Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise, Home and Household in London, c. 1800-1870

List of Figures. List of Tables. Abbreviations. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Separate and Suitable. 2. Barriers and Bridges. 3. Insuring Her Assets. 4. Retailing Respectability. 5. A Household of Enterprise. 6. Property, Home and Business. 7. Historical Female Entrepreneurship. Conclusion. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
Forecasting operating profitability with DuPont analysis: Further evidence

Purpose - – The purpose of this study is to re-examine the relation between changes in profit margin (? PM) and changes in return on net operating assets (? RNOA) by partitioning on the direction of the change in PM. DuPont analysis provides a means of disaggregating a firm’s return on net operating assets (RNOA) into asset turnover (ATO) and profit margin (PM) components to gain insights into the underlying drivers of operating profitability. Prior research finds that changes in ATO are informative about one-year-ahead changes in RNOA, while changes in PM are not. Design/methodology/approach - – Consistent with prior research, regression analysis is used to develop a predictive model for one-year-ahead changes in RNOA. Results based on in-sample parameter estimates are used to examine the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of alternative model specifications. Findings - – The results are consistent with significant forecast improvement resulting from considering the impact on future RNOA of the direction of the ? PM. Originality/value - – The study contributes to the literature on the determinants of profitability ratios by providing further guidance on how financial statement information can be utilized to improve forecasts of firm performance.
A Clostridium difficile alanine racemase affects spore germination and accommodates serine as a substrate

Clostridium difficile has become one of the most common bacterial pathogens in hospital-acquired infections in the United States. Although C. difficile is strictly anaerobic, it survives in aerobic environments and transmits between hosts via spores. C. difficile spore germination is triggered in response to certain bile acids and glycine. Although glycine is the most effective co-germinant, other amino acids can substitute with varying efficiencies. Of these, l-alanine is an effective co-germinant and is also a germinant for most bacterial spores. Many endospore-forming bacteria embed alanine racemases into their spore coats, and these enzymes are thought to convert the l-alanine germinant into d-alanine, a spore germination inhibitor. Although the C. difficile Alr2 racemase is the sixth most highly expressed gene during C. difficile spore formation, a previous study reported that Alr2 has little to no role in germination of C. difficile spores in rich medium. Here, we hypothesized that Alr2 could affect C. difficile l-alanine-induced spore germination in a defined medium. We found that alr2 mutant spores more readily germinate in response to l-alanine as a co-germinant. Surprisingly, d-alanine also functioned as a co-germinant. Moreover, we found that Alr2 could interconvert l- and d-serine and that Alr2 bound to l- and d-serine with ∼2-fold weaker affinity to that of l- and d-alanine. Finally, we demonstrate that l- and d-serine are also co-germinants for C. difficile spores. These results suggest that C. difficile spores can respond to a diverse set of amino acid co-germinants and reveal that Alr2 can accommodate serine as a substrate.
Multicenter trial of a new thoracic electrical bioimpedance device for cardiac output estimation

Objective: To evaluate the capacity of a new thoracic electric bioimpedance system to estimate cardiac output compared with the conventional thermodilution method. Design: Prospective, multicenter study. Setting: A university‐run county hospital, a university‐run U.S. Veterans Affairs hospital, and a university‐affiliated U.S. military hospital. Patients: A series of 68 critically ill patients whose conditions required pulmonary artery catheter insertion. Measurements and Main Results: A total of 842 simultaneous pairs of cardiac output estimations by conventional thermodilution and a new thoracic electric bioimpedance system that uses an improved signal processing technique based on an all‐integer‐coefficient filtering technology, using a time‐frequency distribution that provides a high signal/noise ratio were evaluated. The r value was . 86, r2 = . 74, and p < . 001 by regression analysis; the mean difference between the two methods relative to their average value was 16.6 ± 12.9 (SD) %; the precision was 1.4 L/min or 0.8 L/min/m2; the bias was ‐0.013 L/min. The mean difference between successive pairs of thermodilution measurements was 8.6 ± 0.6 (SD) %, which was about half the difference between simultaneous pairs of measurement by the two methods. The changes in impedance estimations were close to simultaneously measured changes in thermodilution estimates of cardiac output. Conclusions: The new bioimpedance system satisfactorily estimated cardiac output as measured by the thermodilution technique. The difference between the two estimations is more than made up for by the continuous noninvasive capability of the impedance system. (Crit Care Med 1994; 22:1907–1912)
Aerial path planning using meta-heuristics: A survey

