Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
POLYMORPHISM OF THE α-ACTN3 GENE IN INDIVIDUALS PRACTISING DIFFERENT SPORTS DISCIPLINES

In this study the R577X polymorphism of the α-actinin-3 (ACTN3) gene was analysed in relation to physical fitness measured with maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). The studies were carried out in a group of 154 men and 85 women, students of the University of Physical Education in Poznan and professional athletes representing various sports and fitness levels. In our research physiological and molecular procedures were used, i.e. direct measurement of maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) and R577X a-ACTN3 genotyping by PCR-RFLP. The results do not confirm some literature data concerning a statistically significant association of R577X polymorphism in the ACTN3 gene and the level of maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). A trend was observed for higher VO2max values to be found in individuals with the XX and RX genotypes as well as the predominance of the RR genotype in the group of individuals practising speed and power disciplines.
Debt Dilution and Maturity Structure of Sovereign Bonds Ran Bi

We develop a dynamic model of sovereign default and renegotiation to study how expectations of default and debt restructuring in the near future affect the ex ante maturity structure of sovereign debts. This paper argues that the average maturity is shorter when a country is approaching financial distress due to two risks: default risk and “debt dilution” risk. Long-term yield is generally higher than short-term yield to reflect the higher default risk incorporated in long-term debts. When default risk is high and long-term debt is too expensive to afford, the country near default has to rely on short-term debt. The second risk, “debt dilution” risk, is the focus of this paper. It arises because there is no explicit seniority structure among different sovereign debts, and all debt holders are legally equal and expect to get the same haircut rate in the post-default debt restructuring. Therefore, new debt issuances around crisis reduce the amount ∗E-mail: bi@econ.umd. edu
Nitrogen-neutrality: a step towards sustainability

We propose a novel indicator measuring one dimension of the sustainability of an entity in modern societies: Nitrogen-neutrality. N-neutrality strives to offset Nr releases an entity exerts on the environment from the release of reactive nitrogen (Nr) to the environment by reducing it and by offsetting the Nr releases elsewhere. N-neutrality also aims to increase awareness about the consequences of unintentional releases of nitrogen to the environment. N-neutrality is composed of two quantified elements: Nr released by an entity (e.g. on the basis of the N footprint) and Nr reduction from management and offset projects (N offset). It includes management strategies to reduce nitrogen losses before they occur (e.g., through energy conservation). Each of those elements faces specific challenges with regard to data availability and conceptual development. Impacts of Nr releases to the environment are manifold, and the impact profile of one unit of Nr release depends strongly on the compound released and the local susceptibility to Nr. As such, N-neutrality is more difficult to conceptualize and calculate than C-neutrality. We developed a workable conceptual framework for N-neutrality which was adapted for the 6th International Nitrogen Conference (N2013, Kampala, November 2013). Total N footprint of the surveyed meals at N2013 was 66 kg N. A total of US$ 3050 was collected from the participants and used to offset the conference’s N footprint by supporting the UN Millennium Village cluster Ruhiira in South-Western Uganda. The concept needs further development in particular to better incorporate the spatio-temporal variability of impacts and to standardize the methods to quantify the required N offset to neutralize the Nr releases impact. Criteria for compensation projects need to be sharply defined to allow the development of a market for N offset certificates.
An Empirical Study on the effect of Brand Equity of Mobile Phones on Customer Satisfaction

In a competitive and brand conscious market like India, building brand equity of mobile phones is a challenging task. The companies need to assess the prior experiences and future aspirations of consumers to possess these brands. In this context, present study examines the relationship between brand equity dimensions, overall brand equity and customer satisfaction. Data was collected from 245 university students in New Delhi and adjoining cities of India through self-administered questionnaires using convenience sampling technique. Out of these, 205 were used for the purpose of study, which provided a response rate of 83.5 percent. Multiple regressions confirmed a significant relationship between the dimensions of brand equity and overall brand equity; and also between overall brand equity and customer satisfaction. Marketing managers often have limited resources in terms of money, time, and manpower to implement branding strategies, so these findings can help them to prioritize and allocate resources across important dimensions.
Sentiment Analysis: Machine Learning Approach

—Twitter is one of most popular social networking site where people are expressing their views, opinion and emotions liberally. These tweets are recorded and analysed to mine emotions of people related to a terrorist attack (Uri attack). Present study retrieve tweets about Uri attack and find emotions and polarity of tweets. To mine emotions and polarity in tweets, text mining techniques are used. Approximately 5000 tweets are recoded and pre-processed to create a dataset of frequently appearing words. R is used for mining emotions and polarity. Experimental result showed that 94.3% people were disgusted by Uri attack.
Improving the Store Environment: Do Olfactory Cues Affect Evaluations and Behaviors?

