Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Changing Corporate Governance Paradigm: Implications for Transition and Developing Countries

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications, in particular for developing and transition countries, from this literature. We conclude that its focus on the plight of small investors is too narrow when applied to these countries. We argue that this group is unlikely to play an important role in most developing and transition countries. External investors may still be crucial, but they are more likely to come in as strategic investors or creditors. The paper also proposes a broader paradigm including other stakeholders and mechanisms of governance in order to better understand the problems facing these countries and generate policy implications that compensate for the weaknesses of capital markets.
MONITORING & CONTROL AND 3D VISION SYSTEM FOR A CLIMBING AND DRILLING ROBOT IN NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

This paper deals with M&C aspects and 3D vision system in the Saferdrill * project. Saferdrill is a car-size 4-legged climbing robot dedicated to cliffs consolidation, for landslide prevention. The usual way of securing unstable cliffs consists in performing a geological survey, and then to raise scaffolds and have humans setting up and operating cumbersome drillers to make holes where 20 meters-long iron rods are inserted for consolidating the overall structure. Using instead a remotely operated climbing robot is an innovative approach, which brings very significant benefits such as reducing human exposition to danger, reducing the cost, and reducing the environmental impact during operations.
Simulating the impact of H I fluctuations on matched filter search for ionized bubbles in redshifted 21-cm maps

Extending the formalism of Datta, Bharadwaj & Choudhury for detecting ionized bubbles in redshifted 21-cm maps using a matched filtering technique, we use different simulations to analyse the impact of H i fluctuations outside the bubble on the detectability of the bubble. In the first three kinds of simulations there is a spherical bubble of comoving radius R b , the one that we are trying to detect, located at the centre, and the neutral hydrogen (H i) outside the bubble traces the underlying dark matter distribution. We consider three different possible scenarios of re-ionization, i.e. (i) there is a single bubble (SB) in the field of view (FoV) and the hydrogen neutral fraction is constant outside this bubble, (ii) patchy re-ionization (PR) with many small ionized bubbles in the FoV (PR1) and (iii) many spherical ionized bubbles of the same radius R b (PR2). The centres of the extra bubbles trace the dark matter distribution. The fourth kind of simulation uses more realistic maps based on seminumeric modelling (SM) of ionized regions. We make predictions for the currently functioning Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and a forthcoming instrument, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) at a redshift of 6 (corresponding to an observed frequency 203 MHz) for 1000 h observations. We find that for both the SB and PR1 scenarios the fluctuating intergalactic medium restricts bubble detection to size Rb ≤ 6Mpc and R b ≤ 12 Mpc for the GMRT and the MWA, respectively, however large be the integration time. These results are well explained by analytical predictions. In the PR2 scenario, we find that bubble detection is almost impossible for neutral fraction x HI < 0.6 because of large uncertainty due to the Hi fluctuations. Applying the matched filter technique to the SM scenario, we find that it works well even when the targeted ionized bubble is non-spherical due to surrounding bubbles and inhomogeneous recombination. We find that determining the size and positions of the bubbles is not limited by the Hi fluctuations in the SB and PR1 scenario but limited by the instrument's angular resolution instead, and this can be done more precisely for larger bubble. We also find that for bubble detection the GMRT configuration is somewhat superior to the proposed MWA.
Overview and summary

