Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
India's outward foreign direct investments in steel industry in a Chinese comparative perspective

Indian and Chinese enterprises have emerged as important outward investors in recent times with their involvement in a number of prominent Greenfield investments and acquisitions. The theory of international business posits that the ownership of some unique advantages having a revenue generating potential abroad combined with the presence of internalization and locational advantages leads to outward FDI. Conventional MNEs based in the industrialized countries have grown on the strength of ownership advantages derived from innovatory activity that is largely concentrated in these countries. It examines the case of steel industry that has become an important sector of overseas activity for Chinese and Indian companies with a string of major acquisitions of foreign MNEs for acquiring footprints and natural resources in order to identify the sources of ownership advantages and strategies of outward investments from emerging countries.
Toxicity and tolerability of recombinant human ciliary neurotrophic factor in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

We examined the toxicity of both single and multiple subcutaneous injections of recombinant human ciliary neurotrophic factor (rhCNTF) in 72 patients with ALS, in doses ranging from 2 to 100 micro gram/kg.Adverse events were generally dose related and ranged from mild to severe. The tolerability of daily subcutaneous rhCNTF was equivalent to placebo at doses <or=to 5 micro gram/kg/day. At higher doses, anorexia, weight loss, reactivation of herpes simplex virus (HSV1) labialis/stomatitis, cough, and increased oral secretions occurred. NEUROLOGY 1996;47: 1329-1331
Self-Consistent Learning of the Environment

We study the Bayesian process to estimate the features of the environment. We focus on two aspects of the Bayesian process: how estimation error depends on the prior distribution of features and how the prior distribution can be learned from experience. The accuracy of the perception is underestimated when each feature of the environment is considered independently because many different features of the environment are usually highly correlated and the estimation error greatly depends on the correlations. The self-consistent learning process renews the prior distribution of correlated features jointly with the estimation of the environment. Here, maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation decreases the effective dimensions of the feature vector. There are critical noise levels in self-consistent learning with MAP estimation, that cause hysteresis behaviors in learning. The self-consistent learning process with stochastic Bayesian estimation (SBE) makes the presumed distribution of environmental features converge to the true distribution for any level of channel noise. However, SBE is less accurate than MAP estimation. We also discuss another stochastic method of estimation, SBE2, which has a smaller estimation error than SBE without hysteresis.
Individual Risk Factors Associated With Nasopharyngeal Colonization With Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae: A Japanese Birth Cohort Study

Background: The first step in a bacterial disease is the establishment of nasopharyngeal carriage. Methods: We conducted a birth cohort study to identify factors associated with colonization in healthy children and evaluate the serotype distributions and resistances of Streptococcus pneumoniae/Haemophilus influenzae. Nasopharyngeal cultures were obtained from 349 subjects at 5 time points coinciding with health checkups (4, 7, 10, 18 and 36 months). Results: A total of 551 S. pneumoniae (penicillin resistance rate: 46.3%) and 301 H. influenzae (ampicillin resistance rate: 44.5%) isolates were obtained from 1654 samples. In this study, 47.5% and 60.9% of S. pneumoniae isolates were included in the serotypes of 7- and 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccines, respectively. Analyzing by Cox proportional hazards models, cohabiting older sibling(s) attending day-care (hazard ratios: 2.064–3.518, P < 0.001) and an early start of day-care attendance by the subjects themselves (2.259–2.439, P < 0.001) were associated with a higher risk of early colonization regardless of their susceptibility. Recent exposure to antimicrobials was also significantly associated with increased risk of colonization (odds ratios: 2.032–2.999, P < 0.001) but not with resistance rates. This data indicated that introduction of appropriate antimicrobial usage in areas of overuse of antimicrobials could contribute to lower colonization of S. pneumoniae/H. influenzae, resulting in a decrease in the absolute number of resistant isolates. Conclusions: Strategies to control transmission at day-care centers or from older sibling(s) as well as appropriate use of antimicrobials are essential for reducing colonization and the absolute number of resistant isolates.
Implementing total quality management for long- and short-term bottom-line results

In recent years, total quality management (TQM) has been much maligned and even abandoned in some companies because of its apparent inability to contribute to the real bottom-line objectives of the organization. And yet, we know by studying many Japanese and American companies that TQM can lead to a huge competitive advantage. So, what is the problem? The problem actually lies in the TQM implementation strategy or approach used. The results-oriented approach instead of the activity-based approach to implementing TQM is the answer to this dilemma.
Boosting the phishing detection performance by semantic analysis

