Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relations between organizational commitment and demographic factors: a research in banking sector

Aim of this research is to answer if organizational commitment changes according to demografic factors. Inputs gained from 200 person sample group from banking sector. According to the analysis it is found that affective and continuance commitment increases with age and job experience, and all componenets of commitment increase according to time in the last job. With the results derived from analysis, research’s support to organizational theory is discussed and some advices put forward.
Analysis and development of locomotion devices for the gastrointestinal tract

The authors are developing devices for semi-autonomous or autonomous locomotion in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. In this paper, they illustrate the systematic approach to the problem of "effective" locomotion in the GI tract and the critical analysis of "inchworm" locomotion devices, based on extensor and clamper mechanisms. The fundamentals of locomotion and the practical problems encountered during the development and the testing (in vitro and in vivo) of these devices are discussed. A mini device capable of propelling itself in the colon and suitable to perform, at least, rectum-sigmoidoscopy (the tract where approximately 60% of all colon cancers are found) is presented. This paper introduces preliminary, but useful, concepts for understanding, modeling and improving the performance of virtually any existing and novel devices for endoscopy of the GI tract.
Auditory Affective Norms for German: Testing the Influence of Depression and Anxiety on Valence and Arousal Ratings

Background The study of emotional speech perception and emotional prosody necessitates stimuli with reliable affective norms. However, ratings may be affected by the participants' current emotional state as increased anxiety and depression have been shown to yield altered neural responding to emotional stimuli. Therefore, the present study had two aims, first to provide a database of emotional speech stimuli and second to probe the influence of depression and anxiety on the affective ratings. Methodology/Principal Findings We selected 120 words from the Leipzig Affective Norms for German database (LANG), which includes visual ratings of positive, negative, and neutral word stimuli. These words were spoken by a male and a female native speaker of German with the respective emotional prosody, creating a total set of 240 auditory emotional stimuli. The recordings were rated again by an independent sample of subjects for valence and arousal, yielding groups of highly arousing negative or positive stimuli and neutral stimuli low in arousal. These ratings were correlated with participants' emotional state measured with the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS). Higher depression scores were related to more negative valence of negative and positive, but not neutral words. Anxiety scores correlated with increased arousal and more negative valence of negative words. Conclusions/Significance These results underscore the importance of representatively distributed depression and anxiety scores in participants of affective rating studies. The LANG-audition database, which provides well-controlled, short-duration auditory word stimuli for the experimental investigation of emotional speech is available in Supporting Information S1.
Environmental factors influence both abundance and genetic diversity in a widespread bird species

Genetic diversity is one of the key evolutionary variables that correlate with population size, being of critical importance for population viability and the persistence of species. Genetic diversity can also have important ecological consequences within populations, and in turn, ecological factors may drive patterns of genetic diversity. However, the relationship between the genetic diversity of a population and how this interacts with ecological processes has so far only been investigated in a few studies. Here, we investigate the link between ecological factors, local population size, and allelic diversity, using a field study of a common bird species, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus). We studied sparrows outside the breeding season in a confined small valley dominated by dispersed farms and small-scale agriculture in southern France. Population surveys at 36 locations revealed that sparrows were more abundant in locations with high food availability. We then captured and genotyped 891 house sparrows at 10 microsatellite loci from a subset of these locations (N = 12). Population genetic analyses revealed weak genetic structure, where each locality represented a distinct substructure within the study area. We found that food availability was the main factor among others tested to influence the genetic structure between locations. These results suggest that ecological factors can have strong impacts on both population size per se and intrapopulation genetic variation even at a small scale. On a more general level, our data indicate that a patchy environment and low dispersal rate can result in fine-scale patterns of genetic diversity. Given the importance of genetic diversity for population viability, combining ecological and genetic data can help to identify factors limiting population size and determine the conservation potential of populations.
Depression in Epilepsy: Ignoring Clinical Expression of Neuronal Network Dysfunction?

Summary: Epilepsy is a chronic disorder that adversely affects social, vocational, and psychological functioning. Despite the variety and complexity of the negative clinical associations with epilepsy, depression is remarkable in prevalence and related adverse effects on health status. An estimated 30–50% of persons with refractory epilepsy have major depression, and depression has a stronger correlation than seizure rate with quality of life. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in epilepsy. Available data indicate that depression may result from underlying brain dysfunction rather than social and vocational disability. Most patients with depression are not screened systematically for the diagnosis, and are subsequently not treated. Although the density of serotonin receptors is greatest in limbic brain regions commonly involved in human epilepsy, such as the mesial temporal and prefrontal areas, no prior randomized controlled trials have evaluated the efficacy of serotonin reuptake inhibitors for depression in epilepsy.
Prediction of survival in diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma based on the expression of six genes.

