Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of Internet Corporate Social Responsibility Communication: Evidence from France

This research identifies determiners of internet Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication of the 53 French enterprises which are members of l Observatoire sur la ResponsabilitA© SociA©tale des Entreprises (ORSE). This study is completed in two phases. First, we use an analytical grid and develop a scoring technique. We classify the French companies in our sample according to the intensity of their responsible communication on the Internet. Then, we test a set of hypotheses to highlight the explanatory variables of the communication level on the Internet of the responsible enterprise. The results indicate the performance of firms is positively related to the level of CSR communication trough the web.
APSD: A framework for automated processing of survey documents

Document processing implies processing of documents in a way that the information of the documents can be rendered, retrieved or presented in an understandable way. Survey document processing is the task of analyzing survey documents to obtain people's opinion about product or services. Nowadays, survey is conducted in two different forms. One is online survey and another is using printed documents. The survey that is conducted using printed documents is difficult to process due to the lack of automated processing tools for such types of documents. Considering this fact, in this paper we present a framework for efficient processing of survey documents. Our system works in two major steps. First, we recognize the answers of the users' in each document. Then, we analyze the answers considering all the documents to produce final survey results. We have evaluated our system with sufficient number of survey documents and found that our system can perform almost accurate analysis of survey documents.
Product Market Structure and Labor Market Discrimination

W increased competition may generate economic efficiency and push employee compensation to market rates, it may also help reduce differential treatment for protected groups such as women, minorities, and the disabled. This book presents the most comprehensive body of empirical evidence on the connection between the product market and the extent of discrimination in labor markets. The contributors look at data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Hong Kong in order to explore the product market’s influence on discrimination against the disabled, the role of deregulation in creating competition and altering racial employment patterns, and the influence of privatization on public employees’ earnings. Nuanced analyses, using best practice econometrics, lead the contributors to conclude that while competition helps equalize treatment of employees, it does not eliminate discrimination.
PAVING THE ROAD AHEAD: AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES, PRODUCTS LIABILITY, AND THE NEED FOR A NEW APPROACH

Cars that drive themselves may seem about as realistic as Marty McFly’s DeLorean in Back to the Future, but this is far from the case. Autonomous technology is available and in use in many new vehicle models.1 In fact, in 2010 Google announced that the company had successfully built cars capable of driving themselves (“autonomous cars”). 2 Even more amazing, at its 2010 announcement, Google also revealed its driverless cars (customized Toyota Prius models) had logged over 100,000 miles on public roads.3 As of early 2013, Google’s several autonomous vehicles have traveled over 300,000 miles, and have yet to cause a traffic accident
Foreign Object Contamination in Beef Cattle

INTRODUCTION Food safety has become a very important issue in today’s society. One important aspect of food safety is foreign object contamination of beef products. The beef industry has lost millions of dollars from foreign objects found in meat. Foreign objects can be defined as glass, metal, plastic or wood objects found on or imbedded in beef products. These objects cause consumers to lose confidence in beef products and these costs are carried on to the producer indirectly through lower demand for beef. Foreign objects cost processing companies millions of dollars in claims, condemned product, and downtime. These objects must be prevented at the farm level.
Business Investment and Economic Depreciation

We show economic depreciation decreases value maximizing investment hurdle rates and encourages both maintenance and growth. Economic depreciation without maintenance decreases the upside potential of future growth opportunities upon stochastically improved profitability. Managers forestall this decrease with maintenance and expansion investments even with modest current returns. While economic depreciation encourages maintenance and growth for existing businesses, it impedes new venture start in the first instance.
The validity of the SERVQUAL and SERVPERF scales: A meta‐analytic view of 17 years of research across five continents

Purpose – The purpose is to investigate, the difference between SERVQUAL and SERVPERF's predictive validity of service quality.Design/methodology/approach – Data from 17 studies containing 42 effect sizes of the relationships between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF with overall service quality (OSQ) are meta‐analyzed.Findings – Overall, SERVQUAL and SERVPERF are equally valid predictors of OSQ. Adapting the SERVQUAL scale to the measurement context improves its predictive validity; conversely, the predictive validity of SERVPERF is not improved by context adjustments. In addition, measures of services quality gain predictive validity when used in: less individualistic cultures, non‐English speaking countries, and industries with an intermediate level of customization (hotels, rental cars, or banks). Research limitations/implications – No study, that were using non‐adapted scales were conducted outside of the USA making it impossible to disentangle the impact of scale adaptation vs contextual differences on the modera.
Munchausen's Syndrome with Hematuria and Sepsis: An Unusual Case

