Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Betamethasone for the induction of parturition in dairy cows: a comparison of formulations.

Abstract Five hundred and fifty three dairy cows on 27 farms were treated with betamethasone formulations to induce premature parturition. All cows received an initial subcutaneous injection of 20mg betamethasone alcohol as a 10mg/ml suspension. Cows not calved within 7 days received a subcutaneous injection of betamethasone either as a 2mg/ml suspension of the poorly soluble alcohol or as a 2mg/ml solution of the sodium phosphate ester. One hundred and three cows calved within 7 days of initial injection (Group I), 222 received an injection of the 2mg/ml suspension (Group II) and 223 were treated with the betamethasone solution (Group III). Cows in Group I were closer to term at time of treatment than cows in Group II + III (16.6 days compared to 29.9 days). Those cows which failed to calve within 10 days of the second injection were an average of 50.5 days away from term at time of treatment. The mean response-time from first injection to calving was 9.6 and 9.1 days for Groups II and III, respectively .
Exploring New Statistical Methods for Causal Inference in Longitudinal Studies

This study proposes a novel method to provide unbiased effect estimates in the presence of time-dependent confounding and applies the method in an existing merged multi-source nursing home dataset to examine the effect of antipsychotic medication use on all cause mortality. Using standard methods, effect estimates of time-varying exposures from observational data will be biased in the presence of time-dependent variables that are simultaneously confounders and intermediate variables. (Robins et al. 2000) This situation is common in clinical practice whenever treatment initiation, treatment choice, or treatment dose change over time and are based on surrogate markers that are affected by prior treatment. For example, in the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive patients with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), CD4 cell count and HIV RNA levels represent time-varying surrogate markers that are affected by prior treatment and are strong risk factors for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and death. In this context, only methods that appropriately adjust for such timedependent covariates are able to show the beneficial effect of HAART in observational data, while standard methods fail to find significant benefit. (Cole et al. 2003) Unbiased estimation of the mortality risk of antipsychotic treatment of elderly nursing home residents for behavioral symptoms of dementia from observational data is likely subject to similarly problematic conditions. For example, observed behavioral symptoms may simultaneously predict antipsychotic treatment initiation and Department of Statistics, Rutgers University. E-mail: ztan@stat.rutgers. edu. Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, Rutgers University.
AIS Electronic

Good explanatory constructs for Data, Information and Knowledge are central to the Information Systems (IS) field in general, and in particular to theorising how best to generate insight from Data. The central role of Knowledge within such theory has been highlighted recently, as well as the importance of Learning and Research frames (for Data Analytics). Building on these ideas, this paper briefly reviews several related literatures, for relevant ideas to enrich IS theory building. A consensus is found as to the complex, socially constructed nature of Knowledge or Knowing, and the importance of human sensemaking for theorizing how new insight is generated. The paper argues for an intuitive conceptual and practical distinction between Data (which exists as an independent, reified resource), and Information and Knowledge (both of which are embodied or embrained). It briefly outlines how the ideas identified can contribute to theorizing, highlighting specific areas for further inter-disciplinary research.
Measuring service delivery

Argues that Statistical process control is not limited solely to manufacturing applications and that major benefits are to be gained from introducing SPC in administrative and staff support functions. Considers that improving service delivery requires constant measurement against established standards of performance. Describes the key features of SPC programmes. Contends that control charts on their own will not result in improvement. Discusses the use of SPC techniques and asserts that, although not easy to implement, for those organisations which are beginning to introduce them in non‐manufacturing areas, the potential for improvement in quality of service is considerable.
An Examination of Inflated Bank Capital and Credit Risks in China

Since the historical capital regulation by China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) in 2004, Chinese banks have reported remarkable capital growth in their statements. This study examines the impacts of heavily issued and cross-held subordinate debt (SD) towards inflated capital adequacy ratios (CARs) and the credit risks of Chinese banks when they meet regulatory requirements between 2004 and 2009. Our findings suggest that mandatory capital regulations in China have significantly improved bank capital levels despite the widespread window-dressing practice. In addition, the well-capitalised Chinese banks have lowered their credit risks in our sample period. However, the undercapitalised banks may require more strict regulations.
Crowd-Funding: Transforming Customers into Investors through Innovative Service Platforms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emerging crowd‐funding phenomenon, that is a collective effort by consumers who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet, in order to invest in and support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Successful service businesses that organize crowd‐funding and act as intermediaries are emerging, attesting to the viability of this means of attracting investment.Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a “grounded theory” approach, performing an in‐depth qualitative analysis of three cases involving crowd‐funding initiatives: SellaBand in the music business, Trampoline in financial services, and Kapipal in non‐profit services. These cases were selected to represent a diverse set of crowd‐funding operations that vary in terms of risk/return for the investor and the type of payoff associated to the investment.Findings – The research addresses two research questions: how and why do consumers turn into crowd‐funding .
Exonerating Unethical Marketing Executive Behaviors: A Diagnostic Framework

