Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strategic Drivers for Implementing Sustainability Programs in Portuguese Organizations–Let’s Listen to Aristotle: From Triple to Quadruple Bottom Line

This article describes a study that investigated the main strategic drivers that influence the implementation of sus tainability/social responsibility programs. An online survey was administered to managers of Portuguese organizations with certified management systems. The findings suggest that the implementation of such programs is mainly correlated to: 1. ) the approach to understanding and working toward the satisfaction of the community’s needs (in the broad sense of social responsibility); 2. ) how systematically sustainability within the organization is identified and managed (e.g., pollution prevention, improved environmental performance, and compliance with the applicable environmental laws); and 3. ) the degree to which the organization tries to understand the needs of the employees and works toward satisfying them. In addition to the survey, five interviews with top managers of the surveyed organizations provided some useful insights. There was no consensus on the meaning of sustainability and social responsibility: some described it as an instrumental approach for obtaining better organizational results, while others regarded it as the right thing to do (i.e., it is values driven). In all cases, however, the managers supported a kind of umbrella construct under which different size corporations use different models (for example, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), ISO 14001 environmental management systems), although some managers reported that they simply do not know what to do. All of those surveyed agreed that the lack of a systematic approach could represent a major threat to their organization, making them willing to pay more attention and take more action on the issue of sustainability. An additional suggestion made by managers was to change from a triple bottom line (economic dimension, environmental dimension, social equity dimension) to a quadruple bottom line by adding another dimension: personal and family happiness. This fourth dimension was recognized by the Greek philosopher/thinker Aristotle (384-322 BCE) who thought of happiness as the highest good (virtue) and ultimate goal and purpose of life, achieved through living well, in harmony. Such harmony suggests a balance and a lack of excess—in other words a sustainable existence.
Open Problem: Efficient Online Sparse Regression

In practical scenarios, it is often necessary to be able to make predictions with very limited access to the features of any example. We provide one natural formulation as an online sparse regression problem with squared loss, and ask whether it is possible to achieve sublinear regret with ecient algorithms (i.e. polynomial running time in the natural parameters of the problem).
The usefulness of the audit report in investment and financing decisions

The usefulness of the auditor’s report is sometimes called into question, the validity of the information it contains for users when making decisions therefore being criticized. This survey is aimed, on the one hand, at dealers and brokering companies, and, on the other at banks to find out exactly how important the audit report is in the investment decisions that analysts make, as well as in lending decisions made by credit institutions. In this sense, the respondents are asked about the source they consider relevant when making decisions, that is to say, the influence the auditor’s opinion (clean, qualified, adverse or disclaimer) has when investing in and financing companies. The results show that users of audit reports consider the information provided in the auditor’s opinion as useful and important when making decisions, both regarding their decisions of investing in and financing companies as well as the amount of the investment or the loan to grant.
Prediction of clinical phenotypes in invasive breast carcinomas from the integration of radiomics and genomics data

Abstract. Genomic and radiomic imaging profiles of invasive breast carcinomas from The Cancer Genome Atlas and The Cancer Imaging Archive were integrated and a comprehensive analysis was conducted to predict clinical outcomes using the radiogenomic features. Variable selection via LASSO and logistic regression were used to select the most-predictive radiogenomic features for the clinical phenotypes, including pathological stage, lymph node metastasis, and status of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Cross-validation with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was employed as the prediction metric. Higher AUCs were obtained in the prediction of pathological stage, ER, and PR status than for lymph node metastasis and HER2 status. Overall, the prediction performances by genomics alone, radiomics alone, and combined radiogenomics features showed statistically significant correlations with clinical outcomes; however, improvement on the prediction performance by combining genomics and radiomics data was not found to be statistically significant, most likely due to the small sample size of 91 cancer cases with 38 radiomic features and 144 genomic features.
Chikungunya Virus Nonstructural Protein 2 Inhibits Type I/II Interferon-Stimulated JAK-STAT Signaling

ABSTRACT Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is an emerging human pathogen transmitted by mosquitoes. Like that of other alphaviruses, CHIKV replication causes general host shutoff, leading to severe cytopathicity in mammalian cells, and inhibits the ability of infected cells to respond to interferon (IFN). Recent research, however, suggests that alphaviruses may have additional mechanisms to circumvent the host's antiviral IFN response. Here we show that CHIKV replication is resistant to inhibition by interferon once RNA replication has been established and that CHIKV actively suppresses the antiviral IFN response by preventing IFN-induced gene expression. Both CHIKV infection and CHIKV replicon RNA replication efficiently blocked STAT1 phosphorylation and/or nuclear translocation in mammalian cells induced by either type I or type II IFN. Expression of individual CHIKV nonstructural proteins (nsPs) showed that nsP2 was a potent inhibitor of IFN-induced JAK-STAT signaling. In addition, mutations in CHIKV-nsP2 (P718S) and Sindbis virus (SINV)-nsP2 (P726S) that render alphavirus replicons noncytopathic significantly reduced JAK-STAT inhibition. This host shutoff-independent inhibition of IFN signaling by CHIKV is likely to have an important role in viral pathogenesis.
Advancement in Nanoscale CMOS Device Design En Route to Ultra-Low-Power Applications

