Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Student Experiences and Institutional Practices Affecting Spring Semester Transfer Students

Enrollment management techniques have been adopted at many four-year institutions as a means of stabilizing enrollments and revenues in an era of diminishing resources. Most often, enrollment management efforts focus on increasing the number and retention rates of students who matriculate in the fall term. This study examined experiences of spring semester transfer students and the institutional practices related to the mid-year transfer process. Results revealed that students themselves and two and four-year institutions can take steps to facilitate the transfer process and the retention of these students.
Plasmid DNA Encoding IFN-α1 Antagonizes Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Ocular Infection Through CD4+ and CD8+ T Lymphocytes1

The present study was undertaken to further characterize the anti-viral efficacy of a plasmid DNA encoding IFN-α1 against ocular herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection. In mice ocularly treated with plasmid DNA encoding IFN-α1, the efficacy of the transgene was inversely proportional to the amount of virus used to infect the mice. Ocular treatment of mice with the IFN-α1 transgene was the only mucosal route tested that showed efficacy against ocular HSV-1 infection compared with vaginal or intranasal delivery. Mice treated with the plasmid DNA encoding IFN-α1 showed a significant reduction in viral Ag expression in the eyes and trigeminal ganglion that correlated with a reduction in immune cell infiltration into the cornea and iris on days 3 and 6 postinfection, as evidenced by immunohistochemical staining. Depleting mice of either CD4+ or CD8+ T lymphocytes completely blocked the resistance to herpes simplex virus type 1-induced mortality in mice treated with the IFN-α1 transgene. In the absence of infection, the application of naked DNA encoding IFN-α1 significantly increased the levels of IL-6- and IFN-γ-inducible protein 10 transcript expression in the corneas 24 h post-treatment. Expression of the plasmid construct following topical application in the eye included the rectus muscles proximal to the cornea as well as the spleen. Collectively, the protective efficacy of the IFN-α1 transgene against ocular HSV-1 infection is dependent upon the local or distal participation of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes early in the course of the infection, suggesting an indirect effect of the transgene against HSV-1-induced mortality.
The Specialization of the Districts: From Typical Final Goods to Machinery for Making Them?

The main idea of this paper is that bank internationalization might encourage exports as banks’ foreign branches and representative offices provide financial and informational support to exporting firms. This hypothesis has been tested using bank and firm data at Italian province-level between 1993 and 2001. The empirical analysis suggests that there is a positive relationship between bank internationalization and export propensity. The effect seems to be concentrated in the scale and high-technology sectors (according to Pavitt classification), presumably reflecting the greater need for banks’ support in more complex and product-differentiated markets.
Fault-Tolerance in Distributed Real-Time Systems

Fault-tolerance in real-time systems is defined informally as the ability of the system to deliver correct results in a timely manner even in the presence of faults. Dependable real-time systems are being developed in diverse applications including avionics, air-traffic control, plant automation, automotive control, telephone switching, and automatic stock trading. These systems often operate under strict dependability and timing requirements that are imposed due to the interaction with the external environment. Meeting these requirements is complicated by the fact that a real-time system can fail not only because of software or hardware failures, but also because the system is unable to execute its critical functions in time. This talk examines the interdependencies between real-time and fault-tolerance requirements, and presents various schemes for supporting redundancy while maintaining timing predictability. The talk also highlights operating system and communication support unique to the development of such systems. We draw upon examples from several distributed real-time systems including MARS, Totem, Delta-4 XPA, and ARMADA to illustrate these concepts. First, we will identify several distinguishing characteristics of real-time systems. We will discuss the distinction between hard and soft timing requirements, and highlight scheduling technologies to support real-time computing. Second, the problem of predictable redundancy management is considered. In particular, we will examine passive and active replication schemes that provide fault-tolerance while maintaining timing predictability. We will also discuss how certain design methods effectively exploit accuracy( or quality of service ) as a third dimension to the traditional tradeoff between the time vs. space redundancy. Finally, system software to support the development of fault-tolerant real-time systems is described. We will identify requirements unique to such systems including operating system suppo~, real-time communication, and clock synchronization.
Topical cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene replacement for cystic fibrosis-related lung disease.

