Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Training interventions: fulfilling managerial ends or proliferating invaluable means for employees?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of employee training practices in a sample of Iranian‐based organisations.Design/methodology/approach – The research approach adopted for the study conforms to qualitative research in the form of multiple case study design. Semi‐structured interview is adopted to collect qualitative data. To enhance the validity of the information derived from the interviews, the interview data are supplemented by some observations and examination of the related documents.Findings – Data from managers and employees from different functional areas support a capital approach to employee training. The results further indicate that the current approach to training has an upward impact on employee turnover. Overall, the data suggest that the effect of training on employee motivation and productivity is indirect through management's approach and orientation towards training. This, in turn, causes a gap between employee's expectation and perception toward the eff.
A Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Algorithm for Hotel Recommendation

Recommendation systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized recommendation for information, products or services in the Internet. These works, especially collaborative filtering algorithms acquired relatively satisfactory results. They can millions of users easily search hundreds of millions of items. In tourism industry, potential customers may book hotel just once, which make it very important to recommend them suitable hotel. In this paper, user-based and item-based collaborative filtering methods have been proposed for hotel recommendation. Then we combine them to achieve better effectiveness. Experimental result demonstrates that our hybrid collaborative filtering algorithms outperform existing approaches.
The Profitable Theory of Consumers’ and Producers’ Surplus: Positive Demand, Negative Supply?

This paper proves the existence of consumer’s and producer’s surplus, and their aggregate counterparts, without betting on some favorable price changes. Such surplus is the excess value over opportunity cost. Instead of hoping for favorable price change, a more positive attitude to obtain increased surplus is to work harder to make production more efficient. This paper also illustrates how demand and supply can take some unconventional shape.
A cost-effectiveness analysis of adjuvant trastuzumab regimens in early HER2/neu-positive breast cancer.

PURPOSE One-year adjuvant trastuzumab (AT) therapy, with or without anthracyclines, increases disease-free and overall survival in early-stage HER2/neu-positive breast cancer. We sought to evaluate the cost effectiveness of these regimens, which are expensive and potentially toxic. METHODS We used a Markov health-state transition model to simulate three adjuvant therapy options for a cohort of 49-year-old women with HER2/neu-positive early-stage breast cancer: conventional chemotherapy without trastuzumab; anthracycline-based AT regimens used in the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project B-31 and North Central Cancer Treatment Group N9831 trials; and the nonanthracycline AT regimen used in the Breast Cancer International Research group 006 trial. The base case used treatment efficacy measures reported in the randomized clinical trials of AT. We measured health outcomes in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and costs in 2005 United States dollars (US dollars) and subjected results to probabilistic sensitivity analysis. RESULTS In the base case, the anthracycline-based AT arm has an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of 39,982 dollars/QALY, whereas the nonanthracycline AT arm is more expensive and less effective; this result is insensitive to changes in recurrence rates, but if there is no benefit after 4 years, ICERs exceed 100,000 dollars/QALY for both AT arms. Results are moderately sensitive to variation in breast cancer survival rates and trastuzumab cost, and less sensitive to variations in cardiac toxicity. CONCLUSION AT has an ICER comparable to those for other widely used interventions. Longer clinical follow-up is warranted to evaluate the long-term efficacy and toxicity of different AT regimens.
LDR Image to HDR Image Mapping with Overexposure Preprocessing

Due to the growing popularity of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images and HDR displays, a large amount of existing Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images are required to be converted to HDR format to benefit HDR advantages, which give rise to some LDR to HDR algorithms. Most of these algorithms especially tackle overexposed areas during expanding, which is the potential to make the image quality worse than that before processing and introduces artifacts. To dispel these problems, we . present a new,LDR to HDR approach, unlike the existing techniques, it focuses on avoiding sophisticated treatment to overexposed areas in dynamic range expansion step. Based on a separating principle, firstly, according to the familiar types of overexposure, the overexposed areas are classified into two categories which are removed and corrected respectively by two kinds of techniques. Secondly, for maintaining color consistency, color recovery is carried out to the preprocessed images. Finally, the LDR image is expanded to HDR. Experiments show that the proposed approach performs well and produced images become more favorable and suitable for applications. The image quality metric also illustrates that we can reveal more details without causing artifacts introduced by other algorithms.
Social Security and Retirement in Uruguay

Abstract We estimate a structural life-cycle model for retirement behaviour using work history records of the main Uruguayan pension programme. The estimated coefficient of relative risk aversion is around 1.5 and the estimated discount rate is about 1.8 per cent per annum. The marginal disutility of work increases with age and is larger for women than men, and for private than public employees. Simulations show a very low impact of the 1995 pension reform on retirement ages. Many individuals in this population respond little to economic incentives and some individuals would advance rather than postpone retirement after the reform.
Exploring the challenges in obtaining physical activity data from women using hip-worn accelerometers

