Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technology Innovation and Core Competencies: A Empirical Study Based Learning and Social Capital's Perspective

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the interrelationships between internal social capital, learning orientation, technology innovation and core competencies. A 43-item survey questionnaire was developed and 208 manufacturing and service firms in China were selected as the samples of this study. The results conclude: the emphasis of internal social capital is associated with the levels of learning orientation and core competencies; the emphasis of learning orientation is associated with the levels of technology innovation and core competencies; and technology innovation may enhance a firm to build core competencies. Since very limited studies have concentrated on above issues, the results of this study can provide important references to academicians and practitioners in the developing of technology innovation and building core competencies.
TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS EDUCATION IN COMMUNITY COLLEGES

Over the twenty-eight years since this journal began publication (Fall 1961), twenty-one arti cles have appeared concerning transportation and logistics education in colleges and univer sities.1 Professor Roy Sampson sparked an inter est in the subject in Volume 2 by discussing the decline in transportation education in American universities. The following issue had three sep arate articles analyzing Sampson's comments and adding to them. Every few years thereafter, others (mainly but not exclusively academics) have taken a turn at discussing the subject of transportation education. Other journals in the field also have published articles about transportation/logistics education, and perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey was that of Paul Zinszer for the Council of Logistics Management.2.
LazyCap - Template-Based Media Capturing

The rapid adoption of digital cameras and camcorders leads to an explosive growth of personal photos and home video in digital form. This leads to a huge demand for new tools and systems that enables average users to more efficiently and more effectively process, manage, author and share these digital media contents. However, these tasks are always tedious, as well as extremely time consuming, requiring necessary professional skills. To tackle this issue, content analysis based methods has become an interesting and promising research topic. However, due to the difficulties in content analysis after the media data is captured, these methods have insurmountable limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, Template-Based Media Capturing, which provides a uniform scheme to collect extra information during the process of media capturing in an easy and convenient manner. The extra information captured using LazyCap remarkably facilitates further personal media applications such as management, authoring and sharing. The main idea to accomplish this objective is using uniformly defined capturing templates, which are installed on the capturing devices and instantly guide users to capture necessary raw data. LazyCap not only improves the users’ experiences on media management, authoring and sharing after capturing, but also assists users to capture high-quality raw media data.
Delayed metamorphosis in decapod crustaceans: evidence and consequences

Most marine invertebrate species exhibit a complex life cycle including a planktonic larval phase and a benthic juvenile-adult phase. Metamorphosis and settlement are the links between these phases of development. In many species, metamorphosis is triggered by specific chemical and/or physical cues, mainly associated with the adult habitat. In the absence of such cues. competent larvae can delay their metamorphosis by a few days to several months. Most investigations on the delay of metamorphosis have been realised on sessile or sedentary species. In relation to mobile decapod crustaceans. the number of such studies is low, probably because the members of this group retain their mobility after metamorphosis. and hence, may depend less on environmental cues for the induction of settlement and metamorphosis. Nevertheless. the larvae of some decapod species have been shown to depend on metamorphosis-stimulating cues. These include special types of substrates, physical or chemical traits of particular (e.g., estuarine) water bodies, as well as odors from conspecific or congeneric adults. The capacity for delay is, in the decapod species studied so far, limited and may normally end with spontaneous metamorphosis. An extended time of larval development presents the advantage of enhancing the probability for locating a suitable habitat, but it may imply, as a disadvantage, a reduction of juvenile growth or survival and a prolonged development time preceding benthic life. This paper reviews the available evidence for delayed metamorphosis in decapod crustaceans, indentifed cues, the importance of larval age at the time of contact with a cue, and costs of delayed metamorphosis. Additionally, we propose new frontiers for future investigations on delayed metamorphosis in decapod crustaceans, including the molecular identification of chemical cues, the identification of the stage(s) of the moulting cycle that is or are sensitive to such cues, the study of hormonally mediated effects on the moulting cycle, the quantification of energetic or other costs of delayed metamorphosis, and the analysis of relationships between the effectiveness of adult odors and phylogenetic proximity of larvae and adults.
Approximating Network Design Problems on Directed and Undirected Graphs

