nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
What to stress, to whom and where? A cross country investigation of the effects of perceived brand benefits on buying intentions

This paper investigates cross country differences in the importance of four brand benefits that are commonly stressed in international positioning strategies quality, uniqueness, leading position, and growing popularity in determining brand purchase intentions. It also investigates how these effects are moderated by country characteristics, consumer characteristics, and perceptions about competing brands' benefits, as well as whether they are stable across product categories. To achieve this, we developed a hierarchical Bayesian model that recognizes the ordinal nature of the measurement of purchase intentions and captures scale usage differences in a parsimonious way. The model is estimated using a unique multi continent, multi category data set across 19,682 respondents from 25 countries. In total 337 brands across six product categories (fast food, beer, designer brands, athletic shoes and apparel, mobile phones, photography) and two service categories (airlines, credit cards) were assessed. The results show that on average intrinsic benefits (i.e. quality and uniqueness) are most important in determining purchase intentions. The strengths of these effects are significantly influenced by culture and become weaker if more competing brands are perceived to possess these benefits. Companies are therefore advised to trade off between positioning their brand along a brand benefit that appeals to a country, while ensuring that this positioning is distinct from the positioning of competing brands. If a multinational company prefers using one global strategy, then focusing on quality is recommended.
Total Quality Management in Saudi Higher Education

TQM is considered as a philosophy of modern management that is newly entered into the education field after it has proved the effectiveness and success in other fields such as the industry. TQM has been adopted in most of Saudi universities, but only some of them show excellence in the adoption and implementation process. The aim of this paper is to highlight some Saudi universities that successfully adopting the TQM concept and gain a competitive advantage over their local as well as global competitors. This paper also proposed a model to establish better TQM practices, in order to efficiently adopt and implement TQM philosophy in higher education. The model was based on previous research and the findings gained from the experience of TQM in local universities with recommendations to guide the successful quality management implementation.
Use of multiple methodologies for developing a customer oriented model of total quality management in higher education

Educational institutes must embrace the principles of total quality management (TQM) if they seek to remain competitive, and survive and succeed in the long run. An educational institution must embrace the principles of quality management and incorporate them into all of their activities. Starting with a theoretical background, the paper outlines the results of a study conducted on both internal and external customers of the educational system, with select engineering and management institutes as foci of study. The study is an attempt toward developing an integrated customer centric model of quality management in education, through the use of multiple methodologies so as to be able to evaluate service quality; prioritize improvement of service; and guide and develop educational services by incorporating the voice of the customer (VOC) The purpose of this paper is to establish the prioritization for improvement of service design of an educational system through incorporation of the VOC, be it in.
Implementing Total Quality Management in Education: Compatibility and Challenges

Quality education is a great concern in many societies across the world. In a highly competitive education sector, the success of academic institutions depends on the quality of education. Educationalists, policy makers, scholars, and researchers are showing their sincere interest towards the total quality management (TQM) as it is recognized as an effective management philosophy for continuous improvement, customer satisfaction, and organizational excellence. Since this concept was initially developed in the manufacturing sector, therefore, there is a great deal of suspicion whether this philosophy is applicable in education. In this connection, the main objective of this study is to investigate the compatibility of TQM with education. At the same time, this study would try to identify key challenges in implementing TQM in education. It is assumed that this study would be able to draw a meaningful conclusion regarding the applicability of TQM in education as well as to create an awareness regarding those challenges which may create obstacles in implementing TQM in education.
Unsupervised Learning of Discriminative Attributes and Visual Representations
Venue: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Attributes offer useful mid level features to interpret visual data. While most attribute learning methods are supervised by costly human generated labels, we introduce a simple yet powerful unsupervised approach to learn and predict visual attributes directly from data. Given a large unlabeled image collection as input, we train deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to output a set of discriminative, binary attributes often with semantic meanings. Specifically, we first train a CNN coupled with unsupervised discriminative clustering, and then use the cluster membership as a soft supervision to discover shared attributes from the clusters while maximizing their separability. The learned attributes are shown to be capable of encoding rich imagery properties from both natural images and contour patches. The visual representations learned in this way are also transferrable to other tasks such as object detection. We show other convincing results on the related tasks of image retrieval and classification, and contour detection.
Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: ICML