Phishing is increasingly severe in recent years, which seriously threatens the privacy and property security of netizens. Phishing is essentially a counterfeiting of brands. In order to effectively cheat the victim, phishing sites are visually and semantically highly similar to real sites. In recent years, anti-phishing methods based on machine learning are mainstream anti-phishing methods. The effectiveness of the machine learning models hinges on the extracted statistical features. However, the extracted statistical features mainly focus on visual similarity, stealing information and third-party services, which ignore the semantic information of web pages. Therefore, we extract a series of semantic features through word2vec to better describe the features of phishing sites, and further fuse them with other multi-scale statistical features to construct a more robust phishing detection model. The experimental results on the actual data sets show that the majority of phishing websites are effectively identified by only mining the semantic features of word embeddings. The phishing detection models based on fusion features obtained the best detection results, which shows that semantic features and other statistical features have good complementarity. The proposed method provides a promising way for phishing detection in actual Internet environment, which boosts the phishing detection performance effectively.
Staybythyneighbor?Structureformation,coordinationandcostsin tradablepermitmarketswithspatialtradingrules

Market-based instruments have been proposed as a means of implementing cost-eective and adaptive policies for biodiversity conservation. Their very foundation is a well-defined measure of ecological value; only the latter makes conservation services comparable and translates them into a commodity which can be traded among market participants. But what is the right value when local conservation decisions aect ecological functions on a larger scale and thus create spatial externalities (site synergies) on neighboring sites? By means of an agent-based model, we analyze dierent spatial trading rules and their implications on land use decisions in a dynamic cost environment. The model contains a number of alternative submodels which dier in the individual assignment of market values and in the social organization of agents, the latter including cheap talk coordination and cooperation. We show that spatially explicit trading rules can eectively adapt land use towards species requirements and individual costs. For a certain class of submodels (local decisions), we find thresholds for the eectiveness of spatial incentives along a curve of critical parameter values. The progression of this curve is derived analytically and shown to agree with the simulation results. Further, we show that cases of low social organization (e.g. no communication) are particularly prone to suboptimal land allocations due to misinformation and coordination failure.
Generation of Monocyte-Derived Dendritic Cells From Patients With Renal Cell Cancer: Modulation of Their Functional Properties After Therapy With Biological Response Modifiers (IFN-&agr; plus IL-2 and IL-12)

The combination of interferon-&agr; (IFN-&agr;) plus interleukin (IL-2) has been accepted in the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (MRCC), whereas vaccines based on IL-12 or dendritic cells (DCs) are still being investigated. Here the authors analyzed 1) the feasibility to generate functional monocyte-derived DCs (MDDCs) from patients treated with biological response modifiers (BRMs) who have MRCC, 2) the phenotypic modulations of these MDDCs during BRM treatment. Eight and 13 MRCC patients received IL-2 plus IFN-&agr; or IL-12 immunotherapy, respectively. The adherent fraction of mononuclear cells from patients' blood drawn before, during, and after immunotherapy was incubated in clinically approved culture medium supplemented with 5% autologous serum, rhu granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor, and rhuIL-4 for a week. At day 7 or 8 of culture, floating cells were examined in flow cytometric and functional assays (alloreactivity, proliferation assays in the presence of tetanus toxoid or tumor peptides, IL-12 secretion). In all patients except two, MDDCs could be generated but at a lower rate compared with healthy volunteers. Morphologic and phenotypical analyses revealed immature DCs with low levels of CD1a or CD83 expression throughout therapy with BRMs. Capacities in mixed leukocyte reactions were similar to those of healthy volunteers and stable during immunotherapy, whereas presentation of major histocompatibility complex class II tetanus toxoid peptide complexes was slightly enhanced during and after IL-12 therapy. IL-12 expression levels under IFN-&ggr; and CD40L stimulation were significantly lower in MDDC cultures from patients with MRCC compared with healthy volunteers. Overall, peripheral blood mononuclear cells from a cohort of 21 patients with metastatic disease who were treated with BRMs maintained their ability to differentiate into functional MDDCs with no selective quantitative or qualitative advantage.
An Effective Method Based on ACF for Aircraft Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Detecting artificial targets, such as aircraft, in satellite images is significant in military and civil applications. Although the performance has improved with the use of more complicated features and better learning methods, effectively handling aircraft with variations of type, pose, and size is still very challenging. To solve this problem, we propose a multiscale sliding-window framework based on aggregate channel features, well-designed features that contain rich information. We also employ a fast feature pyramids algorithm to accelerate multiscale aircraft detection. In this framework, features are trained by Cascade AdaBoost including multiple rounds of bootstrapping that leads to improved overall accuracy. A two-step nonmaximum suppression algorithm is carefully designed based on a given set of detections. Our method shows a competitive performance on the QuickBird images of 0.6 m resolution.
Valuing marine parks in a developing country: a case study of the Seychelles

