-being. Even if subclinical on average, anxiety and depression symptoms were significantly related to poor psychological well-being, whereas insomnia per se was not. These findings suggest that patients with insomnia report a relevant impact on their psychological well-being, and that such an impact seems to be strongly associated with concomitant subthreshold symptoms of anxiety and depression. The implications for diagnosis and treatment are discussed.