In recent years there have been many successes of using deep representations in reinforcement learning. Still, many of these applications use conventional architectures, such as convolutional networks, LSTMs, or auto encoders. In this paper, we present a new neural network architecture for model free reinforcement learning. Our dueling network represents two separate estimators: one for the state value function and one for the state dependent action advantage function. The main benefit of this factoring is to generalize learning across actions without imposing any change to the underlying reinforcement learning algorithm. Our results show that this architecture leads to better policy evaluation in the presence of many similar valued actions. Moreover, the dueling architecture enables our RL agent to outperform the state of the art on the Atari 2600 domain.
Dynamic Frame skip Deep Q Network
Venue: ArXiv

Deep Reinforcement Learning methods have achieved state of the art performance in learning control policies for the games in the Atari 2600 domain. One of the important parameters in the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) is the frame skip rate. It decides the granularity at which agents can control game play. A frame skip value of $k$ allows the agent to repeat a selected action $k$ number of times. The current state of the art architectures like Deep Q Network (DQN) and Dueling Network Architectures (DuDQN) consist of a framework with a static frame skip rate, where the action output from the network is repeated for a fixed number of frames regardless of the current state. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, Dynamic Frame skip Deep Q Network (DFDQN) which makes the frame skip rate a dynamic learnable parameter. This allows us to choose the number of times an action is to be repeated based on the current state. We show empirically that such a setting improves the performance on relatively harder games like Seaquest.
Caregivers' voices: The experiences of caregivers of children who sustained serious accidental and non accidental head injury in early childhood
Venue: Clinical child psychology and psychiatry

Head injury is a leading cause of mortality and acquired neurological impairment in children. Head injured children may have neurobehavioural deficits that persist for years following injury. Head injury can result in significant and persistent caregiver burden, including mental health issues, family stress and disorganisation, and unmet social and healthcare service needs. Few studies have examined the healthcare and social service needs of children and their families following head injury sustained at an early age. This qualitative study aims to describe the experiences of caregivers of children who sustained a serious head injury (particularly non accidental head injury) before the age of 2 years. Caregivers were interviewed up to 15 years following the initial injury. Semi structured interviews with 21 caregivers of 15 children (aged 3 15 years at the time of interview) were completed. Thematic analysis of interview data generated three key themes: impact, support and information. The study's findings reveal the broad impact of serious childhood head injury on caregivers, specifically the significant distress and burden brought about through lack of information, challenges in accessing support and inconsistent care. Recommendations for developing a quality 'model of care' and improving ease of access to supports for caregivers are provided.
Quilting a Connection: The Use of Quilting in Group Art Therapy to Promote Well Being for Older Women

This qualitative research paper explores the potential of quilting, and the quilting process, as a therapeutic tool for promoting the well being of older women within the context of a group art therapy setting. Social isolation acts as a prominent risk factor for the population of older women in Canada, and is influenced and incited by the social stigma and perspective that older women are an economic and societal burden to Western society. Through an integrative methodology, involving a theoretical approach with elements of arts based inquiry, this research paper reviews and analyzes the literature focused on quilting, group art therapy, and the well being of older women. Additionally, this author's personal learning experience about quilting, in context with being an art therapy student, is explored through the engagement of the quilting process as an arts based inquiry. This personal learning is discussed in correspondence with the main findings from the analyzed and synthesized literature, and as a way to better inform the explored concept of the use of quilting for well being within an art therapy context. Connection with the body, connection with womanhood, and connection through generativity emerged as main themes. These findings are discussed in attempt to distinguish quilting as an appropriate and therapeutic tool for fostering and promoting the well being of older women.
Learning OpenCV 3: Computer Vision in C+ with the OpenCV Library

Learning OpenCV puts you in the middle of the rapidly expanding field of computer vision. Written by the creators of the free open source OpenCV library, this book introduces you to computer vision and demonstrates how you can quickly build applications that enable computers to "see" and make decisions based on that data.The second edition is updated to cover new features and changes in OpenCV 2.0, especially the C+ interface.Computer vision is everywherein security systems, manufacturing inspection systems, medical image analysis, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and more. OpenCV provides an easy to use computer vision framework and a comprehensive library with more than 500 functions that can run vision code in real time. Whether you want to build simple or sophisticated vision applications, Learning OpenCV is the book any developer or hobbyist needs to get started, with the help of hands on exercises in each chapter.This book includes:A thorough introduction to OpenCV Getting input from cameras Transforming images Segmenting images and shape matching Pattern recognition, including face detection Tracking and motion in 2 and 3 dimensions 3D reconstruction from stereo vision Machine learning algorithms
Annual dynamics of impervious surface in the Pearl River Delta, China, from 1988 to 2013, using time series Landsat imagery

