Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance Appraisal, Performance Management and Improving Individual Performance: A Motivational Framework

Performance appraisal has been the focus of considerable research for almost a century. Yet, this research has resulted in very few specific recommendations about designing and implementing appraisal and performance management systems whose goal is performance improvement. We believe that a reason for this is that appraisal research became too interested in measurement issues and not interested enough in ways to improve performance, although some recent trends in the area have begun moving the field in the right direction. We review these trends and their genesis, and propose a motivational framework as a means of integrating what we have learned and generating proposals for future research that focus on employee's performance improvement.
Transforming schools and schools of education : a new vision for preparing educators

Introduction and Overview - Stephen L Jacobson School Improvement - Jack Helfrich A View from the Field From "My Work" to "Our Work" - Hugh G Petrie Beyond Teaching - Catherine Emihovich Learning to Lead through Action Research Preparing Educational Leaders - Stephen L Jacobson A Basis for Partnership Educational Practitioners' Use of Research - Robert B Stevenson Expanding Conventional Understandings Where Are We Going? - Stephen L Jacobson et al
Aids, Human Capital and Growth

We use an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation to study the impact of the AIDS crises on growth. In our model, the AIDS crisis lowers life expectancy and thus the incentive to save and accumulate physical capital. Moreover, the AIDS crisis lowers the returns to human capital investment by creating large numbers of AIDS orphans. We calibrate the model to sub-Saharan economies. If infection rates are around 15-20 percent of the adult population, as they are in countries like Zambia and Botswana, growth rates of per capita income drop about 30-40%. Moreover, the growth rate effects persist beyond the (perhaps counterfactual) end of the AIDS crisis.
An Assessment of Korean Students’ Environmental Literacy

This study was initiated to understand what students know, how they feel, and how they act in the perspectives of environmental literacy. This study takes it a very serious problem that there has been no data about Korean students’status of environmental literacy so far. Based on the correct diagnosis of Korean students’ environmental literacy, environmental education in Korea, including national curriculum, teaching materials and strategy, would take the right way. This study accepts Simmon (1995)’s framework of environmental literacy, consisting of 5 areas, environmental knowledge, skills, affect, and behavior, which is consistent with general goals of environmental education. This study analyzed the relationship between areas in environmental literacy and factors contributing to improving students’ environmental literacy. This study also checked which factors, including age, gender, parents’ schooling, environmental education in schools, and students’ science-related attributes, contributed to improving students’ environmental literacy. The results of this study will help science educators keep in mind how important it is to teach science from the perspectives of environmental literacy.
Stabilization and Reform in Eastern Europe: A Preliminary Evaluation

Common issues emerging from the recent experience with IMF-supported programs in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania are analyzed. These comprise the initial price overshooting and output collapse and the financial and structural problems associated with bad loan portfolios and sluggish implementation of privatization programs. Substantial success has been achieved in the initial microstabilization and opening-up effort. But difficulties with fiscal and monetary control may be emerging as a result of social and political pressures and unclear policy signals on the micro issues involving the structural transformation of the productive and financial systems.
Spanish tourist resorts: New initiatives

The new initiatives of the Tourist Resorts and Hotel sectors are contributing more and more to stabilise the Spanish economy each day. This year, 1994, there is a rapidly growing awareness of the exciting potential rewards for all sectors of the economy and the previous prejudices about Tourism on the part of the financial sector are fast disappearing. Bankers, hotel managements, constructors, local, regional and central governments now work together as a team to study and overcome the problems inherited, paradoxically, from our early successes.
The Corporate Social-Financial Performance Relationship

This research note analyzes the relationship between indicators of corporate social and financial performance within a comprehensive theoretical framework. The results, based on data for 67 large U.S. corporations for 1982-1992, reveal no significant negative social-financial performance relationships and strong positive correlations in both contemporaneous and lead-lag formulations.
Simulated annealing approach for the single-machine total late work scheduling problem with a position-based learning

This paper considers a single-machine scheduling problem with a position-based learning effect where the aim is to find an optimal sequence to minimize the total late work. The late work for a job means the amount of processing of this job that is performed after its due date. Because the problem under consideration is NP-hard, this paper then proposes several simulated annealing algorithms for the near-optimal solution. Finally, the computational results of proposed algorithms are also reported.
Money market microstructure and monetary policy: the Indian experience

