Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of pulsatile and circadian prolactin release and its variability in men.

In order to investigate the intra- and interindividual variability of spontaneous prolactin (PRL) secretion, 24 h blood sampling at 10 min intervals was performed in ten healthy young men (age 19 to 25 yrs) on three occasions (intervals 2 weeks and 3 months). Plasma PRL concentrations were determined in duplicate by immunoradiometric assay. Peak detection was carried out with the PULSAR program. The circadian rhythm was analyzed by a complex cosinor method combining fundamental (24 h), 1st harmonic (12 h), and 2nd harmonic (6 h) frequencies. The original data was well represented by this calculation as shown by mean (+/- SD) correlation coefficients of 0.84 +/- 0.08. Mean and integrated PRL concentrations showed the lowest intraindividual variability (range 2.8 to 19.6%) of all parameters tested. For the number of peaks per 24 h, a median intraindividual variability of 24.2% (range 6.9 to 50%) was seen. In general, intraindividual variability of parameters of pulsatile PRL release was lower than the variability between subjects. The complex cosinor analysis revealed a bimodal pattern of PRL secretion in most profiles. Acrophases (times of highest PRL levels) were found between 0040 and 1000 h, nadirs between 0030 and 2300 h. The amplitude of the circadian rhythm (Max-Min) ranged from 3.8 to 16.9 ng/ml. The time lag between onset of sleep and acrophase was variable (1.75 to 7.38 hrs). Variability of nadir, minimal and maximal PRL, amplitude, and minimal PRL as percent of the mesor was significantly lower within individuals than between subjects (p < 0.02). During sleep, peak heights and peak amplitudes were significantly higher than during waking periods (p < 0.004). No statistically significant differences were found in the distribution of relative frequencies of peak number, peak amplitudes and peak heights between the three series of profiles. The distribution of peak heights was compatible with a normal distribution. In conclusion, it was shown that the circadian rhythm of PRL secretion in normal men can be analysed accurately and reliably with the complex cosinor method, which is relatively easy to perform and yields results comparable to those obtained by much more complicated programs. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Cost-Effective Three-Phase PMSM Drive Tolerant to Open-Phase Fault

This paper presents a low-cost fault-tolerant system for open-phase fault (OPF) in a power-converter-fed permanent-magnet synchronous machine. The proposed fault-tolerant system is based on field orientation control with additional fault tolerance functionality. A current predictive method for OPF detection is presented, together with an estimation of the threshold level for detection. The proposed method is based on the prediction of stator current for the next sampling interval. Furthermore, a new method for postfault operation of the machine is proposed. For optimal performance of the complete drive, a prefiring angle is introduced in order to avoid the temporary generation of negative torque. This improvement increases the average generated postfault electromagnetic torque, and consequently, it reduces the mechanical stress on various machine parts. The proposed fault detection and postfault operation solutions were simulated in MATLAB, and they were also tested on an experimental setup. The results show several advantages of the proposed fault-tolerant solution, like its short fault-detection time, substantial robustness against variation of machine parameters or load fluctuations, and negligible implementation costs, since no hardware modifications are needed. The fault detection algorithm does not require high computing power, and it operates well even during transients.
Prognostication during physician-family discussions about limiting life support in intensive care units*

Objective:Prognostic information is important to the family members of incapacitated, critically ill patients, yet little is known about what prognostic information physicians provide. Our objectives were to determine the types of prognostic information provided to families of critically ill patients when making major end-of-life treatment decisions and to identify factors associated with more physician prognostication. Design:Multiple-center, cross-sectional study. Setting:ICUs of four hospitals. Subjects:Thirty-five physicians, 51 patients, and 169 family members. Interventions:We audiotaped 51 physician-family conferences in which there were deliberations about major end-of-life treatment decisions at four hospitals in 2000–2002. Conferences were coded to identify the types of prognostic information provided by physicians. We used a mixed-effects regression model to identify factors associated with more prognostication by physicians. Measurements and Main Results:The mean number of prognostic statements per conference was 9.4 ± 6.4 (range 0–29). Eighty-six percent of conferences contained discussion of the patient’s anticipated functional status or quality of life, compared with 63% in which the chances for survival were discussed (p = .01). There were significantly more statements about prognosis for functional outcomes per conference compared with statements about prognosis for survival (median 4 [interquartile range 2–8] vs. 1 [interquartile range 0–3]; p < .001). Increasing educational level of the family was independently associated with more prognostic statements by physicians (p < .001) as was the degree of physician-family conflict about withdrawing life support (p < .001) and the physician’s race being white (p = .009). Conclusions:Prognostication occurred frequently during physician-family deliberations about whether to forego life support, but physicians did not discuss the patient’s prognosis for survival in more than one third of conferences. Less educated families received less information about prognosis. Future studies should address whether these observations partially explain the high prevalence of family misunderstandings about prognosis in intensive care units.
Recent history of artificial outcrossing facilitates whole-genome association mapping in elite inbred crop varieties

