Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Profit Margin And Capital Structure: An Empirical Relationship

This study constitutes an attempt to investigate the relationship between debt-to equity ratio and firm’s profitability, taking into consideration the level of firms’ investment and the degree of market power. The study uses panel data for various industries, covering the period 1995-96. The main conclusions of our study are: a) firms which prefer to finance their investment activities through self-finance are more profitable than firms which finance investment through borrowed capital; b) firms prefer competing with each other than cooperating; c) firms use their investment in fixed assets as a strategic variable to affect profitability.
Trade liberalisation, rural poverty, and the environment: global discussions and local cases

Much has been researched and said about the impacts of international trade liberalisation at the country level; but little is known about its social and environmental local-level impacts. Since national averages can mask the existence of winners and losers, national-level studies may be a poor guide to addressing the plight of the rural poor and the environment that are at the core of the agenda of the social and conservation movement. This article compares the international trade-liberalisation debate with the findings of local rural-based case studies in seven countries, co-ordinated by WWF and the World Bank during 2004–2007. It discusses some actions that the conservation and social movement could take to improve the discussion and the practice of trade liberalisation, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.
Political Inclusion of Latino Immigrants

Does becoming a citizen represent a major step toward the inclusion of Latino immigrants in the American polity? I study this question by comparing the behavior of immigrants who have acquired citizenship with that of immigrants who are not willing or not eligible to become citizens, focusing on nonelectoral political activities such as contacting government officials and working to solve problems with others informally or through existing groups and organizations. The data analysis is based on recent survey data from the 2006 Latino National Survey. I use matching methods to control for the nonrandom selection of respondents into citizenship status, and perform a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the robustness of findings to hidden bias. Results suggest that granting citizenship to nonnaturalized immigrants is a measure that, by itself, is unlikely to achieve full inclusion of Latino immigrants in the broader democratic process.
Debate: Public Sector Sustainability Reporting—Implications for Accountants

© 2008 THE AUTHORS JOURNAL COMPILATION © 2008 CIPFA References Dickinson, D. (2005), Sustainability Reporting by Public Agencies: International Uptake, Forms and Practices (Centre for Public Agency Sustainability Reporting, Melbourne). Farneti, F. and Guthrie, J. (2007), Sustainability reporting by Australian public sector organisations: why they report. Paper presented at the Australasian Conference on Social and Environmental Accounting Research (University of Sydney). Hawke, L. (2004), Walking the talk on sustainable development in the public sector. Public Administration Today (September), pp. 50–58.
New requirements for off-line parameter calibration algorithms

The process of designing an evolutionary algorithm requires the definition of an adequate representation, a set of components as operators, parameters and parameters values. In practice, some operators can not be helping the evolutionary algorithm to perform his work, thus we require to be able to detect these situations. In this paper we are interested on analyzing the capabilities of off-line calibration techniques, originally designed to tune parameter values, to recognize situations more related to the design process of an evolutionary algorithm. We experimentally analyze the results of the off-line calibration techniques on some specific situations. For that purpose we use some specially designed operators for an evolutionary algorithm which solves the traveling salesman problem.
Emerging functions of serum amyloid A in inflammation

SAA is a major acute‐phase protein produced in large quantity during APR. The rise of SAA concentration in blood circulation during APR has been a clinical marker for active inflammation. In the past decade, research has been conducted to determine whether SAA plays an active role during inflammation and if so, how it influences the course of inflammation. These efforts have led to the discovery of cytokine‐like activities of rhSAA, which is commercially available and widely used in most of the published studies. SAA activates multiple receptors, including the FPR2, the TLRs TLR2 and TLR4, the scavenger receptor SR‐BI, and the ATP receptor P2X7. More recent studies have shown that SAA not only activates transcription factors, such as NF‐κB, but also plays a role in epigenetic regulation through a MyD88‐IRF4‐Jmjd3 pathway. It is postulated that the activation of these pathways leads to induced expression of proinflammatory factors and a subset of proteins expressed by the M2 macrophages. These functional properties set SAA apart from well‐characterized inflammatory factors, such as LPS and TNF‐α, suggesting that it may play a homeostatic role during the course of inflammation. Ongoing and future studies are directed to addressing unresolved issues, including the difference between rSAA and native SAA isoforms and the exact functions of SAA in physiologic and pathologic settings.
Factors Influencing Progress in Establishing Community-Based Marine Protected Areas in Indonesia

