Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANTIBIOTIC SUSCEPTIBILITY TESTING OF SOME PREVOTELLA STRAINS ISOLATED FROM VESTIBULAR ABSCESSES

The aim of this study was to investigate in vitro the antibiotic susceptibility of 53 strains of Prevotella isolated from vestibular abscesses. The E-test was used for determining the minimum inhibitory concentrations for: benzylpenicillin, ampicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, clindamycin and metronidazole. In addition to this, the beta-lactamase production was detected by the chromogenic cephalosporin test. Most of the strains were susceptible to the tested antibiotics. Twelve strains were resistant to benzylpenicillin and ampicillin due to the production of beta-lactamase. A single isolate of P. buccae presented also resistance to clindamycin. In conclusion, the results of this study recommend the prescription of metronidazole or clindamycin in infections caused by these microorganisms. In case of oral and maxillofacial infections (which are mainly mixed infections), when antimicrobial treatment is necessary but it is done empirically, it might be proper to choose an antibiotic active against beta-lactamase producing bacteria too, such as an association of a penicillin with a beta-lactamase inhibitor.
ERCD: An energy-efficient clone detection protocol in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play an increasing role in a wide variety of applications ranging from hostile environment monitoring to telemedicine services. The hardware and cost constraints of sensor nodes, however, make sensors prone to clone attacks and pose great challenges in the design and deployment of an energy-efficient WSN. In this paper, we propose a location-aware clone detection protocol, which guarantees successful clone attack detection and has little negative impact on the network lifetime. Specifically, we utilize the location information of sensors and randomly select witness nodes located in a ring area to verify the privacy of sensors and to detect clone attacks. The ring structure facilitates energy efficient data forwarding along the path towards the witnesses and the sink, and the traffic load is distributed across the network, which improves the network lifetime significantly. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can approach 100% clone detection probability with trustful witnesses. We further extend the work by studying the clone detection performance with untrustful witnesses and show that the clone detection probability still approaches 98% when 10% of witnesses are compromised. Moreover, our proposed protocol can significantly improve the network lifetime, compared with the existing approach.
Pricing Stock Options in a Jump‐Diffusion Model with Stochastic Volatility and Interest Rates: Applications of Fourier Inversion Methods

Fast closed form solutions for prices on European stock options are developed in a jump‐diffusion model with stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rates. The probability functions in the solutions are computed by using the Fourier inversion formula for distribution functions. The model is calibrated for the S and P 500 and is used to analyze several effects on option prices, including interest rate variability, the negative correlation between stock returns and volatility, and the negative correlation between stock returns and interest rates.
Development of an antifungal denture adhesive film for oral candidiasis utilizing hot melt extrusion technology

Objectives: The overall goal of this research was to produce a stable hot-melt extruded ‘Antifungal Denture Adhesive film’ (ADA) system for the treatment of oral candidiasis. Methods: The ADA systems with hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) and/or polyethylene oxide (PEO) containing clotrimazole (10%) or nystatin (10%) were extruded utilizing a lab scale twin-screw hot-melt extruder. Rolls of the antifungal-containing films were collected and subsequently die-cut into shapes adapted for a maxillary (upper) and mandibular (lower) denture. Results: Differential scanning calorimeter and powder X-ray diffraction results indicated that the crystallinity of both APIs was changed to amorphous phase after hot-melt extrusion. The ADA system, containing blends of HPC and PEO, enhanced the effectiveness of the antimicrobials a maximum of fivefold toward the inhibition of cell adherence of Candida albicans to mammalian cells/Vero cells. Remarkably, a combination of the two polymers without drug also demonstrated a 38% decrease in cell adhesion to the fungi due to the viscosity and the flexibility of the polymers. Drug-release profiles indicated that both drug concentrations were above the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) for C. albicans within 10 min and was maintained for over 10 h. In addition, based on the IC50 and MIC values, it was observed that the antifungal activities of both drugs were increased significantly in the ADA systems. Conclusions: Based on these findings, the ADA system may be used for primary, prophylaxis or adjunct treatment of oral or pharyngeal candidiasis via controlled release of the antifungal agent from the polymer matrix.
International Business Information: How to Find It, How to Use It

This newly updated and expanded edition of a reference bestseller is the only work available that guides business researchers and librarians to the most valuable sources for information on international business--and shows how to interpret and use that data. The authors discuss the best available resources and how to use them to find answers to a wide range of questions about international business. They also describe business practices in various regions and countries, the basics of international trade and finance, international business organizations, and relevant political departments and agencies. Many exhibits and tables are included, and the book's appendices include glossaries, checklists for evaluating sources, and sample disclosure documents.
Crowd and group animation

