Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CSR Reporting in the Airline Industry - An Analysis of the Development of Airlines’ CSR Reporting

This thesis aims to track the development of CSR and sustainability reporting in the airline industry. The emphasis is set only on the reporting practices and not on the companies’ CSR and sustainability activities per se. To analyse the development, a qualitative content analysis with a longitudinal-comparative research design was adopted. This thesis uses an inductive approach, discussing potential reasons for certain trends and developments. The aspects to be considered in the analysis were determined based on general qualitative characteristics of accounting reports, based on the IASB and GRI frameworks. The empirical material consists of sustainability, environmental and annual reports that were available on the airlines’ websites. The sample contains 20 airlines, 12 network, six low-cost and two cargo airlines. The primary focus was to include airlines from the most significant aviation markets. One of the major results of the thesis is that the awareness of sustainability topics among airlines started to receive attention especially during the last decade. Even though airlines seem to have or still put efforts into making their own reports comparable, comparability across different carriers’ reports and the presented measures is not yet achieved and is not expected to do so in the near future. Other observations include the increased use of the GRI framework and the use of assurance for sustainability related information.
Pregnancy with uterine prolapse: Duhrssen’s incision still valid in today’s scenario? -

Background: To study uterine prolapse during pregnancy and its effect on perinatal outcome; importance of Duhrssen incision in aiding vaginal delivery in prolapse. Methods: A retrospective study conducted by reviewing 49 antenatal women with uterine prolapse admitted in the labour room of Department of Obs. & Gynae at G.S. V.M. Medical College, Kanpur over a period of 3 years (2010-13). Results: 17(35.4%) women were booked. 25% of booked antenatal women presenting to our hospital with preterm labour pains managed conservatively. Incidence of preterm labour and delivery, application of Duhrssen’s incision in aiding vaginal delivery and h/o difficult delivery was statistically significant in unbooked women. Conclusion: Preterm labour associated with prolapse led to significant perinatal morbidity and mortality. Management of uterine prolapse during labour is individualized depending on the severity of prolapse, gestational age, parity and women’s preference.
Learning Sentimental Representations for Mixed-Gram Terms

In this paper, we propose a model based on the bag of mixed-gram terms to deal with sentiment classification task and extracting sentimental features. We obtain a very short-dimensional vector to represent sentiment and use the sentimental representations to complete the task of sentiment classification. Furthermore, since the sentimental representations and some traditional word vectors have complementary advantages, we combine the sentimental representations with convolutional neural networks that use other word vectors and ultimately implement a more efficient classifier. Experimental results show that this combination method can use static word vectors to deal with sentimental classification tasks well, and the sentimental representations here play the role of fine-turned word vectors in previous research.
Semantic computation in geography question answering

In this paper, we develop a question answering system for solving single-option geography questions. The system is built in two directions. One computes semantic similarity between two questions. The other converts the task into question sentence binary-classification by generating the distributed representation of sentence semantic. When computing semantic similarity, we first implement a basic framework based on bag-of-words (BOW), and then extend the framework to Edit Distance variant and BM25 variant. On the other hand, we use convolutional neural network and stacked denoising auto-encoder to generate the distributed representation of sentence semantic respectively. Given the semantic representation of sentence, a logistic regression classifier is employed to classify the sentence. The dataset we use is a large scale Chinese college entrance examination question set of geography, which is clawed from the internet. Experiment results show that the performance of CNN can answer the single-option geography questions with high accuracy, which can achieve 0.7310.
Sorting Motifs of the Endosomal/Lysosomal CLC Chloride Transporters*

The CLC protein family contains plasma membrane chloride channels and the intracellular chloride-proton exchangers ClC-3–7. The latter proteins mainly reside on the various compartments of the endosomal-lysosomal system where they are involved in the luminal acidification or chloride accumulation. Although their partially overlapping subcellular distribution has been studied extensively, little is known about their targeting mechanism. In a comprehensive study we now performed pulldown experiments to systematically map the differential binding of adaptor proteins of the endosomal sorting machinery (adaptor proteins and GGAs (Golgi-localized, γ-ear containing, Arf binding)) as well as clathrin to the cytosolic regions of the intracellular CLCs. The resulting interaction pattern fitted well to the known subcellular localizations of the CLCs. By mutating potential sorting motifs, we could locate almost all binding sites, including one already known for ClC-3 and several new motifs for ClC-5, -6, and -7. The impact of the identified binding sites on the subcellular localization of CLC transporters was determined by heterologous expression of mutants. Surprisingly, some vesicular CLCs retained their localization after disruption of interaction sites. However, ClC-7 could be partially shifted from lysosomes to the plasma membrane by combined mutation of N-terminal sorting motifs. The localization of its β-subunit, Ostm1, was determined by that of ClC-7. Ostm1 was not capable of redirecting ClC-7 to lysosomes.
Ambient Backscatter Communication Systems: Detection and Performance Analysis

