Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sales activity systematization and performance: differences between product and service firms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the impact that systematization of sales activities through sales process management has, at the firm level, on profitable sales growth in business-to-business (B2B) companies. The research aims to compare companies focusing on service offerings to those focusing on product offerings. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on survey data. Findings – Despite the emergence of service-dominant logic, B2B service and product companies still differ in how sales process management contributes to firm performance. Research limitations/implications – The findings suggest that differences between service and product firms in their sales process management stem from the different underlying modes of interaction. The findings are generalizable to B2B companies. Practical implications – The findings help businesses differentiate between productive sales process management practices in product and service firms. Originality/value – The study contributes to the .
Killing spinor identities

We have found generic Killing spinor identities which bosonic equations of motion have to satisfy in supersymmetric theories if the solutions admit Killing spinors. Those identities constrain possible quantum corrections to bosonic solutions with unbroken supersymmetries. As an application we show that purely electric static extreme dilaton black holes may acquire specific quantum corrections, but the purely magnetic ones cannot.
Patients’ perceived value of pharmacy quality measures: a mixed-methods study

Objective To describe patients’ perceived value and use of quality measures in evaluating and choosing community pharmacies. Design Focus group methodology was combined with a survey tool. During the focus groups, participants assessed the value of the Pharmacy Quality Alliance's quality measures in evaluating and choosing a pharmacy. Also, participants completed questionnaires rating their perceived value of quality measures in evaluating a pharmacy (1 being low value and 5 being high) or choosing a pharmacy (yes/no). Thematic analysis and descriptive statistics were used to analyse the focus groups and surveys, respectively. Setting Semistructured focus groups were conducted in a private meeting space of an urban and a rural area of a Mid-western State in the USA. Participants Thirty-four adults who filled prescription medications in community pharmacies for a chronic illness were recruited in community pharmacies, senior centres and public libraries. Results While comments indicated that all measures were important, medication safety measures (eg, drug-drug interactions) were valued more highly than others. Rating of quality measure utility in evaluating a pharmacy ranged from a mean of 4.88 (‘drug-drug interactions’) to a mean of 4.0 (‘absence of controller therapy for patients with asthma’). Patients were hesitant to use quality information in choosing a pharmacy (depending on the participant's location) but might consider if moving to a new area or having had a negative pharmacy experience. Use of select quality measures to choose a pharmacy ranged from 97.1% of participants using ‘drug-drug interactions’ (medication safety measure) to 55.9% using ‘absence of controller therapy for patients with asthma’. Conclusions The study participants valued quality measures in evaluating and selecting a community pharmacy, with medication safety measures valued highest. The participants reported that the quality measures would not typically cause a switch in pharmacy but might influence their selection in certain situations.
New Class of Quark Mass Matrices and the Flavor Mixing Matrix

We discuss a new general class of mass matrix ansatz that respects the fermion mass hierarchy and calculability of the flavor mixing matrix. This is a generalization of the various specific forms of the mass matrix that is obtained by successive breaking of the maximal permutation symmetry. By confronting the experimental data, a large class of the mass matrices are shown to survive, while certain specific cases are phenomenologically ruled out.
Atomistic study of the anisotropic interaction between extended and point defects in crystalline silicon and its influence on Si self-interstitial diffusion

In this work we propose a methodology to analyze the elastic energy interaction at the atomic level between Si self-interstitials and extended defects in crystalline Si. The representation of this energy in maps in 2D planes shows the anisotropic nature of the elastic interaction. This elastic energy maps can be used to understand diffusion trajectories of Si self-interstitials around extended defects obtained from classical molecular dynamics simulations. The combined analysis of these trajectories and the elastic energy maps shows preferential capture directions around extended defects.
The Relationship between Lifestyle and Health Locus of Control with Happiness in Students

This study aimed to determine the relationship between lifestyle and health locus of control with happiness in college students. This study was descriptive within the framework of a correlation prediction plan. The sample consisted of 331 undergraduate students of Talesh PNU (246 females and 85 males) 1393-94 academic years who were selected randomly and completed lifestyle questionnaire, health locus of control scale and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire. The data was analyzed using descriptive indicators of mean and standard deviation and Pearson correlation coefficient and stepwise regression methods. The results showed that the relationship between lifestyle and dimensions of happiness were positive and significant. The relationship between internal locus of control with happiness was positive, but in its relation with external locus of control, the chance was negative. Relationship with other locus of control and happiness was not significant. Also, regression analysis showed that 43 percent of happiness are explained by lifestyle and internal locus of control. Based on the findings, we can conclude that the style life and health locus of control affect the level of students' happiness.
A Developmental Perspective in Learning the Mirror-Drawing Task

