Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
African American Obese Mens’ Attitudes and Perceptions of Bariatric Surgery: A Phenomenological Study

ABSTRACT: The major questions being answered in the study are 1) what are the attitudes and perceptions of obese African American men regarding bariatric surgery and 2) what barriers currently exist for African American men that prevent them from considering and seeking surgical intervention for obesity? The methodology used in the research study is phenomenology. Fourteen African American men meeting BMI criteria for obesity participated in semi-structured interviews. In the study, the researchers found three major themes emerged, which included 1) participants’ process of understanding bariatric surgery, 2) masculinity and social norms, and 3) finances. Likewise, additional research regarding African American men, as well as other men of color, is needed to further explore why health disparities regarding obesity and the utilization of surgical intervention currently exist.
The Effect of the Bologna Process on the Duration of Studies

This paper evaluates the effect of replacing traditional German five-year degrees with three-year bachelor programs on the duration until graduation and dropping out of university. Using an extensive dataset containing detailed administrative data on more than 9000 students, competing risks models are estimated. The results reveal that the Bologna process reduced the duration until graduation in absolute and relative terms, indicating that one of the reform´s main objectives was achieved. In addition, there is a favorable impact of being enrolled in a bachelor program on the probability of dropping out of university for students enrolled at the faculty of humanities. However, the results concerning university drop out are less conclusive for the other faculties.
Comparative And Competitive Advantage Agribusiness Of Jawa Brebes Cattle (Jabres) In Brebes Regency

The development of Jabres cattle is very important to increase the population of Jabres cattle in Brebes. There needs to be a good developmentstrategy so that Jabres cattle can have a higher competitiveness. The purpose of this research is to know the level of comparative and competitive advantages agribusiness of Jabres cattle known from the value of Domestic Resources Cost Ratio (DRCR) and Private Cost Ratio (PCR), and to determine the priorities of the development strategy Agribusiness of Jabres cattle uses the method of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with Expert Choice program. The results show that the DRCR value is 0.97 and PCR is worth 0.96, it indicates that Cow Jabres has a comparative and competitive advantage so that it can be competitiveness at the national level. Based on the Anaytical Hierarchy Process analysis that has been done, obtained the results that the most important strategy priority used to develop the agribusiness of Jabres cattle in Brebes is by increased effectiveness in livestock maintenance.
Business for Society Is Society’s Business: Tension Management in a Migrant Integration Supply Chain

Social enterprises are acquiring an increasingly relevant role as focal organizations for managing supply chains to address social problems. We argue that the presence of misaligned institutional logics between these focal organizations and their supply chain stakeholders generates tensions. Building on institutional theory and paradox theory, we analyzed seven dyadic relationships between a single focal social enterprise with a goal of migrant integration and its supply chain stakeholders. We propose relationship management mechanisms related to relationship governance, power and trust to manage such tensions. We observe the application of different relationship management mechanisms relative to different types of tensions. Finally, we relate different relationship management mechanisms to specific tension management approaches referred to as complementarity, acceptance and accommodation, and offer propositions based on our findings.
Pharmacomechanical Thrombolytic Treatment in Symptomatic Acute and Subacute Deep Vein Thrombosis

Background: In this study, we shared the implementation success and clinical results for 38 patients treated with the cleanerTM pharmacomechanical thrombectomy device. Objectives: The impact and results of pharmacomechanical thrombectomy treatment on patients with deep vein thrombosis in the symptomatic acute and subacute phases were assessed. Methods: Pharmacomechanical thrombectomy treatment was applied in a single session to 38 patients with lower extremity deep vein thrombosis in the acute and subacute phases between May 2012 and June 2014. Venography was performed and each assessment was made based on lysis rates and clinical results. Results: Deep vein thrombosis was found in the left lower extremity in 25 patients (65%) and in the right lower extremity in 13 patients (35%). No patient was found to have bilateral deep vein thrombosis. Thrombus localization was in the iliofemoral area in 17 patients (44%), the iliocaval area in three patients (8%), and the femoropopliteal area in 18 patients (56%). When thrombus resolution was assessed at the end of the process, grade III and grade II lysis was achieved in 36 (94%) out of 38 patients. Complete resolution was achieved in 28 patients (74%) in the acute and subacute groups. Conclusions: Pharmacomechanical thrombectomy provides very satisfactory results in a single procedure, as a new method in the treatment of acute and subacute deep vein thrombosis.
Sheep Traders Preferences on Marketing Place and Their Satisfaction during Eid al-Adha Period in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Eid al-Adha is one of the important religious festivals for Muslims in the world. Sheep traders can be divided into primary traders and opportunist traders based on trade activity in this period. This study aims to investigate the preferences of sheep traders on marketing place and their satisfaction during Eid al-Adha period in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In-depth and semi-structured interviews with 59 sheep traders were conducted on Juli 15 – August 25, 2018. The collected data were analyzed by descriptive analysis (score, index and rank). The results indicate that the most livestock purchased from the animal market, followed from farmers for primary traders and livestock traders for opportunist traders. Livestock most widely sold to individual consumers who come to their stalls, and then sold to animal market by primary traders and to organization/groups by opportunist traders. Most primary traders (64.10%) state to sell their sheep with different prices for different types of buyers, while the majority of opportunist traders (65.00%) thought no different. The average price different is IDR 286,364 according to primary traders and IDR 150,000 according to opportunist traders. Most of the primary traders (69.23%) and opportunist traders (90.00%) was pleased with the momentum of Eid al-Adha, as the selling price of their livestock could be higher, easy to sell, and any buyer. The conclusion is that both primary and opportunist traders in Yogyakarta have similar preferences in marketing place to buy and sell their livestock during Eid al-Adha period. Eid al-Adha period provides pleasure and an additional benefit for sheep traders.
Exploring Transportation Demand Management as a Strategy to Decongest Indian Cities and Improve Mobility

