Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Study on Service Quality Perception and Policyholders’ Satisfaction in LIC of India in Nagapattinam District

The aim of the study is to examined the level of policyholders’ satisfaction towards assurance factors of service quality perception and also the impact of perceived quality on policyholders’ satisfaction was measured. A study adapted a non-probability sampling method of Quota sampling was used to select the sample respondent in the eight taluk of Nagapattinam District. 800 respondents were chosen among the population of policyholders in Nagapattinam District. The result found that 21.7 per cent of the highest variability in Satisfaction over the LIC among the respondent of Sirkali taluk, while, the R-Squared statistic indicates that the model as fitted explains 4.8% of the lowest variability in Satisfaction over the LIC among the respondent of Tharangambadi taluk. By overall, the model as fitted at 1.6% of the variability in the overall policyholders’ satisfaction over the LIC and the correspondent adjusted. It was found that the Pvalue in the ANOVA table is greater or equal to 0.05, there is not a statistically significant relationship between the variables at the 95.0% or higher confidence level in the sample area of Nagapattinam, Mayiladurthurai, Vedaranyam, Kuthalam, Thirukkuvalai and Trarangambadi taluk. However, the P-value in the ANOVA table is lesser or equal to 0.05, there is a statistically significant relationship between the variables at the 95.0% or higher confidence level in the sample area of Sirkali, Kilvelur and by overall. It is concluded that among the five assurance variables, the variables V2 has emerged to predict the overall policyholders’ satisfaction over LIC.
Micro-architecture estimation of the useless power consumption of a high-performance processor

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the useless power consumption of a micro-processor that is, the power dissipated to perform those tasks that are not useful for the ultimate goal of committing instructions. This is a first-order estimation of the useless power consumption. A generic high-performance processor is divided in its basic micro-architecture blocks and the amount of useful and useless accesses to each of these blocks is estimated through simulations. The useless power consumption is further divided into useless power when: (a) executing instructions within a mispredicted path, and (b) then executing instructions that will be eventually committed by some of the block accesses performed by these instructions are not needed. The simulations performed indicate that if the useless power dissipation of a high-performance processor could be totally removed (at the cost of no IPC degradation), the overall processor power consumption would be reduced by as much as 65% compared to the same processor in which all the blocks are accessed every cycle.
The Impact of Competition Intensity and Strategic Capabilities on Competitive Strategic Business Choices: The Case of Tunisian Manufacturing Industries

This article aims to show that competitive strategies can be traced back to both internal and external factors. In a sample of Tunisian companies, the concentration strategy, which is independent of marketing and market linkage capacities, is the most solicited faced to the competitive intensity. Cost dominance, which depends on managerial capacities, occupies the second position. Finally, differentiation is the least sought, but dependent on technological’s and information technology’s capabilities.
A Complete Monte Carlo and Sensitivity Analysis of Various Elements in Analog VLSI Circuits

This article describes complete Monte Carlo and sensitivity analysis. Sensitivity analysis is done by various simulations which take very long time. So to save our time and to overcome complexity level of analysis. We formulate various equation in this article to observe sensitivity and MCA.We perform sensitivity analysis and Monte-Carlo Analysis (MCA) on band pass filer circuit in this paper and show how the value of any component parameter change the circuit behavior. All the equation and model for sensitivity analysis of analog VLSI circuit and simulation are done with the help of MATLAB tool.
Infrastructure Disruptions: How Instability Breeds Household Vulnerability

This review examines the literature on the welfare impacts of infrastructure disruptions. There is widespread evidence that households suffer from the consequences of a lack of infrastructure reliability, and that being connected to the grid is not sufficient to close the infrastructure gap. Disruptions and irregular service have adverse effects on household welfare, due to missed work and education opportunities, and negative impact on health. Calibrating costs of unreliable infrastructure on existing willingness to pay assessments, we estimate the welfare losses associated with blackouts and water outages. Overall, between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of GDP would be lost each year because of unreliable infrastructure -- electricity, water and transport.
Shape and appearance information integration in medical image analysis and computer vision

