Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Organizational Culture Mediate Between E-Commerce Adoption and Hotel Performance

Global organizations can go on the information highway and dramatically improve the way business interactions by using E-commerce. This situation and demands force each organization to change, to abridge the gap in environmental changes that take place. One of those who get the full benefits of E-commerce is the hotel industry. The full potential of values brought about by E-commerce in Malaysia is unable to realize. This paper shows the role of organizational culture among E-commerce adoption and hotel performance in Malaysia, from a survey of 111 hotels, four (4) stars above, and 146 hotels three (3) stars below as a sample. Based on the conceptual framework, it can be hypothesized that Organizational culture positively mediates the effect of E-commerce adoption on hotel performance. A statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) Version 20 was used to examine the data. Pearson correlation analysis and descriptive statistics were performed to determine the collinearity problem, and to analyze the relationship between the variables. Lastly, multiple regression analysis was recommended to assess the mediating variable in the relationship between independent variable and dependent variable (Baron and Kenny, 1986). The final results of Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis showed important finding. The relationship between organizational culture and E-commerce adoption significantly correlated with hotel performance. Meanwhile based on mediating model testing, the mediating effect of organizational culture in the hypothesized model exists. The findings of this study may be used to improve the method and management in Malaysia hotel industry environment and employees should be exposed to the requirement in the work culture towards globalization. Therefore, practice within the E-commerce adoption needs to consider the organizational culture as a key element in the hotel performance. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n2p61
ZnO Thin Film Deposition on Sapphire Substrates by Chemical Vapor Deposition

ZnO thin films with thickness around 200 nm were deposited on a-plane sapphire substrates by Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) method with a mixed ZnO-powder/C-powder solid source. These films were characterized by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The correlation between surface structural properties of ZnO thin films and their optical signature measured by temperature dependence of PL is investigated for various growth conditions such as flow rate O2 injection gas and growth temperature. At room temperature, the columbic interaction enhanced absorption edge of 3.305 eV of these films was determined by optical absorption measurements.
Study of optimization design criteria for stand-alone hybrid renewable power systems

Hybrid renewable power systems integrate two or more sources of energy, one of which is renewable, optionally a storage system and typically work in stand-alone mode. They are being considered more and more and we should increment their usage taking advantage of their positive benefits: free of charge resource availability, CO2 emissions reductions and subsidies. Dealing with their inconveniences: variability of renewable resources availability and cost acquisition, through the optimization of the design and the control of the system. The optimal design of hybrid renewable power systems is usually defined by economic criteria. But there are also technical and environmental criteria to be taken into account to improve decision-making. In this paper a discussion on different criteria will introduce the non-economical perspectives in addition to the economic criteria. A case study of a PV-Wind-Diesel-Battery system for a Telecommunication station in Catalonia is discussed. Availability of renewable energy sources is obtained with RETScreen and PVSyst. Analysis and simulations of various hybrid power systems have been done in HOMER resulting on a comparison of different scenarios. Optimal scenario taking into account the best results of all three types of criteria: economic, technical and environmental, is a trade-off of the economic optimum.
Understanding Personality by Understanding Companion Dogs

ABSTRACT The study of personality is well established in human psychology, with trait theory being perhaps the most widely accepted of the personality theories. Animal personality research has utilized trait theory to identify personality factors in a wide variety of animal species. However, it has been somewhat hampered by attempting to apply human personality dimensions to animals rather than investigating the depth and breadth of personality in individual animal species. Research into animal personality offers human personality researchers the chance to explore the evolution and development of human personality. This can best be done by exploring the expression of personality in other species without restriction to human personality models. This paper suggests that the dog, Canis familiaris, is a suitable species to begin with because of its unique place in human society, its history and familiarity with humans, and its genetic plasticity. A potential structure of canine personality is proposed.
Common Pathways to NSSI and Suicide Ideation: The Roles of Rumination and Self-Compassion

