Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In Vivo Distribution of Inorganic Nanoparticles in Preclinical Models

Ongoing progress in nanotechnologies has led to their implementation for in vivo diagnostic and therapy. Thus, the main applications of inorganic nanoparticles are imaging for diagnosis and cell tracking, photothermal and drug-delivery therapies. Following nanoparticles in vivo administration, the systemic circulation can distribute them to every body organ and tissue. Precise characterization of nanoparticles distribution and accumulation in the different body parts in preclinical models is required before any application in humans. The biodistribution of inorganic nanoparticles has been analysed in different preclinical models, particularly mouse, rat and rabbit. This review covers the in vivo biodistribution of different inorganic nanoparticles in preclinical models: gold nanoparticles, silica nanoparticles, iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles, quantum dots and carbon nanotubes.
The effect of corporate governance on the financial structure of listed firms

The purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of corporate governance on the financial structure of listed firms. The analysis is founded on the capital structure and agency theories. Corporate governance literature indicates the existence of nonlinear relationships, and hence this research applies multiple linear regression to a sample of 100 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, corresponding to a 3-year period. The results confirm the influence of corporate governance on the financial structure of listed firms, and in particular, the nonlinear effect of the percentage of executive members of the board.
Solar PV array fed speed sensorless vector control of induction motor drive for water pumping

This paper presents a solar PV array fed speed sensorless vector controlled induction motor drive for water pumping system. For the purpose of harnessing maximum possible power from solar PV array, a DC-DC converter is used. The soft starting of the motor is achieved to mitigate switching stress of the converter and then the maximum power is tracked using a well-known perturb and observe (P & O) control algorithm. With all due virtues associated with the induction motor in terms of the load characteristics, it is inferred that this motor is best suited to drive a water pump having nonlinear torque-speed characteristic and it is observed that the performance is even better than the DC motor. The desired configuration is designed and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink platform and the design and control of the system are validated through demonstration of simulation results.
Time, Attitude, and User Participation: How Prior Events Determine User Attitudes in ERP Implementation

Assimilation of a standard ERP system to an organization is difficult. User involvement seems to be the crux of the matter. However, even the best intentions for user involvement may come to nothing. A case study of a five-year ERP implementation process reveals that a main reason may be that the perception of usefulness of the system in any given phase of the implementation is heavily dependent on preceding eventsâ€”the process. A process model analysis identifies eight episodes and nine encounters in the case showing that the userâ€™s attitude towards the ERP system changes between acceptance, equivocation, resistance and rejection depending on three things: (1) the dynamic between user and consultants, (2) the dynamic between different user groups, and (3) the understanding of technical, organizational and socio-technical options. When relating the empirical findings to existing theory on user participation, it is argued that the changes could be explained as a slide from influential user participation toward pseudo participation and back to influential participation, and that user participation in the context of ERP implementations raises new issues regarding user participation. Thus further research regarding new approaches and/or new techniques and tools for user participation in the context of ERP implementations is needed.
Convolutional over Recurrent Encoder for Neural Machine Translation

Abstract Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach which has shown competitive results to traditional MT approaches. Standard neural MT is an end-to-end neural network where the source sentence is encoded by a recurrent neural network (RNN) called encoder and the target words are predicted using another RNN known as decoder. Recently, various models have been proposed which replace the RNN encoder with a convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, we propose to augment the standard RNN encoder in NMT with additional convolutional layers in order to capture wider context in the encoder output. Experiments on English to German translation demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant improvements over a standard RNN-based baseline.
Retirement Shares Plan: A New Model of Risk Sharing

Investment risk and longevity risk are borne by the plan sponsor in a defined benefit (DB) plan or by the plan participant in a defined contribution (DC) plan. By contrast, our proposed Retirement Shares Plan (RSP) allocates the longevity risk to the plan sponsor and investment risk to the plan participant. The RSP allows the participant sufficient control over the investment risk to tailor that risk to his specific circumstances. This allocation of risk provides predictable and stable cost to the plan sponsor with little chance of unfunded liabilities. The retiree receives lifetime income and potential inflation protection.
Mobile Banking Adoption in Ivory Coast: A Cultural Perspective Impeding its Expansion