Meta-heuristic algorithms have been known to solve complex problems which were once considered difficult to solve. They produce an optimal or near optimal solution with reduced computational complexity and are thus are considered where deterministic algorithms produce inefficient solutions. Robotics has been a disciplinary field where artificial intelligence is bestowed to robots for them to perform complex tasks similar to human beings. Many of tasks involve decision making removing the need for a human intervener. Robots can efficiently perform their tasks on the ground, air as well as underwater missions. To do so, a very important property required by the robot is to efficiently calculate its path in its surroundings. The path planning problem is a hard problem to solve using deterministic techniques and thus many heuristics based techniques are employed to solve this novel problem. This paper will review some the recent advancements in the path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles using meta-heuristic techniques. An extensive survey of the related research is presented with a stress on the major novelties of their work. At last, the research gaps inferred after analyzing the previous works are highlighted along with the future prospects in the field of research.
Evidence for functional significance of the permuted C motif in Co2+-stimulated RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of infectious bursal disease virus.

Segment B of bisegmented infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) encodes virus protein 1 (VP1), possessing RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) activity. This multidomain protein includes an RdRp domain with a non-canonical order of three sequence motifs forming the active site: C-A-B. The A-B-C order of the motifs, as found in RdRps of the majority of viruses, was converted by relocation (permutation) of motif C to a C-A-B order. Due to the unusual location and unproven significance, the motif was named 'C? '. This motif includes an Ala-Asp-Asn tripeptide that replaces the C motif Gly-Asp-Asp sequence, widely considered a hallmark of RdRps. In this study, functional significance of the C? motif was investigated by using purified His-tagged VP1 mutants with either a double replacement (ADN to GDD) or two single-site mutants (ADD or GDN). All mutants showed a significant reduction of RdRp activity in vitro, in comparison to that of VP1. Only the least-affected GDN mutant gave rise to viable, albeit partially impaired, progeny using a reverse-genetics system. Experiments performed to investigate whether the C motif was implicated in the control of metal dependence revealed that, compared with Mn2+ and Mg2+, Co2+ stimulated RdRp unconventionally. No activity was observed in the presence of several divalent cations. Of two Co2+ salts with Cl- and SO4(2-) anions, the former was a stronger stimulant for RdRp. When cell-culture medium was supplemented with 50 microM Co2+, an increase in IBDV progeny yield was observed. The obtained results provide evidence that the unusual Co2+ dependence of the IBDV RdRp might be linked to the permuted organization of the motif.
Fast and Accurate: Structure Coherence Component for Face Alignment

In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate coordinate regression method for face alignment. Unlike most existing facial landmark regression methods which usually employ fully connected layers to convert feature maps into landmark coordinate, we present a structure coherence component to explicitly take the relation among facial landmarks into account. Due to the geometric structure of human face, structure coherence between different facial parts provides important cues for effectively localizing facial landmarks. However, the dense connection in the fully connected layers overuses such coherence, making the important cues unable to be distinguished from all connections. Instead, our structure coherence component leverages a dynamic sparse graph structure to passing features among the most related landmarks. Furthermore, we propose a novel objective function, named Soft Wing loss, to improve the accuracy. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks, including WFLW, COFW and 300W, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance with fast speed. Our approach is especially robust to challenging cases resulting in impressively low failure rate (0% and 2.88%) in COFW and WFLW datasets.
CSR Audit in China - with case study of supply chain CSR audit

