Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Global sourcing of services versus manufacturing activities: is it any different?

International sourcing strategies and operations are usually described distinctively for manufacturing and services. In this paper, the theoretical and strategic relevance of this distinction is questioned. As an alternative, an activity-based theoretical framework for exploring the linkages between the attributes of the globally sourced activities and the international sourcing operations of firms is presented. This paper discusses the implications for global sourcing research and the strategic and organizational implications for managers, and it argues that finding the right match between strategy, activity and organization is a key determinant of the success of the sourcing process and outcome.
North-South Growth and the Terms of Trade

This paper examines equilibrium growth and stability in the world economy using a North-South model in which there is assumed to be surplus labor in both North and South at an exogenously determined level of real wages. The model allows for substitution in consumption between primary commodities and industrial goods in the North. It treats the cases of both surplus and scarce land in the South. In the case of an exogenous shock to the model, the North-South terms of trade may overshoot its equilibrium value and/or converge to this value along a cyclical path: there is no guarantee that the adjustment path is stable.
QUÉ HA FALLADO EN LA MACROECONOMÍA Y FINANZAS SURAMERICANAS DESDE LOS AÑOS NOVENTA

Este articulo examina las experiencias macroeconomicas de cinco paises suramericanos —Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia y Peru— desde los anos noventa. Se destacan caracteristicas comunes en sus politicas macroeconomicas y en las crisis ciclicas que experimentan, las que predominan sobre diferencias relevantes que se examinan. Se analiza como, no obstante la estabilizacion de los precios y la mayor disciplina fiscal logrados, se obtiene un crecimiento mediocre del PIB (3.2% desde los anos noventa), resultado que ha estado asociado a una baja formacion de capital. Al examinar las causas se encuentra una intensa asociacion con la inestabilidad del entorno macroeconomico —en particular, demanda agregada y tipo de cambio real—, una especie de “montana rusa” que enfrentan los productores del PIB. Esta inestabilidad, a su vez, aparece determinada por choques ciclicos de los flujos de capitales y terminos del intercambio. Se concluye que la “incompletitud” de los logros macroeconomicos esta en el centro de la falta de convergencia al desarrollo.
The Global Decline of Nonmarine Mollusks

Abstract Invertebrate species represent more than 99% of animal diversity; however, they receive much less publicity and attract disproportionately minor research effort relative to vertebrates. Nonmarine mollusks (i.e., terrestrial and freshwater) are one of the most diverse and imperiled groups of animals, although not many people other than a few specialists who study the group seem to be aware of their plight. Nonmarine mollusks include a number of phylogenetically disparate lineages and species-rich assemblages that represent two molluscan classes, Bivalvia (clams and mussels) and Gastropoda (snails, slugs, and limpets). In this article we provide an overview of global nonmarine molluscan biodiversity and conservation status, including several case studies documenting the diversity and global decline of nonmarine mollusks. We conclude with a discussion of the roles that mollusks and malacologists should play in conservation, including research, conservation management strategies, and education and outreach.
Childhood Medulloblastoma: Current Therapies, Emerging Molecular Landscape and Newer Therapeutic Insights

Background: Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children, currently treated uniformly based on histopathology and clinico-radiological risk stratification leading to unpredictable relapses and therapeutic failures. Identification of molecular subgroups have thrown light on the reasons for these and now reveals clues to profile molecularly based personalized therapy against these tumors. Methods: Research and online contents were evaluated for pediatric medulloblastoma which included latest information on the molecular subgroups and their clinical relevance and update on efforts to translate them into clinics. Results: Scientific endeavors over the last decade have clearly identified four molecular variants (WNT, SHH, Group 3, and Group 4) and their demographic, genomic, and epigenetic profile. Latest revelations include significant heterogeneity within these subgroups and 12 different subtypes of MB are now identified with disparate outcomes and biology. These findings have important implications for stratification and profiling future clinical trials against these formidable tumors. Conclusion: With the continued outpouring of genomic/epigenomic data of these molecular subgroups and evolution of further subtypes in each subgroup, the challenge lies in comprehensive evaluation of these informations. Current and future endeavors are now needed to profile personalized therapy for each child based on the molecular risk stratification of medulloblastoma, with a hope to improve survival outcome and reduce relapses.
THREE ESSAYS IN SEMI-PARAMETRIC MODELLING OF TIME-VARYING DISTRIBUTION

