Despite scholarly debates on the role of entrepreneurial orientation, its effect on new venture performance remains largely understudied, particularly in the context of emerging economies. ...Determining this association is crucial and has an important implication for scholars and managers of SMEs to increase performance. Therefore, using the resource-based view and upper-echelon theories, this study examines this link by considering the mediating role of opportunity exploitation and the moderating role of transformational leadership in the case of an emerging market in Lebanon. The resource-based view theory discusses the importance of intangible and tangible resources in obtaining a sustainable competitive edge. The upper-echelon theory also connects the attributes of firm performance and top employee management. To achieve this purpose, we conducted a comprehensive survey of 411 managers and owners, 346 of whom were men and 65 of whom were women, of SMEs in the top five provinces of North Lebanon, South Lebanon, Mount Lebanon, Beirut, and Bekaa, where the majority of SMEs are located. This study also collected the data in 2022 and performed moderated mediation analysis to probe this nexus. The empirical results show that entrepreneurial orientation has a positive direct and indirect (through opportunity exploitation) effect on new venture performance. Furthermore, it reveals that opportunity exploitation has a positive effect on new venture performance and partially mediates the entrepreneurial orientation–new venture performance nexus. Furthermore, the results highlight that transformational leadership moderates the direct entrepreneurial orientation–new venture performance nexus, and the positive relationship is stronger for managers (or owners) with higher-level transformational leadership. Moreover, the results reveal that transformational leadership moderates the indirect effect between entrepreneurial orientation and new venture performance through opportunity exploitation, and the extent of the indirect effect is enhanced for managers (or owners) with higher-level transformational leadership. The results are robust and have important policy implications. The current research offers crucial managerial implications for the management of SMEs by paying attention to significant drivers of entrepreneurial orientation and opportunity exploitation. The findings also suggest that entrepreneurs and managers of new ventures must transform their entrepreneurial strategic posture into opportunity exploitation behaviors by pinpointing market inefficiencies and consumer needs, launching novel products and services, and taking advantage of opportunities for new products to enter the market to maximize financial gain.
This study aimed to conduct a comprehensive systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis to summarize available findings on the associations between dietary protein intake and prostate cancer ...risk as well as the dose-response associations of total, animal, plant, and dairy protein intake with prostate cancer risk.
This study followed the 2020 PRISMA guideline. We conducted a systematic search in the online databases of PubMed, Scopus, ISI Web of Science, and Google Scholar to detect eligible prospective studies published to October 2021 that assessed total, animal, plant, and dairy protein intake in relation to prostate cancer risk.
Overall, 12 articles containing prospective studies with a total sample size of 388,062 individuals and 30,165 cases of prostate cancer were included. The overall relative risks (RRs) of prostate cancer, comparing the highest and lowest intakes of total, animal, plant, and dairy protein intake, were 0.99 (95% CI: 92–1.07, I2 =12.8%), 0.99 (95% CI: 95–1.04, I2 =0), 1.01 (95% CI: 96–1.06, I2 =0), and 1.08 (95% CI: 1.00–1.16, I2 =38.1%), respectively, indicating a significant positive association for dairy protein intake (P = 0.04) and non-significant associations for other protein types. However, this positive association was seen among men who consumed ≥ 30 gr/day of dairy protein, such that a 20 g/d increase in dairy protein intake (equal to 2.5 cups milk or yogurt) was associated with a 10% higher risk of prostate cancer (Pooled RR: 1.10, 95% CI: 1.02–1.20, I2 = 42.5%). Such dose-response association was not seen for total, animal, and plant protein intake.
Overall, dairy protein intake may increase the risk of prostate cancer in men who consumed > 30 gr/day of dairy protein. Larger, well-designed studies are still required to further evaluation of this association.
•we found no significant association between total protein intake and risk of prostate cancer.•Each increase of 20 gr/day of dairy protein was associated with a 10% higher risk of prostate cancer.•The significant association between dairy and prostate cancer no longer held after excluding Allen et al. study.