This research paper aims to analyze cultural factors impacting mobile banking adoption in certain countries. To scrutinize the presumption, we have narrowed our study to a developing country, Ivory Coast, which has been trying to develop mobile banking for the past few years. The high potential of the country in terms of technological innovations to improve people's lives and the slow adoption tendency of mobile banking in general prompted the need to investigate the cultural factors that affect mobile banking adoption. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, e-wallet, cost of use and trust are considered. E-wallet and perceived usefulness are expected to be the most compelling elements revealing the slow track of mobile banking adoption.
Similarity of Protein-RNA Interfaces Based on Motif Analysis

We have developed a method for determination of the similarity of pairs of protein-RNA complexes, which we refer to as SIMA (Similarity by Identity and Motif Alignment). The key element in the SIMA method is the description of the protein-RNA interface in terms of motifs (salt bridges, aromatic stacking interactions, nonaromatic stacks, hydrophobic interactions, and hydrogen-bonded motifs), in addition to single hydrogen bonds and van der Waals contacts. Based on a pairwise scoring function combining motif alignment with identity of the protein and RNA sequences, we define a SIMA score for any pair of protein-RNA complexes. A positive score indicates similarity between the complexes. We used the SIMA method to identify 284 nonredundant binary protein-RNA complexes out of 776 such complexes in 382 nonribosomal protein-RNA structure files obtained from the RCSB database. SIMA allows rapid and quantitative comparison of protein-RNA interfaces and may be useful for interface classification with potential functional and evolutionary implications.
Development of a novel helicase assay using electrochemiluminescence.

DNA helicases are ubiquitous enzymes involved in DNA replication, recombination, and repair. These enzymes use the energy of ATP to unwind duplex DNA. A common approach to measure DNA helicase activity utilizes electrophoresis to visualize product formation in a gel. The present study develops a rapid helicase assay based on electrochemiluminescence. The assay is adaptable to rapid high-throughput screening for chemical inhibitors. The assay is applied to Escherichia coli DnaB. Three other technologies have also been applied to DnaB and are compared to results of the electrochemiluminescence-based assay.
The Role of Compensatory Beliefs and Self-efficacy on Treatment Adherence in Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes

Many adolescents suffering from type 1 diabetes have difficulty following the strict demands of their treatment, which can lead to serious health complications. Previous research has shown that self-efficacy, or the conviction that one can achieve a certain goal, has a positive effect on adherence to treatment. We propose that compensatory beliefs (CBs) also have a significant impact on the adherence to treatment which explains why diabetic teenagers fail to fully adhere to their proposed treatment. In a sample of 115 diabetic adolescents, inaccurate compensatory beliefs significantly correlated with poor glycemic control, self-reported blood-sugar monitoring and diet. However, self-efficacy did not significantly correlate with CB levels and accurate compensatory beliefs were not significantly linked of many of the measures of treatment adherence.
Jointly Learning to Locate and Classify Words Using Convolutional Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for weaklysupervised word recognition. Most state of the art automatic speech recognition systems are based on frame-level labels obtained through forced alignments or through a sequential loss. Recently, weakly-supervised trained models have been proposed in vision, that can learn which part of the input is relevant for classifying a given pattern [1]. Our system is composed of a convolutional neural network and a temporal score aggregation mechanism. For each sentence, it is trained using as supervision only some of the words (most frequent) that are present in a given sentence, without knowing their order nor quantity. We show that our proposed system is able to jointly classify and localize words. We also evaluate the system on a keyword spotting task, and show that it can yield similar performance to strong supervised HMM/GMM baseline.
A novel roller bearing fault diagnosis method based on the wavelet extreme learning machine

