Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Monotone Simultaneous Embeddings of Paths in R^d

We study the following problem: Given $k$ paths that share the same vertex set, is there a simultaneous geometric embedding of these paths such that each individual drawing is monotone in some direction? We prove that for any dimension $d \geq 2$, there is a set of $d+1$ paths that does not admit a monotone simultaneous geometric embedding.
Operation of a GEM-TPC With Pixel Readout

A prototype time projection chamber with 26 cm drift length was operated with a short-spaced triple gas electron multiplier (GEM) stack in a setup triggering on cosmic muon tracks. A small part of the anode plane is read out with a CMOS pixel application-specified integrated circuit (ASIC) named Timepix, which provides ultimate readout granularity. Pixel clusters of charge depositions corresponding to single primary electrons are observed and analyzed to reconstruct charged particle tracks. A dataset of several weeks of cosmic ray data is analyzed. The number of clusters per track length is well described by simulation. The obtained single point resolution approaches 50 μm at short drift distances and is well reproduced by a simple model of single-electron diffusion .
Review of the regulatory capability and culture of the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources in the regulation of live animal exports

 Following footage provided to the department in April 2018 showing unacceptable conditions for animals on a ship carrying live sheep to the Middle East, the Hon. David Littleproud MP, Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources initiated an independent review into the capability and culture of the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources in relation to the regulation of live animal exports.
Intention Sensing and the role of danger in physical human-robot interaction

This paper presents an overview about the role of intention sensing in physical human-robot interaction. Robots become more and more active agents in human environments. Applications range from caretaking and rehabilitation to autonomous vehicles that collaborate with a human user towards a common goal. By sensing human activities and deriving the intentions of the human, a better prediction of human behaviour can be made. Based on that, safety mechanisms have a higher chance of actively avoid collisions with humans and therefore support a friendly collaboration. Furthermore, a robot that can express its intentions itself is understandable to humans in the same physical space. All in all, intention sensing and expression can enhance human-robot interaction and
Transform mapping using shared decision tree context clustering for HMM-based cross-lingual speech synthesis

This paper proposes a novel transform mapping technique based on shared decision tree context clustering (STC) for HMM-based cross-lingual speech synthesis. In the conventional cross-lingual speaker adaptation based on state mapping, the adaptation performance is not always satisfactory when there are mis-matches of languages and speakers between the average voice models of input and output languages. In the proposed technique, we alleviate the effect of the mismatches on the transform mapping by introducing a language-independent decision tree constructed by STC, and represent the average voice models using language-independent and dependent tree structures. We also use a bilingual speech corpus for keeping speaker characteristics between the average voice models of different languages. The experimental results show that the proposed technique decreases both spectral and prosodic distortions between original and generated parameter trajectories and signiﬁcantly improves the naturalness of synthetic speech while keeping the speaker similarity compared to the state mapping.
A survey of customer satisfaction, expectations and perceptions as a measure of service quality in SANBS

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the service quality that the SANBS provides to its customers, by measuring customers’ perceptions and their expectations of service quality provided by the supplier of blood transfusion services. The organization that is used for this study is the South African National Blood Service (SANBS). Specifically the study seeks to: 1. Determine the extent to which customers are satisfied or not satisfied with the service they receive from the SANBS using the ten-dimensional format of SERVQUAL model, modified to the specific service quality requirements of the blood transfusion service industry. 2. Establish customers’ perceptions of the service they receive using a multiple-item scale (SERVQUAL) for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. 3. Establish customers’ expectations of the service, and compare them to their perceptions of the service they currently receive. The comparison is made along each service quality dimension, across different parts of same service on a geographical basis, and across different customer groups on a customer category (or type) basis. 4. Recommend implementation of appropriate service quality performance improvement procedures where necessary. Study design and methods: The data for the study came from the SANBS’ customer perception and expectation survey conducted in 2005. Questionnaires were sent out to hospitals that use products and services provided by the SANBS in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal Provinces of South Africa. The questionnaire was based on the multiple-item SERVQUAL model for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality, modified and tailored to specific service quality requirements of the blood transfusion service industry. Questionnaires were sent out to 113 (69.3%) hospitals out of a total of 163 blood-utilizing hospitals in the two provinces. Of the 113 hospitals, 92 (81.4%) responded, with questionnaires rendered unusable. The final sample size is 88 and is included in the final study database. The data is analyzed by comparing different parts of the service on a geographical basis namely KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape zones. The data is also analyzed by comparing different customer groups namely the Rural State Hospitals, the Urban State Hospitals and Private Hospitals. Results: The result confirms the research (alternative) hypothesis (H1 : μ1 ≠ μ2), and rejects Ho. The overall expectations ratings are higher than the perceptions ratings, and the KwaZulu-Natal expectations ratings are higher than the Eastern Cape ratings. The expectations of private hospitals and rural state hospitals have a higher rating than that of urban state hospitals and the perceptions of private and urban state hospitals have a higher rating than that of rural state hospitals. The largest service quality gap is the accessibility dimension which relates specifically to approachability and ease with which customers can access staff at different levels of the organization by e-mail, and includes accessing of knowledgeable blood bank…
Text Mining for Drugs and Chemical Compounds: Methods, Tools and Applications