Information on impervious surface distribution and dynamics is useful for understanding urbanization and its impacts on hydrological cycle, water management, surface energy balances, urban heat island, and biodiversity. Numerous methods have been developed and successfully applied to estimate impervious surfaces. Previous methods of impervious surface estimation mainly focused on the spectral differences between impervious surfaces and other land covers. Moreover, the accuracy of estimation from single or multi temporal images was often limited by the mixed pixel problem in coarse or medium resolution imagery or by the intra class spectral variability problem in high resolution imagery. Time series satellite imagery provides potential to resolve the above problems as well as the spectral confusion with similar surface characteristics due to phenological change, inter annual climatic variability, and long term changes of vegetation. Since Landsat time series has a long record with an effective spatial resolution, this study aimed at estimating and mapping impervious surfaces by analyzing temporal spectral differences between impervious and pervious surfaces that were extracted from dense time series Landsat imagery. Specifically, this study developed an efficient method to extract annual impervious surfaces from time series Landsat data and applied it to the Pearl River Delta, southern China, from 1988 to 2013. The annual classification accuracy yielded from 71% to 91% for all classes, while the mapping accuracy of impervious surfaces ranged from 80.5% to 94.5% Furthermore, it is found that the use of more than 50% of Scan Line Corrector (SLC) off images after 2003 did not substantially reduced annual classification accuracy, which ranged from 78% to 91% It is also worthy to note that more than 80% of classification accuracies were achieved in both 2002 and 2010 despite of more than 40% of cloud cover detected in these two years. These results suggested that the proposed method was effective and efficient in mapping impervious surfaces and detecting impervious surface changes by using temporal spectral differences from dense time series Landsat imagery. The value of full sampling was revealed for enhancing temporal resolution and identifying temporal differences between impervious and pervious surfaces in time series analysis.
Preface to Topical Issue: Waves in the Solar Corona: From Microphysics to Macrophysics

Wave and oscillatory processes in the plasma of the solar corona attract growing attention in the context of key challenges in solar physics. For several decades, waves have been considered as one of the mechanisms for coronal plasma heating (e.g. De Moortel and Browning, 2015) and solar wind acceleration (e.g. Cranmer, 2012) Coronal waves are intensely used for plasma diagnostics, from radio emission to large scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) timescales (see, e.g. Nakariakov, Kashapova, and Yan, 2014; Liu and Ofman, 2014) The waves are natural agents that can establish the connectivity of different layers of the solar atmosphere (Komm et al. 2015) Interesting perspectives have recently been identified for the deep exploitation of the coronal magnetospheric analogy (Nakariakov et al. 2016) This shows that the study of solar coronal waves and oscillations is an active and rapidly developing research topic. This Topical Issue addresses the recent achievements in the field, and contains two invited review papers and eighteen original papers, covering new interesting observational and theoretical results. The invited review of Van Doorsselaere, Kupriyanova, and Yuan (2016) discusses the recent progress in the observational detection and modelling of quasi periodic pulsations
Imperfect adaptation: how the WTO and the IMF adjust to shifting power distributions among their members

How do international institutions adjust to shifting power distributions among their members? We argue that institutional adaptations to the rise of emerging and the decline of established powers are different from what power transition theories (PTTs) would lead us to believe. Institutional adaptations are not impossible, as pessimist PTT variants hold; and they are rarely easy to attain, let alone perfect, as optimist PTT variants imply. To bridge the gap between these versions of PTT, we propose an institutionalist power shift theory (IPST) which combines insights on the conditions and mechanisms of institutional change from functionalist, historical and distributive variants of rational institutionalism. IPST claims that institutional adaptations will succeed or fail depending on whether or not emerging powers are able to undermine the international institution and to make credible threats to this effect. To demonstrate IPST's plausibility we analyze: (1) how India and Brazil gained the agreement of established powers to their membership in the WTO core negotiation group "Quad" which had previously been dominated by developed countries; and (2) how China reached agreement with established powers on (more) even handed surveillance of IMF members' financial stability, which, up to then, had focused on developing countries and exchange rate issues.
Management of Helicobacter pylori infection the Maastricht V/Florence Consensus Report
Venue: Gut

