Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WORKING CONDITIONS 'DETERMINANTS': THE ROLE OF INNOVATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS. EVIDENCE FOR A LOCAL PRODUCTION SYSTEM

Changes in organization of work and production certainly impact on the workers well being. Whether such an influence is positive or negative is an empirical matter, upon which the present work tries to shed light for a local production system located in Northern Italy. During the 1990s several economists and managerial scholars pointed to the positive effects on workers from the introduction of new forms of work and production organization; however, some more recent studies highlight its potential negative effects. In addition to the organizational innovations it is important not to overlooking other aspects of firms’ innovation activity and industrial relations that may influence the working conditions. Cooperative relationships at firm level between union delegates and management are likely to be linked with good quality working conditions. Our empirical aim is twofold. First, we disentangle the role of innovation intensity in four different innovation areas (technology, organization, training and ICT), on working conditions. The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, innovations have an overall positive effect on working conditions. However, this effect is weak and for specific organizational aspects, is negative. Second, we confirm the relationship between cooperative industrial relations, at firm level, and working conditions.
Humanization of the Russian housing model in the postmodern space

The article analyzes the existing approaches of management in the sphere of housing and communal service in Russia (HCS). They have not improved the quality of life and have not ensured sustainable reproduction of the human capital. According to the authors, the implementation in practice of Anglo-Saxon governance model in Russia has not proved the historical context of the country’s development. A comparative analysis was conducted of housing sphere of Russia and the European Union. It is recommended to use the Scandinavian management model as a more acceptable for the Russian conditions.
The Model Confidence Set

The paper introduces the model confidence set (MCS) and applies it to the selection of models. A MCS is a set of models that is constructed such that it will contain the best model with a given level of confidence. The MCS is in this sense analogous to a confidence interval for a parameter. The MCS acknowledges the limitations of the data, such that uninformative data yields a MCS with many models, whereas informative data yields a MCS with only a few models. The MCS procedure does not assume that a particular model is the true model, in fact the MCS procedure can be used to comparemore general objects, beyond the comparison of models. We apply the MCS procedure to two empirical problems. First, we revisit the inflation forecasting problem posed by Stock and Watson (1999), and compute the MCS for their set of inflation forecasts. Second, we compare a number of Taylor rule regressions and determine the MCS of the best in terms of in-sample likelihood criteria.
SIFT-MIC Based Matching Location Algorithm for Wire Bonding

Computer vision inspection system is often applied in automatic wire bonding to ensure the location accuracy and speed, while feature selection affects the performance of inspection system. In this paper, a new feature extraction and matching location algorithm based on SIFT-MIC is proposed for wire bonding. The algorithm chooses MIC corners in the neighborhood of SIFT feature points to increase the robustness of feature extraction. Meanwhile, the selection of SIFT- MIC feature points is before the generation of SIFT descriptors, to reduce the computation and improve the efficiency of feature extraction. The vector angle method is chosen to finish the matching location of the eye-point images and images to be matched. Experimental results show that SIFT-MIC algorithm is invariant to translation and rotation, and has high performance in the positioning accuracy and detection efficiency. The proposed algorithm is suitable for MEMS wire bonding images with rich points and lines features.
Detection of Beta-Barrels from Medium Resolution Cryo-electron Microscopy Density Maps

Detection of Beta-Barrels from Medium Resolution Cryo-electron Microscopy Density Maps Albert Ng Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dong Si Computing & Software Systems Cryo-electron microscopy is becoming one of the most popular techniques used to determine protein structures. At medium resolutions, secondary structures can be seen from within cryo-electron microscopy density maps. The automatic isolation and detection of these secondary structures directly from density maps would be helpful to many, such as drug researchers to enable faster and better drug design for targeted proteins. One such secondary structure is the β-barrel, a β-sheet based secondary structure that is commonly found as in cell membranes and transport proteins. This thesis proposes a novel method combining convolutional neural networks, genetic algorithms, and ray casting to perform automatic detection for β-barrels from within medium resolution cryo-electron density maps. This approach was tested using both experimentally produced and simulated cryo-electron microscopy density maps. This method achieved a sensitivity of 0.95 and specificity of 0.90 on simulated maps. However, this method was only able to obtain a sensitivity of 0.72 and specificity of 0.79 on experimentally produced density maps.
Employment and Child Care Decisions of Mothers and the Well-being of their Children ∗

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of employment and child care decisions of women after birth in order to evaluate the effects of mothers’ decisions on children’s cognitive ability. I use data from the NLSY to estimate the model. The results suggest that the effects of maternal employment and child care on children’s cognitive ability are negative and rather sizeable. In fact, having a full-time working mother who uses child care during the first 5 years after the birth of the child is associated with a 10.4% reduction in ability test scores. Based on the estimates of the model, I assess the impact of policies related to parental leave, child care and other incentives to stay at home after birth on women’s decisions and children’s outcomes. JEL Classification: D1, J1, J22.
Ethnic segregation and educational outcomes in Swedish comprehensive schools: A multilevel analysis

