Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Competition by Effective Management of Cultural Diversity

Many of the multinational construction firms working in developing countries and in the Middle East in particular have been facing serious problems managing and carrying out their assignments. Many project managers have returned home from their Middle East assignments with strange stories about sociocultural mishaps that had resulted from misinterpretations, frustrations, and conflicts. For example, project managers experience a cultural shock when appointments are not met, a delay of two hours is not unusual, workers stop work twice a day for prayers (religion has influence in all aspects of life) and intertribal conflicts lead to intergroup conflicts on the work site. These problems have most often resulted not only in wastage of valuable resources but also in delay in completion of the projects. The decade of the 1970s was a booming period for the construction business in the Middle Eastern oil-rich countries, and it created a lucrative market for multinational construction firms, including firms based in Sweden. This was due to the huge oil revenues, the massive and ambitious investment programs in infrastructure, and the lack of local qualified constructors. However, decline in oil revenues turned the propitious into tough competition. As a result of price competition, shortage of a local labor force, and the high cost of Swedish labor, in some countries the construction firms hired labor from Thailand and Pakistan that was several times cheaper than that from Sweden. Furthermore, the consulting engineers came from different countries such as Japan and Britain. Such cultural differences appeared as an important issue in all aspects of project management - from the tendering and negotiation phase to construction operations. The question was, then, how to manage such culturally diversified groups effectively.
Modeling the supply and demand for tourism: a fully identified VECM approach

Cointegration analysis has gradually appeared in the empirical tourism literature. However, the focus has been exclusively on the demand side, neglecting potentially-important supply-side influences and risking endogeneity bias. One reason for this omission may be the difficulty identifying structural relationships in a system setting. We estimate a vector error correction model of the supply and demand for Hawaii tourism using a theory-directed sequential reduction method suggested by Hall et al. (2002). We compare forecasts for the selected model and for two competing models. Diebold and Mariano (1995) tests for forecast accuracy demonstrate the satisfactory performance of this approach.
Performance Evaluation of an Intel Haswell-and Ivy Bridge-Based Supercomputer Using Scientific and Engineering Applications

We present a performance evaluation conducted on a production supercomputer of the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680v3, a twelve-core implementation of the fourth-generation Haswell architecture, and compare it with Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680v2, an Ivy Bridge implementation of the third-generation Sandy Bridge architecture. Several new architectural features have been incorporated in Haswell including improvements in all levels of the memory hierarchy as well as improvements to vector instructions and power management. We critically evaluate these new features of Haswell and compare with Ivy Bridge using several low-level benchmarks including subset of HPCC, HPCG and four full-scale scientific and engineering applications. We also present a model to predict the performance of HPCG and Cart3D within 5%, and Overflow within 10% accuracy.
A New Approach to Multimedia Information Filtering Based on its Structure

In information filtering systems, the documents are sequentially presented to the users based on the user relevance values. This paper argues that the presented documents should be both important and relevant to the users. Based on this view, a structure based filtering framework is described, which considers the importance and relevance values of documents. An approach, which is used to calculate the importance values of documents, is proposed to improve the representation of user profiles. The experiment results and discussion are given.
One Introduction to Social Network Analysis 1.2 Concept of a Social Network  4 Models for Social Networks with Statistical Applications Figure 1.1

