Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Service quality, customer satisfaction and behavior intentions

It is well known that service quality, customer satisfaction and customer value are becoming the most important factors of business success for either manufacturers or service providers. However, many different conclusions have been reached and related studies are rather fragmented, especially with regard to customer value. Furthermore, there are few related studies with service quality, customer satisfaction and customer value and their influences on customers’ future behaviors in the telecommunication industry as the focus. In this paper, attention is paid to the measurement model of service quality in China’s mobile phone market based on the well‐known SERVQUAL model, but with modification on the basis of focus group discussions and expert opinions to reflect the specific industry attributes and the special culture of China. Emphasis is then paid to the study of the dynamic relationships among service quality, customer value, customer satisfaction and their influences on future behaviors after the key drivers of customer value and customer satisfaction are identified. All of them are based on the development of structural equation models by using PLS‐GRAPH Package.
Treatment with dietary trans10cis12 conjugated linoleic acid causes isomer-specific insulin resistance in obese men with the metabolic syndrome.

OBJECTIVE Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is a group of dietary fatty acids with antiobesity and antidiabetic effects in some animals. The trans10cis12 (t10c12) CLA isomer seems to cause these effects, including improved insulin sensitivity. Whether such isomer-specific effects occur in humans is unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate whether t10c12 CLA or a commercial CLA mixture could improve insulin sensitivity, lipid metabolism, or body composition in obese men with signs of the metabolic syndrome. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In a randomized, double-blind controlled trial, abdominally obese men (n = 60) were treated with 3.4 g/day CLA (isomer mixture), purified t10c12 CLA, or placebo. Euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp, serum hormones, lipids, and anthropometry were assessed before and after 12 weeks of treatment. RESULTS Baseline metabolic status was similar between groups. Unexpectedly, t10c12 CLA increased insulin resistance (19%; P < 0.01) and glycemia (4%; P < 0.001) and reduced HDL cholesterol (-4%; P < 0.01) compared with placebo, whereas body fat, sagittal abdominal diameter, and weight decreased versus baseline, but the difference was not significantly different from placebo. The CLA mixture did not change glucose metabolism, body composition, or weight compared with placebo but lowered HDL cholesterol (-2%; P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS These results reveal important isomer-specific metabolic actions of CLA in abdominally obese humans. A CLA-induced insulin resistance has previously been described only in lipodystrophic mice. Considering the use of CLA-supplements among obese individuals, it is important to clarify the clinical consequences of these results, but they also provide physiological insights into the role of specific dietary fatty acids as modulators of insulin resistance in humans.
Perceptual evaluation of non-verbal cues from a humanoid robot for multi-party teleconferences

Humanoid robots that act as proxies for real people are useful for turn-taking in multi-party teleconferences due to their telepresence effect. However, it is still rather challenging to explore if the robot motions are effective or not as non-verbal cues. For this purpose, this paper presents a perceptual evaluation of robot motions in the context of a multi-party teleconference. Our main focus is on analyzing the relationship between the robot motions and the motivation to speak by testing the following two hypotheses. (H1) There are some kinds of robot motions that are more effective for expressing the motivation to speak than others. (H2) The intensity of robot motions is correlated with the perceived strength of the motivation to speak. In a preliminary experiment with five subjects, we confirmed that our hypotheses were reasonable and we formulated the robot motions that were used in the experiments. In each of 10 evaluation experiments, three participants attended a teleconference for about 30 minutes and one of them (called a subject) evaluated the robot motions in real time. The evaluation results from a total of 10 subjects in 10 experiments demonstrate that both hypotheses can be partly upheld.
Relationship between tensile stress and plaque growth after balloon angioplasty treated with and without intracoronary beta-brachytherapy.

