Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reported social and environmental taxonomies: a longer‐term glimpse

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to identify the taxonomies, and the quality and quantity of environmental and social information disclosed in the annual reports of Australian firms. Design/methodology/approach - Using content analysis, and the broad categories of the Global Reporting Initiative as interpretive guidelines, the study examines the information disclosed in the annual reports of 187 firms listed on the Australian stock exchange over a five-year period Findings - The findings from logistic regression interconnect the firm's categorical imperatives with their reporting of sustainability issues and key performance indicators. Research limitations/implications - Limitations to this research are: the subjective aspects associated with the use of content analysis and the use of logistic regression does not provide a causal relationship between variables, it only provides an interaction. Practical implications - The results suggest a considerable reporting improvement is warranted to support user confidence in the representation, the understandability and comparability of social and environmental information. Accountability and a systemic trust by users in the information reported necessitate these qualitative characteristics form part of the reporting process. Originality/value - The content used to communicate the environmental and social outcomes resulting from a firm's operations has increasingly become aligned to a disclosure strategy, that is, an indication of management imperatives. These results provide pragmatic insights in the disclosure of particular environmental and social classifications in the annual report, and indirectly into management reporting imperatives.
Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics

In the 1992 American election campaign, health reform, a popular issue which Bill Clinton and the Democrats concentrated on, became the focus of the most concerted attack on government in recent American history. A year after it had been introduced to general acclaim Clinton's compromise plan lay in ruins. This account, by a prize-winning social scientist, examines the changing terrain of US politics and public policy. Drawing on contemporary documents, media coverage and confidential White House strategy memoranda, it offers insights into the way the Health Security Bill inadvertently became a perfect foil for anti-government mobilization. According to Skocpol, its enemies found it easy to distort while its supporters failed to marshall their forces at a critical time.
The impact of EU accession on farms' technical efficiency in Hungary

In this article the stochastic frontier analysis method is used to evaluate the technical efficiency of Hungarian farms before and after accession to the European Union (EU), and to investigate the efficiency determinants. The results show that EU membership has reversed the pre-accession process of efficiency decrease. But the other side of the coin is that access to higher post-accession subsidies contributes to lower efficiency of Hungarian farmers. The other remarkable finding is a seeming scarcity of labour on farms, which constrains their production and efficiency. The Hungarian government may therefore have to design specific national policies if its aim is to promote a farming system that uses labour and at the same time is competitive.
Free-Splitting Revisited: Concealing Surplus Value in the Temporary Employment Relationship

Based on a historical study of fee regulation in the employment agency business, the claim that temporary help agencies charge “no fees” to workers is challenged. It is found that the claim rests on technical changes in the statutory definitions of fee and employment agency won through industry lobbying efforts, changes that simply mask traditional fee-charging methods. The article traces the evolution of fee-charging practices in the post-World War II period and points to a new version of “fee splitting” as a prevalent wage setting practice in the staffing industry. The implications of these developments for wage depression and income redistribution are explored.
Introduction of measles into a highly immunised West African community: the role of health care institutions.

In an urban area of Guinea-Bissau, where more than 80% of the children have been vaccinated, measles continues to be a major cause of child mortality. Compared with the period before the introduction of vaccination, more cases occur outside the community, while more cases within the district are now guests and newcomers. Half of the new introductions of measles into the community and 30% of the measles deaths can be traced back to the paediatric ward. Contact with health care institutions plays an important role in the transmission of measles, particularly among the youngest children. This consequence of health care may be avoidable, however, since several studies suggest that sick children can be vaccinated safely and effectively.
Distribution network dynamics with correlated demands

The distribution network designs for two-level supply chains have been analysed using stochastic analytical methods. The market demands faced by multiple retailers are correlated. The correlated demand is modelled as a first order Vector Auto-Regressive process, which is used to represent the progression of and relationships in sets of time series of demand. All participants are assumed to operate an Order-Up-To policy with a Minimum Mean Squared Error forecasting. Inventory and capacity costs have been considered. Control engineering methods have been exploited to obtain the closed form expressions of the variances of the inventory levels and the order rates. The ratios of costs between the decentralised and centralised systems have been used to evaluate the economic performance of the consolidated distribution network. The variance expressions are the key components for the cost ratios. Insights about the system can also be obtained from the analysis of the variance expressions. The impacts of demand patterns, lead-times and the number of decentralised locations on the consolidation decision have been investigated. The results show that the auto-correlation and cross-correlation of the market demands highly affect the consolidation decisions. The Square Root Law for Inventory and Bullwhip has been proved to hold with certain demand correlations. Consolidation scenarios that are always attractive under a specific demand pattern and a set of constraints about the lead-times have been presented. The structural transition of the demand into orders placed onto higher echelons has been investigated. The result shows that higher echelons may not need the point-of-sales data as it is already contained in the order they receive from the retailers. Finally, the model has been validated by its application to real world data and has shown to be a useful tool for practitioners to investigate the dynamic behaviour and economic performance of the distribution network design.
Cross-Layer Design for Two-Way Relaying Networks with Multiple Antennas

