Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Globalisation/regionalisation of accounting firms and their sustainability services

The debate about global integration (standardisation) versus responsiveness (adaptation) has recently been supplemented with perspectives that emphasise regionalisation. And while the discussion has also been extended from manufacturing to services, there are specific sectors and emergent topics that have not yet received much attention. This paper explores how accounting firms (Big Four) and particularly their sustainability services fit in the globalisation/regionalisation/localisation spectrum, and appear to standardise or adapt in main countries in the various regions around the world. Examined are the Big Four accounting firms in general, and their sustainability services in fifteen countries in five regions and globally, as presented on their respective websites. Findings show that, while overall the Big Four are somewhere between globalisation and bi-regionalisation, the traditional independent member firm structure appears to prevail in service offerings, as sustainability services do not exhibit standardisation and there are hardly signs of regionalisation/globalisation. This seems to result from special characteristics of services, such as inseparability of production and consumption, and local requirements regarding sustainability.
SOSYAL BİLGİLER ÖĞRETMEN ADAYLARINDAN MEDYA OKURYAZARLIĞINA BİR BAKIŞ

Bilgi teknolojilerinin toplumsal donusume yol actigi gunumuzde insanin kendini, diger toplumlari ve kulturleri algilayisini etkileyen etmenlerin farkinda olmasi bakimindan medya okuryazarligi onemli bir yasam becerisi olarak ortaya cikmaktadir. Ogrencilere bu becerileri ilkogretim doneminde kazandirmak amaciyla medya okuryazarligi ilkogretim programlarina secmeli ders olarak konulmustur. Bu arastirmada, sosyal bilgiler ogretmen adaylarinin medya okuryazarligiyla ilgili gorusleri belirlenmeye calisilmistir. Bu amacla nitel arastirma kapsaminda 20 sosyal bilgiler ogretmen adayi ile yari yapilandirilmis gorusme gerceklestirilmis, elde edilen veriler betimsel analiz yaklasimi ile cozumlenmistir. Arastirma sonucunda ogretmen adaylari medya okuryazarligini gundemi izleme, haberleri yorumlama gibi cesitli goruslerle aciklamis, sosyal bilgiler ogretmen adayinin medya okuryazari olmasi gerektigini belirtmislerdir. Ogretmen adaylari kendi medya okuryazarliklarini “cevremdekilerle haberleri tartisip, yorumluyorum”, “gundemi izliyorum” gibi goruslerle aciklarken; ayni programda ogrenim goren arkadaslarinin medya okuryazarliklarinin yetersiz oldugunu soylemislerdir. Ogretmen adaylari medya okuryazarligi kazandirmaya yonelik olarak lisans egitimleri sirasinda ders konulari ile guncel olaylarin iliskilendirildigini belirtirken; fakulte yonetimi tarafindan medya okuryazarligi kazandirmaya yonelik calismalar yapilmasini oneri olarak sunmuslardir
Vehicle Acquisitions: Leasing or Financing?

In this study, we investigate household vehicle leasing versus financing behavior using the Interview Survey Portions of the 2001 Consumer Expenditure Survey. Two research questions are addressed in this study: (1) What are the demographics of those who lease as opposed to those who finance, and (2) What are the major factors affecting a consumer's probability of leasing versus financing when acquiring vehicles? Findings show that among income and demographic characteristics, being older, Caucasian or Hispanic, college educated, living in urban Northeast and Midwest, living in large Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), not having teenagers in the family, and having a higher income increase a consumer's probability to lease a vehicle. Most of these income and demographic effects either become smaller or disappear after the vehicle characteristics are controlled for. Among vehicle characteristics, being newer, Japanese or European made, luxury brand, with more cylinders, with power brakes, sunroof, and four-wheel drive increase the probability of leasing. Purchasing the vehicle new instead of used, having a lower down payment and monthly payments, and having a smaller number of contracted payments also increase the probability of leasing.
Price determinants of newly built dwellings in Serbia

This paper analyses the determnants of newly built dwelling prices in Serbia in a panel of 24 cities over the period 2011-2014. Results suggest that dwelling prices primarily tend to rise with populations growth and real total net wages as a proxy of household incomes, while declines in effective interest rate on housing are associated with higher dwelling prices. Additional explanatory variables, such as the level of development of observed cities, geographical distance from the capital, or real GDP dinamics in the country, even though the correct sign, didn't have statisticaly significance influence on the dependant variable.
Greater Physiological Responses While Playing XBox Kinect Compared to Nintendo Wii

