Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cockpit Management Attitudes

Distinctions are drawn between personality traits and attitudes. The stability of the personality and the malleability of attitudes are stressed. These concepts are related to pilot predominance, especially in the areas of crew coordination and cockpit resource management. Airline pilots were administered a Cockpit Management Attitudes questionnaire; empirical data from that survey are reported and implications of the data for training in crew coordination are discussed.
Gene profiling for studying the mechanism of aflatoxin biosynthesis in Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus

Aflatoxins are toxic and carcinogenic polyketide metabolites produced by certain fungal species, including Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus. Many internal and external factors, such as nutrition and environment affect aflatoxin biosynthesis; therefore, we analyzed the transcriptome of A. flavus using expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from a normalized cDNA expression library constructed from mycelia harvested under several conditions. A total of 7218 unique ESTs were identified from 26 110 sequenced cDNA clones. Functional classifications were assigned to these ESTs and genes, potentially involved in the aflatoxin contamination process, were identified. Based on this EST sequence information, a genomic DNA amplicon microarray was constructed at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). To identify potential regulatory networks controlling aflatoxin contamination in food and feeds, gene expression profiles in aflatoxin-supportive media versus non-aflatoxin-supportive media were evaluated in A. flavus and A. parasiticus. Genes consistently expressed in several aflatoxin-supportive media are reported. †Yu, Ronning and Wilkinson contributed equally to this work.
PID design optimization using flower pollination algorithm for a buck converter

This paper presents the development of PID design optimization using Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) and Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA). The optimal PID coefficients are repeatedly searched for using in a buck converter (step-down converter) control process. The system including the PID controller and the conventional buck converter are modelled and implemented in Matlab/Simulink. Simulation results, comparing in terms of searching time and solution quality, reveal that FPA performs better. Additionally, we extend the capability FPA by adding hierarchical search, called HFPA. The quality of the results can be improved in the same searching time.
Ctenus Medius and Phoneutria Nigriventer Spiders Venoms Share Noxious Proinflammatory Activities

ABSTRACT Ctenus medius Keyserling, 1891 (Araneae: Ctenidae) co-occurs in various microhabitats of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and can be easily misidentified as the medically important spider Phoneutria nigriventer Keyserling, 1981 (Ctenidae). Despite being phylogenetically close to Phoneutria, no data are available about the toxic potential of Ctenus medius venom. Here we show that, although presenting different profile of protein composition, C. medius venom displays some of the toxic properties exhibited by P. nigriventer venom, including proteolytic, hyaluronidasic and phospholipasic activities, as well as the ability of causing hyperalgesia and edema. Moreover, C. medius venom interferes in the activation of the complement system in concentrations that P. nigriventer venom is inactive. Thus, these data show that venoms of spiders from Ctenidae family share important proinflammatory properties and suggest that the C. medius bite may have an important noxious effect in human accidents.
Citizen Preferences Regarding New City Services: Demographics Predictors and Patterns of Opinion

ABSTRACT This study identifies patterns of preferences with regard to future city services, in a sample (n = 707) taken from a local citizen survey. Demographic variables including the age, level of education, gender, and length of residence in a community indicate differences in priorities when citizens make various choices concerning potential new services. Also, other factors including income levels and renter/owner status revealed systematic differences in picking the potential services which would have the greatest utility for individual citizens. Some services or activities which citizens preferred were “lumped together” as patterns of preferences, as suggested by a factor analysis of responses.
Conceptual Knowledge Approach to Op erational Risk Management (A Case Study)

This research provides a knowledge conceptual approach to Operational Risk Management, in attempt to explore the scientific bases of the theoretical and practical concerns. The content of this effort is intended to establish a new approach to operations management to be set as a role model for researchers, and particularly the scientific research teams to keep pace with related companies and organizations. the researchers hypothesized that, The risk is the power should be taken into account in the industry. Secondly, Risk Management by its characteristics, is an important approach to the decisions and operation of the top management. It is an inclusive process with all other activities of the whole company. “Performance, scheduling, cost and product life-cycle”. Thirdly, Risk Management has two main basic building blocks: The organizing of the operations and the knowledge-associated support system (Decision Support System). This research also aims to teach the organizations a method to detect and process the data and information by the Risk Memory tool, through their epistemological networks which are connected by Decision Support System within the framework and the aims of the organization (Theory-In-Use).
Management of restricted substances in consumer products

