bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Mechanical Performance of Bio-Inspired Hybrid Structures Utilising Topological Interlocking Geometry
Authors: Djumas Lee , Molotnikov Andrey , Simon George P. , Estrin Yuri 
Published: May 2016

AbstractStructural composites inspired by nacre have emerged as prime exemplars for guiding materials design of fracture-resistant, rigid hybrid materials. The intricate microstructure of nacre, which combines a hard majority phase with a small fraction of a soft phase, achieves superior mechanical properties compared to its constituents and has generated much interest. However, replicating the hierarchical microstructure of nacre is very challenging, not to mention improving it. In this article, we propose to alter the geometry of the hard building blocks by introducing the concept of topological interlocking. This design principle has previously been shown to provide an inherently brittle material with a remarkable flexural compliance. We now demonstrate that by combining the basic architecture of nacre with topological interlocking of discrete hard building blocks, hybrid materials of a new type can be produced. By adding a soft phase at the interfaces between topologically interlocked blocks in a single-build additive manufacturing process, further improvement of mechanical properties is achieved. The design of these fabricated hybrid structures has been guided by computational work elucidating the effect of various geometries. To our knowledge, this is the first reported study that combines the advantages of nacre-inspired structures with the benefits of topological interlocking.
Authenticity
Authors: Kim Hyojin , Bonn Mark A. 
Published: May 2016

Purpose
Based on the theoretical debates involving authenticity and consumer behavior intentions, this exploratory research study aims to identify whether the authentic experiences of tourists visiting wineries affect their behavioral intentions.

Design/methodology/approach
A self-administered questionnaire was created to address authenticity issues within the context of the on-site winery experience and how they ultimately affected behavioral intentions according to selected demographic characteristics. Adapting Wang’s categorization of authenticity as being composed of three dimensions, a total of 13 questions were developed and used to obtain consumer data. To determine whether these three dimensions related to authenticity affected visitors’ behavioral intentions within the context of the winery experience, a standard multiple regression procedure was used at a levels = 0.05 and 0.01.

Findings
The findings show that authentic characteristics play a substantial role in the behavioral intentions of winery tourists. Interestingly, there were no significant relationships between a visitor’s willingness to recommend wineries and the on-site winery experience, presentation of wine bottle labeling and impressions about the overall winery experience.

Research limitations implications
Because this was an exploratory study, repeated applications of this experiment must be conducted in many other global destinations where winery visits occur, to establish generalizable research findings. Future applications of this research study should consider introducing new variables to further measure authenticity related to on-site winery visits, not only to build upon these study findings but also to assist the wine industry marketing professionals in acquiring a better understanding of the relationship between authenticity, as related to on-site winery visits, and the behavioral intentions of winery visitors.

Practical implications
This study’s findings will help to better understand the behavioral intentions of winery visitors based upon the perceived authenticity levels of on-site winery experiences. The results provide strategic and developmental directions for wine industry professionals, winery owners, wine producers and wine destination marketing organizations to more accurately promote winery visits, products and destinations.

Originality/value
Although authenticity and wine tourism have both received much attention as research topics, no research, to date, has addressed the importance of perceived authenticity, as applied to the on-site winery visit, within the overall wine tourism experience and its effect upon visitor intentions. This study endeavored to quantify the attributes of authenticity that are specific to winery tourism and consumer behavior issues.
The relationship between workplace spirituality and hospitality supervisors’ work attitudes
Authors: Gatling Anthony , Kim Jungsun (Sunny) , Milliman John 
Published: May 2016

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which workplace spirituality (WPS) is related to hospitality supervisors’ organizational commitment (OC) and intention to quit (ITQ), examined through the lens of self-determination theory (SDT).Design/methodology/approachBased on survey data collected from 190 supervisors employed by a large US hospitality organization, the relationships were examined using confirmatory factor analysis, second-order factor analysis and structural equation modeling.FindingsThe results of this study suggest that three dimensions of WPS (i.e. meaning and purpose in their work, sense of community and alignment with organizational values) are positively related to OC and negatively related to ITQ. Moreover, these supervisors’ OC fully mediates the negative relationship of WPS to ITQ.Research limitations/implicationsThis study tests the validity and reliability of three WPS dimensions in the hospitality environment. It also provides a theoretical perspective through SDT for explaining how WPS impacts employee work attitudes, which can be used to guide future studies.Practical implicationsHospitality organizations can benefit from the insights of this research into how WPS can increase the commitment and retention of supervisors, who in turn positively impact front-line workers and customer service quality delivery.Originality/valueThis study provides additional implications for SDT and offers new insights into the emerging field of WPS scholarship. While other studies have tested relationships related to involving these WPS variables, a scarcity of research has been offered in hospitality or with a theory-based explanation of these relationships.
Pretrade and risk-based clearing
Authors: Balson William E. , Rausser Gordon 
Published: May 2016

