Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Performance Management Affect Job Turnover Intention in the Federal Government?

From a reform strategy that promises to restore citizen confidence in government, to a hydra-headed monster that has produced unintended negative consequences, performance management has indeed been a controversial topic in the field of public administration. This study examines how performance-based management practices shape organizational behavior, specifically employee job turnover intention. Using data from the 2005 Merit Principles Survey, the authors find that performance-based reward system and performance-supporting supervision are associated with a decrease in the likelihood that federal employees will leave their agencies. The implications of the findings are discussed in the study.
An Obituary for the Third Way: The Financial Crisis and Social Democracy in Europe

Why has the financial crisis not served as an occasion for social democratic revival? It is because, with the ‘Third Way’, European social democracy became imbricated with the financial system in crisis to such an extent that it is in no position to offer an alternative to it. The financial crisis is the crisis of the Third Way. Furthermore, the Third Way was based on the faulty premise that it was possible to replicate USA's apparent success in the 1990s, which, however, was based on very particular conditions. The argument is pursued with reference to inter alia Third Way ideology, transatlantic relations, the political economy of capitalist variety, and the political sociology of mass parties.
Bidirectional associations of vision and hearing loss with anxiety: prospective findings from the Three-City Study

OBJECTIVE the aim of this study was to examine the bidirectional association of vision loss (VL) and hearing loss (HL) with anxiety over a 12-year period. DESIGN this was a prospective population-based study. SETTING community-dwelling French adults. PARTICIPANTS the study included 3,928 adults aged 65 and above from the Three-City study. METHODS the relationships of VL, as assessed by near visual acuity and self-reported HL to a diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) were assessed over 12 years. A further objective was to explore whether sensory loss has a differential relationship with GAD than with anxiety symptoms, assessed by the Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. RESULTS at baseline, HL [odds ratio (OR) = 1.41, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.02-1.96, P = 0.04], but not mild or moderate to severe VL, was associated with self-reported anxiety symptoms (OR = 1.07 95% CI 0.63-1.83, P = 0.80; OR = 0.66 95% CI 0.12-2.22, P = 0.50, respectively). Neither vision nor HL was significantly associated with incident GAD. Baseline GAD was related to increased risk of incident HL (OR = 1.17, 95% CI 1.07-1.28, P < 0.001), but not mild or moderate to severe vision loss (OR = 1.01, 95% CI 0.96-1.06, P = 0.81; OR = 0.97, 95% CI 0.89-1.05, P = 0.45, respectively). CONCLUSIONS increased anxiety symptoms were observed in older adults with HL, whereas we found no evidence for an association between VL and anxiety. Anxiety was prospectively associated with increased risk of reporting HL. Improved detection of anxiety in older adults with HL may improve quality of life.
Business: making an e-business conceptualization and design process more “user”-centered

business For years we have been hearing the mantras that drive home the theme of growth and proliferation of technology: " pervasive computing, " " embedded computing , " " ubiquitous computing, " the networking of the world, the global economy and the shift to an information economy. Of course, these broad trends have indeed been playing out. But growth does not just bring more and more of the same. Are you a human–computer interaction (HCI) professional thinking about offering your services to an e-business consultancy? Or do you already work for such a consultancy and want to make the services it provides more attentive to the desires and needs of the ultimate users? (Some of the larger consultancies are trying to dive into this area quickly through fast-paced hiring and acquisition of research or design firms and then trying to figure out how to make it work.) Or do you work for an e-business or a company trying to transform itself because of e-business? If your answer is " yes " to any of these questions, what do you need to do in order to make the organization's focus and efforts more user-centered? What do you need to watch out for? Several people have written about ways to make design and development processes more user-centered; some of those writings have appeared in this column in previous issues of interactions. But the world is changing quickly. The Web is bringing companies much closer to their customers—customers who now can and will go elsewhere quickly if a website does not meet their needs and desires. Who and where customers are and their patterns of technology use are changing rapidly [3], and Internet development cycles tend to be much shorter than past software development cycles, and they continue to shorten. Companies are therefore clamoring for expertise, organizational structures, and fast e-business design processes that will result in happy users. This article highlights some of the keys to effectively add " user " research to e-business conceptualization and
Unique and overlapping roles for ZipA and FtsA in septal ring assembly in Escherichia coli