Ambient backscatter technology that utilizes the ambient radio frequency signals to enable the communications of battery-free devices has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we study the problem of signal detection for an ambient backscatter communication system that adopts the differential encoding to eliminate the necessity of channel estimation. Specifically, we formulate a new transmission model, design the data detection algorithm, and derive two closed-form detection thresholds. One threshold is used to approximately achieve the minimum sum bit error rate (BER), while the other yields balanced error probabilities for “0” bit and “1” bit. The corresponding BER expressions are derived to fully characterize the detection performance. In addition, the lower and the upper bounds of BER at high signal-to-noise ratio regions are also examined to simplify a performance analysis. Simulation results are then provided to corroborate the theoretical studies.
Self‐Reflection and the Cognitive Control of Behavior: Implications for Learning

In this article, we suggest that self-reflection and self-control--studied under the rubric of "executive function" (EF)—have the potential to transform the way in which learning occurs, allowing for the relatively rapid emergence of new behaviors. We describe 2 lines of research that indicate that reflecting on a task and its affordances helps children to respond flexibly in a more top-down fashion despite interference from prior learning or perceptually salient aspects of the task. Research on A-not-B tasks with infants and young children revealed that postswitch flexibility is an inverted U-shaped function of number of preswitch trials. Overlearning may provide additional opportunities for reflection, in part by freeing up cognitive resources as behavior becomes automatized. Findings from the Flexible Item Selection Task with preschoolers and adults revealed that, although labeling the relevant dimension facilitates performance, performance declines when participants are prohibited from labeling. Labeling one's perspective on a situation not only helps make that perspective an explicit object of consideration, but it may also help children access more abstract conceptual descriptions of a stimulus Research on EF has broad implications for the way in which human learning differs from learning in other species and the way in which human learning may change over the course of development.
Santorio Sanctorius (1561–1636) – Founding Father of Metabolic Balance Studies

The intellectual renaissance of the closing decades of the sixteenth century provided the fertile ground in which the budding spirit of scientific inquiry emerged in the seventeenth century. Direct observation, soon augmented by instrumentation that allowed for quantification and, therefore, verification, became the revelatory medium for the progress of the sciences. In medicine, progress depended on the application of the exact sciences of chemistry, mathematics and physics to the study of function. One of the medical luminaries of this early scientific revolution was Santorio Sanctorius (1561– 1636), whose principal contributions were his studies on insensible perspiration and his instrumental inventions. To study insensible perspiration, he designed a movable platform attached to a steelyard scale that allowed for the quantification of changes in body weight of subjects who partook in their daily activities on the platform. After years of self-experimentation, he applied his device to the study of patients. Unfortunately, his records are lost. What survives is a summary of his observations in a series of aphorisms published under the title of Ars de statica medicina, in 1614; 3 years after he was appointed Ordinary Professor of Theoretical Medicine in Padua. To enhance the bedside evaluation of patients, he also designed instruments to quantify the pulse, temperature, and environmental humidity. For his pioneering and detailed balance studies, Sanctorius clearly deserves the title of founding father of metabolic balance studies.
Shear mode properties of c-axis parallel oriented ScxAl1−xN films grown by RF bias sputtering

Because the increase of piezoelectricity was found in Sc heavily doped AlN films, they have been well studied. Many researchers investigate the properties of the longitudinal mode bulk acoustic wave with c-axis normally oriented ScAlN films. However, there are few reports on the shear mode properties because of difficulties in growth of c-axis parallel oriented ScAlN films which can excite shear mode bulk acoustic wave. In this study, we demonstrated the film growth of c-axis parallel oriented ScAlN using RF substrate bias RF magnetron sputtering method. As a result of X-ray diffraction analyses, we obtained c-axis parallel oriented AlN, Sc0.05Al0. 95N and Sc0.13Al0. 87N films. Then, High overtone bulk acoustic wave resonators were fabricated with these films. They excited shear mode bulk acoustic wave, but shear mode conversion losses were large (more than 20 dB). It is necessary to obtain highly-crystallized ScAlN films.
Measuring Customer Experience: How to Develop and Execute the Most Profitable Customer Experience Strategies

1. CX: the origins and importance for your business 2. CX strategies and management practices 3. The 5 dimensions of CX management 4. The 3 types of CX management practice 5. Linking practices to profitability 6. Your CX management balance sheet: where are you and where do you want to be? How to get from A (current state) to B - a step-by-step approach. 7. The devil is in the details - only what get measured gets managed 8. Best practice versus next practice 9. Concluding thoughts
Plasticity in latitudinal patterns of leaf N and P of Oryza rufipogon in China.