In recent years, the demand for power sensitive designs has grown significantly due to the fast growth of battery-operated portable applications. As the technology scaling continues unabated, subthreshold device design has gained a lot of attention due to the lowpower and ultra-low-power consumption in various applications. Design of low-power high-performance submicron and deep submicron CMOS devices and circuits is a big challenge. Short-channel effect is a major challenge for scaling the gate length down and below 0.1 µm. Detailed review and potential solutions for prolonging CMOS as the leading information technology proposed by various researchers in the past two decades are presented in this paper. This paper attempts to categorize the challenges and solutions for low-power and low-voltage application and thus provides a roadmap for device designers working in the submicron and deep submicron region of CMOS devices separately.
Client employment of previous auditors: shareholders’ views on auditor independence

The role of auditors is to add credibility to financial information and to reduce the risk of management manipulation or concealment. It is vital that auditors be independent of company management. In practice, however, various circumstances may pose a potential threat to auditor independence. One of these threats is the employment of an ex-auditor by a client company. Relatively little research has so far been carried out in this area. We investigated whether investors (both private and institutional) perceived the employment of a former auditor by an audit client as a threat to the independence of the audit firm and whether they would invest in a company which had ‘poached’ a member of the audit team. We found little evidence of concern on the part of institutional investors about the risks posed by auditors joining former client companies. However, private investors demonstrated significantly greater levels of concern about issues related to auditor independence. Although there were differences in the views of institutional and private investors, there did not appear to be a strong demand from respondents to our survey for more stringent restrictions on the movement of auditors from audit firms to audit clients.
Equilibrium in Auctions with Entry

The authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk-neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic. The presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare. The authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness (i.e., the relative abundance of buyers). Their analysis extends well-known revenue-equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies (e.g., reservation prices) in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry. Copyright 1994 by American Economic Association.
Retinoic Acid Fails to Reverse Oligohydramnios-Induced Pulmonary Hypoplasia in Fetal Rats

All-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) stimulates platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF)-A expression and enhances alveolarization in rat lungs. On d 16 of gestation, pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to either a retinoic acid group (intragastric ATRA at 10 mg/kg body weight) or a vehicle group. We punctured each amniotic sac, and fetuses in the opposite uterine horn served as controls. On d 21 of gestation, the fetuses were delivered by cesarean section. Rats subjected to oligohydramnios exhibited significantly lower lung weights and lung/body weight ratios, and ATRA had no effects on the body or lung weights of oligohydramnios-exposed rats. Lung PDGF-A and -B mRNA expression was significantly lower in oligohydramnios-exposed rats compared with control littermates of maternal vehicle-treated dams. Maternal retinoic acid treatment significantly increased PDGF-A and -B mRNA expression in control and oligohydramnios-exposed rats compared with all rats and oligohydramnios-exposed rats of maternal vehicle-treated dams, respectively. Rats exposed to oligohydramnios exhibited a significantly lower generation of alveolar saccules than did control rats in the maternal retinoic acid– and vehicle-treated groups. In this model, maternal retinoic acid treatment showed no positive effects on oligohydramnios-induced pulmonary hypoplasia in the pseudoglandular stage.
Top Ten Reasons to Not Share Your Code ( and why you should anyway )

