Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Consumer education and the OECD electronic commerce consumer protection guidelines

This paper explores the implications of e-commerce transactions and the lack of consumer protection regulation on consumer educators and curricula. The discussion is divided into five sections: conceptualizing e-commerce; the juggernaut of e-commerce; consumer education defined, especially consumer protection in the electronic market-place; the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 1998 Ottawa conference on electronic commerce; and the implications of this fluid market and policy context on consumer educators. Empowerment of the consumer, the ultimate objective of consumer education, is a total challenge in the global electronic market-place, but a challenge that must be embraced by staying informed, becoming a consumer advocate, as well as educator, and remaining ever vigilant as curricula are developed for the domestic consumer transacting in an electronic global market.
Paper versus electronic documentation in complex chronic illness: A comparison

This paper reports an analysis and comparison of the electronic and paper medical records of 5 clinically complex persons with spina bifida, who were seen as in- and outpatients at a small Northeastern urban hospital. The combination of chronic illness, multiple medical and allied health specialties, and longer lifespan in this population ensures both a quantitative volume and qualitative complexity of medical event documentation. This ensures a rich field for research into the content and the nature of the fragmented data presently locked in the paper record.
Craft and Professional Models of Public Relations and Their Relation to Job Satisfaction Among Korean Public Relations Practitioners

To determine which model Korean public relations practitioners use and their levels of job satisfaction, a survey of 167 Korean public relations practitioners in Seoul was conducted. Results showed that Korean practitioners use the craft models of press agentry and public information. However, they aspire to practice two-way, or professional public relations, models. Practitioners of high professionally oriented public relations are more satisfied with their jobs than practitioners of low professionally oriented public relations. This gap between a positive and a normative model also indicated a strong positive relation between the professional models and job satisfaction.
The Jointness of Audit Fees and Demand for MAS: A Self-Selection Analysis

This paper has two objectives: (1) providing a method to evaluate directly the costs (benefits) of knowledge spillovers arising from purchasing MAS from the incumbent auditor, and (2) examining the effect of estimates of the cost of auditor change on clients' ability to capture the resulting cost savings. The first is achieved by using self selection bias parameters estimated from switching regressions. The latter is based on data generated from clients' assessments of auditor change costs and the related economic conditions. For a sample of 84 companies, the results indicate that purchasing MAS from the incumbent auditor does not have a bearing on audit fees. The paper also provides an application of the Heckman-Lee method of correcting for self-selection bias.
OSS data integration using virtual database

Due to network scale expansion and shortening of service lifecycles in recent years, operation support systems (OSSs) have been developed and deployed individually in a short time. However, such OSSs are isolated from each other, which makes it difficult to share data among them. To solve this problem, we propose an OSS data integration approach using a virtual database and discuss its feasibility with respect to functionality and performance. In terms of functionality, we discuss the feasibility of our approach without functions that use event detections. In terms of performance, we argue that overhead will not be a problem in reading and writing data with our approach.
Realistic simulation of multi-scale fluid-solid coupling

In this paper, we present a novel method for simulating middle- and small-scale details of incompressible viscous fluids and solid coupling. To animate the fluid model, we use the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method, which models the flow as a particle system in middle-scale, and based on it, we focus on the interaction between water and solid surface, especially the effects of absorption and adhesion. The absorption is simulated by absorption equations, which are mainly controlled by absorption, absorptivity, and saturation; and the adhesion is simulated by a linear spring and dashpot model, which can simulate the adhesive force. The proposed method works here to realistically animate the water gradually penetrating into the solid object, as well as some movements of runoff and flashing water. This new method thus improves existing fluid simulations, making them capable of generating new kinds of multi-scale interactions which have not realized in the present researches.
Walking ability and activity level after hip fracture in the elderly--a follow-up.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate which variables can predict walking ability and activity level 1 year after hip fracture and to describe changes over time regarding functional capacity. SUBJECTS One hundred and fifty-seven patients (111 women, 46 men), mean age 80.9 (SD 9.5) years, operated on for hip fracture, and able to participate either fully or to some extent in performance tests approximately 1 week after operation were included. Due to high mortality and fragility, only 57 patients participated in the 1-year follow-up. DESIGN AND METHODS The patients were tested at discharge regarding physical performance, pain and bone mineral density. Status before fracture was evaluated by means of interview. At the 1-year follow-up, patients were also asked about their activities outside the home. A stepwise logistic regression was used for prediction. RESULTS The patients had a significantly faster walking speed and better balance function after 1 year than before. The test "Timed up and go" was a strong predictor for both walking ability and activity level 1 year after hip fracture. Knowledge about the patient's walking habits outdoors before hip fracture and the degree of independent walking before hip fracture strengthened the prediction.
Transforming Transnationalism: Second Generation Tongans Overseas

