Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Management in Global Teams A Case Study at Volvo IT in Sweden and China

Volvo IT established a global delivery centre in Tianjin, China in 2009 which works closely with Gothenburg and other sites to develop and maintain IT-solutions that support vehicle sales in Volvo Group globally. Domain knowledge, the specific understanding about the processes and context where the software is used in Volvo Group, is an important asset for Volvo IT. Managing this knowledge in the unique Chinese context, with a young and mobile workforce and a young IT-industry is the challenge that this thesis aims to explain how Volvo IT has handled. The study has been qualitative action research in close cooperation with Volvo IT where the researchers have conducted interviews at the offices of Volvo IT in Gothenburg and Tianjin, and conducted a web-based survey with Volvo IT employees working in Swedish-Chinese teams. The study finds that Volvo IT has managed to establish a similar workplace culture in Tianjin as in Gothenburg by focusing on working with training on culture, emphasising cultural fit when making recruitment decisions, sending Swedish expatriate managers to Tianjin and having close daily interaction with colleagues in Gothenburg. Overall the working style in Tianjin is somewhat more formal with more communication being done in writing and more organized study groups rather than informal discussions of the work at lunch and other breaks. Using a set of globally standardised professional roles and processes for personal development and promotion gives the organization a way to coordinate staffing while it gives the employees transparency and contributes to making growing individual domain knowledge part of growing professionally. The combination of the open Volvo culture and using structured ways to work with professional growth are important for attracting and retaining talented employees. In the future, increasing interaction with end-users and working with broader professional roles can contribute to building domain knowledge. There is also an opportunity for Volvo IT in Tianjin to become a pioneer in close university-industry cooperation and thus learn from academia and inspire students with its culture and opportunities for professional growth.
Short-Sale Constraints and the Pricing of Managerial Skills

We investigate the impact of the absence of short selling on the pricing of managerial skills in the mutual fund industry. In the presence of divergent opinions regarding managerial skills, fund managers can strategically use fees to attract only the most optimistic capital. The recognition of this fee strategy helps explain a set of stylized observations and puzzles in the mutual fund industry, including the underperformance of active funds, the existence of flow convexity, and the negative correlation between gross-of-fee α and fees.
Study on the Effectiveness Evaluation of Internal Control of Food Enterprises based on the Improved Matter-element Model

The internal control plays an important role for enterprise operation management and also becomes the effective method for enterprise to prevent and resist risk. Facing fierce international competition, China's food industry must strengthen its own management to promote its core competence; therefore, the study of effectiveness evaluation of internal control of food industry can avoid slowing down its development because of its internal defect. The effectiveness evaluation index system of internal control of food enterprises is established based on the internal environment, risk assessment, control activity, information and communication, internal supervision, etc. and the effectiveness assessment model is built based on matter-element model, which provide support for the effectiveness evaluation index system of internal control of food enterprises.
Effect of Freshwater Influx on Phytoplankton in the Mandovi Estuary (Goa, India) during Monsoon Season: Chemotaxonomy

The Mandovi estuary is a prominent water body that runs along the west coast of India. It forms an estuarine network with the adjacent Zuari estuary, connected via the Cumbharjua canal. The physico-chemical conditions seen in the Mandovi estuary are influenced by two factors: the fresh water runoff during the monsoon season (June-September) and the tidal influx of coastal seawater during the summer (October to May) season. However, the effects of monsoon related changes on the phytoplankton of the Mandovi estuary are not yet fully understood. An attempt to understand the same has been made here by applying the process of daily sampling at a fixed station throughout the monsoon season. It was noticed that the onset of the monsoon is responsible for an increase in nitrate levels upto 26 μM from <1 µM during pre-monsoon and enhancement of chlorophyll a (chl a) as high as 14 µg·L −1 during the same period. The phytoplankton population was observed through both chemotaxonomy and microscopy and was found to be composed mainly of diatoms. CHEMTAX analysis further uncovers the presence of several other groups of phytoplankton, the presence of which is yet to be reported in many other tropical estuaries. It includes chrysophytes, cyanobacteria, prasinophytes, prymnesiophytes and chlorophytes. The appearance of phytoplankton groups at various stages of the monsoon was recorded, and this data is discussed in relation to environmental changes in the Mandovi estuary during the monsoon season.
Autonomous cross-floor navigation of a stair-climbing mobile robot using wireless and vision sensor

