Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-talk effects on the regenerator allocation optimization

This paper studies the impact of considering crosstalk effects in the IA-RWA process and in the regenerator allocation algorithms. First of all, we evaluate if the regenerator allocation optimization is still useful when the crosstalk effects are considered. For this end we improve a simple physical model which computes the quality of the signal factor for each optical connection. Until now this physical model was unaware of the physical layer impairments depending on the interference between different optical connections, such as the crosstalk. Following the same simple methodology we add the switching node crosstalk effect to the computation of the quality of the signal factor. Once the new physical model is enhanced we evaluate the impact of the crosstalk on the performance of IA-RWA algorithms that optimize the use of the regenerators; and also we evaluate the impact of different e wavelength assignation techniques.
A 250+dB open loop gain feedforward compensated high precision operational amplifier

A stand alone operational amplifier with open loop gain >250db at 200Hz has been designed. It uses non-traditional feedforward compensation technique with five integrators to achieve such a high gain. It operates between 2.7 and 6.7 supply voltage. This amplifier has low offset voltage (<4uV), low noise(6.5nV/sqrtHz), 1/f corner at 0.03Hz with power supply current of 1.8mA. It can drive a load of 2kohm and 100pf in parallel. This amplifier combines performance of high precision bipolar with offset stability of a chopper in a CMOS process. It is targeted towards the applications where the input signal is low frequency < 1kHz and the signal level is in mV range and a high THD is required.
Service liberalization in Lao PDR

Service liberalization is emerging as a high-priority issue in various parts of the world for mega free trade agreements as well as national policy. Lao PDR is no exception. To examine the level of service liberalization in Lao PDR, we first compare the Hoekman Indices of Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam on the ASEAN Framework Agreement on Services (AFAS 8). Lao PDR has lower commitment in many subsectors. In particular, we list the sectors in which Lao PDR made a lower commitment than Cambodia and Vietnam in Mode 3 (supply of services through commercial establishments abroad). Second, a simulation analysis using the Geographical Simulation Model (IDE-GSM) from the Institute of Developing Economies at the Japan External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO) reveals how service liberalization benefits the economic development of Lao PDR. The two analyses clearly reveal that it is essential for Lao PDR to promote further service liberalization since such liberalization will contribute to the country's development.
First Clinical Study on Ultra-High-Field MR Imaging in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis: Comparison of 1.5T and 7T

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Higher magnetic field strengths and continuous improvement of high-resolution imaging in multiple sclerosis (MS) are expected to provide unique in-vivo and non-invasive insights in pathogenesis and clinical monitoring. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of high-resolution imaging of MS lesions in vivo comparing 7T with conventional 1.5T. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Twelve consecutive patients with clinically definite MS were scanned on a 7T whole-body scanner and on a 1.5T Avanto. The 1.5T and 7T imaging protocol consisted of high-resolution axial proton density (PD) + T2-weighted turbo spin-echo and T2*-weighted gradient-echo (GRE), and sagittal T1-weighted 3D magnetization-prepared rapid acquisition of gradient echo. RESULTS: The sequence parameters at 7T had to be modified because of specific absorption rate (SAR) restrictions while keeping contrast parameters equivalent to 1.5T. White matter lesions were better detected and delineated from adjacent structures at 7T compared with 1.5T. There were 42% of the patients who showed additional lesions at 7T: there were 97 white matter lesions detected on 1.5T versus 126 lesions at 7T, an increase of 23%. The perivascular migration of MS lesions was well visualized on T2*-weighted GRE sequences. In larger lesions (10 mm), a multilayer structure was revealed on T2*-weighted GRE not seen at 1.5T. Because of the higher resolution, it was possible to differentiate between juxtacortical white matter lesions and cortical lesions. There were 44% of the subcortical lesions depicted at 7T that showed cortical involvement. CONCLUSIONS: Ultra-high-field imaging of patients with MS at 7T was well tolerated and provided better visualization of MS lesions in the gray matter and demonstrated structural abnormalities within the MS lesions themselves more effectively.
The Evolution of Trade Unions in Britain

Social partnership and collective organization are dissimilar as regards the explanation of the development of the capitalist system, on the one hand emphasizing cooperation between management and labour and on the other the contrary. I indicate that the two propositions are not real substitutes, and provided that the environmental factors are favourable, can become the component parts of a coordinated design for the revitalization of British trade unions.
Regulation of Proopiomelanocortin Gene Transcription during Single and Repeated Immobilization Stress

