Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Health Financing in Ghana

The report is divided into five chapters. This chapter provides background on demographic and epidemiological trends, the configuration of Ghana's health system, and health financing functions and health systems goals. It also describes Ghana's health financing system. Chapter two assesses the performance of Ghana's health system with respect to these goals through international comparisons of health outcomes, inputs, spending, and financial protection as well as time series comparisons of trends in other countries in Africa. Chapter three identifies the strengths and weaknesses of Ghana's health system, which determine Ghana's health reform baseline. Chapter four analyzes the sustainability of the National Health Insurance Scheme, or NHIS in the context of Ghana's future fiscal space, based on Ghana's new standing as a lower-middle-income country. Chapter five analyzes major structural and operational reform options that will help ensure the long-term efficacy and sustainability of the NHIS.
Poor Predictive Value of Serum Creatinine for Renal Allograft Loss

Both medical care and pharmaceutical development have led to an increase in expected graft and patient survival for patients who undergo renal transplantation. From a research perspective, it has become increasingly difficult to study the efficacy of new therapies using traditional ‘hard’ endpoints. In reaction to this dilemma, the transplant community has sought a surrogate endpoint. A natural candidate for a surrogate marker for graft loss that has been proposed is renal function (serum creatinine or calculated GFR levels).
Signaling through Timing of Stock Splits

We develop a dynamic structural model of stock splits, in which managers can signal their private information though the timing of the split decisions. Our approach is consistent with the empirical evidence that shows that the majority of stock splits have 2:1 ratio but are announced at various initial price levels. The model allows us to estimate the preferences of investors about nominal share price levels from stock split data. In addition, we can decompose the split announcement return into the value of new information and the signalling costs. Our estimates show the signalling cost is around 2%.
Injury incidence and balance in rugby players

Objective : This study determined and correlated injury incidence and balance in rugby players. Methods: A prospective survey with balance testing was conducted on first year rugby academy players (N= 114). Injury incidence, static and dynamic balance were tested pre and post-season using a Biosway portable balance system. The data was analysed using paired and independent samples t-tests at p<0.05, Odds ratios, and Spearman’s correlation coefficients. Results: 75.50% participated, 71.40% were 18 years old, and 71.40% were White. Injury was sustained by 83% of players with the knee (25%) most commonly injured. Injury incidence was 1.52 per player with an injury rate of 5.95 injuries per 1000 match playing hours. The Stability Index increased significantly (p=0.03) by 15% in the medial/lateral direction post-season compared to pre-season. Significant differences in post-test anterior posterior and overall static and front and front right dynamic stability between injured and uninjured players were noted. Risk factors for injury included the scrum-half (14.80%) playing position, injuries in the 2nd half of the match (57%), and during contact (67%). Conclusion : Injury incidence was related to static and dynamic balance in forward right direction only.
Marked inhibition of transplant vascular sclerosis by in vivo-mobilized donor dendritic cells and anti-CD154 mAb1

Background. Combination of donor dendritic cells (DC) and anti-CD40 Ligand (L) (CD154) monoclonal antibody (mAb) markedly prolongs heart or skin allograft survival, but the influence of this strategy in models of chronic rejection is unknown. Our aim was to ascertain the influence of in vivo-mobilized immature donor DC plus anti-CD40L mAb on vascular sclerosis in functional murine aortic allografts. Methods. C3H He/J (C3H;H2k) mice received 2×106 freshly isolated, immunobead-purified (>90%) fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 ligand-mobilized C57BL/10 (B10;H2b) CD11c+ DC intravenously (IV), together with 500 &mgr;g of anti-CD40L mAb (MR1) intraperitoneally (IP) on days −7, 0, 4, and 10. Controls received either no donor cells, no mAb, or were untreated. B10 aortic grafts were transplanted in the abdominal aorta on day 0. At day 30, antidonor T-cell proliferative and cytotoxic responses and both complement fixing and immunoglobulin (Ig)G alloantibody levels were determined. Grafts were harvested on days 30 and 60 and examined by histology and immunohistochemistry. Results. DC infusion alone enhanced ex vivo antidonor proliferative and cytotoxic T-cell activity. By contrast, complement-fixing alloantibody levels were reduced. Anti-CD40L mAb alone strongly suppressed each of these responses. Graft inflammatory cell infiltration, intimal smooth muscle cell proliferation, fibrosis, and elastic lamina disruption observed in untreated animals were reduced in response to anti-CD40L mAb or donor DC alone. Antidonor immune reactivity, including IgG levels, and intimal proliferation were all markedly suppressed to an overall greater extent in mice given both treatments. Conclusion. Whereas blockade of the CD40-CD40L pathway ameliorated transplant vasculopathy, preservation of near-normal vessel architecture was achieved by simultaneous administration of donor DC. This strategy represents a novel application of DC for suppression of chronic rejection.
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

In this evaluation of a pilot project to design and build an online customer support system, we present our initial findings in the form of a micro case study. We describe the historical system and the problems it presented, we then detail the proposed prototype and red-flag possible areas of concern. We close with our recommendations for the successful implementation of a (cid:145)real(cid:146) solution. The Irish company in question has requested anonymity as it has been bought over by a multinational and is in the process of a total review of its information systems deployment, including its eCCRM procedures.
Corporate portfolio management within Japanese diversified trading & investment companies : what role does real estate play?

