Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The On-the-Job Training Decision in Latin America

Using data from the World Bank’s Enterprise Survey, this paper explores the determinants of firms’ training decisions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The share of production for the export market and the size of the firm are key factors; training programs are not prevalent in all sectors. In addition, the share of workers receiving training depends on the age of the firm, and only for non-productive workers are differences observed across sectors. More detailed data from a Longitudinal Enterprise Survey in Chile are used to corroborate these findings. It is found that the percentage of workers receiving training is low and that the extensive and intensive margins of training are affected by different sets of firm characteristics. Finally, the results of a qualitative study in Chile suggest that training is mostly introduced to comply with certifications and standards imposed by domestic and foreign authorities. Training in larger firms may also be oriented to improve the work environment.
Dendritic cell‐targeted protein vaccines: a novel approach to induce T‐cell immunity

Abstract. Trumpfheller C, Longhi MP, Caskey M, Idoyaga J, Bozzacco L, Keler T, Schlesinger SJ, Steinman RM (The Rockefeller University, New York, NY; and Celldex Therapeutics, Phillipsburg, NJ; USA). Dendritic cell‐targeted protein vaccines: a novel approach to induce T‐cell immunity (Review). J Intern Med 2012; 271: 183–192.
Computation of an Equilibrium in Spectrum Markets for Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we investigate a market equilibrium in multichannel sharing cognitive radio networks (CRNs): it is assumed that every subchannel is orthogonally licensed to a single primary user (PU), and can be shared with multiple secondary users (SUs). We model this sharing as a spectrum market where PUs offer SUs their subchannels with limiting the interference from SUs; the SUs purchase the right to transmit over the subchannels while observing the inference limits set by the PUs and their budget constraints. Moreover, we consider each SU limits the total interference that can be invoked from all other SUs, and assume that every transmitting SU marks the interference charges to other transmitting SUs. The utility function of SU is defined as least achievable transmission rate, and that of PU is given by the net profit. We define a market equilibrium in the context of extended Fisher model, and show that the equilibrium is yielded by solving an optimization problem, Eisenberg-Gale convex program. To make the solutions of the convex program meet the market equilibrium, we apply monotone-transformation to the utility function of each SU. Furthermore, we develop a distributed algorithm that yields the stationary solutions asymptotically equivalent to the solutions given by the convex program.
Forecasting Tourist Arrivals to Sri Lanka Using Seasonal ARIMA

The benefits of accurate forecasts of international tourist arrivals in short and long term policy planning are well documented in tourism research literature. Forecast of the tourist arrivals can provide reliable estimates of tourist related product and services such as hotel rooms, car rentals, and a number of visitors to places of tourist attractions, etc. In particular, short term tourist arrival forecasts are very vital for optimal pricing of tourist related services such as air tickets and hotel rooms. However, we can find only a few research articles dealing with short term forecasting of international tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. Therefore, we attempted to forecast monthly tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka using customized model building procedure, statistical time series modeling techniques. We found that general seasonal ARIMA model ARIMA 15(4, 0, 0)脳(0, 1, 0)12"> as a suitable model to forecast monthly international tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. Keywords: tourism demand, Sri Lanka, forecasting, SARIMA
A new method of single-phase active power filter for AC electric railway system based on Hilbert transform

This paper presents a new method to harmonics elimination in AC electric railway system by single-phase active filter. In order to create the virtual phase, the Hilbert transform is employed and single-phase system transformed to two-phase symmetrical system. In this study, AC electric railway system consists of the Scott-transformer, autotransformer, the running rails, feeders and catenary. It is considered an electric railway system with balanced loads. The traction systems are utilized PWM converter drives. After obtaining the models of the fundamental elements that describing the AC electric railway system, the simulations carried out via MATLAB/Simulink and the result of simulations illustrated that the new method in single-phase AC railway system is more effective than the other methods.
Risk, Trust, and Compatibility as Antecedents of Mobile Payment Adoption

Mobile payments (m-payments) appear to have the potential to be among the more popular of mobile services, however, take-up has been lower than anticipated, and given associated levels of investment, the issue is of strategic organizational concern. This paper presents a study investigating consumer intentions toward m-payments, extending existing knowledge by developing and evaluating a model that incorporates factors relevant to the m-payment context, including a multi-dimensional treatment of perceived risk. Empirical data to test the model were captured in a region expected to exhibit strong mobile data traffic growth, and were analyzed using variance-based structural equation modeling. The empirical application of the model augments knowledge at the human level of the formation of consumer intentions to use m-payments. The authors also suggest a contribution from an organizational and managerial perspective through presenting information that has implications for development, management, and marketing of m-payment services.
Engaging patients at hospital discharge.

