Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The postoperative analgesic efficacy of intraperitoneal tramadol compared to normal saline or intravenous tramadol in laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background and objective The aim of this study was to compare the postoperative analgesic efficacy of intraperitoneal tramadol with intravenous tramadol or normal saline in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Methods Sixty‐one patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy were randomized to one of three groups in a double‐blind manner via coded syringes. All patients received an intravenous and an intraperitoneal injection after installation of the pneumoperitoneum and again before removal of the trocars. In the control group, all injections were with normal saline. In the intravenous tramadol group, patients received intravenous tramadol 100 mg and intraperitoneal saline. In the intraperitoneal tramadol group, patients received intravenous saline and intraperitoneal tramadol 100 mg. All patients had a standard anaesthetic. Postoperative analgesia was with morphine. Postoperatively, numeric pain scores for parietal and visceral pain, 1 h and 24 h morphine consumption, and adverse effects were recorded. Results Parietal and visceral pain scores were lowest in the intravenous tramadol group during the first postoperative hour (P < 0.016 compared with control). The delay until the first analgesic administration was longest in the intravenous tramadol group (median 23 min, range 1–45), when compared with the intraperitoneal tramadol group (10, 1–120 min, P = 0.263) or with the control group (1, 1–30 min, P = 0.015). One‐hour morphine consumption was significantly lower in the intravenous tramadol group (mean ± SD; 3.4 mg ± 2.5) and in the intraperitoneal tramadol group (4.4 ± 4.3 mg) compared with the control group (6 ± 2 mg) (P = 0.044). There was no difference between the three groups regarding pain scores, morphine consumption and incidence of shoulder pain or adverse effects at 24 h. Conclusion Intravenous tramadol provides superior postoperative analgesia in the early postoperative period after laparoscopic cholecystectomy compared with an equivalent dose of tramadol administered intraperitoneally and with normal saline in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Evidence on substitutability of adult and child labour

Whether child labour displaces adult labour, giving rise to unemployment, is a matter of their substitutability in production. Using a flexible form production function fitted to data on Egypt's economy, we generate Hicks elasticities of complementarity, own and cross-price elasticities, as well as simulate employment effects on adult labour as a result of changing the fixed quantity of labour in compliance with the international call to end child labour. Adult males appear to be complementary with, and adult females substitutes for child labour, although the employment effects of banning child labour are inconclusive.
Takeover Threats and Managerial Myopia

This paper examines the familiar argument that takeover pressure can be damaging because it leads managers to sacrifice long-term interests in order to boost current profits. If stockholders are imperfectly informed, temporarily low earnings may cause the stock to become undervalued, increasing the likelihood of a takeover at an unfavorable price; hence the managerial concern with current bottom line. The magnitude of the problem depends on a variety of factors, including the attitudes and beliefs of shareholders, the extent to which corporate raiders have inside information, and the degree to which managers are concerned with retaining control of their firms.
CT-Guided Hookwire Placement: A Technical Innovation for Preoperative Localization of Nonpalpable Cervical Lymph Nodes

SUMMARY: The aim is to describe the technique of preoperative CT-guided hookwire localization of small, but suspicious, cervical lymph nodes. We present 3 patients who underwent the procedure for nonpalpable cervical nodes detected on PET/CT prior to complete surgical resection of the nodes. The details of the radiological procedure, surgical outcomes, and pathologic results are described. The mean intervention time for preoperative hookwire localization was 9 minutes (range 7–14 minutes). There were no complications. All surgeons felt that the lengths of the surgical skin incision and operative times were reduced because of localization. The pathologic diagnoses were 2 benign nodes and 1 case of metastatic ovarian carcinoma. In conclusion, preoperative CT-guided hookwire localization is a useful technique for guiding surgical excision, especially when cervical nodes are small and deep in location.
Towards a Taxonomy of International Retail Alliances

International alliances in retailing are a fairly new phenomenon. A range of relationships is being formed between retailers in order to take advantage of new opportunities and to counter the threats created by the internationalisation of retailing. This paper proposes a taxonomy of the range of alliances being formed between and among retailers, giving evidence from the UK retail sector to support the taxonomy. A comprehensive identification of UK retailer presence in international alliances is presented, along with a discussion on the potential advantages that accrue from membership of an alliance. We conclude by highlighting further issues for discussion.
What Does Financial Market Do? The Formation of Share Market Prices Under Heterogeneous Beliefs and Common Knowledge

