Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Perspective of Rural Physicians Providing Abortion in Canada: Qualitative Findings of the BC Abortion Providers Survey (BCAPS)

Background An increasing proportion of Canadian induced abortions are performed in large urban areas. For unknown reasons the number of rural abortion providers in Canadian provinces, such as British Columbia (BC), has declined substantially. This study explored the experiences of BC rural and urban physicians providing abortion services. Methods The mixed methods BC Abortion Providers Survey employed self-administered questionnaires, distributed to all known current and some past BC abortion providers in 2011. The optional semi-structured interviews are the focus of this analysis. Interview questions probed the experiences, facilitators and challenges faced by abortion providers, and their future intentions. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using cross-case and thematic analysis. Results Twenty interviews were completed and transcribed, representing 13/27 (48.1%) rural abortion providers, and 7/19 (36.8%) of urban providers in BC. Emerging themes differed between urban and rural providers. Most urban providers worked within clinics and reported a supportive environment. Rural physicians, all providing surgical abortions within hospitals, reported challenging barriers to provision including operating room scheduling, anesthetist and nursing logistical issues, high demand for services, professional isolation, and scarcity of replacement abortion providers. Many rural providers identified a need to “fly under the radar” in their small community. Discussion This first study of experiences among rural and urban abortion providers in Canada identifies addressable challenges faced by rural physicians. Rural providers expressed a need for increased support from hospital administration and policy. Further challenges identified include a desire for continuing professional education opportunities, and for available replacement providers.
Pathways from School to Further Education or Work: Examining the Consequences of Year 12 Course Choices. Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth. Research Report 42.

The subjects that students choose to study for their Year 12 certificate have a major impact on the educational and career options open to them after finishing school. Some subjects or combinations of subjects are traditionally more likely to act as gateways to higher education or to vocational education and training (VET), while others are more likely to lead to the workforce or to unemployment. This study looks at the following research questions: (1) What are the typical clusters of subjects or course types studied by Year 12 students and have these changed since prior analyses as a result of the increased participation in VET subjects and with the apparent broadening of subject choices across the Key Learning Areas? (2) What are the profiles of students enrolled in particular course types in Year 12 and are there particular courses that are more likely to be studied by males or females, or those from different social backgrounds? (3) What field of study area or work do students from particular course types tend to move in? (4) What area of work do students from particular course types tend to move into and are there particular course types that appear to lead more often to unemployment or other poor outcomes? Findings indicate that: the course areas of business studies, sciences other than advanced mathematics-physical sciences, and technical vocational courses provide some alternative pathways for a broad range of students, both in terms of ability and social status, language background and gender; the course that provided the poorest pathway to further education and training of any type were the service-clerical vocational, mixed eclectic and visual and performing arts courses; and most students who left school immediately after completing Year 12 moved into low-level positions, mainly in the areas of retail trades, accommodation, hospitality and manufacturing. The contents are: Executive summary; Introduction; Deriving the courses of study; Profiles of participation in Year 12 courses; Participation in further education and training; Moving into the workforce; Discussion. Included as appendices are: Sample and measures; Subject groupings; Notes on methods of analysis; Estimation of the impact of various factors on participation in Year 12 subjects; Interpreting odds ratios; Participation in higher education broad fields of study.
Social identity and the duality of structure in late Roman-period Britain

The central theme of this article is the relationship between material practices, social identity categories and the duality of structure. The latter concept, linking structure and agency in Giddens’ structuration theory, is here understood as dependent upon the negotiation of categories, such as ethnicity/community, social status, religion and gender, through practices like dwelling, eating and appearing. Such practices can be interpreted from the material patterns that emerge from multi-dimensional and multi-scalar analyses of archaeological data. These ideas are worked through in a case study of Britain in the fourth and early fifth centuries AD, wherein some of the relationships between practices and institutionalized identities (such as those associated with the military) can be discerned. An emphasis on the negotiation of identities in practice also places the theme of temporality at centre-stage, offering a new perspective on the balance between reproduction and transformation in the ongoing constitution of social life.
Dynamics of the Term Structure and Volatility of Shipping Freight Rates

