Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Performance Contract on Public Service Delivery in Kenya: Study of Registration of Persons Kericho District

The study sought to investigate on the influence of performance contract on public service delivery in Kenya with specific reference to the department of registration of person in Kericho District using 2011 – 2012 public service delivery period as the base line. The study adopted a descriptive research design on a sample size of 222 respondents who were identified and selected through purposive and random convenient sampling techniques from a target population of 2040 respondents. Data collection was done by use of questionnaires as well as observation schedules. Collected data was sorted, cleaned, coded and analyzed by the aid of statistical package of social scientist programme (SPSS). Study findings were contently analyzed and presented in form of tables and figures. Based on the study findings, it was concluded that performance contract had positive influence on public service delivery as a tool of customer satisfaction by achieving service delivery timelines, rendering of quality and effective services, increase of production in service delivery by achieving the discussed and agreed targets as well as serving as an avenue of transparency and accountability in service delivery. The study recommended that service delivery period (production of identification documents) be increased upwards from the current 28 waiting working days from the date of application also the processing and production of national identification cards be decentralized. As well capacity building in performance contract to all officers deployed in department of registration of persons be encouraged at the same time legalizing the use and application of performance contract to make it more formidable to all. Key words : Performance contracts, service delivery
A Phase-to-Digital Converter for wide tuning range and PVT tolerant ADPLL operating down to 0.3 V

A Phase-to-Digital Converter (PDC), — an improved scheme of Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) —, is presented. The resolution of PDC is completely tracking to generated clock period. This scheme effectively reduces the calibration efforts in conventional TDC. The key technologies are digitally Controlled Coupled Oscillator (DCCO) and body-bias controlled vernier TDC. This PDC should be a key component of wide tuning range and PVT variation tolerant All Digital PLL (ADPLL).
Evaluating a quantitative IT maturity self-assessment approach: Does it give a good way of the as-is state?

It has become increasingly recognized that IT organizations must ensure that IT services are aligned to business needs and actively support them. Ther efore, the internal IT service management processes are under constant improvement. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most commonlyadopted framework for IT service management. The r ecommendation is to start an ITIL implementation or improvement process by defining a baseline of current state - “wher e are we today”. This helps identify the gap to a wanted future state and will become the basis for an ITIL implementation or improvement plan. One of the most commonly used methods to define current state is to do a maturity assessment using a quantitative self-assessment approach. The purpose of this research is to empirically understand how well aqua nti ta ti ve s el f-ass ess ment d efi nes the a s -i s s ta te a nd ther eby th e ma turi ty of a n I T orga ni za ti on. The research was carried out by conducting a quantitative self-assessment in an IT organization. To understand if the self-assessment produced viable results a meta-evaluation of the survey was conducted through interviews and a document study. The main conclusion, is that the use of a quantitative self-assessment does not define the as-is state and maturity well enough. To do so, it has to be complemented by for instanceinterviews or another type of internal knowledge to produce a good enough baseline.
Chemical Analysis and Antifungal Activity of the Essential Oil of Calea clematidea

Calea clematidea o α E m α o 2 Trichophyton tonsurans Trichophyton rubrum Trichophyton menthagrophytes nterdigitale Epidermophyton floccosum, Microsporum gypseum, Microsporum canis Microsporum nanum.
A Cross Cultural Study of Symptomatology of Depression — Eastern Versus Western Patients —

The symptoms exhibited by 100 depressed patients from Western India were studied. A statistical comparison was made of these symptoms with the symptoms of British depressed patients, reported in two studies from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The symptoms in this group are similar to what has been reported for the Indian population in general except for paranoid features, which were less common. Compared with depressed patients from North India, somatic symptoms were significantly more common, while late insomnia, reduction in work and activities, and retardation were significant less frequent. Compared to South Indian depressed patients, depressed mood and hypochondriasis were significantly greater, and suicidal tendency and diurnal variation significantly less. Amongst Indian depressed patients generally, somatic symptoms, hypochondriasis, anxiety and agitation are present in a significantly larger percentage of patients, but guilt feelings, obsessional and paranoid symptoms are significantly less frequent, compared with British depressed patients.
Effect of Group Affiliation, Ownership Structures, and New Entries on Efficiency: Lessons from the Japanese Life Insurance Industry after Deregulation

