Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intelligence in Integrated UN Peacekeeping Missions: The Joint Mission Analysis Centre

New understandings of operational and security challenges in multidimensional missions have provided the momentum to overcome resistance to the establishment of an intelligence capacity in UN field missions. Joint Mission Analysis Centres (JMACs) have been set up in several missions and are beginning to fulfil this function, both with respect to security aspects of operations and (to a lesser extent) in support of integrated management. However, the contribution JMACs could make to integration is not being fully realized. This is partly a result of the choice to focus expectations for integration at the level of the head of mission, while neglecting to give institutions at a higher level the backing they need to effectively harmonize the priorities and impulses of the Security Council and other parts of the organization. This has led to a perception of integration as a technology of subordination that favours a security agenda over other goals of the UN system. Consequently, the JMAC has been unable to gain the trust and commitment it needs to fully realize its potential to support the strategic management of integrated missions.
Distribution of influence, communication, and relational mentoring in the US superintendency

We report on how fifty superintendents (chief executive officers of public school systems, each invited by a researcher to participate) from seven states in the US talked in eight focus groups of their perspectives on their influence as leaders, their efforts to communicate with stakeholders, and how they learn from these stakeholders. We maintain that our participants’ revelations suggest that three definitions must be expanded to fit their work. First, influence or authority must be seen not merely as vested in the superintendent; rather, these superintendents described their leadership in terms of working with and through others. Second, organizational communication for these superintendents is more than the district’s leader communicating his or her perceptions and wishes to others; it is more relational, in which a variety of actors communicate their perspectives to one another. Third, this type of inter‐professional leadership leads logically to relational mentoring, where learning does not pass merely from expert to novice; rather, superintendents described their roles in terms of various parties learning from and teaching one another. We discuss implications of these insights for practice, research, and preparation.
Physical activities during pregnancy and type of delivery in nulliparae

Abstract The aim of this study was to investigate changes in physical activity across pregnancy and the relationship between trimester-specific physical activity and unplanned caesarean sections (CSs). A cohort study design was carried out. A cohort of 150 pregnant women was established when they received prenatal care at 29–40 weeks of gestation at a medical centre in northern Taiwan. Participants were asked to recall the amounts of physical activity in which they had engaged in the three trimesters as assessed by the Pregnancy Physical Activity Questionnaire (PPAQ). Overall self-reported physical activity for the cohort decreased by 31% in the first trimester compared to the pre-gravid period, then increased in the second trimester and remained stable until delivery. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to evaluate the data and revealed significantly more physical activity during the second trimester than in the first and third trimesters (F = 36.471, P = 0.000). In addition, there was a significant difference between normal spontaneous delivery and unplanned CS groups (F = 4.770, P = 0.031). Logistic regression determined that the odds ratio of undergoing a CS increased by 0.644 (95% confidence interval: 0.429–0.968) for women in the third trimester who performed low levels of physical activity. Results support the benefits of physical activity, and professionals are encouraged to provide pregnant women with information on recommendations for physical activity, particularly in terms of reducing unplanned CSs.
A delay/disruption tolerant solution for mobile-to-mobile file sharing

Due to mobility, communication links between mobile nodes are transient and network maintenance overhead is a major performance bottleneck for data transmission. Low node density makes it difficult to establish end-to-end connection, thus impeding a continuous end-to-end path between a source and a destination. This creates a modern type of DTN, which was originally intended for communication in outer space, but is now directly accessible from our pockets. In this paper, we present a special purpose system for searching and transferring files tailored to both the characteristics of MANETs and the requirements of P2P file sharing. Our approach is based on an application layer overlay network. We port a DTN type solution into an infrastructure-less environment like MANETs and leverage peer mobility to reach data in other disconnected networks. This is done by implementing an asynchronous communication model, store-delegate-and-forward, like DTNs, where a peer can delegate unaccomplished file download or query tasks to special peers. To improve data transmission performance while reducing communication overhead, we select these special peers by the expectation of encountering them again in future and assign them different download starting point on the file.
A retrospective study of bosentan in pulmonary arterial hypertension associated with congenital heart disease.

