Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Concierge. Tradition, Obsolescence and Innovation in Tourism

In the hotel industry the concierge is a key role placed at the customer-supplier interface, managing some of the most important service encounters in the guest’s hospitality experience. The paper discusses the impact of new technologies that challenge, but also contribute to reshape, the importance of this role. The outsourcing trend is another threat to the traditional concierge, which is made possible in the new scenario. A new balance between technological and human factors may emerge out of the complex transformation process that the hospitality industry is presently undergoing.
CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS AND PRODUCT PERFORMANCE: A STUDY OF NIGERIAN CONSUMER MARKETS

The Nigerian economy has experienced increased launching of consumer products; this is occasioned by the level of competition in the country. As such consumers are exposed to large number of product-related communication messages in primetime television and newspaper content. One commonly strategy adopted by manufacturers of consumer products is the use of celebrity endorsement with it attendance cost and other risks. The main objective of this study is to establish if there is a relationship between brand positioning, purchasing decisions, brand equity and celebrity endorsement. A survey of 142 respondents was used and the data was analyzed with Structural Equation Model. The results indicate that trust, level of expertise and the fit between the celebrity and the product have positive impact on product performance. However, it was discovered that attractiveness of the celebrity and the similarities between the celebrity and the receiver has little effect on product performance. Therefore, organizations desirous of making use of celebrity in promoting their products should evaluate the attributes of the celebrities that will enhance product performance.
Class-Specific Guided Local Feature Selection for Data Classification

In this paper, a novel class-specific guided local feature selection (CSGLFS) model is proposed, which derives that each area of the high-dimensional data is related to its own unique discriminant feature subset. This algorithm is superior to existing methods which simply applies a common global feature subset to represent all classes in the high-dimensional input data. In the proposed way, the feature subsets take into account local changes, which optimally adjust to the specific region of high-dimensional space. We also give a linked scheme to measure the similarity between query data and each of the specific classes. Moreover, our CSGLFS method is effectively expressed as a linear programming problem. Experimental results on six public datasets prove that our proposed algorithm is capable to obtain meaningful results compared to existing well-known and advanced feature selection algorithms in terms of classification problem.
Parameter Estimation of Shared Frailty Models Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

Standard survival techniques such as proportional hazards model are suffering from the unobserved heterogeneity. Frailty models provide an alternative way in order to account for heterogeneity caused by unobservable risk factors. Although vast studies have been done on estimation procedures, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) haven't received much attention in frailty studies. In this paper, we investigate the estimation performance of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) via Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in modelling multivariate survival data with shared gamma frailty. Simulation studies and real data application are performed in order to assess the performance of MLE via PSO, quasi-Newton and conjugate gradient method.
AN APPROACH TO NONLINEAR BEHAVIOUR PREDICTION OF TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

The objective of the research presented in this paper is to develop an approach modeling and predicting the nonlinear behaviour of complex technical systems in the operating environment, based on a presentation of the system’s dynamic behaviour and recording of such behaviour by using the rules. This approach should help develop new architectures of nonlinear complex systems and improve existing ones, by mapping in both directions, from the structural to the behavioural domain and vice versa. Verification of this approach is presented on the example of a load lifting device.
Bridging the theory‐and‐practice gap: Mediator power in practice

Although mediators are assumed to be neutral third parties, effective fulfillment of their role involves exercising a significant amount of authority and power. Mediators employ a range of approaches, orientations, and strategies. This article reviews some of the scholarship in this area. It then examines the various dimensions of mediator power, looking specifically at (1) the nature of mediator power and (2) its exercise of power through knowledge and expertise, through designing and controlling the process through reframing, and through imposing pressure to settle. Finally, the article discusses “ethical mediation” in light of mediator power.
PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA – A TIME SERIAL STUDY (1980 – 2012)

The literature on the impact of government expenditure on economic growth has mixed results in both country and cross-country studies. The increasing government expenditure in Nigeria over the years has agitated the minds of researchers as to the impact of these expenditures on economic growth. In an attempt to investigate the effect of government expenditure on economic growth, we employed a disaggregated analysis. The results reveal that government total capital expenditure (TCAP), total recurrent expenditures (TREC), and government expenditure on education (EDU) have negative effect on economic growth. On the contrary, rising government expenditure on transport and communication (TRACO), and health (HEA) results to an increase in economic growth. The study therefore, recommends that Government should increase both capital and recurrent expenditure, including expenditures on education, as well as ensuring that funds meant for the development of these sectors are properly managed. Moreover, the study insists that government should increase its investment in the development of transport and communication, as well as creating an enabling macroeconomic environment for business to strive. Furthermore, government should raise its expenditure in the development of the health sector since it would enhance labour productivity and economic growth. Finally, the study recommends that government should encourage and increase the funding of anti-corruption agencies in order to tackle the high level of corruption in our public offices and institutions.
FUZZYMANAGER: A Teaching and Introductory Environment for Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Clustering