Concerns are being raised about high failure rates of community-based small-scale no-take marine reserves that are proliferating in the Southeast Asian region. Factors hypothesized to influence success include intrinsic community characteristics, project input levels, and change agent characteristics. An empirical analysis of these hypotheses was conducted using a sample of 24 villages in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, where marine reserves were in early phases of establishment. Factors found to influence the rate of progress were village complexity, level of development, project input levels, characteristics of community organizers, and degree of community organizer homophily relative to the community. These findings are important for community-based marine conservation initiatives conducting simultaneous interventions in multiple communities. It provides insights in how project strategies can be adjusted to increase the probability of success, obtain economies of scale, target communities more amenable to community-based interventions and result in a better return on project investments.
Cross-layer admission control based on service upgrading/degrading in CDMA systems with successive interference cancellation

In CDMA systems with successive interference cancellation (SIC), conflicting quality of service (QoS) requirements at different protocol layers must be traded off carefully when designing the admission control (AC) policy at the network layer, especially, the adjustment of decoding orders at the physical layer should be taken into account, and thus the cross-layer AC needs to be considered. Moreover, due to the elastic traffic characteristic of data services, the service level of this kind of users can be upgraded or degraded according to the situation of system load such that the overall system performance will be improved. In this paper, we study the AC policy in CDMA systems with SIC and propose a cross-layer AC algorithm based on service upgrading/degrading, where the aspects of the power constraint and decoding order adjustment at the physical layer are taken into account. We conduct extensive simulation experiments, and the numerical results demonstrate that by our proposed algorithm, the overall system performance such as throughput will be increased meanwhile more users can be admitted into the system.
An efficient pipeline to generate data for studies in plastid population genomics and phylogeography1

Premise of the study: Seed dispersal contributes to gene flow and is responsible for colonization of new sites and range expansion. Sequencing chloroplast haplotypes offers a way to estimate contributions of seed dispersal to population genetic structure and enables studies of population history. Whole-genome sequencing is expensive, but resources can be conserved by pooling samples. Unfortunately, haplotype associations among single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are lost in pooled samples, and treating SNP allele frequencies as independent markers provides biased estimates of genetic structure. Methods: We developed sampling methodologies and an application, CallHap, that uses a least-squares algorithm to evaluate the fit between observed and predicted SNP allele frequencies from pooled samples based on haplotype network phylogeny structure, thus enabling pooling for chloroplast sequencing for large-scale studies of chloroplast genomic variation. This method was tested using artificially constructed test networks and pools, and pooled samples of Lasthenia californica (California goldfields) from southern Oregon, USA. Results: CallHap reliably recovered network topologies and haplotype frequencies from pooled samples. Discussion: The CallHap pipeline allows for the efficient use of resources for estimation of genetic structure for studies using nonrecombining haplotypes such as intraspecific variation in chloroplast, mitochondrial, bacterial, or viral DNA.
Fetal and neonatal NK1.1+ Ly‐49− cells can distinguish between major histocompatibility complex class Ihi and class Ilo target cells: Evidence for a Ly‐49‐independent negative signaling receptor

Natural killer (NK) cell function is regulated by both positive and negative signaling receptors. In adult splenic NK cells, negative signaling has been shown to be mediated by the Ly‐49 family receptors. NK1.1+ 2B4+ CD3− cells that are phenotypically and functionally similar to adult splenic NK cells can be derived from murine fetal liver and thymus. These cells do not express any known Ly‐49 molecules on their surface nor do they contain the known Ly‐49 transcripts. Surface expression of Ly‐49 molecules is first detected on splenic NK1.1+ cells 4–6 days after birth. Despite the absence of these negative signaling receptors, fetal and neonatal Ly‐49− NK cells lyse TAP−/−, major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class Ilo but not TAP+/+, MHC class Ihi target cells. This suggests that fetal and neonatal NK cells express negative signaling receptors other than Ly‐49 molecules.
Voting in State Supreme Court Elections: Competition and Context as Democratic Incentives