A variety of studies indicate that the process of atherosclerosis begins in childhood, that this process is related to elevated levels of blood cholesterol, and that these levels are often predictive of elevated blood cholesterol in adulthood. Despite substantial success in reducing mortality due to coronary heart disease (CHD) in the past two decades, this disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Preventing or slowing the atherosclerotic process in childhood and adolescence could extend the years of healthy life for many Americans. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BLOOD CHOLESTEROL LEVELS IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE High blood cholesterol levels clearly play a role in the development of CHD in adults. This has been established by many laboratory, clinical, pathologic, and epidemiologic studies. A variety of studies also have demonstrated that the atherosclerotic process begins in childhood and is affected by high blood cholesterol levels. The evidence can be summarized as follows: • Compared to their counterparts in many other countries, US children and adolescents have higher blood cholesterol levels and higher intakes of saturated fatty acids and cholesterol, and US adults have higher blood cholesterol levels and higher rates of CHD morbidity and mortality. • Autopsy studies demonstrate that early coronary atherosclerosis or precursors of atherosclerosis often begin in childhood and adolescence. • High serum total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, and very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) cholesterol levels, and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels, are correlated with the extent of early atherosclerotic lesions in adolescents and young adults. • Children and adolescents with elevated serum cholesterol, particularly LDL-cholesterol levels, frequently come from families in which there is a high incidence of CHD among adult members.
A Dynamic Scheduling Algorithm for Complex Product with Batching Machines

At present, scheduling research with batching machines mainly solves scheduling problem without constraint among operations. There is no effective scheduling method for complex product with batching machines. To that end, a new algorithm is proposed to solve dynamic scheduling problem for complex product with batching machines. And the maximum lot-size of the batching machines is two. First, based on the feature of the structure of the processing tree which is provided with complex product, the algorithm adopts Priority strategy, Short-time strategy and Long-path strategy to schedule operations. Second, when the operations belong to batching machine, the algorithm adopts Long-path strategy, Critical-time waiting strategy and Short-time of precursor strategy to schedule operations. Theoretical analysis and examples show that the algorithm can solve dynamic scheduling problem for complex product with batching machines and the maximum lot-size of the batching machines is two. In addition, the complexity is not more than quadratic polynomial.
Distribution of calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) in the leaves of Brassica rapa under varying exogenous Ca and Mg supply.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Leafy vegetable Brassica crops are an important source of dietary calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) and represent potential targets for increasing leaf Ca and Mg concentrations through agronomy or breeding. Although the internal distribution of Ca and Mg within leaves affects the accumulation of these elements, such data are not available for Brassica. The aim of this study was to characterize the internal distribution of Ca and Mg in the leaves of a vegetable Brassica and to determine the effects of altered exogenous Ca and Mg supply on this distribution. METHODS Brassica rapa ssp. trilocularis 'R-o-18' was grown at four different Ca:Mg treatments for 21 d in a controlled environment. Concentrations of Ca and Mg were determined in fully expanded leaves using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Internal distributions of Ca and Mg were determined in transverse leaf sections at the base and apex of leaves using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) with cryo-scanning electron microscopy (cryo-SEM). KEY RESULTS Leaf Ca and Mg concentrations were greatest in palisade and spongy mesophyll cells, respectively, although this was dependent on exogenous supply. Calcium accumulation in palisade mesophyll cells was enhanced slightly under high Mg supply; in contrast, Mg accumulation in spongy mesophyll cells was not affected by Ca supply. CONCLUSIONS The results are consistent with Arabidopsis thaliana and other Brassicaceae, providing phenotypic evidence that conserved mechanisms regulate leaf Ca and Mg distribution at a cellular scale. The future study of Arabidopsis gene orthologues in mutants of this reference B. rapa genotype will improve our understanding of Ca and Mg homeostasis in plants and may provide a model-to-crop translation pathway for targeted breeding.
The Economic Impact of Security Breaches on Publicly Traded Corporations: An Empirical Investigation

In a 2008 survey of 522 computer security professionals, the Computer Security Institute found an average reported cost close to $500,000 for those companies that experienced a financial fraud. A survey of potential cloud computing adopters show that security and privacy are the primary concerns for not using the cloud. The present research conducts an event study to investigate the impact of publicly announced security breaches on the market value of the breached companies. We utilize the cumulative abnormal returns, risk shifts, and volume changes to measure this impact. Our results show that the cumulative abnormal return due to a security breach is -. 19%. We also found the mean risk factor increases by about 22 percent. Our results also show an abnormal trading volume of about 6%. None of the previous research studies in the information systems area has investigated the impact of security breaches on cumulative abnormal returns, volume changes, and risk shifts.
Management of Non-Vitamin K Antagonist Oral Anticoagulants in the Perioperative Setting

