Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sample Selectivity Bias of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Employee Benefits Study

The United States Chamber of Commerce Employee Benefits Study presents annual fringe benefit information that U.S. employers provide to their workers. Forensic economists use this study to estimate fringe benefit losses. This paper demonstrates that the selectivity bias from the sample of firms responding to the Chamber’s survey questionnaire raises serious issues about the reliability of the Employee Benefits Study for litigation purposes.
On the optimization of a CAPM-portfolio considering the possibility of safeguarding its loss

Using a portfolio built from bonds (investment without volatility) and shares (investment with volatility) corresponding to the CAPM we calculate the possible loss of this portfolio. The loss is measured by a so called lower partial moment of the rate of return of the portfolio. Using this loss, we optimize the composition of the portfolio with respect to this loss. Also we investigate the optimization of the portfolio, when the loss can be underwriten by an insurance. Concerning the premium of this insurance contract, we show, that when the premium is defined inadequate e.g. proportional to the investment or proportional to the amount of investment in shares, the optimal portfolio consists only of investment in shares. When the premium is defined more suitable e.g. proportional to the loss, the optimal portfolio is built by an investment in bonds and shares.
In vivo brain electrophoresis – a novel method for chemotherapy of CNS diseases

Objective: The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is a protective mechanism that does its job superbly. So much so, that hitherto, brain chemotherapy has been limited by it. In fact, very few agents are effective against brain disease due to the inherent difficulties of penetrating the BBB. We describe a novel, extremely focused method for delivering drugs to specific diseased areas. This innovative method directly delivers putative substances to the pathological area, bypassing the BBB. Treatment of brain diseases could be improved by targeted, controlled delivery of therapeutic substances to diseased cerebral areas. Our described novel method – in vivo electrophoresis – achieves this. Methods: This technique was evaluated in beagles after craniotomy was performed and a custom-designed plate with electrodes inserted. The delivery of charged substances to selected areas with predictably guided movement was achieved via a created electrical field. Gadolinium, a compound unable to cross the BBB, was injected intracerebrally whereas an electrical field was created using the implanted electrodes surrounding the injection area. The electrical field-guided Gadolinium movement was evaluated using MRI. Results: Gadolinium was moved predictably using the created electrical field without complications. Conclusions: The experiment successfully demonstrated controlled movement of the substance. This technique can significantly change treatment of brain diseases because substances: i) may be moved in a controlled, predictable way – exponentially increasing therapeutic interactions with the target; and ii) no longer need to conform to constraints dictated by the BBB (molecular mass < 500 d; lipophilic), thereby increasing potential number of usable substances.
Changing retail power and performance in distribution channels

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between manufacturer profit rate and large retailer market share for five matched retailer‐manufacturer groupings.Design/methodology/approach – Basic structure‐performance modeling is used to relate manufacturer return on assets to large retail market share and a group of control variables. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Corporate Statistics of Income size class data provide a sample that covers the full range of firm sizes from the smallest to largest firms in the USA.Findings – Large retail share negatively impacts small manufacturer rate of return for shopping goods, while in convenience good markets large retail share has no impact on manufacturer return.Practical implications – Shopping goods retailers have opportunities to gain market power from expertise in merchandising, sales assistance, and product expertise. Strong private brands may offer leverage for convenience good retailers in negotiations with national brand manufacturers.
Cost Effective Dependency Parsing for Indian Languages