Is there late maturation of skill learning? This notion has been raised to explain an adult advantage in learning a variety of tasks, such as auditory temporal-interval discrimination, locomotion adaptation, and drawing visually-distorted spatial patterns (mirror-drawing, MD). Here, we test this assertion by following the practice of the MD task in two 5 min daily sessions separated by a 10 min break, over the course of 2 days, in 5–6-year-old kindergarten children, 7–8-year-old second-graders, and young adults. In the MD task, participants were required to trace a square while looking at their hand only as a reflection in a mirror. Kindergarteners did not show learning of the visual-motor mapping, and on average, did not produce even one full side of a square correctly. Second-graders showed increased online movement control with longer strokes, and robust learning of the visual-motor mapping, resulting in a between-day increase in the number of correctly drawn sides with no loss in accuracy. Overall, kindergarteners and second-graders producing at least one correct polygon-side on Day 1 were more likely to improve their performance between days. Adults showed better performance with improvements in the number of correctly drawn sides between- and within-days, and in accuracy between days. It has been suggested that 5-year-olds cannot learn the task due to their inability to detect and encapsulate previously produced accurate movements. Our findings suggest, instead, that these children lacked initial, accurate performance that could be enhanced through training. Recently, it has been shown that in a simple grapho-motor task the three age-groups improved their speed of performance within a session and between-days, while maintaining accuracy scores. Taken together, these data suggest that children’s motor skill learning depends on the task’s characteristics and their adopting an efficient and mature performance strategy enabling initial success that can be improved through training.
Image retrieval based on integration between YCbCr color histogram and shape feature

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) considers the characteristics of the image itself, for example its shapes, colors and textures. The Current approaches to CBIR differ in terms of which image features are extracted. Recent work deals with combination of distances or scores from different and independent representations. Content-based image retrieval has many application areas such as, education, commerce, military, searching, biomedicine and web image classification. This paper proposes a new image retrieval system, which uses color and Shape descriptions information to form the feature vectors. Bhattacharyya distance and histogram intersection are used to perform feature matching. This framework integrates the ycbcr color histogram which represents the global feature and Fourier descriptor as local descriptor to enhance the retrieval results. The proposed technique is proper for precisely retrieving images even in deformation cases such as geometric deformations and noise. It is tested on a standard image databases such as Wang and UCID database. Experimental work show that the proposed approach improves the precision and recall of retrieval results compared to other approaches reported in literature.
Efficient Verification of the PCI Local Bus using Boolean Satisfiability

The purpose of this paper is to study the application of Boolean Satisfiability to the verification of the PCI Local Bus. The novel feature of this approach is the generation of several propositional formulas that describe the specification of the bus system. The formulas are tested using a powerful SAT solver and the bus is verified for errors. The SAT-based approach has several important advantages over conventional BDD-based approaches such as achieving high speed testing. To demonstrate how our method works, we have modeled the PCI Local Bus and verified several properties.
Variation and Semantic Relation Interpretation: Linguistic and Processing Issues

Studies in linguistics define lexico-syntactic patterns to characterize the linguistic utterances that can be interpreted with semantic relations. Because patterns are assumed to reflect linguistic regularities that have a stable interpretation, several software implement such patterns to extract semantic relations from text. Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of pattern occurrences in various corpora proved that variation may affect their interpretation. In this paper, we report the linguistic variations that impact relation interpretation in language, and may lead to errors in relation extraction systems. We analyze several features of state-of-the-art pattern-based relation extraction tools, mostly how patterns are represented and matched with text, and discuss their role in the tool ability to manage variation.
A Class of Sparseness-Controlled Algorithms for Echo Cancellation

In the context of acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), it is shown that the level of sparseness in acoustic impulse responses can vary greatly in a mobile environment. When the response is strongly sparse, convergence of conventional approaches is poor. Drawing on techniques originally developed for network echo cancellation (NEC), we propose a class of AEC algorithms that can not only work well in both sparse and dispersive circumstances, but also adapt dynamically to the level of sparseness using a new sparseness-controlled approach. Simulation results, using white Gaussian noise (WGN) and speech input signals, show improved performance over existing methods. The proposed algorithms achieve these improvement with only a modest increase in computational complexity.
Assessment of Heavy Metals in Water, Fish and Sediments from UKE Stream, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