In many fundamental problems in medical image analysis and computer vision, object shape and appearance are two important sources of information that when integrated, provide more reliable image interpretation. In this thesis, I propose a new perspective on how to represent the shape, appearance, and deformations of an object of interest in images. Under this new perspective, I develop novel and efficient algorithms that coherently integrate shape and appearance information to augment traditional shape-only deformable models for robust segmentation, to better perform shape alignment and registration in arbitrary dimension, to register images of single or multiple modalities in a joint shape and appearance feature space, and to build a new framework for learning statistical shape and appearance models that requires significantly less human effort than the well-known Active Shape and Appearance Models. I also present several applications of this research on topics including heart wall motion analysis in tagged MRI images, and tracking/learning/transfer of 3-D facial expressions.
Innovation Investment and Labor Mobility: Employee Entrepreneurship from Corporate R&D

This paper studies how corporate research and development (R&D) investment affects labor mobility. We use employer-employee matched data in ordinary least squares and instrumental variables analyses to assess four hypotheses. R&D has no effect on worker retention, exit from employment, or mobility to incumbent firms. Instead, it increases employee departures to entrepreneurship, leading employees to join the founding teams of startups that are venture capital-backed, high tech, high wage, and in different sectors than the parent firm. These high-growth, high-risk startups emerging from R&D benefit from a focused, standalone incentive structure and have poor complementarities to the parent firm’s assets.
Production diseases and farm animal welfare : what do the public think?

i Acknowledgements . iii List of tables . xi List of figures . xiii List of abbreviations . xiv Publications arising from the research . xv Introduction . 1 1.1 Introduction . 1 1.2 Background . 2 1.3 Research aims and objectives . 6 1.4 Research approach . 7 1.5 Thesis outline . 9 1.6 Summary . 10 Literature review . 11 2.1 Introduction . 11 2.2 Food security and intensive animal production . 11 2.3 The rise of intensive production systems . 15 2.4 Farm animal welfare . 18 2.4. 1 What is farm animal welfare? 18 2.4. 2 Farm animal welfare and production diseases . 22 2.5 The importance of public perceptions . 26 2.6 Summary . 30 Attitudes towards farm animal welfare . 31 3.1 Introduction . 31 3.2 Background . 31 3.2.1 Systematic reviews . 31 3.2.2 Rise of the concerned consumer . 34
Research on the infrared image enhancement method

For solving the problems of poor infrared image contrast and blurred edge details,segment enhancement method is proposed to enhance the contrast of infrared image.The wavelet is effective in enhancing the infrared image contrast and edge details and in reducing the noise.The characteristics of image edges may be displayed by characteristic vectors.According to characteristics of infrared image edges,the infrared image edges are correctly extracted.By training sample set,neural network has the ability to solve the scenery physical edges according to the edge characteristic vectors.Experimental result shows that the neutral network edge detection method is superior to other methods in noise resistance,edge positioning and detection accuracy.
Performance evaluation of regional calibration methods for a distributed hydrologic modelling framework

Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences Department of Geosciences Seasonally snow-covered regions are an important source of water and a crucial component of the yearly water balance for substantial areas of the world. The American River, located in the California Sierra Nevada presents an opportunity for evaluation of a distributed hydrologic framework, spanning a great range of elevation, land covers, climate, and degree of human influence. This project also details the first application of the SHyFT framework in North America. This study aims to collect and process available, relevant hydrometeorologic data for the region, and using currently available methods in SHyFT, assess the performance differences between regional approaches versus local and lumped methods, as well as the effect different snow-routines have on model results. The experimental design, employing five different region definitions for each of the respective snow-routines, found highly variable NashSutcliffe efficiencies, ranging between -3.249 and 0.611. The poorest results occurring in problematic calibration approaches for local regions, and regulated sub-regions, the Middle Fork in particular. The overall best performing region was the entire Upper American River Watershed, gauged at Folsom lake using a full − natural − flow adapted time series. Between the three headwater regions, the free-flowing North Fork had the best overall performance between experimental setups, maximum NSE found during validation of 0.523. Between the two snow-routines included, the more advanced gamma-snow outperformed the HBV-snow adapted routine. Results show limited applicability for transfer of locally calibrated parameters to larger regions, for all but one method. The issues in model performance are attributed to several possible sources, spatial interpolation methods of point-based measurements, data quality issues, terrain capture difficulties, and the presence of regulated basins.
IMPACT OF GLOBAL LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS ON PERFORMANCE OF MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES

Purpose of Study: The aim of this study is to influence the global leadership behaviors on performance in multinational companies. The leadership of multinational companies has become a prominent issue in the 21st century. Organizational performance depends on the leadership style and behavior of the organization. It is also viewed as the survival and profitability of an organization in which its measurement is primary both in manufacturing and services. On the other hand, transactional leadership focuses mainly on goal attainment and transactional leaders are focused on task completion and have fewer emphasis on the emotions and challenges of subordinates or employees. Methodology: The data for this study were obtained from existing literatures on the impact of global leadership behaviors on the performance of multinational companies. The methodology heavily relied on existing previous literatures on the subject being dealt with. Results: Transactional leadership was explicated as the style of leadership that focuses on meeting specific goals or performance criteria and the development of followers and their needs. Relations-oriented leaders are different from task-oriented leaders. On this side of the spectrum, relations-oriented leaders tend to focus more on developing a close relationship with their employees. Implications: Transactional leadership style lacks supervision and influence on subordinates from leaders, as they indulge themselves from any situation that threatens or confronts them; therefore, the responsibilities are shifted on the employees.
Combining Spatial and Semantic Information to Represent Image

Recently,bag-of-words(BoW) model has been approved by researchers due to their good performance.There are mainly two categories of bag-of-words models.One is to add spatial information into the image feature representation and the other is to add semantic information.This paper proposes an image feature representation method which combines the spatial information between feature points with the semantic information,and makes the feature show better performance.This paper extracts similar visual words by computing distribution divergence and forms visual phrase,which can present the meaning of image.Image classification experiments based on this method are conducted on UIUC-Sports8 dataset and Scene-15 dataset,and the results show that the visual phrase method has better classification accuracy compared with the conventional bag-of-words model and other models.
Competition in China’s public accounting service market: evidence from newly-established branch offices

ABSTRACT China’s public accounting service profession has experienced rapid development in the past decade, and the major means of expansion are mainly characterized by merging with local audit firms as newly established branch offices across the country. Based on the office-level data in China from 2013 to 2016, this study examines the competing strategies of these newly-established branch offices and their potential impact on the local audit market. We find that newly established branch offices are able to successfully obtain listed clients in the year of establishment via significant low-price competition and reducing audit quality. Furthermore, when competition in the inter-provincial audit market intensifies, it is more likely for existing firms to offer audit fee discounts to their incumbent clients. Our evidence indicates that the epitaxial extension brings about destructive competition, and existing audit firms use price reduction strategies as a defense, thus disrupting normal market competition.
DOES THE LESS DEVELOPED STATES IN MALAYSIA CATCHING-UP TO THE RICHER STATE OF SELANGOR?

Malaysia is targeting to becoming a develop nation by 2020. However, income disparity between the developed and less developed states in Malaysia has persisted for more than 50 years without any sign of narrowing the gap in the future. Despite the various Malaysia Development Plans for the past several decades, regional disparity between states remains. Thus, the objective of the present paper is to address the question whether the less developed states, namely; Kedah, Kelantan, Pahang, Perlis, Sabah, Sarawak and Terengganu are catching-up with the more richer state of Selangor. Using annual data for the period 1970 to 2013, by employing the error-correction model our results suggests that there is cointegration and thus, imply convergence between less developed states and Selangor. Our catch-up analyses suggest that there is narrowing of disparity between Selangor and the less developed states. In this respect, the state government has an important role to play in enhancing growth by continuously providing stable economic environment for investment and other productive economic activities. This will ensure full convergence can take place at a faster rate in the future.
PHYSICALLY BASED REAL TIME FOUNTAIN SIMULATION

This paper presents a physically based approach for real time fountain simulation based on fluid dynamics and particle system. Unlike traditional method which need solve complex Navier Stokes equations, the authors adopt a special case of these equations and a simple dynamics equation of particles, the user can see the fountain flow changes in real time by adjusting some parameters.Metaballs are taken as particles and a ray tracing algorithm based on Bezier Clipping is adopted to obtain visually aesthetic fountain flow. The model is very simple and can be easily integrated into commercial 3D animation software systems.
Malaysia’s tourism demand: gravity model approach