The author thanks G.M. and his mother for candidly sharing their thoughts and feelings about the discharge process. He also thanks Erin Hartman, MS, for her invaluable editorial assistance in preparing this manuscript. The patient safety conference described was part of the Triad for Optimal Patient Safety (TOPS), a project funded by the Gorden & Betty Moore Foundation. Engaging Patients at Hospital Discharge
Methods to Calibrate Projection Transformation Parameters for See-Through Head-Mounted Displays

See-through head-mounted displays (STHMDs), which superimpose the virtual environment generated by computer graphics (CG) on the real world, are expected to be able to vividly display various simulations and designs by using both the real environment and the virtual environment around us. However, we must ensure that the virtual environment is superimposed exactly on the real environment because both environments are visible. Disagreement in matching locations and size between real and virtual objects is likely to occur between the world coordinates of the real environment where the STHMD user actually exists and those of the virtual environment described as parameters of CG. This disagreement directly causes displacement of locations where virtual objects are superimposed. The STHMD must be calibrated so that the virtual environment is superimposed properly. Among the causes of such errors, we focus both on systematic errors of projection transformation parameters caused in manufacturing and differences between actual and supposed location of user's eye on STHMD when in use, and propose a calibration method to eliminate these effects. In the calibration method, the virtual cursor drawn in the virtual environment is directly fitted onto targets in the real environment. Based on the result of fitting, the least-squares method identifies values of the parameters that minimize differences between locations of the virtual cursor in the virtual environment and targets in the real environment. After we describe the calibration methods, we also report the result of this application to the STHMD that we have made. The result is accurate enough to prove the effectiveness of the calibration methods.
A Survey Evaluating Consumers Knowledge, Perception, Awareness and Preparedness about Generic Medicines in Urban Central Gujarat Region

The questionnaire based survey study was conducted to understand the perception about the generic medicines in consumer’s mind of urban Madhya Gujarat region precisely Vadodara, Dahod and Godhra. It was a questionnaire based survey intended to understand exactly what consumers’ think about generic medicines i.e. quality, awareness and preparedness etc. The results of the study show that the consumers were not so clear and confident about these aspects regarding generic medicines but nearly all were facing the issue of costly medicines. When asked about the government’s latest initiatives like Jan Aushadhi Kendra and Din Dayal Upadhyay pharmacy many were aware about it. Many consumers had heard or read about such stores on TV, Radio and newspapers. Most were happy with such efforts of government and were interested in availing benefits of cheaper medicines. Many were unclear about availing such benefit due to their previous experience which points at the ongoing situation where doctors prescribe medicines which are only available in store in doctor’s hospital premises or nearby medical store. It was the prime concerned and not the quality and efficacy of generic medicines. It was found that consumers were very aware about cosmetics. Something must be done to make the consumers’ more aware and doctors more encouraged about generic medicines. Most of the consumers echoed in one voice that more such stores and efforts are needed.
Nursing research into modern day surgery: a literature review

Aim: The aim of this review was to examine the present scope and direction of nursing research into day surgery in order to gain insight into possible future surgical nursing intervention in a rapidly changing healthcare environment. Background: Elective surgical healthcare is changing rapidly. This process has witnessed modern surgical nursing being progressively replaced by devolved medical practices with little or no implementation of interventions based solely upon nursing evidence. Without nursing research into ambulatory surgery and the subsequent knowledge it can provide, such a bias towards the adoption of devolved medical practices will inevitably continue. A review of research activity undertaken by the Nursing profession regarding day surgery was therefore required to aid the promotion and development of nursing based evidence in modern, elective surgery. Method: Relevant literature was gained from topical bibliographical databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, British Nursing Index and Archive, Applied Social Science Index, Cochrane Library and PsychInfo) and cross-referencing. Findings: Forty research papers were examined from which two main themes emerged based upon the broad area of study and recommendations for clinical practice - physical experiences (pain and post-operative nausea and vomiting) and psycho-educational experiences (satisfaction, information provision, anxiety and recovery). Conclusions: Based upon the nursing literature focusing specifically upon patient experiences of day surgery the direction in which modern, surgical nursing should progress may be centrally located with issues concerning the physical and psycho-educational experiences of modern surgery/ anaesthesia. Future nursing studies into modern day surgery should therefore strongly consider the relevant transitory physical care and continuing psycho-educational care. Transitory physical care as such aspects are commonly very brief and succinct whereas psycho-educational care more continuous and ideally spanning several days. However, the implementation and evaluation of such recommendations remains vital.
Color Image Segmentation Using Level Set Method With Initialization Mask in Multiple Color Spaces

The aim of image segmentation in imaging science is to solve the problem of partitioning an image into smaller disjoint homogeneous regions that share similar attributes. The improvement of level set method (LSM) based on Chan-Vese (C-V) model with initialization mask for vector image segmentation in multiple color spaces is studied here. And simultaneously, the final segmentation is completed by a simple labeling scheme. Then the comparative study of the refined C-V model is done in multiple color spaces. The experimental results illustrate that the optimized C-V model leads faster and better segmentation results with robustness to noise and good adaptability in RGB, CIE XYZ, and YCbCr color spaces where the results of test image changes little. But it has made mistakes in HSV and CIE L*a*b* color model. Moreover, these color spaces, i.e. h1h2h3, produce poor segmentation on the reliability and accuracy of a set of test images by performance analysis with evaluation indicators.
Epithelial cell pro-inflammatory cytokine response differs across dental plaque bacterial species.

