Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INNOVATIONS AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: NEOCLASSICAL VERSUS EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

In the last 20 years, the concept of ‘Sustainable Development’ (SD) has become very popular and wide spread in the world. In particular, the environmental dimension of SD asks for new ways to accomplish enhanced quality of life with reduced environmental impact. As a consequence, innovations that contribute to sustainable path ways through an improved environmental quality (the so-called ‘Sustainable Innovations’ - SI s) are facing a growing interest. The present study aims at contributing to the debate about innovation and SD, by focusing on the analysis of SIs from, respectively, the neoclassical and the evolutionary perspective. Whereas neoclassical theorists neoclassical theorists focus on the ‘double externality problem’ of SIs, on the one hand, and on the factors that influence the irimplementation, on the other, evolutionary approach analyses mainly radical technological changes thus stressing the need for a consideration of additional aspects ( in particular social and institutional ones) in the analysis of SIs.
Hydrolysis of 14C-labelled proteins by rumen micro-organisms and by proteolytic enzymes prepared from rumen bacteria

1. Proteins were labelled with 14C in a limited reductive methylation using [14C]formaldehyde and sodium borohydride. 2. The rate of hydrolysis of purified proteins was little (< 10%) affected by methylation and the 14C-labelled digestion products were not incorporated into microbial protein during a 5 h incubation with rumen fluid in vitro. It was therefore concluded that proteins labelled with 14C in this way are valid substrates for study with rumen micro-organisms. 3. The patterns of digestion of 14C-labelled fish meal, linseed meal and groundnut-protein meal by rumen micro-organisms in vitro were similar to those found in vivo. 4. The rates of hydrolysis of a number of 14C-labelled proteins, including glycoprotein II and lectin from kidney beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), were determined with mixed rumen micro-organisms and with proteases extracted from rumen bacteria. Different soluble proteins were digested at quite different rates, with casein being most readily hydrolysed. 5. Proteins modified by performic acid oxidation, by cross-linking using 1,6-di-iso-cyanatohexane or by diazotization were labelled with 14C. Performic acid treatment generally increased the susceptibility of proteins to digestion, so that the rates of hydrolysis of performic acid-treated proteins were more comparable than those of the unmodified proteins. Cross-linking resulted in a decreased rate of hydrolysis except with the insoluble proteins, hide powder azure and elastin congo red. Diazotization had little effect on the rate of hydrolysis of lactoglobulin and albumin, but inhibited casein hydrolysis and stimulated the breakdown of γ-globulin.
Deriving the railway mania

This article argues that the promotion boom which occurred in the railway industry during the mid 1840s was amplified by the issue of derivative-like assets, which let investors take highly leveraged positions in the shares of new railway companies. The partially paid shares which the new railway companies issued allowed investors to obtain exposure to an asset by paying only a small initial deposit. The consequence of this arrangement was that investor returns were substantially amplified, and many schemes could be financed simultaneously. However, when investors were required to make further payments it put a negative downward pressure on prices.
Turkish Currency Crisis of 2000-2001, Revisited

Turkey's exchange rate based stabilization programme had collapsed within just 11 months of its implementation in the midst of a liquidity crunch in November 2000 caused by a reversal in the capital inflow. The onset of the stabilization programme created ample opportunities for speculative investors to make relatively safe one-sided bets, and the initial success of the programme in bringing down interest rates implied substantial capital gains over securities obtained in 1999 and early stages of the programme. It was only natural that speculative investors would take the opportunity to realize these gains while the firm exchange rate commitment was still in place. The programme failed to deal with this contingency effectively, assuming that as long as it was implemented faithfully, long-term investors would be forthcoming to takeover positions speculators would want to unload. That assumption proved disastrously wrong.
Gaussian process dynamical models for multimodal affect recognition

Affective computing systems has a great potential in applications for biofeedback systems and cognitive conductual therapies. Here, by analyzing the physiological behavior of a given subject, we can infer the affective state of an emotional process. Since, emotions can be modeled as dynamic manifestations of these signals, a continuous analysis in the valence/arousal space, brings more information of the affective state related to an emotional process. In this paper we propose a method for dynamic affect recognition from multimodal physiological signals. Our model is based on learning a latent space using Gaussian process latent variable models (GP-LVM), which maps high dimensional data (multimodal physiological signals) in a low dimensional latent space. We incorporate the dynamics to the model by learning the latent representation, with associated dynamics. Finally, a support vector classifier is implemented to evaluate the relevance of the latent space features in the affective recognition process. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently model a physiological time-series and recognize with high accuracy an affective process.
The Impact of Information and Communications Technology Investment on UK Productive Potential 1986-2000: New Statistical Methods and Tests