ZipA and FtsA are essential division proteins in Escherichia coli that are recruited to the division site by interaction with FtsZ. Utilizing a newly isolated temperature‐sensitive mutation in zipA we have more fully characterized the role of ZipA. We confirmed that ZipA is not required for Z ring formation; however, we found that ZipA, like FtsA, is required for recruitment of FtsK and therefore all downstream division proteins. In the absence of FtsA or ZipA Z rings formed; however, in the absence of both, new Z rings were unable to form and preformed Z rings were destabilized. Consistent with this, we found that an FtsZ mutant unable to interact with both ZipA and FtsA was unable to assemble into Z rings. These results demonstrate that ZipA and FtsA are both required for recruitment of additional division proteins to the Z ring, but either one is capable of supporting formation and stabilization of Z rings.
Performance contrasts between family and non‐family unquoted companies in the UK

Explores whether there are any significant performance and ambitions differences between independent family and non‐family unquoted companies in the UK. To detect “real” performance and ambitions differences, rather than demographic “sample” differences between family and non‐family companies, a “matched” sample methodology has been utilized. Concludes that there are strong similarities between the two groups of companies in terms of “hard” objective performance and ambition indicators. Such differences as do occur are reflected in the finding that family companies are markedly more likely to stress non‐financial objectives than non‐family companies. Discusses implications for future research exploring the characteristics and performance of family and non‐family companies.
La misurazione del capitale umano: una rassegna della letteratura

As well known, human capital plays a crucial role both for private and social wellbeing. Notwithstanding, measurement of human capital is not univocally defined in empirical analyses, since different indicators and methods are employed and, sometimes, the proxies seem to be not very efficient for human capital econometric specification. The main aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of different measurements of human capital showing the most diffused approaches based both on simple indexes and on more complex statistical and econometric tools. Since human capital is a multifaceted and complex asset, a necessary condition to better measure it is to improve its understanding and definition, which are the basic requirements of an efficient measurement. Two major results emerge from this analysis. Firstly, it appears quite clearly that the best measurement of human capital in absolute terms does not exist, but, on the contrary, methods or formula which seem the most efficient and coherent to analytical objectives should be adopted. Secondly, approaching human capital measurement, data quality and availability are essential, more than any other methodological and theoretical issue.
Adversarial Learning for Chinese NER from Crowd Annotations

To quickly obtain new labeled data, we can choose crowdsourcing as an alternative way at lower cost in a short time. But as an exchange, crowd annotations from non-experts may be of lower quality than those from experts. In this paper, we propose an approach to performing crowd annotation learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) to make full use of the noisy sequence labels from multiple annotators. Inspired by adversarial learning, our approach uses a common Bi-LSTM and a private Bi-LSTM for representing annotator-generic and -specific information. The annotator-generic information is the common knowledge for entities easily mastered by the crowd. Finally, we build our Chinese NE tagger based on the LSTM-CRF model. In our experiments, we create two data sets for Chinese NER tasks from two domains. The experimental results show that our system achieves better scores than strong baseline systems.
Randomized Algorithms for Query Optimization

