Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vancomycin in the treatment of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – a clinician’s guide to the science informing current practice

Clinicians treating an infection assess a patient in terms of disease manifestation, causative organism and available antibiotic options with the aim of devising a therapeutic strategy under the creed of ‘first, do no harm’. It is often only when treatment is failing or options are limited, as in the scenario of multidrug-resistant organisms, that consideration is given to the interplay that occurs between the microbe and the host. The emergence of Staphylococcus aureus with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin provides a prime example of these dynamic interactions. This review shall explore these concepts in relation to vancomycin for the treatment of methicillin-resistant S. aureus, with the aim of providing an informed approach to the utilization of this drug.
Towards an Efficient City Inventory Management System for Urban Authorities in Developing Countries – The Case of 3D Change Detection

As cities and urban areas grow and become more complex, the task of managing, updating and displaying three‐dimensional urban information can be challenging for city and urban authorities. The emergence of 3D city models has enabled the authorities to work with more reliable and competent data as 3D data (and maps) are proven to be more accurate and relatable in representing real world objects and scenarios. In South East Asia countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, urban development activities are dynamic causing city inventory information to change within short periods of time. The ability to detect and track the changes on building structures located in a city can avoid loss of revenue to the urban authorities as well as improving the efficiency of a city inventory in assisting the decision making process on management level. City inventory management system should be able to store and provide information especially related to the building structure that is needed by the local authority to manage a city efficiently. Current traditional methods utilized by most urban authorities in South East Asia region are inefficient and unable to cope with current complex scenarios in urban areas. This results in some valuable information for building management and information systems being discarded. This research presents a method to boost the efficiency of some aspect in city inventory for local authorities by introducing 3D change detection method on 3D city models. The proposed method is able to detect and analyse changes that occur on 3D buildings using the 3D segmentation approach. A hybrid semantic‐geometric 3D segmentation method that deals with segmentation of a 3D building based on its semantic value and surface characteristics, fitted by one of the predefined primitives is presented. The technique is designed to retain existing semantic and geometric information and ultimately enrich it by adding more specialized information. For future work, the proposed method will be implemented as part of the auto‐updating module that is able to detect any changes on 3D buildings such as storage and retrieval of semantic information of the changed structure, and automatically update the 3D city models for analysis.
Buyer Behavior and Related Technological Advances

The author offers his views regarding consumer behavior research, the progress in this field, and the impact of developments on market researchers, marketing executives, company presidents, public policy makers, and basic researchers. In the author's opinion, the integration of these developments represents a major breakthrough in marketing with important implications for the 1970s.
Market Imperfections and Subsistence Farming: The Case of Kosovo

Rural areas in Kosovo, although covering 60 per cent of the population, do not contribute much to the economic growth. One of the reasons for this situation is that agriculture is stagnating because most of the farms produce for self-consumption. Imports are thus required to meet the urban demand, particularly of wheat, milk and dairy products (Lingard, 2003). Transforming agricultural households into more commercialised farm operators would help generate additional income in rural areas. This paper investigates whether there are market deficiencies on input or output side, which would require government intervention in order to facilitate farm commercialisation. Agricultural households might not have access to output market due to an underdeveloped downstream sector and a lack of contractual relations with processors and traders. On the other side, local producers might not be preferred in comparison to imports as their production level is low with unsatisfactory and variable quality due to constraints on the input markets. This might be the case in Kosovo due to a lack of off-farm opportunities (and thus oversupply and underemployment of labour on-farm), a limited access to credit (resulting in underinvestment and low quality inputs used on-farm) and a high land fragmentation but missing institutions for land consolidation. The only exception is a pilot project Agriculture Land Utilisation project (ALUP) funded by the European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR) which mainly provides technical assistance but does not have the financial capacity to proceed with a wide coverage of land consolidation in practice. To answer these questions, data from the Agricultural Household Survey (AHS) of 2004 are used and a methodology derived from a household model framework is applied.
Multiscale image sharpening adaptive to edge profile

The color image has different edge profiles depending on the objects placed in the scene. We propose a novel image-sharpening method adaptive to the local edge slopes with the suppression of background noises. Prescanning the image by a Gaussian derivative (GD) filter, we generate the edge map, which classifies the edge areas to hard, medium, and soft edges, and separates the flat areas without edges. Multiple GD filters with different standard deviations are selectively applied to sharpen each segmented edge area by looking up the edge map. To keep the gray balance, the edge-sharpening filters are applied only to the luminance image. In flat areas except edges, the sharpening filters are resumed and instead, a Gaussian smoothing filter is applied to reduce the background noises. The proposed method brings a dramatic improvement in the reduction of flat-area noises and the natural image-sharpening effects adaptive to the edge slopes. In addition, we newly introduce quality assessment indices to evaluate the image sharpness and flat-area noises with the experimental data.
Cars and Clothing: Understanding Fashion Trends