Purpose
Risk-based clearing has been proposed by Rausser et al. (2010) for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. This paper aims to illustrate the application of risk-based margins to a case study of the mortgage-backed securities derivative portfolio of the American International Group (AIG) during the period 2005-2008. There exists sufficient publicly available information to examine AIG’s derivative portfolio and how that portfolio would depend on conjectural changes in margin requirements imposed on its OTC derivative positions. Generally, such data on OTC derivative portfolio positions are unavailable in the public domain, and thus, the AIG data provide a unique opportunity for an objective evaluation.

Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses modern financial methodology to evaluate risk-based margining and collateralization for the major OTC derivative portfolio of the AIG.

Findings
This analysis reveals that a risk-based margin procedure would have led to earlier margin calls of greater magnitude initially than the collateral calls actually faced by AIG Financial Products (AIGFP). The total margin ultimately required by the risk-based procedure, however, is similar in magnitude to the collateral calls faced by AIGFP by August 2008. It is likely that a risk-based clearing procedure applied to AIG’s OTC contracts would have led to the AIG undertaking significant hedging and liquidation of their OTC positions well before the losses built up to the point they had, perhaps avoiding the federal government’s orchestrated restructuring that occurred in September 2008.

Originality/value
There has been no published risk-based evaluations of a major OTC portfolio of derivatives for any company, let alone the AIG.
Crisis facilitates policy change, not liberalization
Authors: Stocker Marshall L. 
Published: May 2016

Purpose
Crisis events are windows of opportunity during which a country’s leaders may implement economic policy adjustments which change that country’s level of economic freedom and affect the local capital market. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between annual changes in an economic freedom index, six types of crises and equity market returns.

Design/methodology/approach
The author uses fixed-effects regressions on annual panel data for 69 countries during the period 2000-2010.

Findings
Banking, domestic debt and inflation crises decrease economic freedom, and an external debt crisis weakly relates to increases in economic freedom. Only banking crises relate to a change in economic freedom in the following year, suggesting that crisis-driven changes in economic freedom happen quickly. Gains in economic freedom are more likely to occur during periods of positive local and global equity returns. Preceding and contemporaneous to increases in economic freedom, a country’s equity market outperforms a global equity index, offering observers a leading indicator for economic policy change.

Originality/value
The author finds that crises coincide with decreases in economic freedom, while gains in economic freedom happen during periods of positive capital market sentiment. The absence of a relationship between one-year lagged crisis events and changes in economic freedom suggests prior research relating gains in economic freedom to a crisis occurring 5 or 10 years earlier is a relationship which is more complex, non-linear and specific to the selected data period or spurious. Furthermore, relative equity market returns are related to changes in economic freedom, suggesting that equity markets identify which countries have increased economic freedom, long before popular economic freedom indexes are published.
The trend of integrated reporting practice in South Africa: ceremonial or substantive?
Authors: Ahmed Haji Abdifatah , Anifowose Mutalib 
Published: May 2016

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the trend of integrated reporting (IR) practice following the introduction of an “apply or explain” IR requirement in South Africa. In particular, the authors examine whether the IR practice is ceremonial or substantive in the context of a soft regulatory environment.

Design/methodology/approach
By way of content analyses, the authors examine the extent and quality of IR practice using an IR checklist developed based on normative understanding of existing IR guidelines. The evidence is drawn from 246 integrated reports of large South African companies over a three-year period (2011-2013), following the introduction of IR requirement in South Africa.

Findings
The results show a significant increase in the extent and quality of IR practice. The findings also reveal significant improvements in individual IR categories such as connectivity of information, materiality determination process and reliability and completeness of the integrated reports. However, despite the increasing trend and evidence of both symbolic and substantive IR practice, the authors conclude that the current IR practice is largely ceremonial in nature, produced to acquire organisational legitimacy.

Practical implications
For academics, the authors argue that there is a need to move away from the “what” and “why” aspects of the IR agenda to “how” IR should work inside organisations. In particular, academics should engage with firms through interventionist research to help firms implement integrated thinking and substantive reporting practices. For organisations, the findings draw attention to specific aspects of IR that require improvement. For policymakers, the study provides evidence based on the developmental stage of IR practice and draws attention to certain areas that need clarification. In particular, the International Integrated Reporting Council and Integrated Reporting Committee of South Africa should provide detailed guidelines on connectivity of information, material issues and disclosure of multiple capitals and their trade-offs. Finally, for educators, in line with the ACCA’s embedment of IR in its accounting courses, there is a need to incorporate IR in the curriculum; in particular, the authors argue that the best way to advance IR is in a “ubiquitous” spread in accounting and management courses.