A continuous challenge for special effects in movies is the production of realistic virtual crowds, in terms of rendering and behavior. This course will present state-of-the-art techniques and methods. The course will explain in details the different approaches to create virtual crowds: particle systems with flocking techniques using attraction and repulsion forces, copy and pasting techniques, agent-based methods. The architecture of software tools will be presented including the MASSIVE software used for the Lord of the Ring trilogy, and the software used for the production of human and animal crowds in MADAGASCAR. The course will explore essential aspects to the generation of virtual crowds. In particular, it will present the aspects concerning information (intentions, status and knowledge), behavior (innate, group, complex and guided) and control (programmed, autonomous and guided). It will emphasize essential concepts like sensory input (vision, audition, tactile), versatile motion control, artificial intelligence level, and rendering techniques. The course will also presents the new challenge in the production of realtime crowds for games, VR systems for training and simulation and crowds in Augmented Reality applications for cultural Heritage (like adding virtual audience in Roma or Greek theaters). The course will be illustrated with a lot of examples from recent movies (Lord of the Ring, Shrek2, Madagascar) and real-time applications in Emergency situations and Cultural Heritage. Daniel Thalmann is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans and co-director of a synthetic Marilyn shown on numerous TV channels all over the world. His current research interests include Autonomous Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality and real-time crowds. He is coeditor-in-chief of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds (formerly Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation), and member of the editorial board of 4 journals. He was Program Chair of several conferences including IEEE VR 2000. He has also organized 6 courses at SIGGRAPH on human and crowd animation. Daniel Thalmann is member of the Stearing Committee of the Symposium on Computer Animation. He has published more than 400 papers and 10 books and is also coeditor of 30 books. He received an Honorary Doctorate from University Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003. Trained as a graphic designer, Regelous became interested in computer animation in the mid 1980's. He taught himself how to program and generated works using L-Systems, muscle based facial animation, procedural modeling, and particle animation. After working on television commercials from 1991 through 1995 Regelous joined Weta to work as a …
The Unwanted Effects of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Adoption on International Trade and Investments in Developing Countries

The year 2010 witnessed two major business phenomena in the world. First, an unprecedented degree of consensus among more than 120 countries to require or permit the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in their jurisdictions and; second, for the first time in history Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in developing countries reached a half of global investment inflows that are expected to lift up to over $2 trillion in 2012. When the International Organization of Securities Exchange Commissions (IOSCO) ratified International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in 2002, FDI inflows started to grow from $'36 trillion to $1 trillion in 2005. Furthermore, when the European Union (EU) required its member to use IFRS in 2005, FDI inflows has doubled and reached its peak in 2007 at more than $2 trillion. The global trade also experienced the same increasing trend. Assuming that adopting IFRS promotes higher comparability and transparency of accounting information, the bigger question is does adopting IFRS affect countries’ FDI inflows and values of international trade? To answer this question, we examine the effects of IFRS adoption on international trade and FDI inflows in developing countries. After controlling for generally accepted determinants of FDI inflows and international trade, we find a contradictory fact that developing countries adopting IFRS are unlikely to experience higher FDI inflows and international trade.
E‐recruitment creates order out of chaos at SAT Telecom

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the reasons for, and success of, e‐recruitment at SAT Telecom, India.Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses on the problems that SAT Telecom was facing with its traditional recruitment methods, why it chose the SAP e‐recruitment system and some of the lessons learned.Findings – The paper reveals that savings of around 44 percent on recruitment costs have been identified. There is now less reliance on recruitment consultants and search agents. The average time to fill vacancies has fallen from 70 to 37 days. The cost per hire has dropped.Practical implications – The paper reports that SAT Telecom believes that it has covered the cost of its investment in e‐recruitment software in less than a year.Social implications – The paper claims that the e‐recruitment system could help SAT Telecom to recruit a more diverse workforce.Originality/value – The paper highlights practical steps that companies can take to ensure the success of an e‐recruitment system.
State-Level Institutional Pressure, Firms' Organizational Attributes, and Corporate Voluntary Environmental Behavior

Using a neoinstitutional theory, this study examines how state-level institutional pressure influences firms’ decisions to participate in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Energy Star for Buildings (ESBs) program. In this program, firms voluntarily commit to optimizing energy use in their buildings. We also investigate how participation is influenced by organizational attributes of firms that influence potential economic returns from ESBs participation. Our binary probit analysis shows that the influence of state-level institutional pressure on participation in the ESBs program is weak relative to that of firms’ organizational attributes. Our empirical findings suggest that a firm's decision to participate in the ESBs program is more likely to be driven by economic calculations, such as potential return on investment, than by an effort to relieve institutional pressure exerted by state institutional actors.
The Logic of Scarcity: Idle Spectrum as a First Amendment Violation