Although unethical marketing behaviors of corporations have been studied and some normative frameworks suggested for judging their ethicality, no research has focused on assessing individual responsibilities of marketing executives for the consequences of their unethical actions. The author identifies major factors that exonerate executive responsibility and those that enhance. He derives ten testable research propositions that constitute the framework for the diagnostic model. The model challenges marketing executives to go beyond legal and attributional responsibilities to appropriational responsibilities of commitment to consumers they serve.
DEVELOPING A METHOD FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF EVIDENCE ON THE IMPACTS OF TRANSPORT POLICY INSTRUMENTS

There are some 70 types of land use and transport policy instruments in use in urban areas the help define urban transport policy, and the performance of each differs depending on the size and density of the urban area in question. This paper describes the development of KonSULT, an on-line Knowledge base on Sustainable Urban Land use and Transport. KonSULT provides an up to date compendium of the understanding of the performance of the range of policy instrument available to policy makers, based on experience throughout the developed world. The instrument is intended to be of benefit to transport professionals in developing urban transport strategies and in selecting, designing and implementing specific measures.
Note on Corporate Governance in Japan

It is often said that monitoring tasks are spread out in Japanese corporate governance. Shareholders, employees, and lenders -- particularly a main bank -- all play some role in Japanese corporate governance. It is, however, difficult to show how exactly each constituency monitors management in Japanese publicly held business corporations. I argue that two recent theories -- substitutabilities and complementarities -- would enrich the analysis in this area. Substitutabilities suggest that as capital markets grow further, the importance of monitoring mechanisms by banks and employees reduce. Complementarities suggest different stories. Monitoring by shareholders and in capital markets may not function well unless the mechanism of law enforcement is improved. Where lifetime employees are dominant in the firm's decision-making, information supplied by banks and other business partners may produce more value, so that bank monitoring works better than where managers are selected from employees who worked for the firm for long years. The combination of substitutabilities and complementarities also aids in the analysis of scandals.
Working Capital Management and Firm's Profitability: An Optimal Cash Conversion Cycle

The traditional link between the cash conversion cycle and the firm's profitability is that shortening the cash conversion cycle increases firm's profitability. On the other hand shortening the cash conversion cycle could harm the firm’s operations and reduces profitability. However, identifying optimal levels of inventory, receivables, and payables where total holding and opportunities cost are minimized and recalculating the cash conversion cycle according to these optimal points provides more complete and accurate insights into the efficiency of working capital management. In this regard, we suggest an optimal cash conversion cycle as more accurate and comprehensive measure of working capital management.
Demonstration of monolithically integrated graphene interconnects for low-power CMOS applications

In recent years, interconnects have become an increasingly difficult design challenge as their relative performance has not improved at the same pace with transistor scaling. The specifications for complex features, clock frequency, supply current, and number of I/O resources have added even greater demands for interconnect performance. Furthermore, the resistivity of copper begins to degrade at smaller line widths due to increased scattering effects. Graphene has gathered much interest as an interconnect material due to its high mobility, high current carrying capacity, and high thermal conductivity. DC characterization of sub-50 nm graphene interconnects has been reported but very few studies exist on evaluating their performance when integrated with CMOS. Integrating graphene with CMOS is a critical step in establishing a path for graphene electronics. In this thesis, we characterize the performance of integrated graphene interconnects and demonstrate two prototype CMOS chips. A 0.35 prm CMOS chip implements an array of transmitter/receivers to analyze end-to-end data communication on graphene wires. Graphene sheets are synthesized by chemical vapor deposition, which are then subsequently transferred and patterned into narrow wires up to 1 mm in length. A low-swing signaling technique is applied, which results in a transmitter energy of 0.3-0.7 pJ/bit/mm, and a total energy of 2.4-5.2 pJ/bit/mm. We demonstrate a minimum voltage swing of 100 mV and bit error rates below 2x10-. Despite the high sheet resistivity of graphene, integrated graphene links run at speeds up to 50 Mbps. Finally, a subthreshold FPGA was implemented in 0.18 pm CMOS. We demonstrate reliable signal routing on 4-layer graphene wires which replaces parts of the interconnect fabric. The FPGA test chip includes a 5x5 logic array and a TDC-based tester to monitor the delay of graphene wires. The graphene wires have 2.8x lower capacitance than the reference metal wires, resulting in up to 2.11x faster speeds and 1.54x lower interconnect energy when driven by a low-swing voltage of 0.4 V. This work presents the first graphene-based system application and demonstrates the potential of using low capacitance graphene wires for ultra-low power electronics. Thesis Supervisor: Jing Kong Title: ITT Career Development Associate Professor Thesis Supervisor: Anantha P. Chandrakasan Title: Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor
A Combined Treatment Approach for Adults With ADHD—Results of an Open Study of 43 Patients

