Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The illusion and the paradox of being autonomous, experiences from persons with spinal cord injury in their transition period from hospital to home

Purpose: To open a discourse on the concept of autonomy as a precursor for participation in individuals with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) by exploring the experiences about their perceived autonomy in their transition period from hospital to home. Method: Based on the ‘grounded theory’ approach; in-depth, semi structured interviews were conducted with 11 SCI-patients. A theoretical sampling strategy was used and the data was analysed according to the constant comparative method. Results: To capture this complexity of autonomy, the results have been structured in themes with regard to the self of the patient and his independency. The analysis showed four different typologies of how autonomy is perceived; (1) the active agent, (2) the active follower, (3) the passive follower and (4) the passive victim. Conclusion: Rehabilitation professionals can help individuals in disconnecting their internalised ideal of independency to avoid the illusion of being autonomous and can gain insight in the patients’ typology and empower patients to avoid the paradox of being autonomous. If the ultimate goal of rehabilitation is participation; empowering the patient to achieve a ‘sense of agency’ instead of autonomy is the central goal for rehabilitation professionals. Empowerment and agency are key topics for the patient to gain mastery over his own life. Implications for Rehabilitation During the SCI rehabilitation process it is important to draw the clients’ attention to the difference between being independent and being autonomous. To enable the client with SCI in experiencing a sense of autonomy, it is recommended to reflect on his entire life-span. Embrace the socially embedded feature of autonomy; do not only focus on the individual but consider also his context. Empower clients in the way they want to be supported within their social context and make this clear and negotiable.
Transparency and Accountability in the Extractives Sector: A Synthesis of What Works and What Does Not

While there are a number of transparency and accountability initiatives in the natural resources governance sector, evidence on the impact of these initiative remains sparse. This paper synthesises key lessons from seven impact evaluations of these initiatives in the extractives sector. The synthesis shows that providing information alone may not be sufficient. Instead, information combined with deliberations positively affect knowledge, trust and demand for accountability. Information leads to higher levels of trust only when shared with the public and not when it is solely in the hands of political elites. There is very little evidence on the relative effectiveness of various modalities of sharing information, deliberation and their combinations. Similarly, need exists for more evidence on the role of technology and big data in informing the design and evaluation of these initiatives. There is also a substantial evidence gap on the gendered differential impacts of extractives on women and on ensuring equitable access to resources from the extractive industries.
Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus- polymerase chain reaction (ERIC-PCR) fingerprinting reveals intra-serotype variations among circulating Listeria monocytogenes strains

Forty-five presumptive Listeria monocytogenes isolates were confirmed by multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and characterized for antimicrobial susceptibility and tolerance to commonly used disinfectants. Isolates were also serotyped by PCR and characterized by enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus ERIC-PCR fingerprinting. All of the isolates showed PCR products of 938 bp (genus) and of 750 bp (species). Antimicrobial susceptibility was 100% for ampicillin, amoxicillin/ clavulanic acid, vancomycin and chloramphenicol, whereas for trimethoprim/ sulfamethoxazole it was 98, azithromycin 96, erythromycin 91, tetracycline 82, penicillin 97.8 (2.2% no susceptible), ciprofloxacin 84.4, rifampin 64.4, meropenem 71.1 and clindamycin 22.2%, respectively. All the isolates were resistant to cephalosporins. 71% of the isolates showed a MIC � 200 ppm/10 to15 min for sodium hypochlorite and 98% a MIC � 1.5%/2 to15 min for Tego-51. 58% of isolates were serotyped as 4b/4d/4e, 16% as Ωb/3b, 7% as Ωa/3a, and 4% as Ωc/3c. ERIC-PCR showed 28 polymorphic bands ranging from 100 to 2810 bp that did not cluster according to any phenotype. ERIC-PCR fingerprinting revealed intraserotypic variations and proved that different L. monocytogenes strains were circulating in the country during the isolation period.
Loco-regional administration of nanomedicines for the treatment of lung cancer