Keeping attuned to fashion trends is crucial to the success of companies in many industries. This article explains that fashion trends can be detected fairly easily if the marketer is aware of certain factors which help to determine whether a particular innovation will go on to become an accepted fashion. According to the author, fashion trends may be of two types which faciliate the prediction of peaks in fashion popularity and the point in time when the trend is likely to die out.
UREDT: Unsupervised Learning Based Real-Time Footfall Event Detection Technique in Seismic Signal

Footstep-based systems have myriad uses like activity monitoring, person identification, and fall detection, to name a few. These highly perceptive systems employ seismic signals generated from human footfall events. Extraction of such events from a time-varying signal is a vital aspect of signal analysis. The essential quality of such an event detection technique lies in its capacity to retain its optimum performance in the face of ever-changing background noise in the signal. All the common off-the-shelf event detection techniques need to be adjusted to this environmental noise. Our proposed technique alleviates this problem as it requires no such repeated adjustment of parameters with varying environmental conditions. This technique has an inherent dynamic capability to adapt to fluctuating noise levels. We have compared our technique with amplitude, STA/LTA, and Kurtosis-based techniques. We have used the proposed technique to detect human footfall signals recorded by using seismic sensors. The performance of our technique has been tested on both indoor and outdoor seismic signals to study its behavior in the presence of various environmental noises. It has been found that our proposed technique outperforms all other aforementioned techniques in both scenarios.
The Working Capital Management Practices of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lanka

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in any economy as they are capable of generating employments, promoting the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), embarking innovations and stimulating all other economic activities. This sector is said to be the backbone of all developed and developing nations. Therefore the development of SME sector is paramount important for any country irrespective of their level of development.
Interpersonal Continuity of Care and Care Outcomes: A Critical Review

PURPOSE We wanted to undertake a critical review of the medical literature regarding the relationships between interpersonal continuity of care and the outcomes and cost of health care. METHODS A search of the MEDLINE database from 1966 through April 2002 was conducted by the primary author to find original English language articles focusing on interpersonal continuity of patient care. The articles were then screened to select those articles focusing on the relationship between interpersonal continuity and the outcome or cost of care. These articles were systematically reviewed and analyzed by both authors for study method, measurement technique, and quality of evidence. RESULTS Forty-one research articles reporting the results of 40 studies were identified that addressed the relationship between interpersonal continuity and care outcome. A total of 81 separate care outcomes were reported in these articles. Fifty-one outcomes were significantly improved and only 2 were significantly worse in association with interpersonal continuity. Twenty-two articles reported the results of 20 studies of the relationship between interpersonal continuity and cost. These studies reported significantly lower cost or utilization for 35 of 41 cost variables in association with interpersonal continuity. CONCLUSIONS Although the available literature reflects persistent methodologic problems, it is likely that a significant association exists between interpersonal continuity and improved preventive care and reduced hospitalization. Future research in this area should address more specific and measurable outcomes and more direct costs and should seek to define and measure interpersonal continuity more explicitly.
The effects of shopping aid usage on consumer purchase decision and decision satisfaction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast two types of shopping aids, that is, research‐supporting and solution‐oriented shopping aids, and examine their effectiveness, considering both consumer and situational factors.Design/methodology/approach – Expanded selection and additional detailed information are chosen to illustrate research‐supporting shopping aids, and personalized product recommendations and product ratings are used as examples of solution‐oriented shopping aids. This conceptual paper proposes that usage of shopping aids has an effect on the purchase likelihood and decision satisfaction and focuses on studying the moderating role of consumer product knowledge and time pressure. The thesis is that congruence between the type of a shopping aid and consumer characteristics, such as product knowledge, or situational characteristics, such as time pressure, should enhance the effectiveness of shopping aids.Findings – The research propositions in this paper delineate how the us.
Compact Circularly Polarized Asymmetrical Fractal Boundary Microstrip Antenna for Wireless Applications