1.1 INTRODUCTION T he study of social networks is a new but quickly widening multidisciplinary area involving social, mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences (see Burt, Minor, & Associates, 1983, for application in diverse social environments; in the latter sciences, see Wassermann & Faust, 1994, and especially for the field of economics, see Dutta & Jackson, 2003). It has its own parameters and methodological tools. In this book, we intend to show how graph-theoretic and statistical techniques can be used to study some important parameters of global social networks and illustrate their use in social science studies with some examples of real-life survey data. We hope our illustrations will provide ideas to researchers in various other fields as well. The term social network refers to the articulation of a social relationship, ascribed or achieved, among individuals, families, households, villages, communities , regions, and so on. Each of them can play dual roles, acting both as a unit or node of a social network as well as a social actor (cf. Laumann 1  ONE   " BDB-Ch-01 " — 2010/5/10 — 18:42 — page 2 — #2  2 MODELS FOR SOCIAL NETWORKS WITH STATISTICAL APPLICATIONS & Pappi, 1976). Kinship is a very common example of an ascribed relationship , while some common examples of an achieved relationship are those that are established in the course of regular interaction in the processes of daily life and living, cultural activities, and so on, such as one household requesting help, support, or advice from another; ties of friendship or choice of individuals to spend leisure time together; and preferences in marriage. Incidentally, a relationship can also be negative—for instance, hostility or conflict as opposed to friendship or alliance and alienation versus mutuality or integration. In this book, we will focus on positive relationships. Again, much of what we will discuss is based on sociological data, but it can also be used to study demographic and economic processes such as migration from one region to another, value of any type of economic (e.g., postal money order or trade) exchange between regions, volume of flow of goods between countries, flow of traffic between different places, and so on. Thus, the units of a " social network " can be different, no doubt, such as individuals, families, households, and rural or urban areas, according to the relationship under consideration. But there is a common feature—namely, …
Identification of a Secreted Casein Kinase 1 in Leishmania donovani: Effect of Protein over Expression on Parasite Growth and Virulence

Casein kinase 1 (CK1) plays an important role in eukaryotic signaling pathways, and their substrates include key regulatory proteins involved in cell differentiation, proliferation and chromosome segregation. The Leishmania genome encodes six potential CK1 isoforms, of which five have orthologs in other trypanosomatidae. Leishmania donovani CK1 isoform 4 (Ldck1.4, orthologous to LmjF27.1780) is unique to Leishmania and contains a putative secretion signal peptide. The full-length gene and three shorter constructs were cloned and expressed in E. coli as His-tag proteins. Only the full-length 62.3 kDa protein showed protein kinase activity indicating that the N-terminal and C-terminal domains are essential for protein activity. LdCK1.4-FLAG was stably over expressed in L. donovani, and shown by immunofluorescence to be localized primarily in the cytosol. Western blotting using anti-FLAG and anti-CK1.4 antibodies showed that this CK1 isoform is expressed and secreted by promastigotes. Over expression of LdCK1.4 had a significant effect on promastigote growth in culture with these parasites growing to higher cell densities than the control parasites (wild-type or Ld:luciferase, P<0.001). Analysis by flow cytometry showed a higher percentage, ∼4–5-fold, of virulent metacyclic promastigotes on day 3 among the LdCK1.4 parasites. Finally, parasites over expressing LdCK1.4 gave significantly higher infections of mouse peritoneal macrophages compared to wild-type parasites, 28.6% versus 6.3%, respectively (p = 0.0005). These results suggest that LdCK1.4 plays an important role in parasite survival and virulence. Further studies are needed to validate CK1.4 as a therapeutic target in Leishmania.
The Mathematics of Financial Modeling and Investment Management

Preface.Acknowledgments. About the Authors.Commonly Used Symbols.Abbreviations and Acronyms.Chapter 1. From Art to Engineering in Finance.Chapter 2. Overview of Financial Markets, Financial Assets, and Market Participants.Chapter 3. Milestones in Financial Modeling and Investment Management.Chapter 4. Principles of Calculus.Chapter 5. Matrix Algebra.Chapter 6. Concepts of Probability.Chapter 7. Optimization.Chapter 8. Stochastic Integrals.Chapter 9. Differential Equations and Difference Equations.Chapter 10. Stochastic Differential Equations.Chapter 11. Financial Econometrics: Time Series.Chapter 12. Financial Econometrics: Model Selection, Estimation, and Testing.Chapter 13. Fat Trails, Scaling, and Stable Laws.Chapter 14. Arbitrage Pricing: Finite-State Models.Chapter 15. Arbitrage Pricing: Continuous-State, Continuous-Time Models.Chapter 16. Portfolio Selection using Mean-Variance Analysis.Chapter 17. Capital Asset pricing Model.Chapter 18. Multifactor Models and Common Trends for Common Stocks.Chapter 19. Equity Portfolio Management.Chapter 20. Term Structure Modeling and Valuation of Bonds and Bond Optics.Chapter 21. Bond Portfolio Management.Chapter 22. Credit Risk Modeling and Credit Default Swaps.Chapter 23. Risk Management.Index.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR ATTRIBUTION : FOR REVIEW ONLY 1 Deploying Internet Telephony Services