The effect of information and communications technology (ICT) and other investment on the UK's GDP potential is analysed and tests of the standard assumptions are provided. It is found that, in the absence of hedonic price series for the UK ICT sector, it is acceptable to use surrogates based on the law of one price. The investment data are consistent with the assumptions of optimality and homotheticity. So, in the absence of quality-adjusted measures of labour supply, it is legitimate to assess the contribution of investment to GDP potential independently. Capital investment increased UK GDP potential by about 1 1/2 per cent per annum during 1985-2000.
The Shift of Weekend Effects in Taiwan's Equity Index Return: Index Futures Listings or Other Alternative Explanations

This paper investigates the impact of index futures tradings on day-of-the-week effects for the equity index in Taiwan's equity market. Using the extensive model of Hiraki, Maberly and Taube (1998), the empirical findings support the hypothesis that the introduction of index futures has a significant impact on the return structure, both in terms of daily seasonalities and the lag effects of past returns on current returns. Of particular interest, Tuesday effects gradually disappeared after the introduction of index futures, and in the post-futures period, Monday returns are found to be anomalous. After controlling non-normality of the error distribution and time-varying conditional variance, the results indicate that the Monday and the Tuesday effects co-exist after the index futures listings. Although the US equity market is shown to have a strong influence on the Taiwan's market, the pattern of weekend effects shift remains unchanged after taking the US spillover into account. The closing of Saturday trading is found to be a partial cause of the observed shift.
The Euro, Global Liquidity and the Financial Crisis

Against the background of steadily increasing global liquidity since the beginning of the century in most industrial countries as well as in numerous emerging market economies with a dollar peg, especially China, broad money growth has been running well ahead of nominal GDP. Surprisingly enough, for long time consumer price inflation has remained widely unaffected by the strong monetary dynamics in many regions in the world. Over the same time horizon, however, many countries have experienced sharp but sequential booms in asset prices, such as commodity, real estate or share prices (Schnabl and Hoffmann, 2007). Between 2001 and 2007, for instance, house prices strongly increased by 40 to 60% in a number of OECD countries, the CRB commodity price index surged by 84% in the same period and stock prices more than doubled in nearly all major markets from 2003 to 2007. A similar evolution can be found for oil prices. The oil price being still low in 2001, the next six years saw a steady increase that tripled the price by the middle of 2007. Later that year, the path of oil prices steepened sharply, sending the price to an all-time high on July 3, 2008, only to be followed by an even more spectacular price collapse (Hamilton, 2008, p. 1). Around the turn-of-year 2008/09, the oil price has started to rebound and has now reached values of around 75 US-$ which is about twice as much as at the 『日本 EU学会年報』第30号,pp. 10-38 平成22年
Team autonomy, organizational commitment and company performance – a study in the retail trade

The study focuses on the relationship between perceived team autonomy and company performance through highlighting organizational commitment as a mediating factor in this relationship. Data collected in 2007 came from 25 small-sized companies in the retail trade, covering both the employer and employee levels (n = 369). This study aims to shed light on the following questions: first, is team autonomy associated with organizational commitment and company performance? Second, does commitment mediate the relationship between team autonomy and company performance? Results indicated that team autonomy was both directly and indirectly positively associated with company performance. Furthermore, organizational commitment partially mediated the relationship between team autonomy and company performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Neural based PID control for networked processes

A neural based PID feedback control method for networked process control systems is presented. As there are some uncertain factors such as external disturbance, randomly delayed measurements or control demands in real networked process control systems, the proposed PID controller is implemented by backpropagation neural networks whose weights are updated via minimizing tracking error entropy of closed loop systems. To demonstrate the potential applications of the proposed strategy, an example of a simulated batch reactor is provided. The proposed design method is shown to be useful and effective in dealing with network process control systems.
Intellectual capital accounting and reporting in the knowledge economy