BACKGROUND Cystic fibrosis is caused by a defective gene encoding a protein called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), and is characterised by chronic lung infection resulting in inflammation and progressive lung damage that results in a reduced life expectancy. OBJECTIVES To determine whether topical CFTR gene replacement therapy to the lungs in people with cystic fibrosis is associated with improvements in clinical outcomes, and to assess any adverse effects. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the Cochrane Cystic Fibrosis and Genetic Disorders Group Trials Register comprising references identified from comprehensive electronic database searches, handsearching relevant journals and abstract books of conference proceedings. Date of most recent search: February 2007 SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised controlled trials comparing topical CFTR gene delivery to the lung, using either viral or non-viral delivery systems, with placebo or an alternative delivery system in people with confirmed cystic fibrosis. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS The authors independently extracted data and assessed study quality. Authors of included studies were contacted and asked for any available additional data. Meta-analysis was limited due to differing study designs. MAIN RESULTS Three randomised controlled trials met the inclusion criteria for this review, involving a total of 155 participants. Thirteen studies were excluded. The included studies differed in terms of CFTR gene replacement agent and study design, which limited the meta-analysis. Although the first Moss study reported a significant improvement in respiratory function (FEV(1)) 30 days after participants had received their first dose of gene therapy agent, this finding was not confirmed in their larger second study or in our meta-analysis.In participants who received the CFTR gene transfer agents in the Alton study, "influenza-like" symptoms were found (relative risk 7.00 (95% confidence interval (CI) 1.10 to 44.61)). There were no other significant increases in adverse events in any of the studies. Alton measured ion transport in the lower airways and demonstrated significant changes toward normal values in the participants who received gene transfer agents (P < 0.0001), weighted mean difference 6.86 (95% CI of 3.77 to 9.95). In these participants there was also evidence of increased salt transport in cells obtained by brushing the lower airway. These outcomes, whilst important, are not of direct clinical relevance. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS There is currently no evidence to support the use of CFTR gene transfer reagents as a treatment for lung disease in people with cystic fibrosis. Future studies need to investigate clinically important outcome measures.
Evaluation of a Toolkit to Assist With Implementation of the “80/20” Recommendation

OBJECTIVES: This project developed and evaluated a toolkit for use by nurse executives in New York State (NYS) hospitals in implementing the recommendation that 80% of the registered nursing workforce be prepared with a BSN by 2020. BACKGROUND: While the literature substantiates the link between BSN preparation for RNs and enhanced patient outcomes, few resources exist to assist nurse executives in increasing their proportion of BSN-prepared RNs. METHODS: Seven NYS nurse executives received the toolkit electronically and evaluated the efficacy of the contents. RESULTS: Nurse executives found the toolkit beneficial and shared it inside and outside their organizations. CONCLUSIONS: The toolkit was considered a valuable resource in increasing the proportion of BSN-prepared RNs in these organizations.
rban forest resilience through tree selection — Variation in drought olerance in Acer

It is widely recognized that trees contribute a range of ecosystem services in urban environments. However, the magnitude of their contribution is closely related to their physiological condition and capacity to persist within our towns and cities. Root loss during transplanting, limited soil volume, disruption to soil hydrological processes and impermeable surfaces result in water deficits being major physiological stress limiting the performance of urban trees. The leaf water potential at turgor loss ( P0) provides a robust measure of drought tolerance since a more negative P0 allows the leaf to maintain physiological function over a wider range of leaf water potentials and, by implication, soil matric potentials ( soil). In this study, P0 was calculated for 27 maple (Acer) genotypes based on a known linear relationship between the osmotic potential at full turgor ( 100) and P0. In spring, P0 varied between −1.4 MPa in Acer carpinifolium and −2.7 in both Acer rubrum ‘Northwood’ and Acer x freemanii ‘Autumn Blaze’. During summer, Acer spicatum had the highest P0 at −1.6 MPa and Acer monspessulanum had the lowest P0 at −4.3 MPa. Significant differences in P0 were found between cultivars of A. rubrum and Acer saccharum. A highly significant relationship was found between seasonal osmotic adjustment and summer P0 suggesting that osmotic adjustment is a driving force for summer P0 in Acer leaves. These data confirm the wide range of tolerance to water deficits in Acer and give important insight into the potential of species to tolerate periods of low water availability by providing quantitative data not previously available. The technique shows great promise as a screening tool for the drought tolerance of new and traditional plant material. This data will be highly relevant for those selecting trees for urban sites as well as for nurseries seeking to evaluate genotypes for production purposes. © 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
Comparative analysis of sustainable facilities planning and users' satisfaction in Nigerian universities - a standardised residuals approach

