Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Management Challenge of Sustaining Competitive Advantage through Innovation in Nigerian Business Environment

Organizational learning refers to the sum total of individual and collective learning through training programs, experience, experimentation and work interactions within the organization. Thus, sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to offer superior customer value on an enduring or consistent basis, a situation in which competitors are unable to easily imitate the firm's capacity for value creation. It is worrisome that most literary works have not clearly linked organizational learning with sustainable competitive advantages, as is the case with intellectual capacity (knowledge-based resources) using the resource-based view of the firm. A survey approach was the research design used with particular reference to the South East Zone of Nigeria. Findings revealed that organizational innovation leads to sustained competitive advantage. The Z-statistic value with the corresponding probability value confirms that the organization to a large extent draws its competitive strength jointly from the following factors: creation of new products, changes in way of production, changes in architecture of production, improved ways of sourcing supplies, opening new market opportunities, providing goods and services that others are not yet offering or are not able to copy, being able to offer products of comparable quality at a lower price, maintaining a configuration of resources and capabilities that cannot easily be imitated by competitors, being able to attract customers from competitors due to a positive corporate image and encouraging employees to improve their personal skills. The results total Z-scores in absolute term shows that the listed factors pose challenges to the organization in the process of achieving sustainable competitive advantage through innovation. For further justification, we proceed to their joint significant analysis adopting the one sample Z-test. The proxies employed in this study for the measurement of sustainability agreed with resource-based view strategies on sustainability of competitive advantage in an unstable business environment.
Développement d'un système d'assistance à la marche pour les personnes en perte d'autonomie

L’esperance de vie des populations occidentales a augmente de maniere considerable durant le dernier siecle. Malheureusement, la perte d’autonomie associee avec le vieillissement represente un defi de taille pour la societe de demain. Un des aspects precipitant la perte d’autonomie est la perte de mobilite, car la diminution des capacites physiques a des consequences directes sur l’autonomie, la vie sociale, l’estime de soi et eventuellement les capacites cognitives. Les personnes en perte de mobilite deviennent donc rapidement dependantes de leur communaute. Ce projet a comme objectif la conception d’un systeme d’assistance a la marche de type exosquelette, denomme HRMS-I (Hermes-un), specifiquement adapte aux besoins des personnes en perte de mobilite. Les recherches sur les exosquelettes etant generalement orientees vers le developpement de solutions militaires ou portees sur la mobilite des personnes ayant un handicap, il est essentiel de definir les besoins specifiques a la problematique du projet. Afin d’y parvenir, une analyse des efforts typiques de la vie quotidienne est menee et les caracteristiques anthropomorphiques de la population visee sont identifiees. Ensuite, une etude du type de motorisation optimal et une conception mecanique preliminaire sont effectuees. Une architecture electrique est proposee, le dimensionnement du bloc-pile pour rencontrer les requis de mobilite quotidienne est couvert et une solution de mesure des efforts d’interface au sol a l’aide de quatre cellules de force concues sur mesure est developpee. Finalement, les approches de commandes sont abordees et un modele cinematique est developpe et compare avec les resultats d’un systeme de mesure optoelectronique.
Synthesis for Robots: Guarantees and Feedback for Robot Behavior

Robot control for tasks such as moving around obstacles or grasping objects has advanced significantly in the last few decades. However, controlling robots to perform complex tasks is still accomplished largely by highly trained programmers in a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process that is typically validated only through extensive testing. Formal methods are mathematical techniques for reasoning about systems, their requirements, and their guarantees. Formal synthesis for robotics refers to frameworks for specifying tasks in a mathematically precise language and automatically transforming these specifications into correct-by-construction robot controllers or into a proof that the task cannot be done. Synthesis allows users to reason about the task specification rather than its implementation, reduces implementation error, and provides behavioral guarantees for the resulting controller. This article reviews the current state of formal synthesis for robotics and surveys the landscape of abstractions, specifications, and synthesis algorithms that enable it.
Employee involvement in decision-making: the more the better?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to relate participative decision-making (PDM) to organizational learning, and examine the impact of PDM on organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper integrates the resource-based theory with organizational learning theory to develop a framework, and distinguishes PDM in which decisions are jointly made by employees and managers from employee decision-making (EDM) in which decisions are completely in the hands of employees. The paper incorporates an augmented Cobb–Douglass production function into a structural equation model to estimate the performance impact of PDM and EDM. Findings The paper tests the framework against firm-level data form China, and finds that PDM provides an opportunity for collective learning, and has a positive relationship with productivity-based profit gains; the positive relationship is stronger in firms whose management has greater accumulated knowledge and experience; EDM fails to provide an opportunity for collective learning, and has a negative relationship with productivity-based profit gains. Originality/value Prior research focused on the role of PDM in enhancing the motivation and performance of individual employees, considered the degree of employee involvement as a continuum with the highest being decision-making “completely in the hands of employees,” and concluded that the more involved are employees in decision-making the better. This paper relates PDM to organizational performance, and challenges this conventional view from an organizational learning perspective.
Social Networking Usage and Organization Productivity: A Case Study at a Manufacturing Company