Genomewide association studies depend on the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD), the number and distribution of markers, and the underlying structure in populations under study. Outbreeding species generally exhibit limited LD, and consequently, a very large number of markers are required for effective whole-genome association genetic scans. In contrast, several of the world's major food crops are self-fertilizing inbreeding species with narrow genetic bases and theoretically extensive LD. Together these are predicted to result in a combination of low resolution and a high frequency of spurious associations in LD-based studies. However, inbred elite plant varieties represent a unique human-induced pseudooutbreeding population that has been subjected to strong selection for advantageous alleles. By assaying 1,524 genomewide SNPs we demonstrate that, after accounting for population substructure, the level of LD exhibited in elite northwest European barley, a typical inbred cereal crop, can be effectively exploited to map traits by using whole-genome association scans with several hundred to thousands of biallelic SNPs.
Dimensions of service quality: a study in Istanbul

Investigates the elements which contribute to service quality for customers of the hotel industry in Istanbul. Examines whether the quality dimensions included in the SERVQUAL model apply in an international environment, specifically in Turkey. Searches for additional dimensions, identified by customers, which should be included in the service quality construct. Measures the level of importance of each specific dimension for the users of hotel services in Turkey. Concludes that users of Turkish four– and five‐star hotels may expect to receive friendly, courteous, hygienic and expert service but without special personalized attention.
A Comparison of Outcomes between Diabetic and Nondiabetic Capd Patients in India

Background Continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) has been an established modality of renal replacement therapy in India for a decade, but there is a paucity of published data on the outcome of CAPD patients in India. We analyzed our data to determine the overall predictors of survival and compared patient survival between diabetic and nondiabetic end-stage renal disease patients on CAPD. Methods Of 373 patients, 197 were diabetic (165 males, 32 females) and 176 nondiabetic (104 males, 72 females). Patients were followed for 22 ± 14 patient-months. Patients were prospectively followed until the study end point or death. Results Overall median survival was 48 patient-months. Median survival of diabetics (34.5 patient-months) was significantly inferior to nondiabetic patients (59 patient-months) p = 0.001. Overall patient survival at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years was 90%, 72%, 60%, 49%, and 39%, respectively. Patient survival of diabetics versus nondiabetics at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years was 85% versus 96%, 62% vs 82%, 48% vs 72%, 39% vs 62%, and 34% vs 42%, respectively. The relative risk of mortality in nondiabetics (34/176) was less than that in diabetic patients (71/197): odds ratio (OR) 0.43, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.26 – 0.68; p = 0.001. On Cox regression analysis, diabetes (OR 1.95, 95% CI 1.23 – 3.07; p = 0.004), comorbidities (OR 0.39, 95% CI 0.25 – 0.61; p = 0.001), peritonitis (OR 1.79, 95% CI 1.19 – 2.68; p = 0.005), malnutrition (OR 0.52, 95% CI 0.29 – 0.94; p = 0.03), and residual glomerular filtration rate at initiation of CAPD (OR 0.87, 95% CI 0.81 – 0.93; p = 0.001) were significant predictors of overall mortality. Age (OR 0.68, 95% CI 0.45 – 1.03; p = 0.07), gender (OR 0.66, 95% CI 0.42 – 1.03; p = 0.06), and albumin level at initiation of CAPD (OR 0.92, 95% CI 0.64 – 1.33; p = 0.68) were not predictors of mortality. Age (56 ± 10 vs 46 ± 15 years, p = 0.001), comorbidities (51/197 vs 16/176, p = 0.001), peritonitis rate (0.68 vs 0.50 episodes/patient-year, p = 0.056), and severe malnutrition (27/197 vs 10/176, p = 0.002) were higher in diabetic than in nondiabetic patients. Conclusion In India the majority of CAPD patients are diabetic. Patient survival was inferior in diabetic compared to nondiabetic patients on CAPD, but survival was statistically similar after adjustment for comorbidities. Diabetes, comorbidities, residual glomerular filtration rate, peritonitis, and severe malnutrition are predictors of mortality in CAPD patients.
Bohr: similarity aware geo-distributed data analytics