An unusual case of Munchausen's syndrome is described in which a former microbiology technician was suspected of inoculating himself with contaminated material to produce sepsis and ingesting warfarin in the form of rat poison to cause hematuria. This combination of factitious disorders has rarely been reported. Other unusual features included a nonemergent presentation through the hospital emergency room and a clinical profile not typical of previously published cases.
Factors Influencing the Price of Value-Added Calves at Superior Livestock Auctions (PowerPoint)

Value-added management at the cow-calf level is integrated across breeding, health and nutrition programs. Hedonic pricing models are necessary to navigate through the layered management standards imposed by certified health and marketing programs on the cow-calf sector. Previous research in feeder calf pricing models provides insight on the use and development of ordinary least squares in estimating price effects. Breed, vaccination program, age-and-source verification and natural-beef production have become more relevant as vertical coordination has influenced commercial cow-calf producers. This study provides the industry with new information pertaining to the revenue opportunities that exist for cow-calf producers through increased coordination in the beef industry. Video and satellite auction markets are recognized as a national pricing mechanism for feeder cattle in the United States. These markets represent the management and marketing practices of national cow-calf producers and the tastes and preferences of a national stocker and feedlot industry. Previous research in feeder cattle pricing models is applied to the current genetic, management, marketing and market structure information from video auction markets to discover relevant price effects pertaining to value-added calf production. More intensive value-added management practices were expected to enhance the revenue of cow-calf producers selling their calves through video auction markets. This research confirms that verified health and genetic claims produce higher calf prices compared to commodity calves. Weaned calves with at least two rounds of respiratory vaccinations generated an additional $5.50 to $7.50 per cwt. , and weaning created $2.75 to $4.50 per cwt. in premiums over non-certified health programs. There were statistical differences among the premiums for each aggregated breed influence, and Angus and black and black-white faced cattle offered the highest breed premiums at $5.25 to $7.50 per cwt. compared to Brahman-influenced calves. Age-and-source verification presents the best opportunity for video auction market premiums among recently developed marketing programs. Statistically significant premiums ranged from $1.25 to $2.00 per cwt. for both steers and heifers over the last five years.
Bandwidth Assurance In A Differentiated Services Network

The diierentiated services (DS) architecture has been proposed for providing diierent levels of services and has recently received wide attention. A packet in a DS domain is classiied into a class of service according to its contract proole and treated diierently by its class. There are currently two types of service standardized, Expedited Forwarding (EF) and Assured Forwarding (AF). In this dissertation, we focus on AF service. In AF service, customers make contract in terms of bandwidth with their service providers. At ingress nodes, the service provider marks incoming packets IN or OUT based on the current sending rate and the contracted rate. At core routers, each packet observes diierent drop precedences according to its marking. With these simple marking and forwarding schemes, the service provider can provide diierent amounts of bandwidth to meet the customers' requests. However, it has been observed that the drop precedences by themselves cannot achieve the desired rates because of the strong interaction of the transport protocol with packet drops in the network. In this dissertation, we propose and evaluate a number of techniques to better achieve the throughput guarantees in such networks. The proposed techniques consider modifying the transport protocol at the sender, the marking strategies at the marker and the dropping policies at the router. It is shown that these techniques improve the likelihood of achieving the desired throughput iv guarantees and also improve the service diierentiation. We also develop analytical models of TCP behavior in a DS network. The models quantitatively characterize TCP throughput as functions of the contract rate, the packet-drop rate and the round-trip time. The models analytically explain the previous observations such as unfair sharing of excess bandwidth among TCP ows with diierent contract rates. We look at the problem of achieving speciic QoS goals of individual ows by exibly managing resources available to an aggregated source. It will be shown that an aggregated source can maintain state of individual ows at the edge of the network and utilize this state eeectively in adaptively marking packets of individual ows to meet their QoS goals.
Serologic tests in diagnosis and prognosis of cryptococcosis.

Cases are reviewed with particular emphasis on predisposing factors and diagnostic signs in cryptococcosis and stressing diagnostic serology. The latex slide agglutination test for cryptococcal antigen is found to be sensitive and specific as a diagnostic tool and valuable as a prognostic indicator. Its value is maximized when it is used in conjunction with an agglutination test for cryptococcal antibody, since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the two, so that antibody may be found in cases in which the test for antigen is negative.
Patients with Ischemic Heart Disease Transplantation Combined with Off-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery in Derived Mononuclear Cell − Scintigraphic Assessment of the Effects of Bone Marrow