Providing prior knowledge about biological properties of chemicals, such as kinetic values, protein targets, or toxic effects, can facilitate many aspects of drug development. Chemical information is rapidly accumulating in all sorts of free text documents like patents, industry reports, or scientific articles, which has motivated the development of specifically tailored text mining applications. Despite the potential gains, chemical text mining still faces significant challenges. One of the most salient is the recognition of chemical entities mentioned in text. To help practitioners contribute to this area, a good portion of this review is devoted to this issue, and presents the basic concepts and principles underlying the main strategies. The technical details are introduced and accompanied by relevant bibliographic references. Other tasks discussed are retrieving relevant articles, identifying relationships between chemicals and other entities, or determining the chemical structures of chemicals mentioned in text. This review also introduces a number of published applications that can be used to build pipelines in topics like drug side effects, toxicity, and protein‐disease‐compound network analysis. We conclude the review with an outlook on how we expect the field to evolve, discussing its possibilities and its current limitations.
General Data Protection Regulation and its effects on healthcare in the Netherlands and Germany

On the 25th of May 2018, the European Parliament enforced the General Data Protection Regulation to replace the directive on data regulation established in 1995. The regulation empowers people to be the owners of their personal data. This empowerment has consequences for organisations, who have to make sure that informed consent is retrieved when they start the processing of the data of their customers or patients. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate whether healthcare institutions are affected by the consequences of GDPR on this industry and to assess whether the quality of care is distressed by these new privacy-security measures. Following the research at healthcare institutions up by surveys, research is done to evaluate whether disclosing behaviour of patients might change and whether this could have influences on these healthcare institutions. The results show that healthcare institutions so far have not suffered significantly from the adoption of GDPR, but that work has been more inconvenient and inefficient. Disclosing behaviour is currently not affected, but the surveys show that as privacy-awareness increases; disclosing behaviour might also be impacted; which could potentially lead to consequences for the quality offered in the healthcare sector in the future.
Enterprise System Engagement in Chinese SMEs:Issues of Policy Implementation

The main literature on Enterprise Systems (ES) focuses on large Western firms and has resulted in theoretical models to explain adoption, largely from the perspective of the adopting company. In contrast ES research, and in particular SMEs in China, are limited. This research examines ES engagement in Chinese SMEs from the joint perspectives of both the SME and the ES technology provider in the context of government policies. The research is based on four cases in Shenzhen, PRC and an extended analysis of relevant government policies at central and local levels. Using King et al.’s (1994) institutional analysis it argues for the need of theory to specifically recognize institutional policies. It recognizes also, however, that the problems of policy implementation are significant and suggestions for practice are offered.
Pharmacy practice in Qatar: challenges and opportunities

The State of Qatar is a small oil and gas-rich Gulf country that is experiencing rapid development in health care services, including pharmaceutical services. To date, there is no autonomous professional pharmacy association or society that regulates or promotes the practice of pharmacy in Qatar, and the challenges that face the profession of pharmacy in Qatar mirror the challenges facing the profession in all other Middle Eastern countries. However, a set of initiatives and projects that include pioneering educational initiatives, close alignment of practice with the educational providers, stronger leadership from a National Health Strategy, and the development of pharmacy leadership groups at the practice level all contribute in the fast development of the practice of pharmacy in this country. In this commentary, we provide a snapshot of the pharmaceutical scene in Qatar, and in doing so, we shall discuss the challenges that face the practice, and the main landmarks and initiatives that are destined to move pharmacy forward in Qatar.
The Impact of Ownership Structure, Independent Commissioners, Audit Committees, and Audit Quality on Tax Avoidance - An Empirical Study of Non-Financial Firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2013-2016