Management of restricted material content is an increasingly significant business issue for manufacturers of electronic products. Failure to properly manage restricted material content can not only hinder market access for products today, but can also create significant long-term costs not typically accounted for in product profitability calculations. Many manufacturers are identifying product end-of-life issues as significant during environmental management system (EMS) reviews, and are stepping-up efforts to address this highly complex issue. A successful restricted material management program requires close cooperation from both internal resources (environmental and product engineering, marketing, procurement) and external stakeholders (customers and suppliers). This article outlines the international regulatory parameters driving the need for restricted material management, and presents an effective management system that is currently being implemented by industry.
Judging marketing mix effectiveness

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the differing structural constraints between corporates and small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the area of measuring marketing effectiveness and, using the premise that an imperfect measure is better than none, demonstrate a practitioner‐developed tool for “judging” marketing mix effectiveness through a case study from the automotive sector.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses literature review, SME practitioner experience and a case study from the global automotive sector.Findings – There is no single “magic bullet” metric for measuring marketing effectiveness. Whilst multiple metrics might therefore be used, SMEs’ variances from corporates can render this approach “too difficult”. This can lead to SMEs managing their marketing without adequate planning/control, relying instead on anecdotes/myths. The case‐examined practitioner tool assumes an incomplete measurement system is better than none and that the most pragmatic start‐point is the .
Emerging role of high‐resolution imaging in the detection of renal osteodystrophy

The term renal osteodystrophy refers to changes in bone morphology induced by chronic kidney disease (CKD) and represents the skeletal component of the entity ‘chronic kidney disease – mineral and bone disorder’. Changes in turnover, mineralization, mass and microarchitecture impair bone quality, compromising strength and increasing susceptibility to fractures. Fractures are more common in CKD compared with the general population and result in increased morbidity and mortality. Screening for fracture risk and management of renal osteodystrophy are hindered by the complex, and still only partially understood, pathophysiology and the inadequacy of currently available diagnostic methods. Bone densitometry and bone turnover markers, although potentially helpful, have significant limitations in patients with CKD, and the ‘gold standard’ test of bone biopsy is infrequently performed in routine clinical practice. However, recent advances in high‐resolution bone microarchitecture imaging may offer greater potential for quantification and assessment of bone structure and strength and, when used in conjunction with serum biomarkers, may allow non‐invasive testing for a diagnostic virtual bone biopsy.
PUTTING A VALUE ON OPENNESS: THE EFFECT OF PRODUCT SOURCE CODE RELEASES ON THE MARKET VALUE OF FIRMS.

Using the example of open source software, this study examines the effect of opening up the innovation process on the market value of firms. In a sample of 30 software companies in the time span from 1 January 1999 to 30 April 2007, I find that market valuation is strongly influenced by the business model firms choose for their open innovation efforts. The nonexistence of an explicit revenue model is punished by the capital market while firms whose efforts include an explicit revenue model achieve a premium on their stock price, confirming the potential for value-creation of open innovation efforts.
Detection Filter Design: Spectral Theory and Algorithms

A new formulation of the detection filter problem is generated by assignment of the closed-loop eigenstructure under certain constraints. Detection filters, which are actually a specific class of observes, fix the output error direction of the system so that it can be associated with a particular failure mode and its known design failure direction. The derivation of detection filters from an eigen-system approach permits a very transparent theory. The detection filter gains and closed-loop eigenvectors are obtained from a set of simultaneous equation. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the solution of these algebraic equations are determined which produce a complete theory for detection filters.
Quality aspects for component‐based systems: A metrics based approach

In component‐based development, software systems are built by assembling components already developed and prepared for integration. To estimate the quality of components, complexity, reusability, dependability, and maintainability are the key aspects. The quality of an individual component influences the quality of the overall system. Therefore, there is a strong need to select the best quality component, both from functional and nonfunctional aspects. The present paper produces a critical analysis of metrics for various quality aspects for components and component‐based systems. These aspects include four main quality factors: complexity, dependency, reusability, and maintainability. A systematic study is applied to find as much literature as possible. A total of 49 papers were found suitable after a defined search criteria. The analysis provided in this paper has a different objective as we focused on efficiency and practical ability of the proposed approach in the selected papers. The various key attributes from these two are defined. Each paper is evaluated based on the various key parameters viz. metrics definition, implementation technique, validation, usability, data source, comparative analysis, practicability, and extendibility. The paper critically examines various quality aspects and their metrics for component‐based systems. In some papers, authors have also compared the results with other techniques. For characteristics like complexity and dependency, most of the proposed metrics are analytical. Soft computing and evolutionary approaches are either not being used or much less explored so far for these aspects, which may be the future concern for the researchers. In addition, hybrid approaches like neuro‐fuzzy, neuro‐genetic, etc., may also be examined for evaluation of these aspects. However, to conclude that one particular technique is better than others may not be appropriate. It may be true for one characteristic by considering different set of inputs and dataset but may not be true for the same with different inputs. The intension in the proposed work is to give a score for each metric proposed by the researchers based on the selected parameters, but certainly not to criticize any research contribution by authors. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Factors Influencing Pregnant Womens Utilization of Maternal Health Care Services for Delivery in Ogun State, Nigeria