AIMS We investigated the influence of tensile stress on plaque growth after balloon angioplasty with and without beta-radiation therapy. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-one consecutive patients successfully treated with balloon angioplasty were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively by means of an ECG-gated three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound post-procedure and at follow-up. Eighteen patients were irradiated with catheter-based beta-radiation ((90)Sr/(90)Y source) and 13 were not (control). Studied segments were divided into 2 mm subsegments. Thus 184 irradiated and 111 non-irradiated subsegments were included. Tensile stress was calculated according to Laplace's law. The radiation dose was calculated by means of dose-volume histograms. Plaque growth was positively correlated to tensile stress in both the radiation and control groups (r=0.374, P=0.0001 and r=0.305, P=0.001). Low-dose subsegments (<6 Gy) had a significant correlation (r=0.410, P=0.0001) whereas no correlation was observed in the effective-dose subsegments (> or = 6 Gy). Multivariate analysis identified tensile stress as the only independent predictor of plaque increase in non-irradiated subsegments, whereas actual dose and plaque morphology were stronger predictors in irradiated subsegments. CONCLUSION The results of this study suggest that plaque growth is related to tensile stress after balloon angioplasty. Intracoronary brachytherapy may alter the biophysical process on plaque growth when the prescribed dose is effectively delivered.
cient locking for multicore architectures

The scalability of multithreaded applications on current multicore systems is hampered by the performance of critical sections, due in particular to the costs of access contention and cache misses. In this paper, we propose a new locking technique, Remote Core Locking (RCL) that aims to improve the performance of critical sections in legacy applications on multicore architectures. The idea of RCL is to replace lock acquisitions by optimized remote procedure calls to a dedicated server core. RCL limits the performance collapse observed with regular locks when many threads try to acquire a lock concurrently and removes the need to transfer lock-protected shared data to the core acquiring the lock: such data can typically remain in the server core's cache. Our microbenchmark shows that under high contention, RCL is always more e cient than the other state-of-the-art lock mechanisms, and a preliminary macrobenchmark evaluation shows performance gains on SPLASH-2 benchmarks (speedup up to 4.85) and on the Web cache application memcached (speedup up to 2.62). Key-words: Locks, Multicore ∗ LIP6/INRIA † DIKU,INRIA/LIP6 ‡ INRIA/LIP6 ha l-0 06 41 25 2, v er si on 1 15 N ov 2 01 1 Verrouillage e cace pour les architectures multicores Résumé : L'extensibilité des applications parallèles sur les architectures multicoeurs modernes est limitée par la performance des sections critiques, pour des raisons de contention sur le bus et de défauts de cache. Dans cet article, nous proposons une nouvelle approche pour l'implémentation des verrous, appelée Verrou À Distance (VAD), qui permet d'améliorer la performance des applications patrimoniales sur les architectures multicoeurs. L'idée du VAD est de remplacer les acquisitions de verrous par des appels de procédures à distance vers un ou plusieurs coeurs dédiés. Le VAD permet de limiter l'e et d'e ondrement des performances observé avec les verrous classiques lorsque de nombreux ls d'exécution tentent d'acquérir simultanément un verrou. Le VAD évite également le transfert des données protégées par le verrou vers le coeur qui en fait l'acquisition. De fait, ces données restent dans le cache du coeur serveur. Sous haute contention, nos micro-évaluations montre que le VAD est toujours plus performant que l'état de l'art en matière de verrou. Sur des applications patrimoniales, nos expérimentations montrent un gain en performance pouvant aller jusqu'à 4.85 sur le banc d'essai SPLASH-2 et jusqu'à 2.62 sur le cache Web memcached. Mots-clés : Verrous, Multicoeurs ha l-0 06 41 25 2, v er si on 1 15 N ov 2 01 1 E cient locking for multicore architectures 3
CS 2 : A Searchable Cryptographic Cloud Storage System

