Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of dumped chemical weapon on the Baltic Sea microbiota

Seawater contamination with mustard gas and its derivatives substantially affects marine microorganisms. The mustard gas hydrolysis products (MGHPs) cause depletion of the species composition of microbiocenosis, as suggested by decreases in the Shannon and Pielou indices and the increase in the dominance index. Significant ecological shifts manifested as the decrease in the similarity indices. Decreased bacterial diversity suggests growth of a tolerant opportunistic species. From among bacterial cultures tolerant to mustard gas hydrolysis products the MGHPs-degrading microorganisms were isolated. The isolates were identified as Flavobacterium, Alcaligenes, Bacillus, or Pseudomonas spp. The main properties of these microorganisms are the tolerance to MGHPs, and the ability to utilize thiodiglycol. MGHPs-degrading bacteria can use mustard gas hydrolysis products as the sole source of carbon and energy at the organochlorine substances and thiodiglycol concentrations up to 240 mg/l and 6 g/l, respectively. The results suggest a potential for MGHPs biodegradation by natural occurring populations of near-bottom water and sediment microorganisms. Reduction in the species diversity of the marine microbiota suggests a decrease in the stability of the biosystem as a whole.
Reductions in post-hepatectomy liver failure and related mortality after implementation of the LiMAx algorithm in preoperative work-up: a single-centre analysis of 1170 hepatectomies of one or more segments.

OBJECTIVES Post-hepatectomy liver failure has a major impact on patient outcome. This study aims to explore the impact of the integration of a novel patient-centred evaluation, the LiMAx algorithm, on perioperative patient outcome after hepatectomy. METHODS Trends in perioperative variables and morbidity and mortality rates in 1170 consecutive patients undergoing elective hepatectomy between January 2006 and December 2011 were analysed retrospectively. Propensity score matching was used to compare the effects on morbidity and mortality of the integration of the LiMAx algorithm into clinical practice. RESULTS Over the study period, the proportion of complex hepatectomies increased from 29.1% in 2006 to 37.7% in 2011 (P = 0.034). Similarly, the proportion of patients with liver cirrhosis selected for hepatic surgery rose from 6.9% in 2006 to 11.3% in 2011 (P = 0.039). Despite these increases, rates of post-hepatectomy liver failure fell from 24.7% in 2006 to 9.0% in 2011 (P < 0.001) and liver failure-related postoperative mortality decreased from 4.0% in 2006 to 0.9% in 2011 (P = 0.014). Propensity score matching was associated with reduced rates of post-hepatectomy liver failure [24.7% (n = 77) versus 11.2% (n = 35); P < 0.001] and related mortality [3.8% (n = 12) versus 1.0% (n = 3); P = 0.035]. CONCLUSIONS Postoperative liver failure and postoperative liver failure-related mortality decreased in patients undergoing hepatectomy following the implementation of the LiMAx algorithm.
Conceptual SLA framework for cloud computing

Cloud computing has been a hot topic in the research community since 2007. In cloud computing, the online services are conducted to be pay-as-you-use. Service customers need not be in a long term contract with service providers. Service level agreements (SLAs) are agreements signed between a service provider and another party such as a service consumer, broker agent, or monitoring agent. Because cloud computing is a recent technology providing many services for critical business applications, reliable and flexible mechanisms to manage online contracts are very important. This paper presents the main criteria which should be considered at the stage of designing the SLA in cloud computing. Also, we investigate the negotiation strategies between cloud provider and cloud consumer and propose our method to maintain the trust and reliability between each of the parties involved in the negotiation process.
The Impact of Perceived Managerial Coaching on Local Staff Organizational Commitment in International Development Agencies Working in Gaza Strip

This study aimed at investigating the impact of perceived managerial coaching on organizational commitment of local staff of international development agencies working in Gaza Strip. 150 local staff, in Gaza Strip, were randomly selected to fill in a questionnaire included managerial coaching measure developed by (McLean, Yang, Kuo, Tolbert & Larkin, 2005) and revised by (Park, 2007), and organizational commitment measure, that was based on (Porter, Steers, Mowday & Boulian, 1974). The study found that managerial coaching has a positive effect on organizational commitment and team approach behaviour has an influence over organizational commitment more than other managerial coaching behaviours.
Rapid transneuronal degeneration and death of cortical neurons following removal of the olfactory bulb in adult rats

Following olfactory bulb removal in young and adult rats, many neurons in the primary olfactory cortex become markedly argyrophilic in silver impregnated preparations. Although argyrophilic neurons are found scattered throughout the pyramidal and multiform cell layers, the heaviest concentration is seen in the superficial part of the pyramidal layer.
Speaking style variation and speaker personality

