Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mind the Gap : Bridging the Sustainable Software Systems Research Divide

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. Copyright c © 2015 ACM Abstract Sustainability is a major concern to humanity as a result of the consequences of the rapid consumption of the planets finite natural resources, combined with exponential economic and population growth. Principally associated with the field of ecology, sustainability has emerged as an important area of research in a number of sub-fields within the domain of computing including human-computer interaction. While these communities have attempted to address the challenges of sustainability from their different perspectives, there is a severe lack of common understanding of the fundamental concepts of sustainability and how they relate to software systems. As a result, there is a need for a common ground and consistent terminology to reduce the replication of effort. This paper presents the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainabilty Design as a mechanism for initiating a conversation between the different communities in addressing the challenges of developing sustainable software systems.
Use of ionic liquids in biodiesel production: a review

This paper discusses the feasibility of the use of ionic liquids as catalysts in the biodiesel production field, describing some studies already published in the literature on this theme. Ionic liquids are regarded as a new generation of catalysts in the chemical industry, with several uses in different commercial segments. However only a few publications involving this topic can be found in the literature addressing the manufacture of biodiesel from vegetable oils or animal fats. Through the analysis of the data generated in the studies reviewed, it is possible to affirm that ionic liquids present great potential as catalysts for biodiesel production, but there are some challenges to be faced, such as the production of ionic liquids with low cost, easy recovery and with the possibility of reutilization of the catalyst for several cycles.
Investigation into the use of surf web cameras to improve the accuracy of forecasting wave behavior

Countless web cameras scattered about the UK help surfers decide which beach to visit on any given day. Modern weather models predict the wave features based on deep ocean readings but the underlying morphology of the beach and weather based external factors vary the actual conditions substantially. No strong method of feedback for the accuracy of these weather models, exists and with such a chaotic system, the accuracy can vary substantially. Using a selection of low resolution web cameras, this project is aiming to develop the algorithms required to visually detect wave crests in a video stream and subsequently track their movements. Furthermore, using this data, an estimation of the physical height and speed of the wave can be made.
Advertisers' perceptions of search engine marketing

The objective of this study is to examine advertisers' perceptions of search engine marketing. The theoretical part of the study investigates the two aspects of search engine marketing, namely advertising and optimisation. With the use of a qualitative case study conducted with leading search engine marketers and experts in Finland, the paper suggests that search engine marketing is still in its infancy among Finnish companies. Whereas small-sized dot-com companies operating in the Business-to-Business (B2B) sector have been most active in search engine marketing, traditional brick-and-mortars are just starting to set plans for search engine marketing. Finally, the study discusses the implications and provides future research directions.
Automated placement for a leaf cell generator

A program for the design of leaf cells for silicon compilers of digital VLSI circuits, is being developed. It uses rule based modules to put together basic circuits, check design rules, check designs constraints and to control each of these constituent tasks. An optimization algorithm, in this case a genetic algorithm, optimizes the layout, under the control of the rule system. The program is divided into modules that can run together using a client-server model. <<ETX>>
THE WEALTH EFFECTS OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS TO TARGET-COMPANIES IN USA FOR THE PERIOD 1920-2000: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF RELATED EMPIRICAL STUDIES

In the present paper we collect and assess the results from a number of empirical studies which deal with the economic impact of mergers and acquisitions to the share value of target-companies in USA. The studies in question cover a time interval from 1920 until 2000 and represent almost the entire studies that evaluate the phenomenon among various business areas. Despite the fact that positive results arise for target-companies shareholders from mergers and acquisitions, the results show significant divergences among studies with overlapping sample periods and/or with common or similar event windows, fact which prevents the derivation of concrete conclusions. JEL Classifications: G34, G14, N22.
Joint halftoning and watermarking

A spread spectrum watermarking algorithm for hardcopy imaging applications using a human visual system model based halftoning technique called direct binary search (DBS) is presented. DBS is used to design a halftone that jointly optimizes a human visual system based error metric and correlation watermark detector output. The original image is required for the correlation watermark detector.
Corporate Governance Practices and Firm Performance of Listed Companies Including Islamic Financial Institutions in the United Arab Emirates