Abstract Quality objective physical activity data are required to inform physical activity-based health improvement initiatives, however, various challenges undermine acquisition of such data. We examined the efficacy and challenges of a hip-worn accelerometry protocol in women. Specific objectives included determining accelerometer-wear-compliance rates and understanding the barriers and acceptability of wearing accelerometers. Healthy New Zealand women (n = 406) of three ethnicities (Māori (indigenous New Zealander), Pacific, European) aged 16–45 years (30.9 ± 8.7 y) wore hip-mounted Actigraph wGT3X+ accelerometers for 7 consecutive days under a 24-h wear protocol. Post hoc, a sub-sample (n = 45; age: 29.4 ± 9.0 y) was interviewed to investigate comfort/convenience and burdens of accelerometer-wear. Wear-compliance (≥10 h/day, ≥4 day) was 86%. European women returned more valid data (92.7%, p < .04) than Pacific (73.0%) or Māori women (82.1%). Twenty-two participants (5.4%) had completely missing data; 13 due to lost accelerometers. Burden of accelerometer-wear was greatest during sleeping (66.7%) due to discomfort. Embarrassment of accelerometer visibility through clothing and consequent restricted clothing choices caused high burden in social settings (45.2%). Discomfort during sleeping, embarrassment due to perceived appearance in social settings and ethnicity are key factors affecting the efficacy of collecting physical activity data from women using hip-worn accelerometers. Refining accelerometer design to reduce size and subsequently participant burden should improve acceptability and wear-compliance. Increasing overall participant compliance by reducing burden and ensuring appropriate understanding of study aims and relevance should reduce attrition and improve wear-compliance and data quality when collecting accelerometry data from women of different ethnicities.
Chlamydia pneumoniae antibodies in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

BACKGROUND The significance of persistent or recurrent respiratory infections in adult life for the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is still to a large extent unknown. A few clinical and experimental animal studies suggest that peripheral airways diseases may be due to the cumulative effects of recurrent respiratory infections over an extended period. METHODS C. pneumoniae-specific IgG and IgA antibody levels were determined in two elderly groups of male patients with COPD and in control subjects without the disease. The first group (N = 36) consisted of patients who were hospitalized due to an acute exacerbation of COPD. The second group of patients (N = 54) and the controls (N = 321) were participants in a community survey on respiratory diseases in the elderly. The criteria for seropositivity were defined as an IgG titre of >=16. RESULTS 89% of the hospitalized patients (group I) and 66% of the non-hospitalized patients (Group II) were IgA seropositive as compared to 55% of the controls. Derived from the logistic regression analysis, the odds ratio (OR) WAS 7.4 (95% CI : 2.1-25.7) between group I and the controls and 1.5 (0.7-2.9) between group II and controls. Furthermore, the difference in the age-adjusted geometric mean titres (GMT) of lgA antibodies between the group I and the controls was significant (53.0 for the patients versus 19.1 for the controls). On the contrary, no significant differences between the patients and the controls were found either in the proportion of IgG-seropositive or in the GMT of IgG antibodies. Two of the 29 patients with an exacerbation of COPD, for whom paired sera were available, showed an antibody response suggesting a current acute or reactivated chlamydial infection. CONCLUSIONS The results showed that C. pneumoniae lgA antibodies are found more frequently and in higher concentrations in COPD patients than in disease-free controls. The finding may indicate a chronic C. pneumoniae infection in these patients. The association persisted after controlling for the potential confounding effect of smoking.
Respiratory diseases of mothers and children and environmental factors among households in Jakarta

Respiratory diseases of mothers and children and environmental factors among households in Jakarta examines the links between the indoor environment and respiratory diseases in mothers and children. The author highlights the frequency with which mothers and children suffer from such diseases and how their occurrence is associated with certain environmental characteristics-for instance, for children with damp housing and inadequate provision for the collection of garbage and for mothers with the absence of ventilation in the kitchen.
Empirical validation of cost-function based analysis for networked control systems

In this paper, a networked control system (NCS) over communication links with several communication effects such as packet losses, delays and sampling jitter is considered. Based on an appropriate modeling of the NCS and its links, a quadratic cost function is computed for evaluating and predicting the NCS performance for an arbitrary controller at given communication conditions. To validate the analysis, an NCS is implemented in which the motion of two mobile robots is controlled. The obtained empirical results validate the proposed NCS modeling and cost-based performance analysis.
Expanding Opportunities: Cluster Strategies That Reach More People and More Places 1