We ask whether ethnic segregation in Swedish comprehensive schools, fueled by increased residential segregation and increased immigration during the 1990s, are associated with depressed educational outcomes as measured either by teacher-assigned school grades in ninth grade (age 16) or eligibility to enter an academic study programme at the upper secondary level. We compare immigrant children and Swedish-born pupils with foreign-born parents with those of Swedish ancestry (the reference group). The data are based on two entire cohorts who graduated from comprehensive school in 1998 and 1999 (188,000 pupils and 1,043 schools), linking educational information from schools with Census data on parents’ education, socioeconomic position, and household composition. Using multilevel analysis we find grade differences to the advantage of the reference group. For second generation immigrants, but not immigrant children, these are accounted for by socioeconomic characteristics of the family of origin and of the composite socioeconomic status in schools. We argue that differences in school quality are unlikely to produce these results. Rather, a clustering of immigrant children is likely to create a more difficult learning environment, partly because of language problems, and relative lack of positive role models. This has negative consequences for the achievements of all children in these schools – though most for immigrant children – despite the fact that more resources are allocated to schools with many immigrant pupils. Desegregating policies as well as intense language training for newly arrived immigrant children could be efficient means towards overall increasing academic standards as well as decreasing educational inequality.
Identifying Elastic and Viscoelastic Material Parameters by Means of a Tikhonov Regularization

For studying the interaction of displacements, stresses, and acting forces for elastic and viscoelastic materials, it is of utmost importance to have a decent mathematical model available. Usually such a model consists of a coupled set of nonlinear differential equations together with appropriate boundary conditions. However, since the different material classes vary significantly with respect to their physical and mechanical behavior, the parameters which appear in these equations are unknown and therefore have to be determined before the equations can be used for further investigations or simulations. It is this very step which is addressed in this article where we consider elastic as well as viscoelastic material behavior. The idea is to compute the parameters as solutions of a minimization problem for Tikhonov functionals. Tikhonov regularization is a well-established solution technique for tackling inverse problems. On the one hand, it assures a computation that is stable with respect to noisy input data, and on the other hand, it involves desired a priori information on the solution. In this article we develop problem adapted Tikhonov functionals and prove that a Tikhonov regularization improves the accuracy especially when the underlying system is ill-conditioned.
The Role of Dynamic Capabilities and Social Capital in Breaking Socio-Institutional Inertia in Regional Development

A shift in the techno-economic paradigm will affect regions; regions, however, are path-dependent units. This path-dependency often leads to considerable socio-institutional inertia in the process of transformation whereby regions aim to remain competitive in the face of worldwide competition. The present article assesses the role of the dynamic capabilities of social capital in the process of regional adaptation. A survey conducted in the Lahti urban region in Finland is used as empirical data. The results of the survey reveal the respondents' fairly good awareness of the prevailing techno-economic paradigm and of the strong socio-institutional inertia confronting change in practice. The results suggest, however, that there are systematic differences in responsiveness between local politicians and other decision-makers. The study concludes with a discussion of the relevance of shared common views on the development needed within the region.
Works Title Creating Opportunities for Students to Show What They Know : The Role of Scaffolding in Assessment Tasks Permalink

This study examines the ways in which teachers provide students with written scaffolds in assessment tasks and the impact of these on students’ abilities to demonstrate a core disciplinary proficiency—constructing evidence-based explanations. Data include 76 assessment tasks designed by 33 science teachers and 707 samples of student work. We found five types of scaffolding embedded in assessments that allowed students to make their reasoning explicit: (a) using contextualized phenomena, (b) rubrics, (c) checklists, (d) sentence frames, and (e) encouraging students to draw explanatory models in combination with written explanation. Analyses showed that all five forms of scaffolding were significantly associated with the quality of student explanation even when controlling for teacher variance and student background. Providing contextualized phenomena had the greatest impact on the quality of student explanations, both by itself and in combination with other scaffolding. The results indicate that strategic combinations of scaffolds can prompt students across all achievement levels to more readily use what they know to produce evidence-based explanations, but that the scaffolding must be of high quality. C © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 98:674–704, 2014 Correspondence to: Hosun Kang; e-mail: hosunk@uci.edu Contract grant sponsor: National Science Foundation. Contract grant number: DRL-0822016. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations. C © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. SCAFFOLDING IN ASSESSMENT TASKS 675
Discretionary Risks Disclosure: A Management Perspective