To offer insight into the complex relationship between democratic processes and the judiciary and to expand knowledge about elections, this article examines ballot roll-off in 654 supreme court elections in 38 states from 1980 through 2000. Specifically, I evaluate the extent to which voter participation is responsive to competition, incumbency, and contextual forces that increase salience and information. Results indicate that voting is highly responsive to these factors. Thus, supreme court elections bear a striking resemblance to elections for other offices and may be effective under certain circumstances for promoting democratic control of the bench. Further, contextual forces have an important impact on citizen participation and must be included in satisfactory accounts of electoral politics. From a practical perspective, replacing partisan elections with nonpartisan or retention elections has the unintended consequence of inhibiting voting, even when nonpartisan elections are contested. Thus, some criticisms of judicial elections are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Autologous Transplantation of Gingival Fibroblast-Like Cells and a Hydroxylapatite Complex Graft in the Treatment of Periodontal Osseous Defects: Cell Cultivation and Long-Term Report of Cases

Autogenous cell transplantation via hydroxylapatite (HA) vehicle has been reported to have beneficial effects on the treatment of human periodontal osseous defects. The aim of this study was to explore the possibility of using gingival fibroblast-like cells in the therapy of osseous defects caused by inflammatory periodontitis by reporting long-term results of gingival fibroblast-coated hydroxylapatite (GF–HA) grafting for healing these defects. Gingival fibroblasts were cultured from healthy gingivae of treated subjects. Growth of cells on HA particles was established in vitro, and then the GF–HA complex was transplanted into the periodontal osseous defects. Clinical parameters of gingival and plaque indices, probing depth, and periapical x-ray were monitored at baseline and at various periods from 50 months to 6 years after surgery. Grafting with only HA in the osseous defects of the same patient was used for comparison. The present study shows that GF–HA-treated sites could achieve marked pocket reduction and probing attachment gain at reentry and later recalls. Good clinical bone filling of osseous defects in GF–HA-treated sites was also demonstrated in periapical radiographs (increased bone height and reappearance of the crestal cortex) and in some reentry sites. One HA-treated site was filled with connective tissue only, and the absence of new bone formation was noted during a reentry operation. Another HA-treated site exhibited a comparable increase in radiographic density, while part of HA particles were gradually lost in longer recalls. These limited observations conclude that GF–HA grafting may provide a treatment modality leading to regeneration of periodontal tissues in periodontitis-affected osseous defects. Further studies including more cases and demonstration of the deposition of differentiated periodontal tissues are necessary before further application of this therapy.
Residential Mobility and Neighbourhood Outcomes

When households move they obviously weigh both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighbourhood in their decision process. But, to the extent that housing quality and neighbourhood quality are inter-twined it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which households are more focused on one or another of these two components of the choice process. This paper uses both cross-tabulations of the neighbourhood choices, and logit models of the actual choices, to examine the relative roles of neighbourhoods and houses in the choice process. The research is focused on the question of the extent to which households trade up in house quality, or neighbourhood quality or both, as outcomes of residential mobility. The research measures neighbourhood quality in both socio-economic and environmental dimensions. The study shows that many households not only move up in housing quality, but quite consistently also make gains in neighbourhood quality, often independently of gains in housing quality. Not surprisingly, the largest gains in neighbourhood quality are related to households who make the city/suburban transition in their housing moves. The research adds another dimension to the growing and extensive literature on neighbourhoods and their role in residential choice.
On Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce.
Predictors of relapse to significant alcohol drinking after liver transplantation.

BACKGROUND End-stage alcoholic liver disease is common, with many of these patients referred for liver transplantation (LT). Alcohol relapse after LT can have detrimental outcomes such as graft loss and can contribute to a negative public perception of LT. OBJECTIVE To identify factors that predict the recurrence of harmful alcohol consumption after LT. METHODS A total of 80 patients who underwent LT for alcoholic cirrhosis or had significant alcohol consumption in association with another primary liver disease, from July 1992 to June 2006 in British Columbia, were retrospectively evaluated by chart review. Several demographic-, psychosocial- and addiction-related variables were studied. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to test possible associations among the variables studied and a return to harmful drinking after LT. RESULTS The relapse rate of harmful alcohol consumption post-liver transplant was 10%, with two patient deaths occurring directly as a result of alcohol relapse. Univariate analysis revealed relapse was significantly associated with pretransplant abstinence of less than six months (P=0.003), presence of psychiatric comorbidities (P=0.016), female sex (P=0.019) and increased personal stressors (P=0.044), while age at transplant of younger than 50 years approached significance (P=0.054). Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed the following independent factors for relapse: pretransplant abstinence of less than six months (OR 77.07; standard error 1.743; P=0.013) and female sex (OR 18.80; standard error 1.451; P=0.043). CONCLUSION The findings of the present study strongly support a required minimum of six months of abstinence before LT because duration of abstinence was found to be the strongest predictor of recidivism. Female sex, younger age at transplant and psychiatric comorbidities were also associated with relapse to harmful drinking.
Sustainability Development and the Quality of Assurance Reports: Empirical Evidence

