Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FAIRNESS OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES, LEADER-MEMBER EXCHANGE AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

The purpose of this research was to test the hypothesis that relations between fairness perception of human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational commitment are affected by the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX). Specifically, we predicted the unique (positive) contribution of fairness perception of HRM practices and LMX as well as their interaction to organizational commitment. A sample of 224 managers was drawn from nine diverse multinational, manufacturing companies located in Northern Malaysia. Participation in the research was voluntary. Data were gathered by means of a survey questionnaire that consisted of a series of psychometrically sound scales to assess the employed variables in the study. Hierarchical multiple regression results provided support for the direct impact of fairness perceptions and LMX on each component of commitment. But significant interactions were convincingly evident only in the case of affective commitment. These interactions suggest that the impact of fairness perceptions of HRM practices on affective commitment is not unconditional. Key implications of the survey findings both for theory and practice are discussed, potential limitations are specified, and directions for future research are suggested.
Building (cid:210)Fungus Eaters(cid:211): Design Principles of Autonomous Agents

We describe a set of design principles for building (cid:210)Fungus Eaters(cid:211). (cid:210)Fungus Eaters(cid:211) are complete autonomous systems. The goal is to extract and describe in a compact way a large part of the insights which have been acquired in the animats field. The principles have been developed from a cognitive science perspective. Although they represent only a very modest beginning, they make immediately clear what sort of ideas about intelligence and cognition they endorse. They all contrast sharply with classical thinking. Moreover, they provide powerful heuristics for design.
Using Path Analysis to Examine Causal Relationships Among Balanced Scorecard Performance Indicators for General Hospitals: The Case of a Public Hospital System in Taiwan

Abstract: Examining whether the causal relationships among the performance indicators of the balanced scorecard (BSC) framework exist in hospitals is the aim of this article. Data were collected from all twenty-one general hospitals in a public hospital system and their supervising agency for the 3-year period, 2000-2002. The results of the path analyses identified significant causal relationships among four perspectives in the BSC model. We also verified the relationships among indicators within each perspective, some of which varied as time changed. We conclude that hospital administrators can use path analysis to help them identify and manage leading indicators when adopting the BSC model. However, they should also validate causal relationships between leading and lagging indicators periodically because the management environment changes constantly.
Combining photoluminescence and photocurrent measurements to distinguish photovoltaic losses

We measure the photoluminescence and photocurrent of a blue LED under open- and short-circuit conditions to distinguish between drift and non-drift related carrier loss mechanisms. We also vary the excitation intensity and temperature to monitor changes in recombination parameters. Using a simple rate equation model, we find that diffusion-related non-radiative recombination is thermally activated with an activation energy equal to approximately 44 meV, while drift-related losses account for an excitation- and temperature-independent 10% short-circuit current deficit when the carrier density exceeds a threshold of 5 × 1014 cm-3.
The password practices applied by South African online consumers: Perception versus reality

Background: The ability to identify and authenticate users is regarded as the foundation of computer security. Although new authentication technologies are evolving, passwords are the most common method used to control access in most computer systems. Research suggests that a large portion of computer security password breaches are the result of poor user security behaviour. The password creation and management practices that online consumers apply have a direct effect on the level of computer security and are often targeted in attacks. Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate South African online consumers’ computer password security practices and to determine whether consumers’ perceptions regarding their password security ability is reflected in the password creation and management practices that they apply. Method: A Web-based survey was designed to (1) determine online consumers’ perceptions of their skills and competence in respect of computer password security and (2) determine the practices that South African online consumers apply when creating and managing passwords. The measures applied were then compared to (1) the users’ perceptions about their computer password security abilities and (2) the results of international studies to determine agreement and inconsistencies. Results: South African online consumers regard themselves as proficient password users. However, various instances of unsafe passwords practices were identified. The results of this South African study correspond with the results of various international studies confirming that challenges to ensure safe online transacting are in line with international challenges. Conclusion: There is a disparity between South African online consumers’ perceived ability regarding computer password security and the password creation and management practices that they apply.
The core index of a graph

For a graph $G,$ we denote the number of connected subgraphs of $G$ by $F(G)$. For a tree $T$, $F(T)$ has been studied extensively and it has been observed that $F(T)$ has a reverse correlation with Wiener index of $T$. Based on that, we call $F(G),$ the core index of $G$. In this paper, we characterize the graphs which extremize the core index among all graphs on $n$ vertices with $k\geq 0$ connected components. We extend our study of core index to unicyclic graphs and connected graphs with fixed number of pendant vertices. We obtained the unicyclic graphs which extremize the core index over all unicyclic graphs on $n$ vertices. The graphs which extremize the core index among all unicyclic graphs with fixed girth are also obtained. Among all connected graphs on $n$ vertices with fixed number of pendant vertices, the graph which minimizes and the graph which maximizes the core index are characterized.
AT&T vs Verizon: Mining Twitter for Customer Satisfaction towards North American Mobile Operators