Discretionary risks disclosure practices by managers provide useful information to investors and other users of accounting information in assessing the risk profile of a company. A managers’ ability to disclose relevant risk information that reflects more accurately the companies’ current and future financial performance will facilitate these users in making effective investment decisions. This paper aims to examine empirically the effect of management perception on the disclosure of risk-related information in companies’ annual reports, thus, exploring the current practices of risk reporting by managers of listed companies in Malaysia. The findings should provide useful information to regulators and other policymakers in identifying the factors that influence managers’ perception of risk-related information and, consequently, affect the extent and nature of risk information disclosed in companies’ annual reports. Overall, the findings reveal that enhanced understanding and perception on the overall risk concepts are important drivers that can facilitate managers in disclosing more comprehensive and relevant risk-related information. This, in turn, improves the trust and confidence of investors and other users of financial statements as their evaluations are influenced by the choices of information being disclosed in annual reports by managers.
Autism-A Multifaceted Diffuse Pathology

The causes of pervasive developmental disorders have yet to be resolved. Needless to say, the etiology is complex as are the individual factors, especially in regard to autism. Certain findings may be integrated into early coherent models, but the heterogeneity of findings remains a central feature of autism. The present review examines contemporary areas of research and a few prominent theories specifically dealing with autism. The areas under scrutiny are divided into common academic compartments, such as biological, environmental. Autism represents a very timely topic due to its rising incidence in the population as well as changes in previous concepts occurring at this time. Besides the neurological, biological and epidemiological factors contributing and possibly initiating this disorder we discuss the possible involvement of endogenous morphine, especially in regard to depression and limbic functions. Lastly, we advance the theory that dysfunctional mitochondria appear to be involved in autism as well, explaining the widespread occurrence of its characteristics within the construct of susceptibility to stress and trauma. Thus, the diffuse manifestations of Pervasive Developmental Disorder occur potentially by altering energy processes.
MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PATTERN DISCOVERY OF TRAJECTORIES USINGCONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

Abstract. Movement of point objects are highly sensitive to the underlying situations and conditions during the movement, which are known as contexts. Analyzing movement patterns, while accounting the contextual information, helps to better understand how point objects behave in various contexts and how contexts affect their trajectories. One potential solution for discovering moving objects patterns is analyzing the similarities of their trajectories. This article, therefore, contextualizes the similarity measure of trajectories by not only their spatial footprints but also a notion of internal and external contexts. The dynamic time warping (DTW) method is employed to assess the multi-dimensional similarities of trajectories. Then, the results of similarity searches are utilized in discovering the relative movement patterns of the moving point objects. Several experiments are conducted on real datasets that were obtained from commercial airplanes and the weather information during the flights. The results yielded the robustness of DTW method in quantifying the commonalities of trajectories and discovering movement patterns with 80 % accuracy. Moreover, the results revealed the importance of exploiting contextual information because it can enhance and restrict movements.
FACTORS FOR BOARD EFFECTIVENESS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION: PROPOSAL OF AN INSTRUMENT

We present a set of factors which can contribute to the effectiveness of boards of directors in managing strategy implementation. Following more recent research strands on corporate governance and boards, we focus on non-structural factors related to cognitive, behavioral, work process and power dimensions. They may enhance the explanatory power of structural features of boards where the latter’s effectiveness is concerned. The identified factors are cohesiveness, presence of knowledge and skills, use of knowledge and skills, effort norms, cognitive conflict, task performance and information architecture. They were divided into sets of observable variables, which were consolidated into an instrument reference lists with a view to helping scholars and practitioners in assessing how boards rank in these factors.
IMPACT OF THE AGE OF LAYING CHICKEN ON MECHANICAL STRENGTH OF EGGS

External and internal qualities of eggs are affected by a number of factors including the age of laying chicken. Understanding changes in quality is critical in industrial handling and processing of eggs. The aim of this study was to analyze mechanical strength of eggs laid by hens at 52 to 55 weeks of laying cycle. About 12000 white-shelled leghorn eggs from 6 flocks over 3 months period were used. Mechanical strength of eggs was measured in terms of the rupture force and energy using Universal Instron testing machine. Mean values of eggshells strength decreased from 34 to 31 N between 52 and 55 weeks, respectively. Eggshell thickness was in the range of 0.33 to 0.31 mm. The results showed that age of laying chicken significantly (p<0.05) influenced eggshell strength and eggshell thickness. Older hens laid weaker and thinner eggs. Thus, the age of laying chicken should be considered as a critical factor affecting egg handling and processing quality.
Effects of Pre-Schools on Performance of Grade 1 Pupils: A Case Study of Gweru Urban Primary Schools in Zimbabwe