The field of oral anticoagulation has evolved with the arrival of non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) including an anti-IIa agent (dabigatran etexilate) and anti-Xa agents (rivaroxaban and apixaban). The main specificities of these drugs are predictable pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics but special attention should be paid in the elderly, in case of renal dysfunction and in case of emergency. In addition, their perioperative management is challenging, especially with the absence of specific antidotes. Effectively, periods of interruption before surgery or invasive procedures depend on half-life and keeping a permanent balance between bleeding and thromboembolic risks. In addition, few data regarding the link between plasma concentrations and their effects are provided. Routine laboratory tests are altered by NOACs and quantitative measurements are not widely performed. This paper provides a review on the management of NOACs in the perioperative setting, including the estimation of the bleeding and thrombotic risk, the periods of interruption, the indication of heparin bridging, the usefulness of laboratory tests before surgery or invasive procedure, and the time of resuming. Most data are based on expert's opinions.
Cumulative risk, the home environment, and interactive book reading between mother and child as predictors of school readiness

CUMULATIVE RISK, THE HOME ENVIRONMENT, AND INTERACTIVE BOOK READING BETWEEN MOTHER AND CHILD AS PREDICTORS OF SCHOOL READINESS by LAURA M. NORTHERNER DECEMBER 2013 Advisor: Dr. Christopher J. Trentacosta Major: Psychology (Clinical) Degree: Master of Arts There is evidence in the literature that early school readiness predicts later school performance (Duncan et al., 2007; La Paro and Pianta, 2000). There is less research, however, on the impact of risk factors on a child’s school readiness, and protective factors that may lessen the negative effects of various risk factors. This study explored predictors of school readiness, including cumulative socio-demographic risk, the home environment, and interactive book reading behaviors. Participants included 104 young mothers and their children. The mother and child dyads were assessed at three time points. Cumulative socio-demographic risk was measured in the lab when the children were 18 months old. The home environment and interactive book reading were collected at the mothers’ homes when the children were 24 months old. The outcome measure of school readiness was collected at the mothers’ homes when the children were 36 months old. It was expected that cumulative socio-demographic risk, the home environment and interactive reading behaviors would each predict school readiness. It was also hypothesized that the home environment would moderate the relationship between cumulative risk and school readiness. Finally, it was expected that interactive reading behaviors would
ERK-Dependent Modulation of Cerebellar Synaptic Plasticity after Chronic Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol Exposure

Chronic exposure to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) induces tolerance to cannabinoid-induced locomotor effects, which are mediated by cannabinoid receptors (CB1Rs) located in motor control regions, including the cerebellum. There is substantial evidence of cerebellar CB1R molecular adaptation and modifications in receptor signaling after prolonged cannabinoid exposure. However, very little is known about the effects of chronic cannabinoid administration on cerebellar synaptic plasticity, which may contribute to the development of cannabinoid behavioral tolerance. In the cerebellar cortex, activation of CB1R inhibits excitatory synaptic transmission at parallel fiber (PF)–Purkinje cell (PC) synapses by decreasing neurotransmitter release. Our study aimed to investigate the neurophysiological adaptive responses occurring at cerebellar PF-PC cell synapses after repeated THC exposure. In THC-tolerant mice, an increase of the basal release probability was found at PF-PC synapses, in parallel with a facilitation of slow mGluR1 (metabotropic glutamate receptor type 1)-mediated excitatory postsynaptic currents and a reduced sensitivity to the inhibitory effects of the CB1R agonist CP55,940 [(−)-cis-3-[2-hydroxy-4-(1,1-dimethylheptyl)phenyl]-trans-4-(3-hydroxypropyl)cyclohexanol]. Additionally, after repeated THC exposures, presynaptic PF-PC long-term potentiation was blocked by A1R (adenosine receptor-1) activation. Inhibition of the extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK) pathway prevented these alterations of cerebellar synaptic transmission and plasticity. In summary, we provide evidence for ERK-dependent modulatory mechanisms at PF-PC synapses after chronic THC administration. This contributes to generation of forms of pathological synaptic plasticity that might play a role in cannabinoid dependence.
Representational Interoperability of Linguistic and Collaborative Knowledge Bases