This article addresses the impacts of cluster-based economic development strategies on (a) low- and middle-income people, (b) economically distressed urban and rural places, and (c) small enterprises. It draws on the collective experiences and ideas of a small group of experts and practitioners from various parts of the US and Europe to pinpoint some of the reasons why certain people, places, and firms are left out or fall behind in regional efforts to develop economies based on clusters, identify the barriers to more widely dispersed benefits, and suggest some opportunities for surmounting those barriers. It goes on to recommend new approaches and initiatives that extend opportunities to marginalized populations, less favoured regions, and very small firms and thereby produce more just clusters.
THE ECONOMICS OF ABSENCE: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Worker absenteeism constitutes a significant loss of work time and therefore has important implications for both household income and firm productivity. Despite this, the economics profession has been somewhat laggard relative to other disciplines in addressing the phenomenon. The situation is, however, changing, with recent years witnessing a mild flurry of activity. The aim of this paper is to maintain, and if possible, enhance this momentum. We do this firstly by developing some basic theoretical ideas which we consider to be central to an economic analysis of absence. In particular, we address the often cited claim that observed absence is unequivocally inefficient. Second, by reviewing some of the key contributions, we attempt to assess where the literature on the economics of absence stands at present, as well as suggesting some potentially fruitful lines of future enquiry. Copyright 1996 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd
Procalcitonin, MR-Proadrenomedullin, and Cytokines Measurement in Sepsis Diagnosis: Advantages from Test Combination

Background. Elevated cytokines levels correlate with sepsis severity and mortality but their role in the diagnosis is controversial, whereas Procalcitonin (PCT) has been largely used. Recently, the mid-regional proadrenomedullin (MR-proADM) has been combined with PCT for diagnosis optimization. In this study the combined measurement of PCT, MR-proADM, and cytokines in patients with sepsis was evaluated. Methods. One hundred and four septic patients and 101 controls were enrolled. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and multiple logistic regression were used to evaluate applicant markers for sepsis diagnosis. Markers with best Odds Ratio (OR) were combined, and the posttest probability and a composite score were computed. Results. Based upon ROC curves analysis, PCT, MR-proADM, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α, and MCP-1 were considered applicant for sepsis diagnosis. Among these PCT, MR-proADM , IL-6, and TNF-α showed the best OR. A better posttest probability was found with the combination of PCT with MR-proADM and PCT with IL-6 or TNF-α compared to the single marker. A composite score of PCT, MR-proADM, and TNF-α showed the best ROC curve in the early diagnosis of sepsis. Conclusion. The combination of PCT with other markers should expedite diagnosis and treatment of sepsis optimizing clinical management.
L’autofinancement des coopératives de travailleurs et la théorie économique

On constate depuis quelques annees un net regain d'interet pour la cooperation, en particulier pour les cooperatives de travailleurs. En France, plus de 700 societes cooperatives ouvneres de production (SCOP) ont vu le jour au cours des trois demieres annees (1979-1982), ce qui a multiplie par 2,5 leur nombre dans ce pays. L'experience italienne est encore plus etonnante : depuis 1977, chaque annee a vu se creer quatre a cinq cents cooperatives de production pour I'ensemble des trois grandes federations nationales. Elles ont engendre annuellement entre 1.500 et 1.700 emplois. Au RoyaumeUni, pays de vieille tradition cooperative, la Cooperative Production Federation, qui comptait plus de cent societes en 1900, les a vues disparaitre les unes apres tes autres au point qu'elles sont moins d'une vingtaine aujourd'hui. Mais, parallelement, d'autres mouvements sont nes au cours de la demiere decennie, notamment rindustrial Common Ownership Movement, si bien que depuis 1976 pres de 500 cooperatives de travailleurs ont ete mises sur pied. Fnfin, aux Pays-Bas, on compte a present plus de 400 cooperatives de travailleurs alors qu'elles n'etaient que 80 il y a cinq ans.
A Study on quadratic stability of optimal regulators under gain adjustment

The objective of this paper is to show an online adjustment method of the state feedback gains for multiinput multi-output optimal regulators via the quadratic stability arguments. We first give a region of state feedback gains containing the nominal optimal gain such that quadratic stability is ensured for all time-invariant state feedback gains in the region. We then show that under some mild conditions, quadratic stability is retained for arbitrary time-varying adjustment of the state feedback gain within this region via the concept of strong uniform complete observability.
Intellectual capital and the capital market - organisation and competence