During the last century we have been frustrated by the number of economic crises which trigger extreme uncertainty in the global economic system. Economic agents are sensitive to the uncertainty of inflations, as well as to asset values, for survival in such circumstances. Hence, modern finance and monetary economics emphasise that risk modelling of asset values and inflations are key inputs to financial theory and monetary policy. The risk is completely described by the distribution which is verified to be time-varying and non-normal. Although various parametric and non-parametric approaches have been developed to model the time-varying nature and the non-normality, they still suffer from intrinsic limitations. This study proposes the dynamic modelling of the non-parametric distribution (Functional Autoregressive Model (FAR) and Spatial Distribution Analysis) in order to overcome the limitations. Firstly, we apply FAR to the Value-at-Risk analysis. It forecasts an intraday return density function by the functional autoregressive process and calculates a daily Value-at-Risk by the Normal Inverse Gaussian distribution. It reduces economic cost and improves coverage ability in the Value-at-Risk analysis. Secondly, we apply FAR to forecasting the cross-sectional distribution of sectoral inflation rates, which holds the information of the heterogeneous variation across sectors. As a result, it improves the aggregate inflation rate forecasting. Further, the heterogeneous variation is utilised for constructing the uncertainty band of the aggregate inflation forecast, like the fan-chart of the Bank of England. Thirdly, we apply the spatial distribution analysis to rank investment strategies by comparing their time aggregated utilities over the investment horizon. To this end, we use a spatial dominance test. Since a classical stochastic dominance approach considers only the return distribution at the terminal time point of the investment horizon, it cannot properly evaluate the risk, broken out exogenously or endogenously, in the middle of the investment horizon. However, the proposed spatial dominance approach considers completely the interim risk in evaluating alternative investment strategies.
Firms' decisions to innovate and innovation routines

This article investigates the forces that lead some firms to engage in more innovative activities than others using a survey of 360 large Australian firms. Many earlier studies on the determinants of innovation followed the Schumpeterian tradition, and focused on size and market structure as possible causes of innovativeness; however, with the event of new qualitative measures of industry knowledge and managerial styles, these factors have been found to be less important. The results of the present study show that external factors and generic routines common to all industries, such as the extent of learning, knowledge spillovers, appropriability and managerial approach are more important than industry specific forces. Locally-owned companies were also found to be more innovative, other things considered.
Measuring and Mismeasuring Discrimination against Visible Minority Immigrants: The Role of Work Experience

There are two methods for estimating the earnings disadvantage of groups: the residual difference method and the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. Each method infers disadvantage from differences in earnings of visible minority immigrants and other Canadians, after controls for human capital and job characteristics. We: i) summarize the logic of these methods; ii) critically examine the character of the experience measures used in most of the research; iii) apply the residual difference method to the Workplace and Employee Survey to show how a more thorough approach to the measurement of work experience modifies estimates of earnings disadvantage.
Chinese students: Holiday behaviours in New Zealand

This article reports findings from a sample of 158 students from the People's Republic of China studying in New Zealand. The purpose of the study was to assess the extent to which this market segment undertook travel within their country of studies; and the degree to which they are motivated by features usually regarded as motivators for holidaying by visitors to New Zealand. It found that while relaxation needs motivate holiday patterns, travel was also strongly motivated for 16 per cent of the sample by a search for career and study opportunities. It was also found that trip expenditure per person was low, and a number of possible reasons are suggested. Additionally it appeared that many of the traditional outdoor-adventure attractions of New Zealand have limited appeal to many of these students. The study identifies a number of issues that constrain this market and reference is made to restricted budgets and the need for academic success as inhibiting travel.
Indispensable malaria genes

A critical assessment of new opportunities for drug discovery to treat malaria Malaria parasites, carried by mosquitoes and transmitted to humans, infect ∼200 million individuals and cause ∼500,000 deaths each year (1). Fifteen years after identifying the genome sequence of a malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, malaria treatments still rely heavily on chemicals derived from natural products that were used centuries ago (2). With cell-based functional assays, the gap between genome sequences of Plasmodium spp. and the identification of valuable new therapeutics may be reduced by determining which genes are essential for parasite propagation in the disease-causing blood stage of the parasite life-cycle. The most potent and clinically useful antimalarial drugs rapidly eliminate parasites growing in red blood cells (RBCs). On page 506 of this issue, Zhang et al. (3) report a mutagenesis screen on P. falciparum cultured in human RBCs, identifying 2680 indispensable parasite genes, which may contain antimalarial drug targets. However, it is important to critically assess what fraction of these essential genes will be good drug targets and how one should prioritize such targets for drug discovery.
The role of body mass index, weight change desires and depressive symptoms in the health-related quality of life of children living in urban disadvantage: Testing mediation models