There is a rising trend among companies to publish their sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Assurance of these reports is a valuable voluntary tool to provide them with higher credibility. Nonetheless, the quality of assurance reports differs in practice and the objective of this paper is to provide evidence in this new area of research. Indeed, we are pioneers in developing an index to measure the quality of assurance reports. We choose the Spanish setting because it is the worldwide leading country as regards CSR reporting (KPMG, 2011; Sierra et al., 2012). We have found evidence on the determinants for CSR reporting posited by existing literature that have an impact on (a) the decision of companies to publish their CSR reports, (b) the decision to assure the CSR report or not and (c) the decision to hire the assurance services from an auditor or a consultant and the subsequent quality of the assurance report. Last but not least, our results from a sample of 161 CSR assurance reports evidence that assurance reports are of fairly acceptable quality, according to the index proposed. Furthermore, the value of the quality index is significantly higher if the assurance services are provided by an auditor (as opposed to a consultant) and if the CSR reporting company is larger. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Laser gyroscopes for very high sensitive applications

We present a summary of the recent results obtained with the “G-Pisa” laser gyroscope prototype in the field of rotational metrology. The experimental apparatus consists in an He-Ne laser having a planar square cavity 1.35 m in side that can be operated both in the vertical and in the horizontal plane. For about one year, the ring laser has been utilized by the Virgo gravitational wave interferometer with the aim of estimating and monitoring the local rotational noise which is degrading the performances of its inertial suspensions. Results in the field of environmental monitoring for the improvement of the suspension control as well as the results in the field of rotational seismology are presented. In the last part of the paper we present some considerations about the possibility of performing a ground-based General Relativity test using an array of ring lasers.
Issues of Transparency and Disclosure in the Saudi Stock Market

The stock market crash in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of 2006 not only highlighted the issues of transparency and disclosure but also questioned the ability of the Capital Market Authority to regulate and supervise the market. The Capital Market Authority has been blamed (CMA) for being responsible for a transparency problem; however, after comparing the current listing and disclosure rules with the old ones and with the similar rules of the London Stock Exchange and their enforcement mechanism, the disclosure rules of the CMA proved to be efficient and in compliance with international standards, and the enforcement mechanism also proved to be reasonably effective. This article argues that the problem in the Saudi stock market is a problem of investors' knowledge and the way of attaining and using information. The author stresses the importance of investor education and stricter disciplinary actions against market manipulators who are taking advantage of small investors' lack of experience. The author proposes some reforms in the legislation, such as stricter disciplinary actions against market abuse, tighter supervision, and some changes in the disclosure rules. He concludes that regulating foreign institutional investors will be the real challenge for Saudi legislators in the foreseeable future.
Improving mental health inequality? Some initial evidence from Australia

This study statistically analyses the location and distribution of some aspects of mental health in Queensland. The health status measured here is not the conventional ‘count’ approach, i.e. counting people diagnosed with/without illness, but rather an approach that was developed in the context of mortality, by Silber and subsequently Le Grand. The present context is morbidity. We measure the years lived free of serious mental illness, for people who subsequently contract these illnesses. A complete enumeration dataset (i.e. not a sample), namely, the Queensland hospital admissions dataset commencing in 1964, is available. Specific illness codings are for conditions so consistently serious that hospital admission invariably occurred throughout the 40-year period. The present study is partial, but has two major advantages. First, the measure incorporates the notion that the later in life is the onset of serious mental illness, the better. Second, although age distribution measurement is not possible with ‘count’ data, it is possible with this approach. Inequality measures, such as the Gini coefficient, are applied to measure the inequality in the distribution. Time series on mental health and mental health inequality, for males and females, are thus generated and statistically analysed.