bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Different Vibration Frequencies, Amplitudes and Contraction Levels on Lower Limb Muscles during Graded Isometric Contractions Superimposed on Whole Body Vibration Stimulation
Authors: Pujari Amit N. , Neilson Richard D. , Cardinale Marco 
Published: May 2018

AbstractBackgroundIndirect vibration stimulation i.e. whole body vibration or upper limb vibration, has been suggested increasingly as an effective exercise intervention for sports and rehabilitation applications. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the effects of whole body vibration (WBV) stimulation superimposed to graded isometric contractions superimposed on. For this scope, we investigated the effects of WBV superimposed to graded isometric contractions in the lower limbs on muscle activation. We also assessed the agonist-antagonist co-activation during this type of exercise.Twelve healthy volunteers were exposed to WBV superimposed to graded isometric contractions, at 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100% of the maximum voluntary contractions (V) or just isometric contractions performed on a custom designed horizontal leg press Control (C). Tested stimulation consisted of 30Hzand 50Hz frequencies and 0.5mm and 1.5mm amplitudes. Surface electromyographic activity of Vastus Lateralis (VL), Vastus Medialis (VM) and Biceps Femoris (BF) were measured during V and C conditions. Co-contraction activity of agonist-antagonist muscles was also quantified. The trials were performed in random order.ResultsBoth the prime mover, (VL) and the antagonist, (BF) displayed significantly higher (P < 0.05) EMG activity with the V than the C condition. For both the VL and BF, the increase in mean EMGrms values depended on the frequency, amplitude and muscle contraction level with 50Hz-0.5mm stimulation inducing the largest neuromuscular activity. 50Hz-0.5mm V condition also led to co-activation ratios significantly (P< 0.05) higher at 40, 80 and 100% of MVC than the C condition.ConclusionsOur results show that the isometric contraction superimposed on vibration stimulation leads to higher neuromuscular activity compared to isometric contraction alone in the lower limbs. Compared to the control condition, the vibratory stimulation leads to higher agonist-antagonist co-activation of the muscles around the knee joint in all vibration conditions and effort levels. The combination of vibration magnitude (frequency and amplitude) and the level of muscle contraction affect neuromuscular activity rather than vibration frequency alone. Results of this study suggest that more parameters need to be taken into consideration when designing vibration exercise programs for sports and rehabilitation purposes.
Antagonizing the corticotropin releasing hormone receptor 1 with antalarmin reduces the progression of endometriosis
Authors: Torres-Reverón Annelyn , Rivera-Lopez Leslie L. , Flores Idhaliz , Appleyard Caroline B. 
Published: May 2018

AbstractEndometriosis is a disorder in which endometrial tissue is found outside the uterus causing pain, infertility and stress. Finding an effective and long-term treatment for endometriosis still remains one of the most significant challenges in the field. Corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) is one of the main signaling peptides within the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis released in response to stress. CRH can affect nervous and visceral tissues such as the uterus and gut via activation of two types of CRH receptors: CRHR1 and CRHR2. Our aim was to determine if blocking CRHR1 with antalarmin will reduce endometriosis progression. First, we induced endometriosis in female rats by suturing uterine horn tissue next to the intestinal mesentery and allowed to progress for 7 days. We determined that after 7 days, there was a significant increase in CRHR1 within endometriotic vesicles as compared to normal uterus. A second group of rats received endometriosis but also antalarmin (20 mg/kg, i.p.) during the first 7 days after surgery. As separate group of sham surgery rats served as controls. Endometriosis was allowed to progress until 60 days after surgery. At time of sacrifice, rats were tested for anxiety behaviors and endometriotic vesicles, and uterus were collected. Rats with endometriosis that received antalarmin significantly reduced the size (67% decrease) and number (30% decrease) of endometriotic vesicles. Antalarmin also prevented the increase in CRH and CRHR1 within endometriotic vesicles but not of glucocorticoid receptor. Behaviorally, endometriosis increased anxiety in the zero-maze test but antalarmin did not modify it. Our data provides the first demonstration for the effective use on CRHR1 antagonist for the treatment of endometriosis with promising effects for long-term therapy of this debilitating disease.
Rethinking artisan entrepreneurship in a small island
Authors: Arias Ricardo Alonzo Cortez , Cruz Allan Discua 
Published: May 2018

Purpose
There is a growing interest in artisan entrepreneurs around the world. Scholars are increasingly interested in how artisan enterprises use tourism in a resource-constrained resources. Based on the concept of artisan chocolate entrepreneur, the purpose of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of artisanal chocolate making in a small island with limited resources yet influenced by increased tourism.