The study assessed the factors influencing the utilization of Maternal Healthcare Centers (MHC) for delivery among pregnant women attending ante-natal care in Ikenne, Ogun state, Nigeria. A total of 96 respondents were selected from 5 MHC for the study using the multistage sampling procedure. All the women were monitored till delivery. Furthermore, 48 (50%) of the respondents were randomly chosen and exposed to motivational telephone calls for 6 weeks preceding delivery dates. Structured questionnaire was used to gather data which were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. All analyses were measured at p≤0.05 level of significance. Results showed that most of the women were between 30 and 34 years old, had up to secondary education, recorded parity of 1-2 while timing of first visit was between 20 and 24 weeks of gestation and number of Ante-natal visits were ≥ 4. Monthly income was generally less than N16,000 (~$80). Some 52% of the women gave fair rating for the services received from the healthcare workers and 58% used the MHC for delivery. However, 84% of those who received telephone calls used MHC for delivery while 59% of those who did not received telephone calls used MHC for delivery.
Background Subtraction for Moving Cameras Based on Trajectory-controlled Segmentation and Label Inference

We propose a background subtraction method for moving cameras based on trajectory classification, image segmentation and label inference. In the trajectory classification process, PCA-based outlier detection strategy is used to remove the outliers in the foreground trajectories. Combining optical flow trajectory with watershed algorithm, we propose a trajectory-controlled watershed segmentation algorithm which effectively improves the edge-preserving performance and prevents the over-smooth problem. Finally, label inference based on Markov Random field is conducted for labeling the unlabeled pixels. Experimental results on the motionseg database demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed approach compared with other competing methods.
Functional interactions between OCA2 and the protein complexes BLOC‐1, BLOC‐2, and AP‐3 inferred from epistatic analyses of mouse coat pigmentation

The biogenesis of melanosomes is a multistage process that requires the function of cell‐type‐specific and ubiquitously expressed proteins. OCA2, the product of the gene defective in oculocutaneous albinism type 2, is a melanosomal membrane protein with restricted expression pattern and a potential role in the trafficking of other proteins to melanosomes. The ubiquitous protein complexes AP‐3, BLOC‐1, and BLOC‐2, which contain as subunits the products of genes defective in various types of Hermansky–Pudlak syndrome, have been likewise implicated in trafficking to melanosomes. We have tested for genetic interactions between mutant alleles causing deficiency in OCA2 (pink‐eyed dilution unstable), AP‐3 (pearl), BLOC‐1 (pallid), and BLOC‐2 (cocoa) in C57BL/6J mice. The pallid allele was epistatic to pink‐eyed dilution, and the latter behaved as a semi‐dominant phenotypic enhancer of cocoa and, to a lesser extent, of pearl. These observations suggest functional links between OCA2 and these three protein complexes involved in melanosome biogenesis.
Enhanced Reconfiguration Method for Reducing Mismatch Losses in PV Systems

In addition to energy losses produced by mistracking the global power peak, partially shaded PV systems are susceptible to extra power losses due to power mismatch in their series-connected PV modules. Reconfiguring of PV modules in a PV system has been referred to as an effective method for minimizing these losses. Unfortunately, the available reconfiguration methods that are accurate need lengthy computational time to determine the optimal configuration, which impedes their practical realization in large PV systems. In this paper, a reconfiguration technique is presented that finds the optimal configuration in a reduced computational time. Unlike the existing methods, the proposed method utilizes the greedy optimization principle to derive a simple strategy that can find the optimal PV configuration without the need to solve heavy dynamic programming problems. The benefits of the proposed method are verified with respect to the existing methods under various shading scenarios. Furthermore, a case study on a large PV system is conducted demonstrating that the achieved computational time reduction can reduce the mismatch power losses in partially shaded PV systems.
Multimodal Medical Image Sensor Fusion Framework Using Cascade of Wavelet and Contourlet Transform Domains