This paper describes two experiments that were carried out to determine the relationships between speaking style (so-called ‘tone-of-voice’) and perceived speaker characteristics such as age and personality. We found that listeners can consistently distinguish different tones of voice from one speaker and that they showed a high degree of consistency in associating these tones with different speaker personality characteristics.
TV Channel Search and Commercial Breaks

This study investigates time lapses that interrupt product consumption. Preeminent examples are commercial breaks during television or radio programming. The authors suggest that breaks facilitate consumers’ search for alternatives. Specifically, when there is so much uncertainty that consumers are unclear about utility levels of different products, they engage in costly search to resolve the uncertainty. For TV programming, breaks lower the opportunity cost of search, allowing the consumer to sample alternative channels without further interrupting the viewing experience on the current channel. Using data from the Chinese TV market, the authors estimate a sequential search model to study consumer TV channel choice behavior. The data contain a quasi-natural experiment due to a Chinese government policy change on commercial breaks. The natural experiment creates exogenous variations in the data that enable the empirical identification of heterogeneous consumer preference and search cost. The data patterns support the idea that viewers search for alternatives during commercial breaks. Drawing on the estimates, the authors investigate how the timing of breaks affects TV channels’ viewership, offering insights about how to strategically adjust the timing of breaks.
Deriving cyber use cases from graph projections of cyber data represented as bipartite graphs

Graph analysis can capture relationships between network entities and can be used to identify and rank anomalous hosts, users, or applications from various types of cyber logs. It is often the case that the data in the logs can be represented as a bipartite graph (e.g. internal IP-external IP, user-application, or client-server). State-of-the-art graph based anomaly detection often generalizes across all types of graphs — namely bipartite and non-bipartite. This confounds the interpretation and use of specific graph features such as degree, page rank, and eigencentrality that can provide a security analyst with situational awareness and even insights to potential attacks on enterprise scale networks. Furthermore, graph algorithms applied to data collected from large, distributed enterprise scale networks require accompanying methods that allow them to scale to the data collected. In this paper, we provide a novel, scalable, directional graph projection framework that operates on cyber logs that can be represented as bipartite graphs. We also present methodologies to further narrow returned results to anomalous/outlier cases that may be indicative of a cyber security event. This framework computes directional graph projections and identifies a set of interpretable graph features that describe anomalies within each partite.
Can FDI promote export diversification and sophistication of host countries?: dynamic panel system GMM analysis

Recent trade literature highlights the importance of export diversification and upgrading in fostering faster and sustainable economic growth. This study investigates the impact of FDI inflow and stock on the level of export diversification and sophistication in host country's export baskets. By utilizing the dynamic panel data model, we find that the five-year lagged FDI inflow correlates positively with both export diversification and sophistication, and FDI stock makes the positive contribution to export sophistication. These findings provide support for the possibility of successful capabilities transfer to and building by local firms. We also find that these positive impacts of FDI exist only in developing countries.
Longevity Risk and Capital Accumulation under the Current China Pension System

This paper employs a stochastic OLG (overlapping-generations) model with time-varying instantaneous mortality rates to analyze the relationship between longevity risk and capital accumulation under the current China pension system. By employing a dynamic mortality table, our numerical simulation suggests that longevity risk does increase capital accumulation. Furthermore, we find that the current state pension arrangement cannot initiate capital accumulation.
Managing Talents for Global Leadership Positions in Multinational Corporations

The identification and development of internal high-potential employees is referred to as „talent management‟ within the human resources function. Previous research argues that national culture influences organizational culture and leadership, and that human resource management practices should be adapted to local needs. There is little prior research in regards to how Western multinational corporations address this issue within their global approach to talent management, especially in China, where there is an acknowledged shortage of Chinese nationals that operate effectively within higher leadership levels of Western multinational corporations. This study shows how those multinational corporations identify and develop local leadership talents for global leadership positions, globally compared to in China. The research is based on more than 20 qualitative interviews with 14 large multinational corporations across different industries. The main finding is that in most corporations, adaptations of talent management processes in China are limited, but do exist. However, at the higher leadership levels, there are virtually no adaptations of global leadership standards as of today, and most multinational corporations are striving to continuously improve and implement a global talent management approach.
Recommendation for a set of solar EUV lines to be monitored for aeronomy applications