Indian languages are MoR-FWO1 and hence differ from English in structure and morphology. There are many distinguished characteristics possessed by Indian languages. While working with these languages we have to keep in mind, these characteristics and plan strategies accordingly. We worked on improving Dependency Parsing for Indian Languages, more specifically for Hindi, an Indo-Aryan Language. In the conventional Dependency Parsing methods, the focus has been on developing robust data driven dependency parsing techniques. This initiated efforts in creating hand annotated large treebanks, consisting of hand annotated features. These treebanks serve as input for the training of data-driven parsers. The annotations in Indian Languages’ treebanks are generally multi-layered and furnish information on part of speech category of word forms, their morphological features, related word groups and the syntactic relations. For improvements, richer and richer features are being added. This process of manual annotation is expensive, as it requires a lot of human efforts. It is a tedious task to create treebanks for all the languages. Even if we make the treebanks available, in the real time scenario we require many tools to extract features automatically. Building such tools is also a complex task. We are in an era with almost unlimited access to raw data. Nevertheless, we often struggle to make sense of most of it. Much of this data is unlabeled and thus useless in many of the traditional supervised machine learning scenarios, that require explicit labeled/hand-annotated examples. In this work, we present our efforts towards exploring cost effective approaches for building and improving parsers for resource-poor languages. For this purpose we try to use unsupervised techniques to extract features from the largely available mono-lingual raw corpus. Using cross-lingual treebank transfer, we exploit the available treebanks for other languages and using some techniques like MT2 and try to generate a treebank for the target language. We can use this treebank for training of parser. We first try this approach for Hindi. An important constraint for using this approach is that the annotation of treebank needs to be similar crosslinguistically. For this, we use UD3 framework. Universal Dependencies is an initiative to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of 1morphologically rich and free word order 2Machine Translation 3Universal Dependencies
Risk Factors Associated with E-business Infrastructure of SME's

Electronic business is a value addition tool to the existing business processes of an organisation, and/or provides a new medium to operate a business. It aims to reduce operating costs, integrate vendors, increase customer loyalty, and target different market segments through the use of computers and electronic media. Infrastructure remains a key element in the entire planning and implementation of e-business initiative. While e-business opens up new channels of business and efficiencies in manufacture and delivery of services, it also poses a number of risks that need to be properly addressed and managed. E-business infrastructure comprises of hardware, software, data, network and people with policies and standards supporting the entire infrastructure as pillars. Research found that fast changing technology, security, return on investment, new business models, government and legal issues, privacy, skills shortage and integration issues with legacy systems are some of the risk factors that SME’s should consider and manage while adopting e-business initiatives.
Temperature‐Dependent Genotype‐by‐Genotype Interaction between a Pathogenic Fungus and Its Hyperparasitic Virus

The outcome of host‐parasite interactions may depend not only on the genotypes of the species involved but also on environmental factors. We used the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica, the causal agent of chestnut blight, and its hyperparasitic virus, Cryphonectria hypovirus‐1 (CHV1), to test for genotype‐by‐genotype‐by‐environment interactions in a host‐parasite system. In C. parasitica, infection with CHV1 induces a hypovirulent phenotype with reduced virulence toward the chestnut tree (Castanea spp.) and thus controls chestnut blight in many European regions. In contrast, uninfected virulent C. parasitica have nearly eradicated the American chestnut in North America. We applied a full factorial design and assessed the fungal growth and sporulation of four C. parasitica strains, uninfected and infected with each of the four known CHV1 subtypes, at 12°, 18°, 24°, and 30°C. We found a significant ( \documentclass{aastex} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{bm} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{pifont} \usepackage{stmaryrd} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{portland,xspace} \usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} \newcommand\cyr{ \renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr} \renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss} \renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2} \normalfont \selectfont} \DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyr} \pagestyle{empty} \DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \begin{document} \landscape $$P\leq .0001$$ \end{document} ) genotype‐by‐genotype‐by‐environment interaction, demonstrating the potential for a selection mosaic. As a consequence, different host and parasite genotypes would be selected under different climatic conditions, affecting the coevolutionary dynamics of the host‐parasite interaction and the course of chestnut blight epidemics. Genotype‐by‐genotype‐by‐environment interactions are essential to take into account when designing biological control strategies.
Concept mapping your Web searches: a design rationale and Web-enabled application

Although it has become very common to use World Wide Web-based information in many educational settings, there has been little research on how to better search and organize Web-based information. This paper discusses the shortcomings of Web search engines and Web browsers as learning environments and describes an alternative Web search environment that combines a concept mapping and a data mining technique to address their drawbacks.
ORIGINAL PAPER Promoting Parents' Use Of Non-Pharmacological Methods And Assessment Of Children's Postoperative Pain At Home