Design/methodology/approach
Artisan enterprises are considered relevant in developing countries and their creation merits further attention. This study examines artisan enterprises using in-depth interviews, case studies, and an interpretative approach. The approach enables examining how artisan chocolate enterprises use tourism to develop their businesses in a context characterized by limited resources.

Findings
The findings show that artisan entrepreneurs are encouraged to start and develop enterprises due to lifestyle choices. The findings reveal a connection between artisan chocolatiers developing place-bound features to address a growing demand of tourists’ expectation for authentic and local products. The approach of artisan entrepreneurs in such conditions can be explained through entrepreneurial bricolage.

Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature on the initial stages of artisan enterprises particularly in resource-constrained environments influenced by tourism. More specifically, the study provides evidence of the relevance of tourism for artisanal enterprise emergence, which is a relatively overlooked area in tourism and artisanal studies in developing countries. The study highlights the key place bound features that artisanal chocolate entrepreneurs associate to their products based on tourists’ demand for authentic and local products.
Social media adoption and its impact on firm performance: the case of the UAE
Authors: Ahmad Syed Zamberi , Abu Bakar Abdul Rahim , Ahmad Norita 
Published: May 2018

Purpose
Through social media technologies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can communicate information and respond to competitors with minimal cost. The ability to share and access information can affect SMEs’ performance, but there is little research on the link between SMEs’ social media adoption and their performance. The purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative survey to explore factors that influenced social media adoption by SMEs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and its impact on performance.

Design/methodology/approach
The study used a multi-perspective framework combining technological, organizational and environmental elements affecting SMEs. Survey questionnaires were used to collect data from a random sample of SMEs operating in the UAE. Using partial least squares and structural equation modeling techniques, 144 responses were analyzed.

Findings
Social media adoption had no effect on SMEs’ performance. These findings could help managers and decision makers in the SME sector to try to keep pace with research on social media innovations, and enable them to benefit from social commerce as it becomes more ubiquitous.

Research limitations/implications
This has implications for social media experts and anyone wishing to encourage social media use by SMEs.

Originality/value
The study developed a suitable multi-perspective framework covering various factors that may affect social media use. It also tested the framework empirically on a sample of SMEs from the UAE.
Peer assessment through digital storytelling: experiences of pre-service IT teachers
Authors: Tatli Zeynep , Uğur Nursel , Çakiroğlu Ünal 
Published: May 2018

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reveal the contribution of the digital storytelling to the peer assessments experiences of pre-service teachers within the teaching practices.

Design/methodology/approach
The study is carried out as a special case study. Both qualitative and quantitative data gathering tools were used together to investigate a special case in depth (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2011; Çepni, 2007). In this study, the case investigated was the process whereby the senior year pre-service teachers enrolled in the faculty of education provided assessments of themselves and their peers through the teaching practice course, using digital storytelling. The contributions of the assessment method employed, in the experiences and personal development of the pre-service teachers, were investigated through interviews with pre-service teachers involved.

Findings
The results suggested that pre-service teachers’ perspectives were quite positive toward the use of digital storytelling for peer assessment in their teaching practices. The prominent contributions were: they caused easily tolerate personally as they did not take a direct form, and that they considered peer assessment through digital storytelling as an alternative means of assessment to effectively reflect the process. Receiving more detailed feedback about their classroom experiences and their teaching skills was helpful for pre-service IT teachers. Suggestions due to the findings were also included.

Originality/value
In the study, peer assessment digital stories in the teaching practice courses offers the benefits of confidence with, different perspectives, satisfaction, and objectivity. These benefits can help pre-service teachers to focus on shortcomings regarding their teaching experiences, and take care for the correction. Further studies can be provided about the digital storytelling processes in various assessment processes of the instructions to reveal the potential of digital narratives in other domains as well.
Explaining the emergence of team agility: a complex adaptive systems perspective
Authors: Werder Karl , Maedche Alexander 
Published: May 2018

Purpose
Agile software development helps software producing organizations to respond to manifold challenges. While prior research focused on agility as a project or process phenomenon, the authors suggest that agility is an emergent phenomenon on the team level. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Design/methodology/approach
Using the theory of complex adaptive systems (CASs), the study captures the multiple influencing levels of software development teams (SDTs) and their interplay with self-organization and emergence. The authors investigate three agile SDTs in different contextual environments that participate with four or more different roles each.

