Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Classification scheme for lean manufacturing tools

For the past few years almost every manufacturing industry has been trying to get 'lean'. A headlong rush to become lean also resulted in many misapplications of existing lean manufacturing tools often due to inadequate understanding of the purpose of tools. While tool descriptions abound, there is no way systematically to link a manufacturing organization to its problems and to the possible tools to eliminate these problems. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a classification scheme to serve as a link between manufacturing waste problems and lean manufacturing tools. A manufacturing organization can then match its manufacturing wastes with the appropriate lean manufacturing tools. The classification of existing knowledge is often the first step in moving from a practice to a science. This classification scheme systematically organizes lean manufacturing tools and metrics according to their level of abstraction, appropriate location of application of the tool in the organization, whether it addresses management waste or activity waste, the type of resource waste it addresses, and whether it identifies waste, measures waste, eliminates waste, or a combination of the three. We have organized 101 lean manufacturing tools and metrics using this classification scheme. We have also described some common manufacturing problems using this classification scheme and shown the problem-tool connection through examples. The classification scheme is not intended as a decision-making tool, i.e. it does not decide if something is a waste. However, the proposed scheme does an excellent job of classifying all well-known lean manufacturing tools and metrics and suggests lean manufacturing tools and metrics that will help to address manufacturing problems. This classification scheme will assist companies trying to become lean and can serve as a foundation for research into the science of lean.
Water Pricing, Affordability and Public Choice: An Economic Assessment from a Large Indian Metropolis

The combined use of surface and groundwater that recognizes site-specificity and communities’ preference structure can greatly determine the social and economic sustainability of communities in a growing metropolis. Utilizing both primary and secondary information pertaining to the water sector of India’s capital city, this paper collectively looks at water demand, public choice and financial sustainability of water supply augmentations in both planned urban and unplanned peri-urban areas having differing levels of planning and resource availability. Households’ preference heterogeneity for water supply scenarios differentiated by their ‘quality’ (potable or non-potable) and ‘source’ (surface or groundwater) has been examined through a carefully designed choice experiment (CE) using iterative bidding game. Household’s choice and preference behaviour for dual quality water (decentralized municipal water for drinking and local groundwater for other purposes), single potable quality water and the ‘business-as-usual’ scenarios are assessed through utility function based multinomial logit (MNL) and nested logit (NL) choice models. The values resulting from the analysis are assessed in terms of water supply augmentation options and their practical limits incorporating the choice and preferences from the heterogeneous planning environments typical of a metropolis.
Preliminary Experiments on Unsupervised Word Discovery in Mboshi

The necessity to document thousands of endangered languages encourages the collaboration between linguists and computer scientists in order to provide the documentary linguistics community with the support of automatic processing tools. The French-German ANR-DFG project Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB) aims at developing such tools for three mostly unwritten African languages of the Bantu family. For one of them, Mboshi, a language originating from the " Cu-vette " region of the Republic of Congo, we investigate unsuper-vised word discovery techniques from an unsegmented stream of phonemes. We compare different models and algorithms, both monolingual and bilingual, on a new corpus in Mboshi and French, and discuss various ways to represent the data with suitable granularity. An additional French-English corpus allows us to contrast the results obtained on Mboshi and to experiment with more data.
The role of telomeres and telomerase reverse transcriptase isoforms in pluripotency induction and maintenance

ABSTRACT Telomeres are linear guanine-rich DNA structures at the ends of chromosomes. The length of telomeric DNA is actively regulated by a number of mechanisms in highly proliferative cells such as germ cells, cancer cells, and pluripotent stem cells. Telomeric DNA is synthesized by way of the ribonucleoprotein called telomerase containing a reverse transcriptase (TERT) subunit and RNA component (TERC). TERT is highly conserved across species and ubiquitously present in their respective pluripotent cells. Recent studies have uncovered intricate associations between telomeres and the self-renewal and differentiation properties of pluripotent stem cells. Interestingly, the past decade's work indicates that the TERT subunit also has the capacity to modulate mitochondrial function, to remodel chromatin structure, and to participate in key signaling pathways such as the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. Many of these non-canonical functions do not require TERT's catalytic activity, which hints at possible functions for the extensive number of alternatively spliced TERT isoforms that are highly expressed in pluripotent stem cells. In this review, some of the established and potential routes of pluripotency induction and maintenance are highlighted from the perspectives of telomere maintenance, known TERT isoform functions and their complex regulation.
Some Challenges of Automated Annotation inA Multilingual Scenario