In this paper, we developed a cross-layer design for two-way relaying (TWR) networks with multiple antennas, where two single antenna source nodes exchange information with the aid of one multiple antenna relay node. The proposed cross-layer design considers adaptive modulation (AM) and space-time block coding (STBC) at the physical layer with an automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol at the data link layer, in order to maximize the spectral efficiency under specific delay and packet error ratio (PER) constraints. An MMSE-interference cancellation (IC) receiver is employed at the relay node, to remove the interference in the fist phase of the TWR transmission. The transmission mode is updated for each phase of the TWR transmission on a frame-by-frame basis, to match the time-varying channel conditions and exploit the system performance and throughput gain. Simulation results show that retransmission at the data link layer could alleviate rigorous error-control requirements at the physical layer, and thereby allows higher data transmission. As a result, cross-layer design helps to achieve considerable system spectral efficiency gain for TWR networks, compared to those without cross-layer design.
Wireless Transmission Impact on the Lifetime of Routing Path in VANET

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the field of vehicular networks, primarily due to the advancement in technology and need for safety and entertainment applications. The current generation of vehicles has embedded computers, GPS receivers, and number of sensors, where as the next generation of these vehicles will potentially have short-range wireless network interface. The target of ITS (Intelligent transport system) is to increase safety of passenger by exchanging warning messages between vehicles, this can be done by offering on-board network applications which is a challenge for the scientific community. In addition to safety applications, other telemetric services could improve traffic efficiency environment preservation, comfort and provide a reliable journey. Since VANET (Vehicular Adhoc Network) is composed of vehicles equipped with short range wireless communication capabilities. The performance of vehicles can be affected by high mobility pattern of the vehicle, speed of vehicle, transmission range, network breakup, traffic density and number of vehicles in the route. This paper describes the effect of the wireless transmission range on the lifetime improvement of the routing path in VANET, simulation result obtained helps to select the appropriate transmission range for increasing the lifetime of the routing path.
Housing markets and the economy: the assessment

Housing markets have multiple interactions with the rest of the economy and these are surveyed in this paper. The drivers of house prices include income, the housing stock, demography, credit availability, interest rates, and lagged appreciation, the latter a potential mechanism for overshooting. There is rather less agreement on the determinants of new construction, though planning constraints are widely seen as a major issue and one of the causes of the UK housing affordability problem. The paper argues that housing collateral and downpayment constraints are the key to understanding the role of house-price variations in explaining medium-term consumption fluctuations. Institutional variations between countries and over time account for major differences in linkages between house prices and economic activity. This illuminates debates about how monetary and other policy should react to house-price variations. The paper also discusses the role of housing markets in explaining regional migration and location decisions, intergenerational inequality, and restricting access of the less affluent to public goods, such as good schools, which are capitalized in local house prices.
Effect of space charge on the accumulative characteristics of oil paper insulation under repeated lightning impulses

Repeated impulses have long been considered to affect the insulation properties of electrical equipment. This interesting but rarely studied phenomenon may pose great risks to the reliable operation of power equipment. Therefore, in this work, we focus on the accumulative effect of repeated lightning impulses on the oil-impregnated paper (OIP) used in power transformers. Specifically, we study the effect of space charge on the accumulative characteristics of OIP. A repetitive impulse accumulating test platform was set up, and the tests were conducted to obtain the accumulative characteristics of OIP under repeated lightning impulses. The accumulative characteristics of OIP with various interval time were experimentally identified to study the influence of interval time on the accumulative effect. Then, space charge in OIP samples were investigated using the pulsed electro-acoustic technique. Charge behavior in OIP was analyzed under different conditions, i.e., changing the applied times, amplitude and interval time of the applied lightning impulses. Charge injection and transport occurred during lightning impulse accumulation. The increased application of lightning impulses, high applied voltage, and short interval time contributed to the accumulation and transport of space charges. At last, the possible mechanisms of the accumulative effect are discussed in this article based on the experimental results.
Patient-based assessments of clinical periodontal conditions in relation to alveolar bone loss.