This paper aims to present an autonomous cross-floor navigation system for stair-climbing mobile robot using wireless and vision sensors. Starting from the first floor to the fourth floor in the same building, the discussed map composed of stairways and indoor/outdoor corridors has five road sections. By using upward and forward looking camera setups, imaged based navigation is conducted in most road sections. Image features including ceiling landmarks, stair lines, and skirting lines are adopted to detect robot guiding lanes with appropriate image-processing algorithms. Particularly, wireless sensor modules are installed in the image dead zones so that the robot can adjust and continue its motion accordingly, achieving such long-distance navigation task. To let the robot follow the detected image lanes correctly, a visual servo control driven by image errors and based on car-like mobile robot differential kinematics is also applied for motion control. A self-made stair-climbing robot is finally used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed navigation method.
Determinants of Product Innovation Activities

An empirical analysis is presented of the effects of selected contingency variables on the product innovation activities of firms in entertainment electronics and major household appliance industries in West Germany. The following contingency variables were analysed: the size and industry affiliation of the firm, the top management function executed either by owners or salaried managers, and the competitive pressure that a firm has to face. The empirical findings indicate that smaller enterprises, owner‐run firms and those facing comparatively less competitive pressure are especially active in product innovation, while product innovation plays a less significant role in large and manager‐run firms, as well as in enterprises facing intensive competitive pressure. Conclusions are drawn for competitor analysis and business strategies of firms with regard to the German industries considered.
Multilevel Thresholding Method Based on Electromagnetism for Accurate Brain MRI Segmentation to Detect White Matter, Gray Matter, and CSF

This work explains an advanced and accurate brain MRI segmentation method. MR brain image segmentation is to know the anatomical structure, to identify the abnormalities, and to detect various tissues which help in treatment planning prior to radiation therapy. This proposed technique is a Multilevel Thresholding (MT) method based on the phenomenon of Electromagnetism and it segments the image into three tissues such as White Matter (WM), Gray Matter (GM), and CSF. The approach incorporates skull stripping and filtering using anisotropic diffusion filter in the preprocessing stage. This thresholding method uses the force of attraction-repulsion between the charged particles to increase the population. It is the combination of Electromagnetism-Like optimization algorithm with the Otsu and Kapur objective functions. The results obtained by using the proposed method are compared with the ground-truth images and have given best values for the measures sensitivity, specificity, and segmentation accuracy. The results using 10 MR brain images proved that the proposed method has accurately segmented the three brain tissues compared to the existing segmentation methods such as K-means, fuzzy C-means, OTSU MT, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (BFA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Fuzzy Local Gaussian Mixture Model (FLGMM).
Customer Knowledge Management: Toward Social CRM

Customers are often cited as one of the most important ‘assets’ of contemporary organizations. However, value of both customer relationships and the knowledge ‘extracted’ from them are often limited to the information technology (IT) domain, as the issue of implementing customer relationship management (CRM) software packages. In addition to a more embedded view of CRM, the ‘social’ trends relevant for customer relationships, , exemplified in the use of social networking tools and other ‘social software’ (such as Wiki-based pages, fora, chat pages, etc.) on the Internet, are identified and analyzed. It is argued that the ‘social CRM’ could be improved by taking into account the already existing theoretical and practical tenets of the virtual community model, as developed by contemporary sociology and communication sciences
Self‐service Technologies in Retail Banking: Current and Expected Adoption Patterns

Three key self‐service technologies exist in banking in New Zealand: ATMs (automatic telling machines), EFTPoS (electronic funds transfer at the point of sale), and telephone banking. All three are at differing stages of the adoption process. Of interest is exactly the stage where they are and towards which they are heading. Information of this nature would assist banks in developing marketing strategies. In order to identify at what stages of adoption these technologies are, and heading towards, 302 telephone surveys were carried out with randomly selected respondents. The results indicated that ATMs are at the late majority stage of the diffusion process, and heading for the laggard group. The question thus needs to be asked, “Should banks be spending any resources at all in trying to encourage new users? ” The laggards are the least likely of all customers to adopt, and the banks′ resources could well be better spent elsewhere. EFTPoS is at the late stages of the early majority, and heading for the late.
A Highly Robust Double Node Upset Tolerant latch

Due to technology scaling, radiation induced errors which cause a double node upset (DNU) have become more common in data storage elements. All current designs either suffer from high area and performance overhead or are vulnerable to an error after a DNU thus making them unsuitable for clock gating. A novel latch design is proposed in which all internal and external nodes are capable of recovering the previous value after a single or double node upset. The proposed latch offers higher speed, lower power consumption and lower area requirements compared to all existing DNU tolerant latches capable of recovering all nodes.
Identification of complement C3a as a candidate biomarker in human chronic hepatitis C and HCV‐related hepatocellular carcinoma using a proteomics approach

