Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INVESTMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND FIRM PERFORMANCE : A STUDY OF THE VALVE MANUFACTURING SECTOR

Large amounts of resources have been and continue to be invested in information technology (IT). Much of this investment is made on the basis of-faith that returns will occur. This study presents the results of an empirical test of the performance effects of IT investment in the manufacturing sector. Six years of historical data on IT investment and performance was collected for 33 valve manufacturing firms from the CEO, the controller and the production manager in each firm. Investment was perceptually categorized by management objective (i.e.: into strategic, informational and transactional) and tested against four measures of performance (sales growth, return on assets, and two measures of labour productivity). Heavy use of transactional IT investment was found to be significantly and consistently associated with strong firm performance over the six years studied. Heavy use of strategic IT was found to be neutral in the long term and associated only with relatively poor performing firms in the short term. This study suggests that early adopters of strategic IT could have spectacular success but once the technology becomes common the competitive advantage is lost. In addition, the context of the firm was included in the analysis. Conversion effectiveness, which measures the quality of the firm-wide management and commitment to IT, was found to be a significant moderator between strategic IT investment and firm performance. (CISR) at MIT for providing a supportive sabbatical environment during the writing of this paper. Technology and its effective use in organizations has received much attention in the literature. Many of the seminal studies of technology were of production task technology in manufacturing firms [Woodward 1959]-[Hickson et-al. 1969]-[Burns & Stalker 1961] [Blau et al. 1976]. Information technology (IT) is a relatively new phenomena and less is known about the impacts of its use in contemporary organizations. Despite this, investment in IT has increased dramatically, accounting for an ever increasing proportion of U.S. capital stock. In the service sector, where IT is usually the task technology, IT as a percent of capital stock increased threefold from 6.4% in 1970 to 19.8% in 1988. In the manufacturing sector, where IT is often not the task technology, the increase has been even more pronounced, There is very little convincing evidence that investments in IT generate positive financial returns [Roach 88]. Many IT investment studies "found little persuasive evidence that IT investments created stong leverage on the value of the firm" [Kauffman …
Image denoising using a multivariate shrinkage function in the curvelet domain

A new method based on the curvelet transform is proposed for image denoising. This method exploits a multivariate generalized spherically contoured exponential (GSCE) probability density function to model neighboring curvelet coefficients. Based on the multivariate probability model, which takes account of the dependency between the estimated curvelet coefficients and their neighbors, a multivariate shrinkage function for image denoising is derived by maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator. Experimental results show that the proposed method obtains better performance than the existing curvelet-based image denoising method.
Heart Association Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee Sudden Cardiac Arrest. A Science Advisory for the Public From the American Action for Bystander Response to Adults Who Experience Out-of-Hospital Hands-Only (Compression-Only) Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation: A Call to

Copyright © 2008 American Heart Association. All rights reserved. Print ISSN: 0009-7322. Online 72514 Circulation is published by the American Heart Association. 7272 Greenville Avenue, Dallas, TX DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.107. 18938
Community Treatment of Eating Disorders

About the Author. Acknowledgements. Introduction. Chapter 1: Establishing a Home-oriented Service. Chapter 2: Staff. Chapter 3: Initial Outpatient Assessment. Chapter 4: Physical Assessment and Monitoring. Chapter 5: Psychological Interventions. Chapter 6: Day Care. Chapter 7: Liaison and Outreach. Chapter 8: Inpatient Care. Chapter 9: Rehabilitation: Dealing with SEED. Chapter 10: Technical and Academic Aspects. References. Index.
A new input matching technique for ultra wideband LNAs

A noise reduction input matching technique for broadband low noise amplifiers (LNAs) is presented. The proposed LNA employs a positive active feedback network besides of the conventional common-gate (CG) amplifier to achieve both wideband input signal matching and low noise figure (NF), simultaneously. Compared to the conventional broadband noise cancellation techniques, the presented approach achieves the same NF with much less power consumption and high linearity. Circuit level analysis and simulation results are provided to verify the usefulness of the proposed LNA technique. In contrast to the traditional noise cancellation circuit, the proposed LNA does not degrade the linearity and its IIP3 is similar to the simple common-gate LNA. The proposed technique is applied to an LNA operating in 2∼6.5GHz bandwidth.
Overview of new and developing pharmacological treatments