BACKGROUND Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) plays a significant role in morbidity and mortality of patients with congenital heart disease (CHD). Bosentan, a dual endothelin receptor antagonist has been approved for PAH patients with Eisenmenger physiology (EP). The authors retrospectively reviewed the efficacy and safety of bosentan in Thai PAH patients associated with CHD. MATERIAL AND METHOD The study population was obtained from the databases of the CHD patients at Siriraj Hospital from October 2004 to April 2007 who received 6 months of bosentan treatment. Inclusion criteria are: CHD with Eisenmenger physiology (EP) or those with severe PAH after surgical repair or interventional cardiac catheterization. Clinical characteristics including the 6-- minute walk test (6MWT) distances, oxygen saturation (O2 sat), New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class, and right ventricular systolic pressure (RVSP) at baseline were compared with those at 1, 3, and 6 months post bosentan treatment. Signs and symptoms of adverse events were also recorded. RESULTS There were 11 patients from among those who fitted the inclusion criteria and whose records were examined. Their average age was 51.1 +/- 10.1 years old (13-61 years old). Patients were divided into 2 groups; Group A (6 patients) was PAH with EP and Group B (5 patients) was PAH post intervention. In group A, the 6MWT increased from 151 +/- 69 meters to 293 +/- 61 meters (p = 0.001) with the average increase of 38 +/- 61 meters. The 2O sat increased from 83 +/- 12.7% to 91.8 +/- 5.6% (p = 0.038) with an average increase of 1.4 +/- 0.07%. There was no significant change in right ventricular systolic pressure (RVSP). In group B, there was a trend in 6MWT improvement from 274 +/- 69 meters to 312 +/- 38 meters but this was not statistically different. There were improvements in the NYHA functional class in both groups. There was no significant increase in serum aminotransferase at the end of 6 months in each patient. CONCLUSION There are benefits of bosentan for treatment of severe PAH in CHD, especially in patients with Eisenmenger physiology. Obvious benefits are an improvement of 6MWT and O2 sat.
Sutureless Valves Reduce Hospital Costs Compared to Traditional Valves.

BACKGROUND The study aim was to assess differences in clinical outcome, safety, and associated costs between sutureless and aortic isolated aortic valve replacement (AVR) with a standard bioprosthesis. METHODS A retrospective comparative study was conducted to investigate 65 patients, each of whom had undergone isolated AVR with a traditional aortic valve (T) or a Perceval S sutureless aortic prosthesis (P) between January 2010 and December 2012. Cost data were drawn from the proprietary cost accounting system of the hospital, excluding acquisition costs of the devices. A linear regression model was used to estimate the mean total costs difference between groups. RESULTS The mean cardiopulmonary bypass time and aortic cross-clamp times in the T and P groups were 80 ± 41 min and 58 ± 26 min versus 38 ± 16 min and 26 ± 10 min, respectively (p <0.0001). The mean intensive care unit and ward stays in both groups were 4.2 ± 5.9 and 11.9 ± 6.5 days versus 3.8 ± 4.7 and 10 ± 4.5 days, respectively (p = 0.68 and p = 0.05). The mean costs savings for group P compared to group T were €3,801 (p = 0.13), mainly driven by hospital stay costs. Savings between the P and T groups increased with age: €4,992 in patients aged 70-79 years and €9,326 in those aged 80+ years, and with risk (€4,296 for high-risk patients). CONCLUSIONS Sutureless aortic valves present shorter procedural times and lower hospital costs compared to traditional valves, with higher cost savings at increased patient age and risk. Sutureless aortic valves seem to be cost-effective in patients undergoing AVR.
Metamaterials Application in Sensing

Metamaterials are artificial media structured on a size scale smaller than wavelength of external stimuli, and they can exhibit a strong localization and enhancement of fields, which may provide novel tools to significantly enhance the sensitivity and resolution of sensors, and open new degrees of freedom in sensing design aspect. This paper mainly presents the recent progress concerning metamaterials-based sensing, and detailedly reviews the principle, detecting process and sensitivity of three distinct types of sensors based on metamaterials, as well as their challenges and prospects. Moreover, the design guidelines for each sensor and its performance are compared and summarized.
A Survey of Sequential Pattern Mining

Discovering unexpected and useful patterns in databases is a fundamental data mining task. In recent years, a trend in data mining has been to design algorithms for discovering patterns in sequential data. One of the most popular data mining tasks on sequences is sequential pattern mining. It consists of discovering interesting subsequences in a set of sequences, where the interestingness of a subsequence can be measured in terms of various criteria such as its occurrence frequency, length, and proﬁt. Sequential pattern mining has many real-life applications since data is encoded as sequences in many ﬁelds such as bioinformatics, e-learning, market basket analysis, text analysis, and webpage click-stream analysis. This paper surveys recent studies on sequential pattern mining and its applications. The goal is to provide both an introduction to sequential pattern mining, and a survey of recent advances and research opportunities. The paper is divided into four main parts. First, the task of sequential pattern mining is deﬁned and its applications are reviewed. Key concepts and terminology are introduced. Moreover, main approaches and strategies to solve sequential pattern mining problems are presented. Limitations of traditional sequential pattern mining approaches are also highlighted, and popular variations of the task of sequential pattern mining are presented. The paper also presents research opportunities and the relationship to other popular pattern mining problems. Lastly, the paper also discusses open-source implementations of sequential pattern mining algorithms
First Record of Placodontoidea (Reptilia, Sauropterygia, Placodontia) from the Eastern Tethys

