Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incentives for Businesses: An Empirical Study

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) contacts businesses in the Netherlands regularly with questionnaires on business data. In order to optimize response behaviour, CBS started a project where businesses participating in the monthly and quarterly surveys received an incentive in return. The aim of this study was to evaluate a possible long-term effect on response rates and reminding rates, using an interrupted time series design. It was examined whether the effect of time on the response rate as well as the reminding rate was the same for businesses before and after the introduction of the incentive, while controlling for business size and economic activity. It was expected that businesses would respond more frequently, and less reminding would be needed. Multilevel analyses show no support for these expectations. A visual inspection shows a decrease in response rates and an increase in reminding rates after the introduction of the incentive. Further examination is needed to understand this unexpected effect of the incentive. AUTHOR’S ADDRESS: Toermalijnlaan 80, 3523 BJ Utrecht E-MAIL: B.B. Vennix@students.uu. nl
Marketing of halal meat in the United Kingdom: Supermarkets versus local shops

The purpose of this paper is to explore a number of marketing issues, such as consumer buyer behaviour and distribution channels, in relation to buying halal meat (HM) from local shops versus supermarkets in the UK.Design/methodology/approach ? A consumer survey (300 participants) and observation of three local halal shops and a Morrisons supermarket were successfully undertaken in London, Brighton and Edinburgh. The majority of UK Muslims do not trust big supermarkets when buying HM. They will only trust a Muslim selling halal products in their local shops. Most respondents did not know that supermarkets in their local area sold HM.Research limitations/implications In order to increase the sales of HM ranges, supermarkets need to improve their marketing efforts, for example by advertising in Islamic newspapers, mosques and other relevant sources. Supermarkets need to stock other complementary halal products to get a mass response from this market segment, as well as enhancing/improving their services, for example, there should be sales people who are able to advise customers on particular halal products.Originality/value The study reveals that the majority of UK Muslims are at odds with most UK shoppers and increasingly prefer to shop at small shops, rather than big supermarkets. The paper helps to emphasise the major issues that frame the current state of marketing HM in the UK; contributes to a better understanding of such an important customer sector; and raises the necessary commitment to restructuring HM business activities in the UK and Europe.
Learning kernels from labels with ideal regularization

In this paper, we propose a new form of regularization that is able to utilize the label information of a data set for learning kernels. We first present the definition of extended ideal kernel for both labeled and unlabeled data of multiple classes. Based on this extended ideal kernel, we propose an ideal regularization which is a linear function of the kernel matrix to be learned. The ideal regularization allows us to develop effective algorithms to exploit labels. Two applications of the ideal regularization are considered. Empirical results show the ideal regularization exploits the labels effectively.
ENZYME DISSOLUTION OF THE NUCLEUS PULPOSUS IN HUMANS.

CHYMOPAPAIN, by direct injection into the intervertebral disc, will cause dissolution of the nucleus pulposus in rabbits without apparent effect on the surrounding tissues, such as ligaments, bone, nerve roots, and dura mater. 1 This technique was therefore applied to 22 dogs with paralysis of the hind legs believed to be due to herniation of intervertebral discs. Chymopapain, 1 to 5 mg, was injected directly into the discs apparently involved. Fourteen of the 22 dogs recovered to the extent of being able to stand orwalk. Seven dogs were unimproved. At autopsy, six of these dogs showed herniation or extrusion of the disc at levels other than those injected. The seventh had complete degeneration of the spinal cord below the level of the lesion. No deleterious effects of the enzyme were found in any of these animals. 2 With these favorable experiences as a foundation, clinical trials were started in July, 1963, on humans with sciatica secondary to herniated intervertebral discs. This report deals with the clinical
Studies on sweat losses of nutrients. I. Iron content of whole body sweat and its association with other sweat constituents, serum iron levels, hematological indices, body surface area, and sweat rate.

Whole body sweat was collected in 23 healthy, young adult men during 60 min of profuse sweating in an environmental chamber at 40–45°C and 80–90% relative humidity. Before and after the sweat collection hemoglobin, hematocrit, mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, serum iron, and serum chloride were determined. The iron content of cellrich and cell-free sweat was measured by chemical methods and also the content of chloride, calcium, and magnesium of cell-free sweat.The mean iron concentration of cell-rich sweat was 41.2 μg/100 ml of which 29.8 was found in the cell-free fraction. The corresponding losses per hour were 0.5 and 0.4 mg respectively.Correlation analysis showed a positive association between iron content of cell-free sweat and serum iron levels after sweat collection, suggesting a probable biological relationship. There was also a positive association between iron content of cell-rich sweat and body surface area. No association was found between iron and the other sweat constituents, hem.
Enlargement of hilar periportal space: A sign of early cirrhosis at MR imaging