Corporate governance is considered to have significant implications for the growth prospects of an economy. Well-formulated corporate governance mechanisms are regarded as important not only in reducing risk for investors, but also in protecting shareholders’ value as well as in improving and enhancing a firm’s performance. However, corporate governance mechanisms do vary between countries, as each country is unique in its political, economic, legal, culture and social contexts. Each country has its own corporate governance regulations with respect to various aspects of corporate management, which come under public domain. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) also has its own corporate governance rules introduced in 2010. The results of the study reported here evaluate the consequences of compliance with different components of the rules by UAE firms. The conclusions of the study lead to some recommendations to the UAE regulatory authorities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of compliance with various components of corporate governance rules of 2010 and their relationship between corporate governance practices and performance of financial and non-financial firms and conventional and Islamic banks in the context of the UAE. The study investigated the impact of the implementation of 2010 corporate governance rules and the extent of changes to corporate governance practices two years later (in 2012). During this period, firms that operated in the UAE were experiencing the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and its aftermath.
An integrated framework to improve quality and competitive positioning within the financial services context

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a quality function deployment analytic hierarchy process (QFD‐AHP) framework to improve quality and competitive positioning within the financial services context. The applicability of the model is demonstrated through a case study.Design/methodology/approach – Results of two empirical surveys were utilized to detect the “Voice of the Customer”. The first identified main bank selection criteria and questionnaires and exploratory factor analysis were employed. The second utilized structured interviews for the development of the first house of quality (HOQ), relating customer requirements to key market segments. The AHP was used to determine the intensity of the relationships within the HOQ.Findings – In total, six key selection criteria were designated. Analysis incorporated customer needs and evaluations for the bank's current position, future goals related to specific market segments, and competition allocations. “Pricing” was the most important criterion,.
Proposal for the Possible Establishment of an ASEAN Dollar

The current optimal strategy for ASEAN countries is to assess whether the necessary environments exist for the establishment of a well-integrated common financial market for the ASEAN area, and consequently support for a single currency. The currency is for discussion purposes termed the ASEAN Dollar. In this paper we focus on a practical application, involving two components: 1) The six convergence criteria that we propose each ASEAN country should meet in order to become eligible for the ASEAN Dollar; and 2) Establishment of the ASEAN Economic and Currency Community (AECC). Further, measurement of the evolution of financial market integration in the ASEAN countries will be investigated. Patterned vector time-series modelling will be utilised to set up and monitor economic and financial integration indicators. Those economic and financial integration indicators will be applied to measure the following three broad financial categories in the ASEAN countries: a) credit and bond market integration and cointegration to establish the nature of short and long-term co-movement; b) Stock market integration and cointegration to establish the nature of short and long-term co-movement; and c) Exchange rate market integration and cointegration to establish the nature of short and long-term co-movement. Subsequent evaluation of key indicators of economic and financial integration will also be undertaken.
Lessons for successful BOP marketing from Caracas' slums

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain how leading firms can profitably serve poor consumers by targeting the urban bottom of the pyramid (BOP) with appropriate marketing practices.Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken is an integrative analysis of existing literature and new cases.Findings – The urban BOP market is more profitable for large firms than the rural BOP due to its density of wealth, proximity, homogeneity and modernity. While recommended tactics for BOP marketing like rock bottom pricing, innovative products and sachets never produced market leaders, multilevel channels and inclusive pricing led to dramatic BOP sales growth for respected middle‐class products.Research limitations/implications – Theoretically, this research demonstrates that the urban‐rural divide is a good starting point for the development of context‐contingent strategies because successful urban BOP marketing practices were very different to those recommended for the rural BOP. It also makes a useful c.
An alternating optimization approach for phase retrieval

In this paper, we address the problem of phase retrieval to recover a signal from the magnitude of its Fourier transform. In many applications of phase retrieval, the signals encountered are naturally sparse. In this work, we consider the case where the signal is sparse under the assumption that few components are nonzero. We exploit further the sparse nature of the signals and propose a two stage sparse phase retrieval algorithm. A simple iterative minimization algorithm recovers a sparse signal from measurements of its Fourier transform (or other linear transform) magnitude based on the minimization of a block l1 norm. We show in the experiments that the proposed algorithm achieves a competitive performance. It is robust to noise and scalable in practical implementation. The proposed method converges to a more accurate and stable solution than other existing techniques for synthetic signals. For speech signals, experiments show that the voice quality of reconstructed speech signals is almost as good as the original signals.
Analysis of reconstruction performance of different demosaicing algorithms