This research gives a special attention to CSR audit in China, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The research starts with the analysis of theoretical foundation that underlies the emergence and development of CSR and CSR audit. Both stakeholder theory and principal-agent theory are applicable to explain it. In the context of these two theories, the corporate management is not only responsible for fiduciary finicial duty to shareholders, but also responsible for fiduciary social duty to other stakeholders. Under the need to inspect the implementation status of this fiduciary social duty, CSR audit has gained fast development since its emergence. However since the lack of universal standard or guideline and the different perception to CSR, there is no unified CSR audit scope and depth, which in most cases are determined by the guideline or standard adopted. In light of this several most seen standards and guidelines in China are studied. In China those standards are widely used by the most direct actors of CSR audit – CSR auditors, which majorly comprises of MNCs’ internal audit team and international audit firms. Two case studies also give the focus on these two different types of auditors, trying to closely look at their audit practices in supply chain CSR audit in China. Since the ultimate goal for CSR audit at site level is to achieve the practical improvement of CSR, those two cases are analyzied in a contrast and comparison fasion to reveal the impacting factors to on-site audit process and desion of correction/improvement. Some beneficial learning points are expected to see so that a more effective audit could be developed and practicaly carried out.
Load-Aware Congestion Adaptive Multipath Multicasting

In recent years, all communication system becomes wireless due to vast development and advancements in wireless technology. Such network offers a platform to deploy a wide range of multimedia and other services with different data types. In mobile ad hoc networks one of the most prominent factors which affect the overall performance of the network is congestion. Congestion is one of the most misinterpreted concepts in the context of the wireless network. In general, excessive data traffic in the network referred to as congestion. However, in the wireless network, the congestion occurs due to unavailability of resources such as insufficient bandwidth, low battery power, and so on which leads to high packet losses, bandwidth reduction, and wastage of energy and time in recovering congestion. In addition to this, another factor which degrades the performance is improper load balancing due to certain routing metrics limitation. From the literature, it is observed that many of the existing solutions handle the above problems separately in a not- adaptive manner. However, addressing these issues together in an adaptive manner provides an effective solution to balance the load in the network as well as congestion. The proposed work addresses congestion and load balancing problems parallel with the aim to improve and enhance the overall network performance and lifetime. The proposed Load Aware Congestion Adaptive Multipath Multicast (LACAMM) routing approach adapt to current changes in the load and congestion level to find a suitable path even in the case of congestion scenario and node resource constraints. The proposed scheme measures the node resources such as residual bandwidth and the residual battery to predict the node stability. Redirects the data transmission under congested scenario from the congested node through the non-congested alternate path thereby improves the overall network performance. This work performs well under burst traffic with the harsh environment.
The Release of 5-Methylene-2-Furanone from Irradiated DNA Catalyzed by Cationic Polyamines and Divalent Metal Cations

Abstract Roginskaya, M. , Bernhard, W. A. , Marion, R. T. and Razskazovskiy, Y. The Release of 5-Methylene-2-Furanone from Irradiated DNA Catalyzed by Cationic Polyamines and Divalent Metal Cations. Radiat. Res. 163, 85–89 (2005). Release of 5-methylene-2-furanone (5-MF), a characteristic marker of DNA deoxyribose oxidative damage at the C1′ position, was observed in significant quantities from X-irradiated DNA. This observation, which held for DNA irradiated either in aqueous solution or as a film, requires postirradiation treatment at 90°C in the presence of polyamines and divalent metal cations at biological pH. The 5-MF product was quantified by using reverse-phase HPLC. The radiation chemical yield of 5-MF comprised more than 30% of the yield of total unaltered base release. Polylysine, spermine and Be(II) showed the strongest catalytic effect on 5-MF release, while Zn(II), Cu(II), Ni(II), putrescine and Mg(II) were substantially less efficient. We have hypothesized that the 5-MF release from irradiated DNA occurs through catalytic decomposition of the 2′-deoxyribonolactone (dL) precursor through two consecutive β- and δ-phosphate elimination reactions. A stepwise character of the process was indicated by the S-shaped time course of 5-MF accumulation. If dL proves to be the precursor to 5-MF formation, it would then follow that dL is a very important lesion generated in DNA by ionizing radiation.
Complex arterial reconstruction for pancreas transplantation in recipients with advanced arteriosclerosis.