Compact fractal boundary microstrip antenna is proposed for circular polarization (CP). By replacing the sides of a square patch with asymmetrical prefractal curves, two orthogonal modes are excited for CP operation. The structure is asymmetric along the principal axes (x, y). The indentation parameter of the fractal boundary curve is optimized to design compact CP antennas. Experimental results show that 10-dB return loss and 3-dB axial-ratio bandwidths of the proposed fractal boundary Ant 2 are 162 and 50 MHz, respectively, at operating frequency of around 2540 MHz. Results show that an excellent CP is achieved with a single probe feed, besides reduction in the antenna size by applying fractal boundary concept.
The Impact of Family Control of Firms on Leverage: Australian Evidence

This paper investigates whether leverage of family controlled firms differs from that of non-family controlled firms. Using data from publicly listed industrial firms in Australia traded over 1998 to 2002, family controlled firms appear to have higher levels of leverage than non-family counterparts. Results indicate that the families' incentive to use debt as a means of concentrating voting power outweighs the need to reduce debt in order to mitigate firm risk. Additional analyses show that the desire to use debt as a means for concentrating control is stronger for both smaller family firms and family firms operating in the mining sector. These results add new findings to the leverage literature.
Reducing the burden of communication disorders in the developing world: an opportunity for the millennium development project.

AT THE MILLENNIUM SUMMIT IN SEPTEMBER 2000 IN New York, leaders of 189 countries, including 147 heads of state and government, adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a global partnership to work toward 8 development goals. This project has since emerged as the global priority for resource allocation to the developing world through 2015. Three of the 8 goals—“to reduce child mortality,” “improve maternal health,” and “combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases”—are directly related to health, while the others—“to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger,” “achieve universal primary education,” “promote sex equality and empower women,” “ensure environmental sustainability,” and “develop a global partnership for development”—are indirectly linked to health. Eight of the 18 targets and 18 of the 48 indicators are health related. However, given the myriad problems confronting most developing countries, it is not surprising that some conditions received less attention and others were overlooked or forgotten outright. The World Health Organization (WHO) and other groups have drawn attention to the prevention of chronic diseases, which accounted for an estimated 35 million deaths in 2005. Although health status is often measured in terms of mortality trends, there is a growing recognition of the disease burden associated with diverse health conditions besides mortality. For example, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer not only account for high mortality rates but also cause physical and functional disabilities. Based on the current WHO definition, disability is viewed more within the context of a health condition or disorder that limits activity and that may restrict participation in daily life situations for the affected individuals. Paradoxically, most disabilities are life-long and therefore constitute chronic diseases. Health care systems in the developing world, where 80% of the more than 600 million individuals with disabilities worldwide reside, rarely make provision for adequate intervention services. The millennium development project now presents a unique opportunity to redress the neglect of disabilities in the developing world.
Service excellence from the employees’ point of view: the role of first line supervisors

What role can service employees’ direct supervisors play in stimulating service excellence? The aim of the current study was to provide more insight into the relationship between perceived leader behaviour and employees’ willingness to provide excellent service as well as their perceptions of service quality. In a survey study involving more than 3,500 service employees, the impact of the behaviours of first‐line supervisors on service related outcomes was studied. Supervisors’ supportive behaviours, providing useful information, giving feedback, fair evaluations of performance and their direct stimulation of service related behaviours were all found to be positively related to service outcomes. The results as well as the practical implications of these findings are discussed.
The Elderly Patient at Risk

As the baby-boom generation turn age 65, it is important that nurses are informed about the unique problems of the elderly patient, particularly because the elderly represent the highest percentage of clients in hospitals, homecare, and long-term and subacute nursing facilities. Infusion nurses, particularly those in homecare, are in a pivotal position to proactively identify acute illness at an early stage and thereby improve outcomes in this vulnerable population. To do this, infusion nurses must understand the normal changes that come with aging, the profile of the elderly patient at greatest risk for poor outcomes, and the often-atypical presentation of illness. Additionally, infusion nurses must be informed about tools used to assess and monitor the patient’s status. Finally, infusion nurses must understand the increased potential for iatrogenesis in the elderly and provide proactive interventions to avert its occurrence to improve quality of life and outcomes for this population.
Homogeneous proximity tyrosine kinase assays: scintillation proximity assay versus homogeneous time-resolved fluorescence.