The safety and reliability of roller bearing always have significant importance in rotating machinery. It is needful to build an efficient and excellent accuracy method to monitoring and diagnosis the baring failure. A novel method is presented in this paper to classify the fault feature by wavelet function and extreme learning machine(ELM) that take into account the high accuracy and efficient. The morlet wavelet function was constructed as the activation function of ELM neural nodes. In order to construct the best wavelet basis function. The minimum Shannon entropy and SVD methods are used to select the optimal shape factor and scale parameter for the morlet wavelet, respectively. The proposed method is applied to practical classification and fault diagnosis of roller bearing. The result show that the proposed method is more reliable and suitable than conventional neural networks and other ELM methods for the defect diagnosis of roller bearing.
The Effects of Point Accumulation Effort Level on Redemption Behavior in Loyalty Program

기존의 로열티 프로그램의 소진행동에 관한 실증 연구들은 주로 쿠폰 사용률(Smith and Sparks 2009; Reibstein and Traver 1982)에만 초점을 맞추었고, 실제 소비자들의 포인트 소진행동에 대한 연구들은 매우 미흡한 상황 (Taylor and Neslin 2005; Liu 2009)이다. 이러한 한계점에 대해서 Benavent et al. (2000) 은 대부분 로열티 프로그램 연구는 실험이나 설문조사를 통해 실제 소비자 행동이 아닌 가입 의향과 같은 행동의 도 변수들 측정에만 그치고 있어서, 실제로 소비자들이 어떻게 행동을 했는지에 대한 데이터 분석을 통한 행동연 구의 필요성을 주장하였다. 본 연구는 로열티 프로그램 가입자들의 거래 행동 데이터를 이용하여, 소비자의 실제 행동을 분석한 최초의 연 구라는 점에서 그 의의가 있다고 볼 수 있다. 특히 기존에 연구된 노력수준을 구매빈도로만 국한하여 본 것이 아 닌 좀 더 실질적이고 구체적인 적립방법 측면에서의 노력수준을 알아보았으며, 소비자들의 포인트 적립과 소진하 는 날짜를 계산하여 속도개념을 도입하였다는데 그 의의가 크다고 볼 수 있다. 로그 선형 회귀분석 결과 소비자의 노력과 보상물에 대한 할인의 정도가 노력과 보상물 간에 다르게 영향을 미 치게 되어, 오히려 노력을 더 들일수록 소진속도를 늦추어 천천히 포인트를 소진하게 됨을 검증하였고, 평균 소 진 금액은 더욱 커짐을 확인할 수 있었다. 또한, 본 연구는 데이터가 특정 지역에 몰려있는 현상으로 인한 문제 점을 보완하기 위해 국소가중회귀분석(Locally Weighted Regression)(Cleveland 1979)을 도입하여 가설의 방향성은 유지되면서도 적합도를 향상 시키는 등 방법론적으로도 의미 있는 분석방법을 제시하였다. 한편 마케팅 실무자에게 다음과 같은 시사점을 제공할 수 있다. 로열티 프로그램 설계에 있어서 소비자들이 어떻 게 포인트를 적립하는지가 소비자의 포인트 사용 행동에 영향을 미칠 수 있음을 알아본 연구로, 향후 로열티 프로그 램 설계 시 실무자들이 어떻게 효율적으로 프로그램을 디자인할 지에 대한 방향성을 제시한 연구라고 할 수 있다.
Diffraction limited amplification of picosecond pulses at 1.55 μm wavelength to 14 kW peak power in a single stage core-pumped Er fiber amplifier

Amplification by > 30 dB of ~ 6 ps, 70 pJ pulses at 1.55 mum wavelength in a core pumped single stage fiber amplifier consisting of a record 875 mum2 effective area Erbium fiber generates record peak powers > 14 kW with M2 ~ 1.1.
The active species of 'CO2' utilized by reduced ferredoxin:CO2 oxidoreductase from Clostridium pasteurianum.

Reduced ferredoxin:CO2 oxidoreductase (CO2 reductase) from Clostridium pasteurianum catalyzes the reduction of 'CO2' to formate with reduced ferredoxin, an isotopic exchange between 'CO2' and formate in the absence of ferredoxin, and the oxidation of formate to 'CO2' with oxidized ferredoxin. The active species of 'CO2', i.e. CO2 or HCO3 (H2CO3), utilized by the enzyme was determined. The method employed for the species identification was that of Copper et al. (1968). Both 'CO2' reduction to formate and the exchange reaction were studied. Data were obtained which are compatible with those expected if CO2 is the active species. The V and the dissociation constant Ks of the enzyme - CO2 complex in dependence of pH were determined from initial velocity studies of the exchange reaction. V was found to be only slightly affected by pH between 5.5 and 7.5. Ks was markedly dependent on pH; the constant increased with decreasing pH from 0.2 mM at pH 7.5 to 3 mM at pH 5.5.
[Validity, cost and feasibility of the mAECT and CTC confirmation tests after diagnosis of African of sleeping sickness].