Since the 1960s Tongans have developed extensive transnational ties between the homeland and the overseas populations, including remittances that for many years have bolstered Tonga's economy. This paper examines how these ties have been transformed over time, and focuses on the question of whether the children of Tongan migrants are likely to sustain such ties in the future. Drawing on data collected from ‘second generation’ Tongans in Australia, the paper explores their attitudes towards transnational practices and the extent to which they maintain connections with their parents' homeland. I argue that although Tonga's need for support from the diaspora is growing, migrants' children are unlikely to sustain the current level of remittances. Without an ongoing flow of new migrants, transnational ties are likely to weaken and levels of remittances will suffer a significant decline, with potentially devastating consequences for Tonga.
Adopting sustainable innovation: what makes consumers sign up to green electricity?

This paper investigates what encourages consumers to adopt a green electricity tariff. When people decide to adopt an innovation, such as green electricity, they consider not only functionality, usability, costs and intended outcomes, but also what the innovation means to them, for example, the way it reflects their identity, image, memberships, values and norms. The study reviews the theoretical frameworks of innovation adoption and consumption, and cognitive and normative behaviour, relevant to consumer adoption of pro-environmental innovations, and develops a research framework. Through focus group discussions, a questionnaire survey with 103 respondents and an interview with 10 people, the study finds that consumers sympathetic to environmental issues do not necessarily adopt green electricity. This is due to lack of strong social norms and personal relevance, inconvenience of switching, uncertainty about the quality of green electricity and lack of accurate information. The implications of these findings for strategy, policy and future research are explored. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
We're not all happy yet: Attitudes to work, leadership, and high performance work practices among managers in the public sector

This article explores the attitudes of male and female managers in the public sector toward high performance Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and practices, work, and organisational leadership, and compares these attitudes to those of managers in the private sector. It finds that female public sector managers are most positive about high performance HRM policies and practices. Male public sector managers are less positive than female managers in the public sector and male and female managers in the private sector across all the measures. Psychological contract theory suggests either the changes associated with high performance HRM policies and practices, or attempts to decrease the disadvantage felt by women in the public sector may have resulted in a sense of disadvantage among some men in the sector, and created a changed, more transactional psychological contract between these men and their organisation. Strategies are needed to reengage public sector men.
Total quality management in Sri Lankan service organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an investigation on the use of total quality management (TQM) tools, techniques and concepts among Sri Lankan service organizations.Design/methodology/approach – This research consisted of a literature review and a questionnaire survey done among 99 service organizations in Sri Lanka. First, the factors that are commonly used by TQM organizations were identified through the literature review.Findings – The analysis revealed that there is an enthusiasm among managers in implementing TQM in their organizations. According to the respondents, 41 per cent of the organizations have already implemented TQM. However, deeper analysis of data revealed that there is a lack of thorough understanding of TQM philosophies and techniques among the managers.Practical implications – The findings of the paper will provide information to the practitioners to implement TQM in their organizations and to academics to design courses in TQM.Originality/value – It is .
Look who’s talking: Parliamentary debate in the European Union

Legislative speeches are an important part of parliamentary activity in the European Parliament (EP). Using a new dataset on EP speeches, this paper offers an explanation for participation in legislative debates. We argue that floor speeches partially serve as a communication tool between members of parliament, their national parties, and their European political groups. EP group dissidents often go on record by taking the floor when there is a conflict between their national party and their European political group. In this instance, members give speeches for two reasons: to explain their national party’s position to other members of their EP political group, and to create a positive record for themselves in the eyes of the national party to serve their own reelection purposes.
Understanding Ageing Public Sector Workforces: Demographic challenge or a consequence of public employment policy design?

