Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Institutional Theory and E-Government Research

introduction Recent developments in institutional theory are highly promising for the study of e-government. , have used institutional approaches to understand diverse social and organizational phenomena. Insights gained from these studies can be valuable for guiding research in e-government. In fact, there are some initial efforts in information systems and e-government research that have applied institutional theory and proved useful in generating new insights about how information technologies are 2001) in organizations. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of some of these initial studies to highlight the usefulness of institutional theory in e-government research. We also suggest some opportunities for future research in e-government using institutional theory. This chapter does not capture all the essential theoretical and empirical issues related to using institutional theory in information systems and e-government research. Instead, it is a brief review and a good starting point to explore the potential of institutional theory. We hope that e-government scholars find it interesting and useful. The chapter is organized in five sections, including this introduction. The second section provides a brief overview of institutional theory in various disciplinary traditions, with an emphasis on institutional theory in sociology. Then the chapter identifies various patterns of the use of institutional theory in information systems and e-government research. Based on our analysis of the current state of the art, the fourth section suggests some opportunities for future research. Finally, the fifth section provides some final comments.
Postavení vysokoškoláků a uplatnění absolventů vysokých škol na pracovním trhu 2010

Středisko vzdělávací politiky Pedagogické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy v Praze (SVP) předkládá již 5. výroční zprávu s názvem „Postavení vysokoškoláků a uplatnění absolventů vysokých škol na pracovním trhu 2010“. Zpráva vznikla s podporou Ministerstva školství, mládeže a tělovýchovy. Na webové adrese SVP PedF UK http://www.strediskovzdelavacipolitiky. info/ lze nalézt nejen text zprávy, ale také další informace, údaje a poznatky k tomuto tématu. Středisko vzdělávací politiky Pedagogické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy (SVP PedF UK) dlouhodobě shromažďuje, analyzuje a zveřejňuje údaje o zaměstnatelnosti absolventů všech českých vysokých škol a jejich fakult od roku 2002 do současnosti. Účastní se rovněž velkých mezinárodních výzkumných projektů uplatnění absolventů a spolupracuje s řadou podobně zaměřených pracovišť v evropských zemích jako například v Německu, Nizozemsku, Francii, Itálii, Rakousku nebo ve Slovinsku, ale také v USA a Japonsku. Díky tomu může své závěry a doporučení opřít o seriózní a hluboké zkušenosti a znalosti. Letošní zpráva se skládá ze dvou kapitol. Kromě toho, že jednotlivé kapitoly nabízejí svá specifická témata, mají obě společné to, že se zabývají vlivem ekonomické krize na uplatnění absolventů vysokých škol.
Evidence that photons have extension in space

Satyendra Nath Bose realized that there was a logical inconsistency in the derivation of Planck's radiation law since the derivation used to obtain the temperature-independent prefactor in the blackbody radiation law had been based in part on classical wave hypotheses, such as the number of degrees of freedom of the ether. Bose worked out a strictly quantum derivation by combining the quantum hypothesis with statistical mechanics to determine the number of states of each mode that would occupy a 6-dimensional phase space. Here I use the model of an extended photon to show that the temperature-independent prefactor of Planck's radiation law can be derived in an alternative manner by calculating how many extended photons of each mode would ll a 3-dimensional Euclidean space. By combining my derivation of the temperature-independent prefactor with Planck's temperature-dependent probability distribution, I show that all of the major equations that describe blackbody radiation can be derived from the assumption that the photon is an extended body in 3-dimensional Euclidean space. This derivation provides evidence for the suggestion that photons are neither mathematical points nor groups of innite plane waves, but quantized and nite volume elements.
Cooperative Autonomous Mission Planning and Execution for the Flying Robot MARVIN

MARVIN is an autonomously flying robot based on a model helicopter. It has been designed for participation in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) Millennial Event 1998 – 2000. The competition task consists of a search operation in an unknown disaster scene with threats such as fires, water fountains, and smoke. The overall system consists of the helicopter itself and the ground station hosting most of the computing power. This paper describes how the system components cooperate in planning, executing and re-planning the search mission guided by a variety of sensor data. The most important sensor is a digital photo camera, its images being analyzed by a number of independent computer vision modules. In 1999, MARVIN has taken the lead of the three-year competition.
The effect of N-doping of MQWS on the properties of deep ridge transistor lasers

Transistor lasers (TLs) with n-doped quantum wells (QWs), which own low threshold current, are reported in this paper. The exposed side walls of QWs introduce amounts of recombination centers, which damages the properties of deep ridge TLs greatly. It is found that the heavily doping in quantum wells can effectively alleviate this effect. Assuming that the surface recombination is 106 cm/s, the light output power and current gain of common emitter configurations as functions of varying doping concentration and ridge width are studied. With doping concentration of 1018 cm-3 and ridge width of 2μm, the threshold current of TLs can be reduced from more than 100 mA to 31 mA and current gain can be increased from 0.1 to 2.4.
Improved robust stability criteria for uncertain discrete-time systems with interval time-varying delays via new zero equalities [Brief Paper]

