Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The need for education and training in the use of the EFQM model for quality management in UK higher education institutions

This paper describes the findings of a case study undertaken to investigate the status of total quality management in a UK higher education institution (HEI) using the self‐assessment methodology developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). The case study strategy involved six schools within the same HEI. Provides evidence to encourage implementation of staff development strategies which provide education and training to deans, assistant deans and all personnel involved in quality and performance improvement on the effective use of the EFQM model and the integration of the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency model with the EFQM model. The need to critically evaluate emerging models for quality and performance improvement prior to selection and implementation is emphasized. This study identifies a comparison of the EFQM methodology with the educational criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as a key area for further research.
A Hybrid LP-RPG Heuristic for Modelling Numeric Resource Flows in Planning

Although the use of metric fluents is fundamental to many practical planning problems, the study of heuristics to support fully automated planners working with these fluents remains relatively unexplored. The most widely used heuristic is the relaxation of metric fluents into interval-valued variables --- an idea first proposed a decade ago. Other heuristics depend on domain encodings that supply additional information about fluents, such as capacity constraints or other resource-related annotations. A particular challenge to these approaches is in handling interactions between metric fluents that represent exchange, such as the transformation of quantities of raw materials into quantities of processed goods, or trading of money for materials. The usual relaxation of metric fluents is often very poor in these situations, since it does not recognise that resources, once spent, are no longer available to be spent again. We present a heuristic for numeric planning problems building on the propositional relaxed planning graph, but using a mathematical program for numeric reasoning. We define a class of producer--consumer planning problems and demonstrate how the numeric constraints in these can be modelled in a mixed integer program (MIP). This MIP is then combined with a metric Relaxed Planning Graph (RPG) heuristic to produce an integrated hybrid heuristic. The MIP tracks resource use more accurately than the usual relaxation, but relaxes the ordering of actions, while the RPG captures the causal propositional aspects of the problem. We discuss how these two components interact to produce a single unified heuristic and go on to explore how further numeric features of planning problems can be integrated into the MIP. We show that encoding a limited subset of the propositional problem to augment the MIP can yield more accurate guidance, partly by exploiting structure such as propositional landmarks and propositional resources. Our results show that the use of this heuristic enhances scalability on problems where numeric resource interaction is key in finding a solution.
Deliberating about terrorism: Prejudice and jury verdicts in a mock terrorism trial

Juries in many Western countries are being asked to make decisions about defendants charged with terrorist-related offences, in situations where heightened anxieties and hostility to outgroups may make a fair trial difficult. What impact can deliberation have in addressing any such prejudice? This study estimates the impact of several forms of prejudice on juror verdicts in a mock terrorism trial. The study provides a more realistic setting than most previous studies, with an authentic heritage courtroom, actual jury assembly room and jury deliberation rooms in the NSW Supreme Court, a one-hour live trial and one-hour deliberation. Strong relationships are found between conviction rates and prior attitudes before jury discussion, consistent with other literature. Deliberation significantly reduces the proportion of guilty verdicts; it also reduces the impact on verdict of two forms of prejudice – fear of terrorism and punitiveness. On the other hand it tends to increase the impact of cognitive prejudice, measured both by a modified version of the Jury Bias Scale and a terrorism-specific scale based on attitudes to Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks.
An In-depth Comparison of Subgraph Isomorphism Algorithms in Graph Databases

Finding subgraph isomorphisms is an important problem in many applications which deal with data modeled as graphs. While this problem is NP-hard, in recent years, many algorithms have been proposed to solve it in a reasonable time for real datasets using different join orders, pruning rules, and auxiliary neighborhood information. However, since they have not been empirically compared one another in most research work, it is not clear whether the later work outperforms the earlier work. Another problem is that reported comparisons were often done using the original authors' binaries which were written in different programming environments. In this paper, we address these serious problems by re-implementing five state-of-the-art subgraph isomorphism algorithms in a common code base and by comparing them using many real-world datasets and their query loads. Through our in-depth analysis of experimental results, we report surprising empirical findings.
Post-anaesthesia care unit delirium: incidence, risk factors and associated adverse outcomes