This paper discusses possible optimal corporate portfolio composition for Japanese trading and investment firms from stakeholders’ (specifically shareholders and employees) value maximization perspective. Based on the historical returns of diversified business units of 4 subject companies, performances of individual business units and three portfolios (current, tangency, and “suboptimal”) are analyzed and compared. The study suggests adjusting suboptimal portfolio composition based on each business unit’s systematic risk and excess market return relative to its systematic risk and industry average. A firm also needs consideration on how the composition adjustment would affect diversification benefits the firm now enjoys and also on its overall management strategy.
Biosorption of Cr(III) by Microalgae and Macroalgae: Equilibrium of the Process

Equilibrium experiments of chromium(III) biosorption by microalga (Spirulina sp.) and macroalga (Pithophora varia) were investigated in this paper. Influence of the following process parameters was studied: pH, biomass concentration and temperature. The equilibrium of the process was described with Langmuir equation. The model parameters were determined at various process conditions. The best operation conditions for the process were selected: pH 5, T 20oC, Cs 1g.l-1 for Pithophora varia and the same for Spirulina sp. Under these conditions, the maximum biosorption capacity 60.6 mg.g-1 and 34.6 mg.g-1, and affinity constant 0.182 l.mg-1 and 0.0553 l.mg-1 were reached for Pithophora varia and Spirulina sp. , respectively. It was found that Pithophora varia was more efficient in biosorption of Cr(III) ions than Spirulina sp. Biosorptive properties of microalgal and macroalgal biomass can be employed either in the production of biological feed supplements for livestock or in wastewater treatment processes.
Fault-Tolerant Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks

The integrity of data has tremendous effects on the performance of any data acquisition system. Noise and other disturbances can often degrade the information or data acquired from these systems. Devising a fault-tolerant mechanism in wireless sensor networks is very important due to the construction and deployment characteristics of these low powered sensing devices. More over, due to the low computation and communication capabilities of the sensor nodes, the fault-tolerant mechanism should have a very low computation overhead. In this paper, we present a novel methodology to hierarchically design and implement a protocol for checking the integrity of data from a sensor-node.
Cruise Visitors’ Intention to Return as Land Tourists and Recommend a Visited Destination: A Structural Equation Model

This study analyses cruise visitors' travel experience, their intention to return to a destination as land tourists and the probability to recommend. Consumer's satisfaction is evaluated by taking into account the economic production factors, that is human and physical capital. "Satisfaction with prices" is also included to evaluate the monetary value of the overall purchasing experience. Safety in the harbour is considered as a further attribute. The empirical data were collected via a survey of cruise ship passengers that stopped in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) during 2009. A structural equation model (SEM) is developed. The findings reveal that satisfaction is positively affected by human and physical capital, while overall satisfaction positively influences customers' loyalty. Loyalty is also positively influenced by prices, whereas negatively by an unsafe perception. Finally, loyalty positively effects both the probability of return as land tourists and to recommend, though with a different magnitude.
Joint models for concept-to-text generation

Much of the data found on the world wide web is in numeric, tabular, or other nontextual format (e.g., weather forecast tables, stock market charts, live sensor feeds), and thus inaccessible to non-experts or laypersons. However, most conventional search engines and natural language processing tools (e.g., summarisers) can only handle textual input. As a result, data in non-textual form remains largely inaccessible. Conceptto-text generation refers to the task of automatically producing textual output from non-linguistic input, and holds promise for rendering non-linguistic data widely accessible. Several successful generation systems have been produced in the past twenty years. They mostly rely on human-crafted rules or expert-driven grammars, implement a pipeline architecture, and usually operate in a single domain. In this thesis, we present several novel statistical models that take as input a set of database records and generate a description of them in natural language text. Our unique idea is to combine the processes of structuring a document (document planning), deciding what to say (content selection) and choosing the specific words and syntactic constructs specifying how to say it (lexicalisation and surface realisation), in a uniform joint manner. Rather than breaking up the generation process into a sequence of local decisions, we define a probabilistic context-free grammar that globally describes the inherent structure of the input (a corpus of database records and text describing some of them). This joint representation allows individual processes (i.e., document planning, content selection, and surface realisation) to communicate and influence each other naturally. We recast generation as the task of finding the best derivation tree for a set of input database records and our grammar, and describe several algorithms for decoding in this framework that allows to intersect the grammar with additional information capturing fluency and syntactic well-formedness constraints. We implement our generators using the hypergraph framework. Contrary to traditional systems, we learn all the necessary document, structural and linguistic knowledge from unannotated data. Additionally, we explore a discriminative reranking approach on the hypergraph representation of our model, by including more refined content selection features. Central to our approach is the idea of porting our models to various domains; we experimented on four widely different domains, namely sportscasting, weather forecast generation, booking flights, and troubleshooting guides. The performance of our systems is competitive and often superior compared to state-of-the-art systems that use domain specific constraints, explicit feature engineering or labelled data.
Do Banks Affect the Level and Composition of Industrial Volatility and How?