This study is concerned with the stability problem for uncertain discrete-time systems with interval time-varying delays. By construction of an augmented Lyapunov-Krasovskii-s functional and utilisation of new zero equalities, improved delay-dependent criteria for the stability of the systems are derived for guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of the concerned systems. The effectiveness and the reduced conservatism of the derived results are demonstrated by three illustrative examples.
The Policing of Anti-government Protests: Thailand’s 2013–2014 Demonstrations and a Crisis of Police Legitimacy

Street interactions between the police and protesters can serve as a barometer of state–society conflict. This article seeks to examine the way in which the police respond to anti-government protests, and how these responses influence the politics of legitimacy at stake. Through the examination of protest policing in Thailand’s decade-long political conflicts, which reached the zenith in 2013–2014, I will show that police responses to these protests were a mixture of three approaches: accommodative, restrictive and hands-off. At least four factors influenced the interplay of these methods: (i) the police’s tactical improvement, which however faces structural challenges; (ii) a history of police politicization; (iii) extreme characteristics of the protests; and (iv) the nature of conflict over governmental legitimacy contributing to public mistrust in the police. The Thai case illustrates that handling anti-government protests necessitates political sensitivity and creativity. Otherwise, the government and especially the police can run the risk of further damaging public trust and institutional legitimacy.
Psychosocial Risk Factors, Interventions, and Comorbidity in Patients with Non-Specific Low Back Pain in Primary Care: Need for Comprehensive and Patient-Centered Care

Non-specific low back pain (LBP) affects many people and has major socio-economic consequences. Traditional therapeutic strategies, mainly focused on biomechanical factors, have had moderate and short-term impact. Certain psychosocial factors have been linked to poor prognosis of LBP and they are increasingly considered as promising targets for management of LBP. Primary health care providers (HCPs) are involved in most of the management of people with LBP and they are skilled in providing comprehensive care, including consideration of psychosocial dimensions. This review aims to discuss three pieces of recent research focusing on psychosocial issues in LBP patients in primary care. In the first systematic review, the patients’ or HCPs’ overall judgment about the likely evolution of LBP was the factor most strongly linked to poor outcome, with predictive validity similar to that of multidimensional scales. This result may be explained by the implicit aggregation of many prognostic factors underlying this judgment and suggests the relevance of considering the patients from biopsychosocial and longitudinal points of view. The second review showed that most of the interventions targeting psychosocial factors in LBP in primary care have to date focused on the cognitive-behavioral factors, resulting in little impact. It is unlikely that any intervention focusing on a single factor would ever fit the needs of most patients; interventions targeting determinants from several fields (mainly psychosocial, biomechanical, and occupational) may be more relevant. Should multiple stakeholders be involved in such interventions, enhanced interprofessional collaboration would be critical to ensure the delivery of coordinated care. Finally, in the third study, the prevalence of psychosocial comorbidity in chronic LBP patients was not found to be significantly higher than in other patients consulting in primary care. Rather than specifically screening for psychosocial conditions, this suggests taking into account any potential comorbidity in patients with chronic LBP, as in other patients. All these results support the adoption of a more comprehensive and patient-centered approach when dealing with patients with LBP in primary care. As this condition is illustrative of many situations encountered in primary care, the strategies proposed here may benefit most patients consulting in this setting.
Performance Analysis of Multiprocessor Mesh Interconnection Networks with Wormhole Routing

In this paper, we develop a fairly precise performance model for k-ary n-cube networks with single-flit or infinite buffers, and wormhole routing. The models include the deadlock-free routing scheme of Dally and Seitz in the finite-buffer case. In contrast to previous work, we model the system as a closed queueing network and (i) we include the effects of blocking and pipelining of messages in the network, (ii) we allow for arbitrary sourcedestination probability distributions, and (iii) we explicitly model the virtual channels used in the deadlock-free routing algorithm. The representation of message pipelining and blocking and the asymmetric virtual channel loadings of the deadlock avoidance algorithm require an approximate Mean Value Analysis solution that is rather complex. Nevertheless, these features have a significant impact on system performance and are thus important to model. The model provides a further example that approximate Mean Value Analysis can be used for accurate performance prediction of highly complex systems with non-product-form behavior. We use the model to examine several performance issues for 2-dimensional networks. We study network performance and scalability for nodes that can make multiple requests before blocking for responses, as well as for traffic patterns that exhibit nearest-neighbor communication locality. We study the implications of unidirectional vs bidirectional mesh topologies, end-around connections in the bidirectional case, finite buffers, communication hot-spots, and the deadlock avoidance routing algorithm. Some results of the analysis are: 1) system performance is latency-limited when processors block for a response after every message, but becomes bandwidthlimited as more outstanding requests are allowed; hence, in the latter case, network performance does not scale well with increasing system size, 2) moderate communication locality improves system efficiency, but a very high level of locality is needed for system performance to scale well, 3) in contrast to previous hot-spot studies based on non-blocking processors, we find that the effect of hot-spots on latencies for non-hot traffic is relatively small in systems with up to four outstanding requests, and 4) at some plausible system operating points there is a perceptible difference in the efficiencies of processors at different locations in the mesh, due to asymmetric loads on the virtual channels by the routing algorithm. Index terms Approximate Mean Value Analysis, closed queueing networks, finite buffers, hot-spots, multiprocessor interconnection networks, mesh networks, near-neighbor communication, performance analysis, wormhole routing. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DCR-8451405, and by an IBM Graduate Fellowship.
Novel FRMD7 Mutations and Genomic Rearrangement Expand the Molecular Pathogenesis of X-Linked Idiopathic Infantile Nystagmus.