There are several reasons why new pharmacological treatments are needed for type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. First, the global prevalence of type 2 diabetes continues to grow despite the efforts to improve prevention. Existing treatments do not halt the progression of the disease. Single or multiple oral therapies are often unable to achieve or maintain glycaemic control, and vascular complications remain rife.1 Another important factor is the cost of managing type 2 diabetes. It has been estimated that diabetes consumes 9–14% of total healthcare budgets in Europe and North America.2 Treatment of type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome is complicated by many factors ( Figure 1 ). Disease progression presents a moving target for treatment. In most cases, insulin action has deteriorated to the point of insulin resistance long before type 2 diabetes is diagnosed. Insulin resistance may initially be compensated for by a period of hyperinsulinaemia in some individuals, but insulin secretion will typically have deteriorated to at least 50% below normal capacity by the time diagnosis is made. It is believed that insulin resistance underlies the metabolic syndrome, and risk factors for coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes are components of this syndrome. Figure 1 Type 2 diabetes: treating a moving target.13 (Reproduced with the permission of Blackwell Publishing.) Metabolic syndrome occurs on average in 20% of adults in the western societies and in >40% of those who are in older age groups.3 Importantly, the condition is not static but progressive. Thus, by analogy with the treatment of type 2 diabetes, it is necessary to modify the treatment of various manifestations of metabolic syndrome as the condition progresses ( Figure 1 ). In the current armamentarium for type 2 diabetes, there are treatments to reduce basal and post-prandial glycaemia by the modification of insulin …
Normal Echocardiographic Findings in Four Month Old Male Ostrich (Struthio camelus)

Summary Echocardiography in birds is a useful and competent technique for morphological and functional cardiac assessment. The aim of this study was to establish normal reference echocardiographic values for ostrich. Echocardiographic parameters from 25 apparently healthy male and almost 4 month old ostrich were chosen for this experiment. Echocardiography was prepared from the second and third intercostals space and over the sternum. The mean and standard deviation was calculated for each parameter. The values obtained are: The left ventricular internal diameter at end systole and end diastole was 1.50±0.2 and 2.70±0.16 cm; left ventricular free wall at end systole and end diastole was 0.89±0.04 and 0.62±0.03 cm; inter ventricular septum at end systole and end diastole was 0.99±0.81 and 0.65±0.11 cm, respectively. The stroke volume was 20.98±2.56 cm 3 and fractional shortening was 44.41±0.53%. Normal echocardiographic values in the healthy birds may be used as early diagnostic and prognostic values in ostriches with cardiac diseases.
Case Article - Vermillion OVA1 Test

Tying classroom material to current business events helps motivate and engage students. It also exposes them to examples of how to apply what they learn in practice. We present an example of how, in a course on modeling with spreadsheets, we used or article in The Wall Street Journal WSJ about approval of a medical test as the basis for an exercise on conditional probabilities, conflicting objectives, and the value of information. We present the plan of the discussion followed in class and the exercises assigned to students to help them understand the concepts. We use spreadsheet functions and tools new to many of our students, in particular, lookup functions and tools for sensitivity analysis. We also demonstrate how to create and interpret a tornado chart. We believe that examining the WSJ article in detail has value because it allows students to solidify their understanding of conditional probabilities and spreadsheet modeling and also gives them an appreciation of the complexities and the balancing of multiple perspectives in medical decision making. Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.
Case Article - Embedding a Sustainability Module Into Quantitative Business Courses

Business schools face pressure to incorporate sustainability and ethics into curricula, not only by offering single-themed classes but also by including these topics in existing classes. We embed a stand-alone module, sustainability and supply chain management, into two quantitative courses, the graduate core operations class and an undergraduate concentration class in management science. We develop this module to provide students the background and tools to analyze energy usage and resultant greenhouse gas GHG emissions for a product or process. Students research a supply chain, use carbon auditing software, and make recommendations for improvement. To answer the research question of whether students perceive the module as useful and objective we perform an exploratory survey N = 76. We find that students are engaged and consider delivery as unbiased. In short, this module adds value to the learning experience and can be integrated into classes without extensive instructor preparation. Readers may freely download all supporting materials for use in their own courses. More generally, our approach could prove useful in developing modules on other sustainability subtopics to place into quantitative courses, so as to support the relationship between analytical and qualitative approaches to decision making, especially when those decisions involve ethical or environmental issues. Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.
PrivacyGuard: A VPN-based Platform to Detect Information Leakage on Android Devices