The levels of lead, zinc, copper, iron, manganese, cadmium and mercury were determined in various body parts of two species of catfish; Clarias gariepinus and Synodontis schall, water and sediment samples from Uke stream using atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS) method. The results obtained showed that iron (Fe) had the highest concentration with average of 8.78 mg/g and 7.51 mg/l in sediment and water respectively followed by Zn with 4.79 mg/g (sediment) and 3.19 mg/l (water) while Cd had the lowest concentration of 0.035 mg/g and 0.023 mg/l in the sediment and water respectively. In the two fish species, zinc (0.17 - 3.25 mg/g) was the most highly concentrated in the various matrices while lead (0.011 - 0.031mg/g) was the lowest. Metal levels in the various body parts of the two species of fish studied were found to be more concentrated in either, the head, gills or the intestine. In both species zinc had the widest variability while lead was the least. The metal levels determined in water and sediment are all above the tolerable limits recommended by regulatory bodies which is an indication that this ecosystem is contaminated with heavy metals which would eventually end up in the food chain. The metals determined in various body parts of two species of catfish were below deleterious level; however there is the need for regular monitoring of the heavy metal load in this water body and the aquatic organisms in there because of the long term effects.
Behavioral plasticity in honey bees is associated with differences in brain microRNA transcriptome

Small, non‐coding microRNAs (miRNAs) have been implicated in many biological processes, including the development of the nervous system. However, the roles of miRNAs in natural behavioral and neuronal plasticity are not well understood. To help address this we characterized the microRNA transcriptome in the adult worker honey bee head and investigated whether changes in microRNA expression levels in the brain are associated with division of labor among honey bees, a well‐established model for socially regulated behavior. We determined that several miRNAs were downregulated in bees that specialize on brood care (nurses) relative to foragers. Additional experiments showed that this downregulation is dependent upon social context; it only occurred when nurse bees were in colonies that also contained foragers. Analyses of conservation patterns of brain‐expressed miRNAs across Hymenoptera suggest a role for certain miRNAs in the evolution of the Aculeata, which includes all the eusocial hymenopteran species. Our results support the intriguing hypothesis that miRNAs are important regulators of social behavior at both developmental and evolutionary time scales.
Group Size Effect on the Success of Wolves Hunting

Social foraging shows unexpected features such as the existence of a group size threshold to accomplish a successful hunt. Above this threshold, additional individuals do not increase the probability of capturing the prey. Recent direct observations of wolves (Canis lupus) in Yellowstone Park show that the group size threshold when hunting its most formidable prey, bison (Bison bison), is nearly three times greater than when hunting elk (Cervus elaphus), a prey that is considerably less challenging to capture than bison. These observations provide empirical support to a computational particle model of group hunting which was previously shown to be effective in explaining why hunting success peaks at apparently small pack sizes when hunting elk. The model is based on considering two critical distances between wolves and prey: the minimal safe distance at which wolves stand from the prey, and the avoidance distance at which wolves move away from each other when they approach the prey. The minimal safe distance is longer when the prey is more dangerous to hunt. We show that the model explains effectively that the group size threshold is greater when the minimal safe distance is longer. Actually, the model reveals that the group size threshold results from the nonlinear combination of the variations of both critical distances. Although both distances are longer when the prey is more dangerous, they contribute oppositely to the value of the group size threshold: the group size threshold is smaller when the avoidance distance is longer. This unexpected mechanism gives rise to a global increase of the group size threshold when considering bison with respect to elk, but other prey more dangerous than elk can lead to specific critical distances that can give rise to the same group size threshold. Our results show that the computational model can guide further research on group size effects, suggesting that more experimental observations should be obtained for other kind of prey as e.g. moose (Alces alces).
A Note on the Computation of the Tobit Estimator

TOBIT ESTIMA~S [4] are generally computed by some version of Newton's method. ' In this note ao alternative procedure is proposed for computing these estimates. Some experimental results are presented that indicate that the procedure may be considerably faster than Newton's method for many problems. For ease of reference, the notation in this note corresponds closely to the notation in Amemiya [l].
Predicting Embedded Syntactic Structures from Natural Language Sentences with Neural Network Approaches

Syntactic parsing is a key component of natural language understanding and, traditionally, has a symbolic output. Recently, a new approach for predicting syntactic structures from sentences has emerged: directly producing small and expressive vectors that embed in syntactic structures. In this approach, parsing produces distributed representations. In this paper, we advance the frontier of these novel predictors by using the learning capabilities of neural networks. We propose two approaches for predicting the embedded syntactic structures. The first approach is based on a multi-layer perceptron to learn how to map vectors representing sentences into embedded syntactic structures. The second approach exploits recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory (LSTM-RNN-DRP) to directly map sentences to these embedded structures. We show that both approaches successfully exploit word information to learn syntactic predictors and achieve a significant performance advantage over previous methods. Results on the Penn Treebank corpus are promising. With the LSTM-RNN-DRP, we improve the previous state-of-the-art method by 8.68%.
Rigorous Definition of Quantum Field Operators in Noncommutative Quantum Field Theory