We have previously reported that repeated immobilization produces persistent activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in rats. In an attempt to assess whether any adaptational responses occur at the pituitary level, we examined the detailed time courses of proopiomelanocortin (POMC) gene transcription in the anterior pituitary (AP) in comparison with those of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) gene transcription in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN) during single and repeated immobilization using both intronic and exonic probes. During single immobilization, there was a robust and rapid increase in both CRH heteronuclear RNA (hnRNA) in the PVN and POMC hnRNA in the AP, together with a slower increase in CRH mRNA, but no significant increase in POMC mRNA. Single immobilization also caused significant increases in the plasma concentrations of both ACTH and corticosterone. Daily immobilization for 6 days increased the basal levels of CRH hnRNA and CRH mRNA in the PVN and POMC mRNA in the AP. Both CRH hnRNA and POMC hnRNA responded rapidly to a final episode of acute immobilization on day 7, whereas the peak values of CRH hnRNA and POMC hnRNA after 15 min of the final stress were smaller than those during single immobilization. In contrast to single stress, CRH mRNA did not change significantly, whereas POMC mRNA robustly increased after the final immobilization on day 7. Plasma ACTH increased to a similar degree to single stress, but its initial increase at 5 min was significantly higher than that during single immobilization. The increase in the plasma corticosterone concentration was higher during final immobilization than during single stress. These results suggest that, in response to the hypothalamic drive during repeated immobilization stress, pituitary corticotrophs are capable of upregulating the basal and stress-induced POMC mRNA levels via increased efficiency of the posttranscriptional processing of the hnRNA and/or increased mRNA stability.
An automated technique for designing and improving provisioning processes

Network management is an increasingly important area of research dealing with continuously evolving artificial complex systems. We look at the important network management process of provisioning, which involves all activities to implement changes to the network. Typical provisioning activities include addition or deletion of customers and network elements, growth of the network, and load balancing. We present a new method for specifying and analyzing provisioning workflow. Our method is based on representing workflow by finite state machines augmented with the notion of attribute sets. Such a representation allows us to study important properties of the workflow, and analyze it to detect inefficiencies. We also provide an example of the application of this technique to a trunk provisioning workflow.
Employers' perceptions about tourism management employability skills

This paper discusses a comprehensive study of employers' perceptions of Indian tourism graduates towards assessing measurable qualities. For the purpose of this paper, only the service-based skills such as basic understanding and skills, destination stewardship skills, political and ethical skills, enhanced human resource skills, and dynamic business skills are discussed. A total of 520 employers from travel agencies and tour operators in India were chosen for the survey by using a set of questionnaires on five-point Likert scale. The respondents were mainly come from high-ranking personnel in their firm (responsible for recruitment). The outcomes of this study provide educators a useful guide to develop tourism curricula and teaching methods in order to prepare graduates to cope successfully with a fast-changing tourism business environment.
Directions for Eco-friendly Utilization and Industrialization of Fishery By-products

The study aims to identify the generation and treatment of fishery by-products in Korea and suggests future directions and strategies for their eco-friendly utilization and industrialization. First, the study focuses on the identification of the generation and their treatment in Korea since merely few study were conducted and they did not provide enough information regarding the overall generation and treatment at the national level. According to the estimation, Korea generates 800 thousand to 1,200 thousand tones of fishery by-product every year. The fishery by-products generated at large seafood markets and processing facilities are used or processed as fish meal and feed, but those generated from households and small seafood restaurants are currently treated as food waste. In addition, inadequately treated fishery by-products cause various problems such as spoiling urban landscape, creating odor and incubating pest. After identifying the generation and treatment of fishery by-products, the study suggests directions for the formulation of infrastructure for transition into resource circulation society, minimization of dumped waste and their eco-friendly recycling as resources, diversification of recycled goods and development into a high-value added industry. Finally, the study suggests detailed strategies for the directions such as establishment of legal and institutional foundation, separation of fishery by-products from wastes, development of technology tailored for commercialization, introduction of pilot projects for industrialization and cultivation of social enterprises.
Measuring Financial and Business Operation Impacts, of Software Project Initiatives and Investments, using Project Tracking MarkPoints on the Project Volume.