Deregulation and the succeeding changes, such as forming group affiliation, demutualization, and new entry from foreign countries, are widespread and worldwide phenomenon in the life insurance industry. This study examines impacts of the deregulation and the succeeding changes on efficiency of the Japanese life insurance industry using a Stochastic Input Distance Frontier Approach, a new version of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA), which is the first application to an insurance industry. The main results are as follows. First, a group affiliated life insurer is more efficient than the others. Second, an efficiency difference between mutual and stock life insurers has been getting larger since deregulation. Third, there is not much difference of efficiency between foreign insurers and domestic insurers. We also find that efficiency of life insurers has decreased on average after deregulation.
Interaction of Ets-1 and the POU-homeodomain protein GHF-1/Pit-1 reconstitutes pituitary-specific gene expression

The pituitary-specific, POU-homeodomain factor GHF-1/Pit-1 is necessary, but not sufficient, for cell-specific expression of prolactin (PRL), growth hormone (GH), and thyrotropin. Combinatorial interactions of GHF-1 with other factors are likely to be required; however, such factors and their mechanisms of action remain to be elucidated. Here we identify Ets-1 as a factor that functionally and physically interacts with GHF-1 to fully reconstitute proximal PRL promoter activity. In contrast, Ets-2 has no effect, and the alternatively spliced GHF-2/Pit-1beta variant fails to synergize with Ets-1. The Ets-1-GHF-1 synergy requires a composite Ets-1-GHF-1 cis element and is dependent on an Ets-1-specific protein domain. Furthermore, the ancestrally related and GHF-1-dependent GH promoter, which lacks this composite element, does not exhibit this response. Finally, Ets-1, but not Ets-2, binds directly to GHF-1 and GHF-2. These data show that a functional interaction of GHF-1 and Ets-1, acting via a composite DNA element, is required to establish lactotroph-specific PRL gene expression, thus providing a molecular mechanism by which GHF-1 can discriminate between the GH and PRL genes. These results underscore the importance of transcription factors that are distinct from, but interact with, homeobox proteins to establish lineage-specific gene expression.
The Effects of 24R, 25‐Dihydroxyvitamin D3 and 24S, 25Dihydroxyvitamin D3 on Phosphate Transport in Vivo

The steroid hormone 1, 25‐dihydroxyvitamin D3 [1,25D3] rapidly stimulates the uptake of phosphate in isolated chick intestinal cells, while 24,25‐dihydroxyvitamin D3 [24,25D3] inhibits the rapid stimulation by 1,25D3. in isolated intestinal cells and perfused duodenal loops. Studies were undertaken to determine if 24,25D3 had a similar effect in vivo. 24,25D3 has two isomers which are 24R, 25dihydroxyvitamin D3 [24R,25D3] and 24S, 25dihydroxyvitamin D3 [24S,25D3]. We studied these two isomers separately and tested them over a time course of 1, 5, 10, 15 and 18 h after steroid using chicks on regular diet, but fasted, and chicks on a lower vitamin D diet. All chicks were anesthetized prior to surgical exposure of the duodenal loop and injection of H3 32PO4 in buffer into the lumen. An initial study determined that 3 to 9 min of absorption in vivo was in a linear range, as judged by serum levels of radioactivity. Chicks were then injected IM with either 200 μg 24R,25D3, 20 μg 24S,25D3 or vehicle (1–18 h prior to experimentation) within the same time course studies. The isomers had different effects on phosphate absorption: 24R,25D3 had a hypophosphatemic effect in vivo in which serum levels at 5, 15 and 18 h had decreased to 42%, 39% and 43%, respectively, (P< 0.05) compared with controls. In contrast, 24S, 25(OH)2D3 stimulated intestinal phosphate absorption at the 5h time point by 64%, but had no effect at the other time points tested. Supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. 2010‐65206‐20652 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
The Young Adult

Abstract The U.S. Supreme Court in 1996 ruled to strike down a Rhode Island statute that prohibited liquor retailers from including liquor prices in their advertisements. The rationale behind the decision was because the state law infringed upon free speech rights to advertise low prices. Based upon the ruling, this article explores the effects that different ways of presenting advertised price offers may have on young consumers. The experiment consisted of a convenience sample of 225 college students. Three nearly identical advertisements were used (comparable to the ad in the court' ruling): one with the price listed, one with „WOW” replacing price, and one depicting products only with no price stated. First, data were collected to gather information about the normal shopping habits of the consumer. Second, questions were devised to seek details pertaining to these specific advertisements. Thirdly age particulars were gathered. The findings reveal that price specific ads reinforce the retailer' product offerings. The young adult' attention does widen when price is low and direct-price ads do attract more attention.
Institutional change in the German wage bargaining system: The role of big companies