Abstract Lung cancer poses one of the most significant challenges to modern medicine, killing thousands every year. Current therapy involves surgical resection supplemented with chemotherapy and radiotherapy due to high rates of relapse. Shortcomings of currently available chemotherapy protocols include unacceptably high levels of systemic toxicity and low accumulation of drug at the tumor site. Loco-regional delivery of nanocarriers loaded with anticancer agents has the potential to significantly increase efficacy, while minimizing systemic toxicity to anticancer agents. Local drug administration at the tumor site using nanoparticulate drug delivery systems can reduce systemic toxicities observed with intravenously administered anticancer drugs. In addition, this approach presents an opportunity for sustained delivery of anticancer drug over an extended period of time. Herein, the progress in the development of locally administered nanomedicines for the treatment of lung cancer is reviewed. Administration by inhalation, intratumoral injection and means of direct in situ application are discussed, the benefits and drawbacks of each modality are explored.
Geochemical hunting of lithogenic and anthropogenic impacts on polymetallic distribution (Bregalnica river basin, Republic of Macedonia)

ABSTRACT The main subject of this investigation was the assessment of the lithogenic and anthropogenic distribution of 69 elements in the sediments and fluvisol in the Bregalnica river basin. Alluvial soil and fluvisol samples were collected from the total of eighteen locations along the course of the Bregalnica river and additional thirteen samples were collected from its tributaries. The matrix elements accumulation patterns followed the order: Fe > Na > Al > Ca > Mg > K > Ti > P. The potentially toxic elements, such as As, Cd, Pb, and Zn, have enriched content in the sediments in the medium course of the river, where the main anthropogenic introduction activities occurred. By multivariate analysis the dominant geochemical associations were extracted, as follows: F1: Y-Eu-Lu-Cr-V-La-Gd-Nb-Co-Hf-Zr-Ga-Mg-Fe-Sr-Ta-Sn-Li-Na-Rb-Ni-Ge-Be-Cs; F2: As-W-Ba-Ag-Cu-Tl-Zn-Sb-Mo-In-Cd-Te-Bi-Pb and F3: I-Sc-Br-K. Lead and zinc contents were strongly correlated with the hydrothermal exploitations, especially in the area of Neogene clastite and vulcanite. These elements occur as dominant geochemical markers of the anthropogenic impacts of polymetallic enrichments due to the hydrothermal ore exploitation (Factor 2). The impact of Oligocene volcanism (Kratovo-Zletovo region) was observed in the lithological enrichments of Pb, Zn, Cu, As, Sb, Mo and Bi. Despite the natural distribution along the course of the Bregalnica river, an exceptional anomaly in the iron distribution of the old polymetallic unused mineralization was detected in Zone 1 (Berovo region).
Video Summarization based on Nonnegative Linear Reconstruction

With the development of imaging techniques and the Internet, it is hard to effectively and efficiently manage, index and store large amounts of videos. Video summarization appears to this need by obtaining useful information in videos. Recently, the reconstruction concept has been introduced into video summarization. However, most of these existing reconstruction methods where a dictionary of key frames is selected to reconstruct the original video best might come up with redundant information. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Video Summarization based on Nonnegative Linear Reconstruction (VSNLR) which allows only additive, not subtractive, linear combinations. Our approach consists of two core steps: (1) we detect the shot boundary and choose a representative frame for every shot, then all the representative frames form the candidate set; (2) for every frame in the candidate set, VSNLR selects related frames to reconstruct the given frame by using the nonnegative linear reconstruction function. The key frames are selected by minimizing the sum of reconstruction errors. Experiments on a dataset and comparison to the state-of-art method demonstrate our advantage.
Factors Influencing Coffee Growers’ Perception on Coffee Buyers’ Opportunism: A Case of Coffee Buyer – Supplier Relationships in Tanzania

