Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring the Effect of Experiential Education Using the Perry Model

This paper reports data on how well one engineering curriculum with extensive experiential components helps students mature toward more complex thinking; toward being better able to make good decisions on ambiguous, real-world, engineering problems. Hour-long, structured interviews were used to assess students' thinking based on William Perry's Model of Intellectual Development. These cross-sectional data show Colorado School of Mines students progressing an average of 1.0 Positions during their undergraduate years. This may be an unusually high achievement. If so, the data speak to the value of experiential education in a curriculum. However, the data are disturbing in that only one quarter of graduating seniors show progression to the level needed in their professions (above Position 5), while one third of them still fall below Position 4. We argue that, to get more students to progress above Position 5, professors teaching experiential engineering courses need to be knowledgeable about developmental models like Perry's and need to use those insights proactively in mentoring their students.
An Architecture for Ontology-Based Discovery and Retrieval of Geographic Information

SUMMARY Finding and accessing suitable information in the open and distributed environments of current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) is a crucial task. Catalogues provide searchable repositories of information descriptions, but the mechanisms to support the tasks of discovery and retrieval are still insufficient. Problems of semantic heterogeneity caused by synonyms and homonyms can arise during free-text search in catalogues. Moreover, once a suitable Web Feature Service (WFS) is found and accessed, the property names of a feature are often difficult to interpret. This paper introduces an architecture for ontologybased discovery and retrieval of geographic information that solves semantic heterogeneity problems of current query capabilities. Based on a (real-world) scenario from the area of flood management, the application of our approach shows that the information requestor can be efficiently supported.
The role of moisture in the dynamics and energetics of turbulent baroclinic eddies

The effects of moisture on nonlinear baroclinic eddies are examined in the context of a horizontally homogeneous two-layer quasigeostrophic model. Using an explicit equation for moisture and a simple parameterization of latent heat release, the present study focuses on how moisture affects the statistically steady state of a baroclinically unstable flow. It is shown that, when latent heating is weak, the flow is dominated by jets and baroclinic waves, just as in the corresponding dry model. In this regime, the concept of an effective static stability can be used, which allows one to interpret some aspects of the moist simulations in terms of an equivalent dry model. It is found that a useful way of diagnosing the effective static stability is by relating it to the eddy fluxes of moisture and moist potential vorticity; no a priori theory for its value is presented here. As the strength of latent heating is increased, the flow rather suddenly becomes vortex dominated, with an asymmetry between strong low-level cyclones and weak anticyclones that has no analog in the dry model. It is argued that this asymmetry develops because of a correlation between low-level vorticity and moisture that results from the correlated horizontal transports of moisture and vorticity. The energetics of the simulations and the efficiency of energy production by latent heat release are discussed.
Detection of Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus Antibodies in Cattle by Western Blot Assay with Recombinant Gag Protein

A western blot assay using purified recombinant bovine immunodeficiency virus gag protein has been developed for detection of bovine immunodeficiency virus antibodies in bovine serum samples. The test was standardized with known bovine immunodeficiency virus positive and negative bovine serum samples and the monoclonal antibody to gag protein. Both naturally and experimentally infected cattle sera demonstrated positive test results. The result of western blot assay was compared with polymerase chain reaction test results in 134 blood samples collected from Kansas. Twenty-six samples tested positive for bovine immunodeficiency virus DNA with polymerase chain reaction (18.7%) and 25 were positive for the antibody to gag protein by western blot analysis (17.9%). Of 26 cattle testing positive using the polymerase chain reaction assay, 24 were antibody-positive by western blot assay, thus establishing a strong correlation between the two tests. The sensitivity and specificity of western blot relative to polymerase chain reaction are 0.92 and 0.99, respectively. The western blot assay proved to be a specific and sensitive test.
Test-taking strategies and item specifications: Focusing on a high-stake test

The present study was conducted to investigate the test-taking strategies that respondents used when completing two different item specifications (Factual Information and Inference questions) of a high-stake reading comprehension test. 130 randomly chosen undergraduate EFL learners preparing themselves for graduate studies were divided into three groups based on the results of a proficiency test. Based on their scores from the proficiency test, each ability group had 40 participants. All groups completed two reading passages of Iranian National University Entrance Exam for MA (INUEMA) and two Test-taking Strategy questionnaires which contained four types of strategies. A series of Kruskal-Wallis tests was conducted to investigate whether the three ability group's measures of performance on four types of test-taking strategies revealed significant difference after completing Inference and Factual Information questions. In cases the difference among ability groups was significant; Mann-Whitney U test was conducted as a follow-up significance test in order to indicate where the significant difference occurred. The results revealed that the high-ability and the intermediate groups, compared with the low-ability group, employed more evaluation strategies when completing Inference items of INUEMA. Moreover, low-ability test takers used test-wiseness strategies for Inference items more than the high-ability and the intermediate groups. With respect to the Factual Information items, the intermediate group used more monitoring strategies than the high-ability test takers. Focusing on the validity of the above high-stake test, the findings of the present study are likely to be of great interest to EFL material designers, instructors and high-stake test developers.
Security of an Ordered-Based Distributive Jamming Scheme