Money market microstructure has recently started drawing attention in the empirical literature on financial markets of emerging market economies. In the Indian context, a GARCH(1, 1) model shows that policy instruments impact bid–ask spreads in the money market. Volatility of bid–ask spreads seems to be more persistent in the overnight market than in longer maturity segments. The results also suggest the dominance of policy interventions over the market microstructure across the term structure of the Indian money market. Unanticipated policy actions can delay mean reversion and, therefore, the return to stability.
TARAXACUM OFFICINALE POLLEN DEPRESSES SEED SET OF MONTANE WILDFLOWERS THROUGH POLLEN ALLELOPATHY

Plant species that share pollinators can suffer from interspecific pollen deposition. Male reproductive success is inevitably reduced by the loss of pollen to flowers of another species. Female reproductive success can be affected by reduced stigmatic area or, more strongly, through allelopathic effects by which the admixture of some foreign pollen reduces seed or fruit set. We tested for allelopathic effects of Taraxacum officinale (Asteracaeae) pollen on the seed set of montane wildflowers Erythronium grandiflorum (Liliaceae) and Erysimum capitatum (Brassicaceae), by hand-pollinating plants with pollen mixtures. Taraxacum is a common invasive species, which produces allelopathic chemicals in its root and vegetative tissue, making it a likely candidate for pollen allelopathy. Flowers of both species produced fewer well-developed seeds when pollinated with pollen mixtures containing Taraxacum pollen. The pollen-allelopathic potential of weedy dandelion may add to its ability to disrupt communities that it invades.
Hypothalamic and Striatal Insulin Action Suppresses Endogenous Glucose Production and May Stimulate Glucose Uptake During Hyperinsulinemia in Lean but Not in Overweight Men

Intranasal spray application facilitates insulin delivery to the human brain. Although brain insulin modulates peripheral metabolism, the mechanisms involved remain elusive. Twenty-one men underwent two hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamps with d-[6,6-2H2]glucose infusion to measure endogenous glucose production and glucose disappearance. On two separate days, participants received intranasal insulin or placebo. Insulin spillover into circulation after intranasal insulin application was mimicked by an intravenous insulin bolus on placebo day. On a different day, brain insulin sensitivity was assessed by functional MRI. Glucose infusion rates (GIRs) had to be increased more after nasal insulin than after placebo to maintain euglycemia in lean but not in overweight people. The increase in GIRs was associated with regional brain insulin action in hypothalamus and striatum. Suppression of endogenous glucose production by circulating insulin was more pronounced after administration of nasal insulin than after placebo. Furthermore, glucose uptake into tissue tended to be higher after nasal insulin application. No such effects were detected in overweight participants. By increasing insulin-mediated suppression of endogenous glucose production and stimulating peripheral glucose uptake, brain insulin may improve glucose metabolism during systemic hyperinsulinemia. Obese people appear to lack these mechanisms. Therefore, brain insulin resistance in obesity may have unfavorable consequences for whole-body glucose homeostasis.
Leaving the Nordic Path? The Changing Role of Danish Trade Unions in the Welfare Reform Process

For a long period, Denmark has been labeled a ‘model country’ with a comprehensive welfare state and a successful model of corporatist policy-making. Danish unions are considered amongst the strongest in the world, and they have for a long time been a distinct part of the political system, and as social partners, they were strongly integrated into decision-making processes. The analysis of the Danish welfare and labour market policy during the last two decades documents a profound change in the arrangement and in the status of the social partners (especially unions) in the Danish political system. The results show that two important pillars of the Danish model – the social partner basis and the collective trust in partnership – are eroding. Unions are no longer part of the law-making process and, since 2007, they are formally excluded from the organization of the decision-making process. Recent developments point at weaker unions that operate more as lobbyists instead of being strong corporatist institutions or part of the decision-making process. The results of the study are thought-provoking and the basis for a revised thinking of the Danish and the Nordic model.
Improving Presence Theory Through Experiential Design