Background: Parents have reported challenges in assessing their child's postoperative pain at home. Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of the parental use of the Parents' Postoperative Pain Measure -tool (PPPM) on 1-3 -year-old children's non-pharmacological pain alleviation at home. Methodology: This was a non-randomized, prospective study with two parallel groups, where the parents in the intervention group were provided with PPPM in addition to a pain diary consisting of a verbal pain scale. The data were collected from 50 parents whose children had undergone day surgery in three Finnish university hospitals between January 2006 and June 2007. Parents completed questionnaires consisting of background information, verbal pain rating scale and a sub-scale measuring parents' use of non-pharmacological methods in children's postoperative pain alleviation. Results: Most children had mild postoperative pain after discharge, but in some children pain was moderate or severe. Non-pharmacological interventions were used commonly for pain alleviation in both groups, including holding the child in lap, comforting the child and spending time with the child more than usual during the recovery period after discharge. However, the use of non-pharmacological pain alleviation methods was 15% more common in the intervention group than in the control group. Parents of the intervention group had carried the child (p=0.04) and used distraction (p=0.05) more commonly than parents in control group. No group differences were found in parental assessments of the helpfulness of non-pharmacological pain alleviation methods. Conclusions: Children's pain remains under-treated and their pain alleviation can be promoted by providing the parents pain assessment tools, such as PPPM, to be used at home. The results can be utilized to further improve children's pain alleviation. More parental education is needed to promote their skills to alleviate the child's pain. Further research of the usefulness of the PPPM using larger samples is needed.
Health Index-Based Prognostics for Remaining Useful Life Predictions in Electrical Machines

Many industries have a growing awareness in utilizing new technologies to improve the reliability and availability of their systems. Prognostics, a subject concerned with the prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL), has been increasingly studied and applied to practical systems, such as electrical systems, over the past few years. Here, with the adoption of a data-driven prognostics framework, this paper proposed a health index (HI)-based prognostics method to predict the RUL of electrical machines. By assuming a linearly degrading HI over time, the proposed method predicts the RUL in two steps: 1) from input signals to HI; and then 2) mapping HI to RUL. The novelty of this method lies in the proposed dynamic HI smoothing approach where three characteristics of HI, namely monotonicity, gradualness, and consistency, are incorporated to smooth the current HI values with the previously predicted ones. Real data collected from eight electrical motors, subjected to accelerated thermal aging process, were used in the experimental studies, with the results showing the superiority of the proposed HI-based RUL prediction over the traditional direct RUL prediction (i.e., without HI).
Time to stabilization of anterior cruciate ligament-reconstructed versus healthy knees in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I female athletes.

CONTEXT Jump landing is a common activity in collegiate activities, such as women's basketball, volleyball, and soccer, and is a common mechanism for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. It is important to better understand how athletes returning to competition after ACL reconstruction are able to maintain dynamic postural control during a jump landing. OBJECTIVE To use time to stabilization (TTS) to measure differences in dynamic postural control during jump landing in ACL-reconstructed (ACLR) knees compared with healthy knees among National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I female athletes. DESIGN Case-control study. SETTING University athletic training research laboratory. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS Twenty-four Division I female basketball, volleyball, and soccer players volunteered and were assigned to the healthy control group (n = 12) or the ACLR knee group (n = 12). Participants with ACLR knees were matched to participants with healthy knees by sport and by similar age, height, and mass. INTERVENTION(S) At 1 session, participants performed a single-leg landing task for both limbs. They were instructed to stabilize as quickly as possible in a single-limb stance and remain as motionless as possible for 10 seconds. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) The anterior-posterior TTS and medial-lateral TTS ground reaction force data were used to calculate resultant vector of the TTS (RVTTS) during a jump landing. A 1-way analysis of variance was used to determine group differences on RVTTS. The means and SDs from the participants' 10 trials in each leg were used for the analyses. RESULTS The ACLR group (2.01 ± 0.15 seconds, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.91, 2.10) took longer to stabilize than the control group (1.90 ± 0.07 seconds, 95% CI = 1.86, 1.95) (F(1,22) = 4.28, P = . 05). This result was associated with a large effect size and a 95% CI that did not cross zero (Cohen d = 1.0, 95% CI = 0.91, 1.09). CONCLUSIONS Although they were Division I female athletes at an average of 2.5 years after ACL reconstruction, participants with ACLR knees demonstrated dynamic postural-control deficits as evidenced by their difficulty in controlling ground reaction forces. This increased TTS measurement might contribute to the established literature reflecting differences in single-limb dynamic control. Clinicians might need to focus rehabilitation efforts on stabilization after jump landing. Further research is needed to determine if TTS is a contributing factor in future injury.
A Business Success Versus Failure Prediction Model for Small Businesses in Israel