Characterising the adaptability in nature of plant stoichiometric patterns across geographic or environmental gradients is important in advancing our understanding of the organisation of plant-nutrient relationships. We examined correlations between plant nutrient traits, latitude, longitude, climate and soil variables in 34 populations of Oryza rufipogon across its range. We further compared the responses of population transplants at two experimental gardens: one beyond its northern natural range and another near the southern limit, to assess the nature of geographic variation in plant nutrients. The study showed that leaf P of O. rufipogon in the field was negatively correlated with latitude and largely depended on temperature and soil P availability. Leaf N was not related to latitude but was significantly correlated with precipitation and soil N concentration. Leaf N:P ratio was largely determined by absorption efficiency of P. Transplantation revealed that there were no significant associations of leaf nutrients with geographic, climatic or soil variables of origin in either of the experimental gardens, indicating phenotypic plasticity. However, examination of relationships between response ratios of leaf nutrients and change ratio of climate and soil environments, as well as norms of reaction in the transplantation experiment, revealed more complexity, suggesting both substantial genotypic diversity and the existence of genotype × environment interactions in these populations of O. rufipogon. These data indicate that adaptive plasticity response of plants to temperature and soil P availability significantly explain the observed shifts in leaf N, P and N:P of O. rufipogon along latitudinal gradients.
Preprocessing Design in Pyroelectric Infrared Sensor-Based Human-Tracking System: On Sensor Selection and Calibration

This paper presents an information-gain-based sensor selection approach as well as a sensor sensing probability model-based calibration process for multihuman tracking in distributed binary pyroelectric infrared sensor networks. This research includes three contributions: 1) choose the subset of sensors that can maximize the mutual information between sensors and targets; 2) find the sensor sensing probability model to represent the sensing space for sensor calibration; and 3) provide a factor graph-based message passing scheme for distributed tracking. Our approach can find the solution for sensor selection to optimize the performance of tracking. The sensing probability model is efficiently optimized through the calibration process in order to update the parameters of sensor positions and rotations. An application for mobile calibration and tracking is developed. Simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the proposed framework.
Service Discovery & Selection for Next Generation IPTV Environments

By the end of 2007 initial drafts for standardized IPTV solutions have been made available by ITU-T and will be followed by ETSITISPAN Release 2 in the beginning of 2008. In this paper our approaches for the integration of Service Discovery & Selection mechanisms into an IMS-based IPTV environment will be presented. This work is driven by active participation in ETSI TISPAN Working Group 2 and 3. Relevant existing standards from the Digital Video Broadcasting Group (DVB) and Open Mobile Alliance(OMA) will be analyzed in this context and followed by providing an introduction to a proof of concept demonstrator enhancing the so called Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab which represents an open playground for IMS-based IPTV services.
The Effect of Testosterone Administration and Digit Ratio (2D:4D) on Implicit Preference for Status Goods in Healthy Males

Testosterone has been linked to social status seeking in humans. The present study investigated the effects of testosterone administration on implicit and explicit preferences for status goods in healthy male participants (n = 64), using a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subjects design. We also investigated the interactive effect between second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D; i.e., a proximal index of prenatal testosterone) and testosterone treatment on status preferences. Results showed that testosterone administration has no discernable influence on self-reported willingness-to-pay (i.e., the explicit measure) or implicit attitudes towards status goods. Individuals with lower 2D:4D (i.e., more masculine) had more positive attitudes for high-status goods on an Implicit Association Task, and this association was abolished with testosterone administration. These data suggest interactive effects of acute testosterone administration and prenatal testosterone exposure on human social status seeking, and highlight the utility of implicit methods for measuring status-related behavior.
Multi-dimensional time warping based on complexity invariance and its application in sports evaluation

Complexity invariance of time series is recently considered in distance measurement, which was often neglected before in study of time series. According to related studies, this thought is more effective than the existing methods in many kinds of time series. In sports training area, there are quite a lot of requirements in motion evaluation. We decide to describe the correctness of a motion by comparing the similarity between its time series and the standard model. During the matching process, we believe the introduction of complexity invariance will improve the results of evaluation as well as the time consumption. Thus, in this paper, we use Complexity-Invariant Distance(CID) to measure the distance between multi-dimensional time series on a certain time stamp, and apply it in motion evaluation of dance training. From the results of real world practice, we obtain better performance in both accuracy and time cost.
An efficient method for online detecting abnormal cascading pattern in distributed networks