Findings
The results suggest self-organization as a central process when understanding team agility. While contextual factors often provide restriction on self-organization, they can help the team to enhance its autonomy.

Research limitations/implications
The theoretical contributions result from the development and test of theory grounded propositions and the investigation of mature agile development teams.

Practical implications
The findings help practitioners to improve the cost-effectiveness ratio of their team’s operations.

Originality/value
The study provides empirical evidence for the emergence of team agility in agile SDTs. Using the lens of CAS, the study suggests the importance of the team’s autonomy.
Benefits realisation from IT-enabled innovation
Authors: Waring Teresa , Casey Rebecca , Robson Andrew 
Published: May 2018

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to address the call for more public sector empirical studies on benefits realisation (BR), to contribute to the literature on BR as a dynamic capability (DC) within the context of IT-enabled innovation in a public sector context and to highlight the challenges facing organisations if they adopt a BR competence and capability framework.

Design/methodology/approach
The empirical research conducted within this paper is an exploratory survey. Exploratory surveys are particularly useful when investigating a little known phenomenon and can help to uncover or provide preliminary evidence of association among concepts. This survey was a census of all National Health Service acute hospital trusts in England.

Findings
The study indicates that most hospitals that participated in the survey have a basic approach to BR and have yet to develop a more mature approach that would provide the strong micro-foundations of a BR capability.

Research limitations/implications
The BR framework that has been the basis of the survey is interesting in terms of its components but is limited with regards to the micro-foundations of a benefits realisation capability within an organisation. The research suggests that organisations in the public sector need to focus much more on staff development and recruitment in the area of BR to ensure that they have the appropriate skills sets for a rapidly changing environment.

Originality/value
The paper proposes a framework for BR capabilities and IT-enabled change, and suggests that although the concept of maturity is valuable when considering the micro-foundations of BR, DCs change and respond to stimuli within the external and internal environment and must be renewed and refreshed regularly.
Institutions, human capital and entrepreneurial orientation: implications for growth policy
Authors: Mthanti Thanti , Ojah Kalu 
Published: May 2018

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to establish a more robust empirical support for the long established postulation by Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter that human capital and institutions enable Schumpeterian entrepreneurship, which, in turn, facilitates economic growth.Design/methodology/approachAdopting entrepreneurial orientation (EO) (i.e. innovativeness, proactiveness and risk taking; Mthanti and Ojah, 2017, Research Policy, 46:4, pp. 724-739) as the measure of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship at the macro-level, and using a sample of 93 countries, over 1980-2008, the authors employ system Generalised Method of Moments to investigate institutions and human capital as possible determinants of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (EO).FindingsThe authors find that the human capital-EO nexus is robust across economic development levels. However, there is a cross-country variation in the institutions-EO nexus. In line with theoretical predictions, institutions indeed drive EO in middle-to-high-income countries. However, in low-income countries, building institutions in order to foster EO yields perverse outcomes, which, for us and especially based on deeper analysis, suggest that improving the quality of institutions may not be a necessary precondition for EO/growth policy in low-income countries. Furthermore, the authors find that EO is a highly persistent series, with self-reinforcing network effects, i.e. lofty EO behaviour encourages more lofty EO behaviour.Research limitations/implicationsDrivers of macro EO are erroneously taken as of growth. This empirical analysis corrects the sequencing.Practical implicationsPolicy practice must acknowledge macro-EO importantly has both direct and indirect growth effects.Originality/valueThis study is the first to empirically test the theoretical sequence between drivers of growth/EO and economic growth.
The energetic consequences of habitat structure for forest stream salmonids
Authors: Naman Sean M. , Rosenfeld Jordan S. , Kiffney Peter M. , Richardson John S. 
Published: May 2018

Abstract

Increasing habitat availability (i.e. habitat suitable for occupancy) is often assumed to elevate the abundance or production of mobile consumers; however, this relationship is often nonlinear (threshold or unimodal). Identifying the mechanisms underlying these nonlinearities is essential for predicting the ecological impacts of habitat change, yet the functional forms and ultimate causation of consumer‐habitat relationships are often poorly understood.