Query optimization for relational database systems is a combinatorial optimization problem, which makes exhaustive search unacceptable as the query size grows. Randomized algorithms, such as Iterative Improvement and Simulated Annealing, are viable alternatives to exhaustive search. We present several analytical and experimental results that shed some light on the shape of the cost function of the access plan spaces with which the randomized query optimization algorithms must deal. These are the space that includes only left-deep trees, and the space that includes both deep and bushy trees. We conclude that the shape of both spaces essentially forms a 'well', but of a distinctly different quality. This has inspired a new algorithm, Two Phase Optimization, which is a combination of Simulated Annealing and Iterative Improvement. We show how Iterative Improvement, Simulated Annealing, and Two Phase Optimization perform on the two spaces of interest and explain the results based on the above analysis on the shape of their cost function. In particular, the results show that Two Phase Optimization outperforms the original algorithms in terms of both output quality and running time. Additional experimentation shows that Two Phase Optimization is also very effective on small queries, having the traditional algorithm of System R as the basis for comparison. Thus, it emerges as a strong candidate for query optimization in future database systems. Finally, a comparison between the two spaces of interest in their form used in this work leads to the rather surprising conclusion that the space of both deep and bushy trees is to be preferred over the space of left-deep trees for query optimization. The former has a more definite shape of a 'well' than the latter and also includes more efficient alternatives in most cases. Hence, for the specific choices of connections of alternative access plans in the two spaces, the space of deep and bushy trees is superior with respect to both optimization time and output quality of the algorithms that use it as their search space.
Optical coherence tomography-assisted enhanced depth imaging of central serous chorioretinopathy.

PURPOSE To describe characteristics of central serous chorioretinopathy (CSC) imaged by optical coherence tomography-assisted enhanced depth imaging (EDI-OCT). METHODS The prospective observational case series study consisted of patients with acute or chronic CSC. All subjects underwent fundus fluorescein angiography, indocyanine green angiography (ICGA), and EDI-OCT. RESULTS The study included 68 eyes (68 patients) with 35 eyes showing signs of acute CSC. Mean subfoveal choroidal thickness, 478 ± 114 μm, was larger than the normative value from the beijing eye study 2011 (254 ± 107 μm) on the same ethnic group. In the hyperfluorescent ICGA areas, EDI-OCT revealed a thinning of the inner choroidal layers and enlargement of the underlying hyporeflective lumina in all eyes. the diameter of the hyporeflective lumina (mean: 330 ± 103 μm) was significantly (P < 0.001) associated with subfoveal choroidal thickness (correlation coefficient [r]: 0.68). An RPE detachment was detected in 36 (53%) eyes. A double-layer sign defined as an undulated RPE layer and intact underlying Bruch's membrane (seen in 51 [75%] eyes) was significantly (P = 0.025) more often in the chronic CSC group (29/33; 87%) than in the acute CSC group (22/35; 63%). Prevalence of an RPE microrip (8/68 [12%] eyes) did not differ (P = 0.14) between the chronic CSC group (6/33; 18%) and the acute CSC group (2/35; 5.7%). CONCLUSIONS CSC is characterized by a thinned inner choroidal layer and enlarged underlying hyporeflective choroidal lumina in all eyes, in addition to a dome-shaped RPE elevation, a double-layer sign of the RPE/Bruch's membrane complex, and RPE microrips in some eyes. EDI-OCT may be helpful in the diagnosis of CSC.
Covalent Structure, Synthesis, and Structure-Function Studies of Mesentericin Y 10537, a Defensive Peptide from Gram-positive Bacteria Leuconostoc mesenteroides*