PLoS Med 2005; 2: e124 20. Gusmao-Flores D, Salluh JI, Chalhub RA, et al. The confusion assessment method for the intensive care unit (CAM-ICU) and intensive care delirium screening checklist (ICDSC) for the diagnosis of delirium: a systematic review and metaanalysis of clinical studies. Crit Care 2012; 16: R115 21. van Eijk MM, van den Boogaard M, van Marum RJ, et al. Routine use of the confusion assessment method for the intensive care unit: a multicenter study. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2011; 184: 340–4 22. Pandharipande P, Cotton BA, Shintani A, et al. Motoric subtypes of delirium in mechanically ventilated surgical and trauma intensive care unit patients. Intensive Care Med 2007; 33: 1726–31 23. Martin BJ, Buth KJ, Arora RC, et al. Delirium: a cause for concern beyond the immediate postoperative period. Ann Thorac Surg 2012; 93: 1114–20 24. Whitlock EL, Torres BA, Lin N, et al. Postoperative delirium in a substudy of cardiothoracic surgical patients in the BAGRECALL clinical trial. Anesth Analg 2014; 118: 809–17 25. Raats JW, Steunenberg SL, Crolla RM, et al. Postoperative delirium in elderly after elective and acute colorectal surgery: A prospective cohort study. Int J Surg 2015; 18: 216–9 26. Maniar HS, Lindman BR, Escallier K, et al. Delirium after surgical and transcatheter aortic valve replacement is associated with increased mortality. J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2016; 151: 815–23.e1-2 27. Avidan MS, Evers AS. The fallacy of persistent postoperative cognitive decline. Anesthesiology 2016; 124: 255–8 28. Sau€ er AM, Nathoe HM, Hendrikse J, et al. Cognitive outcomes 7.5 years after angioplasty compared with offpump coronary bypass surgery. Ann Thorac Surg 2013; 96: 1294–300 29. Sprung J, Roberts RO, Knopman DS, et al. Mild cognitive impairment and exposure to general anesthesia for surgeries and procedures: a population-based case-control study. Anesth Analg 2017; 124: 1277–90 30. Sprung J, Roberts RO, Knopman DS, et al. Association of mild cognitive impairment with exposure to general anesthesia for surgical and nonsurgical procedures: a population-based study. Mayo Clin Proc 2016; 91: 208–17 31. Sprung J, Jankowski CJ, Roberts RO, et al. Anesthesia and incident dementia: a population-based, nested, case-control study. Mayo Clin Proc 2013; 88: 552–61
Enhancing effects of adjuvanted 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza A vaccine on memory B-cell responses in HIV-infected individuals

Objective:To assess the humoral immune response to low-dose AS03-adjuvanted and standard-dose nonadjuvanted 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza A vaccine in HIV-infected aviremic individuals receiving antiretroviral therapy and in uninfected individuals. Design:A three-arm study. Setting:Two clinics: one at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA; and the other at the Maple Leaf Medical Clinic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Participants:HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected adults. Intervention:Single intramuscular 15 μg dose of the monovalent inactivated 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza A vaccine without adjuvant or 3.75 μg dose of the same strain with adjuvant AS03. Main outcomes:Immunogenicity, as measured by hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) antibody titers and vaccine-specific memory B-cell responses. Results:A total of 74 participants were enrolled. Twenty-one HIV-infected individuals received the low-dose adjuvanted 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza A vaccine. Twenty-nine HIV-infected and 24 HIV-uninfected individuals received the standard-dose nonadjuvanted vaccine. There were no significant differences in antibody responses at 9 weeks postvaccination among the three groups studied. However, the IgG memory B-cell response against the vaccine was significantly higher in the HIV-infected group that received the low-dose adjuvanted vaccine when compared to the HIV-infected and uninfected groups that received the standard-dose nonadjuvanted vaccine. Conclusions remained unchanged after regression adjustment for age, gender, CD4+ T-cell count, and baseline HAI titer. Conclusion:These data suggest that adjuvants could be used to expand coverage through dose sparing and improve humoral immune responses in immunocompromised individuals.
DVFS using clock scheduling for Multicore Systems-on-Chip and Networks-on-Chip