Measuring the size of a project has always been a challenge in all the disciplines involved in project management. In software project management, defining a measurement unit for a project is even more difficult since the unique characteristics of the software make it invisible and untouchable, and therefore much more difficult to be measured. This paper presents a model that can contribute towards this issue. The MarkPoint presented can be considered as a sizing and measurement unit to a software project. The MarkPoints are based on the requirements of a project where their initial weighted distribution per requirement, implementation phase and other project elements makes the project size needed for the management of the project. The paper initially states the need for such models in the business world and defines the excepted environment for them to be applied successfully. The model and the overall concept is approach from a business and financial perspective, since it's a business oriented approach driven by business needs and expectations in managing software project and investments.
Year : 2008 Let ' s face it : it ' s a cortical

Face perception elicits activation within a distributed cortical network in the human brain. The network includes visual ("core") regions, which process invariant facial features, as well as limbic and prefrontal ("extended") regions that process changeable aspects of faces. Analysis of effective connectivity reveals that the major entry node in the "face network" is the lateral fusiform gyrus and that the functional coupling between the core and the extended systems is content-dependent. A model for face perception is proposed, in which the flow of information through the network is shaped by cognitive demands. www.elsevier. com/locate/ynimg NeuroImage 40 (2008) 415–419
MReC4.5: C4.5 Ensemble Classification with MapReduce

Classification is a significant technique in data mining research and applications. C4.5 is a widely used classification method, and ensemble learning adopts a parallel and distributed computing model for classification. Based on analyses of the MapReduce computing paradigm and the process of ensemble learning, we find that the parallel and distributed computing model in MapReduce is appropriate for implementing ensemble learning. This paper takes the advantages of C4.5, ensemble learning and the MapReduce computing model, and proposes a new method MReC4.5 for parallel and distributed ensemble classification. Our experimental results show that increasing the number of nodes would benefit the effectiveness of classification modeling, and serialization operations at the model level make the MReC4.5 classifier “construct once, use anywhere”.
Application of Markov Chain in Forecasting: A Study of Customers' Brand Loyalty for Mobile Phones

Markov chains methods are principally used for Brand Loyalty studies in marketing problems. Markov chains method comes out as the primary and most powerful technique in predicting the market share a product will achieve in the long term especially in an oligopolistic environment and in finding out the brand loyalty for a product. The concepts of marketing studies are thought as discrete from the time and place viewpoint and so finite Markov chains are applicable for this kind of process. The purpose of this study is to examine customers’ Brand Loyalty for Mobile Phones with Markov chains method. This paper borrows transition matrix as a forecasting instrument for determining the market environment in the future, and sets out to unveil the potential of Markov chains in sequencing students’ brand choice and in determining intensive transitional probabilities for mobile phones. In this study, the data to examine the Brand Loyalty have been obtained from randomly selected 1000 undergraduate students in Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Nigeria vis-a-vis stratified sampling and simple random sampling technique. The data generated were cast into a Markov matrix to permit meaningful observation of the students’ behaviour toward twenty (20) brands of mobile phones. Electronic
Face recognition fusing global and local features

One of the main issues of face recognition is to extract features from face images, which include both local and global features. We present a novel method to perform feature fusion at the feature level. First, global features are extracted by principal component analysis (PCA), while local features are obtained by active appearance model (AAM) and Gabor wavelet transform (GWT). Second, two types of features are fused by weighted concatenation. Finally, Euclidean and feature distances of fused features are applied to carry out a nearest neighbor classifier. The method is evaluated by the recognition rates and computation cost over two face image databases [AR (created by A. Martinez and R. Benavente) and SJTU-IPPR (Shanghai JiaoTong University-Institute of Image Processing and Pattern Recognition)]. Compared with PCA and elastic bunch graph matching (EBGM), the presented method is more effective. Though the recognition rate of the presented method is not as good as nonlinear feature combination (NFC), low computation cost is its superiority. In addition, experimental results show that the novel method is robust to variations over time, expression, illumination, and pose to a certain extent.
A Theoretical Model for the Study of Product Importance Perceptions

Product importance and related constructs have been inadequately defined and understood in the consumer behavior literature. This paper reviews and integrates these constructs and presents a framework for the analysis of product importance perceptions. Two forms of the construct are identified, and the antecedents of and responses to product importance are specified. Implications for consumer research and marketing management are discussed.
Analyzing the role of festivals and events in regional development

