Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Theoretical study of coated spherical metallic nanoparticles for single-molecule surface-enhanced spectroscopy

We investigate the possibility to use coated metallic nanoparticles for single-molecule surface-enhanced spectroscopy by extending the Mie theory. The aggregates of metallodielectric spheres of Au and Ag show a strong local intensity enhancement in the cavity between particles, which can result in up to a 1014-fold increase for surface-enhanced Raman scattering. We also examine the thickness of the coating layer, the size of the core, and the incident wavelength that determine the enhancement.
The key principles of process manager motivation in production and administration processes in an industrial enterprise

The basic premise of sustainable development is that companies should completely re-evaluate their enterprise work logic and process organization. Most of the necessary changes concern employee stimulation and motivation. If we are truly interested in improving business results and the effectiveness of business processes – there would be no progress otherwise – we have to strive to break down the barriers between company management (leadership) and employees in order to establish effective relationships between firms and customers. This paper presents research results of process manager activities in modern industrial enterprises, connected with a methodology proposal for the systematically-oriented process manager motivation of employees in accordance with the increased competitiveness of production and administration processes. It also presents an effective methodology of how to increase the positive effects of welldefined employee motivations from the process manager ś perspective. The core benefit of this methodology lies in the design of a systematic approach to the motivation process from the process manager side, allowing for radical performance improvement via production and administrative processes and the increased competitiveness of enterprise processes.
The Investment CAPM

A new class of Capital Asset Pricing Models arises from the first principle of real investment for individual firms. Conceptually as "causal" as the consumption CAPM, yet empirically more tractable, the investment CAPM emerges as a leading asset pricing paradigm. Firms do a good job in aligning investment policies with costs of capital, and this alignment drives many empirical patterns that are anomalous in the consumption CAPM. Most important, integrating the anomalies literature in finance and accounting with neoclassical economics, the investment CAPM succeeds in mounting an efficient markets counterrevolution to behavioral finance in the past 15 years.
Recent advances in pulsed electric field and non-thermal plasma treatments for food and biorefinery applications

In the last decays pulsed electric field techniques gained increasing importance in biotechnology and food production. Application of electric pulses to cells leads to increased permeability and conductivity of cell membranes and formation of pores in cell membrane - phenomenon called electroporation. Electroporation could be a very suitable technique for improvement of extraction or dying in both food processing and biorefinery. Non-thermal plasma treatment generates reactive species in the samples causing damage of the cell membrane and could be used for wastewater treatment, microbial inactivation and as a treatment prior to open fermentations on complex substrates. In this study, recent advances in pulsed electric field treatment of food, algal biomass and hospital wastewater as well as role of non-thermal plasma treatment in bio-decontamination of complex substrates will be addressed. Also, some environmental and economic aspects of these novel techniques in comparison to conventional treatments will be discussed.
Automated Arterial Input Function Extraction for T1-Weighted DCE-MRI

2 , consisting of 3-D gradient echo acquisitions acquired over a period of approximately 3.5 minutes, with a temporal resolution of 5-8.5 s was used. Baseline T1 was calculated using 3 acquisitions with different flip angles. Concentration of contrast agent was estimated from the change in T1 during the dynamic series. An intravenous contrast agent bolus of less than 10 s duration was manually injected. Acquisitions in the lung and prostate utilised similar protocols, but with 4 s and 2.3 s temporal resolution, respectively, and with the bolus administered using a power injector. AIF estimation: 1. Manually identify a slice that contains a suitable artery, and does not suffer in-flow effects (note that the use of 3- D acquisition allows significantly reduced in-flow effects compared with multi-slice techniques when a slice in the centre of the volume is selected); 2. Extract the time course for every voxel in slice and identify those that show a maximum in concentration within 20 s of the arrival time (early max voxels); 3. Identify the early max voxels within the top 5% of peak concentrations; 4. Average the resultant time courses together to create a mean AIF. Results and Conclusion The AIF identification method proved to extract plausible AIFs from a range of regions of the body, including the lung and prostate (Fig. 1). The positions of the voxels that contribute to the AIF may be determined and mapped onto an anatomical image, showing that the mean AIF is extracted from voxels positioned in arteries. The selection of the top 5 % of early max voxels ensures that partial volume effects are minimised. Figure 2 shows the results of the technique in a glioma patient scanned twice, showing qualitatively good reproducibility. Figure 3 shows measures of the repeatability of the method across all 6 glioma patients. The method provides an AIF estimate with a minimum of user input and is applicable to any area of the body with a suitable artery. The method shows good scan-rescan reproducibility, even in the case shown using manual bolus administration. References
A Cross-Cultural Study of Offering Advice Speech Acts by Iranian EFL Learners and English Native Speakers: Pragmatic Transfer in Focus.