DA-YONG JIANG, RYOSUKE MOTANI, WEI-CHENG HAO, OLIVIER RIEPPEL, YUAN-LIN SUN, LARS SCHMITZ, and ZUO-YU SUN Department of Geology and Geological Museum, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P. R. China, djiang@pku.edu. cn; Department of Geology, University of California, Davis, California 95616-8605, U.S.A; Department of Geology, The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois 60605-2496, U.S.A. , rieppel@fieldmuseum.org.
Immunization with Vibrio cholerae Outer Membrane Vesicles Induces Protective Immunity in Mice

ABSTRACT The gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae releases outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) during growth. In this study, we immunized female mice by the intranasal, intragastric, or intraperitoneal route with purified OMVs derived from V. cholerae. Independent of the route of immunization, mice induced specific, high-titer immune responses of similar levels against a variety of antigens present in the OMVs. After the last immunization, the half-maximum total immunoglobulin titer was stable over a 3-month period, indicating that the immune response was long lasting. The induction of specific isotypes, however, was dependent on the immunization route. Immunoglobulin A, for example, was induced to a significant level only by mucosal immunization, with the intranasal route generating the highest titers. We challenged the offspring of immunized female mice with V. cholerae via the oral route in two consecutive periods, approximately 30 and 95 days after the last immunization. Regardless of the route of immunization, the offspring was protected against colonization with V. cholerae in both challenge periods. Our results show that mucosal immunizations via both routes with OMVs derived from V. cholerae induce long-term protective immune responses against this gastrointestinal pathogen. These findings may contribute to the development of “nonliving,” OMV-based vaccines against V. cholerae and other enteric pathogens, using the oral or intranasal route of immunization.
A Reranking Model for Discourse Segmentation using Subtree Features

This paper presents a discriminative reranking model for the discourse segmentation task, the first step in a discourse parsing system. Our model exploits subtree features to rerank N-best outputs of a base segmenter, which uses syntactic and lexical features in a CRF framework. Experimental results on the RST Discourse Treebank corpus show that our model outperforms existing discourse segmenters in both settings that use gold standard Penn Treebank parse trees and Stanford parse trees.
Making Village Women into "Good Wives and Wise Mothers" in Prewar Japan

Among the many programs undertaken by the Japanese government between 1868 and 1945 was one designed to make of Japanese women "good wives and wise mothers. " The principal vehicle used in the effort to produce paragons of domestic virtue was the school system. The field materials collected in the mid- 1930s by Ella Lury Wiswell in the agricultural community of Suye-mura include excellent firsthand information on the degree to which the policy was effective, particularly with respect to reducing the incidence of premarital. sexual activity, premarital pregnancy, and divorce.
3D Visual-Based Human Motion Descriptors: A Review

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference source on depth-based human motion descriptors. Motion description is a challenging problem which became popular with recent advances in 3D computer vision. Our goal is to introduce the main trends in human 3D motion descriptor design and evaluation next to presenting a review of recent methods belonging to three application categories: action recognition, gesture recognition and gait assessment.
About faults, errors, and other dangerous things

In this paper the traditional paradigm for learning and training of operators in complex systems is discussed and criticised. There is a strong influence coming from research carried out in artificial intelligence (AI). The most well known arguments against the AI-approach are presented and discussed in relation to expertise, intuition and implicit knowledge. The importance of faults and errors are discussed in the context of a new metaphor for cognitive structures to describe expertise, and how knowledge about unsuccessful behaviour influences the actual decisions.
Validation of the Coping With Discrimination Scale in Sexual Minorities

The Coping With Discrimination Scale (CDS) shows promise as a self-report measure of strategies for coping with racial discrimination. To assess the psychometric properties of the measure for use with sexual minorities (i.e., gay, lesbian, bisexual, or GLB persons), a nonprobability sample of 371 GLB adults completed the instrument along with several standardized, self-report measures. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the five-factor structure of the original scale with the exclusion of five items. Adequate internal consistency reliability was found. Internalization, drug and alcohol use, and detachment subscales were correlated positively with measures of psychological distress and negatively with a measure of life satisfaction, providing evidence of construct validity. The education/advocacy and resistance subscales were largely unrelated to concurrently administered validation measures, consistent with prior findings. Coping strategy use varied as a function of primary sources of social support. The CDS appears to be a psychometrically sound measure of several discrimination coping strategies for use with sexual minorities.
An individual-based description of learning within an organization