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the validity, cost and feasibility of two parasitological tests for the confirmation of Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT): the mini Anion-exchange Centrifugation Technique (mAECT) and Capillary Tube Centrifugation (CTC). METHODS During a sleeping sickness screening campaign in 2004 we screened 6502 people in Kwamouth, DRC. Those with a positive result in the Card Agglutination Test for Trypanosomiasis (CATT) had a gland puncture, fresh blood examination, stained thick blood film, mAECT, CTC and CATT titration. Sensitivity and specificity of the confirmation tests were calculated using the combination of all parasitological tests as a reference standard. Each method was costed and its feasibility was assessed with structured interviews of the technicians. RESULTS Sensitivity of classical parasitological methods was 44.8% (36.8-53.0), of CTC 56.5% (48.3-64.5) and of mAECT 75.3% (95% CI: 67.7-81.9). Cost per test was 2.82 Euro for mAECT and 0.76 Euro for CTC. Time per test was 29.78 min for mAECT and 18.25 min for CTC. These two tests were judged feasible in field conditions. CONCLUSION CTC and mAECT used alone or in combination would bring a considerable improvement to HAT active case finding when used as confirmation tests in CATT-whole blood-positive persons. They proved feasible in operational conditions if a 220 V power supply can be guaranteed. As mAECT is more sensitive but also considerably more expensive, efficiency as well as feasibility considerations will have to guide the choice of the best algorithm.
Marketing's Decision Influence within the Firm

This study explores the widely reported decline in marketing department decision influence. A series of field interviews were used to develop a conceptual model of marketing department influence, which was empirically tested using an online survey. Unlike many previous studies, the researchers used a sample frame of finance professionals to avoid possible self-reporting bias from marketing professionals. Furthermore, the researchers use Australian based organizations to assist in extending the research beyond North America and Europe. This study found a positive relationship between marketing accountability and marketing influence, with marketing functions that are able to demonstrate a link between their marketing activities and organizational outcomes having higher levels of marketing decision influence within organizations. The results also suggest a positive relationship between marketing department decision influence and organizational performance, reinforcing the need for organizations to develop marketing departments with high levels of decision influence. This study also found Australian organizations to have levels of marketing influence lower than European and North American organizations for marketing issues but higher levels of influence on strategic issues such as strategic business direction, entry into new geographic markets and new product development.
Compulsory Maintenance Treatment Program Amongst Iranian Injection Drug Users and Its Side Effects

Background: Psychoactive substance use can cause a broad variety of mental health disorders and social health problems for the drug users, their family and society. Objectives: The Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education of Iran has recently proclaimed an estimated number of 2 million drug abusers and 200,000 injecting drug users (IDUs). Patients and Methods: For data collection, the directory of mental, social health, and Addiction designed a questionnaire in cooperation with Drug Control Headquarters of Iran. Results: Among 402 IDUs patients, a large amount of them were male, single, and younger than 39 years. Regarding psychotic and somatic symptoms caused by methadone therapy, most of the participants had no problem with methadone maintenance treatment (MMT). Conclusions: There is a need to train health staff, and the community, concerning preventive measures, treatment, and reducing harm for substance drug users.
Fiscal Austerity and Innovation in Local Governance in Europe