Social networking sites provide communication between applications with millions of people without them having to meet face to face. The organizations can implement social networking technology in their office in which their employees can interact and engaged with each other besides sharing their knowledge and ideas regarding task performance during office hours. The social networking sites play a social important role in bridging boundaries and bringing all people on a common platform which helps organizations find new business opportunities and marketing strategy. Moreover, social networking sites can be used as a social platform to monitor conversation about competitors, products or organizations. However, failure to control the usage will affect the organization productivity since it can waste time and be addictive. Thus, this study is to identify the relationship between social networking usage and organization productivity in a manufacturing company. This study gathered views of 100 employees of the manufacturing company and they were analyzed using Pearson correlation and multiple regressions. The results revealed that there is significant relationship between social networking usage and organization productivity at the company and social networking usage especially for marketing purposes has higher influence on the organization productivity.
Cooperative Privacy Preservation for Wearable Devices in Hybrid Computing-Based Smart Health

Along with an integration of wearable devices, wireless communications and big data in the smart health, biomedical data is collected referring to multiple associated patients during interactions. Due to communication channel openness and data sensibility, privacy preservation become increasingly noteworthy in the edge and cloud hybrid computing-based healthcare applications. In this paper, a cooperative privacy preservation scheme is designed for wearable devices with identity authentication and data access control considerations in the space-aware and time-aware contexts. In the space-aware edge computing mode, secret sharing and MinHash-based authentication is designed to enhance privacy preservation along with similarity computing without revealing sensitive data. In the time-aware cloud computing mode, ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption is applied for fine-grained access control, and bloom filter is used to achieve efficient data structure without privacy exposure. The GNY logic-based security formal analysis is performed to prove theoretical correctness, and the proposed scheme achieves cooperative privacy preservation for wearable devices in smart health with communication overhead and computation cost.
Understanding China’s Evolving Credit Risk Maze

This paper analyses factors that account for credit risk in the Chinese market for bonds issued by non-financial enterprises. By exploring a data set of covering monthly observations of individual corporate and enterprise bonds a number of important structural features of the market are seen to account for cross sectional and time series variations of yield spreads. The analysis sheds light on the issue of implicit government guarantees. The results suggest that steps taken by Chinese authorities to restructure local public finance are concentrating such guarantees to a few segments and are bringing greater financial discipline to other segments of the market.
Analysing Managers’ Financial Motivation for Sustainable Investment Strategies

The purpose of the research is to examine the importance of financial rewards and managers’ motivations, including sustainable investment projects. For that, the role of financial motivation for managers is analysed to understand strategic priorities for sustainable investment policies. Panel data for non-financial listed companies in China are used to determine the best-fit values of the proposed model, and the results of the Lagrange multiplier (LM) and Hausman tests are discussed for sustainable investment strategies. The results demonstrate that both low-paid and highly-paid managers in valuable project firms tend to be conservative and that managers consolidate their positions through underinvestment. This finding is clear evidence that managers are reluctant to take a risk on sustainable investment strategies. However, highly-paid managers of non-valuable project firms are generally willing to obtain high productivity through advanced technologies. The results are also generalized for strategies that are related to project managers’ financial motivation to increase the efficiency of sustainable investment decisions.
Future Internet architecture: clean-slate vs evolutionary design

Long ago developed the Internet has a range of the problems such as IP’s narrow waist, security needs, availability, routing scalability, support of mobility and multihoming. Many appeal to the known ”clean slate” approach to resolve these challenges facing Internet today. In this paper we consider two concepts of future Internet architecture: clean slate and evolutionary research. In part about clean slate we mention the main ideas, design goals and several of examples in this area. Then we describe the Internet design process through biological metaphor and consider the pros and cons of two ways of research.
Proportional Integral Loop Shaping Control Design With Particle Swarm Optimization Tuning