This paper explores the organisation of the information market and its ability to process intellectual capital information for capital markets. Discusses also incentives for market participants to create and use information on the role of intellectual capital (IC) in corporate value creation, and the capability of the market for information to process and use such information in the stock market valuation of companies. Particular attention is paid to corporate disclosure of, and fund manager use of, such information. The analysis also extends the idea of a knowledge‐intensive value creation process to fund managers and analysts. Problems within corporate, fund manager, and analysts knowledge‐intensive value creation chains are considered to be a source of barriers to the creation and use of corporate IC information in markets. Further research on these chains and barriers is required to improve the flow of IC information into stock prices.
Impacts of interval measurement on studies of economic variability: Evidence from stock market variability forecasting

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of interval measured data, rather than traditional point data, on economic variability studies. Design/methodology/approach - The study uses interval measured data to forecast the variability of future stock market changes. The variability (interval) forecasts are then compared with point data-based confidence interval forecasts. Findings - Using interval measured data in stock market variability forecasting can significantly increase forecasting accuracy, compared with using traditional point data. Originality/value - An interval forecast for stock prices essentially consists of predicted levels and a predicted variability which can reduce perceived uncertainty or risk embedded in future investments, and therefore, may influence required returns and capital asset prices.
Speeding up the transition to collective awareness

This positional paper gives an overview of some critical issues concerning collective awareness platforms. It shows how collective awareness could reconcile asymmetric and conflicting relationships to pursue the improvement of structures within society. It also shows the opportunity for public administrations and policy makers to create conditions for collective participation. Collective intelligence can be used as process to pursue the improvement of society based on the collective efforts of individuals. This could be assimilated to a process of social eudamonia, an improvement of the self and of society through awareness and understanding. However, things are not so simple and internal tensions could lead to divergent outcomes. While society is increasingly fragmented and polarised, the power over information seems to concentrate in the hands of few service providers, fiercely competing for market shares and user-generated data, thanks to laws and structures built for a competition driven society. By contrast, there is a growing demand for sharing data, access to information and for the empowerment of individuals and communities. Prosperity, sustainability, equality and collaboration are acquiring new meaning. In response to this demand, many Internet based platforms have been created, governments in Europe have started pursuing open access policies and companies are adopting mixed business models in order to acquire a larger share of data and users. Individuals, companies, governments pursue different objectives using a mix of communication and collaborative tools allowing users to play a pivotal role in the production and management of information, creating the foundation for new horizontal modes of communication and decision making. In order to exemplify pathways to collective awareness to build a society that fosters eudemonia, the paper proposes two examples: 1) social media learning and 2) the governance of health delivery services through social media. The paper concludes identifying five major challenges to help speeding the transition towards Collective Awareness.
Wholegrain cereals for coronary heart disease.

BACKGROUND There is increasing evidence from observational studies that wholegrains can have a beneficial effect on risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD). OBJECTIVES The primary objective is to review the current evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that assess the relationship between the consumption of wholegrain foods and the effects on CHD mortality, morbidity and on risk factors for CHD, in participants previously diagnosed with CHD or with existing risk factors for CHD. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched CENTRAL (Issue 4, 2005), MEDLINE (1966 to 2005), EMBASE (1980 to 2005), CINAHL (1982 to 2005), ProQuest Digital Dissertations (2004 to 2005). No language restrictions were applied. SELECTION CRITERIA We selected randomised controlled trials that assessed the effects of wholegrain foods or diets containing wholegrains, over a minimum of 4 weeks, on CHD and risk factors. Participants included were adults with existing CHD or who had at least one risk factor for CHD, such as abnormal lipids, raised blood pressure or being overweight. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two of our research team independently assessed trial quality and extracted data. Authors of the included studies were contacted for additional information where this was appropriate. MAIN RESULTS Ten trials met the inclusion criteria. None of the studies found reported the effect of wholegrain diets on CHD mortality or CHD events or morbidity. All 10 included studies reported the effect of wholegrain foods or diets on risk factors for CHD. Studies ranged in duration from 4 to 8 weeks. In eight of the included studies, the wholegrain component was oats. Seven of the eight studies reported lower total and low density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol with oatmeal foods than control foods. When the studies were combined in a meta-analysis lower total cholesterol (-0.20 mmol/L, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.31 to -0.10, P = 0.0001 ) and LDL cholesterol (0.18 mmol/L, 95% CI -0.28 to -0.09, P < 0.0001) were found with oatmeal foods. However, there is a lack of studies on other wholegrains or wholegrain diets. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Despite the consistency of effects seen in trials of wholegrain oats, the positive findings should be interpreted cautiously. Many of the trials identified were short term, of poor quality and had insufficient power. Most of the trials were funded by companies with commercial interests in wholegrains. There is a need for well-designed, adequately powered, longer term randomised controlled studies in this area. In particular there is a need for randomised controlled trials on wholegrain foods and diets other than oats.