BACKGROUND Limited subject-based information exists on the relationship between clinical and radiographic periodontal data. AIMS To use subject-based data to assess the extent of concurrence between clinical and radiographic information, and to study what clinical information best predicts alveolar bone loss (ABL). MATERIAL AND METHODS Subject-based data on smoking habits, bleeding on probing, plaque scores, pocket probing depth (PD), and evidence of alveolar BL were obtained, and functional periodontal pentagon risk diagrams (PPRDs) were studied from 168 consecutive subjects attending a medical clinic. RESULTS The mean age of the subjects was 62.7 years (SD+/-9.0). The average number of teeth was 21.3 (SD+/-8.0) with on average 5.6 molars remaining (SD+/- 3.9). In this subject cohort, 33.1% had never smoked, 44.2% had quit smoking, and 22.7% were currently smokers. Mean plaque and bleeding scores were high or 60.2% (SD+/-24.0) and 53.1% (SD+/-23.6), respectively. PDs >or=6.0 mm were found in 55.9% of the subjects. Binary logistic regression analysis demonstrated that tooth loss and proportional plaque scores were the predominant factors included in the equations associated with ABL. Wald coefficients varied between 3.99 and 9.15, and with p-values between 0.05 and 0.01. When included, the PPRD score became the exclusive factor at several cut-off levels (Wald's coefficients between 19.8 and 15.6, p<0.001). Consequently, the best receiver operator curve was identified for the PPRD at the >40% cut-off ABL level (area under the curve: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.74-0.89; p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS The number of teeth lost and the proportion of plaque scores provided significant predictive factors for ABL. The functional PPRD demonstrated an exclusive and highly predictable association with ABL. Subject-based proportional data for PDs >4.0 mm provided poor substitute measures for the extent of ABL.
Do Regional and Non‐regional Knowledge Flows Differ? An Empirical Study on Clustered Firms in the Dutch Life Sciences and Computing Services Industry

In the literature on innovation and geographical proximity, inter‐organizational knowledge flows are increasingly acknowledged to take place at multiple spatial levels. Furthermore, the knowledge flows within and between regions are assumed to have different characteristics. Until now, hardly any study has examined those latter assumptions empirically. This study aims to provide empirical insights by analysing whether there are differences in the characteristics of regional and non‐regional inter‐organizational knowledge flows in the Dutch computing services and life sciences industry. The results indeed show significant differences. Confirming the assumptions in the literature, regional knowledge flows are characterized by a higher number of face‐to‐face contacts, while the knowledge exchanged through non‐regional knowledge flows is more valuable. The relations between the duration and the social base of the knowledge flow and its spatial scale are less straightforward.
Service Failure Complaints Identification in Social Media: A Text Classification Approach

The emergence of social media has brought up plenty of platforms where dissatisfied customers can share their service encounter experiences. Those customers’ feedbacks have been widely recognized as valuable information sources for improving service quality. Due to the sparse distribution of customer complaints and diversity of topics related to non-complaints in social media, manually identifying complaints is timeconsuming and inefficient. In this study, a supervised learning approach including samples enlargement and classifiers construct was proposed. Applying small labeled samples as training samples, reliable complaints samples and non-complaints samples were identified from the unlabeled dataset during the sample enlargement process. Combining the enlarged samples and the labeled samples, SVM and KNN algorithms were employed to construct the classifier. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can efficiently distinguish complaints from non-complaints in social media, especially when the number of labeled samples is very small.
Scheduling in Visual Fog Computing: NP-Completeness and Practical Efficient Solutions

The visual fog paradigm envisions tens of thousands of heterogeneous, camera-enabled edge devices distributed across the Internet, providing live sensing for a myriad of different visual processing applications. The scale, computational demands, and bandwidth needed for visual computing pipelines necessitates offloading intelligently to distributed computing infrastructure, including the cloud, Internet gateway devices, and the edge devices themselves. This paper focuses on the visual fog scheduling problem of assigning the visual computing tasks to various devices to optimize network utilization. We first prove this problem is NP-complete, and then formulate a practical, efficient solution. We demonstrate sub-minute computation time to optimally schedule 20,000 tasks across over 7,000 devices, and just 7-minute execution time to place 60,000 tasks across 20,000 devices, showing our approach is ready to meet the scale challenges introduced by visual fog.
The Myth of Expansionary Fiscal Austerity

Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” – that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending – to combat budget deficits. Some supporters of austerity have gone as far as arguing that fiscal adjustment could restore economic growth. These analyses are being touted to oppose increased stimulus to boost the economy. This paper examines the arguments for austerity and emonstrates that current economic conditions in the United States do not support the case for fiscal adjustment.
In vivo phosphorus nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in status epilepticus

Bicuculline‐induced status epilepticus was studied in paralyzed rabbits ventilated with an oxygen and nitrous oxide mixture. An Oxford Instruments TMR 32–200 spectrometer was used to record phosphorus 31 nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of the in vivo brain. An array of conventional physiological variables including the electroencephalogram was simultaneously recorded. Several features were consistently observed during status epilepticus: (1) Phosphocreatine levels fell to about two‐thirds of their control values and remained at that level despite a gradual decline in seizure activity: (2) intracellular pH declined and then remained constant, whereas seizure discharges declined; (3) adenosine triphosphate levels remained constant at their control values. These new, lower levels of brain phosphocreatine and intracellular pH were largely unaffected by increases in seizure activity brought about by elevation of blood pressure from levels too low to support adequate cerebral perfusion, by waning of anticonvulsant drug effect, or by repeated doses of bicuculline.
Cell therapies for type 1 diabetes mellitus

Type 1 diabetes is caused by autoimmune destruction of pancreatic β-cells and is characterised by absolute insulin insufficiency. The monocellular nature of this disease and endocrine action of insulin make this disease an excellent candidate for cellular therapy. Furthermore, precedent for cellular therapies has been set by successful cadaveric whole pancreas and islet transplantation. In order to expand the supply of cells to meet current and future needs, several novel cell sources have been proposed, including human β-cells or islets expanded in culture, islet xenografts and pancreatic ductal progenitor cells. Surrogate β-cells derived from hepatocytes, intestinal K cells or non-endodermal cell types have also been suggested. Stem cells found in bone marrow and umbilical cord blood have been used extensively to repopulate the haematopoietic system and offer the possibility of autologous transplantation. Recent studies have suggested that these stem cells may also have a broader capacity to differentiate, possibly into β-cells. Stem cells from embryonic sources, such as human embryonic stem and embryonic germ cells, have the ability to proliferate extensively in culture and have an inherent developmental plasticity that may make them a potentially unlimited source of cells that can sense glucose and produce mature insulin. The wide range of proposed cell sources and our increasingly clear picture of pancreatic development suggest that novel cellular therapies might one day compete with non-cellular glucose sensing and insulin delivery devices.
Losses in the PEMC Boundary

Perfect electromagnetic conductor (PEMC) was recently introduced to generalize both the perfect electric conductor (PEC) and the perfect magnetic conductor (PMC), which are used as boundary material. In this paper, an extension of PEMC boundary conditions is made to a more realistic model with small losses ("good electromagnetic conductor"). It is shown that the antisymmetric boundary impedance dyadic defining the ideal PEMC boundary cannot alone carry any losses and a symmetric component must be added that actually dominates the lossy behavior of the boundary. As an example, a slab of low-loss gyrotropic wave-guiding material is studied and shown to represent the lossy counterpart of the PEMC boundary. The effect of losses is demonstrated by considering plane-wave reflection from an imperfect PEMC plane
Label Space Driven Heterogeneous Transfer Learning With Web Induced Alignment

Heterogeneous Transfer Learning (HTL) algorithms leverage knowledge from a heterogeneous source domain to perform a task in a target domain. We present a novel HTL algorithm that works even where there are no shared features, instance correspondences and further, the two domains do not have identical labels. We utilize the label relationships via web-distance to align the data of the domains in the projected space, while preserving the structure of the original data.
The corneal reflex and the R2 component of the blink reflex

A reflex contraction of the human orbicularis oculi muscles can be evoked by stimulation of either the supraorbital region (“blink reflex”) or the cornea (“corneal reflex”). We found that the latency of the corneal reflex was longer, and the duration was longer than the R2 component of the blink reflex. The absolute refractory period of the R2 component of the blink reflex was longer after supraorbital than after corneal conditioning stimulation. When the R2 component of the blink reflex was habituated by repetitive stimuli, stimulation of the cornea still evoked a reflex, but supraorbital stimulation produced only a depressed R2 response. These findings suggest that the two reflexes do not have identical neural connections.