In theory, better access to bank credit can increase or reduce output volatility depending on whether financially constrained firms face more cash-flow or investment opportunity shocks. This paper finds that countries with high levels of bank credit have low volatility of industrial output. Most of the reduction in volatility is idiosyncratic, which follows from the ability of banks to pool and diversify shocks. Systematic volatility is also reduced, but less strongly so. Volatility dampening is achieved via counter-cyclical borrowing: at the firm level, short-term borrowing is more negatively correlated with sales in countries with high levels of bank credit.
Emerging drugs for non-small cell lung cancer

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the world. Therapeutic improvements caused by recent cytotoxic agents seem to have reached a plateau. New therapeutic strategies are, therefore, necessary to improve the cure rate. These include receptor-targeted therapy, signal transduction or cell-cycle inhibition, angiogenesis inhibitors, cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) inhibitors, gene therapy and vaccines. The antiepidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) group includes compounds acting on the extracellular domain of EGFR, such as IMC-C225 and trastuzumab; small molecules inhibiting EGFR phosphorylation, such as ZD 1839 and OSI-774; or compounds that interfere with one of the downstream steps, such as mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MEK) inhibitors. Farnesyl transferase inhibitors, such as SCH66336, and protein kinase C inhibitors, such as ISIS 3521, have also shown antitumour activity. Antiangiogenesis inhibitors include matrix metalloprotease inhibitors (MMPIs), such as marimastat, AG3340, BAY 12-9566, BMS-275291 and Col-3. Antiangiogenic agents offer great potential for the treatment of lung cancer, as shown in preclinical models, whereas emerging data suggest that there are limits to their use as monotherapy in advanced disease. Molecules targeting vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) or its receptor (VEGFR) also seem to control tumour progression and may prolong survival. COX-2 inhibitors are another class of agents currently under evaluation in clinical trials for their chemoprevention role in subjects at high lung cancer risk, and also in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in combination with standard chemotherapeutics. Genetic and immunologic therapies represent two additional promising modalities. All of these therapies are in different phases of clinical testing and have shown encouraging activity alone or in combination with chemotherapy drugs.
Mycotoxins in small grains and maize: Old problems, new challenges

This paper reviews the challenges relating to chronic contamination of small grains and maize with deoxynivalenol and related compounds, fumonisin and the use of ensiled cereals in cool dairy areas. Uncertainties in the tolerable daily intakes for deoxynivalenol and fumonisin are discussed as they have the potential to affect current regulatory limits. In addition, climate change is resulting in more extreme rainfall and drought events which favour formation of deoxynivalenol and fumonisin, respectively. The development and refinement of models for predicting mycotoxin accumulation from weather data will become an essential tool for managing these events. Such models are also important for providing timely food aid to developing countries, which experience increased occurrence of acute toxicities, especially in children. Chronic contamination of silage in some areas with some Penicillium toxins deserves more attention in terms of their economic effects and possible implications for the purity of milk.
Inotropic and Anesthetic Potencies of Etomidate and Thiopental in Dogs

The effects of etomidate and thiopental on myocardial contractility were compared in 10 experiments on isolated papillary muscle preparation perfused by a conscious donor dog. Equianesthetic doses of etomidate (1.4 mg/kg) and thiopental (15.5 mg/kg) were determined separately in conscious dogs. Tension developed by the papillary muscle decreased significantly less after etomidate (17 ± 2%) than after thiopental (33 ± 3%) (P < 0.002) when injected intravenously in equianesthetic doses in donor dogs. When added to arterial blood perfusing the papillary muscle, etomidate had 4–5 times more negative inotropic effect than thiopental. At the same time, the anesthetic potency of etomidate was approximately 11 times greater than that of thiopental. We conclude that both etomidate and thiopental produce a dose-dependent direct negative inotropic effect but that in equianesthetic doses, etomidate causes less pronounced depression of myocardial contractility than thiopental.
The App in Everyday Life: Research Overview for Doctoral Colloquium