In all OECD countries, populations and workforces are ageing, with public services generally being older than broader labour markets. Governments are concerned at the looming capacity crisis and identifying policy responses. However, they have generally identified the problem as a simple change in demographics. This article adds a new perspective to this policy debate. Using a study of an Australian state public service, it identifies an association between changes in public employment policies and changes in the workforce age profile. It suggests that current employment policies, which replaced the traditional focus on youth recruitment with a more open public sector labour market, have made it inevitable that public workforces would age and be older than the general labour market. Policy responses to the older public workforce need to go beyond demographic explanations, to accept the older public workforce as the new norm, and align public employment policies accordingly.
Draft Genome Sequence of Uropathogenic Escherichia coli Strain NB8

ABSTRACT Escherichia coli NB8 is a clinical pyelonephritis isolate. Here, we report the draft genome sequence of uropathogenic E. coli NB8, which contains drug resistance genes encoding resistance to beta-lactams, aminoglycosides, quinolones, macrolides, colistin, sulfonamide-trimethoprim, and tetracycline. NB8 infects the kidney and bladder, making it an important tool for studying E. coli pathogenesis.
Review Essay: The new politics and scholarship of the welfare state

The development of the advanced welfare states has long been an issue attracting enormous scholarly attention within both political science and sociology. For a long time, the welfare state literature was about explaining the growth of modern welfare states in general as well as variation across OECD countries.1 However, since the publication of Pierson’s seminal work (1994; 1996), the welfare state debate has increasingly shifted towards the question of welfare state retrenchment. Numerous journal articles and books about welfare state retrenchment have been published, and we believe that this literature is now so extensive that a review is warranted. Pierson argues that the politics of retrenchment is qualitatively different from the politics of expansion. We claim that the scholarship about retrenchment is also markedly different from the scholarship about the expansion of the welfare state. The expansion literature was dominated by economic and sociological approaches focusing on the societal forces shaping the growth of the welfare state (van Kersbergen, forthcoming). Following van Kersbergen, we argue that the retrenchment literature is dominated by political science approaches. We claim that this is partly visible in the factors highlighted in investigations of retrenchment at the level of welfare states and partly in the attention paid to differences across policy sectors. This review has four sections. First, there is a brief outline of Pierson’s main argument. Then we turn to the main part of the review; the post-Pierson debate. Here we will first look at the factors suggested as explanations for retrenchment at the level of welfare states, and subsequently we turn to the factors suggested to explain retrenchment in relation to specific policy sectors focusing on pensions and health policy. We finish with some suggestions for a further research agenda.2
State of origin: research in global performance management, a proposed research domain and emerging implications

This paper is an attempt to delineate a broad domain in the area of global performance management, so that ongoing research does not become so particularised and detailed that major activities of performance management ? as globally practised across firms, industries and cultures ? are ignored in the pursuit of increasingly constricted conceptualisations of 'performance'. The authors, therefore, propose a research domain that further differentiates performance management systems by considering the complexity in performance criteria with special emphasis on inputs, processes and outputs, by looking at explicit and implicit performance approaches and by investigating the extent of global standardisation and local customisation in global performance management.
Feeding schemes and C/N ratio of a laboratory-scale step-fed sequencing batch reactor for liquid swine manure treatment

ABSTRACT This study was undertaken to investigate the effect of two split feeding schemes (600 mL/200 mL and 400 mL/400 mL, designated as FS1 and FS2, respectively) on the performance of a step-fed sequencing batch reactor (SBR) in treating liquid swine manure for nutrient removal. The SBR was run on an 8-h cycle with a repeated pattern of anaerobic/anoxic/aerobic phases in each cycle and the two feedings always occurred at the beginning of each anaerobic phase. A low-level aeration was used (1.0 L/m3.sec) for the anoxic/aerobic phase to facilitate nitrification and phosphorus uptake while reducing the energy consumption. The results showed that FS1 reduced NH4+-N by 98.7% and FS2 by 98.3%. FS1 had 12.3 mg/L NO3-N left in the effluent, while FS2 had 4.51 mg/L. For soluble phosphorus removal, FS1 achieved 95.2%, while FS2 reached only 68.5%. Both feeding schemes achieved ≥ 95% removal of COD. A good power regression was observed between total nitrogen (sum of all three nitrogen species) and the carbon to nitrogen (C/N) ratio, with the correlation coefficients of 0.9729 and 0.9542 for FS1 and FS2, respectively, based on which it was concluded that higher C/N ratios were required to achieve higher nitrogen removal efficiencies.
AFM-based analysis of human metastatic cancer cells

