Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The strategic and operational dimensions of staff training and professional development for information professionals : what neXus2 has revealed

The paper seeks to continue the debate about the need for professionals in the library and information services (LIS) sector to continually engage in career-long learning to sustain and develop their knowledge and skills in a dynamic industry. Aims: The neXus2 workforce study has been funded by the ALIA and the consortium of National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA). It builds on earlier research work (the neXus census) that looked at the demographic, educational and career perspectives of individual library and information professions, to critically examine institutional policies and practices associated with the LIS workforce. The research aims to develop a clearer understanding of the issues impacting on workforce sustainability, workforce capability and workforce optimisation. Methods: The research methodology involved an extensive online survey conducted in March 2008 which collected data on organisational and general staffing; recruitment and retention; staff development and continuing professional education; and succession planning. Encouragement to participate was provided by key industry groups, including academic, public, health, law and government library and information agencies, with the result that around 150 institutions completed the questionnaire. Results: The paper will specifically discuss the research findings relating to training and professional development, to measure the scope and distribution of training activities across the workforce, to consider the interrelationship between the strategic and operational dimensions of staff development in individual institutions and to analyse the common and distinctive factors evident in the different sectors of the profession. Conclusion: The neXus2 project has successfully engaged LIS institutions in the collection of complex industry data that is relevant to the future education and workforce strategies for all areas of the profession. Cross-sector forums such as Information Online 2009 offer the opportunity for stimulating professional dialogue on the key issues.
Discussion Papers in Economics Dynamics of Output Growth, Consumption and Physical Capital in Two-sector Models of Endogenous Growth No. 2000/46 Portfolio Return Autocorrelation and Non-synchronous Trading in Uk Equities Portfolio Return Autocorrelation and Non-synchronous Trading in Uk Equities

Although infrequent trading in equity stocks is more prevalent in the United Kingdom (and other non-United States countries), we …nd that it is proportionally more important in explaining the degree of serial correlation in stock returns in the US than in the UK, in contrast to much of the existing literature.We show that infrequent trading cannot explain more than a small proportion of the serial correlation observed in monthly UK stock returns and hence, other explanations for return predictability must be sought. Many studies have shown that stock market returns in the UK and other international markets are substantially and signi…cantly serially correlated. The success of an investment strategy that is based on the apparent predictability of returns depends on whether the serial correlation is truly random and period speci…c or due to time varying risk premia or and Mike Wickens for helpful comments, to two anymous referees for detailed and constructuve comments which have greatly improved the paper and to the ESRC and INQUIRE for …nancial support. to market microstructure e¤ects. A frequently noted explanation for this serial correlation is market thinness or, more precisely, the infrequency with which a substantial number of UK stocks are traded. Non-synchronous trading results in a measurement error in the observed data for returns on individual stocks, portfolios and market indices. This measurement error generates serial correlation in the observed returns. Here, we assess the extent to which the observed serial correlation in returns can be explained by equity non-trading behaviour. This will reveal whether there is any residual serial correlation left to be explained by alternative sources. We …nd that, whilst a proportion of the serial correlation in the returns of portfolios of low value stocks can be explained by non-trading, much of it still remains unexplained.
Outlier Detection and False Discovery Rates for Whole-Genome DNA Matching

We define a statistic, called the matching statistic, for locating regions of the genome that exhibit excess similarity among cases when compared to controls. Such regions are reasonable candidates for harboring disease genes. We find the asymptotic distribution of the statistic while accounting for correlations among sampled individuals. We then use the Benjamini and Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) method for multiple hypothesis testing to find regions of excess sharing. The p values for each region involve estimated nuisance parameters. Under appropriate conditions, we show that the FDR method based on p values and with estimated nuisance parameters asymptotically preserves the FDR property. Finally, we apply the method to a pilot study on schizophrenia.
Vibrotactile Exploration of Indoor Objects