Video pornography and nudity detection aim to detect and classify people in videos into nude or normal for censorship purposes. Recent literature has demonstrated pornography detection utilising the ...convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features directly from the whole frames and support vector machine (SVM) to classify the extracted features into two categories. However, existing methods were not able to detect the small-scale content of pornography and nudity in frames with diverse backgrounds. This limitation has led to a high false-negative rate (FNR) and misclassification of nude frames as normal ones. In order to address this matter, this paper explores the limitation of the existing convolutional-only approaches focusing the visual attention of CNN on the expected nude regions inside the frames to reduce the FNR. The You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detector was transferred to the pornography and nudity detection application to detect persons as regions of interest (ROIs), which were applied to CNN and SVM for nude/normal classification. Several experiments were conducted to compare the performance of various CNNs and classifiers using our proposed dataset. It was found that ResNet101 with random forest outperformed other models concerning the F1-score of 90.03% and accuracy of 87.75%. Furthermore, an ablation study was performed to demonstrate the impact of adding the YOLO before the CNN. YOLO–CNN was shown to outperform CNN-only in terms of accuracy, which was increased from 85.5% to 89.5%. Additionally, a new benchmark dataset with challenging content, including various human sizes and backgrounds, was proposed.
This study was carried out to evaluate the response of Nile tilapia,
Oreochromis niloticus (L.), pre-exposed to calcium oxide for 4 days, and exposed to copper for 6 weeks. Fish (8.3
±
0.1 g) were ...stocked in 1.5 m
3 fiberglass tank and exposed to calcium oxide at a rate of 100 mg Ca
2+ L
−
1
for 4 days. After that, fish were transferred and randomly distributed at a rate of 15 fish per 100-L aquarium. Then, fish were post-exposed to concentrations of 0, 0.503, or 1.25 mg Cu
2+ L
−
1
(T1, T2 and T3, respectively). Three other groups were not pre-exposed to Ca and exposed to the same Cu concentrations (T4, T5 and T6, respectively). A fish diet containing 30% crude protein was offered to fish at a daily rate of 3% of live body weight twice daily; 5 days a week for 6 weeks. The final weight, weight gain and SGR were affected significantly by both Cu concentrations and Ca pre-exposure (
P
<
0.05). Fish pre-exposed to Ca (T2 and T3) exhibited better growth compared to non-exposed groups (T5 and T6). Fish mortality increased significantly with increasing the Cu concentration (
P
<
0.05). Feed intake reduced, while FCR increased significantly with increasing the Cu concentration (
P
<
0.05). The feed intake and FCR in T2 and T3 were better than those of T5 and T6 groups. Moisture content was not significantly differed at different treatments (
P
>
0.05). Crude protein decreased significantly at T6 (
P
<
0.05). Total lipids in T2 and T3 were higher than those of T5 and T6 (
P
<
0.05). Ash content and Cu residues in T2 and T3 were significantly lower than those of T5 and T6 (
P
<
0.05). Fulton condition factor, liver somatic index, and viscera somatic index were affected significantly by Cu toxicity (T5 and T6;
P
>
0.05), while they exhibited non-significant differences in T1–T4 groups. RBCs counts, Hct and Hb values were significantly affected by Cu toxicity (
P
<
0.05), while they were similar to control group in Ca pre-exposed groups (
P
>
0.05). Uric acid, creatinine, and AST were significantly affected by both Ca pre-exposure and Cu toxicity (
P
<
0.05). There was no significant changes in uric acid among T2, T3 and T5 (
P
>
0.05). The highest value of uric acid was obtained at T6 (
P
<
0.05). Creatinine, AST and ALT in T2 and T3 were lower than those of T5 and T6 (
P
<
0.05). Lipids in plasma and liver were high, while protein in plasma and liver were low in T5 and T6 (
P
<
0.05). Histological sections were done in fish's gills, liver and kidney in all treatments (T1–T6). The pathologic lesions were observed due to Cu toxicity. These damages became severe with increasing Cu concentration. Tissue alterations in T2 and T3 were less than that in T5 and T6. The present study displayed that Ca pre-exposure may play a factor then it reduced Cu toxicity resulting in a better fish growth.
