Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interaction of fibrinogen with its platelet receptor as part of a multistep reaction in ADP-induced platelet aggregation.

The influence of divalent ions and ADP on the induction, relaxation, and stability of the ADP-induced platelet receptor for fibrinogen was investigated. Platelets, isolated by differential sedimentation and gel filtration in calciumand magnesium-free buffer, exhibited a well defined shape change upon ADP stimulation, but aggregation occurred only when calcium or magnesium were added. ‘“I-Fibrinogen did not bind to the platelets in the absence of divalent ions. Either calcium or magnesium at millimolar levels supported fibrinogenxeceptor interactions, but approximately half as many ‘”1-fibrinogen molecules were bound per platelet in the presence of magnesium as in the presence of calcium. The affinity of the receptor for fibrinogen in the presence of either divalent ion was similar, suggesting a single class of receptors with the divalent ions affecting only their number. Under optimal conditions of ADP and divalent ions, the number of fibrinogen molecules bound per platelet ranged from 15,400 to 82,500 (mean = 38,000) in the presence of calcium and from 8,500 to 32,300 (mean = 20,600) in the presence of magnesium. Variability in the number of induced receptors was not only noted among different donors but also in the same donor drawn on multiple occasions. The interaction of ‘”I-fibrinogen with the platelet was progressively stabilized suggesting that the initial reversible binding is followed by a stable interaction. Experiments with apyrase confirmed this evolution of the receptor system and suggested that the continuous presence of ADP is required for the binding of fibrinogen. The aggregation and deaggregation properties of the platelets correlated very well with the binding of fibrinogen to its receptor and with the stability of this interaction. Based on the present study and the available information, the interaction of fibrinogen with platelets appears to involve multiple steps, and a model sequence for these reactions is proposed.
Qualitative interviews on the beliefs and feelings of adults towards their ownership, but non-use of hearing aids

Abstract Objective: Up to a quarter of the adults who own hearing aids never use them. To provide these ‘non-users’ with the best help, hearing care professionals need to have an in-depth understanding of the non-users’ beliefs and feelings with regard to the non-use. This qualitative study explored these beliefs and feelings in order to increase our understanding of hearing aid non-users. Design: Individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews were completed. Study sample: Eleven hearing aid owners (aged 54–80 years) who reported that they never or hardly ever used their hearing aids. Results: The participants expressed a variety of feelings towards their non-use, including indifference, self-annoyance, frustration, powerlessness, shame, and guilt. Their feelings were related to beliefs about: (1) the severity of their hearing handicap with and without hearing aids, (2) whom or what was responsible for the non-use, and (3) the attitudes of significant others towards the non-use. Conclusions: Hearing-aid non-users differ in their beliefs and feelings towards the non-use. A patient-centred approach is needed.
Energy Performance of 5G-NX Wireless Access Utilizing Massive Beamforming and an Ultra-Lean System Design

This paper presents the energy performance of a new radio access technology (RAT) component in 5G, here denoted as 5G-NX. The 5G-NX RAT encompasses massive beamforming and an ultra-lean design as two of its key technology components. The user throughput, resource utilization of the cells and daily average area power consumption are evaluated by means of system level simulations in an Asian city scenario, and the results are compared with a traditional LTE deployment using the same network layout. The simulation results indicate that the new 5G-NX system provides much better energy performance compared to LTE and this is primarily due to the ultra-lean design and the high beamforming gain that provides both longer and more efficient component sleep in the network. At expected traffic levels beyond 2020, 5G-NX is shown to decrease the network energy consumption by more than 50% while providing around 10 times more capacity.
Enhancing the livelihoods of the rural poor through ICT : a knowledge map - Bangladesh country study

Livelihood analysis is deeply rooted at the micro level, where individuals, families, households and groups create their own coping strategies within a context of vulnerability. The vulnerability of the rural poor is determined by multiple influences related to trends, shocks and seasonality concerning economic, social, political, geographical, and natural resource factors. Vulnerability can increase owing to lack of access to resources, weak economic integration and climatic problems, factors which are often exacerbated by ineffective governance, lack of economic opportunities, social exclusion, conflict, discrimination, and lack of voice for the poor. Vulnerability can also decrease when trends move in directions that are favorable to the poor. Information can play two key roles in reducing the vulnerability of the poor: i) an analytical role in assessing the vulnerability context; and ii) communicating such information to those who can act upon it. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the potential to improve rural livelihoods and expand a range of knowledge bases for the rural poor in Bangladesh. ICTs can improve capacity and efficacy both for the rural poor and for institutions engaged in improving rural livelihoods. Institutional systems can act directly and indirectly to ensure the well-being of the poor: through direct physical assistance which may have a visible impact on vulnerability and through dissemination of information which has an influence in terms of improving livelihoods.
Implementing an electronic observation and early warning score chart in the emergency department: a feasibility study