A 37-residue cationic antimicrobial peptide named mesentericin Y 10537 was purified to homogeneity from cell-free culture supernatant of the Gram-positive bacterium Leuconostoc mesenteroides. The complete amino acid sequence of the peptide, KYYGNGVHCTKSGCSVNWGEAASAGIHRLANGGNGFW, has been established by automated Edman degradation, mass spectrometry, and solid phase synthesis. Mesentericin Y 10537 contains a single intramolecular disulfide bond that forms a 6-membered ring within the molecule. Mesentericin Y 10537 was synthesized by the solid phase method. The synthetic replicate was shown to be indistinguishable from the natural peptide with respect to electrophoretic and chromatographic properties, mass spectrometry analysis, automated amino acid sequence determination, and antimicrobial properties. At nanomolar concentrations, synthetic mesentericin Y 10537 is active against Gram+ bacteria in the genera Lactobacillus and Carnobacterium. Most interestingly, the peptide is inhibitory to the growth of the food-borne pathogen Listeria. CD spectra of mesentericin Y 10537 in low polarity medium, which mimic the lipophilicity of the membrane of target organisms, indicated 30–40% α-helical conformation, and predictions of secondary structure suggested that the peptide can be configured as an amphipathic helix spanning over residues 17–31. To reveal the molecular basis of the specificity of mesentericin Y 10537 targetting and mode of action, NH2- or COOH-terminally truncated analogs together with point-substituted analogs were synthesized and evaluated for their ability to inhibit the growth of Listeria ivanovii. In sharp contrast with broad spectrum α-helical antimicrobial peptides from vertebrate animals, which can be shortened to 14–18 residues without deleterious effect on potency, molecular elements responsible for anti-Listeria activity of mesentericin Y 10537 are to be traced at once to the NH2-terminal tripeptide KYY, the disulfide bridge, the putative α-helical domain 17–31, and the COOH-terminal tryptophan residue of the molecule. It is proposed that the amphipathic helical domain of the peptide interacts with lipid bilayers, leading subsequently to alteration of the membrane functions, whereas residues 1–14 form part of a recognition structure for a membrane-bound receptor, which may be critical for peptide targetting. Because mesentericin Y 10537 is easy to synthesize at low cost, it may represent a useful and tractable tool as a starting point for the design of more potent analogs that may be of potential applicability in foods preservation.
Adaptive Backstepping Control for a Fuel Cell/Boost Converter System

This paper proposes an output voltage regulation scheme for a fuel cell-based power source. The proposed methodology relies on the design of a dynamic backstepping average current-mode controller considering the combined fuel cell stack and boost converter model. Also, an external loop for voltage regulation using a proportional-integral action is added. Moreover, to improve the robustness of the current loop, a load estimator using immersion-invariance approach is designed. As a result, an adaptive backstepping controller ensuring asymptotic stability via a Lyapunov function is achieved. Finally, based on a 460-W testbench and a DSPACE platform, the closed-loop system performance is evaluated through experimental results. An appropriate output voltage regulation and robust behavior concerning to load variation and fuel cell stack unregulated dc output voltage are exhibited.
Production of functional small interfering RNAs by an amino-terminal deletion mutant of human Dicer

Significance Although RNA interference (RNAi) is an important antiviral innate-immune response in plants and invertebrates, whether mammals mount effective RNAi responses remains controversial. Using human cells lacking functional Dicer and protein kinase RNA-activated genes, we examined whether wild-type or a deletion mutant of Dicer, lacking the helicase domain, could induce RNAi when presented with double-stranded RNAs derived from plasmids or generated during viral infections. Overexpression of the truncated Dicer mutant resulted in the production of siRNAs in both cases, and these were sufficient to inhibit the expression of cognate mRNAs. Whether the latent ability of human Dicer to induce RNAi will ever be unmasked in vivo remains unclear. Although RNA interference (RNAi) functions as a potent antiviral innate-immune response in plants and invertebrates, mammalian somatic cells appear incapable of mounting an RNAi response and few, if any, small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) can be detected. To examine why siRNA production is inefficient, we have generated double-knockout human cells lacking both Dicer and protein kinase RNA-activated. Using these cells, which tolerate double-stranded RNA expression, we show that a mutant form of human Dicer lacking the amino-terminal helicase domain can process double-stranded RNAs to produce high levels of siRNAs that are readily detectable by Northern blot, are loaded into RNA-induced silencing complexes, and can effectively and specifically inhibit the expression of cognate mRNAs. Remarkably, overexpression of this mutant Dicer, but not wild-type Dicer, also resulted in a partial inhibition of Influenza A virus—but not poliovirus—replication in human cells.
Can Education Subsidy Reverse Falling Fertility? The Case of Taiwan