A strategic issue facing many developing economies is the maintenance of natural resources, which are important in ecological terms as well as for providing income from tourism. This paper presents an analysis of the economic value of marine protected areas in the Seychelles. The contingent valuation method (CVM) is used to determine tourists willingness to pay (WTP) for visits to Seychelles' marine national parks. In addition, attitudinal and motivational data are related to respondents' stated economic preferences. Three hundred interviews were conducted in the Seychelles during June 1998 and both tourists having visited a park and a more general population of tourists were surveyed. The results demonstrate that different economic values are predicted for respondents from different countries who display a range of both consumer and citizen behaviour in constructing their preferences. In addition, significantly different WTP amounts are predicted depending on which particular marine parks are visited, and the expectations of visitors to Seychelles. The discussion focuses on exploring how this information may be of use to policy makers in setting a realistic pricing policy for visitors to Marine National Parks in the Seychelles.
Self-enforcing international environmental agreements

Effective management of international environmental resources requires cooperation, and in practice cooperation is usually codified in international environmental agreements (IEAs). The essential feature of IEAs is that they cannot be enforced by a third party. This paper explores the properties of self-enforcing IEAs using two models. In one, the number of signatories, the terms of the agreement, and the actions of nonsignatories are determined jointly. In the other, the IEA is modeled as an infinitely repeated game, but one which is renegotiation-proof. Both models indicate that IEAs can do little to improve on the noncooperative outcome when the number of countries that share the resource is large. Copyright 1994 by Royal Economic Society.
Woven Thin-Film Metal Interconnects

The next step in the evolution of electronic textiles (e-textiles) involves the integration of electronics at the yarn level. We aim to integrate "electronic yarns" into textiles by fabricating thin-film devices and interconnects on plastic strips and weaving them into a fabric using a commercial weaving machine. Since interconnect lines are exposed to very small applied bending radii during weaving, we studied changes in interconnect resistance for applied bending radii ranging from 5 mm to 100 μm. We then wove textiles using different weaving patterns and measured the strip bending radius in the textile. Interconnect lines ruptured at bending radii of 120 μm, corresponding to a tensile bending strain of 16.73 %. The smallest bending radius within the textiles was ~165 μm, making all weaving patterns suitable for e-textile fabrication. Finally, we wove strips with interconnect lines and light-emitting diodes using a commercial weaving machine.
Pricing Patterns as Outcomes of Product Positions

Prior empirical work shows that different markets are characterized by different pricing patterns, such as Bertrand-Nash pricing or Stackelberg leader-follower pricing. The author considers a duopolistic market where ex ante identical firms sequentially position their products prior to competing on prices (in a single- or multiperiod setting) and show that the unique equilibrium outcome involves (1) firms choosing Stackelberg pricing over Bertrand-Nash pricing; and (2) the positioning first mover acting as the price leader. An attractive property of this model is that the ex post larger firm acts as the price leader, which is consistent with prior empirical evidence. Copyright 1999 by University of Chicago Press.
The Relationship between Residents’ Attitudes toward Tourism and Tourism Development Options

Many rural communities view tourism as an economic development strategy. This study explores the relationship between resident attitudes toward tourism and support for specific tourism development options. In addition, attitudes and support for development in seven diverse communities are compared. Results indicate that communities differ with respect to residents’ support for specific tourism development options and attitudes toward tourism. In general, residents perceive tourism positively and support most specific types of development. There is a relationship between attitudes and support for development, although the nature of the relationship is different for each community.
The epigenetic footprint of poleward range‐expanding plants in apomictic dandelions

Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation variation, can generate heritable phenotypic variation independent of the underlying genetic code. However, epigenetic variation in natural plant populations is poorly documented and little understood. Here, we test whether northward range expansion of obligate apomicts of the common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) is associated with DNA methylation variation. We characterized and compared patterns of genetic and DNA methylation variation in greenhouse‐reared offspring of T. officinale that were collected along a latitudinal transect of northward range expansion in Europe. Genetic AFLP and epigenetic MS‐AFLP markers revealed high levels of local diversity and modest but significant heritable differentiation between sampling locations and between the southern, central and northern regions of the transect. Patterns of genetic and epigenetic variation were significantly correlated, reflecting the genetic control over epigenetic variation and/or the accumulation of lineage‐specific spontaneous epimutations, which may be selectively neutral. In addition, we identified a small component of DNA methylation differentiation along the transect that is independent of genetic variation. This epigenetic differentiation might reflect environment‐specific induction or, in case the DNA methylation variation affects relevant traits and fitness, selection of heritable DNA methylation variants. Such generated epigenetic variants might contribute to the adaptive capacity of individual asexual lineages under changing environments. Our results highlight the potential of heritable DNA methylation variation to contribute to population differentiation along ecological gradients. Further studies are needed using higher resolution methods to understand the functional significance of such natural occurring epigenetic differentiation.
Visualizing Morphometric Data of Vasculatures