Indian cities are known for their notorious traffic congestion and limited mobility. Increasing per capita income and urbanization are further aggravating the already constrained situation and results in hazards like environmental pollution, accidents and health risks. One of the major reasons for the urban congestion problem is the increasing use of private vehicles. This study addresses the problem of congestion by introducing Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies. TDM encourages people to shift from private vehicles to public transport modes like mass transit and buses. In this research the Jaipur Walled City is analysed for the empirical research. The research employs an aggregate Logit modelling for analysing modal choice probability. For the purpose of modelling, data is collected by a mix of primary and secondary surveys. Based on the findings, this research discusses strategic interventions in four sectors – road space redesign, public transit improvements, use of MRTS and parking arrangements.
Review: Diagnosis and Management of Congenital, Neonatal and Perinatal HSV Infections

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection is one of the most common viral diseases that might occur during pregnancy and during foetal delivery and can transmit vertically from infected mother to foetus or neonate. In infants, the infection is usually fatal if untreated and most of the cases are asymptomatic. Therefore, early diagnostic of both mother and baby is essential and required to save their life. Fortunately, there are many virological and serological techniques are available to detect the virus with a high accuracy rate and help the initiation of treatment with antiviral therapy, particularly with high dose of intravenous acyclovir that has found to be significantly effective in treating the neonatal HSV infection, however, it may associate with neurologic complication in survivors from central nervous system disease.
Mesenchymal stem cells promote augmented response of endogenous neural stem cells in spinal cord injury of rats

Traumatic spinal cord injury results in severe neurological deficits, mostly irreversible. The cell therapy represents a strategy for treatment particularly with the use of stem cells with satisfactory results in several experimental models. The aim of the study was to compare the treatment of spinal cord injury (SCI) with and without mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), to investigate whether MSCs migrate and/or remain at the site of injury, and to analyze the effects of MSCs on inflammation, astrocytic reactivity and activation of endogenous stem cells. Three hours after SCI, animals received bone marrow-derived MSCs (1×107 in 1mL PBS, IV). Animals were euthanized 24 hours, 7 and 21 days post-injury. The MSC were not present in the site of the lesion and the immunofluorescent evaluation showed significant attenuation of inflammatory response with reduction in macrophages labeled with anti-CD68 antibody (ED1), decreased immunoreactivity of astrocytes (GFAP+) and greater activation of endogenous stem cells (nestin+) in the treated groups. Therefore, cell transplantation have a positive effect on recovery from traumatic spinal cord injury possibly due to the potential of MSCs to attenuate the immune response.
An Audit Tool for Assessing the Visuocognitive Design of Infographics