We propose Bohr, a similarity aware geo-distributed data analytics system that minimizes query completion time. The key idea is to exploit similarity between data in different data centers (DCs), and transfer similar data from the bottleneck DC to other sites with more WAN bandwidth. Though these sites have more input data to process, these data are more similar and can be more efficiently aggregated by the combiner to reduce the intermediate data that needs to be shuffled across the WAN. Thus our similarity aware approach reduces the shuffle time and in turn the query completion time (QCT). We design Bohr based on OLAP data cubes to perform efficient similarity checking among datasets in different sites. We implement Bohr on Spark and deploy it across ten sites of AWS EC2. Our extensive evaluation using realistic query workloads shows that Bohr improves the QCT by up to 50% and reduces the intermediate data by up to 6x compared to state-of-the-art solutions that also use OLAP cubes.
Intellectual Capital and Property Rights (IPR) as the Key Asset of a Family Firm : A Case Study with an Evaluation Approach

The role of immaterial production factors is becoming more and more important and they are estimated to be over two-thirds of what is required in production in our postindustrial time. Accordingly, the discussion of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) as key assets is increasing. If these assets are wrongly estimated, this can be very harmful in loan negotiations, credit ratings, taxation, and family business successions or sell-outs. The research question of the present study is: How does a family business owner evaluate the IPR goodwill of his company, and what are his experiences of financiers' evaluations? The case firm in the study is a Finnish firm that produces recorded material, mainly music. The two theoretical approaches included in the literature review are as follows: Intellectual capital and property rights (IPR) and Information asymmetry. The single-case study illustrates the problems of IPR evaluation. Major differences could be discovered in the evaluations of IPR and, according to the empirical data, this seems to be, to a great extent, a consequence of information asymmetry between the family enterprise and their financier. The limitation of the study is that it is based on a single case representing just one industrial branch and one country, but some analytical generalizations may still be possible. The main policy and educational implication is that new thinking in evaluating IPR assets as a family business resource would be needed in financial institutions as well as in governmental industrial policy.
Analysts' Earnings Forecasts and Trading Flows by Various Investor Types in the Korea Stock Exchange ∗

We examine relationships among analysts’ earnings forecast revisions, stock returns, and trading flows by various investor types in the Korea stock exchange. We report three main findings. First, analysts’ earnings revisions and stock returns are strongly positively correlated. This supports the view that analysts’ earnings forecasts contain valuable information that is worth pursuing. Second, net stock purchases by foreign investors tend to precede upward revisions of earnings forecasts. Domestic individuals’ trading flows exhibit the opposite pattern. Third, for the sub-sample of stock returns that are concurrent with large revisions in analysts’ forecasts, net stock purchases by foreign investors also tend to predict a positive stock return. On the whole, our findings suggest that foreign investors are not informationally disadvantaged with respect to earnings news.
EFFECTIVENESS OF MICRO-CREDIT LOANS PROVIDED BY ZARAI TARAQIATI BANK LIMITED UNDER AWAMI ZARAI SCHEME TO THE FARMERS OF FAISALABAD, PAKISTAN

Pakistan agriculture credit system consists of formal and informal sources of credit supply. The formal credit sources involve financial organizations like Zarai Taraqiati Bank limited (ZTBL) formerly known as Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), commercial banks and cooperative societies. ZTBL is considered one of the biggest financial organizations that has contributed in the rural sector of the country. The bank is serving as the prime financial institution. It caters the credit needs of farmers for the development and upgradation of agriculture as well as promotion of small-house industries in the rural areas. ZTBL provides loans to mostly small farmers of 12 acres of land. The present study was designed to explore the effectiveness of these micro-credit loans. Multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select 120 respondents from 2 towns of tehsil Faisalabad. Questionnaire was designed in English and then translated into local language to collect maximum information. SPSS was applied to analyze the data and interpreted in the form of frequencies and percentages. It is found that agricultural production increased by loaning and loans directly affected on the farmer life. Most of the farmers of about 36.7% used loan's amount to purchase the agriculture utilities and some used this amount for other purposes. The study also revealed that loanees are mostly from the young age group and educated. It was perceived that rare filed visits of credit officers and difficult documentation during loan process were main hindrances for farmers. Some of the farmers have perception as ‘it is not good to get loan’ but majority is in the favor. It is concluded that loan cause positive effective on the farmer’s life.
Adaptive limited feedback for intercell interference cancelation in cooperative downlink multicell networks

In this paper, we evaluate intercell interference can-celation techniques in cooperative downlink multicell systems. We compare two classical beamforming strategies for the design of the beamforming vectors: maximum ratio combining precoding and partial zero-forcing. Since full channel state information at the transmission is unfeasible, we consider a limited feedback link and compare different strategies for bit partitioning of the feedback information for serving and interferer base stations. We propose a simple adaptive bit partitioning strategy to select an optimum transmission scheme at the base station. We show that the adaptive bit portioning algorithm is improved the sum capacity performance of the multicell networks significantly.
Review of supply chain management and logistics research

