Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SIMULATION VERSUS REALITY - 4 CASE STUDIES

This paper will focus on four completed projects that have gone through a process of concept design, including energy consumption simulation, followed by design, construction and operation. Through the implementation of comprehensive metering systems in these buildings comparison to computer simulation predictions and real outcomes can been achieved. Differences between the modelling results were found in all cases and either presented ways to further improve energy efficiency or highlighted where further modelling data validation may have been required. This paper will describe some of these findings in further detail.
PATIENT CHOICE, ENTRY, AND THE QUALITY OF PRIMARY CARE: EVIDENCE FROM SWEDISH REFORMS.

Policies aiming to spur quality competition among health care providers are ubiquitous, but their impact on quality is ex ante ambiguous, and credible empirical evidence is lacking in many contexts. This study contributes to the sparse literature on competition and primary care quality by examining recent competition enhancing reforms in Sweden. The reforms aimed to stimulate patient choice and entry of private providers across the country but affected markets differently depending on the initial market structure. We exploit the heterogeneous impact of the reforms in a difference-in-differences strategy, contrasting more and less exposed markets over the period 2005-2013. Although the reforms led to substantially more entry of new providers in more exposed markets, the effects on primary care quality were modest: We find small improvements of patients' overall satisfaction with care, but no consistently significant effects on avoidable hospitalisation rates or satisfaction with access to care. We find no evidence of economically meaningful quality reductions on any outcome measure.
Comparison of screening for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at hospital admission and discharge

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a significant contributor to the growing concern of antibiotic resistant bacteria, especially given its stubborn persistence in hospitals and other health care facility settings. In combination with this characteristic of S. aureus (colloquially referred to as staph), MRSA presents an additional barrier to treatment and is now believed to have colonized two of every 100 people worldwide. According to the CDC, MRSA prevalence sits as high as 25-50% in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Given the resistant nature of staph as well as its capability of evolving to compensate antibiotic treatment, controlling MRSA levels is more a matter of precautionary and defensive measures. This study examines the method of "search and isolation," which seeks to isolate MRSA positive patients in a hospital so as to decrease infection potential. Although this strategy is straightforward, the question of just whom to screen is of practical importance. We compare screening at admission to screening at discharge. To do this, we develop a mathematical model and use simulations to determine MRSA endemic levels in a hospital with either control measure implemented. We found that screening at discharge was the more effective method in controlling MRSA endemicity, but at the cost of a greater number of isolated patients.
Is There Any Relationship between Environment, Human Development, Political and Governance Regimes? Evidences from a Cross-Country Analysis

The current study attempts to understand the relationships among Environmental Quality (EQ), Human Development (HD) and political and governance regime in a cross-country framework. The underlying hypothesis is that in addition to income, as reflected from the literature on Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, several other factors, including social and political ones, may influence environmental decision making, and thereby environmental sustainability, in a country. The EQ of the countries in the current study is denoted by their Environmental Performance Index (2008). Human development is represented by Human Development Index (2007) and Human Poverty Index (2006). Democracy Index (2008) and Corruption Perceptions Index (2008) are considered as proxies for political transparency in a country and its susceptibility to rent-seeking activities respectively. The regression results confirm the closer association between the socio-economic and socio-political factors in a country and its environmental performance.
Study on the Relationships among Marketing Information System Quality and Brand Equity Management in Banking Sector

Marketing information system plays critical role in improving brand power and long-term profitability. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between marketing information system quality (MKISQ) and brand equity management (BEM) within the banking sector. Results show that the three components of the MKISQ: marketing information quality, marketing support service quality, and marketing orientation quality Influence brand equity. This study contributes to the theoretical and managerial implication empirical of the MKISQ and BEM. The paper provides detail discussion, Imitations and suggestions for future research.
THEMATIC COLLECTION : RESPONSE Understanding Early Categorization : One Process or Two ?

We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to the commentaries of Smith (this issue) and Mandler (this issue), especially in light of the critical challenges posed by the latter. We begin with what we believe to be the crux ofthe debate: Does early category formation need to be understood within a dual-process framework in which perceptual learning is dissociated from conceptual understanding? In one way or another, each of us believes the answer to this question at present is no. Smith would appear to agree when she notes that there may be “no such thing as
THE USE OF A FRICTION REDUCING SILICONE DRESSING IN THE MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN WITH EPIDERMOLYSIS BULLOSA

Aim: Previous challenges have revealed that the use of commercially-available ceramide 2containing hydrocolloid dressings (CHCDs) can help to prevent pressure ulcers in patients at risk of developing shear force-related tissue damage. However, the use of adhesive tape around CHCDs is normally required because of its low initial tack force. Healthy skin is consequently damaged by the strong adhesive properties of the tape. The aim of this study was to prepare and evaluate a new CHCD containing tackifying agents.
Stability and acoustic scattering in a cylindrical thin shell containing compressible mean flow