Despite ongoing research over the last 15 years, the presence construct remains somewhat limited in its ability to be applied beyond the sensory domain. In order to increase its usefulness for applied challenges (e.g., using presence theory to enhance simulators' effectiveness), a discussion about a new conceptualization of presence is introduced. This novel perspective on presence is rooted in the notion of experiential design, an approach businesses use to create strategically compelling and memorable experiences. The paper begins with a brief review of presence and then a description of the concepts of experimental design. Following this, a theoretical model of presence, based upon experimental design, is offered. Using this model, an exploration on the mitigation of breaks in presence is offered (a break in presence occurs when presence fails to be maintained). These ideas are presented in order to improve the likelihood of presence emerging for simulation participants and to enhance interdisciplinary researchers' shared conceptualizations of presence.
Towards blind detection of low-rate spatial embedding in image steganalysis

Steganalysis of least significant bit (LSB) embedded images in spatial domain has been investigated extensively over the past decade and most well-known LSB steganography methods have been shown to be detectable. However, according to the latest findings in the area, two major issues of very low-rate (VLR) embedding and content-adaptive steganography have remained hard to resolve. The problem of VLR embedding is indeed a generic problem to any steganalyser, while the issue of adaptive embedding specifically depends on the hiding algorithm employed. The latter challenge has recently been brought up again to the area of LSB steganalysis by highly undetectable stego image steganography that offers a content-adaptive embedding scheme for grey-scale images. The authors new image steganalysis method suggests analysis of the relative norm of the image Clouds manipulated in an LSB embedding system. The method is a self-dependent image analysis and is capable of operating on low-resolution images. The proposed algorithm is applied to the image in spatial domain through image Clouding, relative auto-decorrelation features extraction and quadratic rate estimation, as the main steps of the proposed analysis procedure. The authors then introduce and use new statistical features, Clouds-Min-Sum and Local-Entropies-Sum, which improve both the detection accuracy and the embedding rate estimation. They analytically verify the functionality of the scheme. Their simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms some well known, powerful LSB steganalysis schemes, in terms of true and false detection rates and mean squared error.
A Putative Heterotrimeric G Protein Inhibits the Fusion of COPI-coated Vesicles

Heterotrimeric G proteins have been implicated in the regulation of intracellular protein transport, but their mechanism of action remains unclear. In vivo, secretion of chromogranin B, tagged with the green fluorescent protein, was inhibited by the addition of a general activator of trimeric G proteins (AlF4 −) to stably transfected Vero cells and resulted in an accumulation of the tagged protein in the Golgi apparatus. In an in vitro assay that reconstitutes intra-Golgi protein transport, we find that a membrane-bound and AlF4 −-sensitive factor is involved in the fusion reaction. To determine whether this effect is mediated by a heterotrimeric G protein localized to COPI-coated transport vesicles, we determined the presence of G proteins on these vesicles and found that they were segregated relative to the donor membranes. Because G proteins do not have an obvious sorting, retention, or retrieval signal, we considered the possibility that other interactions might be responsible for this segregation. In agreement with this, we found that trimeric G proteins from isolated Golgi membranes were partially insoluble in Triton X-100. Identification of the proteins that interact with the heterotrimeric G proteins in the Golgi-derived detergent-insoluble complex might help to reveal the regulation of protein secretion mediated by heterotrimeric G proteins.
Graphene Effect on the Improvement of the Response of Optical Fiber SPR Sensor

In this paper, we present a contribution to the development of a fiber-optic surface plasmon resonance sensor coated with a silver film that is suitable for chemical and biological applications. Indeed, the importance of the choice of the metal deposited on the sensitive zone of the sensor was verified. It has been found that silver-based sensors have better sensitivity. But on the other hand, it suffers from its poor chemical stability. In order to improve sensor stability, a protective layer of graphene was added, and an optimization of the geometrical and physical properties characteristic of the new configuration was presented by using a numerical study. The results obtained show that the sensitivity of the sensor depends on a set of parameters, such as the diameter of the core (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${D}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), the sensitive length (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${L}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), and the thickness of the metal layer (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${d}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and its nature. The optimal choice of these parameters was fixed for the following values: <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$D=400~\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L=15$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d=50$ </tex-math></inline-formula> nm.
Enhancing competitiveness in the hospitality industry: Revisiting Porter's generic competitive strategies in Greece

This paper attempts to examine the choices and practices concerning the formulation of marketing strategies of hospitality organisations in Greece, a traditional tourism destination. The introduction includes a bibliographical review of marketing strategies in general and of the theory of generic competitive strategies that was developed by Michael Porter in particular. A brief reference to the development of the hospitality and tourism industry in Greece is presented and the research methodology that was followed is described. The survey findings are presented in tabulation form and a discussion follows.
From Taken‐For‐Granted to Explicit Commitment: The Rise of CSR in a Corporatist Country

