Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Organizational and contractual choices in franchising : Four essays on the relationship between the franchisor's choices and the network performance

Cette these est composee de quatre essais relatifs a l'impact des choix organisationnels sur la performance dans les reseaux de franchise. Concue comme une contribution a l'economie manageriale, la these est fondee sur les theories de l'organisation industrielle, et met en oeuvre des techniques d'econometrie appliquee pour aborder des problematiques ayant des implications manageriales.La premiere partie de la these porte sur les structures organisationnelles des reseaux de franchise, et sur leur impact en termes de perfomance. Plus precisement, le Chapitre 2 etudie l'impact d'une serie de choix organisationnels de l'entreprise amont (le franchiseur). Le Chapitre 3 s'interesse aJ'influence de l'introduction de franchisees multi·unites dans le reseau.La deuxieme partie de la these porte sur les choix contractuels, plus precisement sur les liens entre le taux de redevance et la perfomance des reseaux de franchise. Ainsi, le Chapitre 4 etudie l'influence des problemes d'incitation sur la definition du taux de redevance, et les implications sur la performance financiere du reseau. Alors que les travaux anterieurs dans la litterature empirique ont revele l'inadaptation de la theorie du signal pour comprendre les choix contractuels des reseaux de franchise dans les pays developpes, le Chapitre 5 porte l'analyse sur un pays emergent, le Bresil, et montre que la deternination du taux de redevance est influencee par une motivation de signal liee a la perfomance future du reseau.L'introduction generale, Chapitre 1, met en evidence l'interet de travailler sur les reseaux de franchise et presente les objectifs et les orientations de la these. Une conclusion generale est proposee en Chapitre 6.
Solving hybrid flow-shop scheduling based on improved multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm

In the model of hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with unrelated parallel machines, the makespan, total weighted earliness/tardiness and total waiting time are established as evaluation index. An algorithm of artificial bee colony based on the method of adaptive neighborhood search is designed. According to the characteristics of the model, initial processing sequence is used as solution vector in order to narrow down feasible solutions. Fitness of populations is distinguished by non-dominated sorting. In the process of iteration, excellent individuals are retained so that the diversity of population distribution is increased. Finally, the method is applied to a simulation example, compared with the traditional multi-objective algorithm. The results obtained demonstrate that the improved ABC algorithm for hybrid flow shop scheduling problem is good effective and diversified.
Critical Realism

Critical realism theory states that the theory of knowledge, or epistemology, is different form a theory of being, or ontology. There is a reality which exists independent of its human conception. Critical realists believe that there are unobservable events which cause the observable ones; as such, the social world can be understood only if people understand the structures that generate such unobservable events. This is important in the experimental context, because it allows the scientist to distinguish between the event and what causes it. According to this theory, an individual conducting an experiment creates the conditions necessary for the experiment (observable event), but the results are caused by the underlying laws and mechanisms (unobservable events). The critical side of this theory arises from the identification of epistemic fallacy – the idea of analyzing ontological statements in terms of epistemological statements. Epistemic fallacy is caused by a failure to recognize a difference between ontology and epistemology. The realism side of the theory focuses on the existence of real mechanisms which shape events.
Alcoholic Hepatitis and Liver Transplantation: The Good News and What to Do about It

A recent French trial in the New England Journal of Medicine (Mathurin et al., 2011) reported that early orthotopic liver transplantation (OLTx) improves survival in patients with a first episode of severe alcoholic hepatitis (AH) not responding to medical therapy. In this trial, 26 patients with severe AH at high risk of death were selected (i.e., <2% of patients admitted for an episode of severe AH). The results of this trial are very encouraging as the cumulative 6-month survival rate was higher among patients who received early transplantation than among those who did not (P < 0.001). Notably, this benefit of early transplantation was maintained through 2 years of follow-up (P = 0.004). Alcoholism is still considered by many individuals and clinicians, as a bad habit and there is a general reluctance to transplant alcoholic individuals who still drink. However, research in neuroscience has improved dramatically in the last decades, and we do know by now that alcoholism is a chronic relapsing medical disease of the brain, and not a bad behavior. Let's make a comparison with hepatitis C virus (HCV). We all know that given the presence of extrahepatic sites of HCV replication, the new transplant liver is infected by HCV in virtually all patients, with a 10- to 20-fold increase in levels of viremia after liver transplantation, and progression to HCV-related cirrhosis is estimated to reach 20–30% at 5-year follow-up (Gruener et al., 2004). No one, however, would deny an OLTx to an HCV-infected patient because of the “risk” of the re-infection after surgery. As for alcoholic patients, at present, a minimum of 6 months of total alcohol abstinence before OLTx is required to reduce the risk of alcohol recidivism. Notably, in the French trial (Mathurin et al., 2011) not only survival rate was higher in patients receiving early OLTx, but also a very low number of patents (n = 3; 11.5%) relapsed, i.e., one at 720 days, one at 740 days, and one at 1140 days after transplantation (Mathurin et al., 2011). The take home message of this trial is very important and has significant clinical implications. This trial, in fact, clearly suggests the need to re-consider the 6-month rule. Alcoholic patients who receive OLTx might have a better survival rate if the transplant is performed sooner. As such, it is important, at least in selected cases, to consider the possibility to perform the OLTx the soonest possible in alcoholic patients with severe AH. The possibility to re-consider the 6-month rule, however, needs to be discussed by the scientific and clinical community, together with the need to provide more effective monitoring and treatments for alcoholism both before and after the OLTx. As such, there is a crucial need to develop a more integrated approach in the management of these patients, including the need to follow-up these patients by team players coming from different fields (e.g., hepatology, psychiatry, addiction medicine, surgery).
Harmonic tori in symmetric spaces and commuting Hamiltonian systems on loop algebras