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the finding of an enlarged hilar periportal space is a sign for early cirrhosis at magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Forty‐one pathologically proved cirrhotic patients in the early stage of disease who did not show conventional imaging findings of cirrhosis (early cirrhosis group) and 47 patients without history of chronic liver diseases (control group) were included in this study. MR images were qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated for the presence of enlargement of the periportal space. Enlargement of the periportal space was seen in 98% of patients in the early cirrhosis group, while this finding was seen in 11% of patients in the control group (P < 0.0001). The mean value of the hilar periportal fat thickness was significantly greater (P < 0.0001) in the early cirrhosis group (15.5 ± 6.2 mm) than in the control group (5.3 ± 3.1 mm). The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and positive predictive value of this finding for the MR diagnosis of cirrhosis with a cutoff value of 10 mm were 93%, 92%, 92%, and 91%, respectively. Enlargement of the hilar periportal space is a helpful sign at MR imaging in the discrimination between normal and early cirrhotic livers. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2000;11:136–140. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Evaluating the Security of the Global Containerized Supply Chain

This report provides a strategy for security risk management of large container supply chain systems. The table of contents lists the following headings: SECTION 1. Motivation and Introduction: Toward a Model for Assessing Supply Chain Security; SECTION 2. Proposed and Implemented Security Measures Since September 11, 2001 - Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism Operation Safe Commerce, The Container Security Initiative, The Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002, Antitamper Seals, Radio-Frequency Identification, X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Scanning, Radiation Pagers, Portal Sensors, and Remote Monitoring; SECTION 3. The Global Supply Chain: Points of View, System Components, and Stakeholders - The Transaction Layer: A Business Fulfillment Network, The Logistics Layer: A Multimodal Physical Network for the Transport of Cargo, The Oversight Layer: The Legal and Regulatory Structure of the Global Supply Chain, Interactions Among Layers in the Supply Chain; SECTION 4. Capabilities of the Global Container Supply Chain; SECTION 5. Managing Container Shipping Security: A Case of Technology-Induced Risk - Building Supply-Chain Capabilities, Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism: Making Supply-Chain Participants Responsible for the Security of Container Cargo, Operation Safe Commerce: Harnessing Technology to Improve Customs Inspection Effectiveness, Container Security Initiative: Increasing Deterrence and Efficiency Through Cargo Inspection at Foreign Ports, Maritime Transportation Security Act: Reducing Theft and Improving Incident Response at Ports and on Vessels, Antitamper Seals: Improving the Integrity of Container Shipping, Radio Frequency Identification: Improving the Transparency of Supply-Chain Networks, X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Scanning: Improving Transparency of Cargo Shipments, Radiation Pagers, Portal Sensors, and Remote Monitoring: Increasing Capabilities to Detect Weapons of Mass Destruction; SECTION 6. Preliminary Conclusions, Recommendations, and Future Inquiry - Preliminary Conclusions, The Inseparability of Supply-Chain Security and Efficiency, Potential Underinvestment in Fault Tolerance and Resilience, Recommendations, The Public Sector Should Seek to Bolster the Fault Tolerance and Resilience of the Logistical Supply Chain, Security Efforts Should Address Vulnerabilities Along Supply-Chain Network Edges, R&D Should Target New Technologies for Low-Cost, High-Volume Remote Sensing and Scanning, Future Inquiry.
Prognostic significance of dna index, multiploidy, and S‐phase fraction in ovarian cancer

Paraffin‐embedded tumor samples from 157 ovarian cancer patients were analyzed by DNA flow cytometry. Tumor ploidy had prognostic significance in both early and advanced ovarian cancer. After adjusting for stage, residual tumor mass, histopathologic type, treatment, and age of patient in a Cox regression analysis, the relative risk of death was two‐fold higher in single DNA‐aneuploid and sixfold higher in DNA‐multiploid tumors as compared to DNA‐diploid tumors (P < 0.0001). A tetraploid DNA index was associated with a relatively low risk ratio, whereas hypertetraploid tumors were highly malignant. S‐phase fraction (SPF) had prognostic value especially in DNA‐diploid tumors. The simultaneous evaluation of DNA index, the number of aneuploid cell clones, and SPF gave more prognostic information than the determination of tumor ploidy alone. On the basis of these parameters we have developed a classification of tumor DNA histograms for better prognostic assessment of ovarian cancer.
Nanoemulsion: A Review on Novel Profusion in Advanced Drug Delivery