In two recent studies, Dudok de Wit et al. (2005) and Kretzschmar et al. (2006) have shown that the solar Ultra-Violet spectrum between 25 and 195 nm can be reconstructed from the observation of a set of 6 to 10 carefully chosen spectral lines. The best set of lines, however, is application dependent. In this study, we demonstrate that a good candidate for aeronomy applications consists of the following 6 lines: H I at 102.572 nm, C III at 97.702 nm, O V at 62.973 nm, He I at 58.433 nm, Fe XV at 28.415 nm and He II at 30.378 nm. The TRANSCAR model is used to quantify the impact of each individual line on the density, temperature and velocity profiles. Using a multidimensional scaling technique, we show how to select from this the best set of lines. Although this selection is motivated by the specification of the ionosphere, our set of lines is also found to be appropriate for reconstructing the variability of the solar spectrum between 25 and 195 nm.
Computer vision-based food calorie estimation: dataset, method, and experiment

Computer vision has been introduced to estimate calories from food images. But current food image data sets don't contain volume and mass records of foods, which leads to an incomplete calorie estimation. In this paper, we present a novel food image data set with volume and mass records of foods, and a deep learning method for food detection, to make a complete calorie estimation. Our data set includes 2978 images, and every image contains corresponding each food's annotation, volume and mass records, as well as a certain calibration reference. To estimate calorie of food in the proposed data set, a deep learning method using Faster R-CNN first is put forward to detect the food. And the experiment results show our method is effective to estimate calories and our data set contains adequate information for calorie estimation. Our data set is the first released food image data set which can be used to evaluate computer vision-based calorie estimation methods.
A suggested typology of Greek upscale hotels based on their MrkIS

Purpose – This paper aims to suggest an empirically based typology of hotels according to their marketing information systems (MrkIS) configurations. The study seeks to examine major antecedents of the effectiveness of MrkIS and their influence on the adoption of specific marketing applications. Finally, this paper seeks to expand the general understanding of the relationship between the effectiveness of a hotel's MrkIS and that hotel's overall effectiveness, compared with that of others from the suggested typology.Design/methodology/approach – The paper collected empirical data from a sample of 254 luxury and five‐star Greek hotels. They conducted a cluster analysis in order to define various clusters of hotels based on their use of specific marketing applications. They considered the role of basic antecedents – namely the hotel's degree of market orientation adoption, system quality, the quality of the information that the MrkIS produce, and support service quality – examining their influence on the Mrk.
Demonstration of in vivo bioequivalence of a generic albuterol metered-dose inhaler to Ventolin.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To use histamine bronchoprovocation and bioassay statistical procedures to evaluate the in vivo bioequivalence of a generic albuterol metered-dose inhaler (MDI). DESIGN A randomized, double-blind, balanced, crossover design was used to determine the potency of each generic albuterol MDI actuation relative to Ventolin (Glaxo Wellcome; Research Triangle Park, NC) administration. One treatment was administered on each of 4 study days. A histamine bronchoprovocation procedure was initiated 1.25 h before and 15 min after administration of the study treatment. PATIENTS Twenty-four nonsmoking subjects with mild-to-moderate asthma were studied (18 to 65 years of age; FEV(1), > 60% of predicted; and provocative concentration of histamine causing a 20% fall in FEV(1) [PC(20)], < or = 8 mg/mL at screening). INTERVENTIONS One and four actuations (90 and 360 microg, respectively) of the generic MDI and of Ventolin MDI. Placebo inhalers were used to maintain blinding of inhaler and doses. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS The primary outcome variable was histamine PC(20) measured after study treatment administration. A significant dose-effect relationship was present (p < 0.0001). Deviation from parallelism of the generic and Ventolin dose-response curves (p = 0.95) and differences in overall mean response between the two formulations (p = 0.68) were not significant. Using Finney 2 x 2 bioassay statistical procedures, we estimated that one actuation of the generic albuterol MDI was equivalent to 1.01 puffs of Ventolin (90% confidence interval, 0.69 to 1.50). CONCLUSION The generic albuterol MDI delivers a quantity of albuterol to the beta(2)-receptor site in the lung that is the bioequivalent to Ventolin. Further, this study reinforces the validity of this statistical methodology for determining in vivo bioequivalence.
Exploration of Contextual Relationships for Robust Video Analysis: Applications in Camera Networks, Bio-image Analysis and Activity Forecasting