International Journal of Exercise Science 8(2): 164-173, 2015. Increasing popularity of active video game use as a mode of physical activity prompted this investigation into the physiological differences to playing the Nintendo Wii TM and XBox Kinect TM . Differences in motion capture technology between these systems suggests that using one may result in different movement patterns, and therefore physiological responses, than the other. The purpose of this study was to compare the average (10 minute) and peak heart rate (HR, bpm), oxygen consumption (VO 2 mL . kg -1 . min -1 ), and energy expenditure (EE, kcal . kg -1 . hr -1 ), while playing Boxing and Just Dance 2 (JD2) on the Wii TM and Kinect TM . Fifteen college students (7 female, 8 male) completed 10-minute game sessions for Wii TM and Kinect TM Boxing, and Wii TM and Kinect TM JD2, in random order. Comparisons for average and peak HR, VO 2 , and EE were made. Average and peak HR, VO 2 , and EE were greater (p<0.05) while playing Boxing on the Kinect TM when compared to Boxing on the Wii TM . Average and peak VO 2 and EE were greater (p<0.05) while playing JD2 on the Kinect TM when compared to JD2 on the Wii TM . Peak VO 2 surpassed the moderate exercise intensity threshold only while playing Kinect TM Boxing and Kinect TM JD2. Higher physiological responses were experienced when playing Boxing and JD2 on the Kinect TM versus the Wii TM . When using active video games as a form of physical activity, these findings demonstrate that the Kinect TM is a better choice than the Wii TM .
Politics, Institutions, and Trade ∗

A vast literature on international trade predicts that political institutions aﬀect both the choice of trade partners (extensive margin) and trade volumes (intensive margin). Yet most analyses ignore the former margin, while their estimates of the latter neglect nontrading pairs and thereby suﬀer from selection bias. Also, the data on individual features of multifaceted political institutions are highly collinear, which impedes estimating their separate eﬀects. We develop and implement a two-stage Bayesian LASSO estimator that lets us use detailed measures of institutional features, with highly disaggregated product-level trade ﬂows encompassing over one hundred and thirty countries over a half century. We ﬁnd that political institutions matter more for the extensive than the intensive margin, and that democratic political institutions are not always trade promoting; although trade appears to be fostered by political stability, other features of democracies – party competition and open executive recruitment – inhibit trade.
Supplementary Document-Data Distributions , Computing Time , Analysis and Methods

Supplementary Document Data Distributions, Computing Time, Analysis and Methods Ching-Wei Wang 1,2∗, Yu-Ching Lee 2,3, Evelyne Calista 1,2, Fan Zhou 5, Hongtu Zhu 5,6, Ryohei Suzuki 7,8, Daisuke Komura 7, Shumpei Ishikawa 7, Shih-Ping Cheng 4 Graduate Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan . NTUST Center of Computer Vision and Medical Imaging, Taiwan. Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. Department of Surgery, Mackay Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Department of Biostatistics, University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA. Department of Genomic Pathology, Medical Research Institute, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Tokyo, Japan. Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Hepatitis C Virus Genotypes Introduction

H C virus (HCV) is an important cause of chronic liver disease. HCV causes 20% of acute hepatitis cases, 70% of all chronic hepatitis cases, 40% of all cases of liver cirrhosis, 60% of hepatocellular carcinomas, and 30% of liver transplants in Europe(1). It is also recognized as the leading cause of liver transplantation in the world(2). Only 20% of infected individuals will recover from this viral infection, while the rest become chronically infected(3). While the majority of chronically infected individuals never exhibit symptoms, approximately 10-30% of these patients will eventually develop cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma, both of which are associated with significant morbidity and mortality(4). More than 170 million people worldwide are chronically infected with HCV. According to WHO report in 2002, chronic liver diseases were responsible for 1.4 million deaths, including 796,000 due to cirrhosis and 616,000 due to primary liver cancer. At least 20% of these deaths are probably attributable to HCV infectionmore than 280,000 deaths(5, 6). The prevalence of chronic HCV infection in general population varies greatly in different parts of the world, being estimated between 0.1 and 5%, with a peak prevalence of 2025% in Egypt. HCV prevalence seems to be less than 1% in Iran, which is much lower than most of the neighboring countries(7). HCV was the first virus discovered by molecular cloning method without the direct use of biologic or biophysical methods. This was accomplished by extracting, copying into cDNA, and cloning all the nucleic acid from the plasma of a chimpanzee infected with nonA, non-B hepatitis by contaminated factor XIII concentrate(8). The HCV genome is a positive-sense, singlestranded RNA genome approximately 10 kb long. It has marked similarities to those of members of the genera Pestivirus and Flavivirus. Different HCV isolates from around the world show substantial nucleotide sequence variability throughout the viral genome(9).
Advances in Model-based Downstream Process Development

