Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
csr, Tax and Development

Abstract This article explores and critically examines the connections between tax and development on the one hand and tax and corporate social responsibility (csr) on the other. It does so because, while there is increasing recognition of the importance of taxation to efforts to resource the state and to finance ways of tackling poverty, there is a surprising lack of attention to tax avoidance and evasion as a csr issue for transnational corporations operating in the South, even among those companies that pride themselves on being csr leaders. We review evidence of these trends, provide an empirical analysis of how leading firms deal with tax in their corporate reporting and make the case for including taxation as a new frontier in progressive csr.
Alignment between business environment characteristics, competitive priorities, supply chain structures, and firm business performance

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze the relationships between four constructs – business environment characteristics, competitive priorities, supply chain structures, and firm business performance.Design/methodology/approach – By establishing a conceptual model and conducting structural equation modeling analysis using collected industrial survey data, the study provides a systemic understanding of the relationships between the individual business environment characteristics, the individual competitive priorities and supply chain structures, and the impact of alignment between these elements on firm business performance.Findings – Results of the study reveal that the differences in both strategic and supply chain responses to business environment between high‐ and low‐performing firms in the US textile manufacturing industry are striking. The findings provide evidence to corroborate the impact of the alignment between business environment characteristics, competitive priorities, and supply chain structur.
Crowdsourcing the discovery of software repositories in an educational environment

In software repository mining, it’s important to have a broad representation of projects. In particular, it may be of interest to know what proportion of projects are public. Discovering public projects can be easily parallelized but not so easy to automate due to a variety of data sources. We evaluate the research and educational potential of crowdsourcing such research activity in an educational setting. Students were instructed on three ways of discovering the projects and assigned a task to discover the list of public projects from top 45 forges with each student assigned to one forge. Students had to discover as many of the projects as they could using the method of their choice and provide a market-research report for a ctional customer based on the attribute they selected. A subset of the results was sampled and veried for accuracy. We found that many of the public forges do not host public projects, that a substantial fraction of forges do not provide APIs and the APIs vary dramatically among the remaining forges. Some forges have been discontinued and others renamed, making the discovery task into an archaeological exercise. The students’ ndings raise a number of new research questions and demonstrate the teaching potential of the approach. The accuracy of the results obtained, however, was low, suggesting that crowdsourcing would require at least two or more likely a larger number of investigators per forge or a better way to gauge investigator skill. We expect that these lessons will be helpful in creating education-sourcing eorts in software data discovery.
Fatty liver hepatitis (steatohepatitis) and obesity: An autopsy study with analysis of risk factors

Steatohepatitis (fatty liver hepatitis), histologically identical to alcoholic disease, occurs in some obese patients after jejunoileal bypass. A similar lesion occurs rarely in obese patients without bypass surgery, but the risk factors are poorly understood. Hepatic steatosis, steatohepatitis and fibrosis were sought in 351 apparently nonalcoholic patients at autopsy and various risk factors were evaluated. Incidence of steatosis and steatohepatitis correlated with the degree of obesity. Steatohepatitis was found in 18.5% of markedly obese patients and 2.7% of lean patients. Additional risk factors for steatohepatitis were type II diabetes, weight loss in the preterminal period shortly before death and intravenous glucose therapy in the last week of life. Severe fibrosis was found in 13.8% of markedly obese patients and in 6.6% of lean patients; this difference was largely explained by the higher prevalence of diabetes in obese groups.
Allocation Methods for Alternative Risk Premia Strategies

We use regime switching and regression tree methods to evaluate performance in the risk premia strategies provided by Deutsche Bank and constructed from U.S. research data from the Fama French library. The regime switching method uses the Baum-Welch algorithm at its core and splits return data into a normal and a turbulent regime. Each regime is independently evaluated for risk and the estimates are then weighted together according to the expected value of the proceeding regime. The regression tree methods identify macro-economic states in which the risk premia perform well or poorly and use these results to allocate between risk premia strategies. The regime switching method proves to be mostly unimpressive but has its results boosted by investing less into risky assets as the probability of an upcoming turbulent regime becomes larger. This proves to be highly effective for all time periods and for both data sources. The regression tree method proves the most effective when making the assumption that we know all macro-economic data the same month as it is valid for. Since this is an unrealistic assumption the best method seems to be to evaluate the performance of the risk premia strategy using macro-economic data from the previous quarter.
Studies on drug metabolism by fungi colonizing decomposing human cadavers. Part II: biotransformation of five model drugs by fungi isolated from post-mortem material.