Financial economic models often assume that investors know (or agree on) the fundamental value of the shares of the firm, easing the passage from the individual to the collective dimension of the financial system generated by the Share Exchange over time. Our model relaxes that heroic assumption of one unique "true value" and deals with the formation of share market prices through the dynamic formation of individual and social opinions (or beliefs) based upon a fundamental signal of economic performance and position of the firm, the forecast revision by heterogeneous individual investors, and their social mood or sentiment about the ongoing state of the market pricing process. Market clearing price formation is then featured by individual and group dynamics that make its collective dimension irreducible to its individual level. This dynamic holistic approach can be applied to better understand the market exuberance generated by the Share Exchange over time.
Acupuncture for postherpetic neuralgia: a systematic review protocol

Introduction Postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) is one of the most common complications following herpes zoster. Clinical trials indicate that acupuncture could reduce pain and discomfort among patients with PHN. This protocol aims to describe how to accumulate the current evidence on the efficacy and safety of acupuncture for treating PHN. Methods and analysis This systematic review will electronically search multiple databases including the Cochrane Skin Group Trials Register, MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), the Chinese Medical Current Content (CMCC) and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and will hand search a list of medical journals as a supplement. Any clinical randomised controlled trials related to acupuncture for treating PHN will be included. Outcomes will include pain intensity, global impression, quality of life, safety and costs. By screening the titles, abstracts and full texts, two reviewers will independently select studies, extract data, and assess study quality. Meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials will be conducted using Revman 5.1 software. The results will be presented as risk ratio for dichotomous data, and standardised or weighted mean difference for continuous data. Ethics and dissemination This systematic review does not need ethical approval because there are no data used in our study that are linked to individual patient data. Also, the findings will be disseminated through a peer-review publication or conference presentation. Trial registration number PROSPERO registration number: CRD42014009555.
Dynamic strategies for fixed-income investment

The last 30 years have witnessed an enormous growth in fixed-income markets. How long-term fixed-income strategies should be implemented for the welfare of investors has become a major concern of bond managers. This study makes use of stochastic optimal control to formulate a multi-period portfolio selection model and implements it using backward recursion algorithm to find numerically the optimal allocation of wealth between long- and short-term bonds for an investor with power utility and an investment horizon of 10 years. By way of a technical manipulation, this study uses the fact that the long rate and the spread (difference between long rate and short rate) are uncorrelated to simplify model formulation and parameter estimation. The results show that an investor would increase his/her holding of short-term bond if his/her investment horizon becomes shorter or if he/she is more risk averse, or both.
Cooperative solutions for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Enterprises today are faced with critical decisions as they consider exposing corporate data and applications to mobile devices. Many employees already own smartphones and tablets that have now matured to a point where these devices can be effectively managed using mobile device management (MDM) products. While this maturing device capability may provide the platform for enterprises to ensure a certain level of corporate compliance, MDM systems alone do not provide separation between corporate and personal assets in such a way that the "bring your own device" (BYOD) community is willing to adopt it. Key questions such as "Who owns the data on the device? " or "Does the enterprise have the authority to wipe away some or all of the data on a device upon concern of a security breach? " must be addressed. To extend the utility and flexibility of personally owned mobile devices in the enterprise, device management as well as asset separation should be considered. Unlike traditional corporate-issued laptops, which can be protected by full disk encryption techniques, mobile devices are more diverse in their individual platform capabilities. In addition, at most enterprises, most mobile devices that are brought forward for business purposes are personally owned, and this presents unique challenges. For personally owned enterprise-connected devices, it is important to preserve the user experience as it relates to personal use while providing a containerized enterprise experience as well as the additional layers of authentication that the enterprise imposes. This paper describes IBM's internal transformational journey relating to the creation of a comprehensive mobile ecosystem, highlighting newer revolutionary mobile device virtualization and containerization technologies that can separate personal and enterprise assets, provide for a transparent personal device experience, and ensure the security requirements of the enterprise.
Face recognition using feature extraction based on descriptive statistics of a face image