Objective: Increasing numbers of adults are seeking treatment for ADHD. Pharmacotherapy is well established as the first line treatment for adult ADHD, although medications alone may be insufficient treatment for the myriad problems experienced by these patients. Few studies have examined the clinical outcomes of a combination of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for this clinical population. The purpose of the present study is to examine the potential effectiveness of the combination of pharmacotherapy and cognitive-behavior therapy modified to treat adult patients diagnosed with ADHD. Method: Forty-three adults who underwent a structured diagnostic assessment for ADHD complete 6 months of combined treatment. Treatment outcome is assessed by comparing pre- and posttreatment measures of ADHD symptoms, comorbid symptoms, and ratings of overall functioning. Results/Conclusion: Results indicate that combined treatment is associated with significant improvements on all clinical measures. Limitations of the study design and directions for future research are discussed.
Toward a 21st Century Quality-Measurement System for Managed-Care Organizations

As the Nation's largest managed-care purchaser, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) is working to develop a uniform data and performance-measurement system for all enrollees in managed-care plans. This effort will ultimately hold managed-care plans accountable for continuous improvement in the quality of care they provide and will provide information to consumers and purchasers to make responsible managed-care choices. The effort entails overhauling peer review organization (PRO) conduct of health maintenance organization (HMO) quality review, pilot testing a new HMO performance-measurement system, establishing criteria for Medicaid HMO quality-assurance (QA) programs, adapting employers' HMO performance reporting systems to the needs of Medicare and Medicaid, and participation in a new alliance between public and private sector managed-care purchasers to promote quality improvement and accountability for health plans.
Out-of-core implementation of the parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm

OUT-OF-CORE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PARALLEL MULTILEVEL FAST MULTIPOLE ALGORITHM Bariscan Karaosmanoglu M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Levent Gurel August 2013 We developed an out-of-core (OC) implementation of the parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) to solve electromagnetic problems with reduced memory. The main purpose of the OC method is to reduce in-core memory (primary storage) by using mass storage (secondary storage) units. Depending on the OC implementation, the in-core data may be left in one piece or divided into partitions. If the latter, the partitions are written out into mass storage unit(s) and read into in-core memory when required. In this way, memory reduction is achieved. However, the proposed method causes time delays because reading and writing large data using massive storage units is a long procedure. In our case, repetitive access to data partitions from the mass storage increases the total time of the iterative solution part of MLFMA. Such time delays can be minimized by selecting the right data type and optimizing the sizes of the data partitions. We run the optimization tests on different types of mass storage devices, such as hard disks and solid state drives. This thesis explores OC implementation of the parallel MLFMA. To be more precise, it presents the results of optimization tests done on different partition sizes and shows how computation time is minimized despite the time delays. This thesis also presents full-wave solutions of scattering problems including hundreds of millions of unknowns by employing an OC-implemented parallel MLFMA.
Conservation of a chromosome arm in two distantly related marsupial species

Marsupials, which diverged from eutherian mammals 150 million years ago (MYA), occupy a phylogenetic position that is very valuable in genome comparisons of mammal and other vertebrate species. Within the marsupials, the Australian and American clades (represented by the tammar wallaby Macropus eugenii, and the opossum Monodelphis domestica) diverged about 70 MYA. G-banding and chromosome painting suggest that tammar wallaby chromosome 6q has homology to opossum chromosome 7q. We tested this conservation by physically mapping the tammar wallaby orthologs of opossum chromosome 7q genes. We isolated 28 tammar wallaby BAC clones that contained orthologs of 16 opossum chromosome 7q genes. We used fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) to show that they all mapped specifically to the tammar wallaby chromosome 6q in nearly the same order as their orthologs on opossum chromosome 7q. Thus this chromosome arm is genetically, as well as cytologically, conserved over the 55–80 million years that separate kangaroos and the opossum.
Aggregation of Mutant Cu/Zn Superoxide Dismutase Proteins in a Culture Model of ALS