Using fuzzy logic, and associated techniques such as fuzzy clustering, in a teaching environment necessitates the availability of introductory and pedagogically appropriate tools. In a similar manner, introductory level tools may be necessary for practical applications where users are non-specialists in fuzzy theory, as is often the case. For these two scenarios, and many others, the tools that support the use of the modeling technique must satisfy sets of requirements concerning the interface, functionality, and documentation. Examples of these requirements can include the program’s ability to guide the user, without undue restrictions, through the necessary modeling procedures (as in a wizard interface) and explaining (both textually and graphically) the operation of the inference process. After outlining some of the desirable attributes for such tools that are intended to be used by these fuzzy novices, this paper describes the collection of tools collectively known as FUZZYMANAGER. Despite the name, which reflects its project management origins, the system is targeted towards any group of users without a particularly comprehensive or deep knowledge of fuzzy logic, who want an intuitive and graphical approach to fuzzy logic model building. As well as implementing standard inference options and methods, a clustering based algorithm for automatically deriving fuzzy systems from data (either membership functions, rules, or both may be extracted) is outlined. This component assists with the initial system creation process which can be an especially difficult activity for novices.
Electromagnetic Imaging of Discrete Wire Scatterers via MUSIC Algorithm: Preliminary Experimental Results

Qualitative electromagnetic imaging of perfectly conducting electrical wires with multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is considered in 2D cylindrical coordinates. The motivation arises from safety/security applications where deployed electrical wires are required to be remotely sensed in a near real time setting. The results demonstrate that the algorithm can rapidly reconstruct the 2D coordinates of the electrically conducting thin wire scatterers in the measurement domain.
Evaluation of airborne image data and LIDAR main stem data for monitoring physical resources within the Colorado River ecosystem

This study evaluated near-infrared LIDAR data acquired over the main-stem channel at four long-term monitoring sites within the Colorado River ecosystem (CRE) to determine the ability of these data to provide reliable indications in changes in water elevation over time. Our results indicate that there is a good correlation between the LIDAR water-surface elevations and ground measurements of water-edge elevation, but there are also inherent errors in the LIDAR data. The elevation errors amount to about 50 cm and therefore temporal changes in watersurface elevation that exceed this value by the majority of data at a particular location can be deemed significant or real. This study also evaluated airborne image data for producing photogrammetric elevation data and for automated mapping of sand bars and debris flows within the CRE. The photogrammetric analyses show that spatial resolutions of ≤ 10 cm are required to produce vertical accuracies < 20 cm and that digitally acquired data cannot yet support this monitoring requirement. The mapping analyses indicate that CIR image data are far superior to true-color and panchromatic image data in mapping sand bars and debris flows. The analyses also show that the CIR color information provide almost as much mapping capability as do the combination of CIR color and CIR image texture. Therefore, CIR image data should always be given preference in image data collections, not only for the physical resource program, but also for the biologic resource program.
Non-canonical word order and subject-object asymmetry in Korean case ellipsis

The dispreference for subject case ellipsis in OSV sentences has been analyzed as resulting from a violation of a structural requirement on the position of bare subject NPs (Ahn and Cho 2006a, 2006b, 2007). In this study, we present evidence from an acceptability rating experiment demonstrating that OSV sentences containing a case-ellipsed subject exhibit acceptability patterns different from ungrammatical sentences violating a core syntactic principle on case assignment and that these sentences are judged acceptable when the subject refers to expected, predictable information in context. This evidence supports the conclusion that the dispreference for subject case ellipsis in OSV sentences is due to violations of probabilistic constraints that favor case marking for rare types of subjects and such violations can be remedied by non-syntactic information.
A MEDIAN-BASED DEPTHMAP FUSION STRATEGY FOR THE GENERATION OF ORIENTED POINTS