J Nucl Med. Tsuguo Igari, Hitoshi Ohto and Hitoshi Yokoyama Hiroyuki Yaoita, Shinya Takase, Yukio Maruyama, Yoshiyuki Sato, Hirono Satokawa, Nobuo Hoshi, Nobutaka Ono, Patients with Ischemic Heart Disease Transplantation Combined with Off-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery in Derived Mononuclear Cell − Scintigraphic Assessment of the Effects of Bone Marrow http://jnm.snmjournals. org/content/46/10/1610 This article and updated information are available at: http://jnm.snmjournals. org/site/subscriptions/online.xhtml Information about subscriptions to JNM can be found at: http://jnm.snmjournals. org/site/misc/permission.xhtml Information about reproducing figures, tables, or other portions of this article can be found online at:
Long Term Sales Forecasts of Innovations - An Empirical Study of the Consumer Electronic Market

This paper empirically examines models of replacement sales for six electronic consumer durables - TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Digital Cameras, personal and notebook computers - using data from a large survey of 8077 German households. A new replacement model is developed that fits the empirical "lifetables" better than existing models. This said, fitting to replacement sales data was not substantially improved as these fits are not particularly sensitive to mis-specification of the shape of the underlying distribution. Since many product innovations can be targeted at replacement rather than first purchase buyers - this improved understanding of replacement behaviour helps entrepreneurs identify new opportunities.
Nosocomial acquisition of beta-lactamase--negative, ampicillin-resistant enterococcus.

BACKGROUND A recent prospective study at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Martinez, Calif, revealed that 9% of enterococcal clinical isolates were ampicillin resistant. We prospectively studied 100 patients hospitalized in one general medicine ward and in the medical intensive care unit to study determinants of acquisition of ampicillin-resistant enterococcus. METHODS Rectal swabs and urine cultures were obtained from patients within 72 hours of admission to the study ward and twice weekly until discharge from the ward or the intensive care unit. Cultures were obtained from the hands of personnel and from environmental surfaces in the general medical ward and the intensive care unit. Ampicillin-resistant enterococcal isolates were examined for molecular relatedness by plasmid DNA analysis. RESULTS The cultures from 23 patients yielded ampicillin-resistant enterococci. The rectal swabs yielded ampicillin-resistant enterococci before the urine cultures did except in one patient whose urine and rectal cultures were both positive on the same day. Acquisition of ampicillin-resistant enterococci was significantly associated with previous antimicrobial agents, Foley catheterization, and being bedridden. Resistant enterococci were not isolated from hospital personnel or environmental surfaces. Plasmid analysis by gel electrophoresis demonstrated nine strains, two of which predominated. Rectal and urine isolates from the same patient had identical plasmid electrophoresis patterns. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that ampicillin-resistant enterococci are common in the rectal flora, can spread to the urinary system, are associated with patient characteristics that predipose to nosocomial infection, and may become an emerging clinical problem.
A pilot study to investigate the potential of mass spectrometry profiling in the discovery of novel serum markers in chronic renal disease

Purpose: There has been significant criticism of how technologies such as SELDI have been used in biomarker discovery and how the data have been analysed. We initiated a proof‐of‐principle pilot study using SELDI with stringent pre‐analytic and analytical procedures with robust statistical analysis, to determine whether, under such conditions, using different degrees of renal dysfunction as a model, useful data could be obtained.
Diabetes and Hypertension

The prevalence of hypertension is increasing worldwide, with an estimated 972 million adults with hypertension in 2000 that is predicted to grow to 1.56 billion by 2025, while diabetes worldwide prevalence is estimated as 382 million in 2012 projected to reach 592 billion in 2030. Diabetes mellitus and hypertension are interrelated diseases that strongly expose patients to increased risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular and kidney disease. The prevalence of coexisting hypertension and diabetes appears to be increasing in industrialized nations because populations are aging and both hypertension and T2DM (type2 diabetes mellitus) incidence increases with age. A number of possible reasons have been adduced for this coexistence and it is postulated that both diseases share common pathogenetic factors such as insulin resistance, aging, obesity, chronic subclinical inflammatory processes beside the use of thiazide diuretics in subjects initially with hypertension and the development of nephropathy in those initially with diabetes, especially type 1. Diabetes may also be associated with systolic hypertension secondary to atherosclerosis. In addition both conditions show familiar clustering, which makes it likely to be polygenic in origin. In Diabetics, increased plasma viscosity, stiffness of large arteries, increased production of oxidative radicals and excessive AGEs formation (Advanced Glycation End products) are relevant factors for the development of hypertension. Data from clinical trials emphasize the need for vigilant blood pressure control in patients with diabetes and hypertension. A target blood pressure goal < 140/90 mmHg is recommended by some guidelines while others still recommend more tight control of <130/80. Evidence shows that, to achieve the set goal, use of multiple- drug antihypertensive therapy is required. Agents should be used that have been shown to reduce cardiovascular risk, while not worsening concomitant conditions. It is appropriate that an agent that can block RAAS, such as an ACE inhibitor or an ARB should be the first choice in monotherapy and should be one of the partner drugs used in combination in hypertensive patients with diabetes or glucose intolerance.
Vehicle classification for traffic surveillance videos based on spatial location information and Sparse Representation-based Classifier