We describe the architecture and implementation of our Internet telephony system intended to replace the departmental PBX (telephone switch). Our system serves as a corporate or campus infrastructure for existing and future services like voice, video and streaming media. It interworks with the traditional telephone networks via a PSTN/IP gateway. Initially created as a testbed, it will eventually replace the plain old telephones from our offices, due to the cost benefit and new services it offers. We describe some advanced services provided by our system. We also discuss common inter-operability problems between the PBX and the gateway. Keywords—Internet telephony services; Deploying Internet Telephony; VoIP test-bed; PSTN/IP interoperability; SIP
Efficient Extraction of Optimal , Temporally Flexible Plans

—Robots that operate in hazardous and dynamic environments must be equipped with onboard reasoning capabilities that enable them to autonomously generate mission plans. To operate in such environments, the mission plans must be continuous and temporally flexible. For critical missions, such as search and rescues, the success of the mission relies not only on the feasibility of the plan, but also on the quality of the plan. Thus, to generate robust efficient, temporally flexible plans, a measure of utility is required. We introduce a novel, forward heuristic planner that quickly extracts the optimal, temporally flexible plan, given a hierarchical description of alternative contingency plans and a utility function. Contingency plans are encoded as Temporal Plan Networks (TPNs). Our work presents two key innovations. The first is a compact encoding of a TPN search state. The second is an admissible and informative heuristic, TPN-Max. We empirically validate our solution on TPNs with increasing level of difficulty. Our results show that the TPN-Max heuristic performs significantly better, for TPNs, than the Max heuristic used in the forward heuristic planners [1].
Driving PIN Diodes : The Op-Amp Alternative

PIN diodes, which sandwich a lightly doped intrinsic (I) region between heavily doped P and N regions, are used extensively in RF and microwave applications. Common applications of PIN diodes are microwave switches, phase shifters, and attenuators, where high isolation and low loss are required. They can be found in test equipment, instrumentation, communications gear, radar, and a variety of military applications.
Estimating Pakistan’s Time Varying Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment: An Unobserved Component Approach

This paper envisages estimating the Time-Varying Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (TV-NAIRU) as an unobserved stochastic variable for Pakistan over the time period 1973-74 to 2007-08 using Kalman filter. Results of the study are evident that TV-NAIRU increased from 5.3 percent (1990-91) to 8.12 percent (2004-05) and falls to 6.17 percent again in 2007-08 which is above the actual unemployment rate. The results also indicate that the NAIRU is a relevant concept and the unemployment gap should be one of the factors considered when assessing inflationary pressure in Pakistan.
Scholarly use of R4D documents: a bibliometric exploration

Documents that are featured on R4D are potentially used by a range of scholarly target groups: academics and their students as well as development practitioners and consultants, policy-oriented users and others. Site usage data suggests that many users are based in universities, as well as development and donor agencies. The core R4D repository is designed with a ‘learned community’ in mind, and should be a familiar type of interface to those who use library, thematic and institutional research repositories. R4D is well-indexed by search engines, and Google is the single greatest referrer of users to the site. Google is regularly used by scholarly users to find researchrelated material, as is the more specialist Google Scholar service [1], which has gained increasing acceptance in recent years because, in part, of natural language searching abilities that are more advanced than those most institutional database repositories can provide.
Konkurencyjność polskiego eksportu usług

