Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Construction of a promoter-probe vector for a Bacillus subtilis host by using the trpD+ gene of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens

The trp gene cluster of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens was found to be structurally similar to that of the Enterobacteriaceae. The translation termination codon of the putative trpE gene and the initiation codon for the putative trpD gene overlap at the trpE-trpD junction, and a promoter for the putative trpC gene is suggested to exist. A promoter-probe vector of Bacillus subtilis, pFTB281, was constructed with a DNA fragment of B. amyloliquefaciens, complementing the trpC and trpD mutations of B. subtilis, a 42-base-pair DNA fragment of M13mp7, and the larger EcoRI-PvuII fragment of pUB110, which confers an autonomous replication function and the kanamycin-resistance phenotype to the chimeric plasmid. pFTB281 has BamHI, EcoRI, and SalI cloning sites in the 5'-upstream portion of the protein-coding region of the putative trpD gene, and the insertion of a certain DNA fragment at any of these sites allowed the plasmid to transform a trpD mutant of B. subtilis to the TrpD+ phenotype. DNA fragments showing the promoter function for the trpD gene were obtained from B. amyloliquefaciens and Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosomes and rho 11 and lambda phage DNAs, but rarely from the DNAs of Escherichia coli and pBR322.
Backyard Poultry Farming changing the face of rural and tribal livelihoods

Vanaraja and Gramapriya birds are performing well in different climatic conditions across the country. The rural and tribal people are earning a subsidiary income to the family. These chicken varieties are playing a vital role in the livelihoods of the rural and tribal people of India. Based on the quantity of natural food base available, body weight and health of the bird for input and on the basis of productivity and body weight of bird for output, an economic analysis was carried out for 12 and 15 weeks for male birds of Vanaraja and Gramapriya, respectively. The layers are kept for complete laying cycle of 72 weeks. The farmer can earn a net profit of Rs. 32-44/ bird on males and 200-250/bird on female birds in Vanraja and a Rs. 11 and up to 380 per bird in Gramapriya, respectively.
Mass customization: Implementing the emerging paradigm for competitive advantage

In many industries the dominant paradigm, ‘mass production,’ is being challenged by the emerging paradigm, ‘mass customization. ’ Accordingly, many researchers posit that firms which replace ‘mass production’ with ‘mass customization’ will gain a significant competitive advantage. Based on an in‐depth study of the National Bicycle Industrial Company (NBIC), this paper explores the dynamics of pursuing both mass production and mass customization strategies simultaneously. At the operational level, the paper discusses the organizational mechanisms instituted by the NBIC in order to benefit from the simultaneous pursuit of both approaches. At the competitive level, it isolates the relative contributions of both approaches to the overall competitive positioning of this firm in its industry. Based on this discussion, it provides a framework that illustrates the dynamics involved in the pursuit of both approaches. Implicitly, the paper argues that for firms competing in rapidly changing environments the ability to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage depends on the firm's capability to create knowledge by interacting both mass customization and mass production approaches. Finally, the paper concludes with managerial and research implications regarding the emerging paradigm of mass customization.
Does Corporate Social Responsibility Pay Off in Times of Crisis? An Alternate Perspective on the Relationship between Financial and Corporate Social Performance

There are numerous studies analyzing the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and financial performance, and even if recent surveys give the upper hand to a generally positive relationship, this question still gives rise to debate. I have chosen to approach this theme from a different angle in order to provide an alternate perspective on this issue: does CSP play a role during periods of uncertainty? I test this hypothesis of CSP acting as an insurance-like protection on a sample of French listed companies, over several reference periods around the current financial crisis. My findings show a significant positive link between CSP and financial performance for the period corresponding to the beginning of the crisis (second-half of 2007), but in early 2007 and after the first six months of turmoil, there is no longer a significant connection between the two variables. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
The multi-resolution extended edit distance

Similarity search is a fundamental problem in information technology. The main difficulty of this problem is the high dimensionality of the data objects. In large time series databases, it's important to reduce the dimensionality of these data objects, so that we can manage them. Symbolic representation is a promising technique of dimensionality reduction. In this paper we propose a new distance metric, which is applied to symbolic sequential data objects, and we test it on time series databases in classification task experiments. We also compare it to other distances that are well known in the literature for symbolic data objects, and we prove that it's metric.
Feedforward control design for the wave equation with nonlinear boundary conditions modelling a torsional rod

This paper presents a flatness-based approach for the feedforward control design of the wave equation with nonlinear boundary conditions modelling a torsional rod with a tip load. It uses a subdivision of the relevant time-space region based on the characteristic curves of the system as well as the property of formal power series parameterizability of the underlying partial differential equation on the subregions to derive an expression for the nominal input to achieve perfect tracking performance of a prescribed desired output trajectory. Therefore, this contribution proves the applicability of the formal power series approach to second order hyperbolic partial differential equations.
Antecedents to satisfaction with service recovery