The tourism sector in Malaysia has undergone substantial growths as a result of the efforts taken by the Ministry of Tourism in policy planning and implementation. It is the government’s long-term goal to make Malaysia as the most popular tourism destination. The growth of tourism sector in Malaysia can be measured by tourist arrivals and receipts. Since this industry is able to drive Malaysian economy forward, more studies should be done in determining factors that influence demand for tourism. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify the demand factors of tourist arrivals in Malaysia and estimate their relative importance. Through understanding the determinants of Malaysia’s tourism demand, the government can design strategies and policies to enhance Malaysia’s competitiveness as a tourist destination. This study employed the bilateral tourism flows gravity model. The model includes income level of origin country and exchange rate to control for international shocks. This study also includes supply factor which is number of hotel room availability. The data used includes 149 countries, including countries with small numbers of arrivals. The bilateral tourism flows gravity model was estimated using random effect model (REM). The findings show that shorter distance, population of country origin, country that share common border and common language with Malaysia are major factors that increase international tourist arrivals.
Green Supply Chain Management: A Primer

Green supply chain management (GSCM) is about incorporating the environmental idea in every stage of a supply chain. It has emerged as a set of managerial practices that integrate environmental issues into supply chain management. It includes product design, material selection, manufacturing process, and delivery of the final product to consumers. The aim of GSCM is to minimize or eliminate wastage including hazardous chemical, emissions, energy and solid waste along supply chain. This paper provides a primer on GSCM.
Succession Planning in Organizations; Impact on Workplace Productivity

Succession planning today enables organizations to identify talented employees and provide education to develop them for further higher leach and broader responsibilities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of succession planning on workforce productivity in Kenya. The study adopted desk based methodology. Specifically, the paper identified documentary evidence in the form of already completed studies that focused on succession planning and the impact it has on employees and the organizations at large. The study findings indicated that most organizations are engaging in formalized succession planning in order to offer the knowledge to help high potential employees fit into management positions. Therefore, succession planning programs have emerged as a strong factor influencing staff retention and thus improved productivity. Thus, organizations investment in their staff and improvement contributes to a pool of talent, which benefits the whole organization through retention. The study found that existing level of employee’s performance can be enhanced through providing more development opportunities to employees for strengthening their skills to work in synergy in the firms to compete with the challenges of the world. The paper recommends that succession planning should include those strategies that assist in acknowledging the need and form of value generating skills and knowledge that the organization would need, and transforming these values to competitive advantage(s) for the organization. Succession strategies should create corporate social identity for the organization, where employees sees themselves as owners or partners together with the employer, therefore they strive to make the organization progress.
SQL Injection Attacks in Web Application

SQL injection is a technique for exploiting the Web application that use client-supplied data for SQL queries and, without stripping potentially harmful characters, execute SQL queries in back-end database, thus producing an attack different from the expectation. In the Internet or intranet, remarkable numbers of SQL injections exist the Web application, which is easily exploited by attackers. However, proper countermeasures adopted in Web application could prevent SQL injections or reduce the loss resulted from the attacks.
Marketing factors of formation of company’s customer equity

The satisfaction of consumers’ needs is a major priority of any company. In conditions of economic crisis consumers’ behaviour changes and it should be reflected in the company’s marketing strategy. To maximize consumers’ satisfaction, one should maximize consumers’ benefits, received as a result of consumption of the product, and to minimize consumers’ costs. In conditions Valeriys PRAUDE Elena ShAlKOVSKA
Island destination marketing in an era of recession.

It is common ground that marketing plays a crucial role for the survival and development of any destination. The study examines the consumers' decision making process for destination selection during a period of economic turmoil. The research was held in holidaymakers (N=400) on the island of Zante, Greece. The results confirm that a financial crisis does not entail cancellation of travel; instead it generates various combinations of costly facilities such as accommodation, food, and transport. Additionally, local decision makers alter their decisions according to the crisis circumstances and observe the selection factors used by visitors. It also confirms the important role of central government in destination decision-making and formulation of marketing activities.
COMPETITIVE ASSESSMENT FACTORS OF SEAFOOD EXPORTERS IN VIETNAM

This study aims at exploring the factors influencing the competitiveness of seafood export enterprises in Vietnam by surveying 356 people who are leaders and managers of seafood export enterprises in Vietnam. The results for the impact factor analysis with 11 measures proves that these factors should be displayed in the following order of importance: (1) Managerial and operational abilities; (2) Prices; (3) Human resources; (4) Marketing; (5) The power of brand, (6) Distribution channel, (7) Production technology, (8) Finance, (9) Investments in research and development, (10) Being creative, (11) Commercial disputes’ resolution. After the analysis the author proposes some recommendations to the management board of seafood export enterprises so that to improve their competitive position.