Abstract This study was set to investigate the opinions of grade one teachers and teachers-in-charge (TICs) on the performance of grade one children pre-school and those who did not attend pre-schools. The sample constituted 5 schools from which 5 teachers - in - charge and 30 teachers were taken, making a total of 35 respondents. To collect the data, 2 instruments were used for teachers and teachers-in-charge. These were labeled appendices 1 and 11 respectively. An interview schedule was also employed to complement the questionnaires. It was revealed through this study that children who have been exposed to pre-schools perform better than their counterparts during the first six weeks. The findings have also clearly shown that children from pre-schools are socially and emotionally adjusted and therefore are a step ahead than their counterparts.
Polymorphism analysis of the hsp70 stress gene in Broiler chickens (Gallus gallus) of different breeds

The promoter region and the beginning of the coding region of the hsp70 stress gene were analysed in broiler chickens of a commercial breed (Hubbard-Pettersen), a breed selected for weight gain (PP1) and a non-selected breed (naked-neck Label Rouge). The naked neck gene (Naked neck, Na), which reduces feathering in birds and is thus related to heat resistance, was present in both PP1 and Label Rouge breeds. Genomic DNA was restricted with PstI and Southern blotting analysis of the samples revealed the absence of polymorphic sites for that enzyme in the promoter region and beginning of the coding region of the hsp70 gene of studied birds. PCR-SSCP analysis of these regions, however, indicated the presence of polymorphisms in the beginning of the coding region and the sequencing of the PCR products confirmed and identified two polymorphic sites in this region: a transition A ® G in position +258 and a transversion C ® G in position +276. Both mutations were considered to be silent, since they did not modify the aminoacid sequence of the protein Hsp70. The promoter region of the hsp70 gene was identical in all studied birds, indicating that the regulation pattern of this gene must be the same in all birds at the promoter region. Three different alleles (hsp70-1, hsp70-2 and hsp70-3) were identified for the hsp70 gene from the observed mutations. The allele hsp70-3 was detected in only two breeds, Hubbard-Pettersen and PP1, but at a low frequency (0,016 and 0,006, respectively).
High‐Density Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Linkage Maps of Lowland Switchgrass using Genotyping‐by‐Sequencing

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) is a warm‐season perennial grass with promising potential as a bioenergy crop in the United States. However, the lack of genomic resources has slowed the development of plant lines with optimal characteristics for sustainable feedstock production. We generated high‐density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) linkage maps using a reduced‐representation sequencing approach by genotyping 231 F1 progeny of a cross between two parents of lowland ecotype from the cultivars Kanlow and Alamo. Over 350 million reads were generated and aligned, which enabled identification and ordering of 4611 high‐quality SNPs. The total lengths of the resulting framework maps were 1770 cM for the Kanlow parent and 2059 cM for the Alamo parent. These maps show collinearity with maps generated with polymerase chain reaction (PCR)‐based simple‐sequence repeat (SSR) markers, and new SNP markers were identified in previously unpopulated regions of the genome. Transmission segregation distortion affected all linkage groups (LGs) to differing degrees, and ordering of distorted markers highlighted several regions of unequal inheritance. Framework maps were adversely affected by the addition of distorted markers with varying severity, but distorted maps were of higher marker density and provided additional information for analysis. Alignment of these linkage maps with a draft version of the switchgrass genome assembly demonstrated high levels of collinearity and provides greater confidence in the validity of both resources. This methodology has proven to be a rapid and cost‐effective way to generate high‐quality linkage maps of an outcrossing species.
Effects of Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) on Gait Ability and Symmetry after Stroke

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the application of Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) to the rehabilitation of stroke patients and its effect on gait symmetry. [Subjects] Twenty-five subjects with stroke performed walking under five conditions and the study progressed following a randomized single-blind cross-sectional design. [Methods] We evaluated the effects of a 5-minute session of RAS. Subjects walked under five conditions: (1) a comfortable speed without external rhythm; (2) non-paretic leg footfall with RAS matching the baseline speed; (3) non-paretic leg footfall with RAS 30% slower than the baseline speed; (4) paretic leg footfall with RAS beat frequency matching the baseline speed; (5) paretic leg footfall with RAS 30% faster than the baseline speed. The step time (paretic leg and non-paretic leg), velocity and cadence were measured before and after gait training with RAS [Results] Gait symmetry improved in conditions 4 and 5, but not in conditions 2 and 3. Gait ability was assessed with velocity and cadence. Velocity and cadence improved in conditions 4 and 5. [Conclusion] The results of the study demonstrate the ability of RAS to improve gait symmetry. Thus, RAS should be an effective method for the improvement of the gait symmetry of chronic stroke patients.