BACKGROUND Several gene-expression signatures can be used to predict the prognosis in diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma, but the lack of practical tests for a genome-scale analysis has restricted the use of this method. METHODS We studied 36 genes whose expression had been reported to predict survival in diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma. We measured the expression of each of these genes in independent samples of lymphoma from 66 patients by quantitative real-time polymerase-chain-reaction analyses and related the results to overall survival. RESULTS In a univariate analysis, genes were ranked on the basis of their ability to predict survival. The genes that were the strongest predictors were LMO2, BCL6, FN1, CCND2, SCYA3, and BCL2. We developed a multivariate model that was based on the expression of these six genes, and we validated the model in two independent microarray data sets. The model was independent of the International Prognostic Index and added to its predictive power. CONCLUSIONS Measurement of the expression of six genes is sufficient to predict overall survival in diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma.
A study on Fault Ride-Through of VSC-connected offshore wind farms

Three possible strategies to achieve Fault Ride-Through of offshore wind farms connected through voltage-sourced converter (VSC) based HVDC links are investigated in this paper. Dissipation of excess energy by a braking resistor, fast wind power reduction by voltage modulation and a combination of these two are analyzed. The studies are performed in a four-terminal HVDC grid connecting two 1000 MW wind farms comprised of variable-speed full scale converter wind turbines. Simulation results demonstrate improvements in the performance of the synergistic approach (coordinated operation of the first two strategies). This type of analysis can aid in the design of cost-effective FRT schemes of the envisioned HVDC multiterminal systems.
Joint source-channel cooperation: diversity versus spectral efficiency

User cooperation is a spatial diversity technique where multiple terminals form a virtual antenna array to combat fading. We incorporate source coding into the cooperation scenario and analyze cooperation protocols with respect to the average distortion they achieve. We first compare the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol to direct transmission (DT) and show that it does not increase the performance in the average distortion sense. Then we propose two new cooperation protocols which achieve better performance by increasing the spectral efficiency while still providing diversity, yet maintaining the simple nature of the previous protocols
Evolution of Asthma Severity in a Cohort of Young Adults: Is There Any Gender Difference?

Introduction Little is known about the distribution of asthma severity in men and women in the general population. The objective of our study was to describe asthma severity and change in severity according to gender in a cohort of adult asthmatics Methods Subjects with asthma were identified from random samples of the 22 to 44 year-olds from the general population, screened for asthma from 1991 to 1993 in 48 centers from 22 countries and followed-up during 1998–2002, as part of the European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS). All participants to follow-up with current asthma at baseline were eligible for the analysis. To assess change over the follow-up, asthma severity at the two surveys was defined using standardized data on respiratory symptoms, lung function and medication according to the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) Guidelines. Another quantitative score (Ronchetti) further considering hospitalizations was also analysed. Results The study included 685 subjects with asthma followed-up over a mean period of 8.65 yr (min 4.3-max 11.7). At baseline, asthma severity according to GINA was distributed as intermittent: 40.7%, 31.7% as mild persistent, 14% as moderate persistent, and 13.5% as severe persistent. Using the Ronchetti score derived classification, the distribution of asthma severity was 58% mild, (intermittent and mild persistent), 25.8% moderate, and 15.4% severe. Whatever the classification, there was no significant difference in the severity distribution between men and women. There was also no gender difference in the severity distribution among incident cases which developed asthma between the two surveys. Men with moderate-to-severe asthma at baseline were more likely than women to have moderate-to-severe asthma at follow-up. Using GINA, 69.2% of men vs. 53.1% of women (p = 0.09) with moderate-to-severe asthma at baseline were still moderate-to-severe at follow-up. Using Ronchetti score, 53.3% of men vs. 36.2% of women (p = 0.03) with moderate-to-severe asthma at baseline were still moderate-to-severe at follow-up. Conclusions There was no gender difference in asthma severity at the two surveys. However, our findings suggest that asthma severity might be less stable in women than in men.
Complexity reduction of blind decoding schemes using CRC splitting