Nanoemulsions are submicron sized emulsion that is under extensive investigation as drug carriers for improving the delivery of therapeutic agents. These are by far the most advanced nanoparticle systems for the systemic delivery of active pharmaceutical for controlled drug delivery and targeting. These are the thermodynamically stable isotropic system in which two immiscible liquid (water and oil) are mixed to form a single phase by means of an appropriate surfactants or it mixes with a droplet diameter approximately in the range of 0.5-100 µm. Nanoemulsion droplet size falls typically in the range of 20-200 nm and shows a narrow size distribution. Nanoemulsion show great promise for the future of cosmetics, diagnostics, drug therapies and biotechnologies. Thus the aim of this review is focused on nanoemulsion advantage and disadvantage, various methods of preparation, characterization techniques and the various applications of sub micron size emulsion in different areas such as various route of administration, in chemotherapy, in cosmetic, etc.
A co-operative application management platform based on shared virtual memory

Studying the different mechanisms specific to co-operative applications, we think that a co-operative application management platform is needed. Context sharing being one of the main concepts of co-operation, we propose an environment based on shared virtual memory. To clearly identify the various concepts used in every co-operative system, we define our system with four layers: the interprocess communications layers, the shared memory layer, the services layer and the co-operative distributed application layer. We show how these four layers are complementary and allow to optimize the co-operation management in order to allow users transparent access.
Workforce Reduction Practices in Canadian Hospitals

Over the past five years there has been significant attention paid to health care restructuring, downsizing, and rationalization. However, there was relatively little research on the relationship between workforce reduction strategies and organizational impacts. A new study presents results of a Canada-wide survey of acute care hospitals, answering such questions as (1) to what extent are health care organizations engaging in downsizing and restructuring? , (2) how is workforce reduction related to other activities and practices of the organization? , (3) what is the impact of workforce reduction on the organization and its members and stakeholders? , and (4) what activities or practices characterize those organizations which have successfully and unsuccessfully reduced their workload? The organizational performance measures are easily understood and measure performance from four perspectives: customer, employee, operational, and change and adaptation. The authors identify some of the characteristics of hospitals that have higher organizational and employee performance, even in the face of extensive layoffs and restructuring.
The international spillover effects of ageing and pensions

One of the central conclusions that emerges from this thesis is that countries with large funded pension systems are in the long run negatively affected by the fact that other countries have extensive PAYG schemes. This is especially the case when PAYG countries use government debt to finance their pension burden. High levels of government debt may lead to inflationary pressures. In a monetary union like the EMU it will therefore be important for funded countries that the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact are met and that the ECB is independent, credible and transparent. The thesis also shows that pension reform in a PAYG country can have adverse consequences for countries with funded pension schemes. In a common capital market like the EU, it would therefore be in the interest of funded countries that pension reform is not decided upon in isolation by separate member countries, but that there is some coordination or even centralisation of decision making.
The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31

Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain’s institutional development.
On variable clock methods for path delay testing of sequential circuits

We propose a delay test methodology for general sequential circuits. To test a combinational path between two flip-flops, the source flip-flop is initialized to the appropriate value, followed by creation of a transition, which is propagated through the path. An incorrect logic value is captured in the destination flip-flop if the path delay exceeds the clock period. The state of the destination flip-flop is observed at a primary output through path sensitization. Only one vector that propagates the transition through the path is applied with the rated clock period. All other vectors use a slow speed clock to ensure fault-free initialization and fault effect observation. The test generation method uses a 13-value algebra that represents the relevant transition and hazard states of signals. Since several path delay faults can be activated by the vector applied at the rated clock, only the flip-flops with hazard-free steady values are assumed to have deterministic states. This allows us to generate sequentially robust tests. We present the results of the test generation method on ISCAS benchmark circuits.
Low Power SoC Design

The design of Low Power Systems-on-Chips (SoC) in very deep submicron technologies becomes a very complex task that has to bridge very high level system description with low-level considerations due to technology defaults and variations and increasing system and circuit complexity. This paper describes the major low-level issues, such as dynamic and static power consumption, temperature, technology variations, interconnect, DFM, reliability and yield, and their impact on high-level design, such as the design of multi-Vdd, fault-tolerant, redundant or adaptive chip architectures. Some very low power System-on-Chip (SoC) will be presented in three domains: wireless sensor networks, vision sensors and mobile TV.
Analysis of repair of abasic sites in early onset breast cancer patients