A key ingredient of today’s NLP scenario is annotation and this paper discusses challenges involved in one of the toughest annotation tasks which is sense marking. A large amount of data needs to be sense marked accurately by human annotators in order to train the machine to understand the spoken languages. The sense marked corpus for various languages facilitate the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) which is required for translation. For accurately sense marking voluminous data, a standard and definitive lexicon is required. In the work reported here, the corpus is taken from the newspaper domain and tourism domain. The Princeton WordNet (Version 2.1) is used as the sense repertoire for English text while the Hindi and Nepali WordNets have been used for Hindi and Nepali texts respectively. The corpus was independently tagged by different annotators and it was found that the agreement level on word sense disambiguation was about 85% across the three languages, i.e., English, Hindi and Nepali. Different senses of a particular word in WordNet are quite specific, yet there have been cases when the senses provided had limitations and posed challenges to the human sense markers.
Q-Learning-Based Financial Trading Systems with Applications

The design of financial trading systems (FTSs) is a subject of high interest both for the academic environment and for the professional one due to the promises by machine learning methodologies. In this paper we consider the Reinforcement Learning-based policy evaluation approach known as Q-Learning algorithm (QLa). QLa is an algorithm which real-time optimizes its behavior in relation to the responses it gets from the environment in which it operates. In particular: first we introduce the essential aspects of QLa which are of interest for our purposes; second we present some original FTSs based on differently configured QLas; then we apply such FTSs to an artificial time series of daily stock prices and to six real ones from the Italian stock market belonging to the FTSE MIB basket. The results we achieve are generally satisfactory.
Factors That Determine Independent Director's Existence on the Board of Directors: Evidence from Malaysian Listed Companies

The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the presence of independent directors on boards of directors. Based on the agency theory, we study the different factors influencing the nomination of independent directors. The tests were applied to a sample of 71 companies belonging to Bursa Malaysia Main Market from 2007 to 2009. Using an OLS data regression framework, the findings show that the, coalition control, leverage and CEO tenure determine the independence of the board from the management. The result indicated that when the part of capital represented on the board and held by the coalition of control is low, the presence of independent directors is more important. The presence of the independent directors is significantly and positively determined by the level of debt and CEO tenure. However, we do not find evidence of the influence of the ownership structure, Company size and CEO Duality.
Stability of Narrowband Dynamic Body Area Channel

The stability of a dynamic narrowband on-body area channel is characterized based on real-time measurements of the time domain channel impulse response (CIR) at frequencies near the 900- and 2400-MHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands. A new parameter, channel variation factor, characterizes channel coherence time. Body movement is considered at various transmit-receive pair locations on the human body. Movement has considerable impact on the stability of the channel, a reasonable assumption for coherence time is approximately 10 ms, and there is greater temporal stability at the lower frequency.
Sibling species of mutualistic Symbiodinium clade G from bioeroding sponges in the western Pacific and western Atlantic oceans

Dinoflagellates in the genus Symbiodinium associate with a broad array of metazoan and protistian hosts. Symbiodinium‐based symbioses involving bioeroding sponge hosts have received less attention than those involving popular scleractinian hosts. Certain species of common Cliona harbor high densities of an ecologically restricted group of Symbiodinium, referred to as Clade G. Clade G Symbiodinium are also known to form stable and functionally important associations with Foraminifera and black corals (Antipatharia) Analyses of genetic evidence indicate that Clade G likely comprises several distinct species. Here, we use nucleotide sequence data in combination with ecological and geographic attributes to formally describe Symbiodinium endoclionum sp. nov. obtained from the Pacific boring sponge Cliona orientalis and Symbiodinium spongiolum sp. nov. from the congeneric western Atlantic sponge Cliona varians. These species appear to be part of an adaptive radiation comprising lineages of Clade G specialized to the metazoan phyla Porifera and Cnidaria, which began prior to the separation of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Inflammatory Cytokines and Spontaneous Preterm Birth in Asymptomatic Women: A Systematic Review