Backlash is one of several discontinuities found in different kinds of systems. It can be found in actuators of different types, such as mechanical and hydraulic, giving way to unwanted effects in the system behavior. Proportional integral (PI) loop shaping control design implementing a describing function to find the limit cycle oscillations and the appropriate control gain selection by particle swarm optimization is developed. Therefore, a frequency domain approach is implemented for the control of nonlinear system of any kind such as robotics, mechatronics, and other kind of mechanisms, electrical motors, etc. Finally, in order to corroborate the theoretical background explained in this chapter, the stabilization of a cart-pendulum system with the proposed control strategy is shown.
ETHICAL WORK CLIMATE IN THE NATIONAL AUDIT DEPARTMENT OFFICES IN MALAYSIA

The study aims to examine the ethical work climate types of the National Audit Department (NAD) offices in Malaysia as perceived by the public sector auditors. The respondents of the study were public sector auditors in the NAD offices from both federal and state levels. Using a survey questionnaire comprising instrument about the ethical climate by Victor and Cullen (1988), a total of 382 responses was received and usable. In order to achieve the research objective, descriptive statistics of mean score and standard deviation were used. The results reveal that the highest mean score is ‘rules’ climate, indicating that the public sector auditors perceived this rules ethical climate to be highly present in their organizations. This is followed by ‘instrumental’ and ‘caring’ ethical climate types. In contrast, law ethical climate type was perceived as almost non-exist in the NAD offices. This study provides useful information on the types of ethical climate types that exist in the offices of the National Audit Department (NAD) as perceived by the public sector auditors which may to some extent help to inculcate the right ethical climate in order improve the level of ethics among public sector auditors which will subsequently enhance the credibility of the NAD and public trust in the government.
Sistem Pengenalan Wajah dengan Algoritma Haar Cascade dan Local Binary Pattern Histogram

Recently, the applications of face recognition are increasing significantly. Some methods have already been tried, but the results have not optimal yet. This paper tries to overcome this problem, using haar cascade as face detection algorithm, whereas face recognition uses local binary pattern histogram method. This system uses a webcam as a camera and programming exploit OpenCV library. This system enables to differentiate the face of the human with others objects with the best range from the camera to the object is 50 cm until 150 cm. In addition, this system is capable to recognize faces from the 6 subjects of faces listed in the database, alone and in a group as well in one frame.
CDR in Glaucoma Detection using Dissimilarity Constraints Coding

: Glaucoma is an irreversible chronic eye disease that leads to vision loss. As it can be slowed down through treatment, detecting the disease in time is important. However, many patients are unaware of the disease because it progresses slowly without easily noticeable symptoms. Currently, there is no effective method for low cost population-based glaucoma detection or screening. Recent studies have shown that automated optic nerve head assessment from 2D retinal fundus images is promising for low cost glaucoma screening. In this paper, we propose a method for cup to disc ratio (CDR) assessment using 2D retinal fundus images. Methods: In the proposed method, the optic disc is first segmented and reconstructed using a novel sparse dissimilarity-constrained coding (SDC) approach which considers both the dissimilarity constraint and the sparsity constraint from a set of reference discs with known CDRs. Subsequently, the reconstruction coefficients from the SDC are used to compute the CDR for the testing disc. Results: The proposed method has been tested for CDR assessment in a database of 650 images with CDRs manually measured by trained professionals previously. Experimental results show an average CDR error of 0.064 and correlation coefficient of 0.67 compared with the manual CDRs, better than the state-of-the-art methods. Our proposed method has also been tested for glaucoma screening. The method achieves areas under curve of 0.83 and 0.88 on datasets of 650 and 1676 images, respectively, outperforming other methods. Conclusion: The proposed method achieves good accuracy for glaucoma detection. Significance: The method has a great potential to be used for large-scale population-based glaucoma screening
Creative differences? Measuring creative economy employment in the United States and the UK

ABSTRACT This paper compares the creative economies of the US and the UK regions and nations using high-quality administrative microdata spanning the period 2011–13. The creative industries are highly urbanized in both countries. However, important differences are found in the size, density and diversity of creative activity between the two countries, which reflect differences in both urban systems and industrial organization. By testing the ‘Creative Trident’ approach in a comparative international context, the analysis adds to the literature on definition and classification of creative economies, as well as to discussions of regional economic development through the creative economy.
A IMPORTÂNCIA DA LITERATURA INFANTIL NA COLETA DE DADOS E NA ESTIMULAÇÃO DE FALA INICIAL

