Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Remote Leadership

i Executive Summary Technology has permeated the operations and structure of almost every organization in the world and has transformed the way we work in organizations. In this paper we review the impact of technological change in leadership and, more specifically, leadership in the CF. Our review proceeds in three major sections. First, we review the strategic environment with specific reference to the implications of emergent technology for forces operating in this environment. Second, we review the behavioral science literature focusing on the implications of technology for organizational behavior and, more specifically, organizational leadership. Finally, we integrate both reviews by making a series of recommendations for consideration by the CF as to how to deal with issues of remote leadership. The future security environment will be significantly more complex, fluid and dynamic than previously expected. It will consist of potential and emergent threats from both state and non-state belligerent groups. These groups will have access to similar types of communication and computing technologies that modern western militaries do, or they will have access to the equivalent civilian counterparts. This will enable them to have parity or near-parity for some elements of their command and control, reconnaissance and intelligence capabilities – although these will probably be fragmented in nature as opposed to the coherency of these systems within conventional modern militaries they may be in conflict with. Consequently, they will probably adopt asymmetric strategies and tactics as 'means-and-ends' in order to offset a lack of conventional symmetric capability. In response to the potentials of modern computing and communications technology, and spurred by the general levels of reduction in conventional force sizes and structures, most militaries have moved to a greater reliance on technological capability for force projection. This movement is being lead by the United States as it navigates the latest RMA and attempts to evolve towards the Network-Centric Battlespace. It is recognized that this concept will impact classic or conventional military organizational structures and processes and elements of this are being realized now. However, the scope ii and extent of the full impact has not been fully recognized in many ways as the conceptualization of this mode of warfare, and the technologies that will permit its' evolution, are relatively young or are still emerging. The employment of forces in a Network-Centric environment needed to counter future security asymmetries will be distinctly different than in the past. Organizational structures will be …
High Resolution Spherical Quantization of Sinusoids with Harmonically Related Frequencies

Sinusoidal coding is an essential tool in low-rate audio coding, and developing an efficient quantization scheme for the sinusoidal parameters is therefore crucial. In this work we derive optimal entropy constrained amplitude, phase and frequency quantizers for sinusoids whose frequencies are harmonically related, with respect to the l2 distortion measure. This scheme exploits the harmonic structure of many speech and audio signals in the sense that besides amplitudes and phases, only fundamental frequencies need to be quantized, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of bits assigned to frequency parameters. The asymptotically optimal quantizers minimize a high-resolution approximation of the expected l2 distortion while the corresponding quantization indices satisfy an entropy constraint. The quantizers turn out to be flexible and of low complexity, in the sense that they can be determined easily for varying bit rate requirements, without any sort of retraining or iterative procedures. In an objective rate-distortion comparison, the proposed scheme is shown to outperform two variants of a recently proposed scheme, in which all frequency parameters are quantized separately, either directly or differentially
Lobe-based computed tomography assessment of airway diameter, airway or vessel number, and emphysema extent in relation to the clinical outcomes of COPD

Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between computed tomography assessed lobe-based lung parameters and the clinical outcomes of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), including the frequency of exacerbation and annual change in forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1). Patients and methods We studied 65 patients with COPD. We reconstructed computed tomography images to trace the bronchial tree from right B1 to B10 and created 3 cm circle images around the airways exactly perpendicular to the airway axis in the central, middle, and peripheral zones of the bronchi. The number of airways and vessels, airway inner diameter and area of emphysema in the circles were calculated for each segment. Then, we analyzed the relationships between the lobe-based image parameters and the frequency of exacerbation and annual decline in the FEV1. In addition, we assessed the effects of proximal airway lumen-obliterated emphysema (ALOE) on these clinical features. Results The airway diameter was not associated with the frequency of exacerbation or annual decline in FEV1. Among the structural parameters, lower lobe emphysema was most associated with the frequency of exacerbation. The reductions in the number of airways and vessels in total lobe were associated with the annual decline in FEV1. The subgroup of patients with ALOE demonstrated lower FEV1 and more frequent exacerbation than those without ALOE. Conclusion Lower lobe emphysema predicts frequent COPD exacerbation, whereas the annual decline in FEV1 is associated with the number of airways and vessels in total lobe.
Smoking susceptibility among never-smokers: data from the 2006-07 National Youth Smoking Survey.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to explore school and individual characteristics associated with smoking susceptibility among a nationally representative sample of Canadian youth who were never-smokers. METHODS Using data from the 2006-07 Youth Smoking Survey, multi-level logistic regression modeling was used to examine if student-level and school-level characteristics were associated with smoking susceptibility among grade 9 to 12 never-smokers. RESULTS In 2006, 88.2% of Canadian youth in grades 9 to 12 were considered never-smokers, of whom 28.2% (n=255,840) were considered to be susceptible to future smoking. Significant between-school random variation in smoking susceptibility was identified, although the school-level smoking rate was not significantly associated with the risk of an individual student being susceptible. At the student level, smoking susceptibility was associated with having a sibling who smokes, having 1 or 2 close friends who smoke, having ever used alcohol or marijuana, being female and being in grade 9. Parental smoking and exposure to smoking in a car or in the home were not significantly associated with smoking susceptibility. CONCLUSION One way to prevent smoking onset among youth is to interfere with the development of susceptibility to smoking in non-smoking youth population. We found that over 1 in 4 Canadian youth who were never-smokers in 2006 were considered susceptible to smoking in the future. Ongoing tobacco control prevention initiatives are crucial for reducing the prevalence of smoking susceptibility among non-smoking Canadian youth.
Unsupervised Feature Selection for Principal Components Analysis [ Extended