Background Use of automated systems to aid identification of patient deterioration in routine hospital practice is limited and their impact on patient outcomes remains unclear. This study was designed to evaluate the feasibility of implementing an electronic observation chart with automated early warning score (EWS) calculation in the high-acuity area of an emergency department. Methods This study enrolled 3219 participants before and 3352 after implementation of an automated system, using bedside vital-sign entry on networked mobile devices. The primary outcome measure was the percentage of participants for whom an EWS was accurately recorded at each stage. Results Of the participants, 52.7% before and 92.9% after implementation of the electronic system had an accurate EWS recorded on charts available to the study team. Participant groups were well balanced for baseline characteristics and acuity. Conclusion In this study, the feasibility and limitations of implementing an electronic observation chart in the ED were demonstrated. Accurate EWS documentation was more frequent after implementation of the electronic observation chart. Retrospective analysis suggests that the use of an electronic observation system may lead to a greater percentage of observations being taken from those patients with a higher EWS.
Are there Simple Indicators as to Which IPOs Outperform the Market over the Long Term

Aims: Most companies making an Initial Public Offering (IPO) underperform the market over the long term. Is this because investors are so enamored with IPOs that hope triumphs analysis? If investors are willing to invest in companies likely to underperform the market, someone will take them public. This raises the question as to whether there are simple indicators that can be used to identify IPOs likely to under or over perform the market over the long term. Place and Duration of Study: This study is based on publically available information on Compustat, Hoovers On-line IPO Central, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission website www.sec. gov. Methodology: This study analyzes the long term performance of 820 companies that went public in the United States from 1998 to 2007 and tracks their performance for an average of three and a half years. About 48.41% beat market returns defined as the Standard & Poor’s 500. Companies with the best and worst quintile of Underwriter Reputation, Assets, Revenue, EBITDA and EBITDA to Assets where compared, as were industries. Results: The following factors were found to be statistically significant in identifying IPOs likely to outperform the market: (i) Underwriter Reputation (P <.01), (ii) Industry statistical significance varies among the 17 industries in the study, (iii) Assets (P <.01), (iv) Revenue (P<.01), (v) EBITDA (P <.01), and (vi) the ratio of EBITDA to Assets (P <.01). Simulation analysis using the Wilcoxon Sign Rank test confirms that by avoiding companies likely to underperform, a superior portfolio of IPO companies can be constructed (P = .05). Original Research Article British Journal of Economics, Management & Trade, 4(2): 183-196, 2014 184 Conclusion: This study found there are simple indicators for identifying IPO companies likely to outperform the market. No prediction is made as to specific companies, but results can be used to construct superior portfolios.
Macro-Economic Crises And Corporate Sustainability

How does a macroeconomic crisis affect firms? strategic commitment towards sustainability and the quality of their sustainability performance? We tackle this question by studying the heterogeneous impact of a macro-economic crisis along those dimensions of sustainability that are of strategic relevance, arguing that firms? responses can diverge significantly, even among competitors, depending on two main factors: their strategic orientation and their motivational traits. We examine evidence on the evolution of the sustainability performance of a sample of 2,264 public companies between 2007 and 2011, and find that the variance in the sample increases for some of sustainability dimensions namely those related to environmental innovation, product responsibility, and human rights in the supply chain ? indicating the strategic nature of the response to the crisis through changes in sustainability commitment. We then examine the direct and interactive effects of strategic orientation and firm motives on sustainability performance variation during this period, focusing on those three dimensions. We find evidence that the interplay between strategy and
Internal Agency Relationships: Account Services and Creative Personnel

Abstract A mail survey was conducted among a sample of account and creative services personnel working in advertising agencies nationwide to determine areas of conflict in working relationships between these two groups. Additionally, respondents were asked to perform the same critical analysis of their colleagues within their own departments. Analysis of responses from 256 agency employees indicate that some disagreement between account management and creative services exists. Creative services personnel tended to be more critical of account management than account managers were of creative people. Results are explained by the differing perspectives of the generalist (i.e., account managers) and specialist (i.e., creative services) that must be brought together in an agency to produce effective advertising.
DRASE: A Dynamic Rescheduling and Self-Adaptive Estimation Technique to Enhance ACS Throughputs in CWMP