We consider the stability of small perturbations to a uniform inviscid compressible flow within a cylindrical linear-elastic thin shell. The thin shell is modelled using Flügge's equations, and is forced from the inside by the fluid, and from the outside by damping and spring forces. In addition to acoustic waves within the fluid, the system supports surface waves, which are strongly coupled to the thin shell. Stability is analysed using the Briggs–Bers criterion, and the system is found to be either stable or absolutely unstable, with absolute instability occurring for sufficiently small shell thicknesses. This is significantly different from the stability of a thin shell containing incompressible fluid, even for parameters for which the fluid would otherwise be expected to behave incompressibly (for example, water within a steel thin shell). Asymptotic expressions are derived for the shell thickness separating stable and unstable behaviour. We then consider the scattering of waves by a sudden change in the duct boundary from rigid to thin shell, using the Wiener–Hopf technique. For the scattering of an inbound acoustic wave in the rigid-wall section, the surface waves are found to play an important role close to the sudden boundary change. The solution is given analytically as a sum of duct modes. The results in this paper add to the understanding of the stability of surface waves in models of acoustic linings in aeroengine ducts. The oft-used mass–spring–damper model is regularized by the shell bending terms, and even when these terms are very small, the stability and scattering results are quite different from what has been claimed for the mass–spring–damper model. The scattering results derived here are exact, unique and causal, without the need to apply a Kutta-like condition or to include an instability wave. A movie is available with the online version of the paper.
Savings: the policy debate in Europe

Three issues dominate the public policy debate over savings in Continental Europe. First, can private savings substitute for public pensions in the provision of retirement income, given that the current generosity of pay-as-you-go financed pensions is hardly sustainable in the light of population ageing? And if so, which policy steps have to be taken to alleviate this transition? Second, does the evolution of a 'new financial landscape' in Europe necessitate policy response in terms of taxation and regulation, specifically considering the increase in pension funds? And third, closely related to the other two issues, is there too much or too little saving in an ageing Europe? Will pension reform and the new financial landscape increase or decrease overall saving? Do we need to subsidize saving more or less than we currently do? The paper reviews economic theory and empirical evidence on these intertwined issues. Most importantly, it identifies many gaps in our theoretical and empirical knowledge that caution us against overly strong policy recommendations. Copyright 2001, Oxford University Press.
Beyond the Cost of Price Adjustment: Investments in Pricing Capital

The literature on costs of price adjustment has long argued that changing prices is a complex and costly process. In fact, some authors have suggested that we should think of firms’ price-setting activities as “producing” prices, similar to the way firms use production processes to produce goods and services. In this paper we explore one natural extension of this view, that besides observing costs of price adjustment, we should also expect to see firm-level investments in capital expenditures into these “pricing” production processes. We coin the term “pricing capital” for these investments, and suggest that they can improve the efficiency of the “pricing production” activities by both reducing the costs of adjusting prices, and improving the effectiveness of price adjustments in future periods. Using two types of data sources, we find compelling evidence of the existence as well as the importance of pricing capital in firms. The existence of firm-level “pricing capital” has the potential of fundamentally altering the way we think about pricing and price adjustment in many areas of economics. It suggests looking toward the “pricing capital” to decipher the likely degree and causes of price rigidity and its variation across price setters, markets, and industries. Moreover, “pricing capital” introduces a new, higher-level, pricing decision made by individual firms. Decisions to invest in pricing capital compete with traditional capital investment decisions that have long been studied in economics, such as capital investments in plant, equipment, and R&D. Furthermore, since pricing capital is a choice variable, it implies that costs of price adjustment often used in models of price rigidity are endogenous. As such, pricing capital offers new insights into the micro-foundations of the costs of price adjustment. The most provocative implication of the new theory of pricing, however, is that the allocative efficiency of the price system itself may be determined endogenously by individual price setters who choose whether and how much to invest in pricing capital.
Age of the universe: Influence of the inhomogeneities on the global expansion factor

For the first time we calculate quantitatively the influence of inhomogeneities on the global expansion factor by averaging the Friedmann equation. In the framework of the relativistic second-order Zel'dovich-approximation scheme for irrotational dust we use observational results in form of the normalisation constant fixed by the COBE results and we check different power spectra, namely for adiabatic CDM, isocurvature CDM, HDM, WDM, Strings and Textures. We find that the influence of the inhomogeneities on the global expansion factor is very small. So the error in determining the age of the universe using the Hubble constant in the usual way is negligible. This does not imply that the effect is negligible for local astronomical measurements of the Hubble constant. Locally the determination of the redshift-distance relation can be strongly influenced by the peculiar velocity fields due to inhomogeneities. Our calculation does not consider such effects, but is contrained to comparing globally homogeneous and averaged inhomogeneous matter distributions. In addition we relate our work to previous treatments.
Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Binarization of License Plate Images