The present study investigated the in vitro metabolic capacity of 28 fungal strains isolated from post-mortem material towards five model drugs: amitriptyline, metoprolol, mirtazapine, promethazine, and zolpidem. Each fungal strain was incubated at 25 °C for up to 120 h with each of the five models drugs. Cunninghamella elegans was used as positive control. Aliquots of the incubation mixture were centrifuged and 50 μL of the supernatants were diluted and directly analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with product ion scanning. The remaining mixture was analyzed by full scan gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) after liquid-liquid extraction and acetylation. The metabolic activity was evaluated through the total number of detected metabolites (NDM) produced in each model and fungal strains and the percentage of parent drug remaining (%RPD) after up to five days of incubation. All the tested fungal strains were capable of forming mammalian phase I metabolites. Fungi from the normal fungal flora of the human body such as Candida sp. , Geotrichum candidum, and Trichosporon asahii) formed up to seven metabolites at %RPD values greater than 52% but no new fungal metabolites (NFM). In contrast, some airborne fungal strains like Bjerkandera adusta, Chaetomium sp, Coriolopsis sp. , Fusarium solani and Mucor plumbeus showed NDM values exceeding those of the positive control, complete metabolism of the parent drug in some models and formation of NFM. NFM (numbers in brackets) were detected in four of the five model drugs: amitriptyline (18), metoprolol (4), mirtazapine (8), and zolpidem (2). The latter NFM are potential candidates for marker substances indicating post-mortem fungal metabolism.
Immunohistological characterization of malignant lymphomas of the Waldeyer's ring other than the nasopharynx

Among extranodal lymphomas, the Waldeyer's ring is the second most frequently involved site after the gastrointestinal tract. Fresh tissue from 23 consecutive cases of malignant lymphoma of the faucial tonsil, palate and base of tongue were studied histologically and with a panel of 25 monoclonal antibodies. Twenty cases were primary Waldeyer's ring lymphoma, and all were found to express B‐cell phenotype. Most cases were classified as diffuse centroblastic lymphoma, polymorphic subtype, in which there were immunoblast‐like, centrocyte‐like and/or multilobated centroblasts. All except one case expressed all three B‐cell lineage antigens CD 19, CD20 and CD22, but they showed inconsistent expression of the B‐cell antigens CD9 and CD24. Four cases lacked surface immunoglobulin. Six cases expressed interleukin‐2 receptor, suggesting that they were composed of highly activated B‐cells. Three cases represented relapse in the tonsil or tongue in patients with known malignant lymphoma in other sites; one case expressed T‐cell and two cases B‐cell phenotype (both of which also expressed interleukin‐2 receptor). The clinical features and immunohistological findings suggest that Waldeyer's ring lymphomas, other than those of the nasopharynx, share some of the characteristics of ‘mucosa‐associated lymphoid tissue’ lymphomas. In contrast, nasopharyngeal lymphomas are more related to nasal lymphomas, and are almost exclusively peripheral T‐cell neoplasms.
The effects of loyalty programs on customer loyalty: The mediating role of customer value and the moderating role of relationship benefits

Since the prevalence of loyalty programs worldwide, one of the urgent issues in retailing is whether loyalty programs really enhance customer loyalty. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that utilizes the construct of customer value to explain the link between loyalty programs and customer loyalty in retail context. Based on 450 respondents from members of several large department stores, the results posit that loyalty programs have indirect positive impact on behavioral loyalty, affective loyalty via utilitarian value, hedonic value. This mediating progress is moderated by relationship benefits derived from the long-term relationship between retailers and their customers. The results also show that the role of utilitarian value playing in promoting customer loyalty is more significant, which has certain reference for retailers to design effective loyalty programs. Key words: Loyalty programs, customer value, relationship benefits, customer loyalty.
Exchange rate (volatility) and bilateral agricultural trade: Turkey vs. her major trading partners

The purpose of this study is to analyse the sensitivity of Turkish bilateral agricultural trade flows to exchange rate and its volatility. To this end, we estimate the bilateral export, import and trade balance equations between Turkey and her 16 major trading partners for the period of 1987:q1-;2007:q4 by utilising the Vector Error Correction Modelling (VECM) framework. The short-run analysis based on the Impulseâ€“Response Functions (IRFs) provides evidence that the pattern of Turkish agricultural trade balance with respect to exchange rate changes does not follow the J-curve hypothesis. The long-run analysis based on the Johansen cointegration approach, on the other hand, shows that the exchange rate and its volatility are important factors determining the dynamic of Turkish agricultural trade flows.
The development and manufacture of influenza vaccines

The development and manufacture of an Influenza vaccine is unlike any other product in the Vaccine industry because of the need to change composition on a yearly basis. The poor efficacy of Influenza vaccines over the past 2 y in the Northern Hemisphere invites questions on how the vaccines are manufactured and how change in vaccine composition is controlled. The opinion expressed in this commentary is that the risk of not making the correct HA protein is increased by the need to adapt the new seasonal virus for good propagation in embryonated chicken eggs. This adaptation is required because not enough doses can be made in time for the new 'flu season unless productivity is reasonable. This problem is not necessarily solved by going to a cell culture host for virus propagation and that may explain why this more advanced technology approach is not more widely used. A vaccine based on hemagglutinin (HA) protein that does not involve Influenza virus propagation (such as Flublok®) side steps this particular problem. The exact HA sequence can be used as is in the virus. The technology can be run at large scale, already at 2 × 21,000L in Japan, in contrast to eggs where scale-up is by multiplication; the HA product is highly purified and made consistently in the form of rosettes.
Role of absolute reticulocyte count in evaluation of pancytopenia-a hospital based study.

