Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety and Functional Results of Early Cochlear Implant Switch-On in Children

Objective To assess the safety and the possible advantages of early (1-wk) cochlear implant switch-on in children and to compare impedance and ECAP threshold changes between subjects undergoing early switch-on and those undergoing traditional, 1-month switch-on. Study Design Prospective cohort study. Setting Tertiary care referral pediatric center. Patients Seventeen children receiving a unilateral or bilateral Nucleus Freedom cochlear implant were included, for a total of 20 ears. Ten ears were assigned to the early (1-wk) switch-on group and 10 to the control group (switch-on after 4 wks). Interventions Common ground impedance values and electrically evoked compound action potential thresholds were measured from intraoperation until 9 months postoperatively. Speech perception improvements over time were also assessed. Main Outcome Measures Complication rate, impedance levels (k&OHgr;), and electrically evoked compound action potentials (current levels) Results Early switch-on was well tolerated by patients and did not cause complications. Impedances dropped significantly after switch-on in both groups. They also seemed to achieve an earlier stability in the early switch-on patients, although the difference between groups was not significant. ECAP thresholds showed a similar, nonsignificant decreasing trend over time in both groups. Speech perception improvements did not differ between groups. Conclusion This is the first study investigating the safety and the effects of an early cochlear implant switch-on in children. Results show that such a procedure is well tolerated by pediatric subjects and free from complications. Impedance measurements suggest that the earlier switched-on subjects benefit of lower and more stable impedances than subjects undergoing 1-month switch-on.
Relative performance evaluation and peer-performance summarization errors

In tests of the relative performance evaluation (RPE) hypothesis, empiricists rarely aggregate peer performance in the same way as a firm’s board of directors. Framed as a standard errors-in-variables problem, a commonly held view is that such aggregation errors attenuate the regression coefficient on systematic firm performance towards zero, which creates a bias in favor of the strong-form RPE hypothesis. In contrast, we analytically demonstrate that aggregation differences generate more complicated summarization errors, which create a bias against finding support for strong-form RPE (potentially inducing a Type-II error). Using simulation methods, we demonstrate the sensitivity of empirical inferences to the bias by showing how an empiricist can conclude erroneously that boards, on average, do not apply RPE, simply by selecting more, fewer, or different peers than the board does. We also show that when the board does not apply RPE, empiricists will not find support for RPE (that is, precluding a Type-I error).
The future of human resource management : 64 thought leaders explore the critical HR issues of today and tomorrow

The follow-up to the bestselling Tomorrow's HR Management (978-0-471-19714-0), this book presents an international panel of expert contributors who offer their views on the state of HR and what to expect in the future. Topics covered include HR as a decision science, understanding and managing people, creating and adapting organizational culture, the effects of globalization, collaborative ventures, and investing in the next generation. Like its bestselling predecessor before it, The Future of Human Resource Management offers the very best thinking on the future of HR from the most respected leaders in the field.
Preparation and Use of Voucher Specimens for Documenting Research in Weed Science

Voucher specimens and herbarium collections provide the foundation for many aspects of research in the plant sciences. Available for study and verification by contemporary and future workers, voucher specimens promote reproducibility in scientific method because permanent records document identification, distribution, and interspecific and intraspecific variation of species. The utility and importance of voucher specimens and herbarium collections in supporting research in weed science are discussed, and the collection, preparation, documentation, storage, and shipment of voucher specimens are detailed.
Interactions between brain mitochondria and cytoskeleton: Evidence for specialized outer membrane domains involved in the association of cytoskeleton‐associated proteins to mitochondria in situ and in vitro

The surface distribution of several proteins (porin, hexokinase, and two proteins associated with microtubules or actin filaments) on the outer membrane of brain mitochondria was analyzed by immunogold labelling of purified mitochondria in vitro. The results suggest the existence of specialized domains for the distribution of porin in the outer mitochondrial membrane. Similarities between the distribution of porin and the distribution of microtubule‐associated proteins bound in vitro to mitochondria suggested that mitochondria and microtubules interact by binding microtubule‐associated proteins to porin‐containing domains of the outer membrane. This hypothesis was supported by biochemical studies on outer mitochondrial proteins involved in in vitro binding of cytoskeleton elements. In vitro interactions between mitochondria and microtubules or neurofilaments were analyzed by electron microscopy. These studies revealed cross‐bridging between the outer membrane of mitochondria and the two cytoskeleton elements. Cross‐bridging was influenced by ATP hydrolysis and by several proteins associated with the surface of mitochondria or with microtubules. In addition, unidentified proteins which were recognized by antibodies to all intermediate filaments subunits were associated either with the mitochondrial surface or with microtubules. This data suggest the participation of additional cytoplasmic proteins in the interactions between cytoskeleton elements and mitochondria. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Users Satisfaction and ERP Implementation Success