This study examined the relationship between smallholder coffee growers (suppliers) and the licensed buying companies (buyers). The study reports on the factor (Transaction-Specific Supplier development efforts undertaken by the buyer in the supplier) that influences on suppliers’ perceived buyer opportunism. Literature review on Transaction Cost Theory led to formulation of the research model and hypothesis in order to test the proposed relationship between buyer opportunism and transaction-specific supplier development. Data from a survey of seventy three (73) small holder coffee farmers of Tanzania were used. Ordinary Least Square method through SPSS was used to estimate results of the model and assumptions underlying regression analysis were observed. Empirical findings revealed that transaction-specific supplier development has a significant negative relationship with buyer opportunism. This re-enforces that buyer opportunism should be eradicated in the supply chain of coffee since it reduces both trust and supplier satisfaction. In order for management to overcome buyer opportunism, they need to incorporate transaction-specific supplier development in coffee buyer-seller relationship. Keywords : Buyer, Supplier, Specific Supplier Development and Opportunism.
The relevance of emotional intelligence for leadership in a higher education context

This paper reports on a case-study research investigation that sought to identify the relevance of emotional intelligence for effective higher education academic leadership. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, pre and post a leadership capacity development intervention, to gather broad data on participants' experiences, insights, and engagement in leadership and the utilisation of emotional intelligence in leading. The study found that emotional intelligence is recognised as a highly relevant and important requirement for academic leadership in higher education. Additionally, the investigation ascertained that emotional intelligence traits related to empathy, inspiring and guiding others and responsibly managing oneself were most applicable for academic leadership. The views of participants regarding the relevance of these emotional intelligence traits in academic leadership are presented. Illustrations of how these emotional intelligence traits might manifest in a higher education context are also discussed.
Toward video semantic search based on a structured folksonomy

This study investigated the effectiveness of query expansion using synonymous and co-occurrence tags in users' video searches as well as the effect of visual storyboard surrogates on users' relevance judgments when browsing videos. To do so, we designed a structured folksonomy-based system in which tag queries can be expanded via synonyms or co-occurrence words, based on the use of WordNet 2.1 synonyms and Flickr's related tags. To evaluate the structured folksonomy-based system, we conducted an experiment, the results of which suggest that the mean recall rate in the structured folksonomy-based system is statistically higher than that in a tag-based system without query expansion; however, the mean precision rate in the structured folksonomy-based system is not statistically higher than that in the tag-based system. Next, we compared the precision rates of the proposed system with storyboards (SB), in which SB and text metadata are shown to users when they browse video search results, with those of the proposed system without SB, in which only text metadata are shown. Our result showed that browsing only text surrogates—including tags without multimedia surrogates—is not sufficient for users' relevance judgments. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Clinical significance of early hepatocellular carcinoma

Early hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is defined as a well‐differentiated cancer containing Glisson's triad, but it remains unknown whether this lesion is curable by surgery. We studied 70 patients who had a single HCC smaller than 2 cm in diameter (Stage T1) and who underwent curative hepatectomy and long‐term follow‐up. Based on our typing system, the tumors were assigned as early HCC (n = 15), overt HCC (n = 52), and non‐HCC tumor (n = 3). The rate of microscopic regional spread was lower in early HCCs than in overt HCCs (7% vs. 42%; P = .01). After a median follow‐up of 6.3 years, both overall survival and recurrence‐free survival in the early HCC group were significantly better than those in the overt HCC group (P = .01; P = .001, respectively): the 5‐year rates of overall survival were 93% and 54% and those of recurrence‐free survival were 47% and 16%, respectively. The early HCC group was at a lower risk of recurrence (relative risk, 0.31; 95% confidence interval, 0.15–0.65; P = .002) and death (0.26; 0.09–0.73; P = .01) than was the overt HCC group. Early HCC is a distinct clinical entity with a high rate of surgical cure. (Liver Transpl 2004;10:S16–S19.)
The Empirical Research on the Relationship of Accounting Quality and Financial Constraints and the Innovation. --Evidence form the Listed Companies in Zhejiang Province