The North American Telecommunications sector is one of the leading mobile broadband sectors worldwide, representing increasingly important revenue opportunities for mobile operators. Taking into consideration that the market is being saturated and revenue from new subscriptions is increasingly deteriorating, mobile carriers tend to focus on customer service and high levels of customer satisfaction in order to retain customers and maintain a low churn rate. In this context, it is a matter of critical importance to be able to measure the overall customer satisfaction level, by explicitly or implicitly mining the public opinion towards this end. In this paper, we argue that online social media can be exploited as a proxy to infer customer satisfaction through the utilization of automated, machine-learning based sentiment analysis techniques. Our work focuses on the two leading mobile broadband carriers located in the broader North American area, AT&T and Verizon, by analysing tweets fetched during a 15-day period within February 2013, to assess relative customer satisfaction degrees. The validity of our approach is justified through comparison against surveys conducted during 2012 from Forrester and Vocalabs in terms of customer satisfaction on the overall brand usage experience.
Survey and Experimental Infection of Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli in Common Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus)

Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are frequently used for biomedical research but can be afflicted with diarrhea—a serious and potentially lethal health problem. Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) is thought to be the causative pathogen of hemorrhagic typhlocolitis in common marmosets, but the actual incidence of the disease and the relationship between EPEC and hematochezia are unknown. This study investigated the prevalence of EPEC infection in common marmosets and the association between EPEC and hematochezia. A total of 230 stool or rectal swab samples were collected from 230 common marmosets (98 clinically healthy, 85 diarrhea, and 47 bloody stool samples) and tested by culture-based detection and PCR amplification of VT1, VT2, LT, ST, eae, and bfp genes. Healthy animals were divided into three groups (n = 4 each for high and low concentration groups and n = 2 as negative control), and those in the experimental groups were perorally inoculated with a 2-ml of suspension of EPEC R811 strain adjusted to 5 × 108 (high concentration) and 5 × 104 (low concentration) CFU/ ml. Two animals in each group were examined 3 and 14 days post-inoculation (DPI). EPEC was detected in 10 of 98 clinically healthy samples (10.2%), 17 of 85 diarrhea samples (20%), and all 47 bloody stool samples (100%), with a significant difference detected between presence of EPEC and sample status (P < 0.01). Acute hematochezia was observed in all animals of the high-concentration group but not in other groups at 1 or 2 DPI. A histopathological examination revealed the attachment of gram-negative bacilli to epithelial apical membranes and desquamated epithelial cells in the cecum of animals in the high-concentration group at 3 DPI. These findings suggest that EPEC is a causative agent of hemorrhagic typhlocolitis in common marmosets.
LIFT: A Low-Overhead Practical Information Flow Tracking System for Detecting Security Attacks

Computer security is severely threatened by software vulnerabilities. Prior work shows that information flow tracking (also referred to as taint analysis) is a promising technique to detect a wide range of security attacks. However, current information flow tracking systems are not very practical, because they either require program annotations, source code, non-trivial hardware extensions, or incur prohibitive runtime overheads. This paper proposes a low overhead, software-only information flow tracking system, called LIFT, which minimizes run-time overhead by exploiting dynamic binary instrumentation and optimizations/or detecting various types of security attacks without requiring any hardware changes. More specifically, LIFT aggressively eliminates unnecessary dynamic information flow tracking, coalesces information checks, and efficiently switches between target programs and instrumented information flow tracking code. We have implemented LIFT on a dynamic binary instrumentation framework on Windows. Our real-system experiments with two real-world server applications, one client application and eighteen attack benchmarks show that LIFT can effectively detect various types of security attacks. LIFT also incurs very low overhead, only 6.2% for server applications, and 3.6 times on average for seven SPEC INT2000 applications. Our dynamic optimizations are very effective in reducing the overhead by a factor of 5-12 times
In utero activation of K5.CrePR1 induces gene deletion

The epidermis, which forms the outer layer of the skin, is a constantly self-renewing tissue that provides a fascinating system to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing tissue formation and homeostasis. Mat-uration of the epidermis occurs at a relatively late stage during development. Therefore, the use of conventional knockout approaches, which frequently result in embryonic lethality, has hindered the study of numerous genes, e.g., sonic hedgehog, patched, and notch, thought to play an important role in epidermal development. We recently developed
Investigation of RMF-SLAM and AMF-SLAM in closed loop and open loop paths