Abstract. Due to good scalability, systems for image-based dense surface reconstruction often employ stereo or multi-baseline stereo methods. These types of algorithms represent the scene by a set of depth or disparity maps which eventually have to be fused to extract a consistent, non-redundant surface representation. Generally the single depth observations across the maps possess variances in quality. Within the fusion process not only preservation of precision and detail but also density and robustness with respect to outliers are desirable. Being prune to outliers, in this article we propose a local median-based algorithm for the fusion of depth maps eventually representing the scene as a set of oriented points. Paying respect to scalability, points induced by each of the available depth maps are streamed to cubic tiles which then can be filtered in parallel. Arguing that the triangulation uncertainty is larger in the direction of image rays we define these rays as the main filter direction. Within an additional strategy we define the surface normals as the principle direction for median filtering/integration. The presented approach is straight-forward to implement since employing standard oc- and kd-tree structures enhanced by nearest neighbor queries optimized for cylindrical neighborhoods. We show that the presented method in combination with the MVS (Rothermel et al., 2012) produces surfaces comparable to the results of the Middlebury MVS benchmark and favorably compares to an state-of-the-art algorithm employing the Fountain dataset (Strecha et al., 2008). Moreover, we demonstrate its capability of depth map fusion for city scale reconstructions derived from large frame airborne imagery.
A Novel DNA Damage Response Network Associated with the CTD of RNA Polymerase II

A Novel DNA Damage Response Network Associated with the CTD of RNA Polymerase II by Tiffany Sabin Winsor Department of Biochemistry Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Arno Greenleaf, Supervisor ___________________________ Michael Been ___________________________ Kenneth Kreuzer ___________________________ Laura Rusche ___________________________ John McCusker An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Biochemistry in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright by Tiffany Sabin Winsor 2012
Change of allometry between coarse root and shoot of Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta DOUGL. ex. LOUD) along a stress gradient in the sub-boreal forest zone of British Columbia

Abstract This transect study in 41–178 year-old stands of Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta DOUGL. ex. LOUD.) in the southern boreal forest of British Columbia, Canada, analyses how site conditions modify the coarse root–shoot dynamics of trees. The allometric relationship between diameter growth of coarse roots and trunk is scrutinised for long-term site dependence, and short-term reactions to periodic climate conditions. Along a gradient from poor to rich sites, we analysed 54 trees. The sampling scheme provided two increment cores each from the three main roots and the shoot at breast height per tree. From the year-ring series, we calculated diameter time series for each shoot and each root. With these data, we show (1) that the trees’ coarse root diameter and shoot diameter are linearly related in a double-logarithmic coordinate system, thus representing constant allometry on the long run. Statistical analysis of these long-term trajectories reveals that (2) the relative allocation to coarse roots versus shoot is much higher on poor sites compared to rich sites. A closer look at the short-term reaction to stress events in the period from 1995 to 2000, where several dry years occurred, underpins that (3) a lack of water supply triggers biomass allocation in favour of coarse roots at the expense of shoot growth most pronouncedly on poor sites. Implications of this morphological plasticity for allometric theory, method development, tree and stand dynamics and carbon storage assessment are discussed.
Molecular Phylogenetic Analyses in Court Trials

Molecular phylogenetics allows reconstructing of the genealogy and evolutionary history of organisms from information on their nucleotide or amino acid sequences. When sequences are derived from very fast evolving organisms, such as ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses, changes accumulate in a few days or weeks, thus allowing the reconstruction of very recent evolutionary events in the history of these populations. One such event is the transmission of one of these viruses, for instance human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV), from an infected person to another. This occasionally results in a legal demand seeking for compensation and/or punishment for the transmitter. Hence, expert testimony is sought in court to determine whether the viruses isolated from the source and the infected patients actually share a common origin or not. Molecular phylogenetics and statistical inference methods are used to translate scientific testimony into expert evaluation of the evidence for the court. Key concepts: Fast evolving organisms, such as RNA viruses, can accumulate changes in their genome sequence in a few days or weeks. Changes in nucleotide sequences can be used to track the evolutionary history of organisms sharing a common ancestor. The last common ancestor (LCA) of a set of sequences represents the last sequence before the corresponding lineage split in two or more separate lines of descent. During a transmission event, a portion of the microorganisms in the source is passed onto the recipient(s). Phylogenetic analysis can be used to ascertain when two or more sequences shared an LCA as well as some of its features. Sequences derived from a transmission event will share a more recent LCA than those obtained from unrelated sources. The analysis of LCA can be used to provide expert testimony in courts on the source of an infection. Under special conditions, it is also possible to ascertain the direction of the transmission and an approximate time for it. Phylogenetic analysis is a very powerful and reliable methodology whose use for resolving transmission cases has been validated by courts in many countries. Keywords: RNA viruses; forensic analysis; likelihood; phylogenetic trees; hypothesis testing
Double exponential instability of triangular arbitrage systems