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system encompasses the mechanisms and inklings conducted for the solidified management of enterprise as all-inclusive from the discernment of consequential exertion of management expedients to embellish the expedience of the business. Several organizations have implemented ERP system but none of them has claims the desire results. User satisfaction is considered as central indicators of ERP project success. This study was conducted in Pakistani industry with the purpose to indentify and ensure potential success factors of ERP implementation. On the bases of extensive theoretical underpinning, measurement constructs of success factors of ERP implementation were identified. Survey instrument was developed from those success factors. Total three hundred and fifty questionnaires were distributed randomly to ERP users working in Telecom, engineering, Oil and Gas and Government sector. Out of distributed questionnaires two hundred and twenty eight (N=228) questionnaires were retrieved back. The responses were systematically entered, cleaned, and screened in statistical package for social science (SPPS). The core statistical techniques used in this study are regression and correlation analysis. The study finds that user satisfactions have positive and significance relationship with perceived usefulness of ERP system, Perceived ease of use of ERP, Internal support and compatibility of ERP system whereas as results demonstrability of ERP system is found to insignificantly related to ERP user satisfaction. The study further investigates that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, internal support, and compatibility of ERP system is perceived as important factors for ERP success. The findings suggests that all those interested in better business results and reliable business solutions should consider proper procedure review of software capabilities with confined focus on results demonstrability before embarking on ERP system implementation.
Financial institutions, private acquisition of corporate information, and fund management

The article describes how 27 large UK financial institutions (FIs) sought to acquire an information and influence advantage from the relationships they enjoyed with investee companies in their portfolio. The financial institutions invested much time and effort cultivating these links and contacts. The primary aim of this relationship investment decision was to produce added value in stock selection and asset allocation decisions. The resulting fund performance was the means for inancial institutions to satisfy a fiduciary duty to supply their clients with their preferred mix of return, diversification and liquidity. This problem area is investigated by using financial institutional case data to describe FI behaviour when interacting with their relationship investee companies. The article ends by analysing the case data and case structures through the perspective of inance theory.
Factors associated with the quality of audit committees

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyse whether several indicators of audit committee quality are associated with a number of supply and demand factors such as board composition, board activity, auditor type and leverage.Design/methodology/approach – The 2001 annual reports of a random sample of 200 Australian listed companies were analysed and data gathered on several audit committee quality indicators, i.e. independence, expertise, size and activity. Regression analysis was performed to determine the level of association between these indicators and several board and other variables.Findings – The results indicate that, in 2001, many Australian listed companies were already complying with several of the ASX Corporate Governance Council's recommendations relating to audit committees. Furthermore, in a time period absent of audit committee regulation, there was strong support for the influence of the board of directors on the composition and activity of the audit committee.Research limitation/im.
India's Demographic Transition: Boon or Bane?

Age structure and its dynamics are critical in understanding the impact of population growth on a country's growth prospects. Using state-level data from India, we show that the pace of demographic transition varies across states, and that these differences are likely to be exacerbated over the period 2011–26. We show that the so-called BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh) are likely to see a continuing increase in the share of the working-age population in total population. The BIMARU states are expected to contribute 58 per cent of the increase in India's working-age population. The BIMARU states have traditionally been the slow-growing states and have performed poorly on different accounts of social and physical infrastructure. The article argues that whether the demographic window of opportunity will be utilised and turned into a boon or be wasted and result in a bane will rest critically on the ability of the BIMARU states to exploit the bulge in the working-age population.
The Cost of Pension Insurance