The popular press has recently reported that managers of retail and service outlets are diffusing scents into their stores to create more positive environments and develop a competitive advantage. These efforts are occurring despite there being no scholarly research supporting the use of scent in store environments. The authors present a review of theoretically relevant work from environmental psychology and olfaction research and a study examining the effects of ambient scent in a simulated retail environment. In the reported study, the authors find a difference between evaluations of and behaviors in a scented store environment and those in an unscented store environment. Their findings provide guidelines for managers of retail and service outlets concerning the benefits of scenting store environments.
New model of job design: motivating employees' performance

Purpose – The paper aims to identify the key issues of job design research and practice to motivate employees' performance.Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual model of Hackman and Oldham's job characteristics has been adopted to motivate employees' performance.Findings – The paper finds that a dynamic managerial learning framework is required in order to enhance employees' performance to meet global challenges.Practical implications – Traditional outcomes will certainly remain central to the agenda. But some wider developments are to be incorporated within organizational systems so as to motivate employees for better performance.Originality/value – The paper may be of value to researchers and practitioners in the management development field for offering enhanced jobs to employees leading to improved performance.
Analysis of a brownfield management conflict in Canada

A strategic analysis of an ongoing brownfield management conflict in Elmira, Ontario, Canada is conducted using the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution. This investigation of the situation as it existed in late 2016 constitutes an expansion of an earlier analysis of the dispute which focused on cleansing the groundwater aquifer, polluted by a chemical company in Elmira, to a controversy over the management of the pollution impacts on an adjacent creek. Besides the chemical plant, the other decision-makers involved in the 2016 dispute are the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change of the Province of Ontario, local government, and a citizens’ advisory group. The connections of the 2016 conflict to the earlier study which took place in 1991 are discussed and the evolution of the previous situation to the current one is explored in depth, along with strategic insights.
Self-Similarity Superresolution for Resource-Constrained Image Sensor Node in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks, in combination with image sensors, open up a grand sensing application field. It is a challenging problem to recover a high resolution image from its low resolution counterpart, especially for low-cost resource-constrained image sensors with limited resolution. Sparse representation-based techniques have been developed recently and increasingly to solve this ill-posed inverse problem. Most of these solutions are based on an external dictionary learned from huge image gallery, consequently needing tremendous iteration and long time to match. In this paper, we explore the self-similarity inside the image itself, and propose a new combined self-similarity superresolution solution, with low computation cost and high recover performance. In the self-similarity image super resolution model , a small size sparse dictionary is learned from the image itself by the methods such as . The most similar patch is searched and specially combined during the sparse regulation iteration. Detailed information, such as edge sharpness, is preserved more faithfully and clearly. Experiment results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of this double self-learning method in the image super resolution.
Chinese And Moroccan Higher Education MOOCs: Rationale, Implementation and Challenges

— Integrating technology in teaching helps students to understand all the concepts they are taught in class. Technology makes teaching a walk in the park, a paperless class is environmental friendly, teachers are able to track their students' progress, students can access eBooks and other learning information at anytime of the day, anywhere and distance learning has been made possible . The rapid increase use of information technologies and E-learning throughout educational institutions is changing the way teachers and students learn, work, and establish collaboration. Recent declarations from top Universities to turn to new forms of educational delivery called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) The MOOC movement have recently invaded the field of higher education in the world to the point that some describe it as the undisputed future of the university. Authors claim that online learning and hybrid devices are becoming more responsive to learners’ needs at a time where constrained educational budgets and accompanying decrease in professional development opportunities makes it hard for the universities to keep up with the expectations and demands of the 21st century learners. In line with this, this paper sets out first to present the MOOC framework, placing it in the wider context of open, online learning. Then, it discusses how the key elements of openness, anytime and anywhere learning of this new educational trend can meet learners’ needs for flexibility, collaboration and agency. This paper also argues for the need to adopt a blended learning approach that combines both online and face-to-face experiences to optimize learning in Moroccan higher education. Finally, some challenges are discussed.
The wave-corpuscle properties of microscopic particlesin the nonlinear quantum-mechanical systems