My PhD focuses on studying mobile apps in everyday life. Taking an ethnomethodological approach, my thesis draws upon findings from three studies of app usage -- moving from the micro through to a macro perspective, using video and interview methods. The first study focuses on how users complete specific information search tasks: map-reading and internet search. Study two describes how app use is interwoven with communication, including through talk with co-present others. In the last study I provide a macro perspective on apps, investigating the economic potential of the Uber "rideshare" taxi app in the management and distribution of labour.
Pengaruh Karakteristik Corporate GovernanceTerhadap Kemungkinan Terjadinya Corporate Failurepada Perusahaan Manufaktur yang Listing di BEI

This study aims to analyze and provide empirical evidence the effect of corporate governance characteristics like outside directors, outside ownership, audit opinion, remuneration of boards member, independent audit committee, and board size on probability of corporate failure. The population in this study consists of manufacturing companies listed in Indonesia Stock Exchange. Observation period was 2011-2012. Data was collected by using a purposive sampling method. The total number of samples is 147 companies, consist of 57 failed companies and 90 non-failed companies. The research data were analyzed with logistic regression. The empirical result of this study show that outside ownership and audit opinion are significantly affect the probability of corporate failure. While outside directors, remuneration of boards member, independent audit committee, and board size has no effect on probability of corporate failure
Threats Escalate: Corporate Information Technology Governance Under Fire

In a previous publication The Board’s Responsibility for Information Technology Governance, (with Kara Altenbaumer-Price) we examined: The IT Governance Institute’s Executive Summary and Framework for Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology 4.1 (COBIT®); reviewed the Weill and Ross Corporate and Key Asset Governance Framework; and observed “that in a survey of audit executives and board members, 58 percent believed that their corporate employees had little to no understanding of how to assess risk. ” We further described the new SEC rules on risk management; Congressional action on cyber security; legal basis for director’s duties and responsibilities relative to IT governance; major sources of IT risk; schematic for an IT governance framework; suggested fundamental questions every board should ask; examined board structure, composition and required IT governance skills; litigation risks and a recital of recent cases; mitigating risk through insurance; and the importance of business continuity planning. As the result of the proliferation of cyberattacks during 2010 and 2011, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance announced new disclosure guidance for cybersecurity issues during October, 2011. It has become apparent that newly-disclosed attacks on Information Technology infrastructure have reached crisis proportions. Therefore, a focus on IT governance must be a major priority of management and every corporate board. Issues involving Information Technology are uniquely complex and involve engineering skills that quickly become obsolete in this era of rapid technological change. Here, suggestions are offered about the value of a Chief Information Security Officer and recommendations are made for improving cybersecurity. An examination of recent threats will hopefully assist in bringing a greater understanding of their nature and increased focus on IT governance to the agenda in every boardroom.
Reliable decentralized supervisory control of discrete event systems

We consider a discrete event system controlled by a decentralized supervisor consisting of n local supervisors, and formulate a decentralized supervisory control problem, called a reliable decentralized supervisory control problem. A decentralized supervisor is said to be k-reliable (1/spl les/k/spl les/n) if it exactly achieves a specification language under possible failures of any less than or equal to n-k local supervisors. First, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a k-reliable decentralized supervisor. Next, we consider the case that there does not exist a k-reliable decentralized supervisor for a given specification language. We take two approaches in this case. In the first approach, we present an algorithm for computing a sublanguage of the specification which satisfies the existence conditions of a k-reliable decentralized supervisor. In the second one, we use a coordinator to synthesize a k-reliable decentralized supervisor without altering the specification.
Is the brain overrated?

Preceding the Cambrian explosion by millions of years, jellyfish have a history that goes back at least 650 million years, and they were probably the first multicellular organisms to become motile. Most jellyfish have rather simple visual mechanisms that suggest their humble beginnings, but in vision one class of these creatures stands out. The cubozoan jellyfish, a class in the phylum Cnidaria, are visually precocious and have surprisingly sophisticated ocular anatomy. While other jellyfish have primitive eyes, the cubozoans have camera style eyes, much like squid or even vertebrates, although distinct differences exist. This class of jellyfish has members that vary in size, and Tripedalia cystophora , seen on this month’s cover, is one of the smallest of the jellyfish at 10–12 mm long. In the Caribbean, this species preys upon copepods, a tiny shrimp-like zooplankton, and must rely upon its vision to keep it in the shafts of light that filter between the mangrove roots where the copepods swarm. The approximately 14 species of cubozoans are cuboidal in shape, as their name suggests, with roughly square sides to the bell. The stinger laden tentacles extend from each of the four corners of the …