This article estimates the cost of the federal pension insurance program. Pension insurance claims have an important market-risk component, which means that the cost of the exposure cannot be estimated by discounting future claims by the risk-free rate. Moreover, owing to the complexity of the insurance contract, its price cannot be estimated with known options formulas without introducing an error of nonquantifiable magnitude. To circumvent these problems, we model the insurance program in its full complexity and use a Monte Carlo method. By hedging the exposure with a dynamic premium policy that offloads the market risk to the insureds, one can calculate the risk-free, or actuarial, cost of that policy. One can also characterize the nature of the subsidy and its structure across insured plans. Finally, we provide an estimate of the implicit cost of the hedge function that taxpayers currently are providing for zero remuneration. The model shows that simple contingent claims models of pension insurance result in a price that is about triple the true market cost of the insurance, and that pension insurance models that ignore market risk understate the cost by half. The solution demonstrates the broad characteristics that might characterize a credible private-sector version of pension insurance.
Positive‐feedback trading activity and momentum profits

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine positive-feedback (PF) behavior and its relationship to momentum profitability and information uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach - Using the behavioral function of rational traders and feedback traders, the authors jointly estimate the mean and conditional variance equations of the GARCH model to derive the positive- and non-positive-feedback coefficients, respectively. In each six-month period, the number of PF stocks were then calculated as a fraction of the total number of stocks in that period. The authors then investigate whether day-to-day PF trading activities vary across different momentum portfolios by calculating the percentage of PF stocks in each decile portfolio. Findings - This study finds that about 9.4 per cent of stocks exhibit PF trading activities and that these activities have a more profound effect on stocks with a higher level of information uncertainty. The finding shows that the percentage of stocks with PF trading is higher in the portfolios of extreme losers than in the portfolios of extreme winners. The evidence suggests that stocks exhibiting PF trading activities subsequently experience significantly higher momentum returns. Originality/value - This paper presents evidence to test whether a relationship exists between short-term PF trading and future momentum profitability. Since PF traders tend to chase price movements, PF trading is more likely to cause stock prices to further diverge from the firm's fundamentals and, therefore, give rise to stock return momentum. This phenomenon appears to be more profound in this study when there is a higher level of information uncertainty.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Material Hardships among Low-Income Households with Children

This study estimates the effects of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the risk of food as well as nonfood material hardships experienced by low-income households with children. Data are drawn from the 1996, 2001, and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We examine the relationship between SNAP and material hardships by modeling jointly the likelihood of household participation in SNAP and the risk of experiencing material hardships using a bivariate probit model. We estimate that SNAP reduces household food insecurity by 12.8 percentage points, reduces the risk that households will fall behind on their nonfood essential expenses, including housing (by 7.2 percentage points) and utilities (by 15.3 percentage points), and reduces the risk of medical hardship (by 8.5 percentage points).
Entrepreneurial Teams within Franchise Firms

In the research on franchising firms, several assumptions are generally made. One such assumption is that the role of the entrepreneur is predominantly associated with franchisors, and that franchisees operate under a uniformly regimented system of contractual obligations. Given the restrictions and rules, franchisees have few opportunities for entrepreneurial creativity, serving as owner-managers of a single outlet in a prescribed role of managerial convenience. This study reveals a much more complex and dynamic pattern of relationships between the franchisors and franchisees. Evidence of entrepreneurial teamwork is found, where creativity and adaptation is not always confined to franchisors, and several forms of nested teams within franchising firms are examined. Using both quantitative analysis of secondary data from 1201 North American franchises and in-depth interviews, evidence of entrepreneurial teamwork within the context of franchising firms is presented. The study reveals that restrictive franchise agreements were not always rigorously enforced unless problems occurred, allowing room for entrepreneurial activity by franchisees.
How Should Public Pension Plans Invest?

How public pension plan assets should be invested is an important but unsettled question. Some observers endorse the standard practice of investing heavily in higher yielding but riskier equities, reasoning that the higher average returns will reduce future required tax receipts and also help to reduce underfunding over time. Others advocate a more conservative approach that reduces the volatility of funding levels and the likelihood of severe shortfalls during economic downturns when government resources are already constrained.The accounting rules for public pensions create a perverse incentive to invest in stocks: since projected liabilities are discounted at the expected return on assets rather than at a rate that reflects the generally lower risk of liabilities, investing the assets in the stock market leads to a higher allowed discount rate for the liabilities, which in turn lowers the accounting-based measure of liabilities and lowers required pension contributions. This choice of discount rate contradicts the valuation principle that the risk of the quantity under consideration determines the appropriate discount rate.Determining optimal asset allocation requires us to specify who bears the risks and returns and how risks and returns are traded off, i.e., a budget constraint and an objective function. We solve a simple model that illustrates the asset allocation problem facing a public fiduciary who seeks to minimize the welfare cost of distortionary taxes, subject to a funding constraint. We demonstrate that there is a trade-off between the higher average return on equities which lowers average taxes and the greater risk of equities which increases expected tax distortions. We also incorporate the idea first exposited by Fischer Black (1989) that if there is a positive correlation between stock returns and pension liabilities over longer horizons, then holding some equities can serve as a partial hedge against liabilities, providing an additional reason for equity holdings. We consider the sensitivity of the conclusions about optimal asset allocation to the degree of initial underfunding, to the expected level of future taxes, and to the stochastic properties of pension liabilities. Although we do not model them formally, we discuss other considerations beyond minimizing tax distortions that can influence the optimal asset allocation in S&L pension plans, which together seem to point toward a policy of matching pension assets and liabilities.
Modelling and Analysis of Fault Behaviour of Inverter Microgrids to Aid Future Fault Detection