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the association between inflammatory cytokines and the risk of spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women. DATA SOURCES: We searched electronic databases of the human literature in PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library up to February 2010 using the following key words: “preterm/pre-term + (birth/delivery)” and “cytokine” or “inflammation/inflammatory + marker/biomarker. ” METHODS OF STUDY SELECTION: We included observational studies that reported the association between common inflammatory cytokines and spontaneous preterm birth as an outcome in asymptomatic women. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using fixed and random effects models. TABULATION, INTEGRATION, AND RESULTS: Seventeen primary studies comprising 6,270 participants met the inclusion criteria. Spontaneous preterm birth was strongly associated with increased levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) in midtrimester cervicovaginal fluid (OR 3.05, 95% CI 2.00-4.67) (number needed to treat=7 for identifying an additional preterm delivery) and amniotic fluid (OR 4.52, 95% CI 2.67-7.65) (number needed to treat=7), but there was no association in plasma specimen (OR 1.5, 95% CI 0.7-3.0). Spontaneous preterm birth was strongly associated with increased C-reactive protein (CRP) levels in midtrimester amniotic fluid (OR 7.85, 95% CI 3.88-15.87) (number needed to treat=3), but the association was weak in plasma specimen (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.22-1.90). There were insufficient data (fewer than three studies) for meta-analysis in other inflammatory cytokines. CONCLUSION: Inflammatory cytokine IL-6 in cervicovaginal fluid and IL-6 and CRP in amniotic fluid but not in plasma are strongly associated with spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women, suggesting that inflammation at the maternal-fetal interface, rather than systemic inflammation, may play a major role in the etiology of such spontaneous preterm births.
TESTING CAPITAL ASSET PRICING MODEL FOR ROMANIAN CAPITAL MARKET

The purpose of this article is the empirical testing of Capital Asset Pricing Model(CAPM) for the Romanian capital market, both for individual assets and for portfolios, using asample of daily data for 24 companies listed on Bucharest Stock Exchange, during the period06.01. 2003 - 31.07. 2009, following the interpretation of results and usefulness of the modelestimates. My intention is to find if the relationship between expected return and risk is linear, ifbeta is a complete measure of the risk and if a higher risk is compensated by a higher expectedreturn. The results confirm that the intercept is statistically insignificant, upholding theory, for bothindividual assets and portfolios. The tests do not necessarily provide evidence against CAPM,however other simulations can be built, more close to reality, improving the model and offering analternative which also takes into account the specific conditions of local capital market and theglobal financial crisis consequences.
Can We Trust Best Practices? Six Cognitive Challenges of Evidence-Based Approaches

There is a growing popularity of data-driven best practices in a variety of fields. Although we applaud the impulse to replace anecdotes with evidence, it is important to appreciate some of the cognitive constraints on promulgating best practices to be used by practitioners. We use the evidence-based medicine (EBM) framework that has become popular in health care to raise questions about whether the approach is consistent with how people actually make decisions to manage patient safety. We examine six potential disconnects and suggest ways to strengthen best practices strategies.
Oncogenic c-Ki-ras but Not Oncogenic c-Ha-ras Up-regulates CEA Expression and Disrupts Basolateral Polarity in Colon Epithelial Cells*

Colon carcinomas commonly contain mutations in Ki-ras4B, but very rarely in Ha-ras, suggesting that different Ras isoforms may have distinct functions in colon epithelial cell biology. In an earlier study we had demonstrated that oncogenic Ki-ras4BVal-12, but not oncogenic Ha-ras Val-12, blocks the apicobasal polarization of colon epithelial cells by preventing normal glycosylation of the integrin β1 chain of the collagen receptor. As a result, only the Ki-ras mutated cells exhibited altered cell to substratum attachment, whereas mutation of either Ras isoform activated mitogen-activated protein kinases. We have now asked whether intercellular adhesion proteins implicated in establishing basolateral polarity in colon epithelial cells are modulated by oncogenic Ki-Ras4BVal-12 proteins but not oncogenic Ha-RasVal-12 proteins. The embryonic adhesion protein carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) was up-regulated on the mRNA and protein levels in each of three stable Ki-ras Val-12 transfectant lines but in none of three stable Ha-ras Val-12 transfectant lines. The elevated protein levels of CEA in Ki-ras4BVal-12 transfectant cells were decreased by blocking expression of Ki-ras4BVal-12 with antisense oligonucleotides. N-cadherin levels were decreased in only the Ki-rastransfectants, whereas E-cadherin levels were unchanged. Immunohistochemical analysis demonstrated that Ki-ras4BVal-12 transfectant cells did not polarize into cells with discrete apical and basal regions and so could not restrict expression of CEA to the apical region. These unpolarized cells displayed elevated levels of CEA all along their surface membrane where CEA mediated random, multilayered associations of tumor cells. This aggregation was both calcium-independent and blocked by Fab′ fragments of anti-CEA monoclonal antibody col-1. Trafficking of the lysosomal cysteine protease cathepsin B may also be altered when cell polarity cannot be established. Ki-ras4BVal-12transfectant cells expressed 2-fold elevated protein levels of the lysosomal cysteine protease cathepsin B but did not up-regulate cathepsin B mRNA expression. One function of oncogenic c-Ki-Ras proteins in colon cancer progression may be to up-regulate CEA and thus to prevent the lateral adhesion of adjacent colon epithelial cells that normally form a monolayer in vivo.
The Research of Initial Public Offering Audit Risk Management