Much of the qualitative behaviour of the problem can be seen in embryo form in the simplest possible case: that of harmonic maps of a compact Riemann surface M into S. If M is the Riemann sphere, all harmonic maps into S are ±-holomorphic and so are given by rational functions. A similar picture obtains when the target is a higher dimensional symmetric space [6,7,11,34,35]: in this setting, harmonic maps are obtained from holomorphic curves in some auxiliary complex manifold (a twistor space) such as a flag manifold [6,11] or a loop group [34].
Characterizing and selecting fresh data sources

Data integration is a challenging task due to the large numbers of autonomous data sources. This necessitates the development of techniques to reason about the benefits and costs of acquiring and integrating data. Recently the problem of source selection (i.e., identifying the subset of sources that maximizes the profit from integration) was introduced as a preprocessing step before the actual integration. The problem was studied for static sources and used the accuracy of data fusion to quantify the integration profit. In this paper, we study the problem of source selection considering dynamic data sources whose content changes over time. We define a set of time-dependent metrics, including coverage, freshness and accuracy, to characterize the quality of integrated data. We show how statistical models for the evolution of sources can be used to estimate these metrics. While source selection is NP-complete, we show that for a large class of practical cases, near-optimal solutions can be found, propose an algorithmic framework with theoretical guarantees for our problem and show its effectiveness with an extensive experimental evaluation on both real-world and synthetic data.
Barrier slicing and chopping

One of the critiques on program slicing is that slices presented to the user are hard to understand. This is partly due to bad user interfaces, but mainly related to the problem that slicing 'dumps' the results onto the user without any explanation. We present an approach that can be used to 'filter' slices. This approach basically introduces 'barriers' which are not allowed to be passed during slice computation. An earlier filtering approach is chopping which is also extended to obey such a barrier. The barrier variants of slicing and chopping provide filtering possibilities for smaller slices and better comprehensibility.
Remote sensing of drought: Progress, challenges and opportunities

This review surveys current and emerging drought monitoring approaches using satellite remote sensing observations from climatological and ecosystem perspectives. We argue that satellite observations not currently used for operational drought monitoring, such as near‐surface air relative humidity data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder mission, provide opportunities to improve early drought warning. Current and future satellite missions offer opportunities to develop composite and multi‐indicator drought models. While there are immense opportunities, there are major challenges including data continuity, unquantified uncertainty, sensor changes, and community acceptability. One of the major limitations of many of the currently available satellite observations is their short length of record. A number of relevant satellite missions and sensors (e.g., the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) provide only a decade of data, which may not be sufficient to study droughts from a climate perspective. However, they still provide valuable information about relevant hydrologic and ecological processes linked to this natural hazard. Therefore, there is a need for models and algorithms that combine multiple data sets and/or assimilate satellite observations into model simulations to generate long‐term climate data records. Finally, the study identifies a major gap in indicators for describing drought impacts on the carbon and nitrogen cycle, which are fundamental to assessing drought impacts on ecosystems.
Real-time gender classification

This paper introduces an automatic real-time gender classification system. The system consists of mainly three modules, face detection, normalization and gender classification. The LUT-type weak classifier based on Adaboost learning method is proposed for training both face detector and gender classifier, and a Simple Direct Appearance Model (SDAM) based method is developed to detect the facial landmark points for face normalization. This results in an integrated system with rather good performance. Experiment results on both pictures from World Wide Web and real-time video clips are reported to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness.
Spectrum of superficial posterior cerebral artery territory infarcts