This letter proposes a new efficient yet simple distributed ordered-based jamming scheme for securing a legitimate transmission and powering a wireless receiver equipped with a nonlinear energy harvester. A legitimate source node (Alice) communicates with one legitimate receive node (Bob) and one legitimate radio-frequency energy-harvesting node (Dana) in the presence of an eavesdropping node (Eve). A set of cooperative nodes (Jims) are deployed in the network to power Dana and secure the legitimate transmissions by jamming Eve. In each time slot, only one Jim is selected. Our proposed scheme does not require the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of Eve’s links or the global CSI of the legitimate nodes at a legitimate central unit. The numerical results demonstrate that our scheme achieves higher average secrecy throughput than that achieved by the best-jammer scheme.
EFFECTS OF PRE-EXISTING SUBMERSED MACROPHYTES ON THE INVASION SUCCESS OF HYDRILLA VERTICILLATA

Title of Thesis: EFFECTS OF PRE-EXISTING SUBMERSED MACROPHYTES ON THE INVASION SUCCESS OF HYDRILLA VERTICILLATA Todd B. Chadwell, M.Sc., 2004 Thesis Directed By: Assistant Professor Katharina Engelhardt, Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences I evaluated (1) the effects of a native submersed aquatic plant species, Vallisneria americana, on the colonization success of a non-native and highly invasive submersed aquatic species, Hydrilla verticillata, through field and greenhouse experiments; and (2) the effects of H. verticillata propagule density on its colonization success of patches dominated by the native species. Results of the field study, located in a tidal freshwater region of Chesapeake Bay, suggest that pre-existing vegetation did not have significant negative effects on H. verticillata colonization. However, pre-existing H. verticillata biomass and H. verticillata colonization success were strongly correlated. In contrast, results from the greenhouse study showed that V. americana had a strong inhibitory effect on H. verticillata colonization by fragments and increasing H. verticillata fragment density again increased colonization success. Reduced water column nutrient concentrations, resulting from V. americana growth, appeared to negatively affect successful rooting and subsequent colonization by H. verticillata. EFFECTS OF PRE-EXISTING SUBMERSED MACROPHYTES ON THE INVASION SUCCESS OF HYDRILLA VERTICILLATA
A Review and Synthesis of the Measurement Invariance Literature: Suggestions, Practices, and Recommendations for Organizational Research

The establishment of measurement invariance across groups is a logical prerequisite to conducting substantive cross-group comparisons (e.g., tests of group mean differences, invariance of structural parameter estimates), but measurement invariance is rarely tested in organizational research. In this article, the authors (a) elaborate the importance of conducting tests of measurement invariance across groups, (b) review recommended practices for conducting tests of measurement invariance, (c) review applications of measurement invariance tests in substantive applications, (d) discuss issues involved in tests of various aspects of measurement invariance, (e) present an empirical example of the analysis of longitudinal measurement invariance, and (f) propose an integrative paradigm for conducting sequences of measurement invariance tests.
Enhancing and Displacing Literacy Practices: Examining Student Publishing in a Fifth Grade Writer's Workshop

Publication of student work has been considered a mainstay of the writer’s workshop since the early days of the ‘children as authors’ movement (Graves, 1983). However, this philosophy, which stipulates students should share their work with peers, may not be one that always benefits students. This case study utilizes the concept of literacy-in-action (Brandt & Clinton, 2002), to look at the manner in which one local rendition of writer’s workshop both enhanced and displaced student literacy practices. The guiding question asks: How are focal students, Sara, Ally and Nigel, engaging in the practice of publication of their writing and how are those publications, as literacy objects, mediating their practice of literacy in the writer’s workshop? The examination of writer’s workshop first presents the way publication of student writing found its way into Sara and Nigel’s classroom and the kinds of investments accumulated in it as it made its way into their practice of classroom writing. It then presents the agentful activity engaged in by these students in their classroom literacy practice of writing for publication. Through the analysis, the ways an assessment-focused writer’s workshop worked to enhance and displace individual student’s literacy practices are brought out.
An Efficient Algorithm for the 1D Total Visibility-Index Problem and Its Parallelization

