Knowledge sharing implementation and job searching in Malaysia

The aim of this research is to integrate analysis through case studies on how knowledge sharing could be implemented successfully. Furthermore, this study also will clarify a conceptualisation that provides a new understanding of the relationship between unemployed graduates and the human capital concept. This paper used web documentation for the research technique, and an interpretive approach was used as the research paradigm. Two online recruitment agency sites were analysed thoroughly, and a qualitative analysis was made on them. The connections show how knowledge sharing can be used as a medium to help unemployed graduates to get jobs through online recruitment agencies. An online recruitment agency can help fresh graduates to find good jobs because most of the agencies have thousands of corporate clients. High quality candidates must have good soft skills, problem-solving skills and employable value-added skills to get the best jobs. This study will look at how far online recruitment agencies can better assist new graduates to get the best job for them. The findings will be expressed as qualitative results from the two online recruitment agencies researched as the case studies for the paper. From these case studies, the findings will contribute to the ongoing study on how to implement knowledge sharing among undergraduates after they finished their studies

Estimation and forecasting in SUINAR(1) model

This work considers a generalization of the INAR(1) model to the panel data first order Seemingly Unrelated INteger AutoRegressive Poisson model, SUINAR(1). It presents Bayesian and classical methodologies to estimate the parameters of Poisson SUINAR(1) model and to forecast future observations of the process. In particular, prediction intervals for forecasts - classical approach - and HPD prediction intervals - Bayesian approach - are derived. A simulation study is provided to give additional insight into the finite sample behaviour of the parameter estimates and forecasts

Replicated INAR(1) processes

Replicated time series are a particular type of repeated measures, which consist of time-sequences of measurements taken from several subjects (experimental units). We consider independent replications of count time series that are modelled by first-order integer-valued autoregressive processes, INAR(1). In this work, we propose several estimation methods using the classical and the Bayesian approaches and both in time and frequency domains. Furthermore, we study the asymptotic properties of the estimators. The methods are illustrated and their performance is compared in a simulation study. Finally, the methods are applied to a set of observations concerning sunspot data.PRODEP II

Body shape preferences: Associations with rater body shape and sociosexuality

Copyright @ 2013 Price et al.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is accumulating evidence of condition-dependent mate choice in many species, that is, individual preferences varying in strength according to the condition of the chooser. In humans, for example, people with more attractive faces/bodies, and who are higher in sociosexuality, exhibit stronger preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex faces/bodies. However, previous studies have tended to use only relatively simple, isolated measures of rater attractiveness. Here we use 3D body scanning technology to examine associations between strength of rater preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex bodies, and raters' body shape, self-perceived attractiveness, and sociosexuality. For 118 raters and 80 stimuli models, we used a 3D scanner to extract body measurements associated with attractiveness (male waist-chest ratio [WCR], female waist-hip ratio [WHR], and volume-height index [VHI] in both sexes) and also measured rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality. As expected, WHR and VHI were important predictors of female body attractiveness, while WCR and VHI were important predictors of male body attractiveness. Results indicated that male rater sociosexuality scores were positively associated with strength of preference for attractive (low) VHI and attractive (low) WHR in female bodies. Moreover, male rater self-perceived attractiveness was positively associated with strength of preference for low VHI in female bodies. The only evidence of condition-dependent preferences in females was a positive association between attractive VHI in female raters and preferences for attractive (low) WCR in male bodies. No other significant associations were observed in either sex between aspects of rater body shape and strength of preferences for attractive opposite-sex body traits. These results suggest that among male raters, rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality are important predictors of preference strength for attractive opposite-sex body shapes, and that rater body traits -with the exception of VHI in female raters- may not be good predictors of these preferences in either sex.This study is funded by the Brunel University School of Social Sciences and made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

Effect of pressure on the electronic structure of hcp Titanium

The effect of pressure on the hexagonal close-packed structure of titanium is investigated. The lattice parameters of the equilibrium structure were determined in terms of the Gibbs free energy using the Epitaxial Bain Path method. When this process was repeated for several pressures, the effect of pressure on the lattice parameters was revealed. The calculated lattice parameters were in good agreement with the experimental and theoretical results. The effects of pressure on parameters depending on the electronic structure such as conductivity and resistivity in the ground state were also investigated up to 30 GPa using density functional theory.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Vers un droit à l’autonomie des personnes vivant avec la maladie d’Alzheimer?