Cloud storage provides a highly available, easily accessible and inexpensive remote data repository to clients who cannot afford to maintain their own storage infrastructure. While many applications of cloud storage require security guarantees against the cloud provider (e.g., storage of high-impact business data or medical records), most services cannot guarantee that the provider will not see or modify client data. This is largely because the current approaches for providing security (e.g., encryption and digital signatures) diminish the utility and/or performance of cloud storage. This paper presents CS2, a cryptographic cloud storage system that guarantees confidentiality, integrity and verifiability without sacrificing utility. In particular, while CS2 provides security against the cloud provider, clients are still able not only to efficiently access their data through a search interface but also to add and delete files securely. The CS2 system is based on new highly-efficient and provably-secure cryptographic primitives and protocols. In particular, we (1) construct the first searchable symmetric encryption scheme that is adaptively secure, dynamic and achieves sub-linear search time; (2) introduce and construct search authenticators (which allow a client to efficiently verify the correctness of search operations); and (3) design an efficient and dynamic proof of data possession scheme. Based in part on our new constructions, we propose two cryptographic protocols for cloud storage which we prove secure in the ideal/real-world paradigm. The first protocol implements standard keyword search. Our second protocol implements what we refer to as assisted keyword search, where a user performs a keyword search, sees a summary of the results and asks for a subset of these results. Experimental results from an implementation of CS2 over both simulated and real-world data sets demonstrate that all operations achieve practical performance.
Cooperative ARQs with opportunistic distributed space-time coding: Effective protocols and performance analysis

The paper studies effective protocols and corresponding performance of automatic retransmission request (ARQ) via decode-and-forward (DF) opportunistic distributed space-time coding (ODSTC). Analysis shows that the diversity via ARQ can be drastically increased by allowing non-active relays to overhear the DSTC signal sent by the active relays. Nevertheless, simple schemes without overhearing may also achieve the same diversity when the link quality between the source-relay or the relay-destination is good, hence greatly alleviating the need for a complex protocol with overhearing. Moreover, using more relays opportunistically does provide a higher coding gain if the source-relay channel quality is extremely good, otherwise using two or three relays gives almost the same performance as if using all of them.
A near-quadratic algorithm for the alpha-connected two-center decision problem

We consider the problem of deciding if a set of points can be covered by two discs with centers p and q and common radius r such that the ratio d(p; q)=r is bounded below by a user supplied constant. We also present an O(n 2 log 2 n) algorithm for this problem.
Survey of organisation, actual stocks, and procedures of Ex situ conservation of Heritage Sheep Breed

Dit rapport beschrijft de resultaten van onderzoek naar de maatregelen voor het behoud van zeldzame schapenrassen in Frankrijk, Griekenland, Nederland en United KingdomThis report describes the results of a survey of the organisation and procedures of ex situ conservation of Heritage Sheep breeds in France, Greece, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom
Unobservable factors and panel data sets: an investigation in the labour market

This paper investigates the effects of unobservable factors that, as is well-known, contaminate two of the variables most used in labour market research, namely the stock of unemployment and the stock of vacancies. Using a matching function framework, we compare different panel data estimators using a number of appropriate Hausman tests robust to deviations from the classical errors assumptions. The relevance of the choice of the model specification is underlined. It is shown to what extent conclusions lacking a rigorous statistical analysis may be misleading.
Accurate and Efficient Algorithms that Adapt to Privacy-Enhanced Video for Improved Assistive Monitoring