Building on disconfirmation theory, equity theory and affect‐balance theory, considers antecedents to satisfaction with service recovery. A theoretical model is proposed and tested empirically based on a cross‐sectional national sample of 201 dissatisfied customers complaining of services. The results suggest that perceived performance of service recovery has an impact on equity. Second, disconfirmation of expectations of service recovery and perceived fairness of outcome of service recovery have an impact on satisfaction with service recovery. Finally, negative affect caused by the initial service failure does not have an impact on satisfaction with service recovery.
Capitulum characters in a seed heteromorphic plant, Crepis sancta (Asteraceae): variance partitioning and inference for the evolution of dispersal rate

In Crepis sancta (Asteraceae), achenes produced in the periphery of the flower head have reduced dispersal ability and are larger than achenes produced in the centre of the head, which disperse farther. The proportion of central achenes produced by a single individual represents the potential dispersal rate of its progeny. Seed variation in dispersal ability may be important where there is spatio-temporal variability of habitats, but its evolutionary significance mainly depends on the heritability of the relative proportions of each achene morph. However, the number of peripheral achenes in a capitulum, and that of involucral bracts are suggested to depend on the number of parastichies, a canalized character. From a diallel cross design, phenotypic variance for several capitulum traits was partitioned among six variance components, including the additive variance. The phenotypic values of some head traits reflected the expected frequency due to ontogeny, in particular the number of involucral bracts. Yet, this character also had a significant heritability, suggesting that variation around the mode of the distribution was not only due to developmental noise. The additive variance for number of peripheral and central achenes was not significantly different from zero. In contrast, their respective proportion had a narrow sense heritability greater than 0.20. The present results suggest that the percentage of central achenes per individual, and thus the potential dispersal rate in Crepis sancta, is under quantitative genetic control, and could undergo microevolutionary changes in natural populations.
Marketing as a form of adaptation: empirical evidence from a developing economy

The paper reports an investigation into the marketing and performance consequences of organisations operating in regulated, deregulated and open market environments in Zimbabwe’s developing economy. The findings suggest that organisations do not respond to environmental changes by adapting their marketing effort, hence the environment is a poor predictor of marketing effort. Organisational strategy has a far greater impact on marketing effort than the environment. However, the environment is an important predictor of organisational performance and has significant interaction with business strategy in influencing organisational performance hence it is a quasi‐moderator. Our result suggests that in regulated environments there may be “ideal‐type” strategies for effectiveness and across all environments the concept of equifinality is not supported. There is evidence to suggest that more adaptable strategy types outperform their less adaptive competitors. These results extend a popular typology to developing economies and allow some findings to be generalisable across countries at different stages of economic development.
On graph-theoretic lemmata and complexity classes

Several new complexity classes of search problems that lie between the classes FP and FNP are defined. These classes are contained in the class TFNP of search problems that always have a solution. A problem in each of these new classes is defined in terms of an implicitly given, exponentially large graph, very much like PLS (polynomial local search). The existence of the solution sought is established by means of a simple graph-theoretic lemma with an inefficiently constructive proof. Several class containments and collapses, resulting in the two new classes PDLF contained in PLF are shown; the relation of either class of PLS is open. PLF contains several important problems for which no polynomial-time algorithm is presently known. <<ETX>>
Sequence Prediction with Neural Segmental Models

Segments that span contiguous parts of inputs, such as phonemes in speech, named entities in sentences, actions in videos, occur frequently in sequence prediction problems. Segmental models, a class of models that explicitly hypothesizes segments, have allowed the exploration of rich segment features for sequence prediction. However, segmental models suffer from slow decoding, hampering the use of computationally expensive features. In this thesis, we introduce discriminative segmental cascades, a multi-pass inference framework that allows us to improve accuracy by adding higher-order features and neural segmental features while maintaining efficiency. We also show that instead of including more features to obtain better accuracy, segmental cascades can be used to speed up training and decoding. Segmental models, similarly to conventional speech recognizers, are typically trained in multiple stages. In the first stage, a frame classifier is trained with manual alignments, and then in the second stage, segmental models are trained with manual alignments and the out- puts of the frame classifier. However, obtaining manual alignments are time-consuming and expensive. We explore end-to-end training for segmental models with various loss functions, and show how end-to-end training with marginal log loss can eliminate the need for detailed manual alignments. We draw the connections between the marginal log loss and a popular end-to-end training approach called connectionist temporal classification. We present a unifying framework for various end-to-end graph search-based models, such as hidden Markov models, connectionist temporal classification, and segmental models. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of segmental models to large-vocabulary sequence prediction tasks.
CRITICAL JUNCTURES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNIVERSITY HIGH-TECH SPINOUT COMPANIES.