Originality/value
This study provides empirical account of IR practice over time in the context of a regulatory IR environment. The construction of an IR checklist developed based on normative understanding of local and international IR guidelines is another novel approach of this study.
Paracelsus Revisited: The Dose Concept in a Complex World
Authors: Grandjean Philippe 
Published: May 2016

AbstractAt the time that Paracelsus coined his famous dictum, ‘What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison’, embryonic toxicology was a fairly focused discipline that mainly dealt with occupational poisonings and side effects of pharmaceuticals, such as mercury. While Paracelsus paved the way for the modern threshold concept and the no‐adverse effect level, modern‐day toxicology is now tussling with highly complex issues, such as developmental exposures, genetic predisposition and other sources of hypersusceptibility, multiple causes of underestimated toxicity, and the continuous presence of uncertainty, even in regard to otherwise well‐studied mercury compounds. Further, the wealth of industrial chemicals now challenges the ‘untested‐chemical assumption’, that the lack of documentation means that toxic potentials can be ignored. Unfortunately, in its ambition to provide solid evidence, toxicology has been pushed into almost endless replications, as evidenced by the thousands of toxicology publications every year that focus on toxic metals, including mercury, while less well‐known hazards are ignored. From a public health viewpoint, toxicology needs to provide better guidance on decision‐making under ever‐present uncertainty. In this role, we need to learn from the stalwart Paracelsus the insistence on relying on facts rather than authority alone to protect against chemical hazards.
A Random Effect Model for Reconstruction of Spatial Chromatin Structure
Authors: Park Jincheol , Lin Shili 
Published: May 2016

Summary
A gene may be controlled by distal enhancers and repressors, not merely by regulatory elements in its promoter. Spatial organization of chromosomes is the mechanism that brings genes and their distal regulatory elements into close proximity. Recent molecular techniques, coupled with Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology, enable genome-wide detection of physical contacts between distant genomic loci. In particular, Hi-C is an NGS-aided assay for the study of genome-wide spatial interactions. The availability of such data makes it possible to reconstruct the underlying three-dimensional (3D) spatial chromatin structure. In this article, we present the Poisson Random effect Architecture Model (PRAM) for such an inference. The main feature of PRAM that separates it from previous methods is that it addresses the issue of over-dispersion and takes correlations among contact counts into consideration, thereby achieving greater consistency with observed data. PRAM was applied to Hi-C data to illustrate its performance and to compare the predicted distances with those measured by a Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) validation experiment. Further, PRAM was compared to other methods in the literature based on both real and simulated data.
Land use, fallow period and the recovery of a Caatinga forest
Authors: Sobrinho Mellissa S. , Tabarelli Marcelo , Machado Isabel C. , Sfair Júlia C. , Bruna Emilio M. , Lopes Ariadna V. 
Published: May 2016

AbstractCaatinga vegetation continues to be converted into mosaics of secondary forest stands, but the affect of this process on biodiversity has not yet been examined. We used 35 regenerating and old‐growth stands of Caatinga to examine the recovery of plant assemblages subsequent to slash‐and‐burn agriculture and cattle ranching/pasture in northeastern Brazil. Plant assemblages were contrasted in terms of community structure (stem density/basal area/species richness/diversity), functional (leaf habit/reproductive traits) and taxonomic composition. Soil attributes were also examined to infer potential drivers for cross‐habitat differences. As expected, plant assemblages clearly differed across a large set of community‐level attributes, including all trait categories relative to leaf habit and reproduction (pollination syndrome/floral color, size, type). Overall, old‐growth forest stands supported distinct and more diverse assemblages at the plot and habitat level;e.g., long‐lived tree species were almost exclusively found in old‐growth forest stands. For most attributes, plant assemblages subsequent to pasture exhibited intermediate values between those exhibited by old‐growth forest and those of agriculture‐related stands. Surprisingly, soils exhibited similar fertility‐related scores across habitats. Our results indicate that: (1) sprouting/resprouting represents an important mechanism of forest regeneration; (2) assemblage‐level attributes suggest recovery at distinct rates; (3) forest regeneration implies community‐level changes in both vegetative and reproductive functional attributes, including directional changes; (4) Caatinga is not able to completely recover in a period of 15‐yr following land abandonment; and (5) historical land use affects recovery rates and successional pathways/taxonomic trajectories. Seasonally dry tropical forests may intrinsically cover a wide range of patterns relative to successional model, recovery rates and successional pathways.
Status epilepticus in scrub typhus
Authors: Kalita Jayantee , Mani Vinita E. , Bhoi Sanjeev K. , Misra Usha K. 
Published: May 2016