Feasibility of left lobe living donor liver transplantation between adults: An 8-year, single-center experience of 107 cases. Am J Transplant 2006; 6: 1004. 3. Ikegami T, Nishizaki T, Yanaga K, et al. Changes in the caudate lobe that is transplanted with extended left lobe liver graft from living donors. Surgery 2001; 129: 86. 4. Sugawara Y, Makuuchi M, Imamura H, et al. Living donor liver transplantation in adults: Recent advances and results. Surgery 2002; 132: 348. 5. Todo S, Furukawa H, Jin MB, et al. Living donor liver transplantation in adults: Outcome in Japan. Liver Transpl 2000; 6: S66. 6. Yonemura Y, Taketomi A, Soejima Y, et al. Validity of preoperative volumetric analysis of congestion volume in living donor LT using three-dimensional computed tomography. Liver Transpl 2005; 11: 1556.
A. Simpson.

In 1958, in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan wrote of “a dazzling new playwright,” with his inimitable enthusiasm he declared: “I am ready to burn my boats and promise [that] N.F. Simpson [is] the most gifted comic writer the English stage has discovered since the war” (Tynan 210). Now, in 2008, despite a recent West End revival, 1 few critics would cite Simpson at all and debates regarding the “most gifted comic writer” of the English stage would invariably be centred on Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, Samuel Beckett or, for those with a more morose sense of humour, Harold Pinter. Part of the reason for Simpson’s critical decline can be put down to protracted periods of silence; after his run of critically and commercially successful plays with The English Stage Company, 2 Simpson only produced two further full length plays: The Cresta Run (1965) and Was He Anyone? (1972). Of these, the former was poorly received and the latter only reached the fringe theatre. 3 As Stephen Pile recently put it, “in 1983, Simpson himself vanished” with no apparent fixed address. The other reason that may be cited is that, more than any other British writer of his time, Simpson was associated with “The Theatre of the Absurd. ” As the vogue for the style died out in London, Simpson’s brand of Absurdism simply went out of fashion. John Russell Taylor offers perhaps the most scathing version of that argument: “whether one likes or dislikes N.F. Simpson’s work, it seems to me, there is little to be said about it. It is uniquely all of a piece, all written in pretty well the same style, and all based on one principle, the non-sequitur” (Taylor 66). Whereas, for example, Harold Pinter developed and
Age affects responses on the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) by adults with minimal audiometric loss.