The purpose of the present study was to compare the speech act of offering advice as realized by Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers. The study, more specifically, attempted to find out whether there was any pragmatic transfer from Persian (L1) among Iranian EFL learners while offering advice in English. It also examined whether Iranian EFL learners’ perception of directness/indirectness in the realization of offering advice develops as a result of proficiency development. In order to achieve the objectives, a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to collect the speech act of offering advice from among Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers. The findings indicated that Iranian EFL learners were not as balanced as native English speakers in the use of indirect use of offering advice. It was also observed that Iranian EFL learners had not acquired the pragmatic competence to offer native-like advice with regard to social power and social distance between interlocutors. The result also revealed that Iranian EFL learners and the native English speakers favored a number of similar strategies for the realization of offering advice, though there were differences in terms of frequency use of the speech acts of offering advice. Thus, this study showed evidence of pragmatics transfer.
Relationship among Fitness, Morphological Characteristics, Skills and Performance in Men’s Fast-pitch Softball

Men’s fast-pitch softball does not have a specific battery of tests and relies on the tests and norms of baseball. The specific morphological and fitness demands of the sport are, therefore, not fully understood. The purpose of this study was to establish whether morphological and fitness characteristics are related to skill and performance measures in men’s fast-pitch softball players. The sample was purposively selected and consisted of 15 provincial and 15 club male players. Anthropometric, fitness and skills test were conducted. Match statistics were obtained from the provincial softball federation for the provincial players and from the club for its members. Data were analysed and interpreted both collectively as a group and separately as teams for the purpose of comparison. The results identified a number of strong significant relationships between the different variables tested. Stature and percentage body fat were found to interact significantly with the two key performance areas, batting and base running. The findings convincingly suggest that coaches should include fitness, morphological and skills tests in their coaching and fitness programmes, team selection and talent identification processes. Keywords: Fast-pitch Softball, Fitness, Anthropometry, Skills, Performance, Correlations
The Principle of Turbulent Frame Indifference and new closure relations in LES

In this paper the principle of Turbulent Frame Indifference is revised. The present-day LES models and the drawbacks of the dynamic calculation of the closure coefficient for the generalized SGS turbulent stress tensor are analyzed. A new closure relation for the generalized SGS turbulent stress tensor is proposed. The proposed closure relation for the generalized SGS turbulent stress tensor: complies with the principle of turbulent frame indifference; takes into account both the anisotropy of the turbulence velocity scales and turbulence length scales; removes any balance assumption between the production and dissipation of SGS turbulent kinetic energy. In the proposed model the generalized SGS turbulent stress tensor is related exclusively to the generalized SGS turbulent kinetic energy (which is calculated by means of its balance equation) and the modified Leonard tensor; the SGS viscous dissipation e of the generalized SGS turbulent kinetic energy is calculated by solving the e balance equation. The modelled balance equation of e respects the properties of form-invariance and frame-dependence of the exact balance equation.
Joint Mail‐In Rebate Decisions in Supply Chains Under Demand Uncertainty

We study the joint decisions of offering mail‐in rebates (MIRs) in a single‐manufacturer–single‐retailer supply chain using a game theoretic framework. Either party can offer an MIR to the end consumer if it is in his best interest. The consumer demand is stochastic and depends on the product price and the amount of MIRs. When the retail price is exogenous, we show the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium under both additive and multiplicative demand functions and characterize it completely. We show that any of the following four scenarios can be the equilibrium: both parties offer MIR, only one party offers MIR, none offers MIR. When the retail price is a decision variable for the retailer and the rebate redemption rate increases with the amount of MIR, we once again prove the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium where both the retailer and the manufacturer offer MIRs. Using a numerical study, we show that the average post‐purchase price of the product is higher not only than the perceived pre‐purchase price but also than the newsvendor optimal price without an MIR. This implies that an MIR makes a product look cheaper while the consumers actually pay more on average.
Simulation of boundary layer clouds with double-moment microphysics and microphysics-oriented subgrid-scale modeling