More and more people rely on mobile devices to access the Internet, which also increases the amount of private information that can be gathered from people's devices. Although today's smartphone operating systems are trying to provide a secure environment, they fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. Whereas there are a few tools that alert users when applications leak private information, these tools are often hard to use by the average user or have other problems. To address these problems, we present PrivacyGuard, an open-source VPN-based platform for intercepting the network traffic of applications. PrivacyGuard requires neither root permissions nor any knowledge about VPN technology from its users. PrivacyGuard does not significantly increase the trusted computing base since PrivacyGuard runs in its entirety on the local device and traffic is not routed through a remote VPN server. We implement PrivacyGuard on the Android platform by taking advantage of the VPNService class provided by the Android SDK. PrivacyGuard is configurable, extensible, and useful for many different purposes. We investigate its use for detecting the leakage of multiple types of sensitive data, such as a phone's IMEI number or location data. PrivacyGuard also supports modifying the leaked information and replacing it with crafted data for privacy protection. According to our experiments, PrivacyGuard can detect more leakage incidents by applications and advertisement libraries than TaintDroid. We also demonstrate that PrivacyGuard has reasonable overhead on network performance and almost no overhead on battery consumption.
Would be Melatonin Suitable for Obesity Treatment

Obesity and over-weight can be treated by diets and/or sport activities. The standard approaches for the therapy purposes are relatively safe and they are widely recommended. Unfortunately, efficacy of the therapies is limited and relapses of the obesity or overweight frequently occur. Introduction of surgical techniques such as restriction of stomach volume or bypassing the intestines is another option. The surgical techniques have some backwards as well. In the recent years, management of obesity by application of a new generation drugs seems to be suitable for a fast and reliable therapy. Beside newly developed drugs acting centrally, inhibitors of lipases and drugs reducing adipose formatting are available or tested [1]. The novel drugs, however, have either limited efficacy or significant adverse effects in course of the drugs toxicity and side impacts on the body homeostasis. Evidence of the adverse effects appoint at seriousness of the complications [2]. A surprising fact was found in evaluation of dietary supplements including melatonin which was able to initiate loses of weight or lower gain of weight in the treated individuals [3]. The findings related to melatonin are surprising as melatonin has main biological effect based on circadian rhythm control for which is traded. The pertinent therapy based on melatonin seems to be quite promising when considered low toxicity even when administered for a long time period [4]. Unfortunately, link between melatonin and metabolism control is not well understood and lack of information is quite limiting and not commonly accepted.
An Electronic Teaching Assistant for Basic Operations Management Methods

Software packages are frequently used to support the teaching of quantitative methods. In one possible approach, the educator demonstrates how to use a software package which implements the method considered in the lecture. In an alternative approach, students have to implement the considered method on their own. A popular type of software package used in Master of Business Administration classes for the second approach is the spreadsheet, since students can “program” in an intuitive way by entering formulas in the cells of the worksheet. While letting students implement a method on their own normally takes much longer than just a demonstration by the educator, it can be argued that the students develop a better understanding of the method through active learning. In this context, the spreadsheet-based tutoring system ExcelTutor was developed to help students learn the steps necessary to compute the results of a specific method. After a student has formulated the method on his or her own, ExcelTutor verifies the correctness of the final results and provides feedback on the time needed for the implementation.
Low-power fast (LPF) SRAM cell for write/read operation

Power consumption and Static noise margin (SNM) are most important parameters for memory design. The main source of power consumption in SRAM cell is due to large voltage swing on the bitlines during write operation. To reduce the power consumption and enhance the performance of the SRAM cell, we propose a Low-power fast (LPF) SRAM cell. The cell is simulated in terms of power, delay and read stability. The simulated result shows that the read and write power of the proposed cell is reduced up to 33% and 57.12% at 1.2V (in CMOS 0.12µm technology) respectively compared to the 6T cell. The read SNM of the LPF cell is 2x times of the conventional cell.
A Tempest in a Teacup? Analyzing firestorms on Twitter