This paper describes our study about how to make use of a tactile belt with 8 vibrators to present rich spatial information for blind and visually impaired people while exploring indoor environments. In order to conduct a Wizard-of-Oz evaluation with 12 sighted subjects, a tablet based application has been developed for setting indoor scenarios and exploration interaction. Two sets of tactile patterns for presentation of distance, direction and type of objects, have been evaluated based on one single actuator and multiple actuators, respectively. The results indicated that the subjects can acquire the rich object information through both of the two sets, and they were more sensitive on the vibration position than the vibration intensity.
Blended Learning Dilemma: Teacher Education in the Confucian Heritage Culture

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, higher education institutions have adopted blended learning to engage students in active learning and enhance their learning outcomes. This study investigated 261 preservice student teachers participating in a teacher education programme that was based on a blended learning design. Questionnaires and focus group interviews were administered to obtain data. The purpose of this study was to understand student’ perceptions of blended learning and examine how the interaction between traditional and constructivist conceptions influences learning. The result indicated that the participants favoured face-toface lectures over e-learning, and they exhibited strong preferences for traditional modes of learning. The author suggests that there is still some way to go before students fully engage with online learning but, as they are rooted in the Confucian heritage culture, this can also be used to encourage students to engage with this mode of learning as the process of transformation.
From Second to Third Millennium Schools: The Impact of the Reform Agenda on School Development.

This paper draws on studies from around the world to examine the impact of school reform over the last 30 years. It claims that there is little or no evidence that recent education reforms necessarily lead to improved student outcomes for all students. In fact, findings indicate that some reforms promote a rapid increase in the variation in student achievement between the bestand worst-achieving students and that this variation is linked to the level of decentralization within the school system. The article states that reform activity over the past few years, together with other social changes involving technology, the economy, and employment, have led to new ways of thinking about education. The paper charts the educational changes coming in the third millennium and suggests that dominant trends in society, such as technology, a global economy, and electronic communications, will foster the move from a national to an international or global focus. The report advocates a new charter for education that is oriented towards global education. It suggests that schools use technology rather than compete with it, that they develop collaborative learning, that they refocus on the individual, and that they highlight process skills rather than specific content knowledge. (Contains 44 references.) (RJM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ft ice of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) this document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. 1 PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
Job Durations and the Job Search Model: A Two-Country, Multi-Sample Analysis

This paper assesses whether a parsimonious partial equilibrium job search model with on-the-job search can reproduce observed job durations and transitions to other jobs and to nonemployment. We allow for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals in key structural parameters. Observed heterogeneity and life cycle effects are accounted for by estimating separate models for flow samples of labor market entrants and stock samples of "mature" workers with 10-11 years of experience, by stratifying on education length and by allowing for non-search related wage growth due to accumulation of labor market experience. We use comparable register based panel data for two countries, Denmark and Norway. All workers are followed for 6 years. The model fits observed job-to-job and job-to-nonemployment hazard functions well for most samples with a better fit for entrants than for mature workers, especially for the job-to-job hazard function. We find important differences in structural parameters between entrants and mature workers and we find that the Norwegian labor market is more frictional than the Danish labor market.
THE ENVIRONMENTS OF HIGH-REDSHIFT QUASI-STELLAR OBJECTS

We present a sample of i775-dropout candidates identified in five Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) fields centered on Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) at redshift z ∼ 6. Our fields are as deep as the GOODS ACS images, which are used as a reference field sample. We find them to be overdense in two fields, underdense in two fields, and as dense as the average density of GOODS in one field. The two excess fields show significantly different color distributions from that of GOODS at the 99% confidence level, strengthening the idea that the excess objects are indeed associated with the QSO. The distribution of i775-dropout counts in the five fields is broader than that derived from GOODS at the 80%–96% confidence level, depending on which selection criteria were adopted to identify i775-dropouts; its width cannot be explained by cosmic variance alone. Thus, QSOs seem to affect their environments in complex ways. We suggest the picture where the highest redshift QSOs are located in very massive overdensities and are therefore surrounded by an overdensity of lower mass halos. Radiative feedback by the QSO can in some cases prevent halos from becoming galaxies, thereby generating in extreme cases an underdensity of galaxies. The presence of both enhancement and suppression is compatible with the expected differences between lines of sight at the end of reionization as the presence of residual diffuse neutral hydrogen would provide young galaxies with shielding from the radiative effects of the QSO.
Thematic Reasoning and Theory of Mind. Accounting for Social Inference Difficulties in Schizophrenia