Despite the emergence of new production systems, Europeanization and economic internationalization, the national arrangements of wage bargaining systems have not been eroded. The paper highlights the factors that counteract the pressures for a straightforward decentralization with reference to Germany. Firstly, the maintenance of peaceful labour relations is a major advantage for big companies in centralized wage bargaining systems. Secondly, big companies have been able to achieve labour cost control and the differentiation of working conditions by drawing up pacts for employment and competitiveness at the company level. Thirdly, they have succeeded in introducing a higher degree of flexibility into the collective agreement framework. The main argument will be that institutional change has taken other forms than expected. Whereas the formal institutional setting has remained relatively stable, the functioning of the German wage bargaining system has changed.
The blood‐brain barrier of the rat choroid plexus

Following intravenous injection, cytochrome c traverses the capillary endothelium of the rat choroid plexus and permeates the perivascular space and the extracellular space between epithelial cells. The tracer is incorporated into pinocytotic vesicles adjacent to the lateral and basal plasmalemmas. There‐after, cytochrome c is incorporated into multivesicular and dense bodies. Tracerladen vesicles were not found to fuse with the apical plasmalemma and cytochrome c was not discharged into the cerebral ventricles. Acid phosphatase activity of the choroidal epithelium after the administration of cytochrome c was greatly increased and localized in the same intracellular sites shown for cytochrome c. These data suggest that cytochrome c and possibly other proteins that penetrate the choroidal stroma are taken up by the choroidal epithelium and subsequently degraded in lysosomal vesicles. This heterolytic mechanism may be an important means for preventing the entry of certain substances such as proteins into CSF and subsequently into nervous tissue.
The influence of regional community characteristics on employer recruitment decision making

The Question/Problem: A significant proportion of permanent skilled immigrants in Australia remain underemployed in the labour market relative to their skill sets. Scholarly work attempting to identify the causes of this underemployment of immigrant professionals has tended to focus on immigrants' human capital deficits such as overseas qualifications (Hawthorne, 1994; Productivity Commission Research Report, 2006), overseas based work experiences (Aydemir & Skuterud, 2004; Bauder & Cameron, 2002), and lack of proficiency in English language (Birrell, Hawthorne, & Richardson, 2006; Shields & Wheatley-Price, 2002). Yet other literature suggests that skill utilisation of immigrant professionals can depend on employers on their values, social conventions, information exchange and awareness in relation to new immigrant skills and on the operation of social networks that may facilitate and impede immigrant access to employment (McAllister & Moore, 1989; Evans & Kelley, 1991; Bauder & Cameron, 2002; Tubergen, Maas & Flap, 2004; Productivity Commission Research Report, 2006; Markus, 2009). Surprisingly, little is known of the role of employers in this process and the social context in which employers operate. We report the findings from a study examining how regional community characteristics and the issue of trust influence employer screening of immigrant professionals.
Knowledge Representation for High-Level Norms and Violation Inference in Logic Programming

Most of the knowledge Representation formalisms developed for representing prescriptive norms can be categorized as either suitable for representing either low level or high level norms.We argue that low level norm representations do not advance the cause of autonomy in agents in the sense that it is not the agent itself that determines the normative position it should be at a particular time, on the account of a more general rule. In other words an agent on some external system for a nitty gritty prescriptions of its obligations and prohibitions. On the other hand, high level norms which have an explicit description of a norm's precondition and have some form of implication, do not as they exist in the literature do not support generalized inferences about violation like low level norm representations do. This paper presents a logical formalism for the representation of high level norms in open societies that enable violation inferences that detail the situation in which the norm violation took place and the identity of the norm violation. Norms are formalized as logic programs whose heads specify what an agent is obliged or permitted to do when a situation arises and within what time constraint of the situation.Each norm is also assigned an identity using some reification scheme. The body of each logic program describes the nature of the situation in which the agent is expected to act or desist from acting. This kind of violation is novel in the literature.
fMRI Data Analysis Using Dempster-Shafer Method with Estimating Voxel Selectivity by Belief Measure

In the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data analysis, detecting the activated voxels is a challenging research problem where the existing methods have shown some limits. We propose a new method wherein brain mapping is done based on Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DS) that is a useful method in uncertain representation analysis. Dempster-Shafer allows finding the activated regions by checking the activated voxels in fMRI data. The activated brain areas related to a given stimulus are detected by using a belief measure as a metric for evaluating activated voxels. To test the performance of the proposed method, artificial and real auditory data have been employed. The comparison of the introduced method with the t-test and GLM method has clearly shown that the proposed method can provide a higher correct detection of activated voxels.
Perceptions of Rural Consumers on the Aspects of Meat Quality and Health Implications Associated With Meat Consumption