Audible content has become an effective tool for shaping one's personality and character due to the ease of accessibility to a huge audible content that could be an independent audio files or an ...audio of online videos, movies, and television programs. There is a huge necessity to filter inappropriate audible content of the easily accessible videos and films that are likely to contain an inappropriate speech content. With this in view, all the broadcasting and online video/audio platform companies hire a lot of manpower to detect the foul voices prior to censorship. The process has a large cost in terms of manpower, time and financial resources. In addition to inaccurate detection of foul voices due to fatigue of manpower and weakness of human visual and hearing system in long time and monotonous tasks. As such, this paper proposes an intelligent deep learning-based system for film censorship through a fast and accurate detection and localization approach using advanced deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The dataset of foul language containing isolated words samples and continuous speech were collected, annotated, processed, and analyzed for the development of automated detection of inappropriate speech content. The results indicated the feasibility of the suggested systems by reporting a high volume of inappropriate spoken terms detection. The proposed system outperformed state-of-the-art baseline algorithms on the novel foul language dataset evaluation metrics in terms of macro average AUC (93.85%), weighted average AUC (94.58%), and all other metrics such as F1-score. Additionally, proposed acoustic system outperformed ASR-based system for profanity detection based on the evaluation metrics including AUC, accuracy, precision, and F1-score. Additionally, proposed system was proven to be faster than human manual screening and detection of audible content for films' censorship.
Purpose
The aim of this study was to compare the preperitoneal versus the preaponeurotic mesh positioning in open paraumbilical hernia repair.
Methods
During the period from January 2011 until July ...2012, 60 adult patients were randomly assigned to two equal groups. The patients in group A were treated by preperitoneal mesh repair and those in group B underwent preaponeurotic mesh repair. Both groups were assessed and compared.
Results
There were no significant differences between the two groups in the demographics, hernia characteristics, risk factors, type of anesthesia, American Society of Anesthesiologists score or the mean follow-up period. The length of the operation was significantly shorter in group B than in group A (
P
value = 0.01). There were no significant differences in the early postoperative complications except for the development of a seroma, which developed only in group B (
P
value = 0. 044). The postoperative pain was significantly lower in group A than in group B (
P
value = 0.01). The time of return to normal daily activities was significantly shorter in group A than in group B (
P
value = 0.001).
Conclusion
The preperitoneal mesh placement during the repair of paraumbilical hernias is superior to the preaponeurotic placement, because it is associated with fewer complications, less pain and a shorter time of return to normal daily activities.
Given the excessive foul language identified in audio and video files and the detrimental consequences to an individual's character and behaviour, content censorship is crucial to filter profanities ...from young viewers with higher exposure to uncensored content. Although manual detection and censorship were implemented, the methods proved tedious. Inevitably, misidentifications involving foul language owing to human weariness and the low performance in human visual systems concerning long screening time occurred. As such, this paper proposed an intelligent system for foul language censorship through a mechanized and strong detection method using advanced deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) through Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. Data on foul language were collected, annotated, augmented, and analysed for the development and evaluation of both CNN and RNN configurations. Hence, the results indicated the feasibility of the suggested systems by reporting a high volume of curse word identifications with only 2.53% to 5.92% of False Negative Rate (FNR). The proposed system outperformed state-of-the-art pre-trained neural networks on the novel foul language dataset and proved to reduce the computational cost with minimal trainable parameters.
Atopic dermatitis is an inflammatory skin disorder. Although it is not a life threatening condition, it may become infected with microorganisms, especially in children.
The aim of this study was to ...determine bacterial colonisation in children with atopic dermatitis.
A total of 80 children were randomly included in this study. Two swabs were taken from each child, one from the eczematous skin lesion and the other from apparently healthy skin, as a control. Bacteria were isolated and identified on the basis of the colonial morphology, gram staining and the Vitek System.
The mean age of children in this study was 1.4 years, with no gender difference (p=0.98) (n=80). A total of 240 bacterial colonies were grown from atopic dermatitis lesions in contrast to 193 colonies from non-lesional skin. Gram-positive cocci were found in 78 (97.5%) lesions and in 77 (96.2%) non-lesional skin. Staphylococci species were significantly detected in the lesions than in the non-lesional skin. Ent. Faecalis, Ent. Faecium, Ent. gallinarium and C. minutissium were significantly isolated from lesions as compared to non-lesional skin, whereas C. xerosis was insignificantly found to be more in the lesions (p=0.21). Gram-negative bacteria were isolated from 7(8.8%) lesions, but none were isolated from non-lesional skin. Recovered species were Pantoea agglomerans, Enterobacter cloacae, Chryseobacterium indologenes and Acinetobacter Iwoffii.
Atopic dermatitis in children is complicated with streptococcal and gram-negative bacterial colonisations and the latter was correlated with the severity of the lesions. Enterococci and Corynebacterium species were significant residents. S. aureus remained the chief inhabitant. No causal relationship could be established between the skin microbiota and atopic dermatitis.
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