I am an advocate of sharing the computer code used to produce tables or figures appearing in mathematical and scientific publications, particularly when the results produced by the code are an integral part of the research being presented. I’m not alone, and in fact the number of people thinking this way seems to be rapidly increasing, see for example [1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10]. But there is still much resistance to this idea, and in the past several years I have heard many of the same arguments repeated over and over. So I thought it might be useful to write down some of the arguments along with counter-arguments that may be worth considering. In this article I am thinking mostly of relatively small-scale code of the sort that might be developed to test a new algorithmic idea or verify that a new method performs as claimed, the sort of codes that might accompany articles in many SIAM journals. It can be at least as important to share and archive large scale simulation codes that are used as tools to do science or make policy decisions, but the issues are somewhat different and not all of the arguments below apply directly. However, as computational mathematics becomes increasingly important outside the ivory tower because of these large simulation codes, it is also worth remembering that the way we present our work can play a role in the ability of other scientists and engineers to do credible and reliable work that may have life-or-death consequences. Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method, and sharing the computer code used to reach the conclusions of a paper is often the easiest way to insure that all the details needed to reproduce the results have been provided. This article grew out of a talk I gave with the same title in a minisymposium at the 2011 SIAM CSE meeting in Reno, organized by Jarrod Millman, on “Verifiable, Reproducible Research and Computational Science”. (Slides from my talk and others are available at http://jarrodmillman.com/events/siam2011.html.)
Disaster Policy and Politics: Emergency Management and Homeland Security

1. Disaster Management in the United States Emergency Management as a Profession Disasters as a Field of Scientific Research Presidential Disaster Declarations Fundamental Challenges of Emergency Management Phases of Emergency Management 2. Disaster Management and Theories of Public Management Normative Political Theories The Role of Theory in Emergency Management Toward a Theory of Diaster Recovery Knowledge Codification and Knowledge Diffusion Issues 3. Historical Trends in Disaster Management The Cold War and the Rise of Civil Defense Nationwide Emergency Management The Birth of FEMA Disaster Declarations Issues Civil Defense Again, and Changes in FEMA All-Hazards Management Terrorism Remakes Disaster Management Homeland Security Presidential Directive 4. Understanding Disaster Policy Through Presidential Disaster Declarations The President's Constitutional Emergency Powers Federal Disaster Relief Legislation and Declaration Authority Presidential Discretionary Power Facilitating the President's Work FEMA's Role in the Declaration Process Presidents and Distributive Politics 5. The Role of Scientists and Engineers Researching Hazards and Disasters Disaster Researchers Compete for Government Funding Social Sciences and Emergency Management The Science Informing the Policy and Politics of Disasters Case Studies of Science and Engineering Applied to Disaster Engineering and Public Infrastructure Policy 6. Intergovernmental Relations in Disaster Policy Intergovermental Program Management The National Response Plan and the National Incident Management System Intergovernmental Disaster Management Challenges Government Conractors and Disaster Management 7. Civil-Military Relations and National Security Presidents, the U.S. Military, and Posse Comitatus Militarization of Disaster Policy Homeland Security Terrorism Programs Homeland Security Grants and Their Effects at the Local Level 8. Globalization of Disasters The U.S. Response System for Territories and Foreign States Emergency Managementin Other Nations The United Nations and International Disaster Relief U.S. Domestic Relief versus the U.S. International Relief System 9. Recovery Assistance: 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund versus Conventional Relief The Conventional Model of Disaster Relief The 9/11 Victim's Compensation Fund Compensating Victims of Terrorism before 9/11 Was the Master Model Successful in the 9/11 Case? The Master Model an the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Summary of the Models Pros and Cons of the Master and Master Model 10. Conclusions and the Future Special Issues The Big Questions
Shoulder pain and functional consequences: does it differ when it is at dominant side or not?

PURPOSE The shoulder complex plays an integral role in the activities of daily living and the limitation of its function can greatly affect the patient. The aim of this study was to research the functional consequences of painful conditions in the shoulder region. METHODS Sixty five adult patients with shoulder pain for longer than one month in duration were included to the study. Dominant hands of the patients were determined. The subjects were divided into two groups: shoulder pain at the dominant upper extremity (Group I) or the nondominant one (Group II). The subjects were evaluated for shoulder pain with visual analog scale (VAS), range of motion and functional status with the Disabilities of the Arm, Shoulder, and Hand (DASH) questionnaire. RESULTS In Group I, DASH score was significantly correlated with the VAS score measuring the pain during activity (p< 0.0001, r=0,625). In Group II, no relationship between DASH score, VAS scores and any other parameters was detected. CONCLUSION The most important parameter disturbing the daily living of a patient with shoulder disease is the pain at the shoulder of dominant extremity occurring in active movement.
A high-resolution technique for ultrasound harmonic imaging using sparse representations in Gabor frames