This study explores the influence of facilities planning on users' satisfaction in the work environment of three South-West Nigeria universities selected randomly based on federal, state, and private ownership structure. It sought answers to questions relating to the relationships between sustainable facilities planning and users' satisfaction, the strength of the relationships, and the contributive values of the scale for users' satisfaction in the universities. 186 questionnaires were administered to staff and students, and a response rate of 91.9% achieved. The results of cross tabs, standardised residuals and symmetric measures showed weak statistical association between the two variables across the universities, with response time as a common denominator. The study agrees with Steiss (2005) that a systematic planning effort is vital in decision making about construction and financing of strategic facilities. It was concluded that university administrators optimise operations in capital budgeting, space utilisation, response time, and interconnectivity of facilities by strengthening the association between the two variables. The study contributes to the discussion about student-staff perception of sustainable facilities planning in their universities.
A Proposed Textual Graph Based Model for Arabic Multi-document Summarization

Text summarization task is still an active area of research in natural language preprocessing. Several methods that have been proposed in the literature to solve this task have presented mixed success. However, such methods developed in a multi-document Arabic text summarization are based on extractive summary and none of them is oriented to abstractive summary. This is due to the challenges of Arabic language and lack of resources. In this paper, we present a minimal languagedependent processing abstractive Arabic multi-document summarizer. The proposed model is based on textual graph to remove multi-document redundancy and generate coherent summary. Firstly, the original text, highly redundant and related multidocument, will be converted into textual graph. Next, graph traversal with structural rules will be applied to concatenate related sentences to single ones. Finally, unwanted and less weighted phrases will be removed from the summarized sentences to generate final summary. Preliminary results show that the proposed method has achieved promising results for multidocument summarization.
Sales promotion in Asia: successful strategies for Singapore and Malaysia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the globalisation/culture issue by comparing two Asian countries in which there has been limited prior research regarding their respective supermarket industries, namely, Singapore and Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach – The research design adopted a case-study approach, with two general cases (the New Singaporean and Malaysian supermarket retail industries), made up of two embedded cases each (retailers and manufacturers operating within each country). Findings – The overall finding is that despite prior assumptions that suitability is reliant on product type or country choice, there are a number of sales promotion techniques that are inherently suited to the supermarket industry as a whole. The majority of these “inherently suitable” techniques are price-based and the conclusion is then that these techniques can be used globally. Value-added techniques, on the other hand, should be localised to fit with the market in which they are being applied. Pra.
Refractory cardiogenic shock in a patient with β‐thalassemia major requiring mechanical circulatory support: Case report and literature review

Iron overload cardiomyopathy secondary to β‐thalassemia major is a potentially reversible condition managed with chelation and medical hemodynamic support, as bridge‐to‐recovery or transplant. We describe our experience, and challenges faced, in a pediatric patient with iron overload cardiomyopathy secondary to β‐thalassemia major, requiring biventricular MCS.
Chinese Customers’ Evaluation of Travel Website Quality: A Decision-Tree Analysis

Web design in tourism organizations has become one of the key factors in maintaining a successful travel business. With questions of sustainability plaguing travel agencies, questions on how they should allocate their limited resources for website development to meet changing consumer needs while producing an effective and efficient website linger. This study provides a new technique and tool, decision trees and Weka, that identifies critical attributes that influence quality levels of a customer’s experience when visiting a travel agency’s website. The exploratory study derived eight evaluation attributes based on the attention, interest, desire, and action model. The study generated decision trees via Weka, a data-mining open-source software platform, to analyze the datasets from a web-based experiment. Results indicate that information quality is the most important attribute in designing the website of a travel agency. Then, attributes that enhance the simplicity of websites, such as ease of use, personalization, and flexible reservations, are considered by the customer when evaluating the website quality. Attractiveness can only contribute to evaluations of a website’s quality after usefulness and website simplicity have been determined. Keeping the website useful, simple, and attractive—in that order—will give managers of travel agencies the guidance to design their websites and improve company performance. This study confirms prior research and indicates that decision trees and Weka are viable techniques in evaluating travel agency websites and promotional materials.
Information Leadership and Volatility Spillover Across the Countries: A Case of Indian and Other Asian Equity Markets

Return and volatility spillover among Indian stock market with that of 12 other developed and emerging Asian countries over a period from November 1995 to May 2005 is studied. Daily opening and closing prices of all the major equity indices from the sample countries are examined by applying the GARCH model [Engle (1982) and Bollerslev (1986)] to explore the possibility of information leadership and volatility spillover across the national markets. Apart from different degrees of correlations, both in terms of return and squared return series, among Indian stock market with that of other Asian countries, the contemporaneous intraday return spillover among India and almost all the sample countries are found to be positive and significant. Based on the comparison among the spillover effects in both intraday and overnight return of the domestic market, it will be clear that the foreign market return spillover affect the Indian open-to-close return much greater than its close-to-open return. But in case of volatility spillover from the foreign markets to India, most of the new and pertinent information would be revealed in the opening prices of NIFTY and/or SENSEX, thereby having a stronger effect on the close-to-open (overnight) return in Indian equity market.
Situation Management Over the Smart Grid

