Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Do DVRs Influence Sales

We analyze a multimillion dollar, three-year field study sponsored by five firms to assess whether DVRs impact consumers’ shopping behavior for advertised and private label goods. A large sample of households received an offer for a free DVR and service and close to 20% accepted. We observe each household's shopping history for 48 consumer packaged goods categories during the 13 months prior and the 26 months following the DVR offer. We fail to reject the null of no DVR treatment effect on household spending on advertised branded or private label goods, either 1 or 2 years after the DVRs are shipped. Our predicted DVR effect is tightly centered around 0, suggesting the data may have sufficient power to identify a true null effect. Using advertising exposure information for seven of the brands in the study, we offer suggestive evidence that ad-skipping occurs for a relatively small fraction of the total television content viewed. Other potential explanations for the lack of a DVR effect are also discussed.
Isotopic study of the effects of platelets on development of intimal thickening in autologous vein grafts in dogs

The effects of platelets on the development of intimal thickening of arterially transplanted autologous vein grafts was investigated using canine poor run‐off models. A new apparatus consisting of a shielding lead block to measure in vivo platelet adherence only on the intima of the vein graft was developed. In 23 dogs, 51Cr‐labelled platelets (20 μCi/kg) were injected and isotope emission over the grafts was counted. Platelet adherence was expressed as the thrombocyte accumulation index (TAI), i.e. the ratio of counts over the graft under an abnormal flow condition in the poor run‐off model to those over the graft under normal flow conditions of the contralateral leg. The TAI of the total graft (TTAI) was significantly high immediately and on the first and third days after implantation. The TAIs of the proximal (PTAI) and distal (DTAI) portions of the vein graft were also high at these same times. At 7, 10, 14 and 21 days, the TAI was almost equal to 1·0, a time at which endothelial regeneration was complete as confirmed by scanning electron microscopy. Thus, the prominent intimal thickening of arterially transplanted autologous vein grafts in dogs, induced under an abnormal flow condition, correlates well with the enhanced platelet adherence on the intima of the vein grafts in an early period after implantation.
A high speed flat CORDIC based neuron with multi-level activation function for robust pattern recognition

Implementing Neural Networks in hardware has been a major problem due to the complexity involved in generating non-linear functions. The high hardware costs incurred in real time applications can be substantially reduced by adopting a suitable reuse methodology of the neurons. In addition, neurons with high speed of operation are necessitated to realise hardware efficient real time pattern recognition for images with higher resolution. In this regard, the response time and area of a neuron becomes critical in realising VLSI efficient neural networks. In this paper, the digital architecture of a multiple valued logic neuron has been proposed to realise a neural network implementation for real-time pattern recognition purposes. The proposed neuron uses a multilevel sigmoidal function as the activation function. Flat CORDIC, a new variation of the CORDIC algorithm, has been employed to generate the complex multi-level activation function in a VLSI efficient manner. The proposed neuron operates with a 200 MHz clock and has significant hardware and latency savings when compared to conventional CORDIC based neurons.
Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

Welcome to the 2015 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games! This 19th meeting of the symposium is being held February 27-March 1 in San Francisco, California. As in 2014, the event is being held back-toback with the Game Developers Conference. We hope this will continue to motivate the high academia-industry interaction that is always present at I3D. This year's program consists of 15 papers selected by a rigorous peer review process from amongst 41 submissions. In addition, we continue our collaboration with IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. A selection of I3D papers will be invited to submit extended versions to a special issue of TVCG. We are also continuing our partnership with the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. Five papers originally published in JCGT will be presented in the I3D plenary session, and a selection of I3D papers will also be invited to submit extended versions for publication in JCGT. We hope these partnerships will continue bringing additional attention to I3D and the quality of the work published here.
Blockade of Costimulation Through B7/CD28 Inhibits Experimental Autoimmune Uveoretinitis, But Does Not Induce Long-Term Tolerance