Important progress has been made in the management of Helicobacter pylori infection and in this fifth edition of the Maastricht Consensus Report, key aspects related to the clinical role of H. pylori were re evaluated in 2015. In the Maastricht V/Florence Consensus Conference, 43 experts from 24 countries examined new data related to H. pylori in five subdivided workshops: (1) Indications/Associations, (2) Diagnosis, (3) Treatment, (4) Prevention/Public Health, (5) H. pylori and the Gastric Microbiota. The results of the individual workshops were presented to a final consensus voting that included all participants. Recommendations are provided on the basis of the best available evidence and relevance to the management of H. pylori infection in the various clinical scenarios.
Normalization Propagation: A Parametric Technique for Removing Internal Covariate Shift in Deep Networks
Venue: ICML

While the authors of Batch Normalization (BN) identify and address an important problem involved in training deep networks Internal Covariate Shift the current solution has certain drawbacks. Specifically, BN depends on batch statistics for layerwise input normalization during training which makes the estimates of mean and standard deviation of input (distribution) to hidden layers inaccurate for validation due to shifting parameter values (especially during initial training epochs) Also, BN cannot be used with batch size 1 during training. We address these drawbacks by proposing a non adaptive normalization technique for removing internal covariate shift, that we call Normalization Propagation. Our approach does not depend on batch statistics, but rather uses a data independent parametric estimate of mean and standard deviation in every layer thus being computationally faster compared with BN. We exploit the observation that the pre activation before Rectified Linear Units follow Gaussian distribution in deep networks, and that once the first and second order statistics of any given dataset are normalized, we can forward propagate this normalization without the need for recalculating the approximate statistics for hidden layers.
Managers' autonomy, strategic control, organizational politics and strategic planning effectiveness: An empirical investigation into missing links in the hotel sector

This article reports on the impact of managerial autonomy and strategic control on organizational politics and show how the latter influence effectiveness of strategic planning. In doing so, it outlines particular directions that a rebalanced strategic management research agenda may take. Whereas organizational politics have received sustained interest in the management literature, its conceptual and empirical examination in the tourism industry has been meagre. This study contributes to fill this gap by analyzing data from 175 four and five star hotels located in a less researched region, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The findings indicate that high levels of autonomy combined with low levels of control negate the effectiveness of strategic planning by increasing organizational tensions. Drawing on political and organizational perspectives, an interpretation of the results and policy implications are discussed. The study also delineates interesting research avenues for further research on organizational politics in the tourism industry.
Leader or Lobbyist? How Organizational Politics and Top Supply Chain Manager Political Skill Impacts Supply Chain Orientation and Internal Integration

Despite myriad attempts by supply chain managers and exhortation by scholars, many firms remain insufficiently integrated across internal functional areas. Supply chain management research has hinted that the difficulty may be due to social dynamics occurring within and between organizational departments (i.e. organizational politics) and the perceptions thereof held by employees. This study examines whether perceptions of organizational politics held by firm employees negatively impact internal integration directly, or indirectly via inhibiting the firm's supply chain orientation. Based on social exchange theory and social influence theory, the research also assesses whether the potentially harmful impacts of political perceptions on internal integration are/can be mitigated by employees' perception of the political skill of the top supply chain management executive a person charged with ensuring the firm's supply chain will function successfully. The findings of a broad managerial survey conducted within the U.S. retail industry suggest that perceptions of organizational politics within organizations do directly influence internal integration. Furthermore, the relationship between organizational politics and supply chain orientation is impacted when the top supply chain executive is perceived to be politically skilled.
Organizational Silence in State Owned Enterprises: Intermediary Role of the Perceptions of Organizational Politics

This paper aims to explore how the employees' organizational silence and perception of organizational politics play an intermediary role in the process of generating the organizational silence in the state owned enterprises with specific organizational climate and environment. Using 563 samples from state owned enterprises, a linear structure equation model (SEM) is developed to examine the relationship. The research results show that the leader member exchange has significant negative correlation with organizational silence and that the leader member exchange has significant negative correlation with perception of organizational politics. In addition, the perception of organizational politics partially plays an intermediary role in the formation mechanism of organizational silence. Finally, the countermeasures and proposals are put forward to reduce the organizational silence of employees in the state owned enterprises.