This article provides an inductive empirical investigation into how university high-technology spinout companies develop. A university spinout (USO) is defined as a venture founded by employees of the university around a core technological innovation which had initially been developed at the university. Data were collected using in-depth face-to-face and telephone interviews with representatives from the nine USO, as well as each of their financial investors and seven associated universities over the twelve-month period from July 2001 to July 2002. Critical junctures refers to a complex problem that occurs at a point along a new high-technology venture's expansion path preventing it from achieving the transition from one development phase to the next. Critical junctures occur precisely because of the conflict between a USO venture's existing level and type of resources, capabilities and social capital, and those required to perform in the proceeding phase of development. As a result of the idiosyncratic d.
"Passive victim – strong survivor"? Perceived meaning of labels applied to women who were raped

Three experiments (total N = 464) were conducted in parallel with English- and German-speaking participants to examine the perceived meanings and effects of the labels "victim" versus "survivor" (and their German equivalents) when applied to a woman who was raped. In Study 1 (N = 179), participants read a rape vignette and then rated the meaning of the label it contained (either "victim" or "survivor") on a 15-item semantic differential. Independent of language and participant gender, "survivor" was perceived more positively overall (e.g., as strong, brave, active) than was "victim" (weak, passive, but also innocent). In Study 2 (N = 95), labels were varied within items assessing judgments of an acquaintance-rape case (e.g., "Does the victim [survivor] … carry a certain responsibility for what happened? "), focusing on short-term outcomes. Significant interaction effects of label and participants’ gender emerged on case-related judgments. Participants in both language samples judged "survivor" to be a less appropriate term than "victim". In Study 3 (N = 190), participants read a text in which a woman who had been raped labeled herself as either "victim" or "survivor", focusing on the coping with sexual violence. As in Study 2, German-language participants showed no significant effects of the label on their case judgments but rejected the term "survivor" as inappropriate; English-language participants, by contrast, perceived the woman describing herself as "survivor" to be more psychologically stable and regarded the use of both labels as appropriate. Results are discussed in terms of their applied relevance for communicating about sexual violence.
The biosynthesis and biological role of 6‐deoxyheptose in the lipopolysaccharide O‐antigen of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis

Yersinia pseudotuberculosis O:2a harbours 6‐deoxy‐d‐manno‐heptose in its O‐antigen. The biological function of 6‐deoxyheptose and its role in virulence is unknown and its biosynthetic pathway has not been demonstrated experimentally. Here, we show that dmhA and dmhB are necessary for 6‐deoxyheptose biosynthesis in Y. pseudotuberculosis. Their disruption resulted in the lack of 6‐deoxyheptose in the O‐unit and its replacement by d‐glycero‐d‐manno‐heptose, thus indicating relaxed specificity of the glycosyltransferases, polymerase and ligase involved in lipopolysaccharide synthesis. The dmhB mutant exhibited a lower content in ketooctonic acid (Ko)‐containing core molecules and reduced ligation and polymerization of the O‐unit. We also show that Tyr128 is essential for activity of DmhB, and that DmhB functions as an oligomer, based on the dominant negative effect of overexpression of DmhB Y128F in dmhA. Moreover, we demonstrate that 6‐deoxyheptose is important for virulence‐related functions of the outer membrane and its appendages in vitro, such as barrier function against bile salts, polymyxin and novobiocin, and flagella‐mediated motility. Although both mutants colonized the mouse ceacum as well as the wild type, the dmhB mutant was impaired for colonization of the liver, suggesting that DmhB represents a potential therapeutic target.
Fault-tolerant real-time synchronous collaboration environment using WWW

Drastic advancements in the computer industry have brought about today's complicated and various computer technologies. In particular, two can be noticed with respect to the area of the computing environment. One is the technology which has enabled video-conferencing, which handles multimedia data on the Mbone, and the other is the World Wide Web (WWW), which provides an environment in which to easily locate various kinds of information that the user wants. The growing interest in video-conferencing has drawn researchers' attention to real-time synchronous collaboration environments. This paper presents the development of such a synchronous collaboration environment which can deal with multimedia data between multiple users in real time using WWW systems. The developed environment can be characterized by two features: the multiplication of transfer channels which support real-time multimedia data transfer, and fault tolerance. Multiplication of transfer channels amplifies the ability to transfer multimedia data, and fault tolerance gives reliability to users.
The Australian Barrineans and Their Relationship to Southeast Asian Negritos: An Investigation using Mitochondrial Genomics