The first-come, first-served strategy is generally applied to implement customer premises equipment (CPE) wide area network management protocol, but may work poorly under overloaded conditions. Namely, many sessions established between CPEs and the corresponding auto configuration server (ACS) must be kept waiting. Therefore, a dynamic rescheduling and self-adaptive estimation (DRASE) approach is proposed in this letter to increase the throughput of an ACS with an acceptable drop rate. Specifically, the order of rescheduling is determined by the estimated processing time (EPT), the remaining lifetime, and the waiting time of each session. Once the session is completed, a self-adaptive technique is adopted to update the EPT to increase the effectiveness of rescheduling. Experimental studies show that the throughput of an ACS using DRASE at peak times reaches 1.129 times of the original value, and other evaluated performance metrics are also significantly improved.
Proton Irradiation Effects on AlGaN/AlN/GaN Heterojunctions

AlGaN/AlN/GaN heterojunctions were irradiated by 3 MeV protons with different fluences. Hall and C-V measurements showed that the density and mobility of 2DEG for heterojunctions decreased after proton irradiation. The crystal quality and optical properties of AlGaN/GaN heterojunctions were characterized by the variations of the micro-Raman scattering spectra, XRD and photo luminescence (PL) spectra with proton fluence. It has been obtained that the strain and dislocation of GaN and AlGaN were not affected by the proton injected. The proton irradiation caused the increase of structural defects in HT-AlN buffer layer, which lead to the red shift of A1 (LO) mode. The higher tails of XRD rocking curve indicated the introduction of point defects by irradiation. The full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of E2high phonon mode broadened, which was consistent with change of FWHM of PL near-band-edge emission (BE). The spectra of yellow band normalized to the intensity of BE demonstrated a great increase of Ga vacancies related defects, which may be the main reason for the degradation of optical properties.
Spoons : Restaurant Recommendation for Groups

While there are many restaurant recommendation services for individuals, it is difficult to find one that takes into account the different preferences of a group of users. Spoons is a new web-based recommendation service that suggests restaurants to groups. The system features intuitive interface that users can easily interact with and incorporates machine learning techniques to recommend restaurants that suit best for a group. The application is currently deployed on Heroku, at http://spoonsproject.heorkuapp. com.
Appropriation in times of open innovation: Does secrecy still work?

Recent strategic management literature emphasizes the challenges for firms to capture the returns from their innovations. Large parts of this research stream are devoted to patenting while secrecy is the dominant form of knowledge protection for the vast majority of firms. We focus on secrecy for knowledge protection and especially the effect on innovation performance when firms try to benefit from inflows of external knowledge at the same time. We predict a negative relationship by tracing the innovation performance effects of secrecy and knowledge inflows back to information asymmetry and signaling theory. However, secrecy is not an end in itself. We hypothesize further that firm’s past innovation success affects the effectiveness of secrecy in a negative way. We test and support these hypotheses using panel data on more than 1,000 firms from Germany. These findings allow us to extend academic theory and develop recommendations for management practice by identifying boundaries for both knowledge appropr.
Has nanotechnology led to improved therapeutic outcomes?

Nanoparticulate drug delivery systems provide new opportunities for solving issues associated with problematic drugs or disease states and have, therefore, created great expectations in the field of drug delivery. This review focuses on the potential benefits of nanoparticles compared with other conventional delivery systems. Several nanoparticulate drug delivery systems have already been marketed or are currently under development and are presented in this review. Results from clinical trials demonstrate that nanoparticulate formulations generally enable superior therapeutic outcomes than compared with standard formulations. Therefore, the implementation of nanotechnology in drug delivery represents an important advance with substantial potential to improve therapeutic effectiveness and increase patient’s quality of life.
The Household Enterprise Sector in Tanzania: Why it Matters and Who Cares

The household enterprise sector has a significant role in the Tanzanian economy. It employs a larger share of the urban labor force than wage employment, and is increasingly seen as an alternative to agriculture as a source of additional income for rural and urban households. The sector is uniquely placed within the informal sector, where it represents both conditions of informal employment and informal enterprise. This paper presents a case study on Tanzania using a mixed approach by combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the important role of household enterprises in the labor force of Tanzania, and to identify key factors that influence their productivity. Household enterprise owners are similar to typical labor force participants although primary education appears to be the minimum qualification for household enterprise operators to be successful. Access to location matters -- good, secure location in a marketplace or industrial cluster raises earnings - and access to transport and electricity is found to have a significant effect on earnings as well. In large urban areas, the biggest constraint faced by household enterprises is the lack of access to secure workspace to run the small business. Although lack of credit is a problem across all enterprises in Tanzania, household enterprises are more vulnerable because they are largely left out of the financial sector either as savers or borrowers. Although HEs are part of the livelihood strategies of over half of households in Tanzania, they are ignored in the current development policy frameworks, which emphasize formalization, not productivity. Tanzania has a large number of programs and projects for informal enterprises, but there is no set of policies and program interventions targeted at the household enterprise sector. This gap exacerbates the vulnerability of household enterprises, and reduces their productivity.
Title-based Approach to Relation Discovery from Wikipedia