We investigated whether rumination and self-compassion moderate and/or mediate the relationships between negative affect and both non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicide ideation. Undergraduate university students (n = 415) completed well-validated measures of negative affect, rumination, self-compassion, NSSI, and suicide ideation. Neither rumination nor self-compassion moderated associations between negative affect and NSSI and suicide ideation. However, both rumination and self-compassion mediated associations between negative affect and lifetime history of NSSI and suicide ideation. Self-compassion additionally mediated the association between negative affect and both 12-month NSSI and suicide ideation. The salience of self-compassion, particularly in predicting recent NSSI and suicide ideation, offers promise for early intervention initiatives focusing on less judgmental or self-critical means of self-relation.
Affective problems and decline in cognitive state in older adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Evidence suggests that affective problems, such as depression and anxiety, increase risk for late-life dementia. However, the extent to which affective problems influence cognitive decline, even many years prior to clinical diagnosis of dementia, is not clear. The present study systematically reviews and synthesises the evidence for the association between affective problems and decline in cognitive state (i.e., decline in non-specific cognitive function) in older adults. An electronic search of PubMed, PsycInfo, Cochrane, and ScienceDirect was conducted to identify studies of the association between depression and anxiety separately and decline in cognitive state. Key inclusion criteria were prospective, longitudinal designs with a minimum follow-up period of 1 year. Data extraction and methodological quality assessment using the STROBE checklist were conducted independently by two raters. A total of 34 studies (n = 71 244) met eligibility criteria, with 32 studies measuring depression (n = 68 793), and five measuring anxiety (n = 4698). A multi-level meta-analysis revealed that depression assessed as a binary predictor (OR 1.36, 95% CI 1.05–1.76, p = 0.02) or a continuous predictor (B = −0.008, 95% CI −0.015 to −0.002, p = 0.012; OR 0.992, 95% CI 0.985–0.998) was significantly associated with decline in cognitive state. The number of anxiety studies was insufficient for meta-analysis, and they are described in a narrative review. Results of the present study improve current understanding of the temporal nature of the association between affective problems and decline in cognitive state. They also suggest that cognitive function may need to be monitored closely in individuals with affective disorders, as these individuals may be at particular risk of greater cognitive decline.
An infinite-server queueing model MMAPkGk in semi-Markov random environment with marked MAP arrival and subject to catastrophes

In the present paper the infinite-server MMAPkGk queueing model with random resource vector of customers, marked MAP arrival and semi-Markov (SM) arrival of catastrophes is considered. The joint generating functions (PGF) of transient and stationary distributions of number of busy servers and numbers of different types served customers, as well as Laplace transformations (LT) of joint distributions of total accumulated resources in the model at moment and total accumulated resources of served customers during time interval are found. The basic differential and renewal equations for transient and stationary PGF of queue sizes of customers are found.
Aplicación de un análisis cluster para la evaluación de la vulnerabilidad a la contaminación de los acuíferos

En el presente trabajo se realiza una puesta a prueba de la capacidad del analisis cluster para realizar una cartografia de vulnerabilidad de la contaminacion del acuifero carbonatado de Torremolinos (Sierra de Mijas, Malaga). Para este objetivo se comparan los resultados obtenidos a traves del analisis cluster con otros procedentes de la aplicacion de distintos metodos para cartografia de vulnerabilidad (DRASTIC, GOD y AVI). La cartografia resultante del analisis cluster muestra una distribucion espacial de la vulnerabilidad del acuifero similar a la ofrecida por otros metodos, e incluso se observa en algunas zonas del acuifero una mayor capacidad de discriminacion espacial. El grado de vulnerabilidad, de las distintas unidades espaciales homogeneas obtenidas a partir del cluster, se ha establecido mediante un analisis de la distancia al punto ideal.
Finite Element Analysis and Design Optimization of a Pneumatically Actuating Silicone Module for Robotic Surgery Applications

Abstract The design of a pneumatically actuated silicone module, resembling soft tissue, with three pneumatic chambers is considered and optimized in this study with the aim of using it in a soft robot arm for robotic surgery applications. Three types of silicone materials, Ecoflex 0030 and 0050 and Dragonskin 0030, have been investigated, and a constitutive model has been derived for each of them. Design optimization of the silicone module was based on finite element analysis (FEA) that was validated against experimental data of one-degree bending under one-channel actuation. This was followed by FEA parametric studies for module design optimization to minimize the ballooning effect in one-degree bending as well as reduce the actuation pressure. Modules made from Ecoflex 0030 and Ecoflex 0050 exhibited the same bending shape in FEA, but about three times higher actuation pressure was required for the harder Ecoflex 0050. Design parameters under investigation in the parametric FEA studies included the sha.
Measurement Invariance of TGMD-3 in Children With and Without Mental and Behavioral Disorders

This study evaluated whether the Test of Gross Motor Development 3 (TGMD-3) is a reliable tool to compare children with and without mental and behavioral disorders across gross motor skill domains. A total of 1,075 children (aged 3–11 years), 98 with mental and behavioral disorders and 977 without (typically developing), were included in the analyses. The TGMD-3 evaluates fundamental gross motor skills of children across two domains: locomotor skills and ball skills. Two independent testers simultaneously observed children’s performances (agreement over 95%). Each child completed one practice and then two formal trials. Scores were recorded only during the two formal trials. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis tested the assumption of TGMD-3 measurement invariance across disability groups. According to the magnitude of changes in root mean square error of approximation and comparative fit index between nested models, the assumption of measurement invariance across groups was valid. Loadings of the manifest indicators on locomotor and ball skills were significant (p < .001) in both groups. Item response theory analysis showed good reliability results across locomotor and the ball skills full latent traits. The present study confirmed the factorial structure of TGMD-3 and demonstrated its feasibility across normally developing children and children with mental and behavioral disorders. These findings provide new opportunities for understanding the effect of specific intervention strategies on this population.
Biodegradable Monocrystalline Silicon Photovoltaic Microcells as Power Supplies for Transient Biomedical Implants

