Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE CASE FOR ADAPTIVENESS IN E-BUSINESS: INNOVATION ADOPTION, ECONOMIC SCOPE, AND VALUE CAPTURE THROUGH THE STRATEGY OF SENSE-AND-RESPOND

The Society shall not be responsible for statements or opinions advanced in papers for discussion at meetings of the Society, or printed in its publications. The material is distributed by ISSS "AS IS" and with no warranties of any kind; ISSS disclaims any warranty of accuracy, completeness or timeliness. ISSS will not be held liable to the user or any other person for any damage arising out of or related to the use of, results obtained from the use of, or any inability to use, the CD-ROM. Users assume all risk. Permission to download, print and photocopy a single individual copy of any of these works for person use is research and/or educational pursuit is granted by ISSS. Requests for permission to use this ISSS material elsewhere, to make electronic copies, or to use on LAN/WAN hardware should be addressed to the Secretary of the ISSS. The rise of the Internet has resulted in an e-business revolution, as enterprises, both for-profit and not-for-profit, are transformed through information. The current practice of management has its roots in the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is the approach to strategic management created in the industrial age still applicable in the "new economy"? The rapid change in e-business can result in a number of uncertainties: whether customers will adopt innovations; what scope of products and services for customers is economically desirable to be produced; where the enterprise can capture sufficient value to produce a profit. Challenges such as these occur in a complex economic environment resulting from the interaction between information assets and network forms. In Adaptive Enterprise, Steve Haeckel prescribes a new, generic model for organizational adaptiveness at large scale that is particularly relevant to e-business. In this model, accountable roles sense the value sought by an individual customer, and respond through a deliverable produced with a design combining a set of modular capabilities. This approach to strategy, structure and governance is uniquely suited to cope with an environment of rapid, unpredictable change. E-business strategists should reconsider their approach to strategic management. The sense-and-respond organization is a design as an adaptive, open, purposeful, social system.
A new method to forecast enrollments using fuzzy time series and clustering techniques

This paper presents a new method to forecast enrollments using fuzzy time series and clustering techniques. First, we present an automatic clustering algorithm to partition the universe of discourse into different lengths of intervals. Then, we present a new method for forecasting enrollments using fuzzy time series and the proposed clustering algorithm. The historical data of the University of Alabama are used to illustrate the forecasting process of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method gets a higher average forecasting accuracy rate than the existing methods.
Verbal or Visual? How Information is Distributed across Speech and Gesture in Spatial Dialog

In spatial dialog like in direction giving humans make frequent use of speechaccompanying gestures. Some gestures convey largely the same information as speech while others complement speech. This paper reports a study on how speakers distribute meaning across speech and gesture, and depending on what factors. Utterance meaning and the wider dialog context were tested by statistically analyzing a corpus of direction-giving dialogs. Problems of speech production (as indicated by discourse markers and disfluencies), the communicative goals, and the information status were found to be influential, while feedback signals by the addressee do not have any influence.
TD ( X ) Converges with Probability 1

The methods of temporal differences (Samuel, 1959; Sutton, 1984, 1988) allow an agent to learn accurate predictions of stationary stochastic future outcomes. The learning is effectively stochastic approximation based on samples extracted from the process generating the agent's future. Sutton (1988) proved that for a special case of temporal differences, the expected values of the predictions converge to their correct values, as larger samples are taken, and Dayan (1992) extended his proof to the general case. This article proves the stronger result that the predictions of a slightly modified form of temporal difference learning converge with probability one, and shows how to quantify the rate of convergence. Keywords, reinforcement learning, temporal differences, Q-learning
Dynamic patterns of adaptive radiation.

Adaptive radiation is defined as the evolution of ecological and phenotypic diversity within a rapidly multiplying lineage. When it occurs, adaptive radiation typically follows the colonization of a new environment or the establishment of a "key innovation," which opens new ecological niches and/or new paths for evolution. Here, we take advantage of recent developments in speciation theory and modern computing power to build and explore a large-scale, stochastic, spatially explicit, individual-based model of adaptive radiation driven by adaptation to multidimensional ecological niches. We are able to model evolutionary dynamics of populations with hundreds of thousands of sexual diploid individuals over a time span of 100,000 generations assuming realistic mutation rates and allowing for genetic variation in a large number of both selected and neutral loci. Our results provide theoretical support and explanation for a number of empirical patterns including "area effect," "overshooting effect," and "least action effect," as well as for the idea of a "porous genome. " Our findings suggest that the genetic architecture of traits involved in the most spectacular radiations might be rather simple. We show that a great majority of speciation events are concentrated early in the phylogeny. Our results emphasize the importance of ecological opportunity and genetic constraints in controlling the dynamics of adaptive radiation.
A nomogram to estimate the HbA1c response to different DPP-4 inhibitors in type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of 98 trials with 24 163 patients