Creating a Natural Language Processing (NLP) application often requires to access lexical-semantic Knowledge Bases (KBs). Recently, Collaborative Knowledge Bases (CKBs) such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary1 have been recognized as promising lexicalsemantic KBs for NLP (Zesch et al., 2008b), complementing traditional Linguistic Knowledge Bases (LKBs). As CKBs differ significantly from LKBs concerning their content, structure and topological properties, the interoperability between CKBs and LKBs has become a major issue. To address this problem, we have developed a model of representational interoperability between LKBs and CKBs, which abstracts over the differences in their structures, and enables a uniform representation of their content in terms of entities and lexical-semantic relations between them. An entity consists of a set of lexeme–sense pairs along with a part-of-speech (PoS). The currently supported relations are the lexical relations synonymy and antonymy, as well as the semantic relations hypernymy, hyponymy, holonymy, meronymy and other, which covers any lexical-semantic relation other than the previously listed. NLP algorithms can thus be implemented in an one-time effort, as they only have to “know” about generalized entities and relations instead of being adapted to each KB individually. The KBs currently integrated are the LKBs WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), GermaNet (Kunze, 2004), Cyc (Lenat and Guha, 1989), Roget’s Thesaurus (Jarmasz and Szpakowicz, 2003), Leipzig Annotation Project (Biemann, 2005), and the CKBs Wikipedia and Wiktionary, which are available for a large number of lan-
Supply Chain Management System for Construction Material Planning

Abstract: This study relies on integrated inventory theory which merges with the supply chain concept and aims at the steel bar material of precast factory’s two-echelon supply chain system. In order to consider the variable demand rate, unfixed supply time, unfixed supply frequency and unfixed supply quantity, this study builds a strategic model that minimizes the total inventory cost of all participators. Based on the established model, the material’s supply plan comes into existence, which takes into consideration the time and quantity of material supply, and the starting time of the supplier’s production. It is expected that the study result can be useful reference for participators to deal with the material supply in a more efficient way.
Gaussian mixture model and spatial-temporal evaluation for object detection and tracking in video surveillance system

Scene analysis is very important in a video surveillance system, with purpose to gain information and knowledge from the surrounding. There are many researches covering problems in object detection and tracking, but solve it only partially. This paper will cover an integral technique to do object detection and tracking for video surveillance. First, pixels in the images will be modelled with gaussian mixture model with K-Means algorithm to separate foreground from background image. Then, morphological cleaning is applied to remove noise pixels. Objects will be formed with spatial evaluation, with color mean and contour chain code as its feature. Tracking will be performed with temporal evaluation, i.e. inter-frame object features and distance comparison. This technique is doing well in object detection and tracking, with high true positive and low false negative, but still suffering from false positive in dynamic background scene. The implementation is not perfect, either, with only 30%-50% video speed from the original.
The Algerian Bank's Sterilization Policy and the Sustainability Problematic: Roberto Frenkel's Scenarios (2005-2015)