In biotechnology, the so-called downstream processing (DSP) aims to purify a target component from a very heterogeneous mixture and constitutes the biggest expenditure of a biopharmaceutical production sequence. Especially for monoclonal antibodies, industrial DSP development is commonly based on a sequence of chromatographic processes. These offer high selectivity at mild conditions as well as high robustness and general acceptance by regulatory authorities. The most important class in bioseparation is liquid-solid column chromatography. Here, the sample is dissolved in a liquid mobile phase and pumped through a stationary phase consisting of a packed bed of porous particles or a porous monolith. The molecules in the mobile phase are transported through the film layer outside of the particles or micro pores, then enter the pore system and diffuse inside them. The physical or chemical properties of the stationary phase are chosen such that some components of the injected sample are retained more strongly than others. The focus of this thesis lies on adsorption chromatography where the components of the sample adsorb on the surface of the solid phase with different strengths. Examples of adsorption chromatography include affinity, ion-exchange and hydrophobic interaction chromatography. To reduce the process development effort, so-called platform processes have been developed in industry with a fixed order of chromatographic steps and only few degrees of freedom to be optimized for the specific product. Currently, non-standard antibodies such as antibody-drug-conjugates or new types of biopharmaceuticals, e.g. virus-like particles, emerge that do not fit into platform processes anymore. Hence, the full amount of degrees of freedom has to be considered to find effective and efficient chromatography set-ups. Nowadays, high-throughput methods are used to screen a large part of the design space but require a comparably high amount of sample that is often not available for early stage process development. Thus, simulation tools are increasingly gaining the attention of the pharmaceutical industry in order to determine the optimal process parameters. Modelbased process optimization makes elaborate screening experiments redundant once the model has been calibrated to the specific process step. The mass transport through the column and pores is described by modeling the fluid dynamics effects, while the retention of the species is described by empirical or mechanistic models for adsorption/desorption and/or reaction. In most cases, one-dimensional convection-diffusion-reaction equations provide for a good agreement with measurements. Such model-based approaches are developed and used in academia but technology transfer to industry is still limited. The main reason is the lack of integration of novel tools into laboratory work-flows or in other words the transition from established experimental procedures to computer-aided process development. Although many research groups
An Inference Algorithm for the Static Verification of Pointer Manipulation

The incorrect use of pointers is one of the most common source of bugs. As a consequence, any kind of static code checking capable of detecting potential bugs at compile time is welcome. This paper presents a static analysis for the detection of incorrect accesses to memory (dereferences of invalid pointers). A pointer may be invalid because it has not been initialised or because it refers to a memory location which has been deallocated. The analyser is derived from an axiomatisation of alias and connectivity properties which is shown to be sound with respect to the natural semantics of the language. It deals with dynamically allocated data structures and it is accurate enough to handle circular structures.
Optimization of a ligase detection reaction fluorescent microsphere 2 assay for the characterization of resistance-mediating polymorphisms 3 in African samples of Plasmodium falciparum 4 5 6

5 6 Norbert P. LeClair, Melissa D. Conrad, Frederick N. Baliraine, Christian Nsanzabana, 7 Samuel L. Nsobya, and Philip J. Rosenthal 8 9 10 11 Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA and Department of 12 Medicine, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda 13 14 15 Current address: Department of Biology, LeTourneau University, Longview, TX 16 Current address: Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network, Oxford, UK 17 18 Running title: Assay for P. falciparum genetic polymorphisms 19 20 21 Corresponding author. Mailing address: Box 0811, University of California, San Francisco, CA 22 94143. Phone: (415) 206-8845. Fax: (415) 648-8425. E-mail: prosenthal@medsfgh.ucsf. edu 23 24 25 Copyright © 2013, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved. J. Clin. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/JCM.00904-13 JCM Accepts, published online ahead of print on 29 May 2013
Simple accurate non Iterrative Method determination of Serie Resistances of Solar Cells

The principal aim of this paper is to provide a simple but accurate non iterative method which can be used instead of iterative methods. The protocol of extracting physical parameters affecting the Fill Factor of a solar cell should be valid for any kind of solar cells and any fabrication flow chart process. The protocol has been subdivided into two main steps. The first step was to find a method which can extract approximated parameters values. The proposed method in this paper is focusing on the first and second derivative of the Current – Voltage curves obtained by a Solar Simulator. It was necessary for this principal step to have a reference method. This reference method is the Numerical Lambert Function. It was also necessary for this step to test the method on samples for which the physical known parameters have been extracted before using the reference extracting method. The new proposed method showed clearly the extreme difference between the reference samples, which represented for us a kind of validity guarantee. The Second step which is of non-less importance was to derive factors permitting to calculate exact parameters values which should be as closer as possible to the values extracted previously by iterative methods. KeywordsDerivative Functions; Current Factor; Resistance Factor; Reference Method.
PACE N OISE FOR E XPLORATION