While tourism has a long history of use as a tool for regional development, events and festivals are a more recent policy option. In both cases the emphasis is often placed on the potential positive economic impacts. In both cases there has also been little research conducted into a wider range of outcomes or into the factors and processes that contribute to these outcomes. This article examines the potential role of festivals and events in regional development with a particular focus on effects other than economic. The study reported here used a conceptual framework developed to describe regional tourism development to explore 36 case studies describing festivals and events in a regional development context. The content analysis identified 13 themes as associated with the effectiveness of festivals and events in supporting regional development. These themes were further organized according to their connections to the three key constructs of building social capital, enhancing community capacity, and support for non-tourism-related products and services. These constructs are then used to build a preliminary conceptual framework to understand the role of festivals and events in regional development.
Recommending Quality Book Reviews from Heterogeneous Websites

Purpose – In recent years, readers have limited amounts of time to pick the right books to read from a market that is filled with similar types of books. Aiming to read only good books, readers tend to check book reviews written by others. However, it is very difficult to find good book reviews. The aim of this paper is to present a book review recommendation system that collects reviews from heterogeneous sources on the Internet and performs quality judgments automatically. Users can then read the top‐ranked reviews suggested by this recommendation system.Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, a book review recommendation system is constructed to collect, process, and judge the quality of book reviews from various heterogeneous sources. The quality measurement of book reviews uses review‐evaluation techniques. The prediction results were validated with a ranking list produced by experts.Findings – The proposed system is effective and suitable for recommending quality book reviews from heterogeneous.
Sustainable purchasing and supply management: a structured literature review of definitions and measures at the dyad, chain and network levels

This paper provides a structured literature review of sustainability in purchasing and supply management, moving beyond the traditional environmental and social sustainability. The paper reviews the concept of sustainability at three levels of inter-organizational analysis - i.e. dyad, supply chain and network. The paper distils the nature and scope of existing research and synthesizes measures used to research sustainability across organizational boundaries. This literature review systematically analyzes existing literature. In particular, the review focuses on definitions and measures of sustainable purchasing and supply management to obtain an accurate view of current research. This paper uncovers two distinct trends in the type of research carried out. First, internal or dyadic issues are in focus and second, a tendency to deal with environmental, as opposed to social, sustainability. Despite the need to look beyond the dyad given the risks associated with the extended network, few studies do so in any of the sustainability dimensions. This review is limited by the method employed focusing on definitions and measures. Although the review considers supply chain and network research, it does so purely from a purchasing perspective, thus excluding issues such as logistics and transport. The paper identifies areas open to future research and provides practical insights into how sustainable purchasing and supply are measured. It also synthesizes existing measures of sustainability at different levels and organizes these into a taxonomy. The paper examines studies across multiple levels of analysis and integrates multiple fields of knowledge to show how research on sustainability in purchasing and supply is structured.
Catching Up with the Leaders: The Irish Hare

For many decades Ireland's output per capita ranked about twenty-fourth among the world's industrial nations. Suddenly, in the mid-1990's Ireland started to move up, from twenty-second in 1993 to eighteenth in 1997 and an amazing ninth in 1999. The many facets of Irish success over these years, from a disproportionate representation in popular music to the largest current account surplus in the industrial world, caught the public imagination at home and abroad. This article examines the startling turnaround in Irish economic performance that began in the mid 1980's. Ireland is not alone in having experienced severe macroeconomic imbalances in the past quarter century, but their amplitude has been greater than in almost any other OECD country. The early 1980's saw the worst extremes. In 1981 inflation was 21 percent, the current account deficit was about 15 percent of GNP. and public sector borrowing was running at an even higher rate. The attempt to rein in the twin deficits caused taxation to jump by 10 percentage points of GNP in seven years, while overt unemployment soared to 16 percent of the labor force in 1986 and net emigration approached 1 percent of the population.
Intercalated multi-layer graphene grown by CVD for LSI interconnects

We have fabricated multi-layer graphene (MLG) wiring and demonstrated a resistivity of the same order as Cu and reliability better than Cu. The MLG was synthesized epitaxially by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on an epitaxial Co film, resulting in quality and electrical properties as good as those of a graphite crystal. The MLG was further intercalated with FeCl3 to achieve a resistivity as low as 9.1 μΩ cm. Our results show that intercalated MLG is really promising for future LSI interconnects.