The article encloses a systematization of energy monitoring and management methods for increasing the efficiency of the Smart Grid on basis of the situation management. The Situation Management is determined as a binding process between strategic and tactical administrations of the energy consumption. Also Situation Management may be considered as an integration of two technologies of energy savings: one of one‘s is based on the systems of energy management and another technology is a SmartGrid. The work was performed as part of the Russian Federation grant MK-5279.2014. 8 "Synthesis of efficient technologies for remote monitoring and managing of intellectual power system with active-adaptive network. "
Phase-conjugate wavefront generation via real-time holography in Bi12SiO20 crystals.

Continuous-wave phase-conjugate wavefront generation via real-time holography in Bi12 SiO20 crystals is presented. The efficiency of the device is analyzed in terms of wavefront reflectivity. Electro-optic configurations allowing gain in the reflected wave intensity are considered. Applications include real-time imaging through phase-disturbing media, optical processing, and interferometry.
Persian Proposition Bank

This paper describes the procedure of semantic role labeling and the development of the first manually annotated Persian Proposition Bank (PerPB) which added a layer of predicate-argument information to the syntactic structures of Persian Dependency Treebank (known as PerDT). Through the process of annotating, the annotators could see the syntactic information of all the sentences and so they annotated 29982 sentences with more than 9200 unique verbs. In the annotation procedure, the direct syntactic dependents of the verbs were the first candidates for being annotated. So we did not annotate the other indirect dependents unless their phrasal heads were propositional and had their own arguments or adjuncts. Hence besides the semantic role labeling of verbs, the argument structure of 1300 unique propositional nouns and 300 unique propositional adjectives were annotated in the sentences, too. The accuracy of annotation process was measured by double annotation of the data at two separate stages and finally the data was prepared in the CoNLL dependency format.
Using the Computer Science and Applications (CSA) Activity Monitor in Preschool Children

The primary aim of this study was to assess the ability of the CSA accelerometer to measure physical activity in preschool children. A secondary aim was to examine inter-instrument differences and the effect of accelerometer placement on output. Eleven subjects (mean age = 4.0 years, SD = 0.4) wore the CSA-7164 for a 45-min preschool exercise class. They were observed throughout the class, and their engagement in activity was quantified using the Children’s Physical Activity Form (CPAF). The effect of accelerometer positioning (left vs. right hip) was assessed in 10 subjects over 2 days. CSA output during the class was highly correlated with the CPAF score (r = 0.87, p < .001), and rank order correlations between the 2 methods were also highly significant (r = 0.79, p < .01). Differences in CSA output between left and right hip reached statistical significance (paired t, p < .05), but these differences were small and probably of limited biological significance. The CSA appears to be an appropriate tool fo.
A Rex Family Transcriptional Repressor Influences H2O2 Accumulation by Enterococcus faecalis

ABSTRACT Rex factors are bacterial transcription factors thought to respond to the cellular NAD+/NADH ratio in order to modulate gene expression by differentially binding DNA. To date, Rex factors have been implicated in regulating genes of central metabolism, oxidative stress response, and biofilm formation. The genome of Enterococcus faecalis, a low-GC Gram-positive opportunistic pathogen, encodes EF2638, a putative Rex factor. To study the role of E. faecalis Rex, we purified EF2638 and evaluated its DNA binding activity in vitro. EF2638 was able to bind putative promoter segments of several E. faecalis genes in an NADH-responsive manner, indicating that it represents an authentic Rex factor. Transcriptome analysis of a ΔEF2638 mutant revealed that genes likely to be involved in anaerobic metabolism were upregulated during aerobic growth, and the mutant exhibited an altered NAD+/NADH ratio. The ΔEF2638 mutant also exhibited a growth defect when grown with aeration on several carbon sources, suggesting an impaired ability to cope with oxidative stress. Inclusion of catalase in the medium alleviated the growth defect. H2O2 measurements revealed that the mutant accumulates significantly more H2O2 than wild-type E. faecalis. In summary, EF2638 represents an authentic Rex factor in E. faecalis that influences the production or detoxification of H2O2 in addition to its more familiar role as a regulator of anaerobic gene expression.