تهدف هذه الدراسة أساسا إلى سبر غور السياسة التعقيمية المطبقة من طرف بنك الجزائر بشكل مستمر دون أن تظهر بوادر الخوف من تكاليفها المتراكمة خلال فترة لا بأس بها من الزمن. وتعد سيناريوهات Roberto Frankel من أفصل المعادلات التي تعطي الدلالة المتكاملة الجوانب في هذا السياق، ولأجل هذا تم الاعتماد على بيانات سنوية تزامنت والطفرة النفطية في الجزائر (-2005 1520) تخص جميع المتغيرات التي نصت عليها تلك المعادلات من أجل محاكاة السيناريوهات وتشخيص وضعية بنك الجزائر. ولقد أكدت نتائج الدراسة أن السياسة التعقيمية مازالت لحد الآن تتصف بالاستدامة في التطبيق استنادا إلى ثلاث نتائج فرعية تمثلت في: المستوى المتدني لسعر الفائدة المحلي (%2)؛ هامش مناورة واسع لاستقلالية السياسة النقدية (يتراوح بين 16 إلى %28 )؛ ونتائج شبه مالية موجبة طيلة الفترة ككل.
Alleviating Dynamic Resource Allocation for Bag of Tasks Applications in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing can provide facilities such as infrastructure and applications to clients on demand. Successful servicing of cloud paradigm necessitates accurate resource allocation. Whereas there are different workload types with different characteristics that should be supported by cloud computing, there is no any single solution that can allocate resources to all imaginable demands optimally. Therefore, there is a need to design specific solutions to allocate resources for each workload type. Based on that, in this paper, we focus on bag of tasks workload type and propose an idea to facilitate dynamic resource allocation for it. Technically, the proposed approach exploits users’ service level agreement parameters and classifies them. It controls utilization of servers to response users in a reasonable time. To validate the proposed approach, we evaluate it using the Monte Carlo simulation. Then, the experimental results are compared with two reference models, namely First Fit and Proportional Share. The proposed approach outperforms the reference models in terms of the total cost of resource allocation and response time of clients.
A New Synchronizer Design - Computers, IEEE Transactions on

tained indeed is considerably larger than its maximum cornplete A New Synchronizer Design counterpart. In fact, the maximum incomplete subcubes always have the average size of roughly two times as large as that of their complete counterparts [16], clearly exhibiting the advantage of reconfiguring a faulty hypercube into an incomplete system. While our algorithms for finding maximum incomplete subcubes could arrive at Jacqueline Walker, Student Member, IEEE, and
The OmniTread serpentine robot for industrial inspection and surveillance

Purpose – Describes the design, construction, and performance of the OmniTread serpentine robot. Provides a review of other designs in this new area of mobile robotics. Presents innovative and unique mechanical and control solutions.Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical analysis of key aspects of the mechanical design and their implications on the performance of the robot is presented. Extensive experimentation and testing helped optimize choices of materials for the critical components: tracks and pneumatic bellows. Performance was evaluated by an independent third party: the Southwest Research Institute.Findings – It was found that pneumatic bellows are optimal joint actuators for serpentine robots. They can provide both strength and compliance, depending on the task, at minimal volume and weight.Research limitations/implications – The described prototype is tethered to external sources of electrical and pneumatic power. A smaller and fully self‐contained version of the OmniTread is currently unde.
Machiavellianism, Stakeholder Orientation, and Support for Sustainability Reporting

This study investigates the relations among Machiavellianism, the stakeholder orientation, and Italian managers' support for corporate social and environmental reporting (SER). These relationships have not previously been investigated among a sample of experienced managers but have important implications. As anticipated, Machiavellianism had a strong negative association with the support for SER. Machiavellianism was also negatively related to the stakeholder orientation, which in turn was positively correlated with the support for SER. Support for the stakeholder orientation partially mediated the association between Machiavellianism and SER. The findings advance our understanding of the motivations for sustainability reporting by documenting that managers' fundamental personality traits and economic ideologies are closely associated and are important determinants of normative support for social and environmental disclosures. We further suggest that the results support the case for mandated compliance&#8208;with&#8208;standard sustainability reports coupled with a requirement that such reports be independently audited.