Mutations in the Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD-1) gene underlie some familial cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (FALS), a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by loss of cortical, brainstem, and spinal motor neurons. To investigate the mechanisms responsible for the toxicity of mutant enzyme, SOD-1 cDNAs bearing mutations found in FALS patients (mSOD) were expressed in cultured spinal motor neurons, dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and hippocampal neurons. Many features of motor neuron disease seen in humans with FALS and in transgenic mouse models were reproduced, including preferential susceptibility of motor neurons to toxicity of mSOD. Abnormal cytoplasmic aggregation of mSOD protein was observed in mSOD-expressing motor neurons, but never in neurons expressing SODwt enzyme, and was followed by evidence of apoptotic cell death. Such aggregates were not observed in nonvulnerable neuronal populations expressing mSOD (DRG or hippocampal neurons). Aggregation of SOD-1 may contribute significantly to the death of motor neurons expressing mutations associated with FALS-1 and the mechanisms leading to aggregation may pertain to the specific vulnerability of motor neurons in this disease.
Fate and distribution of 2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP) in rats.

Fischer 344 rats were given a single dose of 0.60 mg/animal of [2-14C]2-amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo[4,5-b]pyridine (PhIP) by gavage; and radioactivity contained in feces, urine, blood, serum proteins, hemoglobin, and tissues was determined at 12, 24, 48 and 96 h after dosing. One major and four minor radioactivity-containing fractions were found in the urine and one major and two minor radioactivity-containing fractions were found in the feces. The feces was the major route of excretion, representing 78% of dose during the first 24 h, and unchanged PhIP in the feces accounted for 51% of the dose. Unmetabolized PhIP was also shown to be the major radioactive fraction in bile and feces from animals given a single dose by i.p. injection. Blood contained a small fraction of the dose and the major, persistently-bound form of PhIP in the blood was to hemoglobin. At 12 h after administration of the dose the colon and cecum contained the highest concentration of radioactivity, while at later times the kidney and liver showed the highest concentration. Of the tissue-contained radioactivity 80-90% was ethanol insoluble at time points later than 24 h, suggesting that it was covalently bound to macromolecules.
A Study of Overweight and Obesity Among Secondary School Students in Dubai : Prevalence and Associated Factors

Obesity is a major public health problem all over the world. It has become a global epidemic in both industrialized and developing countries. The dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity among school children is associated with significant health and financial burdens; warranting strong and comprehensive prevention efforts. Objectives: Measurement of the prevalence of overweight and obesity among secondary school students in Dubai and determination of the associated factors. Materials & methods: Multistage stratified random sample was carried out in secondary schools in Dubai. The stratification was based upon region, gender and language. One class from each grade of educational level was selected randomly. The students were subjected to a self-administrated questionnaire that included personal data, family history, and dietary habits. Weight and height were measured. The sample amounted to 1186 students. Results: The results revealed that the prevalence of overweight and obesity was 26.7%, 12.2% respectively. Male encountered a significant higher percentage of overweight & obesity (30.1% &15.4% respectively) than females (23.1% & 8.9% respectively, p<0.05). Nonnational students experienced a higher percentage of overweight & obesity (29.2% & 12.8% respectively) compared to nationals (20.2% &10.6% respectively) and this was statistically significant. It was found that students in grade ten were more likely to become overweight or obese compared to those in grades eleven or twelve(30.8%, 25.2 % & 22.1% for overweight respectively) and for obesity (15.3%, 10.4% & 9.7% respectively). Stepwise logistic regression analysis delineated five predictors for overweight and obesity. These predictors were in order: eating fast food regularly, positive family history of obesity, male gender, those in tenth grade and nonnational students; the associated risks were (OR = 1.44, 1.51, 1.79, 1.72, and 1.41 respectively). Conclusion & recommendations: The present study revealed that overweight and obesity are highly prevalent among secondary school students in Dubai. Urgent and effective community intervention programs are highly required in order to combat this problem.
Active Ownership and ESG Performance

This chapter will examine the literature on active ownership and the influence that large shareholder groups can exert on companies to achieve better ESG performance. It will ask: How do large shareholders exert influence? What strategies do they adopt? Are these strategies effective? The chapter will also propose a theoretical model to evaluate the effectiveness of shareholder engagement. The model will be illustrated through case studies of shareholder engagements conducted by a number of fund managers.
An Approach for Identifying Road Traffic Information using Opinion Mining from Twitter Messages

—In recent years, online conversation has become very popular. Common people share their thoughts, views, ideas and comments on their topic of interest on the social networking sites. The important thing is the content generated from these social media sites remains mostly unused. These contents in terms of text data are preserved like historical data. Although there is a growing research concerned with retrieval of data from social media, the information extraction using social media data is limited because of its unstructured format. This article presents a text mining approach to identify the road traffic information collected from microblogs like twitter messages. The result shows the challenge in interpreting the unstructured text and extracting useful information from it. This approach provides an efficient way to extract opinions using Text mining techniques integrated with supervised learning methods, classification and rated against an evaluation criteria.