It has been reported that costimulation blockade can result in T cell anergy. We investigated the effects of blocking costimulatory molecules in vivo on the development of experimental autoimmune uveoretinitis (EAU), a model for autoimmune uveitis in humans that is induced in mice by immunization with the retinal Ag interphotoreceptor retinoid binding protein. B10.A mice immunized with a uveitogenic regimen of interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein were treated with Abs to B7.1 and B7.2 for 2 wk. Evaluation of EAU and immunological responses 1 wk later showed that disease had been abrogated, and cellular responses were suppressed. To determine whether the costimulation blockade resulted in tolerance, adult-thymectomized mice immunized for uveitis and treated with anti-B7 or anti-CD28 were rechallenged for uveitis induction 5 wk after the initial immunization. Although confirmed to be disease free after the initial immunization, both anti-B7- and anti-CD28-treated mice developed severe EAU and elevated cellular responses after the rechallenge, equivalent to those of control mice. We conclude that in this model costimulatory blockade in vivo prevents the development of autoimmune disease, but does not result in long-term tolerance. The data are compatible with the interpretation that B7/CD28 blockade prevents generation of effector, but not of memory, T cells.
Privacy-Preserving Polling using Playing Cards

Visualizing protocols is not only useful as a step towards understanding and ensuring security properties, but is also a beneficial tool to communicate notions of security to decision makers and technical people outside the field of cryptography. We present a simple card game that is a visualization for a secure protocol for private polling where it is simple to see that individual responses cannot be traced back to a respondent, and cheating is irrational. We use visualization tricks to illustrate a somewhat complex protocol, namely the Cryptographic Randomized Response Technique protocol of Lipmaa et al. While our tools — commitments and cut-and-choose — are well known, our construction for oblivious transfer using playing cards is new. As part of visualizing the protocol, we have been able to show that, while cut-and-choose protocols normally get more secure with an increasing number of choices, the protocol we consider — surprisingly — does not. This is true for our visualization of the protocol and for the real protocol.
Why bioequivalence and unconditional interchangeability of generic drugs are not the same

Submitted: 27 September 2012; Revised: 26 March 2013; Accepted: 4 April 2013; Published online first: 9 April 2013 Author: Professor Teun van Gelder, MD, PhD, Internist – nephrologist/clinical pharmacologist, Departments of Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, Erasmus University Medical Center, PO Box 2040, NL-3015 CE Rotterdam, The Netherlands Generic Immunosuppressants in Transplantation
Natural killer cells remember: An evolutionary bridge between innate and adaptive immunity?

Since their discovery three decades ago, NK cells have been classified as cells of the innate immune system. NK cells were shown to respond rapidly and non‐specifically to infection, and were thought to act as a functional “bridge” to sustain the early innate immune response until the later adaptive immune responses could be mounted. In light of new findings showing how NK cells possess nearly all of the features of adaptive immunity including memory, we propose the placement of NK cells as an “evolutionary bridge” between innate and adaptive immunity.
Topic model visualization with IPython

The paper introduces an approach to topic model visualization that is characterized by wide possibilities of choosing a method of visualization, user-friendly model representation, and simplicity of implementation for applications. The existing approaches to topic models visualization have been analyzed, and a system, which allows choosing data source for topic models, changing modeling parameters and visualizing the result of topic modeling with IPython has been developed. The example of topic model visualization has been built using the SCTM-en corpus of original news text.
Disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology in French speakers with autism spectrum disorders

ABSTRACT Mixed and inconsistent findings have been reported across languages concerning grammatical morphology in speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Some researchers argue for a selective sparing of grammar whereas others claim to have identified grammatical deficits. The present study aimed to investigate this issue in 26 participants with ASD speaking European French who were matched on age, gender and SES to 26 participants with typical development (TD). The groups were compared regarding their productivity and accuracy of syntactic and agreement categories using the French MOR part-of-speech tagger available from the CHILDES. The groups significantly differed in productivity with respect to nouns, adjectives, determiners, prepositions and gender markers. Error analysis revealed that ASD speakers exhibited a disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology. They made gender, tense and preposition errors and they omitted determiners and pronouns in nominal and verbal contexts. ASD speakers may have a reduced sensitivity to perceiving and processing the distributional structure of syntactic categories when producing grammatical morphemes and agreement categories. The theoretical and cross-linguistic implications of these findings are discussed.
Iris recognition system using block based approach with DWT and DCT

Advancement in electronics industry and revolution in information technology sector has lead authentication and recognition to be the important aspect in today's life. Authentication and recognition can be achieved using biometric cues which provide secure and reliable alternative to traditional methods of human identification. Human iris is most reliable biometric because of its uniqueness, stability and non-invasive nature. The paper presents an efficient iris recognition system for authentication of a person using block based approach with Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for feature extraction and standard deviation method for feature comparison. The proposed system is evaluated for its performance i.e. identification of person on 500 images of iris of 100 persons (5 images of each person) of UBIRIS v2 database. The experimental results prove the efficiency of block based approach with DWT is superior to traditional approach of DWT and DCT. The false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) is minimum for block based DWT.
A compare-and-write ferroelectric nonvolatile flip-flop for energy-harvesting applications