PURPOSE Idiopathic infantile nystagmus (IIN; OMIM 31700) with X-linked inheritance is one of the most common forms of infantile nystagmus. Up to date, three X-linked loci have been identified, Xp11.4-p11.3 (calcium/calmodulin-dependent serine protein kinase [CASK]), Xp22 (GPR143), and Xq26-q27 (FRMD7), respectively. Here, we investigated the role of mutations and copy number variations (CNV) of FRMD7 and GPR143 in the molecular pathogenesis of IIN in 49 unrelated Belgian probands. METHODS We set up a comprehensive molecular genetic workflow based on Sanger sequencing, targeted next generation sequencing (NGS) and CNV analysis using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) for FRMD7 (NM_194277.2) and GPR143 (NM_000273.2). RESULTS In 11/49 probands, nine unique FRMD7 changes were found, five of which are novel: frameshift mutation c.2036del, missense mutations c.801C>A and c.875T>C, splice-site mutation c.497+5G>A, and one genomic rearrangement (1.29 Mb deletion) in a syndromic case. Additionally, four known mutations were found: c.70G>A, c.886G>C, c.910C>T, and c.660del. The latter was found in three independent families. In silico predictions and segregation testing of the novel mutations support their pathogenic effect. No GPR143 mutations or CNVs were found in the remainder of the probands (38/49). CONCLUSIONS Overall, genetic defects of FRMD7 were found in 11/49 (22.4%) probands, including the first reported genomic rearrangement of FRMD7 in IIN, expanding its mutational spectrum. Finally, we generate a discovery cohort of IIN patients potentially harboring either hidden a variation of FRMD7 or mutations in genes at known or novel loci sustaining the genetic heterogeneity of IIN.
Functional equivalence of Brn3 POU-domain transcription factors in mouse retinal neurogenesis

POU-domain transcription factors play essential roles in cell proliferation and differentiation. Previous studies have shown that targeted deletion of each of the three POU-domain Brn3 factors in mice leads to the developmental failure and apoptosis of a unique set of sensory neurons in retina, dorsal root ganglia, trigeminal ganglia and inner ear. The specific defects associated with the removal of each Brn3 gene closely reflect their characteristic spatiotemporal expression patterns. Nevertheless, it remains elusive whether Brn3 factors are functionally equivalent and act through a common molecular mechanism to regulate the development and survival of these sensory neurons. By knocking-in Brn3a (Brn3aki) into the Brn3b locus, we showed here that Brn3aki was expressed in a spatiotemporal manner identical to that of endogenous Brn3b. In addition, Brn3aki functionally restored the normal development and survival of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the absence of Brn3b and fully reinstated the early developmental expression profiles of Brn3b downstream target genes in retina. These results indicate that Brn3 factors are functionally equal and that their unique roles in neurogenesis are determined by the distinctive Brn3 spatiotemporal expression patterns.
Image Classification with Max-SIFT Descriptors

In the conventional Bag-of-Features (BoF) model for image classification, handcrafted descriptors such as SIFT are used for local patch description. Since SIFT is not flipping invariant, left-right flipping operation on images might harm the classification accuracy. To deal with, some algorithms augmented the training and testing datasets with flipped image copies. These models produce better classification results, but with the price of increasing time/memory consumptions. In this paper, we present a simple solution that uses Max-SIFT descriptors for image classification. Max-SIFT is a flipping invariant descriptor which is obtained from the maximum of a SIFT descriptor and its flipped copy. With Max-SIFT, more robust classification models could be trained without dataset augmentation. Experimental results reveal the consistent accuracy gain of Max-SIFT over SIFT. The much cheaper computational cost also makes it capable of being applied onto large-scale classification tasks.
Free-Free Spectral Energy Distributions of Hierarchically Clumped H II Regions