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in modeling contextual information for various computer vision applications. Use of inter-object/inter-activity context has ushered in significant performance improvement over most classical video analysis approaches that independently estimate multiple variables of interest, which are, in fact, interrelated. In this work, we explore the problems of multi-camera data association, spatio-temporal cell tracking and activity forecasting, where the contextual relationship models could be extremely useful but are little studied in literature.Most existing data association techniques focus on sequentially matching pairs of data-point sets and then repeating this process along space-time to achieve long-term correspondences. However, in multi-camera problems, simply combining the local pairwise association results often leads to inconsistencies over the global space-time horizons. We present an optimization framework to combine all pairwise data-association results over a network, which not only establishes global consistency but also improves pairwise accuracies. The proposed 'Network Consistent Data Association' (NCDA) method is also capable of handling the problem of variable number of data-points across different sets of instances in the network and its application is shown in the classic person re-identification problem.In spatio-temporal cell tracking problem, 3D cells within tightly clustered tissues are imaged over time at various depths of the tissue. The objective is to associate these 2D cellular projections that often lack good feature quality. We exploit the tight spatial topology of the cells in a CRF model and obtain robust pairwise similarity measures between the 2D cell segments, which are further combined together via the NCDA method to yield consistent and accurate cell lineages. The estimated lineages are utilized in the proposed tessellation based reconstruction method for generating 3D structures of individual cells.We also explore the activity forecasting problem in continuous videos. We model the simultaneous and/or sequential nature of human activities as contextual information on a graph and combine that with the interrelationship between static scene cues and dynamic target trajectories. The forecasting problem is then solved as inference problem on an MRF model defined on this graph and high accuracy is observed throughout our experiments.
Approaching Future Customer using Technological Advance in Hotel Industry

The purpose of the paper is to draw attention to the technological advance and its impact on marketing strategies in the hospitality industry. It examines the development of the profile of future consumers and their relationship towards technology. In order to approach the new consumer a brand touch-point wheel framework was used as a filter which enabled to analyze the communication between hotels and their guests as a process. The role of the model is to identify and explore all situations where organizations have the opportunity to influence consumer decision-making through technological innovation. Moreover it aims to evaluate effectiveness and potential of each digital channel for hospitability establishments and highlights their impact on consumer behavior. The research results show that attracting today’s consumer requires using a wide range of online media, social networks and mobile applications that work in a relationship involving all brand touch-points. Most importantly, aligning the marketing strategy properly with the corporate brand strategy through an integrated multi-channel campaign creates a sustainable competitive advantage. Each hotel may have different digital marketing strategy, however when a compelling message is sent, engaging the customer throughout the communication process, as a result, customer will identify with the brand, create an emotional connection and become loyal in a long run. (Less)
Real-Time Body Orientation Estimation Based on Two-Layer Stochastic Filter Architecture

The article presents real time rigid body orientation estimation using inertial and magnetic sensors. Based on the review of orientation estimation literature we suggest, as possible alternative to standard approaches, novel two-layer stochastic estimation filter architecture based on Kalman and particle filters combined into two layers. Two-layer architecture was chosen because it enables greater applicability via upgrade of already implemented Kalman or particle filters. Four two-layer filter architectures were designed, each one enabling different layer interaction. Estimation of human head orientation was chosen as a case example. Simulated data and batch head orientation measurement data were used to test the proposed architectures in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency and to select the best one in terms of aforementioned performance parameters. Selected architecture was then implemented in real time for human-computer interaction and was tested on several practical applications. Obtained results are presented and discussed and future research directions suggested.
The development of retail trade in the border areas in Poland in the light of selected theoretical approaches

Over the past twenty years, retail trade in the border zone areas in Poland has been characterized by a great dynamics of change, mainly due to unregistered cross-border trade. The present article investigates the process in the light of theoretical approaches to the problem. The existing models, however, are applied to economic conditions in which the range of activity of the commercial enterprise depends mainly on its entrepreneurship, innovation and investment opportunities. The conditions of conducting commercial activity in the border regions of Poland during the period under investigation were fairly unstable and made the entrepreneurs respond rapidly to the changes underway. This is the reason why the concept of self-organization has been used to fully demonstrate the specifi city of the development of cross-border trade and its complex, multi-faceted and multi-stage
Effect of confining pressure and frequency on the deformation of ballast

Increasing the speed and frequency of trains with the same static axle weight imparts higher dynamic axle loads more frequently. When this occurs on existing track which has not been designed for such loading there can be increased rates of ballast degradation, characterised by unacceptable deformation and lateral spread, leading to more frequent requirements for track maintenance. Recent studies carried out at the University of Wollongong highlighted that confining pressure and frequency have a significant influence on the permanent deformation and degradation of ballast. However, confinement required to keep the deformation and degradation of the ballasted track to an acceptable limit will depend on the train speed (frequency). In this context, a series of cyclic triaxial tests was conducted on latite basalt samples having an initial confining pressure of 120 kPa. After every 25 000 cycles, the confining pressure was decreased in steps to simulate the drop of confining pressure during heavy traffic. Thi.