Purpose – To examine the state of logistics and supply chain management (SCM) research in the last five years from the standpoint of existing methodologies. The state of research is assessed by examining the research design, number of hypothesis testing, research methods, data analysis techniques, data sources, level of analysis and country of authors.Design/methodology/approach – The review of SCM and logistics research is based on 442 papers published from 1999 to 2003 in the following three academic journals Journal of Business Logistics, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, and Supply Chain Management: An International Journal.Findings – Major findings show that there is an increase in the direct observation methods like case studies. In general, the research is more interpretive in nature. Survey method is still holding the highest position. More advanced techniques are being used for data analysis in empirical studies and there has been an increase in hypothesis tes.
Human-humanoid physical interaction realizing force following and task fulfillment

The authors describe the control methods used for a humanoid's compliant behavior following human force and motions while fulfilling given tasks under various constraint conditions during Physical InterFerence (PIF) with a human. PIF is a form of physical interaction viewed from the robot's point of view. In cases of PIF occurrence, PIF Adapting Behaviors for attenuating physical influences caused by PIF on both a human body and a robots' task are required. First, a base control method for compliantly following PIF by coordinating multiple joints of the arms and trunk is presented. By utilizing this method, PIF force produced on several areas of the robot's entire body is efficiently reduced. Next, the control methods for fulfilling given tasks, as well as following PIF at the same time, are proposed. In these methods, the idea is incorporated that if the utilization of redundancy is needed for task fulfillment or constraint conditions and attributes of the given task are changed, the role of each joint needs to change as well. Adapting to the diversity of task attributes and also the necessity of utilizing redundancy, the proposed control methods enable the robots to realize both force following and task fulfillment at the same time. Finally, from the evaluation of the experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed methods realize a humanoid's capability of compliantly adapting to human motions while fulfilling tasks by efficiently utilizing redundancy.
Open innovation: Are inbound and outbound knowledge flows really complementary?

One novel implication of the open innovation paradigm is that inflows and outflows of knowledge are complementary. We argue that engaging simultaneously in buying and selling knowledge should allow firms to increase innovation outcomes. At the same time, we identify some of the relevant costs (cognitive, transaction, and organizational costs) that “open” firms can reduce by combining knowledge inflows and outflows. Empirically, however, we find no evidence for such complementarity in a sample of Belgian manufacturing firms. Firms buying and selling knowledge do increase their sales of new products, but at the same time their R&D costs increase more than proportionally. Our findings, therefore, indicate the need for research into a better understanding of the drivers of actual costs of organizing for open innovation.
A novel method of straight-lines detection based on Hypercomplex Steerable Filters

Straight-lines detection is an important task in image process and image analysis. For the traditional algorithm, nature images sometimes have the problem with detection inaccurate and without the use of full color information. In order to solve those problems, we proposed a novel image straight-lines detection algorithm based on Hypercomplex Steerable Filters. Firstly, the Hypercomplex steerable directional filters and Hypercomplex steerable quadrature filters are constructed. Secondly, the color images of natural scenes are detected by them. Finally, straight-lines detection will be obtained by ridge energy of color images. The proposed straight-lines algorithm also can be used in electric power transmission line detection. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed straight-lines algorithm can achieve a better effect compared with the traditional methods.
Investigation on the Characteristics,Expectation and Satisfaction of Spectators Watching the International Women Basketball League Match in Shaoxing

From the angle of sports marketing and using the methods of questionnaire and mathematical statistics,this paper makes an investigation on spectators watching the 2006 Wanfengaote FIBA international women basketball league match attended in Shaoxing China.The result shows that based on the characteristics and expectations of spectators,the amount of admission tickets admitted by spectators should be increased.Before event,publicizing information of event products should be enforced.During the halftime,the wonderful performance of dunking and fast attack should be increased,the chance of exchange between fans and basketball stars be provided,the management and service function of stadium improved,basic knowledge of enjoy basketball match publicized from many sides,opinions of event service quality from many sides collected and reacted quickly to them in order to improve the satisfaction of spectators.
Conformal microstrip patch array for SDMA applications

This paper presents the calculated and measured space division multiple access (SDMA) performance of a conformal 16x4 element microstrip patch phased array on a cylindrical surface. The described pattern synthesis algorithm allows a fast and efficient evaluation of all the array excitation coefficients, which are necessary to generate the required beams for the SDMA operation of base stations. The array shows an excellent scanning and beam forming capability and is a very promising candidate for the SDMA operation of base stations for mobile communications and for point-to-multipoint connections.