Innovation is meaningful to firm’s competiveness and the sustainable development of the macroeconomic. The quality of accounting information is the indispensable instrument to mitigate the information asymmetry, and innovation plays important role in the process of the maximization of enterprise value. By using the data of listed companies of Zhejiang province, based on the theory that accounting information can mitigate the financial constraints through improving the contract and supervision which can reduce the moral risk and converse option, this paper finally finds accounting information can affect innovation positively through the channel of mitigating the financial constraints, therefore the financial constraint is the one of the mediators between accounting quality and innovation. The finding of this research provides evidence for companies to improve the accounting information to promote innovation and for government to enforce firms to offer high accounting information quality.
Spatial language for human-robot dialogs

In conversation, people often use spatial relationships to describe their environment, e.g., "There is a desk in front of me and a doorway behind it," and to issue directives, e.g., "go around the desk and through the doorway. " In our research, we have been investigating the use of spatial relationships to establish a natural communication mechanism between people and robots, in particular, for novice users. In this paper, the work on robot spatial relationships is combined with a multimodal robot interface. We show how linguistic spatial descriptions and other spatial information can be extracted from an evidence grid map and how this information can be used in a natural, human-robot dialog. Examples using spatial language are included for both robot-to-human feedback and also human-to-robot commands. We also discuss some linguistic consequences in the semantic representations of spatial and locative information based on this work.
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The ba ktra k sear h problem involves visiting all the nodes of an arbitrary binary tree given a pointer to its root, subje t to the onstraint that the hildren of a node are revealed only after their parent is visited. We present a fast, deterministi ba k-tra k sear h algorithm for a p-pro essor COMMON CRCW-PRAM, whi h visits any n-node tree of height h in time O (cid:0) (n=p + h)(loglog logp) 2 (cid:1) . This upper bound ompares favourably with a natural (cid:10)(n=p + h) lower bound for this problem. Our approa h embodies novel, eÆ ient te hniques for dynami ally assigning tree-nodes to pro essors to ensure that the work is shared equitably among them.
Outage performance of two-way DF relaying with Alamouti transmissions and network coding

We investigate the outage performance of a two-phase two-way decode-and-forward (DF) relay channel in which each transceiver is equipped with two antennas, and uses the Alamouti orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) for transmission. The focus is on attaining good outage performance as enabled by the use of OSTBC transmissions in both phases, along with a low complexity near-optimum receiver in the first phase, and physical layer network coding (PNC) in the second phase. Assuming perfect channel state information at the receiver(s) in both phases, we derive expressions for the probability distribution functions of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for all links in a Rayleigh flat-fading scenario. More precisely, we derive an exact expression of the outage probability for the end-to-end transmissions. The accuracy of the derived outage expression is verified by simulation results. We also demonstrate the impacts of channel asymmetry on the outage behavior. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme provides good performance under symmetric channel conditions.
ProTaR: An Infrastructure IP for Repairing RAMs in System-on-Chips

Complex system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs usually consist of many memory cores. Efficient yield-enhancement techniques thus are required for the memory cores in SOCs. This paper presents an infrastructure intelligent property (IIP) for testing, diagnosing, and repairing multiple memory cores in SOCs. The proposed IIP can perform parallel testing for multiple memories, and serial diagnosis or repair for one memory each time. In the repair mode, the proposed IIP can execute various redundancy analysis algorithms. Therefore, the user can select a better redundancy analysis algorithm for each memory core being tested according to its redundancy structure. Simulation results show that the proposed IIP needs less test time and redundancy analysis time than the processor-based built-in self-repair scheme. We also have realized the proposed IIP for four types of memories - two 8 K 64 bit SRAMs, one 4 K x 16 bit SRAM, and one 2 K x 32 bit SRAM - based on TSMC 0.18-mum standard cell technology. Simulation results show that the area overhead of the IIP is only about 4.6%.
Generation of autotetraploid plant of ginger (Zingiber officinale Rosc.) and its quality evaluation