Two homogeneous proximity assays for tyrosine kinases, scintillation proximity assay (SPA) and homogeneous time-resolved fluorescence (HTRF), have been developed and compared. In both formats, the kinase assay was performed using biotinylated peptide substrate, ATP ([33P]ATP in the case of SPA), and tyrosine kinase in a 96-well assay format. After the kinase reaction was stopped, streptavidin-coated SPA beads or europium cryptate-labeled anti-phosphotyrosine antibody and streptavidin-labeled allophycocyanin were added as detection reagents for SPA or HTRF assays, respectively. Since the assay signal was detected only when the energy donor (radioactivity for SPA, Eu for HTRF) and the energy acceptor molecules (SPA beads for SPA, allophycocyanin for HTRF) were in close proximity, both assays required no wash or liquid transfer steps. This homogeneous ("mix-and-measure") nature allows these assays to be much simpler, more robust, and easier to automate than traditional protein kinase assays, such as a filter binding assay or ELISA. Both assays have been miniaturized to a 384-well format to reduce the assay volume, thereby saving the valuable screening samples as well as assay reagents, and automated using automated pipetting stations to increase the assay throughput. Several advantages and disadvantages for each assay are described.
A Study on Telecom Customer Satisfaction Index

The MII publicized national Telecom Customer Satisfaction Index (TCSI) on March 15,2002.As the members of the group doing research on TCSI test, the authors used the testing method of Customer SatisfactionIndex applied in other countries in the light of specific conditions in China and developed TCS model and test program in theory and in practice.
Another nonlinear conjugate gradient algorithm for unconstrained optimization

A nonlinear conjugate gradient algorithm which is a modification of the Dai and Yuan [A nonlinear conjugate gradient method with a strong global convergence property, SIAM J. Optim. 10 (1999), pp. 177–182] conjugate gradient algorithm satisfying a parameterized sufficient descent condition with a parameter δ k is proposed. The parameter δ k is computed by means of the conjugacy condition, thus an algorithm which is a positive multiplicative modification of the Hestenes and Stiefel [Methods of conjugate gradients for solving linear systems, J. Res. Nat. Bur. Standards Sec. B 48 (1952), pp. 409–436] algorithm is obtained. The algorithm can be viewed as an adaptive version of the Dai and Liao [New conjugacy conditions and related nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, Appl. Math. Optim. 43 (2001), pp. 87–101] conjugate gradient algorithm. Close to our computational scheme is the conjugate gradient algorithm recently proposed by Hager and Zhang [A new conjugate gradient method with guaranteed descent and an efficient line search, SIAM J. Optim. 16 (2005), pp. 170–192]. Computational results, for a set consisting of 750 unconstrained optimization test problems, show that this new conjugate gradient algorithm substantially outperforms the known conjugate gradient algorithms.
Efficient image scrambling using polyphase filter banks

Proposes a modification to the classic time-frequency permutation method of signal scrambling which reduces its complexity and memory requirements without decreasing its performance. This new approach is applicable to any filter bank or transform and requires only that the decomposition in question be implemented in a polyphase form. To minimize the computational complexity, modulated polyphase filter banks like the cosine-modulated and allpass filter banks can be selected. Using a two dimensional extension to the basic algorithm, the authors consider the problem of image scrambling and include simulation results. <<ETX>>
Optimal allocation of embedded generation on the Irish distribution network

As a result of the restructuring of electricity markets and the targets laid down for renewable energy, increasing amounts of Embedded Generation are being connected to distribution networks. To accommodate this new type of generation the existing distribution network should be utilised and developed in an optimal manner. This paper explains the background to the technical constraints faced by EG projects and a methodology using linear programming to determine the optimal allocation of EG with respect to these constraints is demonstrated. The methodology is implemented and tested on sections of the Irish distribution network. Results are presented demonstrating that the proper placement and sizing of EG is crucial to the accommodation of increasing levels of EG on distribution networks.
Establishing a Trust-Worthy Social Authentications

Among the several backup authentication mechanisms, authenticating users with the help of their friends (i.e., trustee-based social authentication) has been shown to be a promising backup authentication mechanism. A user in this system is associated with a few trustees that were selected from the user’s friends. When the user wants to regain access to the account, the service provider sends different verification codes to the user’s trustees. The user must obtain at least k (i.e., recovery threshold) verification codes from the trustees before being directed to reset his or her password. In this paper, we provide the first systematic study about the security of trusteebased social authentications. In particular, we first introduce a novel framework of attacks, which we call forest fire attacks. In these attacks, an attacker initially obtains a small number of compromised users, and then the attacker iteratively attacks the rest of users by exploiting trustee-based social authentications. Then, we construct a probabilistic model to formalize the threats of forest fire attacks and their costs for attackers. Moreover, we introduce various defense strategies. Finally, we apply our framework to extensively evaluate various concrete attack and defense strategies using three real-world social network datasets. Our results have strong implications for the design of more secure trustee-based social authentications.