Towards a right to autonomy for people living with dementia? One of the key challenges of the 21st century is to protect the autonomy of an ageing population, with a growing proportion living with cognitive impairments. However, this is an arduous task faced with important issues. The first one is to agree as to what autonomy means, in a context in which international treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights or the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities take different approaches. For the European Court of Human Rights, it is not necessary to choose between autonomy and protection of the person against oneself; on the contrary for the Committee on the rights of persons with disabilities, the priority has to be the maximum preservation of autonomous decision-making even to the point of overlooking the necessary protection. The second hurdle follows: how to conform to these international human rights norms which diverge in their understanding of the relationship of the individual and the community? Thus this is not an easy task for states, like the UK, which have adopted recent legislation meant to increase the role of the will and preferences of individuals at every stage of their lives, whilst maintaining a minimum level of protection. In England, the key instrument is the Mental Capacity Act 2005 which is meant to be "dementia-friendly" but still faces many implementation issues

VConv-DAE: Deep Volumetric Shape Learning Without Object Labels

With the advent of affordable depth sensors, 3D capture becomes more and more ubiquitous and already has made its way into commercial products. Yet, capturing the geometry or complete shapes of everyday objects using scanning devices (e.g. Kinect) still comes with several challenges that result in noise or even incomplete shapes. Recent success in deep learning has shown how to learn complex shape distributions in a data-driven way from large scale 3D CAD Model collections and to utilize them for 3D processing on volumetric representations and thereby circumventing problems of topology and tessellation. Prior work has shown encouraging results on problems ranging from shape completion to recognition. We provide an analysis of such approaches and discover that training as well as the resulting representation are strongly and unnecessarily tied to the notion of object labels. Thus, we propose a full convolutional volumetric auto encoder that learns volumetric representation from noisy data by estimating the voxel occupancy grids. The proposed method outperforms prior work on challenging tasks like denoising and shape completion. We also show that the obtained deep embedding gives competitive performance when used for classification and promising results for shape interpolation

A Trial of a 7-Valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in HIV-Infected Adults.

BACKGROUND: Streptococcus pneumoniae is a leading and serious coinfection in adults with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, particularly in Africa. Prevention of this disease by vaccination with the current 23-valent polysaccharide vaccine is suboptimal. Protein conjugate vaccines offer a further option for protection, but data on their clinical efficacy in adults are needed. METHODS: In this double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical efficacy trial, we studied the efficacy of a 7-valent conjugate pneumococcal vaccine in predominantly HIV-infected Malawian adolescents and adults who had recovered from documented invasive pneumococcal disease. Two doses of vaccine were given 4 weeks apart. The primary end point was a further episode of pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. RESULTS: From February 2003 through October 2007, we followed 496 patients (of whom 44% were male and 88% were HIV-seropositive) for 798 person-years of observation. There were 67 episodes of pneumococcal disease in 52 patients, all in the HIV-infected subgroup. In 24 patients, there were 19 episodes that were caused by vaccine serotypes and 5 episodes that were caused by the 6A serotype. Of these episodes, 5 occurred in the vaccine group and 19 in the placebo group, for a vaccine efficacy of 74% (95% confidence interval [CI], 30 to 90). There were 73 deaths from any cause in the vaccine group and 63 in the placebo group (hazard ratio in the vaccine group, 1.18; 95% CI, 0.84 to 1.66). The number of serious adverse events within 14 days after vaccination was significantly lower in the vaccine group than in the placebo group (3 vs. 17, P=0.002), and the number of minor adverse events was significantly higher in the vaccine group (41 vs. 13, P=0.003). CONCLUSIONS: The 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine protected HIV-infected adults from recurrent pneumococcal infection caused by vaccine serotypes or serotype 6A. (Current Controlled Trials number, ISRCTN54494731.) Copyright 2010 Massachusetts Medical Society

The socially responsible choice in a duopolistic market: a dynamic problem of “ethical product” differentiation

The increasing attention of profit maximizing corporations to corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a new stylized fact of the contemporary economic environment. In our theoretical analysis we model CSR adoption as the optimal response of a profit maximizing firm to the competition of a not for profit corporate pioneer in the presence of a continuum of consumers with heterogeneous preferences towards the social and environmental features of the final good. CSR adoption implies a trade-off since, on the one side, it raises production costs but, on the other side, it leads to accumulation of “ethical capital”.We investigate conditions under which the profit maximizing firm switches from price to price and CSR competition by comparing monopoly and duopoly equilibria and their consequences on aggregate social responsibility and consumer welfare. Our findings provide a theoretical background for competition between profit maximizing incumbents and not for profit entrants in markets such as fair trade, organic food, ethical banking and ethical finance