With the advent of the Web and the explosion of available textual data, the field of domain ontology engineering has gained more and more importance. The last decade, several successful tools for automatically harvesting knowledge from web data have been developed, but the extraction of taxonomic and non taxonomic ontological relationships is still far from being fully solved. This paper describes a new approach which extracts ontological relations from Wikipedia. The non-taxonomic relations extraction process is performed by analyzing the titles which appear in each document of the studied corpus. This method is based on regular expressions which appear in titles and from which we can extract not only the two arguments of the relationships but also the labels which describe the relations. The resulting set of labels is used in order to retrieve new relations by analyzing the title hierarchy in each document. Other relations can be extracted from titles and subtitles containing only one term. An enrichment step is also applied by considering each term which appears as a relation argument of the extracted links in order to discover new concepts and new relations. The experiments have been performed on French Wikipedia articles related to the medical field. The precision and recall values are encouraging and seem to validate
The IBM data warehouse architecture

U sers of IBM's data warehouse solution represent a wide range of communities differing with respect to business activities and processes, services and products, resources and cultures, and, most important, business objectives. This diversity has motivated IBM's development of a comprehensive set of data warehouse offerings (hardware and software) and an integrated warehouse solution designed to serve a wide range of requirements—from simple query and reporting to advanced data mining. IBM is in a unique business position, since the legacy data in many enterprises is stored in files and databases managed by IBM products. Nonetheless, IBM recognizes that many organizations have supplemented these legacy systems with data management tools designed and delivered by other vendors. Therefore, the company's data warehouse architecture includes the ability to integrate data managed by multivendor offerings, as well as interfaces facilitating interoper-ability with multivendor tools. How IBM integrates its own and other vendors' tools to derive useful information for decision support.
An exploratory study on visual merchandising of an apparel store utilizing 3D technology

To provide a competitive edge against the rapid growth of online stores, offline stores' physical environments have become more important in attracting consumers. Visual design and display of items and décor for better communication with consumers is known as visual merchandising (VM), which enhances shoppers' in-store exploration and experience. This study investigates the effect of an apparel store's VM on consumers' response with the S-O-R model. Theme-centric and product-centric VM strategies are suggested as the two representative types, and were thus designed and actualized via 3D technology using SketchUp 8. A short video clip was used to enhance the reality of store environment in examining consumers' evaluation toward VM elements (S), emotional response (O) and approach behaviors (R). This study suggests fundamental classification of VM types for retailers to support the development of VM strategies in design of differentiated store environments.
DISCLOSING THE RADIO LOUDNESS DISTRIBUTION DICHOTOMY IN QUASARS: AN UNBIASED MONTE CARLO APPROACH APPLIED TO THE SDSS–FIRST QUASAR SAMPLE

We investigate the dichotomy in the radio loudness distribution of quasars by modeling their radio emission and various selection effects using a Monte Carlo approach. The existence of two physically distinct quasar populations, the radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars, is controversial and over the last decade a bimodal distribution of radio loudness of quasars has been both affirmed and disputed. We model the quasar radio luminosity distribution with simple unimodal and bimodal distribution functions. The resulting simulated samples are compared to a fiducial sample of 8300 quasars drawn from the SDSS DR7 Quasar Catalog and combined with radio observations from the FIRST survey. Our results indicate that the SDSS–FIRST sample is best described by a radio loudness distribution which consists of two components, with (12 ± 1)% of sources in the radio-loud component. On the other hand, the evidence for a local minimum in the loudness distribution (bimodality) is not strong and we find that previous claims for its existence were probably affected by the incompleteness of the FIRST survey close to its faint limit. We also investigate the redshift and luminosity dependence of the radio loudness distribution and find tentative evidence that at high redshift radio-loud quasars were rarer, on average louder, and exhibited a smaller range in radio loudness. In agreement with other recent work, we conclude that the SDSS–FIRST sample strongly suggests that the radio loudness distribution of quasars is not a universal function, and that more complex models than presented here are needed to fully explain available observations.