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is the predominant linear dimensionality reduction technique, and has been widely applied on datasets in all scientific domains. We consider, both theoretically and empirically, the topic of unsupervised feature selection for PCA, by leveraging algorithms for the so-called Column Subset Selection Problem (CSSP). In words, the CSSP seeks the“best”subset of exactly k columns from an m×n data matrix A, and has been extensively studied in the Numerical Linear Algebra community. We present a novel two-stage algorithm for the CSSP. From a theoretical perspective, for small to moderate values of k, this algorithm significantly improves upon the best previously-existing results [24, 12] for the CSSP. From an empirical perspective, we evaluate this algorithm as an unsupervised feature selection strategy in three application domains of modern statistical data analysis: finance, document-term data, and genetics. We pay particular attention to how this algorithm may be used to select representative or landmark features from an object-feature matrix in an unsupervised manner. In all three application domains, we are able to identify k landmark features, i.e., columns of the data matrix, that capture nearly the same amount of information as does the subspace that is spanned by the top k “eigenfeatures. ”
Computational scales of Sobolev norms with application to preconditioning

This paper provides a framework for developing computationally efficient multilevel preconditioners and representations for Sobolev norms. Specifically, given a Hilbert space V and a nested sequence of subspaces V 1 C V 2 C. C V, we construct operators which are spectrally equivalent to those of the form A = Σ k μ k (Q k - Q k-1 ). Here μ k , k=1,2,. , are positive numbers and Q k is the orthogonal projector onto V k with Q 0 = 0. We first present abstract results which show when A is spectrally equivalent to a similarly constructed operator A defined in terms of an approximation Q k of Q k , for k = 1,2,. We show that these results lead to efficient preconditioners for discretizations of differential and pscudo-differential operators of positive and negative order. These results extend to sums of operators. For example, singularly perturbed problems such as I -eΔ can be preconditioned uniformly independently of the parameter e. We also show how to precondition an operator which results from Tikhonov regularization of a problem with noisy data. Finally, we describe how the technique provides computationally efficient bounded discrete extensions which have applications to domain decomposition.
The Role of Advisory Services in Proxy Voting

This paper studies the information content and consequences of third-party voting advice issued during proxy contests. We document significant abnormal stock returns around proxy vote recommendations and develop an estimation procedure for disentangling stock price effects due to changes in outcome probabilities from those due to changes in outcome-contingent valuations. We find that voting advice is a good predictor of contest outcomes and that vote recommendations appear to certify the extent to which dissidents can add value. Thus, proxy advice seems to play a dual informational role in financial markets.
The effect of age on the use of health and self-care information: confronting the stereotype.

PURPOSE Given stereotypes of older adults, there is the perception that older adults will not use health information technologies. One concern is that practitioners might shy away from providing older patients with health information, and in particular, computerized information. The study's primary objective was to evaluate whether a health information intervention had a differential effect for people of different ages. DESIGN AND METHODS Quasi-experimental survey data from an assessment of a communitywide informational intervention were used. People were asked about their use of medical reference books, telephone advice nurses, or computers for health information in the past few months. In total, 5,909 surveys were completed. RESULTS The data show that older adults were no less likely (and were sometimes more likely) to use health information as a result of the intervention than younger adults. For telephone advice nurses and computers, the effect of the intervention was not significantly different for the different age groups. Yet, compared with persons 18-29 years of age, those over the age of 65 had a 17-percentage point increase in using a self-care book. IMPLICATIONS We find convincing evidence to counter the stereotype that older adults are resistant to trying new health information technologies.
The PASS to superior reading performance