AIM The dental plaque is comprised of numerous bacterial species, which may or may not be pathogenic. Human gingival epithelial cells (HGECs) respond to perturbation by various bacteria of the dental plaque by production of different levels of inflammatory cytokines, which is a putative reflection of their virulence. The aim of the current study was to determine responses in terms of interleukin (IL)-1beta, IL-6, IL-8 and IL-10 secretion induced by Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, Fusobacterium nucleatum and Streptococcus gordonii in order to gauge their virulence potential. MATERIALS AND METHODS HGECs were challenged with the four bacterial species, live or heat killed, at various multiplicity of infections and the elicited IL-1beta, IL-6, IL-8 and IL-10 responses were assayed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS Primary HGECs challenged with live P. gingivalis produced high levels of IL-1beta, while challenge with live A. actinomycetemcomitans gave high levels of IL-8. The opportunistic pathogen F. nucleatum induces the highest levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, while the commensal S. gordonii is the least stimulatory. CONCLUSION We conclude that various dental plaque biofilm bacteria induce different cytokine response profiles in primary HGECs that may reflect their individual virulence or commensal status.
2 Aging Stream Features at Multiple Time Granularities

Massive data streams of positional updates become increasingly difficult to manage under limited memory resources, especially in terms of providing near real-time response to multiple continuous queries. In this paper, we consider online maintenance for spatiotemporal summaries of streaming positions in an aging-aware fashion, by gradually evicting older observations in favor of greater precision for the most recent portions of movement. Although several amnesic functions have been proposed for approximation of time series, we opt for a simple, yet quite efficient scheme that achieves contiguity along all retained stream pieces. To this end, we adapt an amnesic tree structure that effectively meets the requirements of time-decaying approximation while taking advantage of the succession inherent in positional updates. We further exemplify the significance of this scheme in two important cases: the first one refers to trajectory compression of individual objects; the other offers estimated aggregates of moving object locations across time. Both techniques are validated with comprehensive experiments, confirming their suitability in maintaining online concise synopses for moving objects.
Automated design of the surface positions of protein helices

Using a protein design algorithm that quantitatively considers side‐chain interactions, the design of surface residues of α helices was examined. Three scoring functions were tested: a hydrogen‐bond potential, a hydrogen‐bond potential in conjunction with a penalty for uncompensated burial of polar hydrogens, and a hydrogen‐bond potential in combination with helix propensity. The solvent exposed residues of a homodimeric coiled coil based on GCN4‐p1 were designed by using the Dead‐End Elimination Theorem to find the optimal amino acid sequence for each scoring function. The corresponding peptides were synthesized and characterized by circular dichroism spectroscopy and size exclusion chromatography. The designed peptides were dimeric and nearly 100% helical at 1°C, with melting temperatures from 69‐72°C, over 12°C higher than GCN4‐p1, whereas a random hydrophilic sequence at the surface positions produced a peptide that melted at 15°C. Analysis of the designed sequences suggests that helix propensity is the key factor in sequence design for surface helical positions.
Robotic Assessment of Upper Limb Motor Function After Stroke

ABSTRACTTraditional assessment of a stroke subject’s motor ability, carried out by a therapist who observes and rates the subject’s motor behavior using ordinal measurements scales, is subjective, time consuming and lacks sensitivity. Rehabilitation robots, which have been the subject of intense inquiry over the last decade, are equipped with sensors that are used to develop objective measures of motor behaviors in a semiautomated way during therapy. This article reviews the current contributions of robot-assisted motor assessment of the upper limb. It summarizes the various measures related to movement performance, the models of motor recovery in stroke subjects and the relationship of robotic measures to standard clinical measures. It analyses the possibilities offered by current robotic assessment techniques and the aspects to address to make robotic assessment a mainstream motor assessment method.
Finding maximum-cost minimum spanning trees