Objectives: This study was undertaken to ascertain whether or not the body mass index (BMI) of urban disadvantaged children indirectly affects their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) through weight change desires and depressive symptoms and whether such mediation is conditional upon age and gender. Design: A total of 255 children aged 7–12 years (50% male) were recruited from 7 schools in urban disadvantaged districts in Ireland using consecutive sampling. A prospective longitudinal design was employed whereby children completed, at two time points, the Kidscreen-27, the Children’s Depression Inventory, and the Health Related Behaviour Questionnaire, and had their BMI measured. The analyses involved multiple-, half-longitudinal- and moderated-mediation. Results: Results showed that the depressive symptoms of children wanting to change their weight may have lead, in large part, to poorer HRQoL (specifically psychological well-being when considering longitudinal data) rather than weight status per se. The mediation effect of weight change desires occurred regardless of age or gender. Conclusions: Childhood obesity programmes that traditionally focus on the negatives of obesity and the need to control weight may need to take a more positive approach to health and well-being by, for example promoting intuitive eating, an active lifestyle, body acceptance and good mental health.
The Legacy of British Colonialism in India Post 1947

India was under direct British administrative control for almost a century, with independence from Britain not gained until relatively recently, in August 1947. British imperialism had a number of significant impacts on the region – many of which had lasting legacies on the country’s economic and social positions. While some of these impacts were positive for India, many resulted from British imperial interests being prioritized over domestic interests, which led to an uneven pattern of development and weak central government. This note canvasses some of the commonly explored legacies of British colonialism in India, and concludes that a century of foreign control may have done more harm than good for the country’s development.
Semantic analysis for enhanced medical retrieval

Medical search technologies are crucial to enable the user to rapidly and effectively discover useful information from massive medical and clinical data. Because of the complexity of medical terminology, traditional information search methods have not fully expressed the intention of the query request and explored the potential semantic knowledge in the document. In this paper, we propose a multi-analysis approach by considering the medical ontology as a semantic resource, which can excavate latent semantic information of a user's query request. In addition, we also recognize topics of medical documents to express text contents for providing support for calculating the similarity between query keywords and documents. Our experiments on PubMed medical article collections show that the semantic-based multi-analysis approach is feasible and efficient compared with other traditional approaches in medical retrieval.
Leaving Home and Entering the Housing Market

We use a multinomial choice model of owning a home, owning a trailer, or renting to examine the housing-market entry of young adults in the USA after they have left the parental home. We also model the choice between renting independently and sharing with roommates. We show that the likelihood of becoming an independent actor in the housing market is closely related to the size and regional location of the housing market. The young adult's resources are an important influence on housing-market entry. Parents' resources seem to be less important as a factor in housing selection. Whereas trailer ownership is more common among the less well educated, couples, and those leaving home to live in the South or in rural areas, sharing is typical for the younger nest leavers, singles, and those leaving home to live in the cities.
The Effect of Handedness on Supplementary Motor Area Activation during Complex Motor Tasks

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess the activity of supplementary motor area (SMA) in six right-handed and six left-handed healthy volunteers. Two manual tasks (self-initiated previously practiced and unpredictable visually guided) were used. Quantitative analysis of hemispheric and bilateral SMA activation was described as mean ± standard deviation of hot spots/total spots. The two tasks induced bilateral SMA activation. The laterality of SMA activation was affected by manual dominance. Left SMA was significantly more activated in right- and left-handers while performing the motor tasks with the right hand. Right SMA was more activated in the left-handers when the left hand was used. Task complexity was the most important factor influencing the degree of SMA activation.
The Theory of Vulnerable Autonomy and the Legitimacy of the Civil Preventative Order

Criminologists and criminal law theorists have explained the ASBO and the terrorism Control Order as purely instrumental measures in the service of crime control. The political consent enjoyed by these new Civil Preventative Orders has for the most part been regarded in the expert literature as an example of penal populism which has thrown aside sound legal principles. This paper, by contrast, investigates a possible normative basis for these orders. It first analyses and reconstructs their substantive law, arguing that they impose a liability for manifesting a disposition which fails to reassure others. It then investigates the basis for this liability in official anti-social behaviour and counter-terrorism policy, both of which emphasise the vulnerability of normal citizens. The paper then proposes that the ‘vulnerable autonomy’ which these policies and legal instruments seek to protect is an axiomatic feature of the political theories of ‘advanced liberalism’. Finally, the claim made by normative criminal law theorists that Civil Preventative Orders are illegitimate is reconsidered in the light of the theory of vulnerable autonomy.
How Do Distance Runners Experience Inner Speech? An Empirical Investigation