Automated monitoring algorithms operating on live video streamed from a home can effectively aid in several assistive monitoring goals, such as detecting falls or estimating daily energy expenditure. Use of video raises obvious privacy concerns. Several privacy enhancements have been proposed such as modifying a person in video by introducing blur, silhouette, or bounding-box. Person extraction is fundamental in video-based assistive monitoring and degraded in the presence of privacy enhancements; however, privacy enhancements have characteristics that can opportunistically be adapted to. We propose two adaptive algorithms for improving assistive monitoring goal performance with privacy-enhanced video: specific-color hunter and edge-void filler. A nonadaptive algorithm, foregrounding, is used as the default algorithm for the adaptive algorithms. We compare nonadaptive and adaptive algorithms with 5 common privacy enhancements on the effectiveness of 8 automated monitoring goals. The nonadaptive algorithm performance on privacy-enhanced video is degraded from raw video. However, adaptive algorithms can compensate for the degradation. Energy estimation accuracy in our tests degraded from 90.9% to 83.9%, but the adaptive algorithms significantly compensated by bringing the accuracy up to 87.1%. Similarly, fall detection accuracy degraded from 1.0 sensitivity to 0.86 and from 1.0 specificity to 0.79, but the adaptive algorithms compensated accuracy back to 0.92 sensitivity and 0.90 specificity. Additionally, the adaptive algorithms were computationally more efficient than the nonadaptive algorithm, averaging 1.7% more frames processed per second.
Electrical, Mechanical, and Thermal Properties of LDPE Graphene Nanoplatelets Composites Produced by Means of Melt Extrusion Process

Composites of LDPE filled with different amounts of graphene nanoplatelets (GnP) were prepared in form of films by means of precoating technique and single screw melt-extrusion using two types of screws, compression and mixing. This manufacturing process imposes strong anisotropy on the sample’s morphology, in which the nanoplatelets become oriented along the extrusion direction. Such orientation of GnP in LDPE matrix is confirmed by scanning electron microscopy observations and it yields unique electrical properties. As compared to pure LDPE, significant reductions of the through-plane conductivity are found for the composites at relatively low electric fields (<20 kV/mm) at low filler concentrations. Above the field level of 20 kV/mm, a crossover effect is observed that results in a strong field dependency of the conductivity where the non-linear behavior starts to dominate. Moreover, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) results indicate a decrease in polymer crystallinity of the composite matrix with increasing filler content, whereas thermogravimetric (TG) analysis shows a slight increase in the material’s thermal stability. Application of GnP also leads to improvement of mechanical properties, manifested by the increase of Young’s modulus and tensile strength in both types of samples.
Natural Amenities Drive Rural Population Change

Climate, topography, and water area are highly related to rural county population change over the past 25 years. A natural amenities index, derived and discussed here, captures much of this relationship. Average 1970-96 population change in nonmetropolitan counties was I percent among counties low on the natural amenities index and 120 percent among counties high on the index. Most retirement counties and recreation counties score in the top quarter of the amenities index. Employment change is also highly related to natural amenities, although more so over the past 25 years than in the current decade. The importance of particular amentities varies by region. In the Midwest, for example, people are drawn to lakes for recreation and retirement, while people are attracted to the West for its varied topography.
Structurally stable design of output regulation for a class of nonlinear systems

The problem of output regulation of the systems affected by unknown constant parameters is considered here. The main goal is to find a unique feedback compensator (independent on the actual values of unknown parameters) that drives a given error (control criterion) asymptotically to zero for all values of parameters from a certain neighbourhood of their nominal value. Such a task is usually referred to as the structurally stable output regulation problem. Under certain assumptions, such a problem is known to be solvable using dynamical error feedback. The corresponding necessary and sufficient conditions basically include the solvability of the so-called regulator equation and the existence of an immersion of a certain system with outputs into the one having favourable observability and controllability properties. Its model is then directly used for dynamic compensator construction. Usually, such an immersion may be selected as the one to an observable linear system with outputs. In a general case, the above mentioned conditions are highly nonconstructive and difficult to check. This paper studies a certain particular class of systems, the so-called strictly triangular polynomial systems, where that immersion to a linear system can be obtained in a constructive way. Moreover, it provides computer algorithm (based on MAPLE symbolic package) to design the corresponding solution to the structurally stable output regulation problem. Examples together with computer simulations are included to clarify the suggested approach.
Gender pay equity in Australia: Where are we now and where are we heading?