Claims the greatest challenge facing the accounting profession is understanding the huge difference between its balance sheet and market valuation. This gap represents the core value of the company – its intellectual capital represented by brands, products, competitive advantage, patents, trade marks, customer relationships, R&D, human capital etc. The present financial accounting framework is criticised, especially in the USA and Europe, as inadequate and failing to communicate the most important assets and resources of today’s business, known as intangible assets or intellectual capital. As a result, there is a huge value gap and distortions between a business entity value as reported in the financial statements with the value put by investors on the stock market or even in merger and acquisitions cases. In the new knowledge economy (k‐economy), knowledge rather than physical assets drives innovations, revenue and profits growth, and nurtures new competitive advantages. Looks at the challenges encountered by accounting and where it is heading in the k‐economy environment.
Big Visible Testing

Software testing is a key part of software development, so it's important that the testers be as effective as possible. Especially in fast-feedback agile teams, software testers must respond to their teammates' need for information with readily available, easy-to-understand testing materials. The novel twist of turning user experience personas inward to focus on the product team members provides deep insights into both what decisions team members need to make and how to present testing information to them to support those decisions. Having established personas as the context for the testing work, testers are poised to spring into action, planning, estimating, and executing both exploratory testing and user-facing automation. Testers then surface the results of this work to the product team in a way that helps them to address concerns in a timely fashion. Big visible charts display testing for co-located teams in a particularly effective form. Testers experiment with a variety of big visible representations throughout the life of the team, retaining these charts only as long as they provide value for decision-making and moving on to other forms as the team learns more about satisfying their information-gathering needs through testing. User personas produce a fresh perspective on product team members to help testers to focus on the value big visible testing artifacts provide to the individuals on a software development team.
Multi-channel constant current LED driver with temperature and voltage compensation

This paper proposes a new circuit for obtaining a constant current in parallel LED (Light Emitting Diodes) strings. This new technique not only achieves high invariability to temperature in each string but also reduces the internal and external resistance requirements. In this work, the LED current has a low correlation to its forward voltage (VF). Furthermore, this circuit matches the current of a multi-LED parallel string and maintains its accuracy by using only operational amplifiers to control these LEDs. In other words, it reduces the power consumption and die size considerably. The IREF obtained in this circuit is nearly independent of the temperature. This has been accomplished by the mutual compensation of mobility and threshold voltage variations. Moreover, the variations due to the temperature coefficient of resistance have been taken care of. The temperature coefficient of this circuit can achieve as low as 142ppm/°C over the range from −40∬120/°C which large than 20mA.
Ethical Issues in Trauma-Related Research: A Review

Ethical decision-making about trauma-related studies requires a flexible approach that counters assumptions and biases about victims, assures a favorable ethical cost-benefit ratio, and promotes advancement of knowledge that can benefit survivors of traumatic stress. This paper reviews several ethical issues in the field of traumatic stress: Benefit and risks in trauma-related research, whether trauma-related research poses unique risks and if so what those might be, informed consent and mandatory reporting, and supervision of trauma-related research. For each topic, we review potential ethical issues, summarize the research conducted thus far to inform ethical practice, and recommend future practice, research questions and policies to advance the field so that research on trauma can continue to be a win-win situation for all stakeholders in the research enterprise.
Disturbance rejection in nonlinear systems using neural networks

Neural networks with different architectures have been used for the identification and control of a wide class of nonlinear systems. In the present work, the authors consider the problem of input disturbance rejection, when such networks are used in practical problems. A large class of disturbances, which can be modeled as the outputs of unforced linear or nonlinear dynamic systems, are treated. The objective is to determine the identification model and the control law to minimize the effect of the disturbance at the output. In all cases, the method used involves expansion of the state space of the disturbance-free plant in an attempt to eliminate the effect of the disturbance. Several stages of increasing complexity of the problem are discussed in detail. Two simulation studies based on the results discussed are presented. <<ETX>>
BePI: Fast and Memory-Efficient Method for Billion-Scale Random Walk with Restart

How can we measure similarity between nodes quickly and accurately on large graphs? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides a good measure, and has been used in various data mining applications including ranking, recommendation, link prediction and community detection. However, existing methods for computing RWR do not scale to large graphs containing billions of edges; iterative methods are slow in query time, and preprocessing methods require too much memory. In this paper, we propose BePI, a fast, memory-efficient, and scalable method for computing RWR on billion-scale graphs. BePI exploits the best properties from both preprocessing methods and iterative methods. BePI uses a block elimination approach, which is a preprocessing method, to enable fast query time. Also, BePI uses a preconditioned iterative method to decrease memory requirement. The performance of BePI is further improved by decreasing non-zeros of the matrix for the iterative method. Through extensive experiments, we show that BePI processes 100 times larger graphs, and requires up to 130 times less memory space than other preprocessing methods. In the query phase, BePI computes RWR scores up to 9 times faster than existing methods.
Evaluation of the Multiaxial System of ICD-10 (Preliminary Draft): Correlations between Multiaxial Assessment and Clinical Judgements of Aetiology, Treatment Indication and Prognosis