Two related problem are considered. The first concerns a situation in Polish international trade in services. It shows conclusions obtained from analyzing, proposed by B. Balassa, Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) of the exports of services. Data time series included information from period 2000–2012. Comparison between Poland and neighbors economy (Germany, Czech and Slovakia) was done. The second concerns the geographical breakdown of the exports of services data. This breakdown was made from whole economy into voivodship. Specialization of each group of voivodships was analyzed.
The internet of things in transport management in South Africa

To support sustainable transport systems in South Africa, this paper proposes the adoption of internet of things (IoT) technologies. This research extracted information on the activities undertaken by South Africa's public transport agencies from the Department of Transport website, and for each of these activities identified a number of IoT applications and services that can be of value through literature sampling. The activities identified fall under the subdomains of road network management, road safety management, aviation management, road traffic management, maritime services management, cargo transport management, cross-border transport management and passenger rail management.
Host-based Intrusion Detection System using Sequence of System Calls

Intrusion Detection is the powerful tool to protect the networks and system from attacks. Intrusion detection system is divided into host based intrusion detection system and network based intrusion detection system. Network based intrusion system are primarily used to detect the unwanted and abnormal behavior activates in the network. Host based intrusion detection systems are used for monitoring and detecting attacks in the system side. In this paper we use host based intrusion detection methods and data mining techniques to detect the misbehavior and unknown attacks based on the system calls. Here we use sendmail processor’s system call dataset for detecting the abnormal behaviour of system calls. Normal and intrusive behaviour are collected and gather the system calls sequences from sendmail process. Data mining play the important role to detect the intrusion. We use classification rule mining techniques for detecting the intrusion in system calls. From the data set using RIPPER rule the normal behaviour characterises of the system call are extracted. Using normal behaviour constructs the profile and compares the sequence of system call to detect the anomaly sequence system calls. The proposed approach gives good performance and reduces the time complexity and false alarm rates.
DSM-5 and ICD-11 as competing models of PTSD in preadolescent children exposed to a natural disaster: assessing validity and co-occurring symptomatology

ABSTRACT Background: Major revisions have been made to the DSM and ICD models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, it is not known whether these models fit children’s post-trauma responses, even though children are a vulnerable population following disasters. Objective: Using data from Hurricane Ike, we examined how well trauma-exposed children’s symptoms fit the DSM-IV, DSM-5 and ICD-11 models, and whether the models varied by gender. We also evaluated whether elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety characterized children meeting PTSD criteria based on DSM-5 and ICD-11. Method: Eight-months post-disaster, children (N = 327, 7–11 years) affected by Hurricane Ike completed measures of PTSD, anxiety and depression. Algorithms approximated a PTSD diagnosis based on DSM-5 and ICD-11 models. Results: Using confirmatory factor analysis, ICD-11 had the best-fitting model, followed by DSM-IV and DSM-5. The ICD-11 model also demonstrated strong measurement invariance across gender. Analyses revealed poor overlap between DSM-5 and ICD-11, although children meeting either set of criteria reported severe PTSD symptoms. Further, children who met PTSD criteria for DSM-5, but not for ICD-11, reported significantly higher levels of depression and general anxiety than children not meeting DSM-5 criteria. Conclusions: Findings support the parsimonious ICD-11 model of PTSD for trauma-exposed children, although adequate fit also was obtained for DSM-5. Use of only one model of PTSD, be it DSM-5 or ICD-11, will likely miss children with significant post-traumatic stress. DSM-5 may identify children with high levels of comorbid symptomatology, which may require additional clinical intervention.
cAMP-Dependent Protein Kinase Inhibits mGluR2 Coupling to G-Proteins by Direct Receptor Phosphorylation