BACKGROUND Pancytopenia is a common hematological entity encountered in our laboratory practice. Evaluating the causes of pancytopenia is essential for the diagnostic as well as therapeutic management of the patients. Absolute Reticulocyte count (ARC) plays a pivotal role in identifying the cause of pancytopenia in most of the cases but it has grossly been overlooked. Hence, we attempted to identify the significance of ARC as a deciding parameter in evaluating the causes of pancytopenia. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was conducted in a tertiary health care hospital, Chennai, India. A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted over a period of two years (2011-2013). Patients who satisfied the criteria for pancytopenia were evaluated with clinical details. Pancytopenia work-up including Peripheral blood picture, Complete blood counts, Reticulocyte count, Serum Ferritin, B12, Folate and Bone marrow aspirate was carried out. ARC was calculated and an algorithm to approach the cases of pancytopenia was derived considering ARC as the key factor. RESULTS A total of 429 cases of pancytopenia were evaluated and based on our algorithm results were tabulated. ARC was found to be <25x10^(9)/L for cases of Aplastic anaemia; 25-50x10^(9)/L for Nutritional anaemia; and, >100x10^(9)/L in Marrow infiltrative disorders and in cases of sepsis and malaria. CONCLUSION We found that ARC plays an important role in differentiating various causes of pancytopenia and hence should be routinely included in pancytopenia work up in order to avoid unnecessary bone marrow aspirations in pancytopenic patients.
Short range centralized cardiac health monitoring system based on ZigBee communication

Remote health monitoring is a prominent area in modern biomedical research. This involves collection in different biomedical signals from patient using information and communication technology with the objective of remote end assessment of these vital conditions. This paper describes a short range centralized health monitoring system to acquire electrocardiogram (ECG) data using wireless ZigBee communication for computerized analysis. A prototype compact patient data collection system based on ATmega16L microcontroller was developed to collect and compress single lead ECG data for wireless transfer to a centralized station for remote end processing. A state of the art developed software in the central station controlled the patient modules and post acquisition data analysis. Test results with Physionet data and ECG collected from volunteers shown satisfactory result. Average compression achieved using 70 ECG files was 6.93 with average PRD and PRDN of 1.1343 and 8.4645 respectively. Feature extraction results using receiving end ECG data showed an average variance of 0.12%.
The third sector in a devolved Scotland: From policy to evidence

Scotland's post-devolution government has implemented a number of policies engaging with the third sector. These sit within the UK context of New Labour's welfare reform with its twin emphases on neoliberalism and neo-communitarianism. Moves by the Scottish Executive to translate these themes into the Scottish context are illustrated by policies on the relation between the state and third sector organizations, on the social economy, and on volunteering. However, as a case study of the sector in Glasgow demonstrates, significant challenges emerge for the realization of policy claims for the development of social capital and citizenship in practice.
A miniature SPECT using multi-pinhole collimator with vertical septa

We had previously reported a simulation study on a multi-pinhole collimator (MP) having lead vertical septa which could provide improved angular sampling and enlarged imaging field of view (FOV) compared to low energy high resolution parallel-hole collimator (LEHR) using same size detector. The aim of this study was to develop a miniature SPECT to verify the performance of the proposed MP. A detector having 70 mm × 70 mm active area was consisted of a 6 mm thick NaI(Tl) crystal coupled to a 127 mm diameter position-sensitive photomultiplier tube (PSPMT). A 7×7 pinhole collimator with 2 mm diameter pinhole and 40 mm focal length was fabricated to evaluate the performance compared to a typical LEHR. Additionally, a detector having 50 mm × 50 mm active area with 5×5 pinhole collimator and LEHR was investigated to evaluate enlarged imaging FOV. Planar spatial resolution, sensitivity, and resolution hot- and cold-rod phantom images were acquired. Images were reconstructed by the use of a dedicated MLEM algorithm with an unmatched projector/backprojector pair. Spatial resolution and sensitivity were 4.7 mm FWHM and 0.25 cps/μCi at 60 mm distance, respectively. Although the detector size was smaller than the phantom size, MP allowed to image entire phantom images while LEHR provided the images with truncation artifact. The reconstructed images using 60 and 30 projections with both 7×7 pinhole collimator and LEHR showed a similar quality image to the image using 120 projections. However, the reconstructed images with 10 projections using 7×7 pinhole collimator showed better quality than those with LEHR. The reconstructed images using the MP provided high quality images with enlarged imaging FOV even when insufficient angular sampling data were used which would be useful to develop a stationary SPECT.
TRANSPORT MODE CHOICE MODELS FOR METRO MANILA AND URBAN TRANSPORT POLICY APPLICATIONS