A modern System-on-Chip (SoC) contains processor cores, application-specific process- ing elements, memory, peripherals, all connected with a high-bandwidth and low-latency Network-on-Chip (NoC). The downside of such very high level of integration and con- nectivity is the high power consumption. In CMOS technology this is made of a dynamic and a static component. To reduce the dynamic component, Dynamic voltage and Fre- quency Scaling (DVFS) has been adopted. Although DVFS is very effective chip-wide, the power optimization of complex SoCs calls for a finer grain application of DVFS. Ideally all the main components of an SoC should be provided with a DVFS controller. An SoC with a DVFS controller per component with individual DC-DC converters and PLL/DLL circuits cannot scale in size to hundreds of components, which are in the research agenda. We present an alternative that will permit such scaling. It is possible to achieve results close to an optimum DVFS by hopping between few voltage levels and by an innovative application of clock-gating that we term as clock scheduling. We obtain an effective clock frequency by periodically killing some clock cycles of a master clock. We can apply voltage scaling for some of the periodic clock schedules which yield effective clock 1/2, 1/3, . By dithering between few voltages we obtain results close to an ideal DVFS system in simple pipelined circuits and in a complex example, a NoC's switch. Again in the context of a NoC, we show how clock scheduling and voltage scaling can be automatically determined by means of a proportional-integral loop controller that keeps track of the network load. We describe in detail its implementation and all the circuit-level issues that we found. For a single switch, result shows an advantage of up to 2X over simple frequency scaling without voltage scaling. By providing each NoC's switch with our simple DVFS controller, power saving at network level can be significantly more than what a a global DVFS controller can get. In a realistic scenario represented by network traces generated by video applications (MPEG, PIP, MWD, VoPD), we obtain an average power saving of 33%. To reduce static power, the Power-Gating (PG) technique is used and consists in switching- off power supply of unused blocks via pMOS headers or nMOS footers in series with such blocks. Even though research has been done in this field, the application of PG to NoCs has not been fully investigated. We show that it is possible to apply PG to the input buffers of a NoC switch. Their leakage power contributes about 40-50% of total NoC power, hence reducing such contribution is worthwhile. We partitioned buffers in banks and apply PG only to inactive banks. With our technique, it is possible to save about 40% in leakage power, without impact on performance
Preprocessing : data selection , pseudo ECG III . 3 − D centerlines reconstruction

Cardiovascular diseases remain the primary cause of death in developed countries. In most cases, exploration of possibly underlying coronary artery pathologies is performed using X-ray coronary angiography. Current clinical routine in coronary angiography is directly conducted in 2-D projection images from several static viewing angles. However, for diagnosis and treatment purposes, coronary artery reconstruction is highly suitable. The purpose of this study is to provide physicians with a 3-D model of coronary arteries, e.g. for absolute threedimensional measures for lesion assessment, instead of direct projective measures deduced from the images, which are highly dependent on the viewing angle. In this article, we propose a novel method to reconstruct coronary arteries from one single rotational X-ray projection sequence. As a side result, we also obtain an estimation of the coronary artery motion. Our method consists of 3 main consecutive steps: (1) 3-D reconstruction of coronary artery centerlines, including respiratory motion compensation, (2) coronary artery 4-D motion computation, and (3) 3-D tomographic reconstruction of coronary arteries, involving compensation for respiratory and cardiac motions. We present some experiments on clinical datasets, and the feasibility of a true 3-D Quantitative Coronary Analysis is demonstrated.
The Role of Communication in Same-Sex Friendships: A Comparison among African Americans, Asian Americans, and European Americans