Multimodal medical image fusion is effectuated to minimize the redundancy while augmenting the necessary information from the input images acquired using different medical imaging sensors. The sole aim is to yield a single fused image, which could be more informative for an efficient clinical analysis. This paper presents a two-stage multimodal fusion framework using the cascaded combination of stationary wavelet transform (SWT) and non sub-sampled Contourlet transform (NSCT) domains for images acquired using two distinct medical imaging sensor modalities (i.e., magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scan). The major advantage of using a cascaded combination of SWT and NSCT is to improve upon the shift variance, directionality, and phase information in the finally fused image. The first stage employs a principal component analysis algorithm in SWT domain to minimize the redundancy. Maximum fusion rule is then applied in NSCT domain at second stage to enhance the contrast of the diagnostic features. A quantitative analysis of fused images is carried out using dedicated fusion metrics. The fusion responses of the proposed approach are also compared with other state-of-the-art fusion approaches; depicting the superiority of the obtained fusion results.
Unknown primary carcinoma: natural history and prognostic factors in 657 consecutive patients.

PURPOSE To evaluate the natural history, validate previous observations, and identify prognostic factors in patients with unknown primary carcinoma (UPC). PATIENTS AND METHODS Nine hundred twenty-seven consecutive patients referred to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center with a preliminary diagnosis of UPC were prospectively identified. A standardized evaluation narrowed the study population to 657 patients with UPC. All data were recorded and computerized for storage, retrieval, and analysis. The primary end point for the study was survival, which was calculated from the first day of patient registration. Survival curves were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using the Cox-Mantel log-rank test. To identify important prognostic factors, univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted. RESULTS The demographics of the UPC patient population mirrored those of the general population of patients referred to our cancer center except for an excess of men among the UPC patients. Most patients had histologic or cytologic evidence of adenocarcinoma and had more than one organ site metastatically involved. Univariate and multivariate analyses identified numerous important prognostic factors with a significant influence on survival, including sex, number of organ sites involved, specific organ sites involved, and pathologic subtypes. CONCLUSION This study validated previously identified important prognostic factors for survival in UPC. Additional variables that had an impact on survival were identified and the complex interaction of the factors was explored. As patient numbers increase, this database will be able to provide further analyses of patient subsets and potentially relate specific clinical features to the evolving molecular and biochemical understanding of these malignancies.
Commuters’ Behaviors and Attitudes toward Current Transport Mode Chosen

The paper provides overview of the commuters’ behaviors and attitudes towards current transport modes used and what are the factors influences of the motorization trends within the last six years. By using the National Socio-economic Survey (NSS) and National Labor Force Survey (NLFS) as well as the primary data collected to know the private vehicles’ attitudes, it is found that the distance of commuters is getting far and they prefer to use private vehicles to commute, especially motorcycles that are faster and the cost is also reasonable. Based on the income level, it shows very clear evidence that higher income groups mostly use cars, and it is different from motorcycles that are used for all income levels. As a consequence, the share of public transports has been decreasing although government has been trying to improve the capacities and services of some public transports.
Pose identification and updating in autonomous vehicles

In this paper, a novel algorithm to know the pose of any autonomous vehicle is described. Such a system (Attitude and Heading Reference System, AHRS) is essential for real time vehicle navigation, guidance and control applications. For low funded projects, with simple sensors, efficient and robust algorithms become necessary for an acceptable performance, and the well-known extended Kalman filter (EKF) fulfills those requirements. In this kind of applications, the use of the EKF in direct configuration has been much less explored than its counterpart, the EKF in indirect configuration. Specifically, in this paper a novel method based on an Extended Kalman Filter in direct configuration is proposed, where the filter is explicitly derived from both kinematic and errors models. Experiments with real data show that the proposed method is able to maintain an accurate and drift-free attitude and heading estimation.
The influence of a leader's servant leadership on employees' perception of customers' satisfaction with the service and employees' perception of customers' trust in the service firm: the moderating role of employees' trust in the leader

This study examines why a leader needs to establish good relations with his/her subordinate employees to build strong relationships with customers. The production and the consumption of goods in the service sector occur simultaneously, and it is the customer who determines the quality of the service provided (Bateson, 1985; Bradley, Fox, & Morris, 2004; Pfeffer, 1994). Bradley et al. (2004) has shown that leadership style influences employees' behavior patterns as well as the service they provide. The success of internal marketing depends on the kind of leadership a manager demonstrates. However, no study has directly examined the effect of servant leadership on customers' satisfaction. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the impact of servant leadership on employees' perceptions of customers' satisfaction with a service and their trust in the service firm. It demonstrates how employees' trust in the leader moderates the effect of servant leadership on employees' perceptions of customers' satisfaction with a service and their trust in the service firm.