We debate first the properties of quantum mechanics and its difficulties and the reasons resulting in these diffuculties and its direction of development. The fundamental principles of nonlinear quantum mechanics are proposed and established based on these shortcomings of quantum mechanics and real motions and interactions of microscopic particles and backgound field in physical systems. Subsequently, the motion laws and wave-corpuscle duality of microscopic particles described by nonlinear Schr? dinger equation are studied completely in detail using these elementary principles and theories. Concretely speaking, we investigate the wave-particle duality of the solution of the nonlinear Schr? dinger equation, the mechanism and rules of particle collision and the uncertainty relation of particle’s momentum and position, and so on. We obtained that the microscopic particles obey the classical rules of collision of motion and satisfy the minimum uncertainty relation of position and momentum, etc. From these studies we see clearly that the moved rules and features of microscopic particle in nonlinear quantum mechanics is different from those in linear quantum mechanics. Therefore, nolinear quantum mechanics is a necessary result of development of quantum mechanics and represents correctly the properties of microscopic particles in nonlinear systems, which can solve difficulties and problems disputed for about a century by scientists in linear quantum mechanics field.
Partnership, collaboration and mutual gains: evaluating context, interests and legitimacy

Since it emerged as a political and organisational phenomenon, supporters of the partnership approach have associated it with the potential to engendermutually beneficial relationships at the organisational level (Ackers and Payne 1998). Alternatively, collaborative relationships have been argued to be contrary to the long-term interests of workers and trade unions, typically underpinned by notions of managerial incorporation (Kelly 2004). Thus, over the past 20 years, the notion of workplace partnership, collaboration and associated mutual gains has resulted in very heated debates regarding employee representation and voice, and the extent to which mutual gains are actually realisable (Kochan and Osterman 1994; Holland, Cooper, Pyman and Teicher 2012). Other debates concern the concept of partnership in the absence ofunion recognition (Dietz,Cullen andCoad2005; Johnstone,Ackers andWilkinson 2010). Research over this time has been inconclusive with some studies revealing a range of benefits, including stronger workplace organisation (Roche and Geary 2006), non-union employee representation (NER) structures premised on mutual gains (Kaufman and Taras 2010), union survival (Ackers and Payne 1998), informal dialogue and collaborative regime longevity (Rittau andDundon2010),while other evidencepoints towardswork intensification (Marks, Findlay, Hine, Thompson and McKinlay 1998), job insecurity and limited union effectiveness (Kelly 2004). While research is diffuse, what is apparent is that partnership depends uponvarious contextual factors includingmanagement and union strategies, the aims of partnership and related human resource policies, along with wider economic conditions (Dobbins andGunnigle 2009; Teague and Hann 2010). The last two decades have shown that collaborative trust-building employment relationships can wither more than they succeed (Alfes, Shantz and Truss 2012). It is equally apparent that there is little consensus to the explanation about the waxing and waning of such collaborations and the various threads of this research agenda are likely to endure for some time (Wilkinson, Donaghey, Dundon and Freeman, in press). Many of the debates seeking to explain partnership success or failure over the past decade also approach the topicwith an assessment of ‘outcomes’ as the holy grail, while others seek to understand the ‘processes’ that seek to delivermutuality for theparties involved (Samuel 2007; Danford, Richardson, Stewart, Tailby and Upchurch 2008; Jenkins 2008; Johnstone, Wilkinson and Ackers 2009; Evans, Harvey and Turnbull 2012). The context is one in which radical changes in economic, market environments and industrial relations legislation are
Video Retrieval and Sorting Algorithm based on Multiple Features in Sports Videos

Multimedia information, especially videos, is growing explosively with the rapid development of the Internet and multimedia technology. Due to its variety of image features, it is capable of reaching several hundred dimensions and even thousands of dimensions. Storing and indexing the high-dimensional feature vectors has become key technologies of content-based video retrieval. The residual quantization mechanism, which combines the asymmetric distance and set sorting algorithm based on multi-feature candidates, is improved after analyzing the characteristics of soccer videos. For soccer videos, SD-VLAD (Soft Distribution-Vectors of Locally Aggregated Descriptors), BOC (Bag of Color), and shot type are selected for describing the information of images. To address the problem that the original residual quantized inverted index can only retrieve single features, multiple feature retrieval and sorting are proposed. In the stage of candidate set sorting, a multi-feature based similarity calculation method is designed according to the shots type. The experimental results show that multi-feature hierarchical retrieval and sorting can be achieved at the cost of memory space. While ensuring query speed, the accuracy of the query is improved.
THREE-SURFACE AIRCRAFT - A CONCEPT FOR FUTURE LARGE AIRCRAFT