In 2007, when the consequences of the financial breakdown where barely visible, no one could foresee the consequences of those economic turmoils for the European Union (EU). Even today the full effects of the crisis remain unclear and comprehensive analysis are hardly feasible. Specific empirical research on a smaller scale such as regional studies are hence extremely important. The political scientists Carlos Nunes Silva and Jan Bucek have edited the volume Fiscal Austerity and innovation in local Governance in Europe in order to provide such an empiric compilation. This article provides a review of the edited volume. After sketching the foundations of European regional politics and discussing the central aspects of Europe's regional agenda, the book's content is critically revised and discussed. The disciplinary array of the volume's articles ranges from urban studies, policy analysis and regional studies to jurisprudential articles. While a critical revision is at the core of the review, the content of each chapter is only briefly presented. The value of the reviewed volume lies in its rich, topical and informing content, but the lack of analytic sharpness of the framing chapters made a critical discussion of the volume necessary. While the editors of the volume suggest that the crisis has deeply impacted European politics and somehow transformed its core values, they are not concerned enough about the quality of this transformation. The emergence of anti-libertarian, socially regressive and politically narrowing policy agendas remain notes in the margin. While those weaknesses may create a wrong impression about the effects of the European crisis, a critical revision of the volume fosters new insights on the subject matter and elucidates new starting-points for further research. From this perspective the volume provides a rich content of diverse articles, which enable further examination of the subject. This article provides the reader with several approaches towards regional policies in the EU.
Advances in Brief p 53 , CHK 2 , and CHK 1 Genes in Finnish Families with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome : Further Evidence of CHK 2 in Inherited Cancer Predisposition 1

Germ-line mutations in the p53 gene predispose individuals to LiFraumeni syndrome (LFS). The cell cycle checkpoint kinases CHK1 and CHK2 act upstream of p53 in DNA damage responses, and recently rare germ-line mutations in CHK2 were reported in LFS families. We have analyzedCHK1, CHK2, andp53genes for mutations in 44 Finnish families with LFS, Li-Fraumeni-like syndrome, or families phenotypically suggestive of LFS with conformation-sensitive gel electrophoresis. Five different disease-causing mutations were observed in 7 families (7 of 44 families; 15.9%): 4 in the p53gene (5 of 44 families; 11.4%) and 1 in theCHK2 gene (2 of 44 families; 4.5%). Interestingly, the otherCHK2-mutation carrier also has a mutation in the MSH6 gene. The cancer phenotype in the CHK2-families was not characteristic of LFS, and may indicate variable phenotypic expression in the rare families with CHK2 mutations. No mutations in the CHK1 gene were identified. Additional work is necessary to completely unravel the molecular background of LFS.
Real-Time Semantic Segmentation Benchmarking Framework

Semantic segmentation has major benefits in autonomous driving and robotics related applications, where scene understanding is a necessity. Most of the research on semantic segmentation is focused on increasing the accuracy of segmentation models with few research on real-time performance. The few work conducted in this direction does not also provide principled methods to evaluate the different design choices for segmentation. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting the first real-time semantic segmentation benchmarking framework 2. The framework is comprised of different network architectures for feature extraction such as VGG16, MobileNet, and ResNet-18. It is also comprised of multiple metaarchitectures for segmentation that define the decoding methodology. These include Skip architecture, UNet, and Dilation Frontend. Experimental results on cityscapes with a case study using MobileNet architecture and two meta-architectures are presented.
Multistage principal component analysis based method for abdominal ECG decomposition

Reflection of fetal heart electrical activity is present in registered abdominal ECG signals. However this signal component has noticeably less energy than concurrent signals, especially maternal ECG. Therefore traditionally recommended independent component analysis, fails to separate these two ECG signals. Multistage principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed for step-by-step extraction of abdominal ECG signal components. Truncated representation and subsequent subtraction of cardio cycles of maternal ECG are the first steps. The energy of fetal ECG component then becomes comparable or even exceeds energy of other components in the remaining signal. Second stage PCA concentrates energy of the sought signal in one principal component assuring its maximal amplitude regardless to the orientation of the fetus in multilead recordings. Third stage PCA is performed on signal excerpts representing detected fetal heart beats in aim to perform their truncated representation reconstructing their shape for further analysis. The algorithm was tested with PhysioNet Challenge 2013 signals and signals recorded in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences. Results of our method in PhysioNet Challenge 2013 on open data set were: average score: 341.503 bpm2 and 32.81 ms.