In this paper, performance of relative and absolute simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) are studied in dealing with open and closed loop paths. SLAM techniques based on absolute landmark and robot positions (AMF) has global look at the environment. This property is used to error reduction in closed loop paths. However, in open loop path, its error value increases and performance decreases strongly. In SLAM techniques based on relative positions of landmarks (RMF), the environment is observed locally by the robot. The performance of these techniques in paths with closed or open loops look alike without significant difference. One of the reasons why researchers must pay more attention to RMF SLAM in comparison with AMF SLAM methods is their provable convergence besides their significant performance especially in open loop path.
EAGERNESS AND WILLINGNESS TO SHARE : THE RELEVANCE OF DIFFERENT ATTITUDES TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE SHARING

This paper focuses on individuals’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Beside a person’s willingness to share knowledge, we also distinguish eagerness to share, defined as the extent to which an individual has a strong internal drive to communicate their individual intellectual capital to others. The foundations for this distinction are discussed, and hypotheses are presented concerning the relationship of these different attitudes to different ways of knowledge sharing. Our empirical results show a distinction in attitudes similar to the eagerness/willingness distinction, which is related to norms of collectivism and individualism. These attitudes are found to have consequences for knowledge sharing behavior: willing individuals tend to collect more knowledge than they donate, whereas eager people donate and collect in equal degrees. Also, eagerness is positively related to knowledge donating, where willingness is positively related to both donating and collecting. In order to further investigate the meaning of this distinction, however, it needs to be operationalized more sharply.
An Ant-Colony-Optimization Based Approach for Determination of Parameter Significance of Scientific Workflows

In the process of a scientific experiment a workflow is executed multiple times using various values of the parameters of activities. For real-world workflows that may contain hundreds of activities, each having several parameters, it is practically not feasible to conduct a parameter sensitivity study by simply following a ”brute-force approach” (that is experimental evaluation of all possible cases). We believe that a heuristic-guided approach enables to find a near-optimal solution using a reasonable amount of resources without the need for the evaluation of all possibilities. In this paper we present a novel methodology for determination of parameter significance of scientific workflows that is based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). We refer to our methodology, which is a customization of ACO for Parameter Significance determination, as ACO4PS. We use ACO4PS to identify (1) which parameter strongly affects the overall result of the workflow and (2) for which combination of parameter values we obtain the expected result. ACO4PS generates a list of all workflow parameters sorted by significance as well as is capable of generating a subset of significant parameters. We empirically evaluate our methodology using a real-world scientific workflow that deals with the Non-Invasive Glucose Measurement.
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development : An Empirical Investigation : Comment † By

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) (hereafter, AJR) is a seminal article that has reinvigorated debate over the relationship between property rights and economic growth. Following Knack and Keefer (1995), Mauro (1995), La Porta et al. (1998), Hall and Jones (1999), Rodrik (1999), and others, AJR endeavors to determine the causal effect of institutions that protect property rights, measured by risk of capital expropriation, on economic performance. This endeavor is complicated by the fact that the correlation between institutional and economic measures may reflect the reverse influence of economic growth on institutions or the simultaneous influence of omitted variables on both economic output and institutions. To circumvent these problems, AJR uses an instrumental variable (IV) for expropriation risk in an equation determining GDP per capita across previously colonized countries. AJR argues that during the colonial era, Europeans were more likely to settle in places where they had a lower risk of dying from disease. Colonies where Europeans settled developed institutions that protect property better than colonies where Europeans did not settle. The article argues that, in the long run, the direct effects of mortality and European settlement on national income faded, while the indirect effect through property-rights institutions persisted. This argument motivates the use of potential European settler mortality rates as an instrument for the risk of capital expropriation. The AJR IV estimates of the effect of expropriation risk on GDP per capita are large, explaining much of the variation in income across countries. The historical sources containing information on mortality rates during colonial times are thin, which makes constructing a series of potential European settler mortality rates challenging. AJR constructs this series by combining the mortality rates of soldiers (Curtin 1989, 1998), laborers (Curtin et al. 1995), and bishops (Gutierrez 1986) from different time periods, mostly prior to the twentieth century. Researchers have been eager to use this new series, particularly given its promise as an instrumental variable for institutions. Currently, over 20 published articles, and many more working papers, use the AJR settler mortality data in their econometric analyses. The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Comment
Automated Design Improvement by Example