This study was conducted to determine the perceptions of rural low-income consumers on meat quality and health issues associated with meat consumption. A total of 466 consumers in the Eastern Cape (EC) Province (South Africa (SA)) were randomly sampled, and principal component analyses (PCA) were used to analyse the data. With regard to purchasing decisions, correlation analysis was performed to establish the relationships between actual scores and mean scores so as to determine purchase motives and decisions. The major purchase point mentioned by all consumers was the supermarket (65%), and the reasons were that this purchase point was the most hygienic and the meat was fresh (35%). The estimated relationship showed a significant association between products consumed at home and the source of income of consumers. With regard to consumption patterns and health issues, most consumers were aware of nutritional balance issues (64%), and most were aware of the health risks associated with meat consumption (59%). It was concluded that consumer perceptions on the meat quality aspects associated with health and consumption patterns are affected by disposable income and cultural background.
Treatment of childhood tuberculosis with a six month directly observed regimen of only two weeks of daily therapy.

BACKGROUND Recommended treatment of childhood tuberculosis is 6 months in duration with at least 3 drugs. We studied a regimen requiring as few as 58 doses, given entirely by directly observed therapy (DOT), under program conditions. METHODS An observational trial was conducted to determine the effectiveness of a completely DOT 6-month regimen for pulmonary, pleural and lymph node tuberculosis in children with the use of 2 weeks of daily isoniazid, rifampin and pyrazinamide therapy; then 6 weeks of twice weekly isoniazid, rifampin and pyrazinamide therapy; followed by 16 weeks of twice weekly isoniazid and rifampin. All therapy was given by workers from the health department, and patients were followed by the Children's Tuberculosis Clinic in Houston, TX. Patients were evaluated for changes in symptoms, weight, clinical or radiographic findings and adherence to therapy. RESULTS Of the 175 evaluable children (159 pulmonary/thoracic node, 4 pleural, 12 cervical lymph node), 81% of children completed treatment in 6 months. Of the 33 patients who received extended treatment, 3 did so because of physician choice, 17 had an inadequate response to initial therapy, 2 had significant adverse reactions to drugs and 16 had poor adherence to the DOT. Only 37% of patients had complete resolution of disease at the end of treatment, but all continued to improve after therapy was stopped. There was only 1 patient who relapsed after 4 years. CONCLUSION This regimen had results comparable with those of 6-month regimens with longer durations of daily therapy. Determining treatment response in pediatric tuberculosis is difficult because of the slow resolution of chest radiograph abnormalities. DOT is an important aspect of treatment but does not solve all problems with treatment adherence.
[Change of serum ACTH and cortisol levels in Alzheimer disease and mild cognition impairment].

OBJECTIVE To characterize the response of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol in the patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) and those with mild cognition impairment (MCI). METHODS The AD or MCI patients at our department from July 5, 2007 to August 31, 2009 were enrolled. The levels of 8am serum ACTH and cortisol were measured by chemiluminescence in 54 AD patients, 41 MCI patients and 42 age-matched controls. RESULTS The serum ACTH values in 3 groups were (16 ± 5), (16 ± 5) and (17 ± 4) ng/L respectively. The serum ACTH values had insignificant changes in 3 groups (P > 0.05). The serum cortisol values were (595 ± 58), (568 ± 70) and (410 ± 81) nmol/L in 3 groups respectively. And the serum cortisol values significantly increased in AD and MCI groups (P < 0.01). The levels of serum cortisol in MCI group were lower than those in AD group. But there was no significant difference (P > 0.05). Through an analysis of rank correlation, the severity of AD had a positive correlation with serum concentration of cortisol (P < 0.05); there was a negative correlation between the serum level of cortisol and the scores of MMSE in AD patients (P < 0.05). There was no significant change of serum level of cortisol for different genders in 3 groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION The level of serum ACTH has no significant change. A high level of serum cortisol is observed in AD and MCI groups. There is a positive correlation between serum level of cortisol and the severity of AD and a negative correlation between serum level of cortisol and the scores.
Feature extraction for multi-class BCI using EEG coherence

We propose a feature extraction method for multi-class electroencephalographic (EEG) signals based on their pairwise coherences. The coherence provides a sense of the brain's connectivity, and it is relevant as different regions of the brain must communicate between each other for the integration of sensory information. In our case, the process of feature selection is optimized in the sense that only those statistically significant and potentially discriminative coherences at a specific frequency are used, which results in a feature vector of reduced-dimension. Next, those features are classified through Mahalanobis distance classifier and the performance is evaluated by the kappa coefficient. The proposed EEG coherence selection and classification method can provide good efficiency rates, and with the advantage of selecting an optimal combination of features without the need of prior knowledge about the mental task. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method through numerical examples using real EEG data from cognitive tasks.
JBS Swift & Co.

Copyright © 2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp. harvard.edu/educators. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School. D A V I D E . B E L L