IPO fraud has been a hot issue in academic research recently. The false statement behaviors of enterprises severely affect the healthy development of capital market, harm the interests of investors, and thus cause a widespread concern in the community. In these cases, there are also impacts on the accounting firms’ economic and reputation in varying degree. The effective management of audit risks can reduce the loss, timely correct the possible audit risks, and improve audit quality and professional image of CPA. This paper mainly researches how to supervise and control the audit risks in the IPO audit project.
Expression of the myelin and oligodendrocyte progenitor marker sulfatide in neurons and astrocytes of adult rat brain

Sulfatide is a myelin component of the central (CNS) and peripheral nervous system (PNS) and is used extensively to identify oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. We have explored sulfatide expression in CNS gray matter (cerebellum, cerebral cortex, and hippocampus) and the PNS in adult rats using an anti‐sulfatide antibody (Sulph I) and confocal microscopy. Biochemical analyses revealed two Sulph I antigens, sulfatide and seminolipid; sulfatide was present at about five times higher concentration, and the affinity of Sulph I for sulfatide was 2.5 times higher than that for seminolipid. Thus sulfatide was considered the dominant antigen. We found Sulph I immunostaining, in addition to that in myelinated areas in subpopulations of astrocytes and neurons. Astrocyte Sulph I staining was localized to the cell bodies and in some cases also to the processes. In the cerebellum, some Sulph I‐positive astrocytes corresponded to Golgi epithelial cell bodies. We also found Sulph I staining in neuronal cell bodies, which in some neurons was clearly localized to the cytoplasm and in others to the nuclear membrane. Sulph I immunostaining in the PNS was located in the myelin sheath and paranodal end segments. These results demonstrate the expression of sulfatide in cell types other than oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells, showing that sulfatide is not a selective marker for adult oligodendrocyte progenitor cells. Moreover, these findings show that sulfatide is localized also to intracellular compartments and indicate that other roles of sulfatide in astrocytes and neurons, compared to myelin, might be considered. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Increased Myocardial Oxygen Consumption and Contractile State Associated with Increased Heart Rate in Dogs

The effects of increasing the frequency of contraction on myocardial oxygen consumption per minute (MV˙o2) were examined in eight dogs using an isovolumic left ventricular preparation. MV˙o2 was determined at two to four levels of heart rate in each animal. Peak wall stress was maintained constant in each animal so that changes in it would not influence the effects of heart rate on oxygen consumption per beat. As heart rate was increased, there was a highly significant linear increase in MV˙o2. Oxygen consumption per beat was shown to be a negative linear function of the reciprocal of heart rate. Thus, as heart rate increased there was a significant increase in oxygen consumption per beat; when basal oxygen consumption was subtracted from total oxygen consumption, there was a much larger increase in oxygen consumption per beat. Myocardial contractile state, defined as the maximum observed contractile element velocity at the lowest common level of wall stress, was significantly increased by increasing heart rate. The data suggest that the increased M˙Vo2 associated with augmented heart rate is secondary to augmentation of contractile state, as well as to the increase in stress development per minute.
Quieting the affective storm of borderline personality disorder.

Family. V was the older of two children. She described her mother as a controlling person with whom she battled constantly. Her father was more engaging and relaxed, and they enjoyed closeness during her early years. When V was 12, it was discovered that her father was having an extramarital affair. Despite V’s efforts to convince him to remain with their family, her father left when V was 13 to live with his girlfriend. This disruption greatly affected V, who was forced to relocate with her mother and brother to the Midwest, where she had difficulty adjusting and meeting new peers. Her mother became clinically depressed and was unable to parent effectively, creating the sense that V had lost both parents. Her father remained on the East Coast and their contact was limited to occasional phone calls until her return East for college several years later.
A study of mutual fund flow and market return volatility

In this study, we investigate the impact of institutional trading on the market by examining the daily relation between aggregate flow into U.S. equity funds and market volatility. We differentiate the impact of fund inflow and outflow, respectively, on the market volatility. Our empirical results show that there exists an asymmetric concurrent relationship between fund flow and market volatility: fund inflow is negatively correlated with market volatility while fund outflow is positively correlated with market volatility. We also discuss the potential explanations for our results and suggest that our results are consistent with information content differences of funds’ buys and sales.