Background: Zingiber officinale Rosc. is not only an important medical plant in China, but also one of the most commonly used plant spices around the world. Early researches in Z. officinale Rosc. were focused on rapid propagation, germplasm preservation, and somatic embryogenesis, only a few reports focused on the generation of tetraploid ginger plants with colchicines treatment in vitro. Materials and Methods: The adventitious buds were submerged into different concentrations of colchicine water solution for different time to induce polyploid plants, and the induced buds were identified by root-tip chromosome determination and stomatal apparatus observation. Eighteen selected tetraploid lines were transferred to the field, and the leaf characteristics, rhizome yield, contents of volatile oil and gingerol were respectively evaluated to provide evidence of high-yield and good qualities of tetraploid ginger. Results: The induction rate reached as high as 33.3% of treated buds. More than 48 lines of autotetraploid plants were obtained. All tetraploid plants showed typical polyploidy characteristics. All of the 18 selected tetraploid lines possessed higher rhizome yield and overall productivity of volatile oil and gingerol than those of the control. Conclusion: Five elite lines have been selected for further selection and breeding new varieties for commercial production in agricultural production.
The Rub Family of Ubiquitin-like Proteins

Several proteins with significant identity to ubiquitin have been characterized recently. In contrast to ubiquitin’s main role in targeting proteins for degradation, a described function of one family of ubiquitin-related proteins, the Rub family, is to serve as a stable post-translational modification of a complex involved in the G1-to-S cell cycle transition. Rub proteins have been found in animals, plants, and fungi and consist of 76 residues with 52–63% identity to ubiquitin. In this study three different RUB proteins within the plant Arabidopsis are identified; two differ by only 1 amino acid, while the third is only 77.6% identical to the other two. Genes encoding all three are expressed in multiple organs. In addition, we report the crystal structure of higher plant RUB1 at 1.7-Å resolution to help elucidate the functional differences between Rub and ubiquitin. RUB1 contains a single globular domain with a flexible COOH-terminal extension. The overall RUB1 structure is very similar to ubiquitin. The majority of the amino acid differences between RUB1 and ubiquitin map to the surface. These changes alter the electrostatic surface potential in two regions and likely confer specificity between ubiquitin and RUB1 and their ubiquitin-activating enzyme (E1) or E1-like activating enzymes.
A Low Serum Concentration of Mannan‐Binding Protein is Not Associated with Serogroup B or C Meningococcal Disease

The mammalian C‐type serum lectin, mannan‐binding protein (MBP), may induce Clq‐ and antibody‐independent activation of the classical pathway of complement. Accordingly, MBP is considered as a member of the complement system. Complement deficiencies have been found with increased frequency in patients with meningococcal disease. Therefore, we investigated the MBP levels in patients with meningococcal disease. Ninety‐nine Norwegian individuals (age 12–21 years) who survived severe systemic disease caused by serogroup B or C meningococci were investigated. No significant differences were observed in the MBP concentration between patients with serogroup B (n = 76) or C (n = 25) disease and healthy blood donor controls (n = 40) (P >0.05). The frequency of patients with low levels of MBP (< 100 μg/1) was 10.1%. This was not different from controls (12.5%). Thus, low MBP concentrations do not appear to predispose to serogroup B or C meningococcal disease.
Social entrepreneurship in the United Arab Emirates: challenges and recommendations

The purpose of this study is to explore current challenges facing social entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates, and provide recommendations that can contribute to the development of the growing and vibrant community of social entrepreneurs in the UAE. The UAE is a recognized regional and global leader in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. Recognizing this, this study seeks to contribute thoughtful insights that can help the UAE embrace social entrepreneurship and further act as a catalyst to push social entrepreneurship forward within the wider region. Based on primary interviews with key informants, several key challenges were identified related to a lack of institutional support a lack of social and cultural awareness regarding social entrepreneurship within the UAE. Further challenges include a lack of clear benchmarks related to monitoring and measuring social impact. Overall, the challenges identified highlighting the need for more government and institutional support, as well as a stronger link between the corporate sector, academia, and the social enterprise sector.