Objectives To develop a nomogram for estimating the glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) response to different dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors in type 2 diabetes. Design A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of DPP-4 inhibitors (vildagliptin, sitagliptin, saxagliptin, linagliptin and alogliptin) on HbA1c were conducted. Electronic searches were carried out up to December 2013. Trials were included if they were carried out on participants with type 2 diabetes, lasted at least 12 weeks, included at least 30 participants and had a final assessment of HbA1c. A random effect model was used to pool data. A nomogram was used to represent results of the metaregression model. Participants Adults with type 2 diabetes. Interventions Any DPP-4 inhibitor (vildagliptin, sitagliptin, saxagliptin, linagliptin or alogliptin). Outcome measures The HbA1c response to each DPP-4 inhibitor within 1 year of therapy. Results We screened 928 citations and reviewed 98 articles reporting 98 RCTs with 100 arms in 24 163 participants. There were 26 arms with vildagliptin, 37 with sitagliptin, 13 with saxagliptin, 13 with linagliptin and 11 with alogliptin. For all 100 arms, the mean baseline HbA1c value was 8.05% (64 mmol/mol); the decrease of HbA1c from baseline was −0.77% (95% CI −0.82 to −0.72%), with high heterogeneity (I2=96%). Multivariable metaregression model that included baseline HbA1c, type of DPP-4 inhibitor and fasting glucose explained 58% of variance between studies, with no significant interaction between them. Other factors, including age, previous diabetes drugs and duration of treatment added low predictive power (<1%). The nomogram estimates the absolute HbA1c reduction from baseline using the type of DPP-4 inhibitor, baseline values of HbA1c and fasting glucose. Conclusions Baseline HbA1c level and fasting glucose explain most of the variance in HbA1c change in response to DPP-4 inhibitors: each increase of 1.0% units HbA1c provides a 0.4–0.5% units greater fall.
A Database Replication Protocol Where Multicast Writesets Are Always Committed

Database replication protocols based on a certification approach are usually the best ones for achieving good performance. The weak voting approach achieves a slightly longer transaction completion time, but with a lower abortion rate. So, both techniques can be considered as the best ones for replication when performance is a must, and both of them take advantage of the properties provided by atomic broadcast. We propose a new database replication strategy that shares many characteristics with such previous strategies. It is also based on totally ordering the application of writesets, using only an unordered reliable broadcast, instead of an atomic broadcast. Additionally, the writesets of transactions that are aborted in the final validation phase are not broadcast in our strategy. Thus, this new approach reduces the communication traffic and also achieves a good transaction response time (even shorter than those previous strategies in some system configurations).
The Manin constant of elliptic curves over function fields

We study the p-adic valuation of the values of normalised Hecke eigenforms attached to non-isotrivial elliptic curves defined over function fields of transcendence degree one over finite fields of characteristic p. We derive upper bounds on the smallest attained valuation in terms of the minimal discriminant under a certain assumption on the function field and provide examples to show that our estimates are optimal. As an application of our results we also prove the analogue of the degree conjecture unconditionally for strong Weil curves with square-free conductor defined over function fields satisfying the assumption mentioned above.
Fast Exact Euclidean Distance (FEED): A New Class of Adaptable Distance Transforms

A new unique class of foldable distance transforms of digital images (DT) is introduced, baptized: Fast exact euclidean distance (FEED) transforms. FEED class algorithms calculate the DT starting-directly from the definition or rather its inverse. The principle of FEED class algorithms is introduced, followed by strategies for their efficient implementation. It is shown that FEED class algorithms unite properties of ordered propagation, raster scanning, and independent scanning DT. Moreover, FEED class algorithms shown to have a unique property: they can be tailored to the images under investigation. Benchmarks are conducted on both the Fabbri et al. data set and on a newly developed data set. Three baseline, three approximate, and three state-of-the-art DT algorithms were included, in addition to two implementations of FEED class algorithms. It illustrates that FEED class algorithms i) provide truly exact Euclidean DT; ii) do no suffer from disconnected Voronoi tiles, which is a unique feature for non-parallel but fast DT; iii) outperform any other approximate and exact Euclidean DT with its time complexity O(N), even after their optimization; and iv) are unequaled in that they can be adapted to the characteristics of the image class at hand.
Application of HITS algorithms to detect terms and sentences with high saliency scores