The high cost of software maintenance could potentially be reduced by automatically improving the design of object-oriented programs without altering their behaviour. We have constructed a software tool capable of refactoring object-oriented programs to conform more closely to design quality models based on a set of metrics, by formulating the task as a search problem in the space of alternative designs. However, no consensus exists on a single quality model for object-oriented design, since the definition of 'quality' can depend on the purpose, pedigree and perception of the maintenance programmer. We therefore demonstrate here the flexibility of our approach by automatically refactoring several Java programs to conform with quality models based on the metric values of example programs. Results show that an object-oriented program can be automatically refactored to reduce its dissimilarity in terms of a set of design metrics to another program having some desirable trait, such as ease of maintenance.
Measurement of the CP-violating phase $\phi_s^{J/\psi \phi}$ using the flavor-tagged decay $B_s^0 \rightarrow J/\psi \phi$ in 8 fb$^{-1}$ of $p \barp$ collisions

We report an updated measurement of the CP-violating phase, $\phi_s^{J/\psi \phi}$, and the decay-width difference for the two mass eigenstates, $\Delta \Gamma_s$, from the flavor-tagged decay $B_s^0 \rightarrow J/\psi \phi$. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 8.0 fb$^{-1}$ accumulated with the D0 detector using $p \barp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 1.96$ TeV produced at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The 68% confidence level intervals, including systematic uncertainties, are $\Delta \Gamma_s = 0.163 +0.065 -0.064 ps^{-1}$ and $\phi_s^{J/\psi \phi} = -0.55 +0.38 -0.36$. The $p$-value for the Standard Model point is 29.8%.
The Sensor Kinase CbrA Is a Global Regulator That Modulates Metabolism, Virulence, and Antibiotic Resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that possesses a large arsenal of virulence factors enabling the pathogen to cause serious infections in immunocompromised patients, burn victims, and cystic fibrosis patients. CbrA is a sensor kinase that has previously been implied to play a role with its cognate response regulator CbrB in the metabolic regulation of carbon and nitrogen utilization in P. aeruginosa. Here it is demonstrated that CbrA and CbrB play an important role in various virulence and virulence-related processes of the bacteria, including swarming, biofilm formation, cytotoxicity, and antibiotic resistance. The cbrA deletion mutant was completely unable to swarm while exhibiting an increase in biofilm formation, supporting the inverse regulation of swarming and biofilm formation in P. aeruginosa. The cbrA mutant also exhibited increased cytotoxicity to human lung epithelial cells as early as 4 and 6 h postinfection. Furthermore, the cbrA mutant demonstrated increased resistance toward a variety of clinically important antibiotics, including polymyxin B, ciprofloxacin, and tobramycin. Microarray analysis revealed that under swarming conditions, CbrA regulated the expression of many genes, including phoPQ, pmrAB, arnBCADTEF, dnaK, and pvdQ, consistent with the antibiotic resistance and swarming impairment phenotypes of the cbrA mutant. Phenotypic and real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) analyses of a PA14 cbrB mutant suggested that CbrA may be modulating swarming, biofilm formation, and cytotoxicity via CbrB and that the CrcZ small RNA is likely downstream of this two-component regulator. However, as CbrB did not have a resistance phenotype, CbrA likely modulates antibiotic resistance in a manner independent of CbrB.
OM: Opportunistic Multicast Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks

Opportunistic routing is a recent routing paradigm that achieves high throughput in the face of universally lossy wireless links in wireless mesh networks, likewise, network coding popularly investigated by many institutes is another approach of enhancing the throughput in wireless networks. How to combine the both techniques is an interesting research. To our knowledge, this is still an open issue to implement the multicast routing in wireless mesh networks simultaneously employing the both mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an efficient multicast protocol based on the opportunistic routing and network coding. Additionally, we also provide an ETX (expected number of transmissions) based cost metric formula of the multicast sub-group. Extensive simulation reveals that the performance of the novel presented multicast routing protocol outperforms the conventional multicast routing protocol in wireless mesh networks.
Lightly Supervised Acoustic Model Training

Although tremendous progress has been made in speech recognition technology, with the capability of todays state-of- the-art systems to transcribe unrestricted continuous speech from bro adcast data, these systems rely on the availability of large amount s of manually transcribed acoustic training data. Obtaining su ch data is both time-consuming and expensive, requiring trained human annotators with substantial amounts of supervision. In this p aper we describe some recent experiments using lightly supervised techniques for acoustic model training in order to reduce the sys tem development cost. The strategy we investigate uses a speech recognizer to transcribe unannotated broadcast news data, and optionally combines the hypothesized transcription with associa ted, but unaligned closed captions or transcripts to create labeled training. We show that this approach can dramatically reduces the cost of building acoustic models.