Network design on directed graphs are problems that require to select a minimum cost directed subgraph of a given edge-weighted directed graph, under some constraints. One of the main goals of this proposal is to understand some of the most fundamental network design problems on directed graphs whose exact approximability status remains unclear for a very long time. Directed graphs appear frequently, when modeling the problem by an undirected graph is not enough (see, for example, [71]). Applications for which the graphs arising are naturally directed include questions related to the web graph (c.f., [68]), social networks graphs (c.f., [72]), dynamic graphs in artificial intelligence (c.f. [25]), and more.
The dynamics of younger and older adult's paired behavior when playing an interactive silhouette game

In this paper, we report on the findings of an acute trial in which we evaluate the design of a novel gesture-based game. 60 younger and older players, divided into three separate group-types: (i) Young-Young, (ii) Old-Old, and (iii) Young-Old, took part in the study. The primary aim of this work was to evaluate the communicative and cooperative behavior of same-age and mixed-age pairs, with secondary interests in their perceived ease-of-use of the game. A mixed-method approach was used, comprising of direct observations, a post-game questionnaire and paired interviews. Our results identified noticeable differences between the group-types, with the Young-Old showing more physical cooperation, as compared to the same-age groups. The work elaborates on how the young and old differ in expectations and perceived interaction, and concludes with some recommendations for future research.
Filling the Silent Void: Genetic Therapies for Hearing Impairment

The inner ear cytoarchitecture forms one of the most intricate and delicate organs in the human body and is vulnerable to the effects of genetic disorders, aging, and environmental damage. Owing to the inability of the mammalian cochlea to regenerate sensory hair cells, the loss of hair cells is a leading cause of deafness in humans. Millions of individuals worldwide are affected by the emotionally and financially devastating effects of hearing impairment (HI). This paper provides a brief introduction into the key role of genes regulating inner ear development and function. Potential future therapies that leverage on an improved understanding of these molecular pathways are also described in detail.
Bevacizumab-Induced Reversible Thrombocytopenia in a Patient with Adenocarcinoma of Colon: Rare Adverse Effect of Bevacizumab

We report a case of bevacizumab- (BEV-) induced thrombocytopenia in a 59-year-old man with adenocarcinoma of colon. After colectomy, the patient was treated with twelve cycles of FOLFOX-4 (folinic acid, 5-fluorouracil, and oxaliplatin) regimen. On relapse, he was treated with FOLFIRI (folinic acid, 5-fluorouracil, and irinotecan) regimen along with BEV 10 mg/kg for 6 cycles. After that, BEV was continued for maintenance as a single agent at an interval of three weeks. After the13th cycle of BEV, the patient developed melena with epistaxis and thrombocytopenia, from which he recovered on withdrawal of BEV. On rechallenge with half the initial dose, there was once again a reversible drop in platelet count. The proposed mechanism of thrombocytopenia may be immune-mediated peripheral destruction of platelets.
Hepatoprotective Role of Ethanolic Extract of Vitex negundo in Thioacetamide-Induced Liver Fibrosis in Male Rats

The hepatoprotective activity of ethanolic extract from the leaves of Vitex negundo (VN) was conducted against thioacetamide- (TAA-) induced hepatic injury in Sprague Dawley rats. The therapeutic effect of the extract was investigated on adult male rats. Rats were divided into seven groups: control, TAA, Silymarin (SY), and VN high dose and low dose groups. Rats were administered with VN extract at two different doses, 100 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg body weight. After 12 weeks, the rats administered with VN showed a significantly lower liver to body weight ratio. Their abnormal levels of biochemical parameters and liver malondialdehyde were restored closer to the normal levels and were comparable to the levels in animals treated with the standard drug, SY. Gross necropsy and histopathological examination further confirmed the results. Progression of liver fibrosis induced by TAA in rats was intervened by VN extract administration, and these effects were similar to those administered with SY. This is the first report on hepatoprotective effect of VN against TAA-induced liver fibrosis.
Expression of CETP and of splice variants induces the same level of ER stress despite secretion efficiency differences Published, JLR Papers in Press, May 28, 2008.

The cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) gene has been associated with a variety of phenotypes, including HDL-cholesterol levels and, more sporadically, with cardiovascular disease, obesity, and extreme longevity. Alterations of CETP activity levels can be caused by single-base polymorphisms as well as by alternative splicing. In addition to the previously characterized alternative splicing that skips exon 9, we found additional minor variants and characterized the activity of the resultant proteins. The novel variants skipped exon 9 sequences and inserted one of two in-frame exons from Alu-derived intronic sequences. None of the alternatively spliced variants are efficiently secreted, and coexpression of them inhibits wild-type CETP secretion. Expression of the alternative spliced variants causes an induction of genes linked to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response, including the neighboring HERPUD1 (homocysteine- and ER stress-inducible protein, ubiquitin-like domain-containing) gene. Unexpectedly, even though wild-type CETP is secreted much more efficiently than spliced variants, it induces the same degree of stress response as spliced variants, whereas a control secreted protein does not. CETP plays a complex role in modulating ER stress, with its expression inducing the response and its cholesteryl ester transfer activity and differential splicing modulating the response in other ways.
SPARSE GAUSSIAN PROCESSES : INFERENCE AND MODEL SELECTION

Gaussian Process (GP) inference is a probabilistic kernel method where the GP is treated as a latent function. The inference is carried out using the Bayesian online learning and its extension to the more general iterative approach which we call TAP/EP learning (short for TAP (Opper and Winther, 2001) and “expectation-propagation” (EP) (Minka, 2000)). Sparsity is introduced in this context to make the TAP/EP method applicable to large datasets. We address the prohibitive scaling of the number of parameters by defining a subset of the training data that is used as the support the GP, thus the number of required parameters is independent of the training set, similar to the case of “Support–” or “Relevance–Vectors”. An advantage of the full probabilistic treatment is that allows the computation of the marginal data likelihood or evidence, leading to hyper-parameter estimation within the GP inference. An EM algorithm to choose the hyper-parameters is proposed. The TAP/EP learning is the E-step and the M-step then updates the hyper-parameters. Due to the sparse E-step the resulting algorithm does not involve manipulation of large matrices. The presented algorithm is applicable to a wide variety of likelihood functions. We present results of applying the algorithm on classification and nonstandard regression problems applied to artificial and real datasets.
Environmental Law for Sustainability

This is an edited collection of new articles, published by Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2006. The editors are Professors Benjamin J. Richardson and Stepan Wood, Osgoode Hall law School, Toronto. The volume of new essays presents critical new scholarship on law for sustainable development. Its contributors provide international and comparative perspectives on the current state of environmental law and its future directions. Aimed at both students and scholars in law and other social sciences, it goes beyond conventional descriptions of environmental law and policy to a theoretical and interdisciplinary analysis of the role of law in sustainable development. Starting from the premise that ecological sustainability requires environmental law systems to be sensitive to a wide array of institutional, social and economic issues and to emerging forms of environmental governance beyond conventional legal regulation, the book explores: future directions in command regulation; changing forms of public administration; risk assessment and precautionary regulation; ecological justice; public participation in environmental decision-making; indigenous peoples and the environment; industry self-regulation; economic instruments; sustainable finance; the state of international environmental law; and environmental law in developing countries. Contributors include: Klaus Bosselmann (Auckland), Elizabeth Fisher (Oxford), Carolyn Abbot (Manchester), Donna Craig (Macquarie), Steve Dovers (ANU), David Driesen (Syracuse), Oren Perez (Israel), Jona Razzaque (West of England) and Jaye Ellis (McGill).
Identification of Risk Factors Affecting Impaired Fasting Glucose and Diabetes in Adult Patients from Northeast China