Posterior cerebral artery (PCA) territory infarction is not uncommon. Published series were concentrated either on isolated deep PCA territory infarcts or on incomplete calcarine artery territory infarcts. Although, correlations between clinical symptoms, causes of stroke and outcome at 6‐months in patients with superficial PCA territory stroke are less well known. We sought prospectively stroke causes, infarct topography, and clinical findings of 137 patients with superficial PCA territory infarcts with or without mesencephalic/thalamic involvement, representing 11% of patients with posterior circulation ischemic stroke in our Stroke Registry. We analyzed patients by subdividing into three subgroups; (1) cortical infarct (CI) group; (2) cortical and deep infarcts (CDI) (thalamic and/or mesencephalic involvement) group; (3) bilateral infarcts (BI) group. We studied the outcomes of patients at 6‐month regarding clinical findings, risk factors and vascular mechanisms by means of comprehensive vascular and cardiac studies. Seventy‐one patients (52%) had cortical (CI) PCA infarct, 52 patients (38%) had CDI, and 14 patients (10%) had bilateral PCA infarct (BI). In the CDI group, unilateral thalamus was involved in 38 patients (73%) and unilateral mesencephalic involvement was present in 27% of patients. The presumed causes of infarction were intrinsic PCA disease in 33 patients (26%), proximal large‐artery disease (PLAD) in 33 (24%), cardioembolism in 23 (17%), co‐existence of PLAD and cardioembolism in 7 (5%), vertebral or basilar artery dissection in 8 (6%), and coagulopathy in 2. The death rate was 7% in our series and stroke recurrence was 16% during 6‐month follow‐up period. Features of the stroke that was associated with significant increased risk of poor outcome included, consciousness disturbances at stroke onset (RR, 66.6; 95% CI, 8.6–515.5), mesencephalic and/or thalamic involvement (RR, 3.79; 95% CI, 1.49–9.65), PLAD (RR, 2.71; 95% CI, 1.09–6.73), and basilar artery disease (RR, 5.94; 95% CI, 1.73–20.47). The infarct mechanisms in three different types of superficial PCA territory stroke were quite similar, but cardioembolism was found more frequent in those with cortical PCA territory infarction. Although, the cause of stroke could not reliably dictate the infarct topography and clinical features. Visual field defect was the main clinical symptom in all groups, but sensorial, motor and neuropsychological deficits occurred mostly in those with CDI. Outcome is good in general, although patients having PLAD and basilar artery disease had more risk of stroke recurrence and poor outcome rather than those with intrinsic PCA disease.
Experience with safe manual memory-management in cyclone

The goal of the Cyclone project is to investigate type safety for low-level languages such as C. Our most difficult challenge has been providing programmers control over memory management while retaining type safety. This paper reports on our experience trying to integrate and effectively use two previously proposed, type-safe memory management mechanisms: statically-scoped regions and unique pointers. We found that these typing mechanisms can be combined to build alternative memory-management abstractions, such as reference counted objects and arenas with dynamic lifetimes, and thus provide a flexible basis. Our experience---porting C programs and building new applications for resource-constrained systems---confirms that experts can use these features to improve memory footprint and sometimes to improve throughput when used instead of, or in combination with, conservative garbage collection.
The Primacy of the Subjective: Foundations for a Unified Theory of Mind and Language

In this highly original monograph, Nicholas Georgalis proposes that the concept of minimal content is fundamental both to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of language. He argues that to understand mind and language requires minimal content -- a narrow, first-person, non-phenomenal concept that represents the subject of an agent's intentional state as the agent conceives it. Orthodox third-person objective methodology must be supplemented with first-person subjective methodology. Georgalis demonstrates limitations of a strictly third-person methodology in the study of mind and language and argues that these deficiencies can be corrected only by the incorporation of a first-person methodology. Nevertheless, this expanded methodology makes possible an objective understanding of the subjective. Georgalis argues against the conflation of consciousness and subjectivity with phenomenal experience. Consequently, and contrary to common belief, he argues that consciousness without phenomenality is as strongly implicated in intentionality as it is in phenomenal states. He proposes a broader understanding of the "hard problem" of consciousness, arguing that there is an "explanatory gap problem" for both phenomenal and intentional states. His theory provides a framework that renders the vexing relations between mental and brain states comprehensible. Georgalis also argues for novel explanations of the phenomenal and of representation -- explanations that follow from the core concept of minimal content. Treating the topics of meaning and reference, he introduces a first-person concept of intended reference derivative from minimal content that resolves various problems in the philosophy of language. Eschewing ontology, Georgalis proposes his theory as a means to make sense of, analyze, and relate issues in the philosophies of mind and language. The concept of minimal content, he argues, plays a necessary, pivotal, unifying, and foundational role in advancing our understanding of these issues.
Stability of Quadratic Projection Methods

In this paper we discuss the stability of an alternative pollution-free procedure for computing spectra. The main difference with the Galerkin method lies in the fact that it gives rise to a weak approximate problem which is quadratic in the spectral parameter, instead of linear. Previous accounts on this new procedure can be found in Levitin and Shargorodsky (2002) [math.SP/0212087] and Boulton (2006) [math.SP/0503126].
Poisson convergence in the restricted k‐partitioning problem