With the great discrepancy in the literature as to which variables do in fact lead to success or failure of small businesses there is no theory; the Lussier 15 variable business success versus failure prediction model stands out in its accuracy that has been tested and validated already in three very different parts of the world. This study further contributes by testing the model in Israel with a sample of 205 small businesses - 101 failed and 104 successful. Results support the modeli¯s validity in Israel, reinforcing its global validity and moving toward a theory; while demonstrating similarity of SMEs in Israel to those in other economies.
National Drug Stockout Risks in Africa: Analysis of the Global Fund Disbursement Process for Procurement from 2002 to 2013

Despite substantial financial aid from international donors for procurement of health products, stockouts of life-saving drugs related to prevalent infectious diseases are still widespread in Africa. Addressing the lack of research on why these stockouts occur, we study the relationship between The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and its grant recipients. Specifically, we leverage extensive historical fund disbursement and drug procurement data to build a discrete-event simulation model predicting the joint impact of procurement and grant disbursement processes on national drug availability for the Global Fund’s recipient countries in Africa. This model is validated against cumulative stockout levels inferred from historical grant implementation lengths, and used to evaluate potential high-level modifications of disbursement or procurement processes. Results show the existence of substantial intrinsic stockout risks in many countries, due to the unpredictability of fund disbursements and the frequency of grant performance monitoring performed by the Global Fund. Interventions increasing fund disbursement levels to protect against disbursement timing uncertainty are predicted to be more effective than others that include regional buffer stocks and bridge financing.
A Pattern Recognition Approach for Software Engineering Data Analysis

In order to plan, control, and evaluate the software development process, one needs to collect and analyze data in a meaningful way. Classical techniques for such analysis are not always well suited to software engineering data. A pattern recognition approach for analyzing software engineering data, called optimized set reduction (OSR), that addresses many of the problems associated with the usual approaches is described. Methods are discussed for using the technique for prediction, risk management, and quality evaluation. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique for the particular application of software cost estimation. >
The Cashless Policy in Nigeria: Prospects and Challenges

In Nigeria as it is in many developing countries, cash is the main mode of payment. This makes the country to be heavily cash- based economy. However, the cost of cash to Nigeria financial system is high and increasing. It is in this regard that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced the cashless policy with the objective of promoting the use of electronic payment channels instead of cash. This study seeks to point out the prospects and challenges of such policy, in a developing economy like Nigeria. The study presented useful recommendations for policy makers. In conclusion, the study posits that the move towards a cashless Nigeria brings with it numerous benefits but there is still the need to create more awareness to entice the numerous unbanked Nigerians into the banking system.
Detection of air gap eccentricity in the presence of stator inter-turn fault of inverter fed induction machines

Online monitoring of air gap eccentricity using only current and voltage sensors is still considered most difficult during mains operation. At high dynamic inverter- fed operation it then becomes extremely challenging. The only industrially accepted method so far is the usage of the vibration spectrum obtained from extensive measurements. As has already been shown, the detection and exploitation of the machines transient phase reactance offers the possibility to determine machine asymmetries with high accuracy. The detection is realized by a transient stimulation of the machine with voltage pulses by the inverter as well as by measuring the reaction of the machine current. The stimulation can be either realized by a specific switching sequence of the inverter, or by using the pulses generated by the PWM in specific operating points. In the resulting detection signal however, all effects that influence the transient phase reactances superpose. Whereas the inherent influences like spatial saturation or slotting can be identified and eliminated, the air gap eccentricity and stator winding inter turn short circuit and especially their simultaneous occurrence need additional attention and signal processing. Measurements on specially manufactured machines are presented to show both the separated occurrence of air gap eccentricity and an inter turn isolation fault in the stator windings, as well as their simultaneous incident. As both fault conditions have strong impact on the transient reactance their interaction has to be determined in all operating states to enable an accurate separation of both defects.