Background: Besides genetic factors, the occurrence of diabetes is influenced by lifestyles and environmental factors as well as trace elements in diet materials. Subjects with impaired fasting glucose (IFG) have an increased risk of developing diabetes mellitus (DM). This study aimed to explore risk factors affecting IFG and diabetes in patients from Northeast China. Methods: A population-based, cross-sectional survey of chronic diseases and related risk factors was conducted in Jilin Province of Northeast China. All adult residents, aged 18–79, were invited to participate in this survey using the method of multistage stratified random cluster sampling. One hundred thirty-four patients with IFG or DM and 391 healthy control subjects were recruited. We compared demographic factors, body size measurements, healthy-related behaviors, and hair metallic element contents between IFG/diabetes patients and healthy individuals. Results: IFG/diabetes patients had a greater weight, waist, hip, and body mass index (BMI) than control subjects. Significant differences in the content of zinc (Zn), potassium (K), copper (Ca), and sodium (Na) as well as Cu/Zn ratios between IFG or DM patients and control subjects (p < 0.05) were also observed. Hair Cu, selenium (Se), and Na contents were positively correlated with blood glucose levels (Cu: rs = 0.135, p = 0.002; Se: rs = 0.110, p = 0.012; Na: rs = 0.091, p = 0.038). Polytomous logistic regression adjusting for age, sex, family history of diabetes and BMI, showed that subjects with high BMI were more likely to develop IFG and DM (IFG: OR = 1.15, OR 95% CI = 1.02–1.29; DM: OR = 1.15, OR 95% CI = 1.01–1.33). Moreover, rarely or never eating fruits was a risk factor for DM (OR = 5.46, OR 95% CI = 1.87–15.98) but not for IFG (OR = 1.70, OR 95% CI = 0.72–4.02). Subjects with abdominal obesity or DM history were more susceptible to DM (abdominal obesity: OR = 2.99, OR 95% CI = 1.07–8.37; DM history: OR = 2.69, OR 95% CI = 1.01–7.20). We found that subjects living in Changling County had a significantly lower chance to suffer from IFG (OR and 95% CI for OR: 0.25, 0.08–0.74). Men and 60–69 years old subjects were at increased risk for IFG (male: OR = 3.51, OR 95% CI = 1.34–9.18; age 60–69: OR = 6.64, OR 95% CI = 1.36–32.47). We did not find significant associations of IFG or DM with certain lifestyles (such as eating more meat, exercise or physical activity, smoking, or alcohol drinking) or the content of some metallic elements (such as iron (Fe), Zn , K, calcium (Ca), Na, or magnesium (Mg)). Conclusions: This study demonstrated that less or no fruit eating, DM family history, abdominal obesity conferred vulnerability to DM. Living in Changling County, men and 60–69 years old subjects were found to be risk factors for IFG. Subjects with high BMI were more likely to develop IFG and DM.
DTStorage: Dynamic Tape-Based Storage for Cost-Effective and Highly-Available Streaming Service

An online streaming service is a gateway providing highly accessible data to end-users. However, the rapid growth of digital data and the corresponding user accesses increase the storage costs and management burden of the service providers. In particular, the accumulation of rarely accessed cold data and the time-varying and skewed data accesses are the two major problems degrading the efficiency as well as throughput of modern streaming services. In this paper, we propose DTStorage, a dynamic tape-based storage system for cost-effective and highly-available streaming services. DTStorage significantly reduces the storage costs by keeping latency-insensitive cold data in cost-effective tape storages, and achieves high throughput by adaptively balancing the data availability with its contention-aware replica management policy. Our prototype evaluated in collaboration with KT, the largest multimedia service company in Korea, reduces the storage costs by up to 45% while satisfying the target performance of a real-world smart TV streaming workload.
MASK: anonymous on-demand routing in mobile ad hoc networks