This article contributes to a thriving line of research that examines issue interpretation and social accounts in order to study the adoption and diffusion of organizational concepts and management practices. It employs the empirical example of the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Austria between 1990 and 2005 to investigate the complex role institutional pressures and social positions of actors play in the local adoption of globally theorized ideas. More specifically, the study reveals distinct patterns in rhetorical CSR adoption that illustrate the initial hesitation and reluctance of an established elite in the Austrian business community towards the Anglo-American notion of 'explicit' CSR, while non-elite actors who were less favourably positioned in the social order readily embraced the concept. It is in such a sense that CSR is nevertheless instrumentalized to challenge, reinterpret, or explicitly evoke the autochthonous idea of institutionalized social solidarity. Conceptually, this research takes into account social structure, actors' positions in the social order, and resulting divergent adoption motivations - i.e. the individual, yet socially derived, relevance systems of actors - and relates them to mechanisms and processes of institutional change. (author's abstract)
A survey of molecular details in the human pineal gland in the light of phylogeny, structure, function and chronobiological diseases

Abstract: The human pineal gland is a neuroendocrine transducer that forms an integral part of the brain. Through the nocturnally elevated synthesis and release of the neurohormone melatonin, the pineal gland encodes and disseminates information on circadian time, thus coupling the outside world to the biochemical and physiological internal demands of the body. Approaches to better understand molecular details behind the rhythmic signalling in the human pineal gland are limited but implicitly warranted, as human chronobiological dysfunctions are often associated with alterations in melatonin synthesis. Current knowledge on melatonin synthesis in the human pineal gland is based on minimally invasive analyses, and by the comparison of signalling events between different vertebrate species, with emphasis put on data acquired in sheep and other primates. Together with investigations using autoptic pineal tissue, a remnant silhouette of premortem dynamics within the hormone’s biosynthesis pathway can be constructed. The detected biochemical scenario behind the generation of dynamics in melatonin synthesis positions the human pineal gland surprisingly isolated. In this neuroendocrine brain structure, protein‐protein interactions and nucleo‐cytoplasmic protein shuttling indicate furthermore a novel twist in the molecular dynamics in the cells of this neuroendocrine brain structure. These findings have to be seen in the light that an impaired melatonin synthesis is observed in elderly and/or demented patients, in individuals affected by Alzheimer’s disease, Smith–Magenis syndrome, autism spectrum disorder and sleep phase disorders. Already, recent advances in understanding signalling dynamics in the human pineal gland have significantly helped to counteract chronobiological dysfunctions through a proper restoration of the nocturnal melatonin surge.
Futures Hedges under Basis Heteroscedasticity

Minimum variance and mean-variance optimizing hedges are developed when basis risk exhibits heteroscedasticity; that is, the variance of the difference between spot and futures prices is not constant but rises with the level of spot prices. Two different hedging objectives are modeled and optimized. The resulting optimality conditions are then interpreted both analytically and intuitively. Simulations are run to determine whether the model proposed here is superior to the traditional model in terms of minimizing the hedger’s terminal wealth. The resulting hedge ratios are shown to differ from those that are obtained for the traditional homoscedastic basis case, but consistent with the extant theoretical paradigm, the demand for futures contacts is dichotomized into pure hedging and pure speculative components. The simulations demonstrate that, under the statistical assumptions invoked, the proposed model implies uniformly less hedging and a lower variance of terminal wealth compared with the traditional model.
Transient analysis of high-speed channels via Newton-GMRES Waveform Relaxation

This paper presents a technique for the numerical simulation of coupled high-speed channels terminated by arbitrary nonlinear drivers and receivers. The method builds on a number of existing techniques. A Delayed-Rational Macromodel is used to describe the channel in compact form, and a general Waveform Relaxation framework is used to cast the solution as an iterative process that refines initial estimates of transient scattering waves at the channel ports. Since a plain Waveform Relaxation approach is not able to guarantee convergence, we turn to a more general class of nonlinear algebraic solvers based on a combination of the Newton method with a Generalized Minimal Residual iteration, where the Waveform Relaxation equations act as a preconditioner. The convergence of this scheme can be proved in the general case. Numerical examples show that very few iterations are indeed required even for strongly nonlinear terminations.