In this article we consider the current trends in gender pay equity in Australia, identifying the lack of improvement, and indeed the recent deterioration, in the national gender wage ratio. We analyse the gender wage gap by industry, State, and labour force status and consider developments in the regulatory sphere and social context which have the potential to have an impact on gender pay equity. We conclude with a discussion of the future prospects for the gender wage gap.
Market Reactions to the Information Content of Earnings over Alternative Quarters

This paper addresses issues left unanswered from prior published research showing that fourth-quarter earnings exhibit higher forecast errors. It offers an explanation for these findings and presents evidence to support this explanation. Unlike prior research, the market's reaction to fourth-quarter earnings as compared to that of the other three quarters is documented using a metric designed to capture both the size and sign of the forecast error. Our analysis indicates that there is a differential market reaction to earnings surprises over alternative quarters. Large negative unexpected earnings in the fourth quarter are associated with a smaller negative adjustment in stock returns as compared to all other quarters. Such an adjustment agrees with the explanation developed here for the higher forecast errors in the fourth quarter. These results do not support previous research that found counter-intuitive results concerning the relationship between earnings surprises and stock market returns for the fourth quarter.
Endothelial progenitors in pulmonary hypertension: new pathophysiology and therapeutic implications

Pulmonary hypertension is a progressive and disabling disease with as yet unclear pathogenesis, limited treatment options and poor prognosis. This is why the discovery of new pathogenic mechanisms and therapeutic strategies are needed. Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are bone marrow-derived cells involved in endothelial homeostasis, as well as physiological and pathological angiogenesis. Experimental and clinical studies have been conducted to understand the possible contribution of EPCs to the pathogenesis of pulmonary hypertension. Conflicting results have been obtained regarding the protective versus harmful effects of EPCs on the pulmonary vasculature. However, preliminary clinical trials using EPC-based therapies in patients with pulmonary hypertension show benefit of this approach, thus revealing EPCs as potential therapeutic targets. This review critically summarises the complex and conflicting data on EPCs and pulmonary hypertension, in both humans and animals, putting them into the context of lung (patho)physiology. The resulting scenario identifies EPCs as a novel and fascinating tool to study pathophysiology and therapy in the setting of pulmonary hypertension.
DYNAMIC COLLECTIONS IN INDRI

Text search engines have historically been designed for unchanging collections of documents. While this is fine for many applications, a growing number of important applications in news, finance, law and desktop search require indexes that can be efficiently updated. Previous research into supporting dynamic collections revolves around incremental methods. Incremental systems are optimized for adding large batches of documents to an existing index. These systems do not generally allow for queries to run while an incremental update is taking place. This work presents recent changes to the Indri search engine to support dynamic collections. Unlike previous incremental systems, Indri does not require large batch sizes to achieve efficient indexing performance. Indri is also designed to be as concurrent as possible, allowing queries to run while documents are added to the system.
A Sampling-Based Algorithm for Approximating Maximum Average Value Region in Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor network, sensory readings are often noisy due to the imprecision of measuring hardware and the disturbance of deployment environment, so it is often inaccurate if we use individual sensor readings to answer queries. In this paper, we consider a useful application of sensor network: maximum average value region query. This query returns the region with the maximum average value among all possible regions in the network, where the region is a fix-sized circle pre-defined by users. Using the average value of a region to answer the query, noises between sensors will be neutralized with each other, which will make the results more reliable. However, because of the huge amount of possible regions in the network, it is costly to process the query exactly. Therefore, we propose a sampling-based algorithm AMAVR to deal with the problem approximately. AMAVR uses a background value to prune the useless regions which cannot be the result. A further optimization strategy is also given to handle the situation that, background value based filter does not work when some individual sensor nodes have higher values than their neighbors. By using both of the two techniques, the scale of the sampling population can be effectively reduced, that is, we cost less energy to get a satisfying result. At last, the conducted simulations demonstrate the energy efficiency of the proposed methods in our paper.