Defective DNA repair has been suggested as a possible predisposing factor for breast cancer. We have investigated the repair of the frequent endogenous lesions abasic sites in sporadic early onset breast cancer patients and matched control individuals. No significant difference was observed between the abasic site repair capacities of peripheral blood lymphocytes from cases and controls. Repair of abasic sites was also studied in tumor and surrounding normal tissues of the patients. The 2 tissues showed marked differences in histology and protein composition with a fibro‐collagenous component varying from sample to sample but invariably higher in normal tissues as compared with the adjacent tumor. These differences involved the need to calculate the repair activities of tissues on the basis of cellular DNA content for comparison purposes. After doing so, tumor and normal tissues exhibited similar abasic site repair capacities, whereas lymphocytes showed a repair capacity significantly lower than tissues. We conclude that early onset sporadic breast cancer patients show no evident defect in repair of abasic sites at the level of both lymphocytes and tumor. Int. J. Cancer 85:21–26, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Perceptions of a peer suicide prevention program by inmates and professionals working in prisons.

BACKGROUND Suicide prevention is a major challenge for penal institutions in many countries. The traditional approach relies on the expertise of health professionals and is supplemented by the intervention of other professionals and the inmates themselves. New methods of suicide prevention based on peer support have been developed in recent years. Peer prevention programs rely on the ability of inmates to identify suicide risk. AIMS This study examines perceived suicide risk among inmates and explores possible explanations. METHOD 54 inmates and 17 professionals working in prisons responded to a questionnaire. RESULTS The peer prevention program was found to change inmates' expectations of support in the event of a suicide crisis. The study also found that the inmates involved in the program tended to underestimate the risk of suicide. The perception of the prevention program and the level of self-consciousness were found to account for the underestimation of suicide risk. CONCLUSIONS Support for inmates involved in suicide prevention programs must take into account their isolation in prison. The training provided to inmates must also consider the biases affecting the assessment of risk.
Discriminating schizophrenia from normal controls using resting state functional network connectivity: A deep neural network and layer-wise relevance propagation method

Deep learning has gained considerable attention in the scientific community, breaking benchmark records in many fields such as speech and visual recognition [1]. Motivated by extending advancement of deep learning approaches to brain imaging classification, we propose a framework, called “deep neural network (DNN)+ layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP)”, to distinguish schizophrenia patients (SZ) from healthy controls (HCs) using functional network connectivity (FNC). 1100 Chinese subjects of 7 sites are included, each with a 50∗50 FNC matrix resulted from group ICA on resting-state fMRI data. The proposed DNN+LRP not only improves classification accuracy significantly compare to four state-of-the-art classification methods (84% vs. less than 79%, 10 folds cross validation) but also enables identification of the most contributing FNC patterns related to SZ classification, which cannot be easily traced back by general DNN models. By conducting LRP, we identified the FNC patterns that exhibit the highest discriminative power in SZ classification. More importantly, when using leave-one-site-out cross validation (using 6 sites for training, 1 site for testing, 7 times in total), the cross-site classification accuracy reached 82%, suggesting high robustness and generalization performance of the proposed method, promising a wide utility in the community and great potentials for biomarker identification of brain disorders.
Fatty acid Composition , Anti-inflammatory and Analgesic Activities of Balanites aegyptiaca Seeds in Rats

The anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects of B. aegyptiaca seeds petroleum ether extract was investigated in Wistar albino rats. The anti-inflammatory effect was assessed on acute and chronic models by using carrageenan induced paw oedema and cotton pellet induced granuloma respectively. The analgesic activity of the petroleum ether extract of seeds was evaluated by acetic acid induced writhes. Oral administration of B. aegyptiaca seeds petroleum ether extract at dose rate of 2, 4 and 8ml/kg significantly (P < 0.05) inhibited carrageenan induced paw oedema in rats. The inhibition was comparable to that observed by indomethacin used as a standard antiinflammatory drug. In cotton pellet granuloma method, the formation of granuloma significantly (P < 0.05) hindered by oral administration of the extract at dose rate of 4 and 8ml/kg compared to the control and standard drug diclofenac sodium. The petroleum ether extract also significantly (P < 0.05) reduced the writhes produced by acetic acid compared to control and standard analgesic drug diclofenac sodium. Moreover, the acute toxicity study indicated that oral administration of seeds oil in rats did not have any side or toxic effects up to 20 ml/kg except of anorexia in rats received higher doses of the oil. Gas Chromatography analysis of seed oil revealed the presence of capric acid, palmitic acid and oleic acid. This study confirmed the traditional uses of B. aegyptiaca seeds as anti-inflammatory and as an analgesic agent which may be attributed to its fatty acids content.