Forty-five raters in 7 German centres took part in a multicentric field trial of the multiaxial system of ICD-10, delivering a total of 488 multiaxial assessments of 12 written case summaries. In addition to the multi-axial ratings (including main and subsidiary psychiatry diagnoses, level of social dysfunctioning and psychosocial stressors), assessments were made by the raters of the aetiology, treatment indications and prognosis of the main psychiatric disorder. There were significant correlations between these judgements and the measures of the multiaxial ratings: 62% of the cases diagnosed as endogenous were assessed as having a high level of social dysfunctioning (the proportion for all cases being 50.4%) and 63.4% as having a low number of stressors (vs. 52.8% in all cases). In contrast, cases diagnosed as reactive were assessed as having a lower level of social dysfunctioning and more social stressors. Cases whose prognosis was poor showed a higher rate of comorbidity and a high level of social dysfunctioning. The results demonstrate that the multiaxial approach reflects factors important to the process of clinical treatment and decision making and delivers preliminary evidence of this system’s treatment and prognostic validity.
Cohort mortality study of Philadelphia firefighters.

BACKGROUND Fire fighters are exposed to a wide variety of toxic chemicals. Previous studies have reported excess risk of some cancers but have been limited by small numbers or little information on employment characteristics. METHODS We conducted a retrospective cohort mortality study among 7,789 Philadelphia firefighters employed between 1925 and 1986. For each cause of death, the standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) and 95% confidence intervals were estimated. We also compared mortality among groups of firefighters defined by the estimated number of career runs and potential for diesel exposure. RESULTS In comparison with U.S. white men, the firefighters had similar mortality from all causes of death combined (SMR = 0.96) and all cancers (SMR = 1.10). There were statistically significant deficits of deaths from nervous system diseases (SMR = 0.47), cerebrovascular diseases (SMR = 0.83), respiratory diseases (SMR = 0.67), genitourinary diseases (SMR = 0.54), all accidents (SMR = 0.72), and suicide (SMR = 0.66). Statistically significant excess risks were observed for colon cancer (SMR = 1.51) and ischemic heart disease (SMR = 1.09). The risks of mortality from colon cancer (SMR = 1.68), kidney cancer (SMR = 2.20), non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (SMR = 1.72), multiple myeloma (SMR = 2.31), and benign neoplasms (SMR = 2.54) were increased among firefighters with at least 20 years of service. CONCLUSIONS Our study found no significant increase in overall mortality among Philadelphia firefighters. However, we observed increased mortality for cancers of the colon and kidney, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma. There was insufficient follow-up since the introduction of diesel equipment to adequately assess risk.
Monetary Shocks and Real Exchange Rate Hysteresis: Evidence from the G-7 Countries

Long-run monetary neutrality specifies that nominal disturbances do not affect long-run real exchange rates. However, the "over depreciation" of the US dollar in the late 1980s, after its strong appreciation earlier in the decade, suggested to a number of observers that nominal disturbances alter long-run real exchange rates; that is, money supply shocks entail real exchange rate hysteresis. Using data from the G-7 countries and the post-1973 float, the paper measures the long-run effects of relative money supply disturbances on real US dollar exchange rates. Little evidence of hysteretic monetary policy effects is found. Copyright 2001 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Investigation on the confinement loss of index-guided photonic crystal fibers in the visible spectrum

This paper presents a comparative study of confinement ability of two 4-ring hexagonal lattice index-guided PCFs with different air-hole spacing (pitch) in the visible spectrum. The structure of PCF is designed and analyzed by using the Finite Element Method (FEM) with anisotropic perfectly matched layers. From analysis and comparison of the two optimized PCF structures, it can be investigated that the confinement loss is very low in the structure designed with d/Λ=0.5 and Λ=1.4 μm, where the light is single mode and confined in the core for the visible region (400-700) nm. A low confinement loss and low birefringence of the order of 10-3 and 10-4 respectively are obtained for this PCF. Also the effective area is found to be nearly 2-3 μm2 and non-linearity co-efficient as 198-82 km-1w-1 respectively in the desired spectrum. This extremely high confinement ability in the visible range and non-linearity makes it promising for non-linear and sensing applications.