Background Corcoran (2000, 2001) has suggested that theory of mind judgements can be arrived at using analogical reasoning skills and she has proposed that this is the route that people with schizophrenia take when they make inferences about others' mental states. Recent work has demonstrated a robust relationship between mental state inference and autobiographical memory, providing initial support for the model. This study examines the model further by exploring the assertion that in schizophrenia the ability to infer the mental states of others also depends upon effective social reasoning in conditional contexts. Method 59 people with a DSM IV diagnosis of schizophrenia and 44 healthy subjects performed four versions of the thematic selection task. The versions varied according to the familiarity and social nature of the material they incorporated. The same subjects also completed the Hinting Task, a measure of theory of mind and tests of intellectual functioning and narrative recall. Results The schizophrenia and the normal control groups differed in their performance on all of the measures except that of intellectual functioning. Explorations within the schizophrenia group indicated that social reasoning was most markedly affected in the patients with negative signs and in those with paranoid delusions while for the hinting task, those with negative signs performed significantly worse than those in remission but this difference seemed to be due to these patients' poorer narrative memory. There was evidence in the schizophrenia data to support the hypothesis of a relationship between theory of mind and social conditional reasoning. Conclusion This work provided further support for the idea that in patients with schizophrenia at least, judgements about the mental states of others are achieved using analogical reasoning.
Message Passing Multi-Agent GANs

Communicating and sharing intelligence among agents is an important facet of achieving Artificial General Intelligence. As a first step towards this challenge, we introduce a novel framework for image generation: Message Passing Multi-Agent Generative Adversarial Networks (MPM GANs). While GANs have recently been shown to be very effective for image generation and other tasks, these networks have been limited to mostly single generator-discriminator networks. We show that we can obtain multi-agent GANs that communicate through message passing to achieve better image generation. The objectives of the individual agents in this framework are two fold: a co-operation objective and a competing objective. The co-operation objective ensures that the message sharing mechanism guides the other generator to generate better than itself while the competing objective encourages each generator to generate better than its counterpart. We analyze and visualize the messages that these GANs share among themselves in various scenarios. We quantitatively show that the message sharing formulation serves as a regularizer for the adversarial training. Qualitatively, we show that the different generators capture different traits of the underlying data distribution.
Evaluation of a two-generation rat model for vitamin A deficiency and the interrelationship with iron metabolism

In order to induce a range of vitamin A-deficient states in young growing rats and to study the effect of vitamin A deficiency on Fe status, we designed the following two-generation experiment. Dams were fed on diets with one of five vitamin A levels from 2 weeks before and throughout pregnancy and lactation. The pups received the same diets as their mothers both before and after weaning. The five dietary levels of vitamin A were 1200, 450, 150, 75 and 0 retinol equivalents/kg feed. Vitamin A intake did not affect reproduction outcome, nor were body and liver weights of the pups affected when they were 3·5 weeks old. Male pups with normal vitamin A status had higher plasma retinol levels than female pups. Vitamin A status of the offspring was affected from 3·5 weeks onwards. Body and liver weights were decreased in the male pups given the lowest dietary vitamin A levels from week 6·5 onwards but not in the female pups. Fe status was marginally affected. Haemoglobin levels were increased and total Fe-binding capacity was decreased in the groups given no dietary vitamin A at week 9·5. Splenic Fe was increased only in the male pups given the lowest levels of dietary vitamin A. However, as a whole, Fe status was only mildly affected and subject to considerable variation. We conclude that the two-generation rat model described here is not suitable for studying effects of vitamin A deficiency on Fe metabolism.
Exports and FDI: A granger causality analysis in a heterogeneous panel

This paper investigates the heterogenous panels Granger causality between exports and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) for the twelve new EU countries from 1995 until 2010. The cointegration test by Pedroni (1999) shows a long run heterogenous relationship. A two-stage Engle and Granger procedure (1987), allowing for testing of heterogeneity of panel data on dynamic models, shows a bilateral causal relationship between exports and foreign direct investment both in the long and short run for the examined countries.
Assessment of Long-Term Spatio-Temporal Rainfall Variability over Ghana using Wavelet Analysis

Rainfall variability has strong impact on food security, livelihood and socio-economic activities as farming in West Africa is mainly rain-fed. The annual, seasonal and decadal rainfall variability over Ghana has been studied and their periodicities analysed using wavelet analysis. A rainfall time series from 1901–2010 from the Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC) was used in this analysis. It was observed that high mean annual rainfall totals ranging from 900–1900mm are recorded over the entire country. In addition, very high totals between 1500–1900mmare recorded at the South-Western part of the country whereas low totals (900–1200 mm) are recorded in the Savannah and East coast of the country. In general, a decreasing trend was observed for the annual rainfall over all the agro-ecological zones except for the coastal zone, where a slight increasing trend of 0.1600mm per year was seen. The seasonal trend analysis revealed a significant decreasing trend at 0.01 significance level in all the agro-ecological zones except for the Savannah during the DJF season indicating an intensification of the Harmattan. The Coastal zone recorded the lowest mean rainfall values for all seasons with the highest of about 150 mm in MAM. The Forest zone on the other hand recorded very high rainfall values for all seasons with the maximum of about 200 mm in JJA. The Transition zone, however, recorded almost quite stable rainfall amount for all seasons except for DJF. On the decadal time scale, below normal rainfall values were observed between the 1901–1920 and 1980–2010 periods for almost all the agro-ecological zones except for the Savannah which showed above normal rainfall values within the 1901–1940 period. Indicating that, the decreasing trend observed in recent years is not solely due to antropogenic factors but have a strong contribution from a natural climate variability. The wavelet analysis also revealed a strong annual periodicity over all the agro-ecological zones except for the Coastal and Forest zones where the annual periodicity was accompanied by 4–8 months signal. The results of both the 5 year moving average and the decadal anomaly confirm a significant decrease in rainfall amount. This will have negative consequences on agricultural practices, water resource management and food security.
Patient Satisfaction with Methadone Maintenance Treatment in Vietnam: A Comparison of Different Integrative-Service Delivery Models

Background Patient satisfaction is an important component of quality in healthcare delivery. To inform the expansion of Methadone Maintenance Treatment (MMT) services in Vietnam, we examined the satisfaction of patients with regards to different services delivery models and identified its associated factors. Methods We interviewed 1,016 MMT patients at 5 clinics in Hanoi and Nam Dinh province. The modified SATIS instrument, a 10-item scale, was used to measure three dimensions: “Services quality and convenience”, “Health workers’ capacity and responsiveness” and “Inter-professional care”. Results The average score was high across three SATIS dimensions. However, only one third of patients completely satisfied with general health services and treatment outcomes. Older age, higher education, having any problem in self-care and anxiety/depression were negatively associated with patient’s satisfaction. Meanwhile, patients receiving MMT at clinics, where more comprehensive HIV and general health care services were available, were more likely to report a complete satisfaction. Conclusion Patients were highly satisfied with MMT services in Vietnam. However, treatment for drug users should go beyond methadone maintenance to address complicated health demands of drug users. Integrating MMT with comprehensive HIV and general health services together with improving the capacity of health workers and efficiency of services organisation to provide interconnected health care for drug users are critical for improving the outcomes of the MMT program.
Assignment , Expectations , and Endowment : Variations in the Lab and Their Effects on Choice ∗

This paper is aimed to assess, with two lab experiments, to what extent Kőszegi and Rabin’s (2006) model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences can explain Knetsch’s (1989) endowment effect. Departing from past work, we design a 2×2 experiment that disentangles “assignment” to a good (a mug vs. a pen) from the probability with which an assigned good is expected to be owned. We further vary, with a 2×2×2 experiment, explicit and implicit references to ownership, thus separately varying assignment, expectations, and endowment. While mere assignment can reproduce some of the original effect, we find no role in the effect to expectations.