This paper investigates the relationship between the dynamics of the term structure and time-varying volatility of shipping freight rates. Using a dataset covering the period from January 1992 to September 2007 and augmented EGARCH models, we find support for the argument that the volatility of freight rates is related to the shape of the term structure of the freight market. Furthermore, it is found that this relationship is asymmetric in the sense that when the freight market is in backwardation, volatility is higher compared to periods when the market is in contango. The results have important implications for freight risk analysis and management. © 2011 LSE and the University of Bath
State Bank Enterprise Awards: An Impact Evaluation Case Study

This study is concerned with the development of entrepreneurship in young Thais, studying at high school level through an entrepreneurship encouragement program undertaken during the recent period of Thailand's economic recovery. This program is considered new to the country since it focuses on high school participants, a target-group untapped by most existing business incubation programs. In addition, it also takes significant account of the experiential learning method for entrepreneurship development. The research shows that the program had substantial, yet limited impact in encouraging its participants to become future entrepreneurs. This was due to the individual background, parental influence, and differences in their own beliefs that played an essential role in supporting or hindering young Thais towards entrepreneurship. Quantitative and qualitative research methods, used in conjunction, were used to portray the overall effectiveness of this program; such a mixed method is not commonly practiced in most entrepreneurship program evaluations. Quantitative research was used primarily to give representative results on how well the specific program objectives had been achieved by the participants as well as to select representatives of the program for the qualitative data gathering. Qualitative research was utilised to capture testimonials of program impacts and to obtain a comprehensive interpretation of participants’ perceptions, evaluation of program effectiveness, and the factors that support or hinder their development towards entrepreneurship. The study suggests that this short-term entrepreneurship encouragement program had limited success; success was dependent on both personal and external factors relating to each participant. It showed that one’s prior condition was a significant determinant of the varying level of success. The program was able to encourage the participants with relatively limited business experience towards entrepreneurship, specifically in stimulating more awareness and knowledge in developing entrepreneurial competencies. For those participants with an established background in business, the program provided a period of incubation that encouraged them to become entrepreneurs; it provided them with an opportunity of real business implementation that increased their prospects of success in future entrepreneurship. The concrete success levels revealed by the study suggests that this short-term entrepreneurship encouragement program might best position itself by providing an initial selection process to separate the ‘entrepreneurto- be’ from the ‘will not be’. The selected ‘entrepreneur-to-be’ could then be further groomed to be one of the successful entrepreneurs to play an important role in driving the long-term economic growth of Thailand.
Progress with numerical integration of the near-singular Green function gradient on general triangle domains

Curvilinear, higher-order, triangular elements are often used in the Method of Moments (MoM). In such cases quadrature schemes based on near-singularity cancellation transformations have shown great promise. This paper focuses on the field evaluation integral involving the scalar Green function gradient kernel grad(1/R). Schemes based on splitting into three sub-triangles, followed by near-singularity cancellation transformations are compared. The three-subdomain methods offer easy control of accuracy. The results suggest that an enhanced version of the existing Augmented-Duffy-R1-Linear scheme is more efficient than the other schemes available in the literature at present.
Increasing Implicit Self-Esteem Through Classical Conditioning

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.
Multi-Language Image Description with Neural Sequence Models

In this paper we present an approach to multi-language image description bringing together insights from neural machine translation and neural image description. To create a description of an image for a given target language, our sequence generation models condition on feature vectors from the image, the description from the source language, and/or a multimodal vector computed over the image and a description in the source language. In image description experiments on the IAPR-TC12 dataset of images aligned with English and German sentences, we find significant and substantial improvements in BLEU4 and Meteor scores for models trained over multiple languages, compared to a monolingual baseline.
Age-related changes in frequency of mind-wandering and task-related interferences during memory encoding and their impact on retrieval