Although the significant risk factors for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are well known from epidemiological studies, diagnosis of this disease at an early stage is difficult, and HCC remains one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide. Thus, to identify any useful HCC‐related biomarkers is still a need. We performed SELDI‐TOF MS to identify differentially expressed proteins in HCC serum using weak cation exchange protein chips. Protein characterization was performed by 2‐DE separation and nano flow LC‐MS/MS. A total of 55 sera were collected from HCC patients and compared with those from 48 patients with chronic hepatitis and 9 healthy individuals. A candidate marker of about 8900 Da was detected as differentially expressed in patients with chronic hepatitis C and hepatitis C virus (HCV)‐related HCC. We identified this differentially expressed protein as complement C3a. The expression of C3a in HCC sera was further validated by PS20 chip immunoassay and Western blotting. Complement C3a was found to be elevated in patients with chronic hepatitis C and HCV‐related HCC. The combination of SELDI‐TOF MS and 2‐DE provides a solution to identify disease‐associated serum biomarkers.
Environmental management: the role of supply chain capabilities in the auto sector

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific role of supply chain capabilities (SCCs) in the implementation of particular green strategies and the extent to which this relationship is contingent upon firm size. Design/methodology/approach – A survey-based approach was used to empirically test the study hypotheses. Data that were collected from 225 senior logistics/supply chain managers across the automotive OEM and supplier base (predominantly from China, North America and Europe) were analyzed using moderated regression analyses. Findings – SCCs contribute to effective green strategy implementation and their magnitude varies significantly with respect to green design, green purchasing and green manufacturing. Firm size has positive moderating effects on supply chain flexibility in both green design and green purchasing, and on supplier appraisal capability in both green purchasing and green manufacturing. However, unexpectedly, firm size negatively moderates not only supply chain manage.
related: an R package for analysing pairwise relatedness from codominant molecular markers

Analyses of pairwise relatedness represent a key component to addressing many topics in biology. However, such analyses have been limited because most available programs provide a means to estimate relatedness based on only a single estimator, making comparison across estimators difficult. Second, all programs to date have been platform specific, working only on a specific operating system. This has the undesirable outcome of making choice of relatedness estimator limited by operating system preference, rather than being based on scientific rationale. Here, we present a new R package, called related, that can calculate relatedness based on seven estimators, can account for genotyping errors, missing data and inbreeding, and can estimate 95% confidence intervals. Moreover, simulation functions are provided that allow for easy comparison of the performance of different estimators and for analyses of how much resolution to expect from a given data set. Because this package works in R, it is platform independent. Combined, this functionality should allow for more appropriate analyses and interpretation of pairwise relatedness and will also allow for the integration of relatedness data into larger R workflows.
Letter: PNPLA3, metabolic syndrome and NAFLD status in obese subjects – authors’ reply

*Key Laboratory of Combined Multi-Organ Transplantation, Ministry of Public Health and Key Laboratory of Organ Transplantation of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, China. Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Hangzhou, China. Division of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, Department of Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Department of Pediatrics, Women and children’s hospital of Guangxi, Nanning, China. E-mail: shusenzheng@zju.edu. cn
Using Electronic Health Records to Monitor and Improve Adherence to Medication

Adherence to medication is a serious problem in the United States leading to complications and preventable hospitalizations, particularly for patients with chronic diseases. Interventions have been proposed as a means to improve adherence to medication, but the optimal time to perform an intervention has not been well studied. Electronic health records (EHRs) can be used to monitor patient adherence to medication, providing a source of information to help decide when to perform an intervention. We propose a Markov decision process (MDP) model to determine when to perform adherence-improving interventions based on a patient’s EHR. We consider the tradeoff between the patient’s perspective of maximizing (quality-adjusted) time to first adverse health event and the payer’s perspective of minimizing the cost of interventions, medication, and adverse events. We use our model to evaluate the costs and benefits of implementing an EHR-based active surveillance system for adherence-improving interventions in the context of cardiovascular disease management. We also provide some theoretical insights into the structure of the optimal intervention policy and the influence of health risks and costs on intervention decisions.
Study on the Structure of Fermented Grains-grabbing Device for Liquor Production

Under the background of mechanical liquor production,the overall design scheme of fermented grains-grading device was introduced.Such device was composed of translation component,rotation component,quick-change component and fermented grains-grabbing operating component.The structure and the functions of each component were elaborated,especially the structure design and the working principles of fermented grains-grabbing component were introduced in details.The utilization of such device would enhance working efficiency,reduce labour intensity and improve the working environment.
Micro cloning: a multiple cloning technique for avocados using micro containers