Summary form only given. Consider the scenario in which a start-up communication company charges its network users by the cost of the minimum spanning tree (MST) they use in their protocols. Wanting to increase their profits, they aim at maximizing the cost of the MST of their network. We consider two different cases. In the first case, the company has a set of links with fixed cost vector W and wants to configure the network so that the MST of the network has the maximum possible cost. In the second case, the network topology is fixed, but the costs on the links assume d different values W/sub 1/, W/sub 2/, . , W/sub d/ over the day. The company wants to fix the link costs to a value W~ = /spl Sigma//sub i/ p/sub i/ w/sub i/, for some weights p/sub 1/, p/sub 2/, . , p/sub d/ where 0 /spl les/ p/sub i/ /spl les/ 1 and /spl Sigma//sub i/p/sub i/ = 1, so that the resulting network has a maximum-cost MST.
Thermal Stability and Nanostructure of CoCrPt Longitudinal Recording Media

We report a systematic study of activation volumes and their correlation with physical grain sizes and thermal stability in CoCrPt media fabricated by magnetron sputtering. Different underlayers and CoCrPt layer thicknesses were used to provide a range of lateral grain sizes, M/sub r//spl delta/ (product of remanence M/sub r/ and film thickness /spl delta/) values, and remanence coercivities. Two methods, namely the field-sweep-rate dependence of coercivity and measurements of magnetic viscosity and irreversible susceptibility, were used to determine the activation volumes and the results obtained from the two methods are in reasonable agreement. For CoCrPt layer thickness from 10 nm to 27 nm, the activation volumes of these films range from about 3/spl times/10/sup -18/ cm/sup 3/ to 5/spl times/10/sup -18/ cm/sup 3/, which indicate that these films are thermally stable. Furthermore, for most samples the activation volumes are close to the volumes of the physical CoCrPt grains. This suggests that the magnetic grains in these films switch almost independently. Films with physical grain sizes small enough to approach thermal instability are also discussed.
TNF‐α, a potent lipid metabolism regulator

As a multifunctional cytokine, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF‐α) exerts a series of biological actions in different cells, tissues, organs, and species and has been demonstrated to regulate and interfere with energy metabolism, especially lipid homeostasis. A large body of researches suggested that the effects of TNF‐α on lipid metabolism mainly include five aspects: (1) suppresses free fatty acid (FFA) uptake and promotes lipogenesis; (2) induces lipolysis; (3) inhibits lipid‐metabolism‐related enzymes activity; (4) regulates cholesterol metabolism; (5) regulates other adipocyte‐derived adipokines. The molecular mechanisms underlying these actions are complex and several signal transduction pathways might be involved. Regulation of metabolism‐related gene expression at transcriptional and protein levels and impact on enzymes activity might be of importance. Identification and verification of these pathways might provide novel potential strategies and drug targets for dyslipidemia therapy. However, the inconsistent and even conflict conclusions on lipid profile drawn from human subjects after infliximab therapy poses the possibility that the effect of TNF‐α on lipid metabolism might be more complicated than it appeared to be. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An Injury Equivalency System for Establishing a Common Economic Threshold for Three Species of Rice Planthoppers (Hemiptera: Delphacidae) in Taiwan

ABSTRACT The economic threshold (ET) for multiple pest species that share the same injury type on host plants (feeding guild) has been proposed for decision-making in integrated management framework of many defoliating insect pests. However, only a few consider agricultural pests with sucking mouthparts. This study presents the first injury equivalency system for the feeding guild made up of three rice (Oryza sativa L.) planthopper (Hemiptera: Delphacidae) species—Nilaparvata lugens (Stål), Sogatella furcifera (Harváth), and Laodelphax striatellus (Fallén)—by using relative amount of honeydew excretion of each species. The intraspecific injury equivalent coefficient was determined; this coefficient provides an exchange rate for different developmental stages in a species. N. lugens was chosen as the standard species to obtain interspecific injury equivalents for other individuals in the guild, allowing estimates of total guild injury feasible. For extension purposes, the injury equivalency was simplified by pooling all nymphs and adults in the guild to mitigate the potential confusion resulting from uncertainty of instars or wing form. A matrix of ETs established on previous studies and incorporating changes of management cost and rice price was used and served as a control decision guide for the guild samples. The validity of the proposed injury equivalency system was tested using several field data sets, and the results are generally promising and meaningfully elevate the accuracy of estimating combined injury and damage to rice, suggesting that the proposed system is a better integrated pest management decision-making system compared with conventional practices.
Impact of 2008 Financial Crisis On Earnings Quality :IFRS and US GAAP Differential Case of France and United States

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of 2008 financial crisis in two countries adopting two different accounting and financial systems: France (IFRS) and United States (US GAAP). From two French and American samples of 4030 firm–year observations (from 2004 to 2013), we found significant discrepancies between the two countries and within the same country. For French companies, only the persistence was degraded during 2008 and this deterioration mitigated after the year of the crisis. However, the effect of the crisis on the earnings quality of US companies was paradoxical: negative effect on predictability, value relevance and timeliness and positive effect on conservatism and without effects on earnings management.