This paper investigates the fault behaviour of an inverter-only supplied microgrid by computer simulation and numerical analysis. The purpose of this study is to give a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the dynamics involved in a microgrid under fault conditions in order to supply a tool to help the design of a suitable fault detection strategy. After considering first the nature of microgrids and the control of stand-alone inverters, a model of a microgrid supplied by one single inverter-interfaced source is simulated in PSCAD for two different faults conditions. Simplifications to the inverter model which captures its behaviour under fault conditions are then proposed. Finally the effectiveness of the simplified model is demonstrated using a sequence-component-based fault analysis of the microgrid test network.
An unsupervised vocabulary selection technique for Chinese automatic speech recognition

The vocabulary is a vital component of automatic speech recognition(ASR) systems. For a specific Chinese speech recognition task, using a large general vocabulary not only leads to a much longer time to decode, but also hurts the recognition accuracy. In this paper, we proposed an unsupervised algorithm to select task-specific words from a large general vocabulary. The out-of-vocabulary(OOV) rate is a measure of vocabularies, and it is related to the recognition accuracy. However, it is hard to compute OOV rate for a Chinese vocabulary, since OOVs are often segmented into single Chinese characters and most Chinese vocabularies contain all the single Chinese characters. To deal with this problem, we proposed a novel method to estimate the OOV rate of Chinese vocabularies. In experiments, we found that our estimated OOV rate is related to the character error rate(CER) of recognition. Our proposed vocabulary selection method provided both the lowest OOV rate and CER on two Chinese conversational telephone speech(CTS) evaluation sets compared to the general vocabulary and frequency based vocabulary selection method. In addition, our proposed method significantly reduced the size of the language model(LM) and the corresponding weighted finite state transducer(WFST) network, which led to a more efficient decoding.
Model-Free Implied Volatility: From Surface to Index

We propose a new method for approximating the expected quadratic variation of an asset based on its option prices. The quadratic variation of an asset price is often regarded as a measure of its volatility, and its expected value under pricing measure can be understood as the market's expectation of future volatility. We utilize the relation between the asset variance and the Black-Scholes implied volatility surface, and discuss the merits of this new model-free approach compared to the CBOE procedure underlying the VIX index. The interpolation scheme for the volatility surface we introduce is designed to be consistent with arbitrage bounds. We show numerically under the Heston stochastic volatility model that this approach significantly reduces the approximation errors, and we further provide empirical evidence from the Nikkei 225 options that the new implied volatility index is more accurate in predicting future volatility.
An ultra-low-noise Source-Measuring Unit for semiconductor device noise characterization

This work presents an automated measurement system designed and realized in order to perform low-frequency noise measurements on MOSFET devices with the easy of use and programmability of a Source-Measuring Unit (SMU). The designed instrument is made up mainly by two parts, an analog part that bias the Device Under Test and amplifies its signals, and a digital part that allows to reconfigure, according to the measurement needs, the analog part in a remote driven way. Thus, it was possible to integrate the designed system in a wafer-level measurement system, provided with a dedicated software, in order to perform, in a completely automated way, various set of noise measurements that could require even large amounts of time. Moreover for completeness of the measurement system, in order to allow the user to check out the DUT's integrity and measure its I/V curves (as required before performing any noise measurement) the designed system allows even to perform a static characterization using a dedicated software that has been integrated in the noise measurement Virtual Instrument. With this solution, the use of a parameter analyzer and a switch matrix can be avoided, thus positioning the instrument on the prober shelf, very close to the device, solving a great amount of external interference problems.