Unlike document images, license plate images are mostly captured under uneven lighting conditions. In particular, a shadowed region has sharp intensity variation and sometimes that region has very high intensity by reflected light. This paper presents a new technique for thresholding license plate images. This approach consists of three parts. In the first part, it performs a rough thresholding and classifies the type of license plate to adjust some parameters optimally. Next, it identifies a shadow type and binarizes license plate images by adjusting the window size and location according to the shadow type. And finally, post-processing based on the cluster analysis is performed. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed five well-known methods.
A Spam Filtering Technique using SVM Light Tool

Spam has become a headache of the today's internet causing many problems to all users on Internet. Spam emails not only consume computing resources, money but are frustrating. A lot of money is being spent/ lost due to spam globally each year. Data mining approaches for content based spam filtering have been seen promising. Filtering is the one of the important technique to stop spam. Now-a-days there is a tremendous need of some trust-worthy and adaptive spam filtering system in the market which should have the ability to react quickly to the real time changes and provide fast and qualitative self-tuning in accordance with a new set of features. This paper explores the use of support vector machines for classifying and filtering spam messages and also to improve the accuracy and time performance. Also a comparative analysis among the algorithms is also being presented here with a view to get the optimized results in spam filtering.
Why Conference Committees?: A Policy Explanation for the Use of Conference

Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the U.S. congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Conference committees occur frequently and handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then granted wide leverage in shaping the policy choices on legislation with such broad implications for the membership? It would seem that existing theoretical models addressing this matter are somewhat incomplete in their handling of formal procedures and/or the motivations of involved actors. In this paper, we argue that certain conditions on preferences and information yield the chambers, who must be complicit in the decision to go to conference, higher expected policy returns to delegating this authority to utility-maximizing conferees.
Nonlinear growth effect of remittances in recipient countries: an econometric analysis of remittances-growth nexus in Bangladesh

The macroeconomic impacts of remittances flows on developing economies are not well understood. The paper is an attempt to understand the impact of inward remittances flows on per capita GDP growth in Bangladesh during 1974-2006. We find that the growth effect of remittances is negative at first but becomes positive at a later stage- a strong evidence of a non-linear relationship. This could be due to unproductive use of remittances in the beginning followed by more productive utilisation. Remittances positively affect per capita GDP growth in Bangladesh when the complementarity between remittances and financial development is incorporated into the analysis.
Wireless Sensor Network Using Energy Efficient Ring Routing Protocol with Mobile Sink

: In wireless sensor networks efficiency of energy is considered to be important role due to the limited battery capacity of sensor nodes. In existing system various hierarchical approaches have been experimented, in which each approach suffers from overhead, hotspot and flooding problem. In this paper we propose ring routing approach energy-efficient mobile sink routing protocol is introduced, which aims to minimize this overhead while preserving the advantages of mobile sinks. This ring routing approach is designed to support multiple mobile sink. The technique forms a ring of nodes from the available regular nodes. Ring is formed with the help of certain radius from the centre, nodes closer to the ring which is defined by the radius is formed. The location of the sink node is found through a ring node and is shared between all the ring nodes. Then the source node with the data forwards it to the sink through the anchor nodes.The proposed system achieves higher performance, lifetime and a smaller amount delay while compared with the existing system and this system prevents congestion, traffic between the nodes in case of large wireless sensor network.
Challenges in Groundwater Remediation with Iron Nanoparticles: Enabling Colloidal Stability

Zero-valent iron (ZVI)-based remediation is an attractive treatment option as iron is inexpensive, non-toxic and environmentally compatible. Nanoparticles are attractive for remediation of various contaminants because of their unique physiochemical properties (Zhang, 2003, 2005). Reactivity of the nanoparticle increases with an increase in surface area (Gotpagar et al., 1997; Li et al., 2003). In recent years, microparticles (mZVI), iron filings and ZVI nanoparticles (nZVI) have been used for the removal of various groundwater contaminants including chlorinated compounds (Matheson and Tratnyek, 1994; Boronina et al., 1995; Orth and Gillham, 1996; Roberts et al., 1996; Campbell et al., 1997; Liang et al., 1997; Tratnyek et al., 1997; He and Zhao, 2005; Tee and Bhattacharyya, 2005; Huang and Zhang, 2006; Liu and Lowry, 2006; Cheng et al., 2007), pesticides (Singh et al., 1998; Feitz et al., 2005; Joo and Zhao, 2008; Thompson, 2008), heavy metals (Boronina et al., 1995; Powell et al., 1995; Roberts et al., 1996; Blowes et al., 1997; Fiedor et al., 1998; Ponder et al., 2000; Alowitz and Scherer, 2002), nitrate (Huang et al., 2003; Huang and Zhang, 2005; Bezbaruah et al., 2008), and explosives (Gregory et al., 2004; Oh et al., 2005) in water. The typical mode of chlorinated contaminant degradation by ZVI is reductive dehalogenation (Matheson and Tratnyek, 1994), as shown below (Eq. 1).
Understanding Deviations in Hydrogen Solubility Predictions in Transition Metals through First-Principles Calculations