Nonlinear effects of habitat on animal abundance may manifest through physical constraints on foraging that restrict consumers from accessing their resources. Subsequent spatial incongruence between consumers and resources should lead to unimodal or saturating effects of habitat availability on consumer production if increasing the area of habitat suitable for consumer occupancy comes at the expense of habitats that generate resources. However, the shape of this relationship could be sensitive to cross‐ecosystem prey subsidies, which may be unrelated to recipient habitat structure and result in more linear habitat effects on consumer production.

We investigated habitat‐production relationships for juveniles of stream‐rearing Pacific salmon and trout (Oncorhynchus spp.), which typically forage in low‐velocity pool habitats, while their prey (drifting benthic invertebrates) are produced upstream in high‐velocity riffles. However, juvenile salmonids also consume subsidies of terrestrial invertebrates that may be independent of pool‐riffle structure.

We measured salmonid biomass production in 13 experimental enclosures each containing a downstream pool and upstream riffle, spanning a gradient of relative pool area (14%–80% pool). Increasing pool relative to riffle habitat area decreased prey abundance, leading to a nonlinear saturating effect on fish production. We then used bioenergetics model simulations to examine how the relationship between pool area and salmonid biomass is affected by varying levels of terrestrial subsidy. Simulations indicated that increasing terrestrial prey inputs linearized the effect of habitat availability on salmonid biomass, while decreasing terrestrial inputs exaggerated a “hump‐shaped” effect.

Our results imply that nonlinear effects of habitat availability on consumer production can arise from trade‐offs between habitat suitable for consumer occupancy and habitat that generates prey. However, cross‐ecosystem prey subsidies can effectively decouple this trade‐off and modify consumer‐habitat relationships in recipient systems.
Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London
Authors: Beswick Joe , Penny Joe 
Published: May 2018

AbstractThis article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.
Melitz Meets Milk: The Impact of Quota Abolition on EU Dairy Export Competitiveness
Authors: Philippidis George , Waschik Robert 
Published: May 2018

AbstractPrevious studies of EU milk quota abolition usually assume perfect competition (PC) in the dairy industry, despite evidence to the contrary. We use a global computable general equilibrium framework with an imperfectly competitive (IC) model variant, which offers insights into structural change (i.e. scale of output, firm entry/exit) and varietal diversity in the dairy industry. A heterogeneous‐firm Melitz extension enriches our analysis by endogenising the decision‐making process of domestic firms when exporting (or not) to specific foreign markets. The results from a PC CGE model variant are found to be consistent with respected market outlooks and official data. Furthermore, PC and IC variants generate broadly similar trends – a result corroborated in a previous study of Italian dairy firms. Our IC model prediction of a ‘shakeout’ among EU dairy firms is tentatively supported by actual observations. Finally, as an industry characterised by significant product innovation, increased extra‐EU export orientation by remaining dairy firms increases varietal choice, which further boosts EU dairy exports compared with the PC model variant.
Optimal Design of Agri‐environmental Schemes under Asymmetric Information for Improving Farmland Biodiversity
Authors: Gómez‐Limón José A. , Gutiérrez‐Martín Carlos , Villanueva Anastasio J. 
Published: May 2018

AbstractInformation asymmetry is one of the main obstacles to the effective design and implementation of agri‐environmental schemes (AES). The literature has generally addressed this issue through the use of principal‐agent models (PAM). We develop a PAM to support optimal design of a new AES for improving farmland biodiversity. We use the results of choice experiments to assess both the costs incurred by the agent for the provision of biodiversity and the resulting social benefits. We also make a number of novel contributions such as the inclusion of a non‐linear non‐compliance detection curve, a sensitivity analysis to identify which parameter estimates have a critical impact on PAM results, and analysis of the efficiency of different sanction scenarios. The results suggest that: (i) the second‐best solutions differ significantly from the optimal solutions attainable with perfect information, with farmers being strongly over‐compensated for the extra costs associated with improved biodiversity; (ii) monitoring levels should be higher; (iii) the sanction system should be tougher. Sensitivity analysis shows the need for accurate estimates of the marginal cost of public funds and the costs and benefits associated with the public goods, which represent the key parameters determining PAM results.