Neste estudo, apresentamos uma reflexão a respeito e relato do uso de literatura infantil na coleta de dados de desenvolvimento linguístico de crianças com desenvolvimento típico. Após apresentar a literatura sobre desenvolvimento da linguagem e sobre a literatura infantil, discutimos os métodos de coleta de dados infantis. Como leitor poderá ver, em geral, temos na literatura linguística regras de formato de transcrição, sem fazer menção às ferramentas utilizadas para a estimulação de fala da criança. Por essa razão e com intuito de mostrar a importância do uso desse tipo de literatura, apresentamos exemplos de sessões de coleta e estimulação de fala de crianças de dois a três anos do GEDEF, que ocorreram por meio da leitura e contação de estórias pelas crianças. No relato, descrevemos os aspectos linguísticos que foram trabalhados por meio de diferentes obras infantis.
Artificial Heads for Free Field Recording: How well do they simulate real heads?

Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain ? You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at vbn@aub.aau. dk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
MONETARY POLICY AND BANK PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIA: A VECTOR AUTOREGRESSION (VAR) APPROACH

This paper investigated the effectiveness of monetary policy in enhancing the performance of the Nigerian Commercial Banks in terms of their Profitability, Liquidity and Credit performances for the period 1980 to 2017. The monetary policy variables used were, monetary policy rate, Treasury Bill rates, cash reserve ratio and money supply growth. Applying Vector Autoregression analysis (VAR) on the variables, the study found that overall, monetary policy conduct was effective in enhancing commercial banks performance in Nigeria over the period. Specifically, it was found that monetary policy rate and Treasury Bill rates were positively related to profitability of commercial banks in Nigeria. Also, monetary policy rate, money supply and cash reserve ratio were very effective in improving the credit performance of commercial banks in Nigeria. Furthermore, both monetary policy rate and money supply movements produced positive impact on the liquidity performance of commercial banks at various magnitudes. Hence, the study recommended that a good mix of policy instruments be used to enhance the returns on investment in the Nigerian banking system.
An enterprise risk management system for SMEs: innovative design paradigm and risk representation model

ABSTRACT In this conceptual paper, a system design paradigm, intended to help small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) engage in enterprise risk management (ERM) with a minimum investment in resources, is proposed. The foundations are both compliance with ERM general guidelines and two main principles, namely adaptability to different SMEs profiles and simplicity of use. The solution emerges as a combination of a simplified framework and a customizable methodology. Then, a full-ERM system is proposed whose enactment is supported by a specially developed risk representation model based on causal dependencies between events, taking into account risk interconnectivity and strategic context alignment. The sequential ERM framework, designed with mandatory and optional modules, is presented together with its associated risk representation methodology part. The latter is intended to be straightforward and adjustable to various contexts.
Slot Antenna Design for 5G Mobile Networks

—This paper presents the design of broadband microstrip antenna for wireless communication applications. The antenna structure is based on the microstrip line combined with a slot technique and a modified geometry antenna in order to enlarge the bandwidth and adapting the impedance thus minimizing distortion in order to avoid high crosstalk and radiation. The proposed antennas have been successfully designed, optimized, miniaturized and simulated by using Momentum software integrated into ADS ”Advanced Design System” and CADFEKO. The final broadband antennas are operating in 8.5GHz on ADS and 8.9 GHz on FEKO respectively with a return loss less than -10dB.
Robustness analysis of HOG pathway related genes in budding yeast

We applied a novel genetic screening method, named “genetic tug-of-war” (gTOW) to estimate the upper limit of gene copy numbers in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The study involved 29 HOG pathway related genes which included kinases, phosphatases and transcription factors to cover different set of players in the signal transduction system. In addition a phenotypic profiling was conducted in four different growth conditions with three outputs: lag phase, growth phase and efficiency of growth. A number of interesting hits were identified, including PBS2 which had low numbers of gene copies. It will be of interest to expand the study to encompass the entire known signal transduction system in yeast to search for sensitive nodes.
Achievable Common Rate and Power Allocation in Cooperative Multiple Access Channels

In this paper, we aim at obtaining usable bounds on the performance of the cooperative multiple access channel (CMAC) under a Gaussian model. We first show that the problem can be transformed into a convex optimization problem which makes it easily solvable using numerical tools. We propose, as a line of study, to consider the maximal achievable common rate by every node in the network. We then proceed to express closed-form bounds on the capacity region of the CMAC in that common rate scenario. We study simple cooperation schemes based on existing results in relay channels and compare them to other medium sharing approaches. In the end, we show that using the relay-channel based protocols can be efficient for some parameters, but gets less interesting in the Gaussian case if the source-destination links are good enough.