During the performance of cognitive tasks such as memory encoding, attention can become decoupled from the external environment and instead focused on internal thoughts related to the appraisal of the current task (task-related interferences; TRI), or personal thoughts unrelated to the task at hand (mind-wandering; MW). However, the association between the frequency of these thoughts experienced at encoding and retrieval accuracy in young and older adults remains poorly understood. In this study young and older adults encoded lists of words using one of two encoding tasks: judging whether words are man-made/natural (objective task), or whether they are pleasant/neutral (subjective task). We measured the frequency of TRI and MW at encoding, and related them to retrieval accuracy in both age groups. We found that encoding task influenced the type of internal thoughts experienced by young, but not older, adults: young exhibited greater MW in the subjective vs the objective task, and greater TRI in the objective vs subjective encoding task. Second, across both tasks we found marked age-related decreases in both MW and TRI at encoding, and frequency of these thoughts negatively impacted memory retrieval in young adults only. We discuss these findings in relation to current theories of ageing, attention and memory.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy With and Without Medication in the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) are established monotherapies for obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), yet research on their combined efficacy is lacking. Practicing psychologists who treat OCD are thus unable to say definitively whether exposure and ritual prevention would be more successful with concomitant SRI pharmacotherapy. The authors explored this issue in a clinical sample of 56 outpatients who received fee-for-service CBT; 31 (55%) received CBT alone, and 25 (45%) received CBT plus SRI. Both groups made clinically significant and comparable posttreatment gains, suggesting that CBT is effective with or without concomitant pharmacotherapy. Clinical implications are discussed. With the current widespread use of medication to treat a variety of mental health problems, professional psychologists often need to discuss with prospective patients the pros and cons of continuing the medication regimen while undergoing psychotherapy. Conversely, patients who are considering medication may ask their psychologists whether they should do so while receiving psychological services to maximize benefit. Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are often unclear, as research on the relative efficacy of psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and their combination is underdeveloped for most psychological disorders. This is certainly the case with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), for which the efficacy of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) has been well established (see Abramowitz, 1997; Greist, Jefferson, Kobak,
Some new directions for financial stability

When the in-coming Labour government in the UK transferred responsibility for the supervision of banks to the newly formed Financial Services Authority (FSA) in May 1997, at the same time it reaffirmed, (e.g. in the Chancellor’s statement on the Bank of England of 20 May 1997, reprinted in BEQB, 1997, p. 246), that the Bank of England retained responsibility for overall financial stability. But what exactly are the functional responsibilities of a central bank which is required to maintain systemic financial stability without having supervisory oversight of individual financial institutions? Particularly since a number of other major countries have been following this same route, for example in Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, Austria, and now China, it is worth starting with this question.
From Courtroom to Converse: My 30 Year Journey

Introduction Documenting one's cumulative research program can be a humbling experience. First, such an assignment requires acknowledging that most of our work has limited impact on the academic and practitioner communities. Second, even setting impact aside, there is the issue of trying to make it appear that there is some master plan that guides our research. Here again, I suspect most of us conduct our research without any overarching plan in mind. Certainly, this has been true for my research program. Still, it is possible for me to tell a story that provides some structure to this research and hopefully in the process helps the reader see my research program as a progression of ideas. With this in mind, I have decided to provide a brief background of my almost 30 years of study of channel management and channel structure issues,
The SMOS Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission is European Space Agency (ESA's) second Earth Explorer Opportunity mission, launched in November 2009. It is a joint program between ESA Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnologico Industrial. SMOS carries a single payload, an L-Band 2-D interferometric radiometer in the 1400-1427 MHz protected band. This wavelength penetrates well through the atmosphere, and hence the instrument probes the earth surface emissivity. Surface emissivity can then be related to the moisture content in the first few centimeters of soil, and, after some surface roughness and temperature corrections, to the sea surface salinity over ocean. The goal of the level 2 algorithm is thus to deliver global soil moisture (SM) maps with a desired accuracy of 0.04 m3/m3. To reach this goal, a retrieval algorithm was developed and implemented in the ground segment which processes level 1 to level 2 data. Level 1 consists mainly of angular brightness temperatures (TB), while level 2 consists of geophysical products in swath mode, i.e., as acquired by the sensor during a half orbit from pole to pole. In this context, a group of institutes prepared the SMOS algorithm theoretical basis documents to be used to produce the operational algorithm. The principle of the SM retrieval algorithm is based on an iterative approach which aims at minimizing a cost function. The main component of the cost function is given by the sum of the squared weighted differences between measured and modeled TB data, for a variety of incidence angles. The algorithm finds the best set of the parameters, e.g., SM and vegetation characteristics, which drive the direct TB model and minimizes the cost function. The end user Level 2 SM product contains SM, vegetation opacity, and estimated dielectric constant of any surface, TB computed at 42.5°, flags and quality indices, and other parameters of interest. This paper gives an overview of the algorithm, discusses the caveats, and provides a glimpse of the Cal Val exercises.
Evaluating and improving semi-analytic modelling of dust in galaxies based on radiative transfer calculations