If financial markets displayed the informational efficiency postulated in the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), arbitrage operations would be self-extinguishing. The present paper considers arbitrage sequences in foreign exchange (FX) markets, in which trading platforms and information are fragmented. In [18,9] it was shown that sequences of triangular arbitrage operations in FX markets containing $4$ currencies and trader-arbitrageurs tend to display periodicity or grow exponentially rather than being self-extinguishing. This paper extends the analysis to $5$ or higher-order currency worlds. The key findings are that in a $5$-currency world arbitrage sequences may also follow an exponential law as well as display periodicity, but that in higher-order currency worlds a double exponential law may additionally apply. There is an ``inheritance of instability'' in the higher-order currency worlds. Profitable arbitrage operations are thus endemic rather that displaying the self-extinguishing properties implied by the EMH.
BLASCHKE REPRESENTATION OF FUNCTIONS ON THE CIRCLE

We prove that every unimodularly bounded measurable function on the complex unit circle admits a representation f = f+ + fi 1 + fif+ , where f+ and fi extend holomorphically into the interior and the exterior of the circle, respectively, fi vanishes at infinity, and both functions are unimod- ularly bounded. The representation is unique if kfk1 < 1.
Blood Culture-Negative Endocarditis

Blood culture-negative endocarditis is often severe and difficult to diagnose. Infective blood culture-negative endocarditis is classified into three main categories: (1) bacterial endocarditis with blood cultures sterilized by previous antibacterial treatment; (2) endocarditis related to fastidious microorganisms in which prolonged incubation is necessary; (3) true blood culture-negative endocarditis, due to intra-cellular bacteria that cannot be routinely cultured in blood with currently available. There are two major etiologies for noninfective endocarditis: (1) nonbacterial thrombotic endocarditis and (2) endocarditis related to systemic diseases (SLE and Behcet disease). Team approach including cardiologists, infection disease (ID) specialists, microbiologists, pathologist and immunologist is crucial for diagnosis and management of blood culture-negative endocarditis as it needs elegant and high-quality modern technics of histology, molecular analysis and essential epidemiological information.
Effect of Empowerment on Job Satisfaction: A Study of Software Sector of Pakistan

A continuing issue that maneuvers researchers in software projects is what encourages employees to perform well and make contributions to the projects. Prior studies have mainly focused on other behavioral factors but we propose that empowerment plays a crucial role in boosting employees’ performance. A survey has been conducted via self-administered questionnaire to test perceptions of employees working on various software projects regarding empowerment practices and their perceived task performance. Two types of empowerment have been studied in the present study. Moreover, limitations and implications have also been discussed. Keywords : Software sector, empowerment, structural empowerment, psychological empowerment, Job performance
Molecular Dynamics Assessment of Modelled IgG Binding Receptor Protein (1PGB)

Protein structure prediction is one of the most interesting and challenging area in Structural Biology due to its functional importance. In this paper an attempt has been made to minimize the gaps between insilico and wet lab determination of threedimensional structure of a protein by molecular modelling and simulation technique. The working concept has been presented through small, typical B1 domain of protein (IgG binding receptors protein) case study. Insilico molecular model of IgG binding receptors protein has been prepared through MODELLER. Energy minimization and molecular dynamics calculations were done through GROMACS using OPLS force field and validation has been done through PROCHECK and ERRAT programs (97.04%). RMSD, RMSF, Phi (f) / Psi (ѱ), B-factor and ASA analysis, were calculated for modelled structure. The performance of prediction has been assessed by error estimation in Phi/Psi values.
The Effects of Different Concentrations of Nitrogen Sources on Growth of Micropropagated Potato Cultivars

The use of nitrogen in nutrient media is essential for growth and helps identify highly productive media for potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) micropropagation and adventitious shoot formation. Three potato cultivars (Agria, Marfona and Savalan cultivars) were examined for their growth response with medium containing four different levels of KNO3 (1, 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75 times as much 1.9 g l) and NH4NO3 (1, 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75 times as much 1.65 g l). The morphogenic responses of cultivars were evaluated via measurement of root length, number of roots, shoot length, number of shoots and number of nodes per plantlet. Results indicated that the cultivars differed in their response to nitrogen source types and different concentrations. The results of both KNO3 and NH4NO3 experiments indicated that N3C1 and N3C2 (2.85 g l KNO3 and 2.475 g l NH4NO3 in Agria and Marfona, respectively) had the longest shoot length. Cultivars Agria and Marfona at 2.375, 2.85 and 3.325 g l KNO3 produced the shortest root length, but cultivar Savalan in all KNO3 levels had the highest root length. Our findings indicated that the third concentration of both nitrogen sources (KNO3 and NH4NO3) were better than other nitrogen concentrations in all cultivars for number of shoots and number of nodes. Therefore, nitrogen source media should have significant utility for shoot or other important traits in potato in vitro culture conditions.