The Supreme Court has distinguished the regulation of radio spectrum from the regulation of printing presses, and applied more lenient scrutiny to the regulation of spectrum, based on its conclusion that the spectrum is unusually scarce. The Court has never confronted an allegation that government actions resulted in unused or underused spectrum, but there is good reason to believe that such government-created idle spectrum exists. Government limits on the number of printing presses almost assuredly would be subject to heightened scrutiny and would not survive such scrutiny. This article addresses the question whether the scarcity rationale - or any other reasoning - supports distinguishing spectrum from print such that government actions constricting the supply of spectrum would pass muster. I argue that the scarcity rationale does not support, and instead undercuts, government actions that limit the use of the spectrum. Government decisions that exacerbate the problems that gave rise to government regulation in the first place subvert the entire justification for lenient review. And no other rationale would distinguish spectrum from print in a way that would support government constraints on the former but not the latter. Commentators have not attended to this question of the constitutional status of idle spectrum, perhaps assuming that National Broadcasting Co. v. United States and Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC effectively held that all regulation of spectrum is subject to lenient scrutiny. But the cases did not purport to extend so broadly, and there is good reason to conclude that their lenient review would not apply to government actions reducing the availability of spectrum. The appropriate review, I contend, is the intermediate scrutiny ordinarily applied to content-neutral speech regulation. In order to satisfy such scrutiny, the government must put forward an important or substantial government interest. I suggest that in most cases the only interest that would justify a refusal to allocate spectrum is nontrivial interference. I thus conclude that, even if one accepts the current state of the doctrine, the government cannot exclude non-interfering uses from the spectrum.
Calculating marginal effects in dichotomous - continuous models

In many economic settings, individual decisions can be viewed as a sequential process where a dichotomous choice is followed by a continuous choice. These processes are frequently encountered in consumption demand studies, where the decision of whether or not to consume a particular commodity is followed by the choice of how much to consume. The Heckman two-step approach has been extensively used in estimating these models. Expressions are derived for calculating marginal effects of regressors in dichotomous-continuous models. It is proposed that the marginal effect expressions are incomplete in almost all consumption demand studies that use the Heckman approach. In dichotomous-continuous models, a change in an explanatory variable that is common to both stages of the decision process has two effects: (1) it affects the likelihood of whether the commodity will be consumed; and (2) if the commodity is consumed, it affects the expenditure on that commodity. The first effect has so far been omitted from applied demand studies. The correct marginal effect expressions are derived for single-commodity and multiple-commodity demand models. An application to consumption survey data on 12 food commodities shows that erroneous marginal effect expressions can introduce substantial bias in demand elasticity estimates.
N-[3a-(4-Bromophenyl)-8b-hydroxy-6,8-dimethoxy-3-phenyl-2,3,3a,8b-tetrahydro-1H-cyclopenta[b]benzofuran-1-yl]formamide monohydrate

In the title compound, C26H24BrNO5·H2O, a synthetic analogue of natural flavagline, the cyclopentane ring adopts an envelope conformation (the flap atom bearing the phenyl group) and the vicinal phenyl and bromophenyl groups are slightly shifted relative to each other [CPh—C—C—CPhBr = 36.3 (2)°]. Intramolecular N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds form S(5) motifs. In the crystal, the organic and the water molecules are linked by an O—H⋯O hydrogen bond. Pairs of organic and water molecules, located about inversion centers, interact through O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming R 4 4(20) and R 4 4(26) motifs, which together lead to C 2 2(9) motifs. The crystal packing is also characterized by N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between neighbouring organic molecules, forming R 2 2(10) and R 2 2(18) motifs, respectively.
Dynamic versus static control policies in single stage production-inventory systems

In this paper, two approaches of production-inventory control are considered: the future requirements-based approach and the inventory consumption-based approach. We focus on a single-stage and single-item inventory system under non-stationary demand, information about which is provided by means of forecasts. Forecasts and forecast uncertainties are assumed to be exogenous data known in advance at each period over a forecasting horizon. Three forecast-based dynamic inventory control policies are analysed. These dynamic policies are extensions of the standard static re-order point and order-up-to-level policies that have been developed under the stationary demand assumption. The policies’ parameters are derived by using a sequential optimization procedure. A numerical investigation is conducted based on theoretical generated data; the results demonstrate the benefit of using the dynamic policies when compared with the static ones. Connections between the analysed policies are also highlighted.
Maintaining a social-emotional intervention and its benefits for institutionalized children.