Over the last few decades there were dramatic improvements in ultrasound imaging quality with the utilization of harmonic frequencies induced by both tissue and echo-contrast agents. The advantages of harmonic imaging cause rapid penetration of this modality to diverse clinical uses, among which myocardial perfusion determination seems to be the most important application. In order to effectively employ the information, comprised in the higher harmonics of the received signals, this information should be properly extracted. A commonly used method of harmonics separation is linear filtering. One of its main shortcomings is the inverse relationship between the detectability of the contrast agent and the axial resolution. In this paper, a novel, nonlinear technique is proposed for separating the harmonic components, contained in the received radio-frequency images. It is demonstrated that the harmonic separation can be efficiently performed by means of convex optimization. It performs the separation without affecting the image resolution. The procedure is based on the concepts of sparse signal representation in overcomplete signal bases. A special type of the sparse signal representation, that is especially suitable for the problem at hand, is explicitly described. The ability of the novel technique to acquire "un-masked," second (or higher) harmonic images is demonstrated in series of computer and phantom experiments.
Do Travel Agencies Measure Up to Customer Expectation? An Empirical Investigation of Travel Agencies' Service Quality as Measured by SERVQUAL

Abstract To achieve and maintain their competitiveness and profitability, travel agencies should manage and aim to continuously improve the level of service quality offered to their customers. To know what their current level of quality is and to identify those aspects of their service which need improving, travel agencies should measure their service quality. This research reports an application of Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry's SERVQUAL questionnaire to a sample of New Zealand clients of travel agencies. The results support the reliability of the scale, but were unable to replicate the five dimensions of the original study. The implications of these and other findings relating to the gaps are discussed and further applications of SERVQUAL for travel agencies are presented.
Subservient Suburbia: The Reliance of Large Suburban Companies on Central City Firms for Financial and Professional Services

Abstract Some analysts see the suburbs as economically autonomous areas minimally or not at all dependent on the central city; others claim that suburbia continues to lack the agglomeration economies necessary for high-level corporate services. Although the suburbs now contain more population, jobs, and office space than do central cities, the functions of suburban economic activity are not easily discerned from government statistics. This article examines the degree to which suburban companies rely on suburban- and central city-based firms for financial and professional services. The research shows that suburban companies seldom employ suburban service providers. Suburban companies rely mostly on service firms located either in their own central city or in the central city of another metropolitan region. Suburban service providers tend to cater to smaller companies within their own metropolitan areas; they are seldom hired by companies from other metropolitan areas.
Environmental Externalities, Median Voters, and the Multicentric City

This paper presents a new theory of the formation of a multicentric city and shows an example where median voters prevail in the social choice of land use patterns. To be specific, environmental externalities of work zones give an incentive to voters to form multiple subcenters in a city even in the absence of agglomeration economies. In addition, the land use pattern chosen closely follows the median voter's preferences under appropriately structured choice process. In this demonstration, zoning is as much the mechanism by which the internal structure of a city is organized as it is the one used to organize the metropolitan fabric of local governments in the Tiebout-Oates-Hamilton system. Copyright Blackwell Publishers, 2004
Control and Coordination of Information Systems in Multinational Corporations: An Empirical Examination of Subsidiary and Host Country Factors

Abstract In multinational corporations (MNCs), subsidiaries operate in environments separated, not only by geographical distances, but also by time, language, politics, and legal frameworks. Such heterogeneity of operating environments puts great demands on the management of information systems (IS) to control and coordinate the organization's worldwide IS operations. This study examines the factors influencing the integration of the IS function across subsidiaries in MNCs. Specifically, the impact of subsidiary strategic role, perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU), and host country IS resources on the use of formal and informal mechanisms of control and coordination is examined. Multiple regression models were run on matched sets of data collected from 54 headquarters-subsidiary pairs. The relationship between the strategic role of a subsidiary and the level of integration was found to be significant. Moderate support was also found for the hypothesized relationship between IS resources and integration, though not in the direction expected. There was no support for the predicted relationships involving perceived environmental uncertainty.
Organizational governance of knowledge and learning

Many organizations are making a substantial investment in their knowledge and learning functions. Unfortunately, often these organizations don't realize an optimal level of return from this investment because their programs are poorly governed. We describe what the governance of knowledge and learning is, and based upon a research study that we performed, suggest which forms of governance work best in practice. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Religion, social milieu, and the contraceptive revolution

This study examines how the social environment of religious congregations affects the spread of contraceptive use in developing contexts, using Mozambique as a case study. Analysis of qualitative data collected in urban areas of that country in 1998-99 and of the data from the 1997 Mozambique Demographic and Health Survey suggests that, in urban areas, the environment of more socioculturally diverse and inclusive Roman Catholic and mission-based Protestant congregations is more propitious to the spread and legitimization of modern contraception than the milieu of smaller, relatively homogeneous, independent churches. In rural areas, however, sociocultural diversity within and across different religious denominations is minimal, and membership in any formal congregation offers an advantage in contraceptive learning.