Bioresorbable electronic materials serve as foundations for implantable devices that provide active diagnostic or therapeutic function over a timeframe matched to a biological process, and then disappear within the body to avoid secondary surgical extraction. Approaches to power supply in these physically transient systems are critically important. This paper describes a fully biodegradable, monocrystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) platform based on microscale cells (microcells) designed to operate at wavelengths with long penetration depths in biological tissues (red and near infrared wavelengths), such that external illumination can provide realistic levels of power. Systematic characterization and theoretical simulations of operation under porcine skin and fat establish a foundational understanding of these systems and their scalability. In vivo studies of a representative platform capable of generating ≈60 µW of electrical power under 4 mm of porcine skin and fat illustrate an ability to operate blue light‐emitting diodes (LEDs) as subdermal implants in rats for 3 d. Here, the PV system fully resorbs after 4 months. Histological analysis reveals that the degradation process introduces no inflammatory responses in the surrounding tissues. The results suggest the potential for using silicon photovoltaic microcells as bioresorbable power supplies for various transient biomedical implants.
Paratyphoid Infections

of one great group of intestinal micro-organisms some of which are in their ordinary condition innocent, while others are pathogenic to man. Dr. Warren Coleman 1 and Dr. B. H. Buxton, of New York, have lately made a careful study of these so-called paratyphoid organisms. They say that since Gartner's discovery of the B. enteritidis, increasing interest has attended the study of the intermediate members of the typhoid-colon group of bacilli. In 1893 Gilbert proposed the terms " paratyphoid " and " paracolon " to designate these intermediaries ; but Durham regards these terms as inappropriate, since he believes that the intermediates are well-defined species of organisms, and suggests that they should all be classified under the
Watch to Edit: Video Retargeting using Gaze

We present a novel approach to optimally retarget videos for varied displays with differing aspect ratios by preserving salient scene content discovered via eye tracking. Our algorithm performs editing with cut, pan and zoom operations by optimizing the path of a cropping window within the original video while seeking to (i) preserve salient regions, and (ii) adhere to the principles of cinematography. Our approach is (a) content agnostic as the same methodology is employed to re‐edit a wide‐angle video recording or a close‐up movie sequence captured with a static or moving camera, and (b) independent of video length and can in principle re‐edit an entire movie in one shot.
Comparison of strategies to learn from imbalanced classes for computer aided diagnosis of inborn steroidogenic disorders

In the bio-medical domain, a high detection rate of possibly rare diseases is usually highly desirable while errors in the majority class (e.g. healthy controls) may be more acceptable. Hence, optimizing the overall predictive accuracy is often unsuitable. Here, we analyse a large data set of urine GC/MS measurements from 829 controls and 68 patients suﬀering from one of three inborn steroidogenic disorders. We use 2 comparable algorithms able to handle large amounts of missing data. Furthermore, we compare a variety of diﬀerent strategies to deal with the highly imbalanced data, including undersampling, oversampling and the introduction of class-speciﬁc costs.
DBpedia Links : The Hub of Links for the Web of Data

Links are the key enabler for retrieval of related information on the Web of Data. Currently, DBpedia is one of the central interlinking hubs in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. With over 28 million of described and localized things it is one of the largest and open datasets. With the increasing number of linked datasets, there is need for proper maintenance of these links. In this paper, we describe the DBpedia Links repository, which maintains linksets between DBpedia and other LOD datasets. We describe the system for maintenance, update and quality assurance of the linksets.
A DAX-enabled mmap mechanism for log-structured in-memory file systems

Emerging byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory(NVM) technologies offer fine-grained access to persistent data with latency comparable to DRAM. This presents both challenges and opportunities to system software designers. To utilize the fascinating features of NVM, a lot of works have been done to develop NVM-based file systems. Direct access (DAX) is a key feature provided by most NVM-based file systems, it enables applications to directly access NVM without going through the page cache layer. However, DAX-style mmap may cause serious consistency issues in versioning in-memory file systems that adopt CoW to solve block sharing problem among snapshots. In this paper, we propose a new mmap mechanism called versioning-mmap which solves the consistency issue of memory-mapped I/O in DAX-enabled versioning in-memory file systems. We implement our proposed mechanism in HMVFS and do a series of experiments based on our implementation. Results show that our mechanism achieves consistency while imposing negligible performance overhead compared to PMFS and NOVA.
Computer-based methods for the mouse full-length cDNA encyclopedia: real-time sequence clustering for construction of a nonredundant cDNA library.