Many proposed demosaicing algorithms used in single chip cameras are perceptually optimized only for multimedia imaging system where the QoE is used as criteria of quality. Concerning applied imaging system (e.g. security) the optimization criteria are totally different (e.g. character identification) and therefore the well rated algorithms may not be suitable for security. Four state-of-art interpolation techniques have been applied on the synthetic Snellen eye chart image test in order to evaluate the performance of character reconstruction. After that the image quality has been evaluated by the group of observers and two different objective quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM) have been calculated for comparison.
Optimistic Attitudes Protect Against Progression of Carotid Atherosclerosis in Healthy Middle-Aged Women

Objective: Optimistic people report a higher quality of life, engage in more active coping and adopt more health-promoting behaviors than people low in optimism, ie, pessimism. We evaluated whether pessimists are more likely to show progression in carotid disease than optimists. Methods: A total of 209 middle-aged healthy premenopausal women enrolled in an epidemiological study of cardiovascular risk factors and had carotid scans 10.4 years and 13.5 years later when they were at least 5 years postmenopausal. Women completed the Life Orientation Test (LOT), a measure of pessimistic and optimistic attitudes, at study entry and at the time of the first carotid scan. Analyses evaluated the association of LOT scores and change in carotid intima medial thickness (IMT) across 3 years. Results: Multiple linear regression analyses showed that the higher the pessimism scores at study entry, the greater the increase in mean IMT (&bgr; = 0.17, p < .007). A comparison of those in the lowest quartile of LOT scores (most optimistic) with those in the other three quartiles showed that the most optimistic group had less progression than the remaining more pessimistic women (mean percent increase = 1.3 and 6.0 for mean IMT, F = 15.4, p < .001). Women who were chronically optimistic at study entry and at the first carotid scan (bottom quartiles at both times) had less progression in mean IMT than did those who were chronically pessimistic (top quartiles at both times). Conclusions: Optimistic women are less likely to show progression of carotid disease in mid-life than are pessimists. LOT = Life Orientation Test; IMT = intima medial thickness; HWS = Healthy Women Study; DBP = diastolic blood pressure; SBP = systolic blood pressure; HDL-C = high-density lipoprotein cholesterol; BMI = body mass index; HT = hormone therapy; ANCOVA = analyses of covariance.
Speech recognition based confidence measures for building voices from untranscribed speech

Today, large amount of audio data is available on the web in the form of audiobooks, podcasts, video lectures, video blogs, news bulletins. In addition, we can effortlessly record and store audio data such as read/lecture/impromptu speech on hand-held devices. These data are rich in prosody, provide a plethora of voices to choose from, and their availability can significantly reduce the overhead of data preparation involved in building general purpose synthesizers, thus helping to rapidly building synthetic voices. But, a few problems such as the following are associated with readily using this data for speech synthesis (1) these audio files are generally long and audio-transcriptions alignment is memory intensive (2) available corresponding transcriptions are approximate, (3) many times no transcriptions are available at all, (4) the audio may contain disfluencies and non-speech noises, since the audio is not specifically recorded for building synthetic voices, and (5) if we obtain automatic transcripts, they are not error free. Earlier works on long audio alignment which addressed the first and second issue generally preferred reasonable transcripts, and mainly focused on (1) less manual intervention, (2) mispronunciation detection and (3) segmentation error recovery. In this thesis, we used a public domain large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to obtain transcripts, followed by confidence measure based data pruning which together address the five issues with the found data, and also ensure the above three points. For proof of concept, we built voices in English language using audiobook (read speech) in female voice downloaded from Librivox and lecture (spontaneous speech) in male voice downloaded from Coursera using both reference and hypotheses transcriptions, and evaluated them in terms of intelligibility and naturalness with the help of perceptual listening test on Blizzard 2013 corpus. The results of subjective intelligibility and naturalness test show that we can build voices of quality comparable to those built using reference transcriptions with the use of automatic transcripts and confidence measure based data pruning.
Does corporate performance predict the cost of equity capital

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between corporate performance and cost of equity capital. The work includes the anecdotal evidences to support the relation between and corporate performance is taken as an independent variable and cost of equity capital is taken as dependent variable while return on asset is taken as proxy to measure the corporate performance. Panel regression is applied while to check the effectiveness of random and fixed effect, Hausman test is exercised. The study finds insignificant relation between corporate performance and cost of equity capital
Design Pattern Refactoring by Pretty-Printing