The space, on which quantum field operators are given, is constructed in any theory, in which the usual product between test functions is substituted by the $\star$-product (the Moyal-type product). The important example of such a theory is noncommutative quantum field theory (NC QFT). This construction is the key point in the derivation of the Wightman reconstruction theorem.
Ihardetsi : A Question Answering system for Basque built on reused linguistic processors

This paper presents Ihardetsi, a question answering system oriented to Basque. We describe the main architecture of the system, paying special attention to the use of linguistic resources and tools. The system has been built reusing such tools, on the basis that general linguistic processors can be adapted to satisfy the requirements of the question answering task. This methodology can be suitable for other projects, specially when lesser resourced languages are involved. Along with the description of the system, we outline its performance presenting some experiments and the obtained results.
Reducing the Bias: How Perspective Taking Affects First- and Third-Person Perceptions of Media Influence

Third- and first-person perceptions (TPPs/FPPs) are considered to be biased judgments of media influence on self and others. Research suggests that perspective taking, i.e., thinking from another person’s position, decreases perceptual gaps between self and others via assimilation. In a two-factorial experiment (n = 431), we test whether this effect of perspective taking (Factor 1) holds true for the presumed influence of desirable and undesirable messages (Factor 2). Results indicate that perspective taking significantly reduces TPPs in the case of an undesirable message but not FPPs that are provoked by the desirable message. The observable effect traces back to a change in presumed message influence on the self. Presumed influence on others was independent of both factors, desirability of message influence and perspective taking. These findings are discussed in the light of cognitive and motivational explanations for FPPs/TPPs.
The Effects Of Privatization And International Competitive Pressure On Firms??? Price-Cost Margins: Micro Evidence From Emerging Economies1

This paper uses representative firm level panel data of 1,701 Bulgarian and 2,047 Romanian manufacturing firms to estimate price-cost margins and to analyze how these are affected by privatization and increased competitive pressure. The estimation method used, which is based on Roeger (1995), deals with potential endogeneity problems that are associated with estimating firm performance, by making use of the properties of the primal and dual Solow residual. We find that privatization is associated with higher price-cost margins in both Bulgaria and Romania. Moreover, foreign owned firms have higher markups than domestic privatized firms. Our results suggest that the sequencing of reforms, such as demonopolization prior to privatization and the establishment of competition policy, may be important. In addition, our results give support to the idea that opening to trade has a disciplining effect on firms? market power. We find that increased import penetration is associated with lower price-cost margins in sectors where product market concentration is relatively high. Our results can be of relevance for other emerging economies, such as China and Vietnam, which still have to undergo major privatization programs.
Evaluation of the marginal and internal gap of metal-ceramic crown fabricated with a selective laser sintering technology: two- and three-dimensional replica techniques

PURPOSE One of the most important factors in evaluating the quality of fixed dental prostheses (FDPs) is their gap. The purpose of this study was to compare the marginal and internal gap of two different metal-ceramic crowns, casting and selective laser sintering (SLS), before and after porcelain firing. Furthermore, this study evaluated whether metal-ceramic crowns made using the SLS have the same clinical acceptability as crowns made by the traditional casting. MATERIALS AND METHODS The 10 study models were produced using stone. The 20 specimens were produced using the casting and the SLS methods; 10 samples were made in each group. After the core gap measurements, 10 metal-ceramic crowns in each group were finished using the conventional technique of firing porcelain. The gap of the metal-ceramic crowns was measured. The marginal and internal gaps were measured by two-dimensional and three-dimensional replica techniques, respectively. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and nonparametric ANCOVA were used for statistical analysis (α=.05). RESULTS In both groups, the gap increased after completion of the metal-ceramic crown compared to the core. In all measured areas, the gap of the metal cores and metal-ceramic crowns produced by the SLS was greater than that of the metal cores and metal-ceramic crowns produced using the casting. Statistically significant differences were found between cast and SLS (metal cores and metal-ceramic crown). CONCLUSION Although the gap of the FDPs produced by the SLS was greater than that of the FDPs produced by the conventional casting in all measured areas, none exceeded the clinically acceptable range.