The treatment of dust attenuation is crucial in order to compare the predictions of galaxy formation models with multiwavelength observations. Most past studies have used either simple analytic prescriptions or full radiative transfer (RT) calculations. Here, we couple star formation histories and morphologies predicted by the semi-analytic galaxy formation model MORGANA with RT calculations from the spectrophotometric and dust code GRASIL to create a library of galaxy spectral energy distributions from the UV/optical through the far-infrared, and compare the predictions of the RT calculations with analytic prescriptions. We consider a low- and high-redshift sample, as well as an additional library constructed with empirical, noncosmological star formation histories and simple (pure bulge or disc) morphologies. Based on these libraries, we derive fitting formulae for the effective dust optical depth as a function of galaxy physical properties such as metallicity, gas mass and radius. We show that such fitting formulae can predict the V-band optical depth with a scatter smaller than 0.4 dex for both the low- and high-redshift samples, but there is a large galaxy-to-galaxy scatter in the shapes of attenuation curves, probably due to geometrical variations, which our simple recipe does not capture well. However, our new recipe provides a better approximation to the GRASIL results at optical wavelength than standard analytic prescriptions from the literature, particularly at high redshift.
Myocardial Viability Testing and the Effect of Early Intervention in Patients With Advanced Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction

Background— The clinical value of revascularization and other procedures in patients with severe systolic heart failure is unclear. It has been suggested that assessing ischemia and viability by positron emission tomography (PET) with fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) imaging may identify patients for whom revascularization may lead to improved survival. We performed a propensity analysis to determine whether there might be a survival advantage from revascularization. Methods and Results— We analyzed the survival of 765 consecutive patients (age 64±11 years, 80% men) with advanced left ventricular systolic dysfunction (ejection fraction ≤35%) and without significant valvular heart disease who underwent PET/FDG study at the Cleveland Clinic between 1997 and 2002. Early intervention was defined as any cardiac intervention (surgical or percutaneous) within the first 6 months of the PET/FDG study. In the entire cohort, 230 patients (30%) underwent early intervention (188 [25%] had open heart surgery, most commonly coronary artery bypass grafting, and 42 [5%] had percutaneous revascularization); 535 (70%) were treated medically. Using 39 demographic, clinical and PET/FDG variables, we were able to propensity-match 153 of the 230 patients with 153 patients who did not undergo early intervention. Among the propensity-matched group, there were 84 deaths during a median of 3 years follow-up. Early intervention was associated with a markedly lower risk of death (3-year mortality rate of 15% versus 35%, propensity adjusted hazard ratio 0.52, 95% CI 0.33 to 0.81, P=0.0004). Conclusions— Among systolic heart failure patients referred for PET/FDG, early intervention may be associated with improved survival irrespective of the degree of viability.
Generating Software Test Data by Evolution

This paper discusses the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) for automatic software test data generation. This research extends previous work on dynamic test data generation where the problem of test data generation is reduced to one of minimizing a function. In our work, the function is minimized by using one of two genetic algorithms in place of the local minimization techniques used in earlier research. We describe the implementation of our GA-based system and examine the effectiveness of this approach on a number of programs, one of which is significantly larger than those for which results have previously been reported in the literature. We also examine the effect of program complexity on the test data generation problem by executing our system on a number of synthetic programs that have varying complexities.