This study explored whether affectively oriented forms of communication are accorded the same significance in the friendships of Asian and African Americans as they are in the friendships of European Americans. Participants (72 Asian American men and women; 50 African American men and women; and 55 European American men and women) indicated the importance of affectively versus instrumentally oriented communication skills using a revised version of the authors’ Communication Functions Questionnaire. Results indicated a complex pattern of differences due to ethnicity, sex, and type of communication skill. In particular, European American women viewed the affectively oriented skills of their same-sex friends as more important than did African American women. These and related findings are discussed in terms of the role communication plays in friendships, and how this role is moderated by ethnicity and sex.
Evaluation of hydrocarbons and organochlorine pesticides and their tolerant microorganisms from an agricultural soil to define its bioremediation feasibility

The concentrations of hydrocarbons and organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), nutrients and tolerant microorganisms in an agricultural soil from a locality in Tepeaca, Puebla, Mexico, were determined to define its feasibility for bioremediation. The OCPs detected were heptachlor, aldrin, trans-chlordane, endosulfán I, endosulfán II, 1,1,1-bis-(4-chlorophenyl)-2,2-trichloroethane (4,4′-DDT), 1,1-bis-(4-chlorophenyl)-2,2-dichloroethene (4,4′-DDE) and endrin aldehyde, with values of 0.69–30.81 ng g−1. The concentration of hydrocarbons in the soil of Middle Hydrocarbons Fraction (MHF), C10 to C28, was 4608–27,748 mg kg−1 and 1117–19,610 mg kg−1 for Heavy Hydrocarbons Fraction (HHF), C28 to C35, due to an oil spill from the rupture of a pipeline. The soil was deficient in nitrogen (0.03–0.07%) and phosphorus (0 ppm), and therefore it was advisable to fertilize to bio-stimulate the native microorganisms of soil. In the soil samples, hydrocarbonoclast fungi 3.72 × 102 to 44.6 × 102 CFU g−1 d.s. and hydrocarbonoclast bacteria (0.17 × 105 to 8.60 × 105 CFU g−1 d.s.) were detected, with a tolerance of 30,000 mg kg−1 of diesel. Moreover, pesticideclast fungi (5.13 × 102 to 42.2 × 102 CFU g−1 d.s.) and pesticideclast bacteria (0.15 × 105 to 9.68 × 105 CFU g−1 d.s.) were determined with tolerance to 20 mg kg−1 of OCPs. Fungi and bacteria tolerant to both pollutants were also quantified. Therefore, native microorganisms had potential to be stimulated to degrade hydrocarbons and pesticides or both pollutants. The concentration of pollutants and the microbial activity analyzed indicated that bioremediation of the soil contaminated with hydrocarbons and pesticides using bio-stimulation of native microorganisms was feasible.
The effects of social context, source fairness, and perceived self-source similarity on social influence: a self-categorisation analysis

Based upon a self-categorisation analysis of social influence (Turner, 1991), we predicted that individuals who self-categorise with the source of a communication would align their own private attitudes more closely with the source when that source was distributively fair rather than unfair in an intragroup context. We expected this pattern to reverse in an intergroup context when the unfairness was ingroup favouring. These expectations were confirmed in a laboratory experiment (N=101). The data suggest that neither source similarity nor source fairness serve simply as persuasion cues to which individuals thoughtlessly conform. We argue, instead that, once self-categorised, individuals: (1) actively attend to an ingroup member's behaviours and the context in which they occur, and (2) are influenced only by a source who provides some form of social identity enhancement, either by being fair in an intragroup context (Lind & Tyler, 1988) or ingroup favouring in an intergroup context (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Macro–Micro–Symbolic Teaching to Promote Relational Understanding of Chemical Reactions