Mixing of cloud with dry environmental air changes the cloud droplet spectrum and crucially affects optical properties of clouds. This effect is still poorly understood (e.g., Brenguier and Grabowski 1993, Burnet and Brenguier 2007) and it is a significant source of uncertainty in aerosol indirect effects. As entrainment and mixing leads to the reduction of the liquid water content (LWC), the issue is whether the dilution of a cloud results in the reduction of only the droplet size (as in the homogeneous mixing), only the droplet concentration (as in the extremely inhomogeneous mixing), or both the concentration and the size (as in the inhomogeneous mixing). On the theoretical grounds, homogeneity of mixing depends on the relative magnitude of the time scales for droplet evaporation and turbulent homogenization. In the homogeneous mixing case, turbulent homogenization time scale needs to be much shorter than the droplet evaporation time scale. In the opposite limit, the extremely inhomogeneous mixing is thought to take place. This paper extends an approach for modeling subgrid-scale processes associated with entrainment and mixing proposed in Grabowski (2007; hereinafter G07) and Jarecka et al. (2009; hereinafter JGP09). In G07 and JGP09, the discussion was limited to the bulk representation of cloud microphysics. Here, the approach presented in G07 and JGP09 is extended to the doublemoment bulk microphysics scheme of Morrison and Grabowski (2007; 2008) to locally predict the homogeneity of mixing. The next section summarizes an approach to delay LWC evaporation (until the subgrid-scale homogenization can be assumed) developed in G07 and JGP09. JGP09 referred to this approach as the λ − β sunbrid-scale mixing model. Section 3 outlines the new approach that combines the λ − β model with the double-moment bulk microphysics scheme of Morrison and Grabowski (2008, MG08 hereinafter) to locally predict the homogeneity of mixing. Section 4 presents an example of results from simulations of a field of shallow convective clouds with the new approach.
Forest fragmentation reduces recruitment of large-seeded tree species in a semi-deciduous tropical forest of southern Mexico

Abstract: This study tested whether the reduction in the number of large-bodied seed dispersers is correlated with shifts in the taxonomic and functional (e.g. dispersal mode and seed size) traits of the seeding communities within small fragments of semi-deciduous forest, southern Mexico. In five fragments (2.3–640 ha) and one continuous forest site we sampled tree and seedling species in 40 (20 × 20 m) and 120 (3 × 3 m) plots respectively, and recorded the incidence (presence/absence) of the disperser fauna (three common large-birds and >500-g mammals). Tree and seedling species were categorized according to dispersal mode, seed size and whether they originated from local (i.e. from dropped) or immigrant (i.e. from actively dispersed) seeds. Fragment size negatively correlated with number of species of medium to large vertebrate seed-dispersers and number of seedlings of large-seeded species, but had no influence on functional traits of the adult-tree community. Between 41% and 61% of all seedlings were considered as immigrants and the proportion of immigrant seedlings of large-seeded tree species was negatively correlated with forest size. The results suggest that biased defaunation in small forest fragments may seriously reduce recruitment of large-seeded tree species (>1.4 cm length) dispersed by vertebrates, negatively affecting successional trajectories of small forest fragments.
Diversification Strategy and Performance of Malaysian Firms

Business diversification has drawn the attention of strategic management and finance scholars. This preliminary study examines factors that influence firm performance using multiple measures of performance namely accounting and market measurements. The study used OLS data analysis for a sample of 70 Malaysian firms from various industries during the period 2001 to 2005. The evidence produces some factors that explain performance measurement but results are still ambiguous.
Fibrinogen, platelet and factor XIII supplementation in cardiac surgery: In vitro and in vivo studies

Background: There is a high risk of bleeding complications in cardiac surgery. Fibrinogen and platelet concentrates are often used to treat perioperative bleeding, but there is little information about its efficacy. The overall aim of this thesis project was to study the effects of fibrinogen, platelet and factor XIII concentrates on markers of hemostasis in blood samples from cardiac surgery patients. Methods: Increasing doses of fibrinogen, platelets, and factor XIII were added to blood samples from patients or healthy volunteers (study I, III–V). In study II, blood samples from cardiac surgery patients with ongoing bleeding were analyzed before and after transfusion of fibrinogen and/or platelet concentrates. In all studies, platelet function was assessed with impedance aggregometry, and clot formation with thromboelastometry. Results: Supplementation with fibrinogen improved clot formation while platelets improved both platelet aggregation and clot formation in blood samples form cardiac surgery patients (I). Fibrinogen to patients with ongoing bleeding improved clot formation and platelets improved platelet aggregation (II). Factor XIII supplementation to blood samples from cardiac and scoliosis surgery patients improved clot formation moderately (III). Supplementation with platelets improved platelet aggregation independently of antiplatelet therapy (IV). Time-dependent changes in platelet concentrates were detected with impedance aggregometry in vitro (V). The results predicted with moderate accuracy changes in aggregation after addition of the platelet concentrates to whole blood samples. Conclusions: The results suggest that transfusion with fibrinogen or platelets improve hemostasis, whereas factor XIII should remain a secondary tool in the treatment of perioperative bleeding. Impedance aggregometry may be used to monitor the quality of stored platelet concentrates in vitro.
Development of an Inter-Organisational System for Supply Chain Management Adoption Framework: A Proposed Study of Collaborative Factors from Supplier and Customer Perspectives