A multiple cloning technique was developed and successfully implemented commercially. This technique is derived from the so-called Frolich technique, which is used as a standard by various nurseries world-wide. This technique implies the positioning of 55 ml micro containers over the multiple etiolated shoots (one per shoot), which developed simultaneously and consecutively from the so called nurse graft. Root initiation occurs within these containers. After successful grafting of these shoots to a commercial scion cultivar, these fully developed avocado plants (clones) are separated from the nurse seedling just above the nurse graft. Usually after hardening off, the wholesale nursery will transplant these micro clones to 7 liter containers (plant bags). However, with this technique it is possible to profitably deliver large numbers of these micro clones to distant growers or satellite nurseries world-wide, to be grown by them to a field transplantable or saleable tree size. Compared to any other, this technique is unique in the sense that it is possible to produce clonal plants small in size, light in weight and in compliance with the highest phytosanitary standards. Consequently massive transport savings over long distances are possible and the export of nursery trees becomes a reality.
Genetic and physiological characterization of Escherichia coli mutants deficient in phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase activity

Mutants doubly deficient in phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (pck) and phosphoenolpyruvate synthetase (pps) were unable to grow with succinate as the sole carbon source. A number of pck mutations isolated from pps strains by penicillin selection mapped at 74 min on the Escherichia coli chromosome, between glpD and aroB. Several of the strains containing these mutations had a protein antigenically related to phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase, and therefore, the mutations probably represented mutations in the structural gene for this enzyme. Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase was regulated at the level of transcription by catabolite repression. Enzyme levels also increased in stationary-phase cultures by a mechanism independent of cyclic adenosine monophosphate or the product of the relA gene.
Anticonvulsant Mechanisms of Electroconvulsive Therapy and Relation to Therapeutic Efficacy

Background Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is held to confer anticonvulsant effects, although the role of rise in seizure threshold upon clinical effect is uncertain. This study investigated the relationship in a large, consecutive, retrospective sample of patients receiving ECT in Aberdeen. We have tested the hypotheses of previous authors to further examine the relationship between seizure and therapeutic effect as well as discuss the potential underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Methods All patients receiving ECT at the Royal Cornhill Hospital between 2000 and the end of 2008 were identified from the Scottish ECT Accreditation Network. Electroconvulsive therapy was administered twice weekly with a bifrontotemporal electrode placement using routine dosage schedules. Data were gathered from the Scottish ECT Accreditation Network and case notes regarding ECT course and clinical effect. Results The seizure threshold increased in 219 (94.4%) patients, stayed the same in 13 (5.6%) patients, and decreased in 0 patient (n = 232). No significant relationship was present between change in seizure threshold and change in Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale score (P = 0.39; Kendall &tgr; b r = 0.047; n = 182), although responders did display greater increase in seizure threshold than nonresponders. Conclusions Electroconvulsive therapy confers anticonvulsant effects in a consecutive sample of real-life patients. Neither initial seizure threshold nor magnitude of seizure threshold increase is a predictor of clinical response to ECT. A rise in seizure threshold is not essential for therapeutic effect but may represent an important marker of underlying neuronal state. The evidence reviewed in this article supports a link between neuroplastic effects of ECT and the evidenced rise in seizure threshold.
Brand loyalty and the role of hedonic value

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to explore the antecedents of brand loyalty in the chocolate market.Design/methodology/approach – A large sample of 808 effective responses was collected through an online questionnaire that was posted on the Facebook wall of a Finnish confectionery company. A model of four antecedents (brand satisfaction, brand equity, brand value, brand trust) leading to two aspects of brand loyalty (behavioral loyalty, attitudinal loyalty) was constructed. The moderating effect of consumers' hedonic value in the model was tested. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the constructs and multigroup structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.Findings – The results suggest that brand satisfaction is the most significant factor for brand loyalty within the chocolate market, followed by brand value and brand equity. The findings suggest that brand trust is the least significant factor for brand loyalty since it was only marginally related to attitudinal b.
GEOGRAPHIC DISTANCE AND M&A MARKETS: IPOS AS INFORMATION DIFFUSION MECHANISMS.

We examine acquisitions of small firms after they undergo an IPO. Drawing from studies that examine geographic distance as a source of adverse selection, we argue that IPOs can provide signals that mitigate the effects of information asymmetry and draw in more distant bidders. The findings highlight the interdependencies between IPO and M&A markets.