We adopt the HITS algorithm and assess the performance of its mutual reinforcement principle to detect terms and sentences with high saliency scores in documents. An overview is given of the goal, possible applications and the implementation. The weighting scheme that has been used, is described and accounted for. Experimental results are given as well as ideas for further research. 1 Goal and application The goal is to extract terms and sentences that are salient for the content of a document. Document summarization, which is a very active research area, is the most important possible application. Given the present explosion in the amount of available information, summarization becomes more and more important e.g. for presenting retrieval results, identifying new information, etc. It should be noted that the technique described here only extracts terms and sentences and should be complemented with other techniques. 2 Weighting scheme and HITS algorithm In this section we elaborate on the HITS algorithm and the weighting scheme that has been used. The HITS algorithm, first described by Kleinberg [1], was originally used for the detection of high scoring hub and authority web pages using a mutual reinforcement principle between them. This principle states that a web page is a good authority if it is pointed to by many good hubs and that a good hub page points to many good authorities. A graph of nodes representing web pages and directed edges between them (representing hyperlinks) is constructed and each node gets an authority score and a hub score. For the detection of terms and sentences with high saliency scores, we construct a directed acyclic graph. All sentences of a document are represented by ’sentence nodes’ that have outgoing directed edges to ’term nodes’ for each term they contain. These edges can carry two weights, one of them used in ’forward sense’ of the edge (downstream the arrow) and one in ’backward sense’ (upstream). The HITS algorithm is adapted a bit to incorporate them in the calculations. The edge weights indicate the frequency of the terms in the corresponding sentence, optionally multiplied by weight factors described below. The mutual reinforcement principle can then be reformulated as: ”A salient term is a term that occurs in a lot of salient sentences and a salient sentence is a sentence that contains a lot of salient terms”. After removing any HTML tags from the documents, the sentences they contain are preprocessed. First of all, depending on the choice of the user, the stopwords can be removed as well as all nonalphanumeric characters (except hyphens). Also all isolated numbers are considered as bearing not much content and are removed. The remaining terms are then stemmed using the Porter stemmer
A 1.9μW 4.4fJ/Conversion-step 10b 1MS/s Charge-Redistribution ADC

An ADC for energy scavenging is proposed using a charge-redistribution DAC, a dynamic 2-stage comparator, and a delay-line-based controller realized in CMOS. The charge-redistribution DAC can be used in a simple way to make a SAR ADC. The 10b differential ADC uses bootstrapped NMOS devices to sample the differential input voltage onto two identical charge-redistribution DACs. The test chip is fabricated in a 65nm CMOS process. In this ADC, the MSB is set in between the sampling phase and the first comparison, saving energy and time.
Movement analysis and metabolic profile of tennis match play: comparison between hard courts and clay courts

Abstract This study aimed to define the movement analysis and metabolic model in tennis on hard courts and clay courts. Twenty-four tennis players were equipped with a 15 Hz GPS and a Polar. H7 and played a match on each playing surface. The average duration of matches was 76 Å} 24 (C) and 69 Å} 17 min (H). The maximum heart rate (HRmax) was 185 Å} 14 (C) and 178 Å} 10 bpm (H), the average heart rate (HRav) was 144 Å} 14 (C) and 139 Å} 12 bpm (H). The average metabolic power (MPav) was 3.93 Å} . 34 (C) and 3.70 Å} . 34 W Å~ kg−1 (H) (ES = .72, C > H, +6%). The ANOVA and the post hoc showed significant differences regarding the considered parameters on both the surfaces. The t-test highlighted significant surface-related differences (ES = .88, C > H, +26%) concerning accelerations performed between 50 and 60% of the maximum value, decelerations between 40 and 50% of the maximum (ES = 1.28, H > C, +37%), metabolic power between 0 and 10 W Å~ kg−1 (ES = .71, H > C, +1%), and 10 and 20 W Å~ kg−1 (ES = .78, C > H, +15%).
Social capital measurement of community based organizations through microfinance a case of ethnography sociological inquest and behavioral finance

There has been considerable and growing interest in social capital theory in current years, evidenced by its relevance to various disciplines and numerous subject areas. This interest stems from the appeal of the concept as it integrates sociology and economics, and combines a number of ideas including civic tradition, civicness, civic involvement and social cohesion. Existing studies have suggested that social capital has considerable benefits for a range of economic and sociological outcomes. These purported benefits, and the concept behind social capital, are not new but rooted in the work of early economic and sociologic thinkers.
Threat-Based Security Analysis for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm focusing on the inter-connection of things or devices to each other and to the users. This technology is anticipated to become an integral milestone in the development of smart homes and smart cities. For any technology to be successful and achieve widespread use, it needs to gain the trust of users by providing adequate security and privacy assurance. Despite the growing interest of the research community in IoT, and the emergence of several surveys and papers addressing its architecture and its elements, we are still lacking a thorough analysis of the security and privacy properties that are required for a system where the constituent devices vary in their capabilities. In this paper we provide a threat model based on use-cases of IoT, which can be used to determine where efforts should be invested in order to secure these systems. We conclude by recommending measures that will help in providing security and assuring privacy when using IoT.
A DIY power monitor to compare mobile energy consumption in situ