Visuocognitive design accommodates the alignment of visualization to human cognitive processes. Established theory suggests that 1) recognition is easier than recall [1], 2) spatial visualizations are less abstract than temporal ones [2], and 3) aesthetics induce cognitive ease [3]. These principles, and others, underpin our new audit tool that focusses on design for cognition. Theories of form, function and utility have been known for many decades and are well-known in the field of design, but infovisualization is a relatively new field, as are associated fields such as user-experience (UX), user-centered design and information design. Therefore, generally, design schools focus far more (possibly, exclusively) on teaching form, style, function, sustainability and user-experience than on visuocognition. The same emphasis is found in the design industry. This audit tool has been created to provide heuristic evaluations based on a set of visuocognitive design principles and is, therefore, a valuable contribution. To devise the visuocognitive principles, we conducted a narrative review as a method of approach. The tool is composed of one prerequisite and six principles. ‘Informed Engagement’ is the prerequisite to accurately inform the graphics with ground truth, and to give them substance. The six principles are: 1) clarity, 2) arrangement, 3) cued meaning, 4) intuitive meaning, 5) cognitive fit, and 6) cognitive preference. They are divided into three groups: the first two principles concern appearance, the second two principles concern meaning, and the last two principles concern cognition (Figure 1). The term ‘meaning’ can imply intended meaning by the designer (in a graphic representation), or construed meaning by the user. The novelty of this audit tool is that it fixes ‘meaning’ as the pivotal point between aesthetic visual display and mental cognition, with the aim to align construed meaning with intended meaning and achieve fluent cognition.
Proactive car navigation: how can destination prediction give us new navigation experience?

Conventional car navigation systems that require manual input of a user's destination are not frequently used for familiar routes such as daily commutes and regular shopping. In this paper, we propose and realize proactive car navigation, which integrates daily destination prediction system to car navigation system in order to eliminate input by user by displaying information related to destinations automatically. By questionnaire-based evaluation, we found that proactive car navigation innovates a user's driving experiences, and offers them various advantages, even for regularly frequented destinations.
HDR video enhancement, processing and coding

Advances in digital camera technology have led to the development of image sensors that are capable of capturing High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. Although this has enabled the capture of greater depths of colour and illumination, there remain problems with regards to transmitting and displaying the HDR image data. Current consumer level displays are designed to only show images with a depth of 8-bits per pixel per channel. Typical HDR images can be 10-bits per pixel per channel and upwards, leading to the first problem, how to display HDR images on Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) displays. This is linked to a further problem, that of transmitting the HDR data to the SDR devices, due to the fact that most state-of-the-art image and video coding standards deal with only SDR data. Further, as with most technologies of this kind, current HDR displays are extremely expensive. Furthermore, media broadcast organisations have invested significant sums of money into their current architecture and are unwilling to completely change their systems at further cost. [Continues. ]
Geographical Epidemiology of Cardiovascular Disease in India: An Exploratory Study

Geographical Epidemiology of Cardiovascular Disease in India: An exploratory study By Prem kumar Mony Master of Science (2009) Institute of Medical Sciences University of Toronto Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) have become the leading cause of death in India and other developing countries. The aims of this study were to: (1) describe the geographical epidemiology of CVD in India, (2) provide a graphical display of CVD risk factors and mortality outcomes, and (3) describe the sources of bias. Five large, nationally-representative datasets from India were studied. Cardiovascular death rates were 308/100,000 among males and 198/100,000 among females in middle-age (30-69years). Wide variations between states were noted in the distribution of risk factors and mortality. The selected risk factors explained 49% and 43% of the variation among males and females respectively. Ecologic analysis revealed death rates at state-level were associated with rates of overweight and vegetarianism among males; no such association was found among females. This study has implications for identification of areas with high burden, formulation of hypotheses, and assessing needs for disease control at national/regional levels.
Adoption and acceptance of autonomous vehicles

Author: Title: Frans Hollström Adoption and acceptance of autonomous vehicles Year: 2019 Master’s thesis. LUT University LUT School of Business and management Master’s degree program in Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability (MSIS) 135 pages, 20 figures, 21 tables, 64 appendices Examiners: Professor Kaisu Puumalainen Associate professor Maija Hujala
The Efficient Deployment of Police Resources: Theory and New Evidence from a Randomized Drunk Driving Crackdown in India

Should police activity should be narrowly focused and high force, or widely dispersed but of moderate intensity? Critics of intense "hot spot" policing argue it primarily displaces, not reduces, crime. But if learning about enforcement takes time, the police may take advantage of this period to intervene intensively in the most productive location. We propose a multi-armed bandit model of criminal learning and structurally estimate its parameters using data from a randomized controlled experiment on an anti-drunken driving campaign in Rajasthan, India. In each police station, sobriety checkpoints were either rotated among 3 locations or fixed in the best location, and the intensity of the crackdown was cross-randomized. Rotating checkpoints reduced night accidents by 17%, and night deaths by 25%, while fixed checkpoints had no significant effects. In structural estimation, we show clear evidence of driver learning and strategic responses. We use these parameters to simulate environment-specific optimal enforcement policies.
Preferential Trade Agreements and Firms' Market-Entry Mode Decisions