In this paper the activities of the Institute of Design Aerodynamics within the DLR project "Dreiflachen-Flugzeug (3FF)" - Three-Surface Aircraft, TSA - concerning the investigation of three-surface aircraft configurations are presented. Results of aircraft predesign calculations of the retrofitted wind-tunnel model DLR-F11 show higher performances for the optimised TSA configuration compared to the conventional design. However, the performance increase is coupled with a loss of static stability. Under the boundary condition of equal static stability, the same performance gain is achieved with a conventional design. The possible performance potential of TSA configurations can only be realised if the concept of a "free-floating canard", which does not influence the static stability, is taken into account. Corresponding transonic canard designs demonstrate the aerodynamic feasibility of the canard concept for transport aircraft configurations at high cruise Mach numbers for a backward swept canard at a low aft position and a forward swept canard at a low front position.
Laptops for a digital lifestyle : Millennial students and wireless mobile technologies

This paper describes findings relating to the implementation of wireless mobile computing with a small group of undergraduate students in a university setting. The purpose was to explore the digital lifestyle afforded by the availability of this technology, particularly with millennial students. This group is characterised by information connectedness, multitasking, and a focus on immediacy. The research built on a previous study to identify key aspects of these attributes as they emerged in this setting. It also identified issues with integrating wireless laptops into curricula, and infrastructural imperatives that need to be considered to successfully engage students in using mobile wireless technologies.
Objectivization of Audio-Visual Correlation analysis

Simultaneous perception of audio and visual stimuli often causes concealment or misrepresentation of information actually contained in these stimuli. Such effects are called the “image proximity effect” or the “ventriloquism effect” in the literature. Until recently, most research carried out to understand their nature was based on subjective assessments. The authors of this paper propose a methodology based on both subjective and objectively retrieved data. In this methodology, objective data reflect the screen areas that attract most attention. The data were collected and processed by an eye-gaze tracking system. To support the proposed methodology, two series of experiments were conducted – one with a commercial eye-gaze tracking system Tobii T60, and another with the Cyber-Eye system developed at the Multimedia Systems Department of the Gdansk University of Technology. In most cases, the visual-auditory stimuli were presented using a 3D video. It was found that the eye-gaze tracking system did objectivize the results of experiments. Moreover, the tests revealed a strong correlation between the localization of a visual stimulus on which a participant’s gaze focused and the value of the “image proximity effect”. It was also proved that gaze tracking may be useful in experiments which aim at evaluation of the proximity effect when presented visual stimuli are stereoscopic.
A Prescription to Retire the Rhetoric of 'Principles-Based Systems' in Corporate Law, Securities Regulation and Accounting

This Article corrects widespread misconception about whether complex regulatory systems can be fairly described as either "rules-based" or "principles-based" (also called "standards-based"). Promiscuous use of these labels has proliferated in the years since the implosion of Enron Corp. While the concepts of rules and principles (or standards) are useful to classify individual provisions, they are not scalable to the level of complex regulatory systems. The Article uses examples from corporate law, securities regulation and accounting to illustrate this problematic phenomenon before turning to a series of possible explanations for the widespread use of these misleading labels. The piece contributes to the substantive fields it uses to animate the inquiry and to more general jurisprudential literature on the rules-standards question.
Study on applicability of adhesive forces for micro-material handling in production technology

Micro-material handling and micro-assembly becomes increasingly important in largevolume manufacturing of products like sensors in automotive applications. Smaller dimensions of the micro-objects lead to problems with regard to the reliability of the manufacturing process because adhesive forces become predominant over gravity for objects whose dimensions are in the micro-range. In contrast to the common approach of minimizing those adhesive forces, this paper focuses on the use of the three main adhesive forces, van-der-Waals, electrostatic and surface tension forces, as gripping principles. These forces are compared to conventional vacuum grippers with regard to gripping forces and complexity of application. Modelling of the forces is executed for separation distances in the range of 1x10 -12 m - 1x10 -3 m. Even though vacuum forces dominate in magnitude over others within the whole range, there are several disadvantages of using them. On the other hand adhesive forces are advantageous in that they require little amount of energy and they do not mechanically strain the micro-parts being handled.
Assessing Regulation inside Government in the United Kingdom

This study is a review on the extant of regulation inside government in the United Kingdom (UK) and critiques on the mass regulation effort. Regulation in the UK is delivered through inspections by several inspectorates including the auditors (Audit Commission). The inspection subjects cover all aspects of government activities from operations to reporting. The inspectorates check on the subjects based on pre-determined criteria and on number basis. The results will then be calculated and the inspected organizations will also be ranked. Literatures argue that besides giving justice to the public sector reform agenda, regulation inside government have influences government spending and alter participant behavior.