Vehicle classification plays an important part in Intelligent Transport System (ITS). However, the existing vehicle classification methods are not very robust to various changes such as lighting, weathers, noises, and the classification accuracy has been requiring to be improved. Sparse Representation-based Classifier (SRC) is not sensitive to the shortage and damage of data, the feature selection methods, is robust to lighting changes of the images, and can achieve excellent performance in multi-class classification problems. Therefore, this paper presents a new method based on spatial location information and SRC. Firstly, taken the specific characteristics of vehicles into consideration, the features of HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) and HU moments are extracted to characterize the property of vehicles. In addition, the spatial location information is added to HU moment features in this paper to improve its ability to distinguish and describe vehicles. Then, vehicles are classified into six classes (large bus, car, motorcycle, minibus, truck and van) by SRC. The performance evaluation is carried out on the dataset which consists of 13300 vehicle images extracted from the real highway surveillance videos. The experimental results show that, using the proposed method, the time cost of classification can be speeded up by about 1.57 times and the average classification precision can achieve 96.53%, which is drastically improved by more than 2.7% compared to other existing methods.
Human pose estimation from video and inertial sensors

The analysis and understanding of human movement is central to many applications such as sports science, medical diagnosis and movie production. The ability to automatically monitor human activity in security sensitive areas such as airports, lobbies or borders is of great practical importance. Furthermore, automatic pose estimation from images leverages the processing and understanding of massive digital libraries available on the Internet. We build upon a model based approach where the human shape is modeled with a surface mesh and the motion is parameterized by a kinematic chain. We then seek for the pose of the model that best explains the available observations coming from different sensors. In a first scenario, we consider a calibrated multiview setup in an indoor studio. To obtain very accurate results, we propose a novel tracker that combines information coming from video and a small set of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). We do so by locally optimizing a joint energy consisting of a term that measures the likelihood of the video data and a term for the IMU data. This is the first work to successfully combine video and IMUs information for full body pose estimation. When compared to commercial marker based systems the proposed solution is more cost efficient and less intrusive for the user. In a second scenario, we relax the assumption of an indoor studio and we tackle outdoor scenes with background clutter, illumination changes, large recording volumes and difficult motions of people interacting with objects. Again, we combine information from video and IMUs. Here we employ a particle based optimization approach that allows us to be more robust to tracking failures. To satisfy the orientation constraints imposed by the IMUs, we derive an analytic Inverse Kinematics (IK) procedure to sample from the manifold of valid poses. The generated hypothesis come from a lower dimensional manifold and therefore the computational cost can be reduced. Experiments on challenging sequences suggest the proposed tracker can be applied to capture in outdoor scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed IK sampling procedure can be used to integrate any kind of constraints derived from the environment. Finally, we consider the most challenging possible scenario: pose estimation of monocular images. Here, we argue that estimating the pose to the degree of accuracy as in an engineered environment is too ambitious with the current technology. Therefore, we propose to extract meaningful semantic information about the pose directly from image features in a discriminative fashion. In particular, we introduce posebits which are semantic pose descriptors about the geometric relationships between parts in the body. The experiments show that the intermediate step of inferring posebits from images can improve pose estimation from monocular imagery. Furthermore, posebits can be very useful as input feature for many computer vision algorithms.
Social-Psychological Influences on Opinion Expression in Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Communication

This study used an experiment embedded within a Web-based survey to examine the influence of contextual (i.e., face-to-face vs. online chat room discussion) and social-psychological factors on individuals' willingness to express opinions. In this experiment, respondents were asked whether they would be willing to express an opinion if they were placed in a face-to-face discussion group in one condition and in an online chat room discussion group in the other condition. Results indicate that print news use, fear of isolation, communication apprehension, future opinion congruency, and communication setting significantly predict willingness to speak out. In addition, not only did fear of isolation have a negative main effect on opinion expression, but this effect was significantly attenuated by computer-mediated discussion. Findings suggest that computer-mediated communication may avoid some of the dysfunctional social-psychological influences found in face-to-face interactions and create a forum conducive for public deliberation.