KAI A. STERN: Preferential Trade Agreements and Firms’ Market-Entry Mode Decisions (Under the direction of Layna Mosley.) When firms internationalize, they select from a menu of entry modes. Firms’ choice of entry mode is partially dependent on host country external uncertainty, one component of which is policy risk. Extant political science work on the determinants of cross-border investment has tended to ignore variation in entry modes, focusing instead on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Redirecting the conversation from aggregated FDI flows to firmlevel internationalization decisions, I argue that preferential trade agreements (PTAs), as a signal of commitment to certain policies, lower policy risk and facilitate high-risk entry modes. Further, I theorize that PTA chapters targeted at certain sectors should primarily impact firms in those sectors. Using firm-level transactions data from up to 146 non-OECD countries from 1990-2017 and multilevel logistic regression, I find that PTAs are strongly associated with riskier entry modes and that there is a moderate sector-specific effect for services chapters.
Corporate R&D and Creditor Value: A Contingency Perspective

This study investigates the relationship between corporate R&D and creditor value. The empirical results suggest that such relationship is contingent on the situations of existing R&D investment and institutional arrangement of corporate governance. We find that R&D investment increases creditor value when insufficient R&D threatens survival, while reduces creditor value when such threat is mitigated. Moreover, such curvilinear relationship is mainly driven by firms with relatively weak managerial entrenchment. Hypotheses are tested with 98 U.S. listed firms in manufacturing sector over 2001-2007.
Managing people for performance in medium-sized workplaces in the UK

This study seeks to challenge the existing beliefs, and to review the gaps, in the relationship between human resource policies and practices and performance. By reviewing the Universalistic, Contingency, and Configurational perspectives clarification is sought as to how best to study the relationship, as well as revealing what the links are. Central to a better understanding of how the HR-performance relationship is developed, are the concepts of path dependency and causal ambiguity. These concepts are explored through a multi-method approach, with the adoption of quantitative and qualitative data providing a robust view of HR within organisations. From within a population of engineering workplaces, each a member of the Engineering Employers’ Federation, data was successfully collated from two hundred and fifty-six medium sized workplaces using a questionnaire. The analysis of questionnaire data is triangulated with four in-depth case studies providing an uncommonly strong research framework. The questionnaire data indicates that the presence of HR is influenced by a variety of factors, including customers, technology, and organisational size. The relationship with performance is revealed as more complex. The questionnaire data provide modest indications as to the mediating factors between HR and performance. These include a focus on engaging flexibly, and providing a distinctive product or service, consistent with a differentiation approach to engineering. Case study data provides greater detail, enabling a discussion of the nature of the HR system, and the way in which its introduction and management is critical to achieving effective performance. The case company results also find that elements of an appropriate HR system facilitate the discretionary behaviours of management. In turn, these behaviours enhance the opportunities for employees to engage with the organisation encouraging employee commitment and discretionary effort. Similarly, an appropriate HR system enables employees to develop patterns of capability, unique to the organisation leading to sustainability.
Combination therapy in the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension - 2015 update

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a disease with a poor prognosis and high mortality rates therefore in the era of advanced therapies targeting different patophysiological pathways attractive seems the idea of combining drugs from two or more classes. They can be applied sequentially or initially (upfront). Data from randomized clinical placebo controlled trials and observational studies show that both strategies can be successful in terms of improvement of functional capacity or delaying time to clinical worsening. The European Society of Cardiology guidelines on pulmonary hypertension issued in 2015 present in detail the role of combination therapy in the management of PAH.
The first impact of EU regulation on non-financial disclosure: An exploratory analysis in the oil & gas sector

Directive 2014/95, in force since 2017, is the first European step that requires companies to provide mandatory non-financial information (NFI). The regulation concerns sustainability information with the policy goal of increased accountability and comparability among European “public interest entities” on that matters. According to the framework of Regulatory Integrated Assessment (RIA), the study compares the disclosure before and after the Directive application considering the content (what) and the location of the information in companies’ reports (where). Content analysis is applied to both financial and non-financial reports to create a disclosure scoring index and an overlapping one. Thus to compare the ex-ante analysis to the ex-post by a quantitative scoring system. The research contributes to the debate on the regulatory policy evaluation examining whether the ex-post assessment reveals a change in companies’ reporting behaviour about non-financial information, i.e. if the regulation achieves its policy objectives of improving sustainability disclosure. Findings show differences between the ex-ante and the ex-post phase: after the enforcement of the Directive there is an increase in the degree of disclosure (what) and a reduction in the level of overlap (where), with more companies choosing “embedded” reports. These results are a preliminary step in the regulatory policy evaluation and they answer to the request of more studies on the ex-post implementation review of regulation.