In this paper, a novel compare-and-write ferroelectric nonvolatile flip-flop is developed, which can be used in the checkpoint processor for energy-harvesting applications. It can make the processor nonvolatile, secure and instant recoverable from power failures. The behavior model of ferroelectric capacitor is set up to characterize its electrical property. An improved architecture of ferroelectric capacitor based flip-flop is proposed in which a compare-and-write block is used to decide if the state of ferroelectric capacitor should be changed. Thus, the presented architecture can prolong the lifetime of the ferroelectric capacitor by removing the unnecessary programming cycles. The design is implemented in HJTM 0.18um CMOS process and simulation results show that the proposed ferroelectric nonvolatile flip-flop operates properly and reduces 40–80% programming cycles, which increases the lifetime of the ferroelectric capacitors effectively and expands its application in checkpoint processors for energy-harvesting area.
Scope for selecting many breeding stocks of possible economic value in the future

Current animal improvement deals largely with selection of stocks for current economic objectives. However, there is uncertainty about how well these objectives will hold in the future, since husbandry and marketing needs and conditions may change unpredictably over time. The scope for developing alternative stocks, selected for different chosen sets of objectives, is considered, so that by substitution or crossing it may be possible to reduce the uncertainty and better meet future needs and conditions. The reduction in uncertainty is modelled by including risk or uncertainty in the discount rate in assessing benefits over time from one cycle of selection. From the national viewpoint, the costs of developing alternative selection stocks are small relative to the possible returns. Thus, if the uncertainties were reduced by having them, a large number of such alternative stocks would be justified. The expected benefits to the community from animal breeding would also be increased thereby.
TRADE LIBERALISATION AND POVERTY

This paper is an output from a project funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID) for the benefit of developing countries. The views expressed are not necessarily those of DfID. I am grateful to Xavier Cirera for research assistance, Shoshana Ormonde for logistical help and to Way on whose work in India, Zambia and Zimbabwe I have drawn so freely.
INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING (IPO) AND THE UNDERPRICING PHENOMENA

The research paper presents the findings of study carried out to investigate the initial / short run underpricing of Initial Public Offerings (IPO) issued through NSE and listed on both the stock exchanges in India i.e. BSE and NSE during 2003-2010.The facts that emerge from the study confirm that like developedcountriesIPOs are underpriced in India in the short run. However, there has been a marked decline in underpricing over the years, which signifies improved market efficiency. Due to the presence of initial returns, the cost of equity capital is very high for issues in India. It was also observed that regulatory measures such as IPO grading and the concept of anchor investorintroducedby SEBI to safeguardthe interest of retail investorare not very effective. Investors' sentiments play an important role in the Indian IPO market as reflected by difference in initial returns due to phase of market and pricing of IPOs at higher or lower level of the price band.
Alterations in brain structures related to taste reward circuitry in ill and recovered anorexia nervosa and in bulimia nervosa.

OBJECTIVE The pathophysiology of anorexia nervosa remains obscure, but structural brain alterations could be functionally important biomarkers. The authors assessed taste pleasantness and reward sensitivity in relation to brain structure, which may be related to food avoidance commonly seen in eating disorders. METHOD The authors used structural MR imaging to study gray and white matter volumes in women with current restricting-type anorexia nervosa (N=19), women recovered from restricting-type anorexia nervosa (N=24), women with bulimia nervosa (N=19), and healthy comparison women (N=24). RESULTS All eating disorder groups exhibited increased gray matter volume of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (gyrus rectus). Manual tracing confirmed larger gyrus rectus volume, and volume predicted taste pleasantness ratings across all groups. Analyses also indicated other morphological differences between diagnostic categories. Antero-ventral insula gray matter volumes were increased on the right side in the anorexia nervosa and recovered anorexia nervosa groups and on the left side in the bulimia nervosa group relative to the healthy comparison group. Dorsal striatum volumes were reduced in the recovered anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa groups and predicted sensitivity to reward in all three eating disorder groups. The eating disorder groups also showed reduced white matter in right temporal and parietal areas relative to the healthy comparison group. The results held when a range of covariates, such as age, depression, anxiety, and medications, were controlled for. CONCLUSION Brain structure in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and striatum is altered in eating disorders and suggests altered brain circuitry that has been associated with taste pleasantness and reward value.
The contingency role of business strategy on the relationship between operations practices and performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the direct influence of three types of operations management practices, namely total quality management (TQM), lean manufacturing (LEAN), and supply chain management (SCM) on operational performance. Design/methodology/approach – Cluster analysis is used to classify data collected from Thai manufacturing firms into three business strategy clusters of cost leadership, differentiation, and focussed strategy. Next, multiple-regression analysis was used to test the relationships between operations management practices and performance in each of the three strategy clusters. Findings – Results show that all three operations management practices were significantly associated with performance including the interaction of TQM and SCM. Also, the interaction of LEAN and SCM significantly affected performance for firms pursuing focussed business strategy. Practical implications – Manufacturers in developing nations can use this result to deploy appropriate operations .
Chapter 5. Financial Globalization: Opportunities and Challenges for Developing Countries *