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods generally engage in exploratory behavior through noise injection in the action space. An alternative is to add noise directly to the agent’s parameters, which can lead to more consistent exploration and a richer set of behaviors. Methods such as evolutionary strategies use parameter perturbations, but discard all temporal structure in the process and require significantly more samples. Combining parameter noise with traditional RL methods allows to combine the best of both worlds. We demonstrate that both offand on-policy methods benefit from this approach through experimental comparison of DQN, DDPG, and TRPO on high-dimensional discrete action environments as well as continuous control tasks.
Single Photon Atomic Sorting: Isotope Separation with Maxwell's Demon

Isotope separation is one of the grand challenges of modern society and holds great potential for basic science, medicine, energy, and defense. We consider here a new and general approach to isotope separation. The method is based on an irreversible change of the mass-to-magnetic moment ratio of a particular isotope in an atomic beam, followed by a magnetic multipole whose gradients deflect and guide the atoms. The underlying mechanism is a reduction of the entropy of the beam by the information of a single-scattered photon for each atom that is separated. We numerically simulate isotope separation for a range of examples, including lithium, for which we describe the experimental setup we are currently constructing. Simulations of other examples demonstrate this technique's general applicability to almost the entire periodic table. We show that the efficiency of the process is only limited by the available laser power, since one photon on average enables the separation of one atom. The practical importance of the proposed method is that large-scale isotope separation should be possible, using ordinary inexpensive magnets and the existing technologies of supersonic beams and lasers.
Customer Satisfaction, Market Share, and Profitability: Findings from Sweden

Are there economic benefits to improving customer satisfaction? Many firms that are frustrated in their efforts to improve quality and customer satisfaction are beginning to question the link between customer satisfaction and economic returns. The authors investigate the nature and strength of this link. They discuss how expectations, quality, and price should affect customer satisfaction and why customer satisfaction, in turn, should affect profitability; this results in a set of hypotheses that are tested using a national customer satisfaction index and traditional accounting measures of economic returns, such as return on investment. The findings support a positive impact of quality on customer satisfaction, and, in turn, profitability. The authors demonstrate the economic benefits of increasing customer satisfaction using both an empirical forecast and a new analytical model. In addition, they discuss why increasing market share actually might lead to lower customer satisfaction and provide preliminary empirical support for this hypothesis. Finally, two new findings emerge: First, the market's expectations of the quality of a firm's output positively affects customers’ overall satisfaction with the firm; and second, these expectations are largely rational, albeit with a small adaptive component.
CSE 599 i : Online and Adaptive Machine Learning Winter 2018 Lecture 6 : Non-stochastic best arm identification

Example 1. Imagine that we are solving a non-convex optimization problem on some (multivariate) function f using gradient descent. Recall that gradient descent converges to local minima. Because non-convex functions may have multiple minima, we cannot guarantee that gradient descent will converge to the global minimum. To resolve this issue, we will use random restarts, the process of starting multiple instances of gradient descent from random locations and outputting the least-valued minimum found. If an instance of gradient descent is obviously not going to converge quickly to a low-valued minimum, that instance should be stopped early in favor of other, more-promising ones.
Does Your CULTURE Encourage INNOVATION ? CDR

For many years military leaders have been calling for the U.S. Armed Forces to be more agile, adaptive, and innovative in order to defeat future and emerging threats. To assist the military in this endeavor, the University of Alabama in Huntsville explored Department of Defense (DoD) culture at the organizational level. Having the proper organizational culture can improve performance by empowering members to interact better with their environment, to communicate
Remote assessment of pre- And post-disaster critical physical infrastructures using mobile workstation chariot and D4AR models

This paper presents a new technology and a systematic approach for disaster response and recovery of Critical Physical Infrastructures (CPIs). Our suggested approach is based on using a Mobile Workstation Chariot (MWC) assembled on Segway personal transporter which supports both horizontal and vertical real-time visual data capture and transmission flow, first responders and civil engineers can quickly traverse hazardous terrain, collect and transmit photographs/videos, and communicate with the command center in real-time. Using MWC wireless communication tools, first responders and civil engineers can access disaster-survivable black boxes allowing Building Information Models (BIM), pre-disaster photographs and operational information of buildings to be collected and communicated back to the command center. Finally at the command center, using sensed visual data and image-based reconstruction techniques, the post-disaster site is reconstructed in 3D. The resulting integrated representation of the post-disaster model and the collected photographs are superimposed over the pre-disaster BIM to generate a 4D Augmented Reality (DAR) model. By integrated representation of pre-disaster and post-disaster information, the DAR allows damages, safety and stability of the CPIs as well as possible rescue operation routings and plans to be assessed. Critical information for disaster response and recovery can be analyzed and communicated back to the field easily and quickly. We present preliminary results of our experiments for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing sensed data using the MWC as well as the DAR. These results demonstrate a great potential for application of MWC and DAR for disaster response and recovery operations. The limitation and benefits of this approach plus further required developments are discussed.