The purpose of this research is threefold: (1) to identify the difficulties that Grade 10 students in a Lebanese school have that hinder their conceptual understanding at the micro–macro–symbolic interface in chemistry, (2) to investigate the effect of a macro–micro–symbolic teaching approach on students’ relational understanding of chemical reactions, and (3) to characterize students’ conceptual profiles regarding their understanding of chemical reactions in terms of macro, micro, symbolic levels and the relations among them, at the end of the teaching sequence. Forty six 10th graders from two sections participated in the study. A student-centered approach was followed in both sections based on constructivist pedagogy. Hence the teacher played the role of a facilitator who guided students in a meaning making inductive learning process, through questioning, monitoring, validating, and clarifying ideas. Instruction in the experimental group was characterized by macro–micro–symbolic teaching that focuses on the interplay between the levels, integrates various representations, and engages students in an epistemic discourse about the nature of knowing in chemistry. Data sources for the study included a pre-test and two post-intervention tasks: a post-test and a concept map task, in addition to interviews with selected students from both sections. Findings indicated that macro–micro–symbolic teaching enhanced students’ conceptual understanding and relational learning of chemical reactions. Besides, four assertions related to students’ conceptual and epistemological thinking in response to the different teaching approaches are presented. Implications for instruction and for teacher education programs, as well as recommendations for further research, are discussed in light of these findings.
Shooting manipulation system with high reaching accuracy

In this paper, we propose a shooting manipulation system for manipulating a distant object in an instant. The proposed system mechanistically acts on a remote target by constraining an end-effector catapulted by an impulsive air flow through a flexible string connected with an elastic cantilever. Experimental results shows that the proposed shooting manipulation system has excellent basic performances such as high motion straightness of a reaching path, quickness in a turning motion, and high reaching accuracy in spite of its simplicity. Furthermore, we show that, by making full use of the basic performances of the proposed system, it is possible to realize a quick capturing of a falling object 0.7[m] away with a high success rate of 92 percents.
The Effects of Being an Only Child, Family Cohesion, and Family Conflict on Behavioral Problems among Adolescents with Physically Ill Parents

Background: This study aimed to examine the parental physical illness’ effect on behavioral problems among adolescents, and the effects of being an only child, family cohesion, and family conflict on behavioral problems among adolescents with physically ill parents in Liaoning province, China. Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed in 2009. A questionnaire including two dimensions of the Family Environment Scale (family cohesion and family conflict), self-reported Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and demographic factors was distributed to the subjects. Results: Among the 5220 adolescents, 308 adolescents lived with physically ill parents. The adolescents with physically ill parents had more behavioral problems than adolescents with healthy parents. Among the girls who lived in families with physically ill parents, the SDQ score and the prevalence of SDQ syndromes were higher in the girls with siblings than the girls without siblings after adjusting for variables; the effect of family cohesion on SDQ was significant after adjusting for variables. Conclusion: Interventions targeting family cohesion may be effective to reduce behavioral problems of adolescents with physically ill parents.
Robust Filtering Through Coherent Lower Previsions

The classical filtering problem is re-examined to take into account imprecision in the knowledge about the probabilistic relationships involved. Imprecision is modeled in this paper by closed convex sets of probabilities. We derive a solution of the state estimation problem under such a framework that is very general: it can deal with any closed convex set of probability distributions used to characterize uncertainty in the prior, likelihood, and state transition models. This is made possible by formulating the theory directly in terms of coherent lower previsions, that is, of the lower envelopes of the expectations obtained from the set of distributions. The general solution is specialized to two particular classes of coherent lower previsions. The first consists of a family of Gaussian distributions whose means are only known to belong to an interval. The second is the so-called linear-vacuous mixture model, which is a family made of convex combinations of a known nominal distribution (e.g., a Gaussian) with arbitrary distributions. For the latter case, we empirically compare the proposed estimator with the Kalman filter. This shows that our solution is more robust to the presence of modelling errors in the system and that, hence, appears to be a more realistic approach than the Kalman filter in such a case.