In many large-scale real-time monitoring applications, such as water quality monitoring of large water distribution networks, massive streams flow out of multiple concurrent sensors continuously. Online detection of abnormal event, especially of those spreading in the area, is vital to such networks, as the event will influence a large number of nodes once breaking out. In this paper, we first define such event as abnormal cascading pattern, and propose an efficient, online approach to detection. Instead of analyzing the streams independently, we focus on the correlation among streams and its variation. We first summarize the evolving correlation between each pair of streams into a profile, distinguish the abnormal variation based on the profile, and then catch the cascading pattern through associating the abnormal pairs. Experiments indicate high detection sensitivity, low false alarm rate and background noise tolerance of our approach.
Antiviral RNA Silencing Is Restricted to the Marginal Region of the Dark Green Tissue in the Mosaic Leaves of Tomato Mosaic Virus-Infected Tobacco Plants

ABSTRACT Mosaic is a common disease symptom caused by virus infection in plants. Mosaic leaves of Tomato mosaic virus (ToMV)-infected tobacco plants consist of yellow-green and dark green tissues that contain large and small numbers of virions, respectively. Although the involvement of RNA silencing in mosaic development has been suggested, its role in the process that results in an uneven distribution of the virus is unknown. Here, we investigated whether and where ToMV-directed RNA silencing was established in tobacco mosaic leaves. When transgenic tobaccos defective in RNA silencing were infected with ToMV, little or no dark green tissue appeared, implying the involvement of RNA silencing in mosaic development. ToMV-related small interfering RNAs were rarely detected in the dark green areas of the first mosaic leaves, and their interior portions were susceptible to infection. Thus, ToMV-directed RNA silencing was not effective there. By visualizing the cells where ToMV-directed RNA silencing was active, it was found that the effective silencing occurs only in the marginal regions of the dark green tissue (∼0.5 mm in width) and along the major veins. Further, the cells in the margins were resistant against recombinant potato virus X carrying a ToMV-derived sequence. These findings demonstrate that RNA silencing against ToMV is established in the cells located at the margins of the dark green areas, restricting the expansion of yellow-green areas, and consequently defines the mosaic pattern. The mechanism of mosaic symptom development is discussed in relation to the systemic spread of the virus and RNA silencing.
Ultrasmall volume molecular isothermal amplification in microfluidic chip with advanced surface processing

In this paper, we developed a metal micro-fluidic chip with advanced surface processing for ultra-small volume molecular isothermal amplification. This method takes advantages of the nucleic acid amplification with good stability and consistency, high sensitivity about 31 genomic DNA copies and bacteria specific gene identification. Based on the advanced surface processing, the bioreaction assays of nucleic acid amplification was dropped about 392nl in volume. A high numerical aperture confocal optical detection system was advanced to sensitively monitor the DNA amplification with low noise and high power collecting fluorescence near to the optical diffraction limit. A speedy nucleic acid isothermal amplification was performed in the ultra-small volume microfluidic chip, where the time at the inflexions of second derivative to DNA exponential amplified curves was brought forward and the sensitivity was improved about 65 folds to that of in current 25μl Ep-tube amplified reaction, which indicates a promising clinic molecular diagnostics in the droplet amplification.
Another Look at Industry Momentum and the Cross Section of Expected Returns

This paper investigates whether industry affiliation matters to implementing industry momentum strategies. After discriminating between relevant and redundant industries it shows that only a subset corresponding to less than 50% of the overall market capitalization generates significant momentum payoffs. Industry momentum is only priced in the cross section of expected returns when relevant industries are used as test assets. An out-of-sample experiment utilizing a new double-sorting approach is proposed. It incorporates a learning period to condition momentum strategies on relevant industries and offers evidence that the conditional momentum strategy generates up to 30% higher payoffs than the unconditional counterpart.
Impacts of Robot Assistant Performance on Human Trust , Satisfaction , and Frustration

People look for ways to develop bonds and create meaningful relationships with others. In these interactions, there are several parameters that play an important role when it comes to interacting with any autonomous or semi-autonomous system like robots or prostheses. In this study, the focus was on studying how the performance of a robotic assistant impacted self-reported human metrics related to trust, frustration, and satisfaction with the robot. All these factors could impact the ability for people to successfully interact with autonomous systems; it is likely that the task performance of the human-robot team would be highly variable according to any significant changes in the human trust, frustration, and satisfaction with the robot. In this study, it was found that the performance of the robot during the collaborative task significantly impacted the persons’ trust, satisfaction, and frustration with the