According to what people report, inner speech is a very common experience. Cognitive science researchers have been slow to investigate the phenomenon because its non-observability makes it difficult to study. This experiment uses an experiential questionnaire method with a tightly constrained design to explore properties of inner speech that have been proposed by Lev Vygotsky. Using a sample of distance running athletes, it investigates the extent of (1) dialogue, (2) condensed syntax, (3) evaluation, and (4) auditory representations of others, in inner speech. Employing three sets of interviews with each athlete that immediately followed their participation in training and competitive running, the study finds evidence to support a Vygotskian theoretical approach to inner speech, with strong evidence for condensed syntax, dialogue and evaluation.
Trade between asymmetrical democratic countries

This essay sheds light on the problems arising from trade between asymmetric countries, particularly when associated with a different degree of power. At present, when the importance of external trade is clearly increasing and different countries of different size, wealth and stage of economic development establish even more extensive commercial links with one another, this raises fresh policy issues, but also theoretical challenges.
The Basel Committee Proposals for Capital Adequacy Reform: A Critical Analysis

This paper is aimed at: reviewing the contents of the proposals, drawing on the results of theoretical and empirical research wherever possible, in order to underscore relative strengths and/or weaknesses; providing a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals, which again will take effect after a period of grandfathering and therefore allow researchers and practitioners to evaluate their effectiveness in solving the problems that emerged during the crisis, and to assess their potential consequences.
ANALYTICAL REPRESENTATION OF UNDERSAMPLED FACE RECOGNITION APPROACH BASED ON DICTIONARY LEARNING AND SPARSE REPRESENTATION

-Human computer interaction is to improve the interactions between the users and the computer and in the human computer the facial expression and its recognition plays an important role, the related research work regarded to this is carried out from the past twenty years. Among all biometric mechanisms, face images and its emotions are useful in social interaction and face images are used for conveying identity too based on the emotion recognized. With the increase of the Security threats around the world, it is very difficult to find a person whether he is an authorized one or not. Due to an increase of the Globalization and digitization around the world, the Face Recognition technology gains a lot of importance for identification purpose. he proposed method is also to handle the corrupted ones due to occlusion or disguise, which is not present during training. This is achieved by the learning of a robust auxiliary dictionary from the subjects not of interest. Together with the undersampled training data, both intra and interclass variations can thus be successfully handled, while the unseen occlusions can be automatically disregarded for improved recognition. The simulation results shows the better results than the traditional methods
Cournot Competition and Reduction of Corruption to Prevent Garment Factory Fires in Bangladesh

The number of member factories in the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association has grown more than 6.8 fold during the past 20 years to reach 5,700.This has been overshadowed by repeated deadly garment factory fires that have resulted in at least 267 workers losing their lives in Dhaka and the surrounding regions during the past 20 years. With a focus on work-related injury and death caused by major indifference to the small changes, this paper indicates that such work-related injury and death can be prevented through Cournot competition if factory owners employ managers, to whom they give two missions: maximize sales and ensure worker safety.
Independent and combined effects of alcohol intake, tobacco smoking and betel quid chewing on the risk of esophageal cancer in Taiwan

A multicenter case‐control study was conducted in northern and southern Taiwan to clarify the independent and combined effects of alcohol intake, tobacco smoking and betel quid chewing on the risk of esophageal cancer. A total of 513 patients with newly diagnosed and histopathologically confirmed squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus and 818 gender, age and study hospital‐matched controls were included. We found a significant dose‐response relationship between the duration and intensity of consumption of the 3 substances and the development of this neoplasm in this site. Although the amount of alcohol consumed had a stronger effect on the risk of esophageal cancer than the number of years it was consumed, however, the number of years one smoked had a stronger effect on the risk than the amount of cigarettes consumed. The strongest risk factor of esophageal cancer was alcohol intake, with highest risk (OR = 13.9) being for those who consumed more than 900 g/day‐year. Combined exposure to any 2 of 3 substances brought the risks up to 8.8–19.7 fold and, to all 3 substances, to 41.2‐fold. A multiplicative interaction effect for alcohol drinkers who smoked on cancer risk was detected, whereas an additive interaction effect was found among drinkers who chewed. The combined effect of all 3 substances accounted for 83.7% of the attributable fraction of contracting esophageal cancer in this population. In conclusion, these results suggest that the intensity and the length of time alcohol and tobacco are used play different roles in the etiology of esophageal cancer. Alcohol separately interacts with tobacco and betel quid in a differently synergistic way in determining the development of this site of cancer.