In an effort to understand unusual power-law spectral slopes observed in some hypercompact H II regions, we consider the radio continuum energy distribution from an ensemble of spherical clumps. An analytic expression for the free-free emission from a single spherical clump is derived. The radio continuum slope (with Fν ∝ να) is governed by the population of clump optical depths N(τ) such that (1) at frequencies where all clumps are thick, a continuum slope of +2 is found, (2) at frequencies where all clumps are optically thin, a flattened slope of -0.11 is found, and (3) at intermediate frequencies, a power-law segment of significant bandwidth with slopes between these two limiting values can result. For the ensemble distribution, we adopt a power-law distribution N(τ) ∝ τ-γ and find that significant power-law segments in the spectral energy distribution with slopes from +2 to -0.11 result only for a relatively restricted range of γ values from 1 to 2. Furthermore, a greater range of clump optical depths for this distribution leads to a wider bandwidth over which the intermediate power-law segment exists. The model is applied to the source W49N B2 with an observed slope of α ≈ +0.9, but that may be turning over to become optically thin around 2 mm. An adequate fit is found in which most clumps are optically thin and there is little "shadowing" of rearward clumps by foreground clumps (i.e., the geometrical covering factor C ≪ 1). The primary insight gained from our study is that in the Rayleigh-Jeans limit for the Planck function that applies for the radio band, it is the distribution in optical depth of the clump population that is solely responsible for setting the continuum shape, with variations in the size and temperature of clumps serving to modulate the level of free-free emission.
An Extended Input Output Table Compiled for Analyzing Water Demand and Consumption at County Level in China

This paper attempts to propose hybrid methodology of compiling water resource extended input-output (IO) table at county level (According to administrative structure of China, a county is subordinate to its province, and provincial level is parallel to state level of other countries). By combining Non-Survey-based RAS-technique for possible iterated results and Partial-Survey-based current situation for actual ongoing resource-consumption, we aimed to depict a more accurate structure for water resource consumption and regional economic impact analysis at a county level in the arid area. Additionally, non-parameter methodology was adopted to interpolate missing data. Since human interventions continually have impacted on the natural environment that would finally lead to over-consumption of natural resources, we introduced water consumption caused by cultivation in the Primary Industry and water usage in other industries into a local input-output matrix of Shandan County in Gansu Province, China. Evidence of empirical analysis shows that the modified IO table can more accurately describe economic structure than weighted provincial average IO table does. Moreover, industrialization is ongoing with economic diversity and continually generating water use demand even though also stimulating imports of light industrial products according to the Partial-Survey reports. It demonstrates that industrialization and increasing household consumption drive a high speed of economic growth but with a high cost of water consumption through the Secondary and Tertiary Industries, even at a far rural area. Hence, water scarcity would be a constraint on sustainable development in regions such as Shandan County when taking economic valuation of natural water consumption into account.
Numerical Approach to Obtain Positive solution for Classes of Laplacian Systems

Using a numerical method based on sub-super solution, we will obtain positive solution to the coupled-system of boundary value problems of the form i¢u = ‚1f(v) + "1h(u) in › i¢v = ‚2 g(u) + "2∞(v) in › u = 0 = v on @› where i¢ is the Laplacian operator ‚1;‚2;"1;"2 are nonnegative parameters, and › is a bounded region in R n , with smooth boundary @› . We obtain numerically a large positive solution for ‚1 + "1 and ‚2 + "2 large when
Macroprudential policy and central bank communication PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE – PLEASE DO NOT

In response to the financial crisis of 2007-2010, many central banks have been or will be assigned important tasks related to macroprudential supervision. Central bank communication will constitute a central policy tool for that purpose. The paper asks the question how such communication will affect financial markets, exploiting the fact that many central banks have had some financial stability role in the past, and have communicated extensively on this through the publication of Financial Stability Reports (FSRs) and financial stability-related statements by governors. Building a unique dataset, it provides an empirical assessment of the financial market reactions to more than 1000 releases of FSRs and speeches in 36 countries over the past 14 years. The findings suggest that FSRs have a significant and potentially long-lasting effect on stock market returns. Moreover, they tend to reduce market volatility, in particular if they contain an optimistic assessment. Speeches and interviews, in contrast, have little effect on market returns and tend to increase market volatility. The findings underline the importance of differentiating between communication tools and content when designing a communication strategy on financial stability issues. JEL classification: E44, E58, G12.
Logically Characterizing Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems

Currently, adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS) are described with nonuniform methods, depending on the specific view on the system, the application, or other parameters. There is no common language for expressing functionality of AEHS, hence these systems are difficult to compare and analyze. In this paper we investigate how a logical description can be employed to characterize adaptive educational hypermedia. We propose a definition of AEHS based on first-order logic, characterize some AEHS due to this formalism, and discuss the applicability of this approach.