We developed computer-based methods for constructing a nonredundant mouse full-length cDNA library. Our cDNA library construction process comprises assessment of library quality, sequencing the 3' ends of inserts and clustering, and completing a re-array to generate a nonredundant library from a redundant one. After the cDNA libraries are generated, we sequence the 5' ends of the inserts to check the quality of the library; then we determine the sequencing priority of each library. Selected libraries undergo large-scale sequencing of the 3' ends of the inserts and clustering of the tag sequences. After clustering, the nonredundant library is constructed from the original libraries, which have redundant clones. All libraries, plates, clones, sequences, and clusters are uniquely identified, and all information is saved in the database according to this identifier. At press time, our system has been in place for the past two years; we have clustered 939,725 3' end sequences into 127,385 groups from 227 cDNA libraries/sublibraries (see http://genome.gse.riken.go.jp/).
Geostatistical Methods for Filling Gaps in Level-3 Monthly-Mean Aerosol Optical Depth Data from Multi-Angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer

ABSTRACTThe Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) retrieved from satellite remote sensing measurements such as from MISR and MODIS, both onboard the Terra platform, are widely used for studying regional and global patterns of aerosol loading. Aerosol products from these sensors are also used for analyzing feedbacks and relationship between aerosols and climatic variables including clouds, precipitation, and radiation fluxes. Several statistical techniques leading to the understanding of such relationships, including empirical orthogonal function and temporal trend extraction methods, require spatially complete AOD data records. Inherent to remote sensing of aerosols, cloud cover significantly affects aerosol retrievals and results in missing data across the AOD products. This paper demonstrates widely-used geostatistical techniques, such as Co-Kriging (CK) and Regression Kriging (RK), for spatially-filling missing data in the MISR AOD product for the period 2001–2013. Among the unique characteristics of this data-filling algorithm is that it utilizes additional AOD information obtained from MODIS. The mean accuracy of the predicted MISR AOD using CK method is estimated to be 0.05, globally. The gap-filled MISR AOD data are also compared with 131 ground-based Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations, located around the world. It is found that Root Mean Squared Error of the gap-filled AOD dataset and the original MISR AOD product with respect to AERONET data are 0.143. The gap-filled AOD dataset can be used in applications where the presence of missing values is undesirable such as for global/regional aerosol variability and trend analysis.
Comparison of ATB FUNGUS 2 and VITEK-2 Antifungal Susceptibility (AST-YS01) Tests for Candida Species Isolated from Blood Culture

Background: The VITEK-2 yeast susceptibility test (AST-YS01; bioMerieux, Hazelwood, MO, USA) has recently been introduced as a fully automated, commercial antifungal susceptibility test system that determines MIC endpoints spectrophotometrically, thereby eliminating subjective errors. We compared the ATB FUNGUS 2 (bioMe rieux) and VITEK-2 (ASTYS01) systems to the CLSI M27 method for susceptibility testing of Candida isolates. Methods: We tested 59 Candida species that were isolated from blood cultures at Wonju Christian Hospital between September 2008 and August 2009. We compared MIC results for amphotericin B, flucytosine, fluconazole and voriconazole using the ATB FUNGUS 2 and VITEK-2 (AST-YS01) tests to those obtained by the CLSI M27 broth microdilution method. Results: Within two-fold dilutions of MICs, the agreement of the ATB FUNGUS 2 and VITEK-2 (ASTYS01) tests with the CLSI method according to antifungal agents were: amphotericin B, 100% vs. 100% flucytosine, 100% vs. 100% fluconazole, 83.6% vs. 98.3% and voriconazole, 83.6% vs. 96.7%, respectively. The categorical discrepancies for fluconazole and voriconazole were 20.4% and 18.6% for ATB FUNGUS 2, and 6.8% and 0% for VITEK-2 (ASTYS01). There were no major errors for fluconazole and voriconazole in either ATB FUNGUS 2 or VITEK-2 (ASTYS01) tests. Conclusion: The VITEK-2 system (AST-YS01) appears to be rapid and highly correlative with the CLSI method, suggesting that it is effective for antifungal susceptibility testing for Candida species in clinical settings. (Korean J Clin Microbiol 2010;13: 114-120)
A novel principle for causal inference in data with small error variance

Causal inference addresses the problem of identifying cause and eﬀect variables in observed data. While most of the current techniques base heavily on exploiting asymmetries in the error noise, these techniques struggle in data that only contain small noise. We present a novel principle for causal inference in a bivariate setting with small error variance. For this, we exploit an asymmetry in the prediction error under the assumption of additive noise and an independence between data generating mechanism and its input. The applicability of our approach is corroborated with empirical evaluations in artiﬁcial and real-world data sets.