Volume visualization is a common, very well-established visualization technique for volumetric data sets. Numerous advancements have been proposed and sophisticated improvements have been implemented to produce elaborated renderings that are capable of enhancing details within the volume. However, volume visualization alone is often not sufficient for the application domain. Often times, researchers are interested in accurate measurements extracted from volumetric data to gain further insight of the specimen. These extracted measurements can then be used to generate and visualize a geometric reconstruction of the specimen. The visualization can incorporate additional tools that allow researchers to determine additional measurements of the specimen to help in the analysis. This paper describes such a software system which is capable of accurately extracting measurements from volumetric data, reconstructing the geometric properties of the specimen, and interactively visualizing the results, thereby allowing researcher to further investigate the geometric configuration of the specimen.
An open framework for automated chemical hazard assessment based on GreenScreen for Safer Chemicals: A proof of concept

GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals is a framework for comparative chemical hazard assessment. It is the first transparent, open and publicly accessible framework of its kind, allowing manufacturers and governmental agencies to make informed decisions about the chemicals and substances used in consumer products and buildings. In the GreenScreen® benchmarking process, chemical hazards are assessed and classified based on 18 hazard endpoints from up to 30 different sources. The result is a simple numerical benchmark score and accompanying assessment report that allows users to flag chemicals of concern and identify safer alternatives. Although the screening process is straightforward, aggregating and sorting hazard data is tedious, time‐consuming, and prone to human error. In light of these challenges, the present work demonstrates the usage of automation to cull chemical hazard data from publicly available internet resources, assign metadata, and perform a GreenScreen® hazard assessment using the GreenScreen® “List Translator. ” The automated technique, written as a module in the Python programming language, generates GreenScreen® List Translation data for over 3000 chemicals in approximately 30 s. Discussion of the potential benefits and limitations of automated techniques is provided. By embedding the library into a web‐based graphical user interface, the extensibility of the library is demonstrated. The accompanying source code is made available to the hazard assessment community. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2017;13:167–176. © 2016 SETAC
The Relevance of the Concepts of Formality and Informality: A Theoretical Appraisal

Since its first appearance in the 1970s, the concept of informality has referred to highly heterogeneous phenomena and measurement methods, and has been explored by development microeconomics and institutional economics via the notions of formal and informal institutions and contracts (Hart 1973). This plurality of meanings and instruments calls into question the concept’s validity. The paper synthesizes the critical issues within both a development economics and an institutional economics perspective. It highlights the continuity of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ phenomena as well as the weaknesses of most criteria that discriminate between the two categories. It proposes a theoretical approach toward institutions according to which all institutions, be they formal or informal, include forms and contents. The latter’s dynamics are explained in terms of core attributes of institutions and rules: relevance, credibility and
Nutritional Status and Nutritional Treatment Are Related to Outcomes and Mortality in Older Adults with Hip Fracture

Malnutrition is very prevalent in geriatric patients with hip fracture. Nevertheless, its importance is not fully recognized. The objective of this paper is to review the impact of malnutrition and of nutritional treatment upon outcomes and mortality in older people with hip fracture. We searched the PubMed database for studies evaluating nutritional aspects in people aged 70 years and over with hip fracture. The total number of studies included in the review was 44, which analyzed 26,281 subjects (73.5% women, 83.6 ± 7.2 years old). Older people with hip fracture presented an inadequate nutrient intake for their requirements, which caused deterioration in their already compromised nutritional status. The prevalence of malnutrition was approximately 18.7% using the Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA) (large or short form) as a diagnostic tool, but the prevalence was greater (45.7%) if different criteria were used (such as Body Mass Index (BMI), weight loss, or albumin concentration). Low scores in anthropometric indices were associated with a higher prevalence of complications during hospitalization and with a worse functional recovery. Despite improvements in the treatment of geriatric patients with hip fracture, mortality was still unacceptably high (30% within 1 year and up to 40% within 3 years). Malnutrition was associated with an increase in mortality. Nutritional intervention was cost effective and was associated with an improvement in nutritional status and a greater functional recovery. To conclude, in older people, the prevention of malnutrition and an early nutritional intervention can improve recovery following a hip fracture.