This article reports the maintenance of one of the largest interventions conducted in St. Petersburg (Russian Federation) orphanages for children birth to 4 years using regular caregiving staff. One orphanage received training plus structural changes, another training only, and a third business as usual. The intervention produced substantial differences between these institutions on the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory and on the Battelle Developmental Inventory scores for children. These institutional differences in HOME scores (N = 298) and Battelle scores for children (N = 357) departing the institutions for families in St. Petersburg and the United States were maintained for at least 6 years after the intervention project. This result may be associated with certain features of the intervention and activities conducted during the follow-up interval.
The Performance of Chicago Board of Trade Corn, Soybean, and Wheat Futures Contracts after Recent Changes in Speculative Limits

Three attributes of futures contract behavior important for market performance liquidity, volatility, and convergence are investigated before and after the 2005 increase in speculative position limits for corn, soybean, and wheat contracts at the Chicago Board of Trade. The analysis of liquidity and market depth reveals a sharp increase in open interest for corn, soybeans and wheat beginning in late 2005. The increase in position limits likely accommodated the increase in speculative interest in corn, soybean and wheat futures, but some of the increase would have occurred without the increase as new market participants received hedge exemptions. The analysis of price volatility revealed no large change in measures of volatility after the change in speculative limits. For corn and soybeans, the picture that unfolds relative to convergence patterns is one of weakness, but not failure. For wheat, the picture that unfolds relative to convergence patterns is not only one of weakness, but failure to accomplish one of the fundamental tasks of a futures market. The persistence and growing magnitude of the delivery location basis in wheat suggests a problem with the contract specifications.
Interference of bovine herpesvirus 1 (BHV‐1) in sorbitol‐Induced apoptosis

In order to determine the ability of bovine herpesvirus type 1 (BHV‐1) to suppress apoptosis, we examined the effects of BHV‐1 infection on sorbitol‐induced apoptosis on Madin–Darby bovine kidney (MDBK) cells. BHV‐1 suppresses sorbitol‐induced apoptosis in a manner similar to that of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV‐1), indicating that BHV‐1 has one or more anti‐apoptotic genes. To elucidate the molecular mechanisms of apoptosis, expression of some genes encoding apoptosis‐inhibiting and ‐promoting factors were analyzed on BHV‐1 infected cells during the process of sorbitol‐induced apoptosis. Our results revealed that the expression of bcl‐2 and bcl‐xL decreased after 5 and 3 h p.i. , respectively; while bax and procaspase‐3 expression increased with respect to control as a function of p.i. times and at 7 h p.i. they were not observed. We further show that the expression of p53 gene was also enhanced, suggesting that this apoptotic mechanism is p53 dependent. From these results, we propose that BHV‐1 has one or more genes encoding apoptosis‐inhibiting factors which interfere with the involvement of bcl‐2 gene family members and apoptotic pathway, depending upon caspase‐3, triggered by sorbitol. J. Cell. Biochem. 89: 373–380, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Building a test collection for complex document information processing

Research and development of information access technology for scanned paper documents has been hampered by the lack of public test collections of realistic scope and complexity. As part of a project to create a prototype system for search and mining of masses of document images, we are assembling a 1.5 terabyte dataset to support evaluation of both end-to-end complex document information processing (CDIP) tasks (e.g., text retrieval and data mining) as well as component technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR), document structure analysis, signature matching, and authorship attribution.
Hiring Difficulties and Manpower Flows: Does Labour Market Density Matter?

We analyse the impact of density on labour markets when firms and workers are heterogeneous. Using the results of a survey carried out in the French Midi-Pyrénées region, we show that, for comparable sizes and sectors, recruiting firms in low-density areas experience more difficulties in finding workers meeting the requirements of the jobs, especially since being usually located far away from large urban agglomerations, they appear to hold little attractiveness for potential migrants. As a consequence, they recruit less and the competition between firms on the local labour market is reduced. This, in turn, contributes to lessen the hiring difficulties for firms that do post vacancies in low-density areas. The labour market density therefore has opposite effects on the causes of hiring difficulties, but we show that its overall impact on the frequency of those difficulties for firms which hire is negative. Finally, because they are less likely to find a better match than their current job, employees living in low-density local labour markets have a lower tendency to resign than other workers do. As a consequence, turnover increases density.