Blind decoding, used on control channels of some multi-user wireless access systems, is a technique for achieving adaptive modulation and coding. The idea is to adapt the modulation and coding scheme to the channel quality but instead of signaling the parameters used explicitly, the receiver blindly tries a number of fixed parameter combinations until a successful decoding attempt is detected, with the help of a cyclic redundancy check. In this paper we suggest a new method for reducing the complexity and energy consumption associated with such blind decoding schemes. Our idea is to use a mini-CRC injected early in the data stream to determine if the current decoding attempt is using the correct modulation and coding parameters. We analyze and exemplify the complexity gain of this approach and also investigate the impact of the rearrangement of the CRC scheme in terms of the probability of undetected error. The presented results for the complexity gain are promising and the impact on the error detection capability turns out to be small if any.
A Transmit Diversity Technique for OFDM System

In current 4G systems growing demand of multimedia services and the growth of internet related contents lead to increasing interest to high speed communications. One indispensable problem of the wireless channel is fading, which can be mitigated by diversity. There are various coding methods to achieve high reliability for Multiple Input Multiple OutputOrthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems earlier. Recently, Space Time Block Codes (STBC) have gained much attention as an effective transmit diversity technique to provide reliable transmission with high peak data rates to increase the speed and performance of wireless communication systems. This paper presents the performance evaluation of OFDM system, in which fading is reduced by using diversity techniques along with coding methods under various fading channels such as Rician and Rayleigh fading channels. In this work, a performance criterion such as Bit Error Rate (BER) for low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) ranging from 10dB to 20dB is analyzed. The BER for OFDM system without including STBC is 1.776x10 and including STBC is 1.621x10 over Rician Channel. Whereas, over Rayleigh channel the BER for OFDM system without including STBC is 1.834x10 and including STBC, it is reduced to 6.345x10 for the same SNR of 14dB. Thus, OFDM system with STBC provide high data rate with good reliability.
Proceedings of The Second Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora associated with The 8 th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing ( RANLP

Recent developments in statistical machine translation (SMT), e.g., the availability of efficient implementations of integrated open-source toolkits like Moses, have made it possible to build a prototype system with decent translation quality for any language pair in a few days or even hours. This is so in theory. In practice, doing so requires having a large set of parallel sentence-aligned bilingual texts (a bi-text) for that language pair, which is often unavailable. Large high-quality bi-texts are rare; except for Arabic, Chinese, and some official languages of the European Union (EU), most of the 6,500+ world languages remain resourcepoor from an SMT viewpoint. This number is even more striking if we consider language pairs instead of individual languages, e.g., while Arabic and Chinese are among the most resource-rich languages for SMT, the Arabic-Chinese language pair is quite resource-poor. Moreover, even resourcerich language pairs could be poor in bi-texts for a specific domain, e.g., biomedical text, conversa-
Knowledge Management in Challenging Settings - A Case of Military Aircraft

Besides typical challenges related to knowledge management (KM), EADS Military Aircraft is facing some specific challenges resulting from the company's history as well as from its position in the military environment. This descriptive case study reports on the specific challenges and state-of-the-art of KM within a military company and presents some KM initiatives related to these challenges. Furthermore, challenges are related to corresponding concepts and criteria for selecting specific methodologies to tackle upcoming challenges. Finally, the authors are concluding this paper with several key success factors for KM within this environment and give an overview of the next steps.
New regression formula to estimate the prenatal crown formation time of human deciduous central incisors derived from a Roman Imperial sample (Velia, Salerno, Italy, I-II cent. CE)

The characterization and quantification of human dental enamel microstructure, in both permanent and deciduous teeth, allows us to document crucial growth parameters and to identify stressful events, thus contributing to the reconstruction of the past life history of an individual. Most studies to date have focused on the more accessible post-natal portion of the deciduous dental enamel, even though the analysis of prenatal enamel is pivotal in understanding fetal growth, and reveals information about the mother’s health status during pregnancy. This contribution reports new data describing the prenatal enamel development of 18 central deciduous incisors from the Imperial Roman necropolis of Velia (I-II century CE, Salerno, Italy). Histomorphometrical analysis was performed to collect data on prenatal crown formation times, daily secretion rates and enamel extension rates. Results for the Velia sample allowed us to derive a new regression formula, using a robust statistical approach, that describes the average rates of deciduous enamel formation. This can now be used as a reference for pre-industrial populations. The same regression formula, even when daily incremental markings are difficult to visualize, may provide a clue to predicting the proportion of infants born full term and pre-term in an archaeological series.
The impact of sensorimotor experience on affective evaluation of dance