One of the primary physiological roles of group II and group III metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs) is to presynaptically reduce synaptic transmission at glutamatergic synapses. Interestingly, previous studies suggest that presynaptic mGluRs are tightly regulated by protein kinases. cAMP analogs and the adenylyl cyclase activator forskolin inhibit the function of presynaptic group II mGluRs in area CA3 of the hippocampus. We now report that forskolin has a similar inhibitory effect on putative mGluR2-mediated responses at the medial perforant path synapse and that this effect of forskolin is blocked by a selective inhibitor of cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA). A series of biochemical and molecular studies was used to determine the precise mechanism by which PKA inhibits mGluR2 function. Our studies reveal that PKA directly phosphorylates mGluR2 at a single serine residue (Ser843) on the C-terminal tail region of the receptor. Site-directed mutagenesis combined with biochemical measures of mGluR2 function reveal that phosphorylation of this site inhibits coupling of mGluR2 from GTP-binding proteins
Cardiovascular KATP channels and advanced aging

With advanced aging, there is a decline in innate cardiovascular function. This decline is not general in nature. Instead, specific changes occur that impact the basic cardiovascular function, which include alterations in biochemical pathways and ion channel function. This review focuses on a particular ion channel that couple the latter two processes, namely the KATP channel, which opening is promoted by alterations in intracellular energy metabolism. We show that the intrinsic properties of the KATP channel changes with advanced aging and argue that the channel can be further modulated by biochemical changes. The importance is widespread, given the ubiquitous nature of the KATP channel in the cardiovascular system where it can regulate processes as diverse as cardiac function, blood flow and protection mechanisms against superimposed stress, such as cardiac ischemia. We highlight questions that remain to be answered before the KATP channel can be considered as a viable target for therapeutic intervention.
A New Approach for Disparity Map Estimation from Stereo Image Sequences using Hybrid Segmentation Algorithm

In this paper, a stereo matching algorithm based on image segments is presented. We propose the hybrid segmentation algorithm that is based on a combination of the Belief Propagation and K-Means algorithms with aim to refine the final sparse disparity map by using a stereo pair of images. Firstly, a color based segmentation method is applied for segmenting the left image of the input stereo pair (reference image) into regions. The main aim of the segmentation is to simplify representation of the image into the form that is easier to analyze and is able to locate objects in images. Secondly, results of the segmentation are used as an input of the SIFT-SAD matching method to determine the disparity estimate of each image pixel. This matching algorithm is proposed by combining Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) with the Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD). Finally, the comparisons between the three robust feature detection methods: Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), Affine SIFT (ASIFT) and Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) are presented. The obtained experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our method is competitive and the final disparity maps are close to the ground truth data.
High-Performance Symmetric Block Ciphers on CUDA

From almost all research fields, GPU has been noticed as hardware with high cost-performance. Consequently, implementation of cryptographic modules on GPU is also becoming popular. It has become increasingly clear that GPGPU implemented encryption speed is beyond that of FPGA implementation, for which speeding up depends heavily on programmers'tuning techniques. To date, we have also evaluated its effectiveness aimed at AES. In this paper, we targeted AES, Camellia, CIPHER UNICORN-A, and Hierocrypt-3 from an e-Government Recommended Ciphers List by Cryptography Research and Evaluation Committees (CRYPTREC) in Japan as encryption implementation on CUDA, based on two previously reported insights. According to the evaluation result, the throughput of implementation of Camellia on Tesla C2050 achieved 50.6 Gbps. In contrast, throughput without data transfer and with overlapping encryption on GPU and the data copy was 27.5 Gbps. Moreover, using Tesla C2050, small 4 MB file size achieved near maximum throughput, which indicates that Fermi architecture is more suitable for practical use as a cryptographic accelerator than conventional GT200 architecture is. Furthermore, the tendencies of the performance increase for each GPU showed similar results, irrespective of the type of cipher algorithm used. The fact might allow performance prediction modeling to become straightforward.