This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges that financial globalization entail for developing countries. Financial globalization can come with crises and contagion. But financial globalization can also lead to large benefits, particularly to the development of the financial system. The net effect of financial globalization is likely positive, with risks being more prevalent right after countries liberalize. In the long run, large potential gains are expected. So far, only some countries, sectors, and firms have taken advantage of globalization. As financial systems turn global, governments lose policy instruments, so there is an increasing need for international financial policy coordination.
The mediating role of organizational learning between absorptive capacity and performance in companies employing enterprise resource planning software

This dissertation focuses on the acquisition of information systems technology and how the acquisition of information systems (IS) can improve the performance of a firm. The central purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the literature that explains the success of IS projects. It addresses the organizational processes that contribute to the successful implementation of IS, and explains why some organizations achieve financial returns and strategic advantages from their IS efforts while others do not. The population in this dissertation consists of top level IS executives in the US or Canada employed in firms who have implemented enterprise resource planning software. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has the capability to join disparate data sources and make them available across enterprises in an organized, personalized, secure, and searchable fashion. ERP integrates key business and management processes to provide a comprehensive view of an organization. The term used in the literature to refer to firm readiness to technological advances is absorptive capacity. Absorptive capacity is an organizational, firm-level construct that incorporates a learning curve into the technology adoption process. Cohen and Levinthal (1990) define absorptive capacity as the firm's ability to perceive value in external information, in this case an information system, and be able to adopt it, internalize it and exploit it to maximize profits. This dissertation tests the relationship between absorptive capacity and performance mediated by organizational learning. Absorptive capacity, therefore, is a measure of potential increase in performance but not a guarantee of increased performance. Several processes have to occur in order for organizations to learn. First of all, organizations have to acquire knowledge by eliciting or sharing knowledge (Argote, 1999) in the assimilation stage (Lane et al., 2001; Lane & Lubatkin, 1998). This stage is followed by a second stage named internalization or integration (Kim, 1998; Lyles & Salk, 1996). Group learning involves the processes through which members share, generate, evaluate and combine knowledge (Argote, 1999). The third stage, optimization, is where an organization reaches the point of exploitation of a learned technology (Cohen & Levinthal 1990, 1994). The relationships between absorptive capacity, organizational learning and performance represent the research framework for the dissertation. A path begins from absorptive capacity to organizational learning, but because organizational learning is divided into three stages there are three separate paths leading to each level in organizational learning: assimilation, integration and optimization. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the series of dependence relationships simultaneously.
Successful aging at 100 years: the relevance of subjectivity and psychological resources

ABSTRACT Background: Very old individuals seem to present an admirable capacity to overcome adversities and adapt to the challenges of advanced age. However, studies focusing successful pattern of centenarians found that they may easily fail to be categorized as successful agers when objective criteria are applied. The present study examines if centenarians can be considered successful agers. Following Rowe and Kahn's successful aging model, the primary goal was to clarify whether centenarians are able to be successful agers according to objective and subjective criteria of no major disease and disability, high cognitive and physical functioning and engagement with life. The second goal was to investigate whether socio-demographic factors, psychological, social, and economic resources are related to objective and subjective successful aging profiles. Methods: We examined different profiles of successful aging in a high selected sample of individuals aged 100 and more years old from the population-based Oporto Centenarian Study. Results: Main findings reveal that centenarians do not represent the prototype of successful aging, but self-ratings demonstrate that many of them feel successful, despite not being objectively considered as so. Those who were considered successful agers presented higher values of self-efficacy, hope, and purpose in life, as well as few difficulties in covering financial expenses. Conclusions: As a basis for strengthening the existing model, the value of subjectivity should be explored and psychological resources promoted in interventions to foster positive adaptation in very old age.