This paper proposes a new method of feature extraction for face recognition based on descriptive statistics of a face image. Our method works by first converting the face image with all the corresponding face components such as eyes, nose, and mouth to a grayscale images. The features are then extracted from the grayscale image, based on a descriptive statistics of the image and its corresponding face components. The edges of a face image and its corresponding face components are detected by using the canny algorithm. In the recognition step, different classifiers such as Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), k -Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and Pairwise Opposite Class-Nearest Neighbor (POC-NN) can be used for face recognition. We evaluated our method with more conventional Eigenface method based upon the AT&T and Yale face databases. The evaluation clearly confirm that for both databases our proposed method yields a higher recognition rate and requires less computational time than the Eigenface method.
Tonal Description of Polyphonic Audio for Music Content Processing

We present a method to extract a description of the tonal aspects of music from polyphonic audio signals. We define this tonal description using different levels of abstraction, differentiating between low-level signal descriptors and high-level textual labels. We also establish different temporal scales for description, defining some features as being attached to a certain time instant, and other global descriptors as related to a wider segment. The description is validated by estimating the key of a piece. We also propose the description as a tonal representation of the polyphonic audio signal to measure tonal similarity between audio excerpts and to establish the tonal structure of a musical piece.
Characteristics and Fluctuation of Negative Bias Temperature Instability in Si Nanowire Field-Effect Transistors

In this letter, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) in silicon nanowire field-effect transistors (SNWFETs) is investigated and found to exhibit some new characteristics that are probably due to the structural nature of nanowires. In long-channel SNWFETs, a fast degradation and a quick saturation of NBTI are observed and discussed. In short-channel SNWFETs, a large fluctuation of NBTI is observed, which mainly originates from the ultrasmall gate areas of the short-channel SNWFETs and the statistical nature of randomly trapped charges in the oxide and at the Si/SiO2 interface. Techniques to suppress the fluctuation and characterize the intrinsic NBTI in ultrasmall SNWFETs are proposed and discussed. A recently developed online gate current method is demonstrated, which effectively alleviates this NBTI fluctuation in SNWFETs.
Sample selection bias and the South African wage function

Conventional wage analyses suffers from a debilitating ailment: since there are no observable market wages for individuals who do not work, findings are limited to the sample of the population that are employed. Due to the problem of sample selection bias, using this subsample of working individuals to draw conclusions for the entire population will lead to inconsistent estimates. Remedial procedures have been developed to address this issue. Unfortunately, these models strongly rely on the assumed parametric distribution of the unobservable residuals as well as the existence of an exclusion restriction, delivering biased estimates if either of these assumptions is violated. This has given rise to a recent interest in semi-parametric estimation methods that do not make any distributional assumptions and are thus less sensitive to deviations from normality. This paper will investigate a few proposed solutions to the sample selection problem in an attempt to identify the best model of earnings for South African data.
Integrative management of sustainability performance, measurement and reporting

Sustainability performance management is a newly emerging term which addresses the social, environmental and economic (performance) aspects of corporate management in general and of corporate sustainability management in particular. The management of sustainability performance requires a sound management framework which firstly links environmental and social management with the business and competitive strategy and management and, secondly, that integrates environmental and social information with economic business information and sustainability reporting. This contribution addresses the link between the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard as a strategic information and management approach, sustainability accounting as a supporting measurement approach and sustainability reporting for communication and reporting.
Statistical machine translation of systems for Sinhala - Tamil

One of the most promising and leading machine translation strategies would be Statistical Translation Approach. Being pertinent even to structurally dissimilar language pairs, it has confirmed its suitability for large text translation. Rising demand is present for automatic translation between Sinhala and Tamil for quite a lot of decades. Statistical approach is the best preference to resolve the unavailability of a machine translation tool for the languages concerned. Because of language similarity, statistical approach could thrive agreeably, exclusive of more concern on linguistic knowledge. A basic translation system has been modelled and implemented in this research, with the preparation of parallel corpora from parliament order papers. This paper demonstrates only the preliminary system runs of the research, devoid of various parameter refinements and actual design and evaluation strategies. Language Model, Translation Model and Decoder Configurations are done consistent with recent literature. To facilitate the improvement of output quality, MERT technique is integrated to tune the decoder. To stay away from sole dependence on BLEU, two other automatic metrics namely TER and NIST are utilised for the evaluation in different aspects. In addition, directions to future research are also recognized and specified for the refinements of this system.
On the (S − 1, S) lost sales inventory model with priority demand classes