Past research demonstrates that we are more likely to positively evaluate a stimulus if we have had previous experience with that stimulus. This has been shown for judgment of faces, architecture, artworks and body movements. In contrast, other evidence suggests that this relationship can also work in the inverse direction, at least in the domain of watching dance. Specifically, it has been shown that in certain contexts, people derive greater pleasure from watching unfamiliar movements they would not be able to physically reproduce compared to simpler, familiar actions they could physically reproduce. It remains unknown, however, how different kinds of experience with complex actions, such as dance, might change observers' affective judgments of these movements. Our aim was to clarify the relationship between experience and affective evaluation of whole body movements. In a between-subjects design, participants received either physical dance training with a video game system, visual and auditory experience or auditory experience only. Participants' aesthetic preferences for dance stimuli were measured before and after the training sessions. Results show that participants from the physical training group not only improved their physical performance of the dance sequences, but also reported higher enjoyment and interest in the stimuli after training. This suggests that physically learning particular movements leads to greater enjoyment while observing them. These effects are not simply due to increased familiarity with audio or visual elements of the stimuli, as the other two training groups showed no increase in aesthetic ratings post-training. We suggest these results support an embodied simulation account of aesthetics, and discuss how the present findings contribute to a better understanding of the shaping of preferences by sensorimotor experience.
Preoperative Epidural Ketamine Does Not Have a Postoperative Opioid Sparing Effect

Ketamine reduces nociception by binding noncompetitively to the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor, the activation of which provokes hypersensitivity within the central nervous system. We studied the analgesic effect of extradural ketamine given before or after upper abdominal surgery. We sought to assess the effect of ketamine on preemptive analgesia. Ketamine 60 mg was injected epidurally through an indwelling catheter that was inserted at the T7-8 or T8-9 interspace in 98 patients. Patients were randomly allocated into one of the two groups, each consisting of 49 patients: ketamine was given before the induction of anesthesia (Group 1) and after the parietal peritoneum was closed (Group 2). Sample size was calculated using a two-tailed alpha = 0.05 and power of 95%. For postoperative analgesia, meperidine 25 mg was given epidurally whenever a patient complained of pain or the visual analog scale score was greater than 4. The first and the second day cumulative meperidine consumption was not different between the two groups. We conclude that preoperative epidural ketamine 60 mg does not have a preemptive analgesic effect. Implications: In patients undergoing upper abdominal surgery, a single epidural injection of 60 mg of ketamine administered preoperatively was not associated with decreased postoperative analgesic demands. This finding does not contribute to one of the fundamental scientific objectives of preemptive analgesia that postoperative analgesia well beyond the duration of any single drug effect could be produced. (Anesth Analg 1998;87:103-6)
Transconjunctival Orbital Fat Repositioning: Transposition of Orbital Fat Pedicles into a Subperiosteal Pocket

Rejuvenation of the lower eyelid complex is based on the principle that the contour changes characterizing aging involve not only prolapse of orbital fat but also descent of the cheek tissues, resulting in accentuation of the orbital rim and tear trough groove. When a deep groove is present along the orbital rim in the area of the tear trough deformity, it is advantageous, rather than removing orbital fat, to reposition the fat over the orbital rim through the opened arcus marginalis onto the superior face of the maxilla. Orbital fat repositioning can be accomplished through a transconjunctival approach. The arcus marginalis is exposed and incised, and a subperiosteal pocket is created over the superior face of the maxilla. The subperiosteal pocket shape and location are customized based on the desired location of the orbital fat pedicle; often the origins of the levator superioris labialis and the levator alae nasi muscles are partially dissected. Medial and central fat pedicles are created and rotated over the orbital rim into the subperiosteal pocket. A 6-0 polypropylene externalized sutured is used to fixate the fat pedicle in position. The suture can be removed after 3 to 5 days. Twenty-four patients were followed clinically after orbital fat repositioning, with follow-up ranging from 6 to 30 months. Although the fat pedicle undergoes some variable resorption, the viability of the graft, the texture and contour of the repositioned fat after a healing period of 1 to 2 months, and the excellent patient acceptance are indicative of the viability of orbital fat repositioning.
Parallel Rendering with an Actor ModelAlan Heirich ?

This paper describes an application of autonomous concurrent objects (Actors) to parallel rendering. The resulting rendering system is shown to be both scalable and portable. A parallel rendering application based on Monte Carlo path tracing is constructed using programming abstractions deened by the Actor model. This application is demonstrated to scale to hundreds of computers with eeciencies approaching 99%. The abstractions and the application are demonstrated to be portable across a range of parallel and distributed computer systems with various communications characteristics and topologies. A similar set of abstractions have been implemented in VLSI, suggesting that the entire rendering application could be realized by a special purpose systolic architecture.