BACKGROUND Age-related declines in auditory and cognitive processing may contribute to the difficulties with listening in noise that are often reported by older adults. Such difficulties are reported even by those who have relatively good audiograms that could be considered "normal" for their age (ISO 7029-2000 [ISO, 2000]). The Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ; Gatehouse and Noble, 2004) is a questionnaire developed to measure a listener's self-reported ability to hear in a variety of everyday situations, such as those that are challenging for older adults, and it can provide insights into the possible contributions of auditory and cognitive factors to their listening difficulties. The SSQ has been shown to be a sensitive and reliable questionnaire to detect benefits associated with the use of different hearing technologies and potentially other forms of intervention. Establishing how age-matched listeners with audiograms "normal" for their age rate the items on the SSQ could enable an extension of its use in audiological assessment and in setting rehabilitative goals. PURPOSE The main purpose of this study was to investigate how younger and older adults who passed audiometric screening and who had thresholds considered to be "normal" for their age responded on the SSQ. It was also of interest to compare these results to those reported previously for older listeners with hearing loss in an attempt to tease out the relative effects of age and hearing loss. STUDY SAMPLE The SSQ was administered to 48 younger (mean age = 19 yr; SD = 1.0) and 48 older (mean age = 70 yr, SD = 4.1) adults with clinically normal audiometric thresholds below 4 kHz. The younger adults were recruited through an introductory psychology course, and the older adults were volunteers from the local community. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Both age groups completed the SSQ. The differences between the groups were analyzed. Correlations were used to compare the pattern of results across items for the two age groups in the present study and to assess the relationship between SSQ scores and objective measures of hearing. Comparisons were also made to published results for older adults with hearing loss. RESULTS The pattern of reported difficulty across items was similar for both age groups, but younger adults had significantly higher scores than older adults on 42 of the 46 items. On average, younger adults scored 8.8 (SD = 0.6) out of 10 and older adults scored 7.7 (SD = 1.2) out of 10. By comparison, scores of 5.5 (SD = 1.9) have been reported for older adults (mean age = 71 yr, SD = 8.1) with moderate hearing loss (Gatehouse and Noble, 2004). CONCLUSIONS By establishing the best scores that could reasonably be expected from younger and older adults with "normal" hearing thresholds, these results provide clinicians with information that should assist them in setting realistic targets for interventions for adults of different ages.
Streamed Data Analysis Using Adaptable Bloom Filter

With the coming up of plethora of web applications and technologies like sensors, IoT, cloud computing, etc., the data generation resources have increased exponentially. Stream processing requires real time analytics of data in motion and that too in a single pass. This paper proposes a framework for hourly analysis of streamed data using Bloom filter, a probabilistic data structure where hashing is done by using a combination of double hashing and partition hashing; leading to less inter-hash function collision and decreased computational overhead. When size of incoming data is not known, use of Static Bloom filter leads to high collision rate if data flow is too much, and wastage of storage space if data is less. In such cases it is difficult to determine the optimal Bloom filter parameters (m, k) in advance, thus a target threshold for false positives (f_p) cannot be guaranteed. To accommodate the growing data size, one of the major requirements in Bloom filter is that filter size m should grow dynamically. For predicting the array size of Bloom filter Kalman filter has been used. It has been experimentally proved that proposed Adaptable Bloom Filter (ATBF) efficiently performs peak hour analysis, server utilization and reduces the time and space required for querying dynamic datasets.
Vandal: A Scalable Security Analysis Framework for Smart Contracts

The rise of modern blockchains has facilitated the emergence of smart contracts: autonomous programs that live and run on the blockchain. Smart contracts have seen a rapid climb to prominence, with applications predicted in law, business, commerce, and governance. Smart contracts are commonly written in a high-level language such as Ethereum's Solidity, and translated to compact low-level bytecode for deployment on the blockchain. Once deployed, the bytecode is autonomously executed, usually by a %Turing-complete virtual machine. As with all programs, smart contracts can be highly vulnerable to malicious attacks due to deficient programming methodologies, languages, and toolchains, including buggy compilers. At the same time, smart contracts are also high-value targets, often commanding large amounts of cryptocurrency. Hence, developers and auditors need security frameworks capable of analysing low-level bytecode to detect potential security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present Vandal: a security analysis framework for Ethereum smart contracts. Vandal consists of an analysis pipeline that converts low-level Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode to semantic logic relations. Users of the framework can express security analyses in a declarative fashion: a security analysis is expressed in a logic specification written in the \souffle language. We conduct a large-scale empirical study for a set of common smart contract security vulnerabilities, and show the effectiveness and efficiency of Vandal. Vandal is both fast and robust, successfully analysing over 95\% of all 141k unique contracts with an average runtime of 4.15 seconds; outperforming the current state of the art tools---Oyente, EthIR, Mythril, and Rattle---under equivalent conditions.