: This study aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of family ownership, government ownership, foreign ownership, independent commissioners, audit committees and audit quality on tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is proxied by the Cash Effective Tax Rate (CETR), which is the ratio of cash tax paid to pre-tax income. The sample includes 568 non-financial firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange between 2013 and 2016 and is determined by the purposive sampling method. The impacts of family ownership, government ownership, foreign ownership, independent commissioners, audit committees and audit quality on tax avoidance were analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis with the help of SPSS 21 software. Based on the results, it can be concluded that independent commissioners, audit committees and audit quality have no significant impact on tax avoidance; meanwhile, family ownership, government ownership, and foreign ownership have a significant impact on tax avoidance. This indicates that higher ownership of family, government, and foreign company will reduce tax avoidance practices.
Overtherapy or undertherapy for papillary thyroid microcarcinoma?

Summary Papillary thyroid microcarcinomas £1 cm have an excellent prognosis both in terms of overall and relapse-free survival. Their high prevalence in autopsy series suggests that most papillary microcarcinomas do not progress to clinically relevant cancer. The extent of surgery is still controversial. Lobectomy or subtotal resection are standard procedures, but multifocal microcarcinomas or lymph node metastases might be overlooked. The pros and cons of completion thyroidectomy and ablative radioiodine therapy are based on limited evidence due to heterogenous inclusion criteria in published series. The retrospective data analyses included subgroups with infiltration of the thyroid capsule, lymph node metastases or multifocal microcarcinomas at the primary staging. The local relapse rate reached approximately 7% after different therapeutic regimes. Radioiodine ablation decreased the recurrence rate in some retrospective studies, but data are inconsistent. Successful radioiodine ablation is possible also after less radical surgery without complete thyroidectomy with postoperative 131I uptake of 10 to 20% or remnants of 3-8 ml. This concept was evaluated successfully in a monocentric series of patients with multifocal microcarcinomas. The therapeutic consideration should include the diameter of the carcinoma, neigh-bourhood to the thyroid capsule, histopathologic subgroups, age, familiar occurrence, patient’s informed consent and in future moleculargenetic tests, too. Therefore, limited surgical procedures for small papillary carcinomas as therapeutic standard, respectively thyroidectomy, lymph node dissection in the central compartment of the neck and ablative radioiodine therapy for individual cases are options for experienced surgeons and specialized tumour centers.
Computational Modeling of Narrative

The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called Narrative ML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates together narratology, AI, and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists. It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists), AI researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, game developers, and narrative theorists.
Lithium Effects on Inositol Phospholipids and Inositol Phosphates: Evaluation of an In Vivo Model for Assessing Polyphosphoinositide Turnover in Brain

Abstract: Administration of lithium chloride to rats injected intracerebrally with [3H]inositol led to time‐ and dose‐dependent increases in levels of labeled inositol monophosphates in brain. Quantitative analysis of the inositol phosphates by ion chromatography revealed 37‐ and 20‐fold increases in the mass of myo‐inositol 1‐phosphate and 4‐phosphate, respectively, at 4 h intraperitoneal after injections of 6 mEq/kg of lithium chloride. Albeit to a much lesser extent, lithium administration also resulted in an increase in the level of myo‐inositol 1,4‐bisphosphate in brain. The lithium‐induced increase in content of labeled inositol monophosphates was marked by a concomitant decrease in content of labeled inositol, and after injections of high doses of lithium, e.g., 10 mEq/kg, this was followed by a general decrease in labeling of the inositol phospholipids. In general, animals injected with [3H]inositol but not lithium did not reveal obvious differences in labeling of inositol monophosphates on stimulation by mecamylamine or pilocarpine. However, when animals were injected with [3H]inositol and then lithium, there were large increases in the levels of labeled inositol monophosphates on administration of these compounds. Administration of atropine to the lithium‐treated mice led to a partial reduction in the amount of labeled inositol monophosphates accumulated due to the administration of lithium alone. Furthermore, atropine was able to block the pilocarpine‐induced increase in level of labeled inositol monophosphates. These results demonstrate the suitable use of the radiotracer technique together with lithium administration for assessing the effects of drugs and receptor agonists on the signaling system involving polyphosphoinositide turnover in brain.
Islamic Banks and Financial Stability: Further Evidence