Many current smartphones need to be recharged every day despite only average usage. This problem is intensified when phones need to track their location on a continuous basis. We provide a yet unavailable platform for accurately measuring the energy consumption of different hardware/software solutions comparing up to three variants in a mobile setting. We show that the accuracy of our system is similar to a fixed, commercial system but is especially useful to evaluate and optimize technology and algorithms that require the phone to be used on the go.
Rat forebrain neurogenesis and striatal neuron replacement after focal stroke

The persistence of neurogenesis in the forebrain subventricular zone (SVZ) of adult mammals suggests that the mature brain maintains the potential for neuronal replacement after injury. We examined whether focal ischemic injury in adult rat would increase SVZ neurogenesis and direct migration and neuronal differentiation of endogenous precursors in damaged regions. Focal stroke was induced in adult rats by 90‐minute right middle cerebral artery occlusion (tMCAO). Cell proliferation and neurogenesis were assessed with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) labeling and immunostaining for cell type‐specific markers. Brains examined 10–21 days after stroke showed markedly increased SVZ neurogenesis and chains of neuroblasts extending from the SVZ to the peri‐infarct striatum. Many BrdU‐labeled cells persisted in the striatum and cortex adjacent to infarcts, but at 35 days after tMCAO only BrdU‐labeled cells in the neostriatum expressed neuronal markers. Newly generated cells in the injured neostriatum expressed markers of medium spiny neurons, which characterize most neostriatal neurons lost after tMCAO. These findings indicate that focal ischemic injury increases SVZ neurogenesis and directs neuroblast migration to sites of damage. Moreover, neuroblasts in the injured neostriatum appear to differentiate into a region‐appropriate phenotype, which suggests that the mature brain is capable of replacing some neurons lost after ischemic injury.
Joint synchronization, channel length estimation, and channel estimation for the maximum likelihood sequence estimator for high speed wireless communications

The performance of channel-estimation-based maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) depends on the accuracy of the channel estimate. Conventional least-squares channel estimators preset a fixed length for the channel. For wireless communications, however, the actual length of the channel is environment-dependent and in general unknown. It is therefore desirable to modify conventional channel estimation algorithms so that the length of the channel estimator adapts to the actual channel. We propose a least-squares algorithm for joint synchronization, channel length estimation, and channel estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is robust against propagation environment and achieves the best trade-off between performance and complexity.
Simulation of the Formation and Morphology of Ice Mantles on Interstellar Grains

Although still poorly understood, the chemistry that occurs on the surfaces of interstellar dust particles profoundly affects the growth of molecules in the interstellar medium. An important set of surface reactions produces icy mantles of many monolayers in cold and dense regions. The monolayers are dominated by water ice, but also contain CO, CO2, and occasionally methanol, as well as minor constituents. In this paper, the rate of production of water-ice-dominated mantles is calculated for different physical conditions of interstellar clouds and for the first time images of the morphology of interstellar ices are presented. For this purpose, the continuous-time random-walk Monte Carlo simulation technique has been used. The visual extinction, density, and gas and grain temperatures are varied. It is shown that our stochastic approach can reproduce the important observation that ice mantles only grow in the denser regions.
Recognizing text using motion data from a smartwatch

In this paper, we show how motion data collected with a smartwatch can be used to infer text written on a whiteboard. All data is gathered by a commercial, off the shelf smartwatch, without any additional hardware. We obtain single letters recognition rates of 94% in the first guess. Using three guesses, we recognize 99% of the letters. This result is achieved by transforming raw sensor measurements into a coordinate system reflecting the orientation of the whiteboard. Therefore, training data recorded on one whiteboard can be used on another even if the user is writing at different heights or body postures. We show that the built in microphone picks up the sounds caused by the pen which can help to segment the input into individual letters.
Factors affecting success in the professional entry exam for accountants in Brazil

ABSTRACT This paper explores factors that have affected the success of candidates in the professional entry exam conducted by Brazil’s Federal Council of Accounting. We analyse results of 18,948 candidates who sat for the exam in 2012, using a logistic regression model and the key indicators used by government to monitor the performance of higher education institutions (HEIs) and the characteristics of candidates. We find that success is related positively to the quality of the HEIs from which candidates graduated and to a measure of student ability that is used widely in Brazil. We find also that males perform better than females and that younger candidates perform better than older candidates. The geographical region of Brazil within which candidates completed the exam was also significant. The insights provided will help public policy-makers in Brazil, and the Brazilian accounting profession, to understand key factors associated with current low pass rates.