In this paper an inventory model with several demand classes, prioritised according to importance, is analysed. We consider a lot‐for‐lot or (S − 1, S) inventory model with lost sales. For each demand class there is a critical stock level at and below which demand from that class is not satisfied from stock on hand. In this way stock is retained to meet demand from higher priority demand classes. A set of such critical levels determines the stocking policy. For Poisson demand and a generally distributed lead time, we derive expressions for the service levels for each demand class and the average total cost per unit time. Efficient solution methods for obtaining optimal policies, with and without service level constraints, are presented. Numerical experiments in which the solution methods are tested demonstrate that significant cost reductions can be achieved by distinguishing between demand classes. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 593–610, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10032
CMP monitoring and prediction based metal fill

Nowadays, two different methodologies are used to address the CMP issues. On one hand, we find basic design oriented methods consisting of reaching a minimal density of geometries in the design. On the other hand we find model based approaches in which complex process related parameters are used. This makes these techniques, either not accurate or not usable by designers. In both cases there is no efficient monitoring of the CMP effect through Process Control Modules. This paper presents a new methodology to improve CMP process yield from the designer side. A prediction function of metal thickness variations due to CMP is established thanks to specific test structures. A method to monitor the CMP process evolution at no cost is presented and finally a technique for using the prediction function to drive metal filling procedure is described.
The effects of regional diversity on national unemployment through inter-regional migration: new evidence from Taiwan

The relationship between diversity and unemployment has long been an important issue for regional scientists. This article applies quarterly data for four regions in Taiwan during the 1981–2004 period and the empirical results indicate that regional diversity can reduce the national unemployment rate, and this is solid support for the hypothesis of inter-regional migration. To further evaluate this, the interactions among regional unemployment rates are tested using the seemingly unrelated regression estimation approach, where the negative correlations of the regional residuals show that inter-regional migration is indeed an important common factor among regions. An isolated regional labour market with the highest unemployment rate in Taiwan re-confirms that inter-regional migration plays a critical role in lowering national unemployment. In sum, regional diversity can induce migration, which then reduces national unemployment.
Municipal hazard mitigation planning: a comparison of plans in British Columbia and the United States

This paper examines the extent to which 20 municipalities in the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia have included provisions in their community plans for reducing natural hazard risk and vulnerability. Findings show that the plans are generally lacking in hazard related factual information, goals, and policies, and in mechanisms to promote plan implementation. The plans also do not compare favorably to municipal hazard mitigation plans in the United States. The authors provide recommendations for provincial/state and municipal governments with respect to improving the quality of municipal plans and their capacity to enhance public safety.
Non-linear education gradient across the nutrition transition: mothers’ overweight and the population education transition

Abstract Objective Previous studies found that developed and developing countries present opposite education–overweight gradients but have not considered the dynamics at different levels of national development. An inverted U-shaped curve is hypothesized to best describe the education–overweight association. It is also hypothesized that as the nutrition transition unfolds within nations the shape of education–overweight curve changes. Design Multilevel logistic regression was used to estimate the moderating effect of the nutrition transition at the population level on the education–overweight gradient. At the individual level, a non-linear estimate of the education association was used to assess the optimal functional form of the association across the nutrition transition. Setting Twenty-two administrations of the Demographic and Health Survey, collected at different time points across the nutrition transition in nine Latin American/Caribbean countries. Subjects Mothers of reproductive age (15–49 years) in each administration (n 143 258). Results In the pooled sample, a non-linear education gradient on mothers’ overweight was found; each additional year of schooling increases the probability of being overweight up to the end of primary schooling, after which each additional year of schooling decreases the probability of overweight. Also, as access to diets high in animal fats and sweeteners increases over time, the curve’s critical point moves to lower education levels, the detrimental positive effect of education diminishes, and both occur as the overall risk of overweight increases with greater access to harmful diets. Conclusions Both hypotheses were supported. As the nutrition transition progresses, the education–overweight curve shifts steadily to a negative linear association with a higher average risk of overweight; and education, at increasingly lower levels, acts as a ‘social vaccine’ against increasing risk of overweight. These empirical patterns fit the general ‘population education transition’ curve hypothesis about how education’s influences on health risks are contextualized across population transitions.