The objectives of this paper is to assess whether there is any overall differences in the level of financial stability of Islamic banks as compared to conventional banks and whether such differences (if any) are linked to certain contractual constraints faced by Islamic banks (with the z-score as a proxy for financial stability). In particular, the phenomenon of profit distribution, the level of fixed rate asset concentration, the level of profit sharing and the existence of discretionary reserves are proposed as key factors associated with the level of financial stability. The results provide mixed support for these assertions. The negative association between profit distribution management and financial stability is inconclusive. However, fixed rate asset concentration is almost invariably associated with lower financial stability, while there is some support for a negative association between profit and loss asset concentration and financial stability. Discretionary reserves are associated with lower financial stability, in contrast to the proposed relationship. The results found in this study tend to be stronger for smaller banks.
On Screen Defenses, Screen Hunger and Screen Identity

In the early years of psychoanalysis, patients coming for treatment were suffering from symptom neuroses, a relatively cleancut and well-dcfined group of pathological formations. The clinical picture changed as society changed and after TVorld TVar I, patients seeking therapy were found to be suffering from Character disorders, an ill-defined, heterogeneous form of neurosis. Since resuming practice aftcr TVorld \Var 11, it seems to me that once again there is a change in the prevailing clinical picture oE patients coming for psychoanalytic treatment. They are still preponderantly character disorders, but now the pathology seems to be centered around a defective formation of tlie self-imagc, an identity disorder, The struggle to establish one’s self-image or self-representation has been elucidated in recent psychoanalytic literature in the writings of Erikson (5), Jacobson (32, 33), and Hartmann (31). Erikson goes so far as to state that the study of identity today is as strategic as the study of sexuality was in Freud’s day. There is no doubt that disorders of the self-image are being described more frequently today (6, 35). In part this certainly is due to our particular interest in studying the vicissitudes oE ego development. Ever since the character disorders dominated the clinical scene, psychoanalysts have focused their attention on the ego functions. The ego’s methods and motives in coping with the dangerous instinctual demands and painful reality are the decisive factors in character formation. Among the most important means available to the ego in this struggle are the defenses. T h e problem of defense is complicated because as yet we have no systematic classification either in regard to chronology or to complexity (16). Freud suggested, however, that it might be helpful to relate particular forms of defense to specific clinical disorders (22). This presentation is an
An Improved Model for Analyzing the Performance of Photocatalytic Oxidation Reactors in Removing Volatile Organic Compounds and Its Application

Abstract An improved photocatalytic oxidation (PCO) reactor model was developed to analyze the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in indoor air. One new parameter, the average total removing factor K t, together with the other two parameters, the number of mass transfer units NTUm and the fractional conversion e, are found to be the main parameters influencing the photooxidation performance of PCO reactors. Three new parameters, the ideal reaction number of mass transfer units, NTUm,ir; the ideal reaction fractional conversion, εir; and the reaction effectiveness, η, also are defined. These concepts are helpful to the structural design and optimization for PCO reactors. The application of the model in designing a plate-type PCO reactor is demonstrated. This study shows that the present model is an effective tool for designing PCO reactors and for evaluating VOC removal performance of available PCO reactors.
The Child Trust Fund in the UK: Policy Challenges and Potential Responses

The United Kingdom introduced the Child Trust Fund (CTF) policy, a children's savings policy, in 2002. A focus group study conducted on parental attitudes to the CTF (Prabhakar, 2006, 2007) identified main reasons why CTF accounts were left unopened. This paper explores different ways that non-opening of accounts might be reduced. One strategy draws upon recent developments in behavioral economics and points to different ways that the CTF may be designed. An alternative strategy emphasises the role of financial education of parents as a way of addressing their concerns and increasing the opening rates of these accounts. The paper also considers another issue raised during the focus groups, namely parental unhappiness with the treatment of older siblings denied a CTF. This is part of a broader concern about the additional help that may be needed for children from particular backgrounds.