Hydrogen solubility in ten transition metals (V, Nb, Ta, W, Ni, Pd, Pt, Cu, Ag, and Au) has been predicted by first-principles based on density functional theory (DFT) combined with chemical potential equilibrium between hydrogen in the gas and solid-solution phases. Binding energies and vibrational frequencies of dissolved hydrogen in metals are obtained from DFT calculations, and the sensitivity of solubility predictions with respect to the DFT-calculated variables has been analyzed. In general, the solubility increases with increasing binding strength and decreasing vibrational frequencies of hydrogen. The solubility predictions match experimental data within a factor of 2 in the cases of V, Nb, Ta, and W and within a factor of 3 in the cases of Ni, Cu, and Ag. In Pd, the deviation in solubility predictions is mainly attributed to the errors involved in the calculated vibrational frequencies of dissolved hydrogen. In Pt and Au, hydrogen in the octahedral interstitial site is less stable than in the tet.
The Effects of Low Altitude Training on Erythropoietin Response and Hematological Variables in Elite Female Fencers

The Live High-Train High (LHTH) model altitude training is required to sojourn over 2000m more than 3 weeks. In such altitudes response that may cause decreased living, sleeping and training quality. In these cases coaches may approach with suspicion to LHTH can be harmful for their training intensity edgewise training quality. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of 12 days 1850m training on some hematological parameters in the world-class woman fencers. Ten female fencers (age 21.50 ± 3.69, height 167.16 ± 3.88 cm, weight 59.11 ± 3.437 kg) voluntarily participated in this study. The athletes were investigated low altitude training camp at 1850m. The blood samples were taken before and after the moderate altitude training for analyzing erythropoietin (EPO), red blood cell (RBC), hemoglobin (HB) and hematocrit (HCT) concentration levels. The paired sample t-test was used for determine the differences pre and posttests results, significance levels p<0.05 Results shows that concentrations of EPO increased significantly after twelve days low altitude training. However RBC, HB, HCT concentrations were unaffected by the hypoxic stimulus. The results of this study have suggested that the 12 days LHTH training at 1850 m can be stimulated EPO. This means 1850 m altitude possibly induces hypoxic effect. Nevertheless, 12 days altitude training is not enough to enhance performance related blood markers.
Studies on cattle Trypanosomiasis in the coastal savannah of Ghana: A policy guide

The control of Trypanosomiasis is complex and multifaceted, necessitating a holistic approach for a full understanding of the disease and its control. This study is an example of such a strategy and adopts various approaches. This research seeks to identify and explain the perceived problems of cattle farmers associated with trypanosomiasis control and to suggest the appropriate strategies for planning and control of animal trypanosomiasis in the study area. A Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) involving 850 cattle farmers (drovers, herdsmen, owners) adopted a technique known as preference ranking of production objectives to determine the relative importance of trypanosomiasis in the Coastal savannah. A survey, using a structured interview of 250 herdsmen focused on constraints encountered by herdsmen in the use of Berenil® for trypanosomiasis control as well as the quality of drug services provided. A multiple regression equation was run on PC-SPSS Programme [version 16] by the Ordinary Least Square (OLS). The findings indicate that, milk production, the most dominant production objective of farmers, was most affected by trypanosomiasis. Some of the constraints identified with trypanosomiasis control were inappropriate dosages of Berenil® used by farmers, inappropriate pour-on techniques and lack of extension training. Recommendations were targeted at removing these constraints.
Evolution of long-period, white-dwarf binaries: application to GRO J1744-28 and type Ia supernovae

We calculated the evolution of long-period white dwarf binaries, by accounting for thermally unstable accretion during mass transfer. Under certain conditions we found that, the accretion rates onto the white dwarf during dwarf nova outbursts can be sufficiently high to allow steady nuclear burning of the accreted matter and growth of the white dwarf mass. If the Chandrasekhar mass is reached, the white dwarf may collapse to be a neutron star, or explode as a type Ia supernova. This scenario appears to account well for the formation of the bursting pulsar GRO J1744−28, and probably type Ia supernovae with delay times considerably longer than 1 Gyr.