The authors examine the problem of selecting a model for an individual-based representation of learning within a population of learners. Individual-based representations can be used to create distributions of learning patterns in the workplace. This is an alternate theoretical view of learning in organizations whereby performance is a unique attribute of each individual within the organization. Several published learning curve models are fitted to 3874 episodes of individual performance improvement. They conclude that a three-parameter hyperbolic function outperforms the other models for this application. This approach provides managers with: (1) distributions of between-worker variability with respect to rate of learning, prior learning, and steady-state production rates; (2) a quantitative measure of workforce learning that can provide information useful for workforce task-assignments; and (3) a methodological framework for selecting a most preferred individual model such that workforce distributions may be constructed and provide such information. Results indicate that workers perform in a region between the two extremes of fast improvement to a low level of productivity and slow improvement to a high level of productivity. Also, workers with more prior experience tend to have a higher steady-state productivity level.
Models for the Compressible Web

Graphs resulting from human behavior (the web graph, friendship graphs, etc.) have hitherto been viewed as a monolithic class of graphs with similar characteristics; for instance, their degree distributions are markedly heavy-tailed. In this paper we take our understanding of behavioral graphs a step further by showing that an intriguing empirical property of web graphs --- their compressibility--- cannot be exhibited by well-known graph models for the web and for social networks. We then develop amore nuanced model for web graphs and show that it does exhibit compressibility, in addition to previously modeled web graph properties.
Present orientation, future orientation and alcohol use in Northern Irish adolescents

Earlier initiation into more problematic drinking behaviour has been found to be associated with more problematic drinking later in life. Research has suggested that a lower future time perspective (and higher present time perspective) is associated with health-compromising behaviours such as problematic alcohol use in college student, University undergraduate and general population samples. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine whether consideration of future consequences (CFC), assessed by the Consideration of Future Consequences Scale, was significantly related to drinking behaviour in a large sample (n = 707) of Northern Irish adolescents. Alcohol use was self-reported by means of a composite measure of drinking behaviour. Demographic data were also gathered. After controlling for year in school (proxy for age), sex and for clustering at school level, lower future orientation and higher present orientation were found to be significantly associated with more problematic self-reported drinking behaviour. These results extend recent findings of a significant relationship between a foreshortened future time perspective and more problematic self-reported drinking behaviour in a UK sample of University undergraduates, to a large UK sample of adolescents. Given the relationship between early-onset drinking and more problematic use in later life, health promotion interventions might explore using the CFC construct in targeting adolescent drinkers.
Progress as a Sociological Concept

The idea of progress is one of the most elusive notions which the student of society is called upon to examine. This is painfully evident in the undiscriminating and chaotic use to which the term has been put. What scheme of social rearrangement, however fantastic, impossible, or vicious, has not been hailed as the very embodiment of progress? Like the much abused liberty of Madame Roland's pathetic lament, progress has served as the excuse for reckless iconoclasm of every sort. Yet, in spite of despair on tlie part of some sociologists of so defining the idea of progress that it may win a generally recognized meaning, there seems to be no prospect that the word will die out of the language. ' If it is likely to continue in constant use, it is possible that some merit may attach to an effort to assort and criticize, in the light of present sociological theory, a few of the various significations which it has acquired, to analyze out of the mass of meanings a few definite characteristics, and to formulate them into a criterion which may serve as a measure of social progress. Some of the pitfalls into which users of the term have fallen are suggested by the word itself. Its most obvious implication is movement, change (progredior, "to walk forth, to advance"). Hence there have been those who have felt that the essence of progress is a break with the past, and that whatever is new and different must also be higher and better. This idea has often been associated with some phase of the age-long notion of evolution, which, dressed in one philosophic garment or another, has appeared in almost every century since speculative thought commenced. Whatever the evolutionary process has brought
Learning to Trust and Trusting to Learn

There is insufficient trust between top British managers and those they manage, trust which is essential to the mode of learning implied in the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization. Requisite levels of trust will not be created and nurtured without institutional change, at national and organizational level, and a new form of politics which allows `rank-and-file' members of organizations to ensure that their own experience is given voice and taken into account. It is proposed that radical theatre, founded on notions of trust and learning, has the potential for introducing such a conception of politics into organizational life.