Recently biomechanics of cancer cells, in particular stiffness or elasticity, has been identified as an important factor relating to cancer cell function, adherence, motility, transformation and invasion. We report on the nanomechanical responses of metastatic cancer cells and benign mesothelial cells taken from human body cavity fluids using atomic force microscopy. Following our initial study (Cross et al 2007 Nat. Nanotechnol. 2 780–3), we report on the biophysical properties of patient-derived effusion cells and address the influence of cell morphology on measured cell stiffness. Using a cytocentrifugation method, which yields morphologically indistinguishable cells that can be prepared in 1 min and avoids any possible artifacts due to 12 h ex vivo culture, we find that metastatic tumor cells are more than 80% softer than benign cells with a distribution over six times narrower than that of normal cells. Consistent with our previous study, which yielded distinguishable cell populations based on ex vivo growth and morphological characteristics, our results show it is unlikely that morphology alone is sufficient to explain the difference in elastic moduli for these two cell types. Moreover, analysis of non-specific cell adhesion inherent to tumor and normal cells collected from patients show surface adhesion of tumor cells is ∼33% less adhesive compared to that of normal cells. Our findings indicate that biomechanical-based functional analysis may provide an additional platform for cytological evaluation and diagnosis of cancer in the future.
Class, Mobility and Merit The Experience of Two British Birth Cohorts

The controversial issue of meritocracy' can be most productively addressed if it is treated as one of direction of change over time: i.e. whether individual merit, understood in terms of ability, effort, or educational attainment, is growing in importance in processes of social selection. To test the thesis of increasing merit selection', we analyse data from two British cohort studies relating to children born in 1958 and 1970 respectively. We find that, from the later to the earlier cohort, the pattern of relative rates of class mobility changed little; and that individual merit, as we are able to measure it, did not play a greater part in mediating the association between class origins and destinations. In fact, the effects of ability and educational attainment on individuals' relative mobility chances diminished somewhat. These findings, we argue, are less surprising than they may at first appear if viewed in the context of the problematic relationship between the idea of meritocracy and the operation of a free-market economy
Book Review: Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina

Courts Under Constraints is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship in comparative politics on law and courts; however, it does much more than “fill a gap” in a developing literature. It is a model of how novel, theoretically driven research can illuminate a puzzling political phenomenon. Helmke asks why Argentine high court judges, who enjoy few de facto protections from political interference, have sometimes challenged the authority of the very officials who appointed them. Writing about judges who appear to strategically avoid conflict with politicians is common; writing about judges who appear to strategically invite such conflict is most certainly not. Unsurprisingly, existing theories of judicial behavior offer no explanation for such choices. Indeed, in the standard positive political account, strategic decisions are inherently deferential, designed to minimize confrontation with current members of government. In providing a theoretical explanation of this behavior and a wide array of empirical tests, Helmke does much to advance our understanding of interbranch politics, especially in states where institutions are unstable. Helmke’s theoretical innovation is to recognize that because transitions from one ruling coalition to another can place considerable pressure on judges, the incentive to deviate from one’s sincere view of the law may begin prior to the transition. This simple yet important observation nicely links the theoretical approach to judicial politics advocated by Epstein and Knight (1998) with the broader comparative focus on regime stability (e.g., Przeworkski, Alvarez, Cheibub, & Limongi, 2002). Why would a judge strategically rule against his or her appointer? Helmke suggests that he or she may do so to avoid being punished by a subsequent government. Although this argument is briefly sketched in chapter 2 (pp. 28-29), we find the book’s core theoretical contribution in the subsequent chapter, in which Helmke introduces a formal signaling model of judicial-government interaction. In chapter 3, we learn that “strategic defection” from a current government arises out of fundamental political uncertainties. Because appointing a judge is not costless, even politicians capable of replacing the entire judiciary may elect not to do so. The choice depends on the government’s beliefs about whether a judge’s ideology is compatible with its own, something it may be able to learn from past decisions. Similarly, because issuing a decision that misrepresents a judge’s preferences is both personally unsatisfying and may induce a negative response from the current government, the