Algorithms for multi-point range query and reverse nearest neighbour search

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Are Foreign Firms Privileged By Their Host Governments? Evidence From The 2000 World Business Environment Survey

Using the data from World Business Environment Survey (WBES) on over 10,000 firms across eighty one countries, this paper finds preliminary evidence that foreign firms enjoy significant regulatory advantages - as perceived by the firms themselves - over domestic firms. The findings on regulatory advantages of foreign firms hold with a variety of alternative measures of regulations and with or without firm- and country-level attributes and industry and country controls. There is also evidence that foreign firms' regulatory advantages are especially substantial vis-a-vis the politically weak domestic firms. Furthermore, the regulatory advantages of foreign firms appear stronger in corrupt countries than in non-corrupt countries

Motivational Factors of Productivity: The Perspective of Employees

PLS-SEM Result

Multi-class secondary metabolites in cyanobacterial blooms from a tropical water body: distribution patterns and real-time prediction

Cyanotoxins produced by cyanobacterial blooms contaminate freshwater bodies worldwide. Yet, the distribution patterns of these secondary metabolites in tropical regions are still not well-understood and predictive models using simple water quality indicators are rarely discussed. Here, we investigated the co-occurrence and spatiotemporal trends of 18 cyanobacterial metabolites (including 11 microcystin varints, anatoxin-a, homoanatoxin-a, cylindrospermospin, nodularin, anabaenopeptins A and B) in a tropical freshwater lake plagued with blooms. Random forest (RF) models were developed to predict microcystins and cylindrospermopsin and assess the relative importance of 22 potential predictors that determined their concentrations. The results showed that microcystins, cylindrospermopsin, anatoxin-a, homoanatoxin-a and anabaenopeptins were found at least once in the studied water body, with microcystin-RR and cylindrospermopsin being most detected. Anabaenopeptins A and B were detected for the first time in tropical freshwaters at low concentrations. The metabolite profiles were highly variable at both temporal and spatial scales. The rapid RF prediction models for microcystins and cylindrospermopsin were successfully developed (i.e., chlorophyll-a, total carbon, rainfall and ammonium for microcystins prediction; and chloride, total carbon, rainfall and nitrate for cylindrospermopsin prediction). The models can help to envisage the relationships between cyanotoxins and environmental variables and provide useful information for making policy decisions

Integrating Extended Theory of Planned Behaviour and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory to Examine the Effects of Environmental Practices

Analysi

Gen Z in intention to adopt of A.I. in Financial Services

Gen Z in Malaysia on the intention to adopt A.I. in Financial Service

Cultivation and sequencing of rumen microbiome members from the Hungate1000 Collection

Productivity of ruminant livestock depends on the rumen microbiota, which ferment indigestible plant polysaccharides into nutrients used for growth. Understanding the functions carried out by the rumen microbiota is important for reducing greenhouse gas production by ruminants and for developing biofuels from lignocellulose. We present 410 cultured bacteria and archaea, together with their reference genomes, representing every cultivated rumen-associated archaeal and bacterial family. We evaluate polysaccharide degradation, short-chain fatty acid production and methanogenesis pathways, and assign specific taxa to functions. A total of 336 organisms were present in available rumen metagenomic data sets, and 134 were present in human gut microbiome data sets. Comparison with the human microbiome revealed rumen-specific enrichment for genes encoding de novo synthesis of vitamin B-12, ongoing evolution by gene loss and potential vertical inheritance of the rumen microbiome based on underrepresentation of markers of environmental stress. We estimate that our Hungate genome resource represents similar to 75% of the genus-level bacterial and archaeal taxa present in the rumen