Let T be a terrain and P be a set of points on its surface. An important problem in Geographic Information Science (GIS) is computing the visibility index of a point p on P, that is, the number of points in P that are visible from p. The total visibility-index problem asks for the visibility index of every point in P. We present the first subquadratic-time algorithm to solve the one-dimensional total-visibility-index problem. Our algorithm uses a geometric dualization technique to reduce the problem to a set of instances of the red--blue line segment intersection counting problem, allowing us to find the total visibility-index in O(n log2 n) time. We implement a naive O(n2) approach and four variations of our algorithm: one that uses an existing red--blue line segment intersection counting algorithm and three new approaches that leverage features specific to our problem. Two of our implementations allow for parallel execution, requiring O(log2 n) time and O(n log2 n) work in the CREW PRAM model. We present experimental results for both serial and parallel implementations on synthetic and real-world datasets using two hardware platforms. Results show that all variants of our algorithm outperform the naive approach by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we show that our special-case red--blue line segment intersection counting implementations out-perform the existing general-case solution by up to a factor 10. Our fastest parallel implementation is able to process a terrain of more than 100 million vertices in under 3 minutes, achieving up to 85% parallel efficiency using 16 cores.
Survival and recurrence factors in adult medulloblastoma: the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center experience from 1978 to 1998.

Medulloblastoma is a rare adult primary brain tumor for which limited retrospective studies are available to elucidate natural history or to guide therapy. A retrospective chart and imaging review of adult patients (aged >18 years) with medulloblastoma was performed to identify survival and prognostic factors. Fifty-seven patients were evaluated at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center from 1978-1998. Statistical analysis of prognostic factors and overall survival was performed for a subgroup of 28 patients who were followed exclusively at our institution from the time of diagnosis until death or last follow-up. These 28 patients had an overall survival of 91% at 3 years and 84% at 5 years, whereas median survival was not reached after a median follow-up of 168 weeks (range, 9-602 weeks). Progression-free survival for all patients was 68% at 3 years and 62% at 5 years, and was not statistically different between poor- and standard-risk patients. Univariate analysis of clinical features, such as age, sex, extent of local disease, extent of resection, and use of adjuvant chemotherapy, did not identify any prognostic variables for survival among the 28 patients. Patterns of recurrence revealed that the posterior fossa was the most common site (56%), followed by bone marrow (25%). Adult medulloblastoma appears to have a favorable prognosis after treatment with maximally surgically feasible resection followed by craniospinal irradiation. Optimal treatment remains to be clarified, as both standard-risk and poor-risk patients have prolonged disease-free survival. The marked difference between survival and progression-free survival suggests that salvage therapy, usually with combination chemotherapy in this cohort of patients, is of benefit. More formal analysis of the survival benefit was not possible, however, because of the small number of patients treated at recurrence with any one therapeutic regimen.
HMM and DTW for evaluation of therapeutical gestures using kinect

Automatic recognition of the quality of movement in human beings is a challenging task, given the difficulty both in defining the constraints that make a movement correct, and the difficulty in using noisy data to determine if these constraints were satisfied. This paper presents a method for the detection of deviations from the correct form in movements from physical therapy routines based on Hidden Markov Models, which is compared to Dynamic Time Warping. The activities studied include upper an lower limbs movements, the data used comes from a Kinect sensor. Correct repetitions of the activities of interest were recorded, as well as deviations from these correct forms. The ability of the proposed approach to detect these deviations was studied. Results show that a system based on HMM is much more likely to determine if a certain movement has deviated from the specification.
Laparoscopic Radical Cystectomy in the Elderly – Results of a Single Center LRC only Series

ABSTRACT Objective: To compare outcome of laparoscopic radical cystectomy (LRC) with ileal conduit in 22 elderly (≥75 years) versus 51 younger (<75 years) patients. Materials and Methods: Analysis of prospectively gathered data of a single institution LRC only series was performed. Selection bias for LRC versus non-surgical treatments was assessed with data retrieved from the Netherlands Cancer Registry. Results: Median age difference between LRC groups was 9.0 years. (77.0 versus 68.0 years). Both groups had similar surgical indications, body mass index and gender distribution. Charlson Comorbidity Index score was 3 versus 4 in ≥50% of younger and elderly patients. Median operative time (340 versus 341 min) and estimated blood loss (<500 versus >500mL) did not differ between groups. Median total hospital stay was 12.0 versus 14.0 days for younger and elderly patients. Grade I-II 90-d complication rate was higher for elderly patients (68 versus 43%, p=0.05). Grade III-V 90-d complication rate was equal for both groups (23 versus 29%, p=0.557). 90-d mortality rate was higher for elderly patients (14 versus 4%, p=0.157). Median follow-up was 40.0 months for younger and 57.0 months for elderly patients. Estimated overall and cancer-specific survival at 5years. was 46% versus 35% and 64% versus 64% for younger and elderly patients respectively. Conclusions: Our results suggest that LRC is feasible in elderly patients, where a non-surgical treatment is usually favoured.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies

Mary: I had a guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home. And then he e-mailed me to my Blackberry and so I texted to his cell and then he e-mailed me to my home account, and then the whole thing just got out of control. And I miss the days when you had one phone number and one answering machine. And that one answering machine housed one cassette tape. And that one cassette tape either had a message from the guy or it didn’t. And now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. —monologue spoken by actress Drew Barrymore in the film, He’s Just Not That Into You. Interview with Drew Barrymore: Cole Haddon: Is there any good way to end a relationship if not in person? Drew Barrymore: The in-person is first and foremost, a must! Fly. Do whatever you can. The older you get, the more un-okay it is to do it over any technological device. Yes, in person is the starter right there, and then, hopefully, as sweetly and kindly and nurturingly as possible. http://www.film. com/celebrities/drew-barrymore/story/drew-barrymore-interview-hesjust/25827455
Women's Attitudes and Health Beliefs toward Osteoporosis Screening in a Community Pharmacy

The aim of this study was to examine women's attitudes and health beliefs towards osteoporosis screening in a community pharmacy setting, utilizing the theoretical framework of Health Belief Model. A nonexperimental, cross-sectional research design, examining a convenience sample of women aged 18 and over, from several New York City senior care centers, a church, and a university campus in New York, was employed to assess the study objectives. Osteoporosis Health Belief Scale questionnaire was used to study the attitudes and health beliefs of participants towards bone mineral density screening in community pharmacy. From the study, it was observed that perceptions of severity and susceptibility towards osteoporosis and subjects' demographic characteristics did not seem to significantly influence the decision to screen in a community pharmacy setting. The perceptions of benefits of community pharmacy-based osteoporosis screening and the perceived barriers were found to be of greater importance in women's decisions to engage in osteoporosis-specific preventive behavior.
Organizational factors impacting job strain and mental quality of life in emergency and critical care units.

OBJECTIVES This study measures the association between hospital staff's job strain (JS), mental quality of life (MQL) and how they are influenced by the organization models within emergency and critical care units. MATERIAL AND METHODS This study describes workers employed in emergency departments and intensive care units of a French public hospital. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to survey the demographic and organizational characteristics of their work, as well as work-related mental stress, psychosocial and organizational constraints, and their MQL. RESULTS Among 145 workers participating in the study, 59.3% of them report job strain and 54.5% of them have low MQL scores. The majority of staff with job strain has reported working more than 2 weekends per month, were regularly on-call, worked in dysfunctional environments and did not participate in regular meetings. The staff with low MQL worked more frequently in dysfunctional environments, had significant complaints regarding employer's efforts to promote communications or provide adequate staffing levels than the workers with a high MQL score. CONCLUSIONS If stress reduction and improved MQL in emergency and intensive care units is to be achieved, hospital management needs to design work schedules that provide a better balance between working and non-working hours. Additionally, ergonomic design, functional environments and improved communications needs to be implemented.
An experimental study of carbon-isotope fractionation between diet, hair, and feces of mammalian herbivores

The carbon-isotope composition of hair and feces offers a glimpse into the diets of mammalian herbivores. It is particularly useful for determining the relative consumption of browse and graze in tropical environments, as these foods have strongly divergent carbon-isotope compositions. Fecal δ 13 C values reflect the last few days consumption, whereas hair provides longer term dietary information. Previous studies have shown, however, that some fractionation occurs between dietary δ 13 C values and those of hair and feces. Accurate dietary reconstruction requires an understand- ing of these fractionations, but few controlled-feeding studies have been undertaken to investigate these fractionations in any mammalian taxa, fewer still in large mammalian herbivores. Here, we present data from the first study of carbon-isotope fractionation between diet, hair, and feces in multiple herbivore taxa. All taxa were fed pure alfalfa (Medicago sativa) diets for a minimum period of 6 months, at which point recently grown hair was shaved and ana- lyzed for carbon isotopes. The mean observed diet-hair fractionation was +3.2‰, with a range of +2.7 to +3.5‰. We also examined diet-feces fractionation for herbivores on alfalfa and bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon) feeds. The mean diet-feces fractionation for both diets was -0.8‰, with less fractionation for alfalfa (-0.6‰) than bermudagrass (-1.0‰). Fecal carbon turnover also varies greatly between taxa. When diets were switched, horse (Equus caballus) feces reflected the new diet within 60 h, but alpaca (Lama pacos) feces did not equilibrate with the new diet for nearly 200 h. Thus, fecal carbon isotopes provide far greater dietary resolution for hindgut-fermenting horses than foregut-fermenting alpacas.