—Most design patterns in the Gang-of-Four text can be written as a refactoring script – a programmatic sequence of refactorings. R 3 is a new Java refactoring engine based on pretty-printing. It builds a main-memory, non-persistent database to encode containment relationships among Java entity declarations (e.g., packages, classes, methods), language features such as inheritance and modiﬁers, and precondition checks for each declaration. R 3 design pattern scripts modify the database and do not modify Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) . While classical refactoring engines transform source code or ASTs directly, R 3 produces refactored code by displaying the contents of the modiﬁed database when pretty-printing ASTs. R 3 performs comparable precondition checks and code changes to that of the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) refactorings but R 3 ’s codebase is about half the size of JDT refactorings and runs an order of magnitude faster. R 3 refactorings pass relevant regression tests in JDT and ﬁx JDT refactoring bugs that we found.
Operational management and operations strategies: an SME perspective

This exploratory study examines the role of operational management and operations strategies in small- and medium-sized business communities. Using empirical research, it was discovered that a significant proportion of these enterprises apply operational 'emphases', that is, a combination of various strategies and tactics. Many of these 'emphases' or 'spectra' were used in disparate industries and made substantial contributions to the competitive positioning sought by the organisations involved.
Lysine acetylation of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis HU protein modulates its DNA binding and genome organization

Nucleoid‐associated protein HU, a conserved protein across eubacteria is necessary for maintaining the nucleoid organization and global regulation of gene expression. Mycobacterium tuberculosis HU (MtHU) is distinct from the other orthologues having 114 amino acid long carboxyl terminal extensions with a high degree of sequence similarity to eukaryotic histones. In this study, we demonstrate that the DNA binding property of MtHU is regulated by posttranslational modifications akin to eukaryotic histones. MtHU purified from M. tuberculosis cells is found to be acetylated on multiple lysine residues unlike the E. coli expressed recombinant protein. Using coimmunoprecipitation assay, we identified Eis as one of the acetyl transferases that interacts with MtHU and modifies it. Although Eis is known to acetylate aminoglycosides, the kinetics of acetylation showed that its protein acetylation activity on MtHU is robust. In vitro Eis modified MtHU at various lysine residues, primarily those located at the carboxyl terminal domain. Acetylation of MtHU caused reduced DNA interaction and alteration in DNA compaction ability of the NAP. Over‐expression of the Eis leads to hyperacetylation of HU and decompaction of genome. These results provide first insights into the modulation of the nucleoid structure by lysine acetylation in bacteria.
The Role of Interdependence in Offshoring

In the search for new sources of competitive advantage, companies are replacing a traditionally collocated in-house production with globally configured value networks, which consist of diverse and interdependent affiliates. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of interdependence in the process of global dispersion of work. The paper employs a qualitative methodology, which draws on a case study of a Danish company. The case company embarked on a large scale offshore outsourcing initiative in 2005. Since then, the company’s operations set-up went through several major re-configurations. The study indicates that the company’s offshoring patterns cannot be attributed exclusively to either management decisions or exogenous factors. Among other explanations, interdependence plays a significant role in determining the trajectories and outcomes of offshoring. On this basis, a number of recommendations for managers are developed.
Institutional Environment for Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce Usage: Toward an Understanding in the Chinese Context

This study leveraged new institutional economics (NIE) theory to examine whether and how four facets of the institutional environment—industrial pressure, governmental support, legal adequacy, and national culture compatibility—affect business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce usage. Due to a lack of overarching research models and empirical evidence, several research steps leading to interview data were taken to address the research question: 1) a comprehensive literature review on NIE theory and the four institutional factors; 2) a pilot study surveying 11 firms in China using short, structured questionnaires; and 3) focused phone interviews with three Chinese firms using non-directive, open-response questions based on the pilot study results. Then a pattern-matching, literal replication approach was followed to conduct a cross-case analysis. Results suggested that industry pressure from customer usage and requests was an important driver of B2B e-commerce usage in those Chinese firms. A supportive government policy and regulatory environment may facilitate contractual trust in the e-commerce context. Also, Chinese culture that values face-to-face interaction and interpersonal relationship deterred e-commerce usage in those firms. These results led to proposal of a conceptual framework and four propositions for future institutional studies on B2B e-commerce usage. The theoretical and conceptual views through the lens of NIE theory and interviews with business executives provide unique insights of B2B e-commerce usage for researchers, managers, and policy-makers.