ABSTRACT Although the role of cognitive processes, such as planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive (PASS) processing in reading ability has been examined in samples of typically developing children and children with reading difficulties, it remains unclear if these processes also contribute to superior reading performance. Thus, in this study we examined (a) which PASS processes differentiate superior readers from average readers and (b) what is the individual profile of the superior readers. Thirty-six children with superior reading performance (standard score in Broad Reading equal to or higher than 130) and 43 average readers (standard score in Broad Reading between 85 and 115) were assessed on measures of general intelligence, planning, attention, simultaneous, and successive processing. The results of multivariate analyses indicated that the superior readers performed significantly better than the average readers only in simultaneous and successive processing. However, the superior readers exhibited diverse individual profiles of cognitive assets. The psychoeducational implications of these findings are discussed.
Ginibre sampling and signal reconstruction

The spatial distribution of sensing nodes plays a crucial role in signal sampling and reconstruction via wireless sensor networks. Although homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP) model is widely adopted for its analytical tractability, it cannot be considered a proper model for all experiencing nodes. The Ginibre point process (GPP) is a class of determinantal point processes that has been recently proposed for wireless networks with repulsiveness between nodes. A modified GPP can be considered an intermediate class between the PPP (fully random) and the GPP (relatively regular) that can be derived as limiting cases. In this paper we analyze sampling and reconstruction of finite-energy signals in ℝd when samples are gathered in space according to a determinantal point process whose second order product density function generalizes to ℝd that of a modified GPP in ℝ2. We derive closed form expressions for sampled signal energy spectral density (ESD) and for signal reconstruction mean square error (MSE). Results known in the literature are shown to be sub-cases of the proposed framework. The proposed analysis is also able to answer to the fundamental question: does the higher regularity of GPP also imply an higher signal reconstruction accuracy, according to the intuition? Theoretical results are illustrated through a simple case study.
Bubbles, feedback and the intracluster medium: three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations

We use a three-dimensional hydrodynamical code to simulate the effect of energy injection on cooling flows in the intracluster medium. Specifically, we compare a simulation of a 1015-M⊙ cluster with radiative cooling only with a second simulation in which thermal energy is injected 31 kpc off-centre, over 64 kpc3 at a rate of for 50 Myr. The heat injection forms a hot, low-density bubble which quickly rises, dragging behind it material from the cluster core. The rising bubble pushes with it a shell of gas which expands and cools. We find the appearance of the bubble in X-ray temperature and luminosity to be in good qualitative agreement with recent Chandra observations of cluster cores. Toward the end of the simulation, at 600 Myr, the displaced gas begins to fall back toward the core, and the subsequent turbulence is very efficient at mixing the low- and high-entropy gas. The result is that the cooling flow is disrupted for up to ∼ 50 Myr after the injection of energy ceases. Thus this mechanism provides a very efficient method for regulating cooling flows, if the injection events occur with a 1:1 duty cycle.
Tracers of stellar mass-loss. I. Optical and near-IR colours and surface brightness fluctuations

We present optical and infrared (IR) integrated colours and surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) magnitudes, computed from stellar population synthesis models that include emission from the dusty envelopes surrounding thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars undergoing mass loss. We explore the effects of varying the mass-loss rate by one order of magnitude around the fiducial value, modifying accordingly both the stellar parameters and the output spectra of the TP-AGB stars plus their dusty envelopes. The models are single burst, and range in age from a few Myr to 14 Gyr, and in metallicity between Z = 0.0001 and 0.07; they combine new calculations for the evolution of stars in the TP-AGB phase, with star plus envelope spectral energy distributions (SEDs) produced with the radiative transfer code DUSTY. We compare these models to optical and near-IR data of single AGB stars and Magellanic star clusters. This comparison validates the current understanding of the role of mass loss in determining stellar parameters and spectra in the TP-AGB. However, neither broad-band colours nor SBF measurements in the optical or the near-IR can discern global changes in the mass-loss rate of a stellar population. We predict that mid-IR SBF measurements can pick out such changes, and actually resolve whether a relation between metallicity and mass loss exists.
Impact‐induced frictional melting in ordinary chondrites: A mechanism for deformation, darkening, and vein formation

Abstract— High speed friction experiments have been performed on the ordinary chondrites El Hammami (H5, S2) and Sahara 97001 (L6, S3) using an axial friction‐welding apparatus. Each sample was subjected to a strain rate of 103 to 104 s−1, which generated 250 to 500 μm‐deep darkened zones on each sample cube. Thin section analyses reveal that the darkened areas are composed of silicate glass and mineral fragments intermingled with dispersed submicron‐size FeNi and FeS blebs. Fracturing of mineral grains and the formation of tiny metallic veins define the extent of deformation beyond the darkened shear zone. These features are not present in the original meteorites. The shear zones and tiny veins are quite similar to certain vein systems seen in naturally deformed ordinary chondrites. The experiments show that shock deformation is not required for the formation of melt veins and darkening in ordinary chondrites. Therefore, the presence of melt veins and darkening does not imply that an ordinary chondrite has undergone severe shock deformation. In fact, high strain rate deformation and frictional melting are especially important for the formation of veins at low shock pressures.
A quantitative analysis of the reward-enhancing effects of nicotine using reinforcer demand