The randomized k‐number partitioning problem is the task to distribute N i.i. d. random variables into k groups in such a way that the sums of the variables in each group are as similar as possible. The restricted k‐partitioning problem refers to the case where the number of elements in each group is fixed to N/k. In the case k = 2 it has been shown that the properly rescaled differences of the two sums in the close to optimal partitions converge to a Poisson point process, as if they were independent random variables. We generalize this result to the case k > 2 in the restricted problem and show that the vector of differences between the k sums converges to a k ‐ 1‐dimensional Poisson point process. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg. , 2007
Leptin and ghrelin levels in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea: effect of CPAP treatment

Serum leptin and ghrelin levels were investigated in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) syndrome before and during continuous positive airways pressure (CPAP) treatment and compared with body mass index (BMI)-matched controls without OSA. Male patients (n=30) with OSA (apnoea/hypopnoea index=58±16, BMI=32.6±5.3 kg·m−2) underwent CPAP treatment. Fasting leptin and ghrelin were measured atbaseline and 2 days, and in the case of leptin 2 months after initiation of treatment. Baseline plasma ghrelin levels were significantly higher in OSA patients than in controls. After 2 days of CPAP treatment, plasma ghrelin decreased in almost all OSA patients (n=9) to levels that were only slightly higher than those of controls (n=9). Leptin levels did not change significantly from baseline after 2 days of CPAP treatment, but were higher than in the control group. After 8 weeks, leptin levels decreased significantly, although the BMI of the patients showed no change. The decrease in leptin levels was more pronounced in patients with a BMI <30 kg·m−2. These data indicate that the elevated leptin and ghrelin levels are not determined by obesity alone, since they rapidly decreased during continuous positive airways pressure therapy.
City Safety - A System Addressing Rear-End Collisions at Low Speeds

Rear-end collisions account for a substantial amount of crashes. The vast majority of rear-end collisions occur at speeds up to 30 km/h, mostly in city traffic. A common cause of these crashes is driver distraction. A rear-end collision might lead to soft-tissue neck injuries for the occupants in both vehicles involved, as well as material damages. The objective of this study is to present and discuss the potential benefit of a production system helping the driver to mitigate and in certain situations avoid rear-end collisions in low speed. City Safety monitors the traffic in front with the help of a laser sensor that is built into the windscreen's upper section. It can detect the rear-end of a vehicle in front of the City Safety equipped car. If the driver is about to drive into the vehicle in front and does not react in time, the car brakes itself. The scope for the system is every day low speed scenarios, like queues or entering roundabouts, situations where a large portion of collisions appear due to distracted drivers. City Safety is active at speeds up to 30 km/h. If the relative speed difference between the vehicles is less than 15 km/h it can help the driver to avoid a collision completely. In relative speed differences above 15 km/h up to an absolute speed of 30 km/h the objective is to reduce speed as much as possible before a collision occurs. Independent evaluation has shown that this technology offers the potential benefits of reducing collisions, leading to a substantial reduction in car damage costs and injuries to the occupants. Based on available statistics and dose-response model techniques, the reduction of impact severity is estimated to have the potential to reduce the risk of soft-tissue neck injuries in the rear-end impacted car by approximately 60%. Real-world retrospective studies of the production system will enable more precise quantification of the effect in the future. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa. dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0371.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.
THE CATABOLISM OF PROTEIN ANTIGENS IN THE NEWBORN AND MATURING RABBIT

The rate of degradation, organ deposition, and blood clearance of SBSA, SRSA, and IRSA has been measured in the newborn, 6-, and 30-day-old rabbits. When the animals were injected with a weight-graded dose of the 3 proteins, differences in their catabolism in the newborns were demonstrable as compared to the 6-, and 30-day-old animals. The capacity to degrade the azo compounds was shown to be incompletely developed at birth. At 6 days of age, however, the rabbits catabolized these proteins much at the same rate as the 30-day-old animals. Addition of the benzenesulfonate moiety determined the rate of degradation organ deposition and excretion rather than the carrier protein when the azo compounds were injected. The biosynthetically labeled S25 rabbit serum albumin (IRSA) was catabolized at a slower rate than the azoproteins in all age groups. Very little difference in the metabolism and organ deposition of the IRSA was shown to exist between the newborn and maturing animals. A dosage schedule, therefore, designed to test the immunological capacity of developing animals may not be valid when calculated upon body weight. The low level of activity of enzyme systems present at birth which degrade anti-genic material may serve as an explanation as to why this period of development is so vulnerable to the induction of tolerance rather than immunity when compared to the adult.