Abstract The existence of a short-statured Aboriginal population in the Far North Queensland (FNQ) rainforest zone of Australia's northeast coast and Tasmania has long been an enigma in Australian anthropology. Based on their reduced stature and associated morphological traits such as tightly curled hair, Birdsell and Tindale proposed that these “Barrinean” peoples were closely related to “negrito” peoples of Southeast Asia and that their ancestors had been the original Pleistocene settlers of Sahul, eventually displaced by taller invaders. Subsequent craniometric and blood protein studies, however, have suggested an overall homogeneity of indigenous Australians, including Barrineans. To confirm this finding and determine the degree of relatedness between Barrinean people and Southeast Asian negritos, we compared indigenous Australian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences in populations from the FNQ rainforest ecozone and Tasmania with sequences from other Australian Aboriginal populations and from Southeast Asian negrito populations (Philippines Batek and Mamanwa, and mainland Southeast Asian Jahai, Mendriq, and Batak). The results confirm that FNQ and Tasmanian mtDNA haplogroups cluster with those of other Australian Aboriginal populations and are only very distantly related to Southeast Asian negrito haplogroups.
In vitro evaluation of cytotoxicity and corrosion behavior of commercially pure titanium and Ti-6Al-4V alloy for dental implants

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the cytotoxicity in human gingival fibroblast by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay and corrosion behavior by potentiodynamic polarization technique of commercially pure titanium (Ti 12) and its alloy Ti-6Al-4V (Ti 31). Materials and Methods: In the present in vitro study, cytotoxicity of Ti 12 and Ti 31 in human gingival fibroblast by MTT assay and the corrosion behavior by potentiodynamic polarization technique in aqueous solutions of 0.1 N NaCl, 0.1 N KCl, and artificial saliva with and without NaF were studied. Results: The independent t-test within materials and paired t-test with time interval showed higher cell viability for Ti 12 compared to Ti 31. Over a period, cell viability found to stabilize in both Ti 12 and Ti 31. The effects of ions of Ti and alloying elements aluminum and vanadium on the cell viability were found with incubation period of cells on samples to 72 h. The electrochemical behavior of Ti 12 and Ti 31 in different experimental solutions showed a general tendency for the immersion potential to shift steadily toward nobler values indicated formation of TiO2and additional metal oxides. The multiphase alloy Ti-6Al-4V showed more surface pitting. Conclusion: The commercially pure Ti showed better cell viability compared to Ti 31. Less cell viability in Ti 31 is because of the presence of aluminum and vanadium. A significant decrease in cytotoxicity due to the formation of TiO2over a period of time was observed both in Ti 12 and Ti 31. The electrochemical behavior of Ti 12 and Ti 31 in different experimental solutions showed a general tendency for the immersion potential to shift steadily toward nobler values indicated formation of TiO2 and additional metal oxides. Ti 31 alloy showed surface pitting because of its multiphase structure.
How to Measure Intangible Resources in Listed Companies

The principal problems associated with the concept of intellectual capital (except for the lack of recognized definition) includes the lack of a recognized standard of valuation. This prevents investors and other stakeholders to compare companies in the markets. Most studies concerning the measurement of intangible resources relates to companies in such industries as biotechnology, aerospace, computer software, cosmetics, healthcare, Internet, media, advertising, pharmaceuticals and computer industry. The main goal of this paper is to present advantages and disadvantages of most popular intellectual capital valuation ratios which can be used in listed companies.
Validation of the Polish Version of the Chronic Cough Quality of Life Questionnaire (Leicester Cough Questionnaire).

BACKGROUND The Leicester Cough Questionnaire (LCQ) is one of the few specific quality-of-life questionnaires (QOLQ) dedicated to measuring the impact of chronic cough on patients' health/condition. OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to validate the Polish version of the LCQ. MATERIAL AND METHODS The LCQ was translated forward and backward. The Polish version of the LCQ was tested on 35 patients suffering from chronic cough (23 women, median age 60 years, nonor ex-smokers, median cough duration of 23 weeks). Its validity was tested by comparison to a visual analogue scale (VAS) of cough intensity and other health questionnaires (hospital anxiety and depression scale - HADS, Euro-Quality of Life Questionnaire - EQ5D, St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire - SGRQ). The internal reliability of the Polish version of the LCQ was determined using the Cronbach alpha coefficient and its repeatability by the intraclass consistency coefficient. RESULTS The translation of the LCQ into Polish was accepted by the author of the original LCQ. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for total LCQ was 0.89, and reached 0.82, 0.86 and 0.78 for the physical, psychological and social domain, respectively. There were significant negative correlations between cough severity measured by VAS, the results of the EQ5D and SGRQ and the Polish version of the LCQ. The intraclass correlation coefficient of the test-retest reliability was significant (0.99). CONCLUSIONS The Polish version of the LCQ has been validated and is a reliable tool to measure the impact of chronic cough on quality of life of patients with chronic cough.