SummaryScrub typhus is an emerging infection, and there is little information about status epilepticus (SE) in scrub typhus. We report the clinical spectrum and outcome of SE in scrub typhus. In a 3‐year prospective hospital‐based observational study, all scrub typhus patients with SE were included. Scrub typhus was diagnosed by immunochromatography assay. SE was defined if convulsions lasted longer than 5 min. The patients' demographic, clinical, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electroencephalography (EEG) findings were noted. Response to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) and outcome at 1 month and 1 year were recorded. Between 2012 and 2014, there were 66 patients with scrub typhus admitted with central nervous system (CNS) involvement, 10 (15.2%) of whom had SE (generalized convulsions in 5, secondary generalized in one). The median age of the patients was 34 (range 18–71) years and seven were female. The duration of SE ranged between 10 min and 48 h. SE responded to one AED in five patients, two AEDs in three patients, and more than two AEDs in two patients. Cranial MRI findings were normal. All patients recovered completely with doxycycline by 1 month and AED was withdrawn by 8 months in all. Although 15% patients with scrub typhus may have SE, they have good outcome.
Exploring the Effects of a Short‐Term Spanish Immersion Program in a Postsecondary Setting
Authors: Miano Alice A. , Bernhardt Elizabeth B. , Brates Vivian 
Published: May 2016

AbstractThis article probes the extent to which postsecondary Spanish learners can substantively increase their knowledge of Spanish over a two‐week period within a context of language and content instruction for four hours per day. The article considers the relationship of an immersion experience to upper‐level literature and culture classes. Insights into integrating service learning as a key part of the Spanish learning experience are also provided. Oral and writing data were collected in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 to demonstrate that participants showed significant improvement in their Spanish language abilities within the two weeks of the intensive experience. The enhancement of participants' Spanish language proficiency did not, however, bridge to upper‐level Spanish literature and culture courses, or necessarily to an interest in study abroad. Using service learning as a motivating factor in student participation had a positive affective impact.
A surfactant‐based wound dressing can reduce bacterial biofilms in a porcine skin explant model
Authors: Yang Qingping , Larose Christelle , Della Porta Alessandra C , Schultz Gregory S , Gibson Daniel J 
Published: May 2016

AbstractBacterial biofilms have been found in many, if not all, chronic wounds. Their excessive extracellular matrix secretion and the metabolic changes that they undergo render them highly tolerant of many antibiotic and antimicrobial treatments. Physical removal and/or disruption are a common approach to treating wounds suspected of having bacterial biofilms. While many of these techniques use mechanical energy as the primary means of removal, we have begun to investigate if surfactants could facilitate the removal of bacterial biofilms, or if they might sensitise the biofilms to antimicrobial interventions. We tested a new surfactant‐based wound gel on an ex vivo porcine skin explant model infected with a functionally tolerant 3‐day biofilm. The wounds were dressed with a surfactant‐based gel directly on the wound or with moistened gauze. The wounds were then wiped daily with moistened gauze, and the gel or gauze was re‐applied. Each day, an explant from each group was harvested and tested for total viable bacteria counts and viable biofilm‐protected bacteria counts. The results show that daily wiping with moistened gauze led to an initial decrease of bacteria, but by day 3, the biofilm had been fully re‐established to the same level prior to the beginning of treatment. For the surfactant‐based treatment, there was no detectable functional biofilm after the first treatment. The gauze control, which was also subjected to daily wiping, still contained functional biofilms, indicating that this result was not due to wiping alone. The total bacteria in the surfactant‐treated explants steadily decreased through day 3, when there were no detectable bacteria, while the wiping‐only control bacteria counts remained steady. The use of a moist gauze to wipe the visually apparent slime off of a wound appears to be insufficient to reduce biofilm over a 3‐day period. Daily application of the surfactant gel dressing and wiping reduced the biofilm to undetectable levels within 3 days in a skin explant model. A 3‐day regimen of dressing the wound model with a surfactant gel followed by gentle removal of the gel by wiping with a moistened gauze appears to be a simple and adequate approach to removing a bacterial biofilm infection in an ex vivo model. Additional clinical evidence is needed to determine if this promising approach can perform the same in clinically infected chronic wounds.