`Firestorms,' sudden bursts of negative attention in cases of controversy and outrage, are seemingly widespread on Twitter and are an increasing source of fascination and anxiety in the corporate, governmental, and public spheres. Using media mentions, we collect 80 candidate events from January 2011 to September 2014 that we would term `firestorms. ' Using data from the Twitter decahose (or gardenhose), a 10% random sample of all tweets, we describe the size and longevity of these firestorms. We take two firestorm exemplars, #myNYPD and #CancelColbert, as case studies to describe more fully. Then, taking the 20 firestorms with the most tweets, we look at the change in mention networks of participants over the course of the firestorm as one method of testing for possible impacts of firestorms. We find that the mention networks before and after the firestorms are more similar to each other than to those of the firestorms, suggesting that firestorms neither emerge from existing networks, nor do they result in lasting changes to social structure. To verify this, we randomly sample users and generate mention networks for baseline comparison, and find that the firestorms are not associated with a greater than random amount of change in mention networks.
Saliency-based structural degradation evaluation of 3D mesh simplification

Visual perceptual degradation is usually introduced during 3D mesh simplification. Some geometric metrics without considering human visual perception and perceptual metrics based on subjective test have been proposed. A new Global Perceptual Structural Degradation metric (GPSD) based on mesh saliency and information theory to evaluate the visual perceptual degradation is proposed in this letter. It can also provide the function of multi-scale evaluation of visual degradation effectively. The accuracy and validity of the proposed metric have been demonstrated through subjective experiment.
Issues with e-learning in nursing and health education in the UK: are new technologies being embraced in the teaching and learning environments?

In this paper we present aspects of a study that scoped e-learning implementation in nursing and health science disciplines throughout the UK and explored the factors affecting use. Data related to the use of technologies are presented here. While there are many drivers for the use of e-learning, the current scope of engagement in nursing and health science disciplines is unknown and variations in adoption have not been explored. A postal questionnaire sent to a purposive sample of 93 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) obtained data from 25 universities (response rate of 28%) related to their uptake and development of e-learning. Questionnaire data was analysed using descriptive statistics. From this, nine HEIs were identified, reflecting a range of levels of engagement in e-learning. Data was collected through 35 staff interviews across the sites. Qualitative data from the interviews was transcribed to allow thematic analysis. Though e-learning adoption and use vary across the sector, the predominant learning and teaching engagement is instructivist and managed through a virtual learning environment. There is limited experimentation with e-learning and teaching use, linked to key centres of excellence and the efforts of ‘champions’. It is suggested that a more systematic approach to development and funding is required to achieve enhanced use of e-learning.
Spurious-response suppression in microstrip Parallel-Coupled bandpass filters by using Defected Microstrip Structures

This paper presents a novel Parallel-Coupled Microstrip Line (PCML) bandpass filter by etching of some slot resonators on the strip for suppressing the first spurious response. These slots perform a serious LC resonance property in certain frequency and suppress the spurious signals. Slot on the strip that is called Defected Microstrip Structure (DMS). The DMS interconnection disturbs the current distribution only across the strip, thereby giving a modified microstrip line with certain stop band and slow-wave characteristics. The measured results show a satisfactory rejection level more than 30dB at first spurious passband without affecting the passband response.
Editorial - People of Marketing Science

The success of Marketing Science and its status as the premier quantitative journal in marketing depend critically on the contributions of its reviewers, associate editors, and authors. Marketing Science receives a wide variety of manuscripts that draw from a diverse set of paradigms and address a diverse set of substantive and methodological issues. Across the board, Marketing Science authors expect high-quality and timely reviews from the journal. The reviewers’ and associate editors’ work is all the more demanding because our submissions usually employ state-of-theart techniques and address sophisticated problems. During 2011, Marketing Science was ably served by 50 associate editors and more than 300 reviewers. In addition to our regular associate editors and editorial review board members, we benefit from the services of guest associate editors and ad hoc reviewers. Reviewers help us by providing quality control and helping the authors improve their papers through constructive comments. Our associate editors read manuscripts, synthesize review reports, and provide their expert recommendations. In addition, our reviewer selection process now incorporates voluntary suggestions from the associate editors. In cases involving potential conflict of interest, we also use guest editors-in-chief.1 We are very grateful to all the scholars who provide valuable service to the journal as regular and ad hoc reviewers, regular and guest associate editors, and guest editors-in-chief. Table 1 recognizes a subset of associate editors (regular and guest) who completed the most reports and/or had the fastest turnaround times during 2011. Table 2 lists our reviewers (regular and guest) who completed the most reviews and/or provided the fasted turnaround times in 2011.