Multinomial and nested logit models were developed for urban transport mode choice of urban travelers during the morning home-to-work trips in Metro Manila. In the multinomial logit model, seven mode choices were available including the private car, regular taxi, light rail transit, air-conditioned bus, non-air-conditioned bus, jeepney, and fx megataxi. Two-level nested logit models were further developed which divided the available modes into private and public, and the public modes were further divided into air-conditioned and non- air-conditioned modes in the three-level nested logit models. Important deterministic variables included in the utility equations include in-vehicle time, out-of-vehicle time, individual monthly income divided by out-of-pocket cost, among others. The developed models were then used to determine the utility ranking of transport modes in Metro Manila and to test the effect of proposed urban transport-related developments in Metro Manila on mode choice probabilities of urban travelers.
Visegrad Group Co‐Operation and Russia

Much thought has been given of late to how national preferences impact upon European Union‐level policy‐making towards Russia and it is widely accepted that discrepancies in Member State attitudes can undermine consistent and effective multilateral policies. So far there has been no attempt to ascertain whether subregional groupings that exist inside the EU (which represent a potential in‐between layer of policy‐making between the bilateral and multilateral) are inclined or able to attempt to co‐ordinate their positions on Russia. This article focuses on the Visegrad Group (VG), which would appear to be an obvious candidate, but actually has virtually no co‐operation agenda vis‐a‐vis Russia (the other main groupings are the Benelux Economic Union, the Nordic Council and the Weimar Triangle). The article argues that it is difficult to accommodate Russia in the current VG foreign policy framework due to the focus on ‘low’ politics and integration assistance. It also contends that limited capacity and intra‐VG divergence on key aspects of relations with Russia mean that the VG is unlikely to expand its agenda so as to attempt more co‐operation on Russia in the future.
Tutorial on “Switching and routing for spatially and spectrally flexible elastic optical networking”

The traffic carried by core optical networks as well as the per-channel interface rates required by IP routers are growing at a remarkable pace year-over-year. This trend is due to the widespread deployment of fixed and wireless broadband networks as well as huge growth of video-based traffic supported via internet and social media applications. Optical transmission and switching advancements have so far satisfied this huge traffic growth by delivering the content over the network infrastructure in a cost and energy efficient manner utilizing to the maximum extend the capabilities of optoelectronic and photonic subsystems and the available bandwidth of deployed optical fibers. However, we are approaching fast fundamental spectral efficiency limits of single-mode fibers and the scientific and industrial telecommunications community foresees that the growth capabilities of conventional WDM networks operating on a fixed frequency grid are quite limited.
Investing in Agricultural Supply: The Determinants of Agricultural Research and Extension Investment

The capacity to increase the supply of food and other agricultural products is of obvious importance to developing countries, particularly those faced with rapidly growing populations. Historically, growth in agricultural supply has passed through stages. As long as it was possible to bring new areas under cultivation at low cost, increased agricultural supply was achieved primarily through the expansion of cultivated area. As low-cost land-conversion possibilities became exhausted, higher-cost sources of growth were exploited, notably investments in irrigation and drainage. Investments in agricultural research and extension systems have also produced growth in agricultural supply, as documented by a large number of economic studies. These studies, however, have revealed strong interactions of improved agricultural technology with soil and climate factors, which impede the diffusion of technology across broad regions. Agricultural experiment stations and associated extension services must, therefore, be located to serve specific subregions if their growth-producing potential is to be realized fully. ' Agricultural research systems are complex institutions. The formidable public good problems encountered in most branches of scientific research are particularly acute in the case of agriculture. Patent laws protect mechanical and chemical inventions more easily than biological inventions. Hence crop and livestock research-plant breeding, phy-
Securitization and Mortgage Renegotiation: Evidence from the Great Depression

We use loan-level data from the New York City metropolitan area to examine the extent to which lenders attempted to prevent foreclosures with concessionary modifications during the Great Depression. We find no principal forgiveness in the sample and only a handful of concessionary mortgage modifications of other types. Far more mortgages terminated through foreclosure than received any sort of concessionary modification. The results indicate that there are significant impediments to renegotiation of residential mortgages beyond securitization. As such, less renegotiation seems unlikely to be a major cost of securitization of residential mortgages. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. , Oxford University Press.