Reward enhancement by nicotine has been suggested as an important phenomenon contributing toward tobacco abuse and dependence. Reinforcement value is a multifaceted construct not fully represented by any single measure of response strength. The present study evaluated the changes in the reinforcement value of a visual stimulus in 16 male Sprague–Dawley rats using the reinforcer demand technique proposed by Hursh and Silberberg. The different parameters of the model have been shown to represent differing facets of reinforcement value, including intensity, perseverance, and sensitivity to changes in response cost. Rats lever-pressed for 1-min presentations of a compound visual stimulus over blocks of 10 sessions across a range of response requirements (fixed ratio 1, 2, 4, 8, 14, 22, 32). Nicotine (0.4 mg/kg, base) or saline was administered 5 min before each session. Estimates from the demand model were calculated between nicotine and saline administration conditions within subjects and changes in reinforcement value were assessed as differences in Q0, Pmax, Omax, and essential value. Nicotine administration increased operant responding across the entire range of reinforcement schedules tested, and uniformly affected model parameter estimates in a manner suggesting increased reinforcement value of the visual stimulus.
Stability of Propagating Fronts in Damped Hyperbolic Equations

We consider the damped hyperbolic equation in one space dimension $\epsilon u_{tt} + u_t = u_{xx} + F(u)$, where $\epsilon$ is a positive, not necessarily small parameter. We assume that $F(0)=F(1)=0$ and that $F$ is concave on the interval $[0,1]$. Under these assumptions, our equation has a continuous family of monotone propagating fronts (or travelling waves) indexed by the speed parameter $c \ge c_*$. Using energy estimates, we first show that the travelling waves are locally stable with respect to perturbations in a weighted Sobolev space. Then, under additional assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain global stability results using a suitable version of the hyperbolic Maximum Principle. Finally, in the critical case $c = c_*$, we use self-similar variables to compute the exact asymptotic behavior of the perturbations as $t \to +\infty$. In particular, setting $\epsilon = 0$, we recover several stability results for the travelling waves of the corresponding parabolic equation.
Increasing River Flows in the Sahel

Despite the drought observed since 1968 in most of the West African Sahel, runoff and rivers discharges have been increasing in the same region. This trend is related with land use change rather than climate change. This paper aims to describe the regional extension of such a phenomenon and to demonstrate that the increase in runoff is observed from the point scale up to the regional scale. It highlights the opposition of functioning between a Sahelian zone, where the Sahel's paradox applies, and the Sudanian and Guinean areas, where runoff has been logically decreasing with the rainfall. The current OPEN ACCESS Water 2010, 2 171 trend is evidenced using experimental runoff plots and discharge data from the local to the regional scales.
Trainee teachers’ experience of primary science teaching, and the perceived impact on their developing professional identity

Abstract This study took place within an environment of educational change in teaching and assessment in the UK, where the National Curriculum (NC) and National External Examination syllabi undertook significant revision. Science education specifically, has seen aspiration raised to allow pupils to achieve a greater depth of understanding at Key Stage 4 and hence facilitate advanced study. Central to the development of effective scientific understanding is teacher preparation. This study examined the factors that impacted on the experiences of primary teachers during their training. Questionnaires completed by a sample of one hundred and sixteen trainee teachers followed by semi-structured interviews of sixteen trainees were used as a means of interpreting Post-Graduate Certification in Education (PGCE) trainee teachers’ experiences during taught university sessions and school based training. The findings showed that the majority of the trainees rated their training highly, and perceived themselves to be confident primary science pedagogues. They felt, however that the very limited opportunities to observe and teach science during their training negatively influenced their overall development.
Experimental study of direction-of-arrival estimation using reconfigurable antennas

In this paper, we present an experimental study evaluating the performance of a reconfigurable antenna element for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in wireless systems. We consider a reconfigurable antenna with directive radiation pattern and an electronic control mechanism to continuously scan its beam over the space. We implement a MUSIC-type algorithm which estimates the DOA using samples collected from different configurations (scanning steps) of the antenna radiation pattern. All experiments were carried out in an anechoic chamber using an actual reconfigurable antenna for different number of scanning steps. The results confirm the successful estimation of the DOA even with two scanning steps.