This paper has identified a research gap to study how organisations collaborate together to adopt InterOrganisational System (IOS) for Supply Chain Management (SCM). This paper outlines the development of a framework to examine how organisations collaborate together to adopt IOS for SCM from both supplier and customer perspectives. Nine collaborative factors have been identified in the framework. A proposed research approach to examine the adoption framework from both supplier and customer perspectives is also outlined.
Brand Personality in Chile: A Combined Emic-Etic Approach

The purpose of our study is to extend previous work on brand personality (Aaker 1997). While following Aaker’s recommended methodology, we did so in the context of an emerging market economy such as Chile, and using a combined emic-etic research approach. Then, we investigated the cross-cultural applicability of the construct and we also look into the applicability of the measurement instrument developed by Aaker (1997). After several validation studies, six brand personality dimensions were found instead of the original North American based study, with Tradition being the new Chilean dimension. This is consistent with previous work finding nation-specific dimensions in Japan, Spain, and France (i.e. Aaker, Benet-Martinez, Garolera, 2001; Koebel and Landwein, 1999). Insights for the understanding and management of brand images in international contexts, complementing parallel work done in other developed nations are derived.
Projecting the risk of damage to reef-lined coasts due to intensified tropical cyclones and sea level rise in Palau to 2100

Tropical cyclones (TCs), sea level rise (SLR), and storm surges cause major problems including beach erosion, saltwater intrusion into groundwater, and damage to infrastructure in coastal areas. The magnitude and extent of damage is predicted to increase as a consequence of future climate change and local factors. Upward reef growth has attracted attention for its role as a natural breakwater able to reduce the risks of natural disasters to coastal communities. However, projections of change in the risk to coastal reefs under conditions of intensified TCs, SLR, and storm surges are poorly quantified. In this study we assessed the current status of natural breakwaters on Melekeok reef in the Palau Islands. Based on wave simulations we predicted the potential effects on the reef by 2100 of intensified TCs (significant wave height at the outer ocean = 8.7–11.0 m; significant wave period at the outer ocean = 13–15 s), SLR (0.24–0.98 m), and storm surge. The simulation was conducted for two reef condition scenarios: a degraded reef and a healthy reef. Analyses of reef growth based on drillcores enabled an assessment of the coral community and rate of reef production that are necessary to reduce the risk to the coast of TCs, SLR, and storm surges. The reef is currently highly effective in dissipating incoming waves, with the reef crest to the upper reef slope reducing wave height by 75 %, and the entire reef dissipating waves by 88 % of the incident wave height. However, our calculations show that under intensified TCs, SLR, and storm surges, by 2100 significant wave heights at the reef flat will increase from 1.05–1.24 m at present to 2.14 m if reefs are degraded. Similarly, by 2100 the sea level at the shoreline will increase from 0.86–2.10 m at present to 1.19–3.45 m if reefs are degraded. These predicted changes will probably cause beach erosion, saltwater intrusion into groundwater, and damage to infrastructure. However, our simulation indicates that reef growth reduces the wave height by a maximum of 0.44 m at the reef flat by 2100. These findings emphasize the need for future reef formation to reduce the damaging effects of waves on the coastline. Corymbose Acropora corals will be key to reducing such effects, and 2.6–5.8 kg CaCO 3 /m 2 /y will be required to build the reef by 2100. If the RCP 8.5 scenario is realized by 2100, an increase in coral cover of > 8 % will be needed to reduce the impact of waves on the coastline. The use of coral reef growth to reduce disaster risk will be more cost-effective than building artificial barriers. Benefits in addition to reducing disaster risk include the ecological services provided by reefs, and marine products and tourism. Research of the type described here will be required to advise policy development directed at disaster prevention for small island nations, and for developing and developed countries.
Ejection force of tubular injection moldings. Part II A prediction model

The integrated knowledge of the injection molding process and the material changes induced by processing is essential to guarantee the quality of technical parts. In the case of parts with deep cavities, quite often the ejection phase of the molding cycle is critical. Thus, in the mold design stage, the aspects associated with the ejection system will require special consideration. In particular, the prediction of the ejection force will contribute to optimizing the mold design and to guarantee the integrity of the moldings. In this work, a simulation algorithm based on a thermomechanical model is described and their predictions are compared with experimental data obtained from a fully-instrumented mold (pressure, temperature, and force). Three common thermoplastics polymers were used for the tubular moldings: a semicrystalline polypropylene and two amorphous thermoplastics: polystyrene and polycarbonate. The thermomechanical model is based on the assumption of the polymer behavior changing from purely viscous to purely elastic below a transition point. This point corresponds to solidification determined by temperature in the case of amorphous materials and by critical crystallinity for semicrystalline polymers. The model results for the ejection force closely agree with the experimental data for the three materials used. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 45: 325–332, 2005. © 2005 Society of Plastics Engineers