Abstract The education subsidy in Taiwan is available for government employees only. In 1996, the government ceased to index the education subsidy for inflation, which created a natural experiment ideal for studying the effect of the education subsidy on fertility. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform reduced the fertility probability for public-sector households by 17 per cent and this negative response appears to be permanent. The estimated probability elasticity of fertility is 0.05, which is smaller than that of personal tax exemption (0.8). The results also suggest that the education subsidy has a heterogeneous effect on fertility across income groups.
Strategies and Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Developing Countries: Case Study of Latin America

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to assess the importance of economic and institutional factors for outward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) originating in the developing countries. The estimate drawn up through a panel data model for three countries in Latin America shows that these outflows are directly influenced by economic factors, such as gross-domestic product (GDP) growth and rising foreign exchange rates. Moreover, FDI is positively correlated with institutional variables such as globalization and education as well as with inward FDI stocks in their respective countries of origin.
What Weights Work for You? Adapting Weights for Any Pareto Front Shape in Decomposition-Based Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimisation

The quality of solution sets generated by decomposition-based evolutionary multi-objective optimisation (EMO) algorithms depends heavily on the consistency between a given problem's Pareto front shape and the specified weights' distribution. A set of weights distributed uniformly in a simplex often leads to a set of well-distributed solutions on a Pareto front with a simplex-like shape, but may fail on other Pareto front shapes. It is an open problem on how to specify a set of appropriate weights without the information of the problem's Pareto front beforehand. In this article, we propose an approach to adapt weights during the evolutionary process (called AdaW). AdaW progressively seeks a suitable distribution of weights for the given problem by elaborating several key parts in weight adaptation—weight generation, weight addition, weight deletion, and weight update frequency. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach. AdaW works well for Pareto fronts with very different shapes: 1) the simplex-like, 2) the inverted simplex-like, 3) the highly nonlinear, 4) the disconnect, 5) the degenerate, 6) the scaled, and 7) the high-dimensional.
The Riskiness of Public Sector Performance Measurement: A Review and Research Agenda

Public sector performance measurement (PM) practices can be risky. It is imperative that research engages with the riskiness of PM and how this might be reduced. To help move towards a less risky state of public sector PM, where benefits outweigh negative potential, this paper reviews studies on PM risk to ascertain what existing research indicates about (a) the risks of PM (b) the conditions in which the risks of PM are more likely to manifest, and (c) the approaches that mitigate the risks of PM. Based on this, the paper outlines a way forward for public sector PM research. Overall the paper makes a number of contributions. First, it brings together a disparate and fragmented field in reviewing studies examining the risks of PM. Second, the paper reframes the research question that public sector PM risk research and public sector PM studies more broadly should engage in. Third, specific suggestions are offered in terms of how future research might proceed in a coordinated manner, examining and informing practice where PM is part of an integrated and enabling control system for strategising and managing in the public sector, and where citizen-centric PM is utilised as part of multiple evaluation modes to more effectively support accountability to external constituents.
Domain-Shared Group-Sparse Dictionary Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation has been proved to be a promising approach to solve the problem of dataset bias. To employ source labels in the target domain, it is required to align the joint distributions of source and target data. To do this, the key research problem is to align conditional distributions across domains without target labels. In this paper, we propose a new criterion of domain-shared group-sparsity that is an equivalent condition for conditional distribution alignment. To solve the problem in joint distribution alignment, a domain-shared group-sparse dictionary learning method is developed towards joint alignment of conditional and marginal distributions. A classifier for target domain is trained using the domain-shared group-sparse coefficients and the target-specific information from the target data. Experimental results on cross-domain face and object recognition show that the proposed method outperforms eight state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms.