Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Forgotten Half of Program Evaluation: A Focus on the Translation of Rating Scales for Use with Hispanic Populations

Extension professionals often work with diverse clientele; however, most assessment tools have been developed and validated with English-speaking samples. There is little research and practical guidance on the cultural adaptation and translation of rating scales. The purpose of this article is to summarize the methodological work in this area as it relates to evaluation in Extension, specifically with Spanish-speaking, Hispanic populations of Mexican origin. General practices are reviewed and recommendations outlined. Inferences about program outcomes and impacts depend, in large part, on the rating scale; therefore, inattention to these issues could lead to misleading results and interpretations.
Leadership: An Islamic Perspective

Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. In terms of the leadership study’s approach it can be said that the concept of leadership in Islam is closer to the concept of ‘leadership as a process’ with the integrated approaches between the ‘leadership as a power relationship’ and ‘a leadership as a transformation process’ where the leader is seen as a person who has the power to effect change in others, and the same time the leader is also regarded as a person who can move followers to accomplish more than usually expected of them. This means the effectiveness of leadership depends not only on a person’s special character but also on the existence of the party which receives the action, while the condition of a place also determines the effectiveness of a leader’s action. It is a shared influence process.
Defining Temperatures of Granular Powders Analogously with Thermodynamics to Understand the Jamming Phenomena

For the purpose of applying laws or principles originated from thermal systems to granular athermal systems, we may need to properly define the critical “temperature” concept in granular powders. The conventional environmental temperature in thermal systems is too weak to drive movements of particles in granular powders and cannot function as a thermal energy indicator. For maintaining the same functionality as in thermal systems, the temperature in granular powders is defined analogously and uniformly in this article using kinetic energy connections. The newly defined granular temperature is utilized to describe and explain one of the most important phenomena observed in granular powders, the jamming transition, by introducing jamming temperature and jamming volume fraction concepts. The predictions from the equations of the jamming volume fractions for several cases like granular powders under shear or vibration are in line with experimental observations and empirical solutions in powder handlings. The equations are mainly for hard sphere systems without frictional forces among particles, but can be easily extended to frictional granular systems with frictional energy term included in. The goal of this article is to lay a foundation for establishing similar concepts in granular powders, allowing granular powders to be described with common laws or principles we are familiar with in thermal systems. Our intention is to build a bridge between thermal systems and granular powders to account for many similarities already found between these two systems.
Efficient Design and Performance Analysis of Wireless Mesh and Overlay Networks

This document summarizes part of the research work I have been developing during the last five years. My research interests focused on two main topics, namely (1) the design and evaluation of wireless networked computer systems (more specifically, of Wireless Mesh and Community networks), and (2) the planning of overlay networks and the distributed overlay formation problem. Wireless Mesh Networks represent an effective means to provide broadband wireless connectivity without the need of a costly wired network infrastructure. The flexibility provided by this wireless network technology has fostered the development of new communication paradigms, like Wireless Mesh Community Networks, where devices owned and managed by different individuals cooperate to extend the network coverage. In this context, we designed efficient and secure communication protocols at the Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing levels. We developed power-controlled, multi-channel MAC protocols for mesh nodes equipped with directional antennas; these protocols increase the spatial reuse and therefore the overall network performance. We then tackled the routing problem in wireless multi-hop networks using both exact models and heuristics; we further proposed a cross-layer routing protocol, named Directional Deflection Routing, which exploits multiple paths towards the destination based on the MAC layer indication on channel availability in different directions. We further addressed the security issues of these networks by developing robust security architectures, coping with the problem of reliable routing in the presence of selfish participants (typical of community networks). We then focused our attention on Overlay networks, which have emerged as a viable and very effective means to provide a flexible, robust, and scalable platform for distributed applications, while leaving the underlying Internet infrastructure unchanged. A careful planning of the overlay topology and the choice of the routing strategies have obviously a great impact on the performance of such networks. In this regard, we solved the overlay network design problem considering both centralized and fully distributed approaches. We first introduced several mathematical models for the optimal overlay network design problem, which select the optimal number and location of the overlay nodes to be deployed, while taking accurate account of the traffic routing. We further developed a set of efficient heuristics that obtain near-optimal solutions for large-scale network instances in a reasonable computation time. Finally, we proposed two novel socially-aware overlay network design games to deal with the fully distributed overlay network formation problem. The first game combines both individual and social concerns in a unified and flexible manner, while the second game uses a Stackelberg (leader-follower) approach, where the overlay network administrator leads the users to a systemwide efficient equilibrium by stimulating the utilization of an appropriate subset of links.
The nuclear taboo, Battlestar Galactica, and the real world: Illustrations from a science-fiction universe

The nuclear age has been characterized by an emerging and now well-established norm of nuclear non-use, the ‘nuclear taboo’. In the realistic and naturalistic setting of the science-fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica, however, nuclear weapons are used frequently and at times massively. Claiming that science fiction can function as an illuminating ‘mirror’ for international relations scholarship and that we can learn something from ‘second-order’ (fictional) worlds, this article explores potential in-show reasons that render the absence of a nuclear taboo plausible within the universe of Battlestar Galactica. We turn to the central pillars of the nuclear taboo in the real world and find them reversed in the show: nuclear weapons are (depicted as) ‘clean’, international institutions are absent, and the enemy is socially constructed as a ‘radical other’, thus rendering the possibility, if not likelihood, of nuclear war plausible. With these insights, we return to our world and argue that, particularly during the years of the George W Bush presidency, the erosion tendencies of the nuclear taboo were indeed quite serious: technological progress and growing political inclination expedited plans to develop usable nuclear weapons, arms control regimes came under considerable strain, and opponents were portrayed as ‘unjust enemies’ or ‘rogues’.
Adding structure to Gnutella to improve search performance in a real-world deployment

Gnutella is still one of the most popular P2P systems with millions of users. The advantages of Gnutella are its low maintenance overhead, its excel- lent robustness properties, and its query processing e xibility. Recent improve- ments, such as the introduction of ultrapeers and augmented node degrees also signicantly reduced its excessive network bandwidth usage which was one of Gnutella's major drawbacks. Despite these improvements, Gnutella is still inef- cient for rare queries in terms of low success rates and massive message prop- agation overhead. In this paper we augment the unstructured Gnutella network with a structured overlay network of ultrapeers based on the Kademlia DHT to address the problem of rare queries in Gnutella. We present the required query, maintenance, and ultrapeer election algorithms which use both overlays at their optimal efcienc y, describe the protocols and architecture of our hybrid system, and present our implementation on the basis of the LimeWire Gnutella client and the Azureus Kademlia implementation. To demonstrate the advantages and ef- ciency of our hybrid approach we provide experimental results from large-scale experiments with hybrid ultrapeers running on PlanetLab which were connected to the live LimeWire Gnutella and Azureus Kademlia networks, with approxi- mately 4 million (LimeWire) and 800 thousand (Azureus) connected users during the experiments.
User acceptance of social learning systems in higher education: an application of the extended Technology Acceptance Model

Abstract This study aims to explore the users’ behaviour and acceptance of social media for learning in higher educational institutions with the help of the extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). TAM has been extended to investigate how ethical and security awareness of users affect the actual usage of social learning applications. For this purpose, a survey was conducted and the Structural Equation Model approach was utilised to investigate the direct and indirect causal relationships among the constructs in the research model. Interestingly, the findings from the analysis reveal that, except ‘ease of use’, TAM’s core and external constructs are significant predictors of actual behaviour towards using social media for learning.
JLQCD's dynamical overlap project

We present an overview of our project of large-scale simulations with dynamical overlap fermions. The first production run in two-flavor QCD is on-going using the Iwasaki gauge action on a 16^3 \times 32 lattice at the lattice spacing of 0.12fm with six sea quark masses down to m_{s,phys}/6, where m_{s,phys} is the physical strange quark mass. We briefly introduce our choice of the lattice action and simulation algorithm, and describe the present status of the production run. Preliminary results on the light meson masses and the static quark potential are also reported.
Exit problem of a two-dimensional risk process from a cone: exact and asymptotic results

Consider two insurance companies (or two branches of the same company) that divide between them both claims and premia in some specified proportions. We model the occurrence of claims according to a renewal process. One ruin problem considered is that when the corresponding two-dimensional risk process first leaves the positive quadrant; another is that of entering the negative quadrant. When the claims arrive according to a Poisson process we obtain a closed form expression for the ultimate ruin probability. In the general case we analyze the asymptotics of the ruin probability when the initial reserves of both companies tend to infinity, both under Cramér light-tail and under subexponential assumptions on the claim size distribution.
Detailed view on slow sinusoidal, hemodynamic oscillations on the human brain cortex by Fourier transforming oxy/deoxy hyperspectral images

Slow sinusoidal, hemodynamic oscillations (SSHOs) around 0.1 Hz are frequently seen in mammalian and human brains. In four patients undergoing epilepsy surgery, subtle but robust fluctuations in oxy‐ and deoxyhemoglobin were detected using hyperspectral imaging of the cortex. These SSHOs were stationary during the entire 4 to 10 min acquisition time. By Fourier filtering the oxy‐ and deoxyhemoglobin time signals with a small bandwidth, SSHOs became visible within localized regions of the brain, with distinctive frequencies and a continuous phase variation within that region. SSHOs of deoxyhemoglobin appeared to have an opposite phase and 11% smaller amplitude with respect to the oxyhemoglobin SSHOs. Although the origin of SSHOs remains unclear, we find indications that the observed SSHOs may embody a local propagating hemodynamic wave with velocities in line with capillary blood velocities, and conceivably related to vasomotion and maintenance of adequate tissue perfusion. Hyperspectral imaging of the human cortex during surgery allow in‐depth characterization of SSHOs, and may give further insight in the nature and potential (clinical) use of SSHOs.
Detection of Postnatal Depression

The development of a 10-item self-report scale (EPDS) to screen for Postnatal Depression in the community is described. After extensive pilot interviews a validation study was carried out on 84 mothers using the Research Diagnostic Criteria for depressive illness obtained from Goldberg's Standardised Psychiatric Interview. The EPDS was found to have satisfactory sensitivity and specficity, and was also sensitive to change in the severity of depression over time. The scale can be completed in about 5 minutes and has a simple method of scoring. The use of the EPDS in the secondary prevention of Postnatal Depression is discussed.
Dead parrots make bad pets: Exploring modifier effects in noun phrases

Sometimes modifiers have a strong effect on core aspects of the meaning of the nouns they are attached to: A parrot is a desirable pet, but a dead parrot is, at the very least, a rather unusual household companion. In order to stimulate computational research into the impact of modification on phrase meaning, we collected and made available a large dataset containing subject ratings for a variety of noun phrases and the categories they might belong to. We propose to use compositional distributional semantics to model these data, experimenting with numerous distributional semantic spaces, phrase composition methods and asymmetric similarity measures. Our models capture a statistically significant portion of the data, although much work is still needed before we achieve a full computational account of modification effects.
The Collapse of Neutron Stars in High-Mass Binaries as the Energy Source for the Gamma-Ray Bursts

The energy source has remained to be the great mystery in understanding of the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), if the events are placed at cosmological distances as indicated by a number of recent observations. The currently popular models include (1) the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole binary and (2) the hypernova scenario, i.e., the collapse of a massive member in a close binary. Since a neutron star will inevitably collapse into a black hole if its mass exceeds the limit Mmax ≈ 3 M☉, releasing a total binding gravitational energy of ~1054 ergs, we explore semiempirically the possibility of attributing the energy source of GRBs to the accretion-induced collapse of a neutron star (AICNS) in a massive X-ray binary system consisting of a neutron star and a type O/B companion. This happens because a significant mass flow of ~10−3-10−4 M☉ yr-1 may be transferred onto the neutron star through the Roche-lobe overflow and primarily during the spiral-in phase when it plunges into the envelope of the companion, which may eventually lead to the AICNS before the neutron star merges with the core of the companion. In this scenario, a "dirty" fireball with a moderate amount of beaming is naturally expected because of the nonuniformity of the stellar matter surrounding the explosion inside the companion, and a small fraction (~0.1%) of the energy is sufficient to create the observed GRBs. In addition, the bulk of the ejecting matter of the companion star with a relatively slow expansion rate may act as the afterglow. Assuming a nonevolutionary model for galaxies, we estimate that the birthrate of the AICNS events is about two per day within a volume to redshift z=1 for an Ω0=1 universe, consistent with the reported GRB rate. It appears that the AICNS scenario, as a result of stellar evolution, may provide a natural explanation for the origin of GRBs and therefore deserves to be further investigated in the theoretical study of GRBs.
Clinical course of mesenteric artery stenosis in elderly americans.

BACKGROUND To examine prospectively the relationship between stenosis or occlusion of the celiac and superior mesenteric arteries and symptoms of chronic intestinal ischemia in free-living elderly patients in the United States. METHODS As part of an ancillary study to the Cardiovascular Health Study, participants in the Forsyth County (North Carolina) cohort underwent visceral duplex ultrasonography of the celiac and superior mesenteric arteries. Critical mesenteric artery stenosis (MAS) or occlusion was defined by Doppler flow ultrasound-derived criteria. Clinical outcomes were assessed at annual follow-up examinations and review of death certificates. Multivariate associations between the presence of MAS and all-cause mortality and adverse cardiovascular events were analyzed. Participants with MAS were contacted to determine the presence of symptoms consistent with chronic intestinal ischemia. RESULTS Of 553 participants who underwent visceral duplex ultrasonography, 97 (17.5%) had disease of the celiac or superior mesenteric artery. At a mean follow-up of 6(1/2) years, 20 participants with MAS (20.6%) and 93 without MAS (20.4%) had died (relative risk, 1.01; 95% confidence interval, 0.66-1.55). No deaths were attributed to intestinal infarction. No association existed between the presence of MAS and prevalent cardiovascular disease, all-cause mortality, or adverse cardiovascular events. A questionnaire was completed by 71% of the surviving participants with MAS. No participant reported symptoms or weight loss consistent with chronic intestinal ischemia. CONCLUSIONS Mesenteric artery stenosis was a common finding in free-living elderly patients. At long-term follow-up, the presence of asymptomatic MAS was not associated with death or adverse cardiovascular events. Participants with asymptomatic MAS by duplex ultrasonographic criteria did not experience intestinal infarction or develop chronic intestinal ischemia.
Growth Volatility and Financial Liberalization

We examine the effects of both equity market liberalization and capital account openness on real consumption growth variability. We show that financial liberalization is mostly associated with lower consumption growth volatility. Our results are robust, surviving controls for business-cycle effects, economic and financial development, the quality of institutions, and other variables. Countries that have more open capital accounts experience a greater reduction in consumption growth volatility after equity market openings. The results hold for both total and idiosyncratic consumption growth volatility. We also find that financial liberalizations are associated with declines in the ratio of consumption growth volatility to GDP growth volatility, suggesting improved risk sharing. Our results are weaker for liberalizing emerging markets but we never observe an increase in real volatility. Moreover, we demonstrate significant differences in the volatility response depending on the size of the banking and government sectors and certain institutional factors.
Impact of exacerbations on health care cost and resource utilization in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients with chronic bronchitis from a predominantly Medicare population

Background Exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) lead to significant increases in resource utilization and cost to the health care system. COPD patients with chronic bronchitis and a history of exacerbations pose an additional burden to the system. This study examined health care utilization and cost among these patients. Methods For this retrospective analysis, data were extracted from a large national health plan with a predominantly Medicare population. This study involved patients who were aged 40–89 years, had been enrolled continuously for 24 months or more, had at least two separate insurance claims for COPD with chronic bronchitis (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification code 491.xx), and had pharmacy claims for COPD maintenance medications between January 1, 2007, and March 31, 2009. Two years of data were examined for each patient; the index date was defined as the first occurrence of COPD. Baseline characteristics were obtained from the first year of data, with health outcomes tracked in the second year. Severe exacerbation was defined by COPD-related hospitalization or death; moderate exacerbation was defined by oral or parenteral corticosteroid use. Adjusted numbers of exacerbations and COPD-related costs per patient were estimated controlling for demographic and clinical characteristics. Results The final study sample involved 8554 patients; mean age was 70.1 ± 8.6 years and 49.8% of the overall population had exacerbation, 13.9% had a severe exacerbation only, 29.1% had a moderate exacerbation only, and 6.8% had both a severe and moderate exacerbation. COPD-related mean annual costs were $4069 (all figures given in US dollars) for the overall population and $6381 for patients with two or more exacerbations. All-cause health care costs were $18,976 for the overall population and $23,901 for patients with history of two or more exacerbations. Severity of exacerbations, presence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and long-term oxygen use were associated with higher adjusted costs. Conclusions The results indicate that despite treatment with maintenance medications, COPD patients continue to have exacerbations resulting in higher costs. New medications and disease management interventions are warranted to reduce the severity and frequency of exacerbations and the related cost impact of the disease.