The shared wireless medium of mobile ad hoc networks facilitates passive, adversarial eavesdropping on data communications whereby adversaries can launch various devastating attacks on the target network. To thwart passive eavesdropping and the resulting attacks, we propose a novel anonymous on-demand routing protocol, termed MASK, which can accomplish both MAC-layer and network-layer communications without disclosing real IDs of the participating nodes under a rather strong adversary model. MASK offers the anonymity of senders, receivers, and sender-receiver relationships in addition to node unlocatability and untrackability and end-to-end flow untraceability. It is also resistant to a wide range of attacks. Moreover, MASK preserves the high routing efficiency as compared to previous proposals. Detailed simulation studies have shown that MASK is highly effective and efficient
Calculation of Expected Error of Localization by Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Network

Localization by connectivity in wireless sensor networks is an approach that does not impose any additional hardware to sensor nodes and it only uses connectivity information. In this approach localization is erroneous. In this paper we propose a formula to estimate average of error in localization of random sensor network. The work is started with a view on localization in regular distributed network. Obtained formula will be generalized for randomly distributed network using the random density function of connectivity. Proposed formula shows that the error rate is different depending on the network parameters. Simulation results confirm the performance and correctness of the formula.
Service provisioning for a next-generation adaptive grid

Finding ways of providing efficient, scalable and robust grid service provisioning is one of the foundations of next generation grid systems. Recognising the need for flexible, autonomic and self-manageable solutions, we propose a flexible grid service provisioning framework built on a two layer architecture that promotes a clear separation of concerns. A low-level layer manages a self-organised peer-to-peer overlay that provides grid membership and fundamental message exchange mechanisms. The key differentiating factor of the proposed approach is the use of collaborative bio-inspired algorithm to maintain and optimise the overlay topology in order to improve communication efficiency, as well as adapting to dynamic network conditions. Building on these premises, a high-level layer provides grid services such as resource discovery and monitoring. The proposed solution is evaluated under different scenarios that assess its qualities concerning performance, adaptiveness, reliability, fault-resilience and network communication efficiency. Analysis of the obtained results serves as a guideline for the selection of optimal resource discovery and multicast strategies.
Health care and public service use and costs before and after provision of housing for chronically homeless persons with severe alcohol problems.

CONTEXT Chronically homeless individuals with severe alcohol problems often have multiple medical and psychiatric problems and use costly health and criminal justice services at high rates. OBJECTIVE To evaluate association of a "Housing First" intervention for chronically homeless individuals with severe alcohol problems with health care use and costs. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Quasi-experimental design comparing 95 housed participants (with drinking permitted) with 39 wait-list control participants enrolled between November 2005 and March 2007 in Seattle, Washington. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Use and cost of services (jail bookings, days incarcerated, shelter and sobering center use, hospital-based medical services, publicly funded alcohol and drug detoxification and treatment, emergency medical services, and Medicaid-funded services) for Housing First participants relative to wait-list controls. RESULTS Housing First participants had total costs of $8,175,922 in the year prior to the study, or median costs of $4066 per person per month (interquartile range [IQR], $2067-$8264). Median monthly costs decreased to $1492 (IQR, $337-$5709) and $958 (IQR, $98-$3200) after 6 and 12 months in housing, respectively. Poisson generalized estimating equation regressions using propensity score adjustments showed total cost rate reduction of 53% for housed participants relative to wait-list controls (rate ratio, 0.47; 95% confidence interval, 0.25-0.88) over the first 6 months. Total cost offsets for Housing First participants relative to controls averaged $2449 per person per month after accounting for housing program costs. CONCLUSIONS In this population of chronically homeless individuals with high service use and costs, a Housing First program was associated with a relative decrease in costs after 6 months. These benefits increased to the extent that participants were retained in housing longer.