Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The theoretical order as a means of professionalizing health promotion

In Poland, the issue of required preparation and professional status of people working in health promotion (HP) is not specified in detail and existing rules are not transparent. An important aspect of professionalization of the field should be strong embedding in the theoretical framework. Furthermore, the term “theory and evidence-based” used in relation to HP and health education (HE) interventions is getting popularity. This paper is a thematic draft which discusses several issues subjectively assessed as constitutive for the professionalization of the HP field. It presents: professions related to HP; fundamental differences between HP and HE; theoretical forms in HP; the importance of theory in HP; selected theoretical concepts on disease, health and health behaviors. Particular attention was paid to the concepts that were considered the key to understanding the philosophy and specificity of HP and therefore should be the starting point in acquiring essential competences to professional performance.
Constructing an internal reference price for product innovations

The internal reference price is the decisive standard against which observed prices are compared to evaluate whether a product offering is a good deal or not. If no reference price has been established for a product category, such as for product innovations, is it uncertain against which standard the price can be compared. Despite extensive research on the use of reference prices, little is known how an internal reference price is constructed for an unfamiliar product category. We conduct two experiments to support our two suggested mechanisms. Reference prices for an unfamiliar product category can either be constructed through repeated exposure to incidental price information or through transfer of price information from a familiar, similar product category to an unfamiliar product category, but only if the product value and price are correlated; a condition often not considered in product innovation testing.
The Live Well Allegheny Conversation Project: Increasing Social and Civic Engagement in Order to Address Health Disparities in the Mon Valley

The Mon Valley region currently experiences a disproportionate burden of chronic disease when compared to county and national standards. Live Well Allegheny (LWA) Mon Valley, a program of the Allegheny County Health Department, works to combat regional disparities by partnering with area municipal councils and others to draft and implement health policies that combat chronic disease behaviors and promote healthy community environments. The effectiveness of the LWA program is hindered by a lack of community buy-in and direct resident engagement. The purpose of this thesis is to produce a program plan for a LWA community-engagement initiative, called the LWA Conversation Project, which will host resident-led discussions and create action plans inspired by resident input. The program plan is drafted using the PRECEDE-PROCEED model and includes community health assessments, implementation and evaluation frameworks, and a facilitator’s guide. The intervention incorporates community organizing principles and draws from established community engagement models. The creation of a resident-driven complement to the current Live Well Allegheny program serves the dual purpose of empowering residents to take an active role in health promotion in their region and of providing LWA and its partners with first-hand information about the needs of the communities they serve. By increasing the social and civic engagement of the region’s residents, the program will increase the social capital and overall health of the Mon Valley region through the empowerment of individuals to become active participants in shaping their community.
Elucidating the Linkages Between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Local Government Sustainability Performance

Linking strategic management to performance has been called essential for public managers to confront pernicious environmental and community problems in the 21st century. This article examines the role that an organization’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays in the linkages between organizational capacities, strategies, and perceived performance. An EO is considered a key driver of a public organization’s willingness to engage in risk taking, innovation, and proactivity aimed at enhancing organizational routines, decision-making, and performance. Scholars have provided empirical guidance for the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurialism in bureaucracy, yet we know little systematically about how EO links to strategies that may affect performance in the public sector. To investigate, we employ a mixed methods design using a nationwide survey of U.S. local governments and interviews with local government managers about their experiences in sustainability programs. Quantitatively, we find evidence for environmental factors of political and administrative capacities positively influencing EO, and that strategic activities of performance information use, venturing, and interorganizational collaboration mediate the relation between EO and perceived sustainability performance. Interviews corroborate these findings and illuminate how local government managers proactively engage stakeholders, consider risk taking, build capacity, and pursue innovation in sustainability.
Spillover Effects of Capital Expenditure Announcements within Business Groups

Using the capital expenditure announcements of Taiwanese business group affiliated firms, this study examines whether the group diversification and ownership structure influence intragroup spillover effects. We find that the stock price reactions of the announcing firms are positively associated with both the stock price reactions and the post&#8208;announcement long&#8208;term performance of their non&#8208;announcing group peers. More importantly, the evidence shows that this positive spillover effect weakens for business groups associated with a pyramidal ownership structure. The evidence supports the conjecture that principal&#8211;principal conflicts play an important role in moderating the spillover effects in a business group. The findings further show that the spillover effects are stronger during periods of financial crises. Finally, in the 3&#8208;year period following announcements, the non&#8208;announcing group members experience declining industry&#8208;adjusted performance.
Cooperating in Africa ’ s sustainable structural transformation: policymaking capacity and the role of emerging economies 

for Most African countries today are pursuing one or both of the following policy agendas as they strive towards a sustainable transition: 1) a global normative agenda moving away from traditional patterns of economic growth and toward a greater emphasis on sustainable development (2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), and 2) a regional context-dependent development policy agenda that entails the achievement of a more radical structural transformation (Agenda 2063). Having identified these two overlapping policy agendas, both of which are aimed at moving away from an exclusive focus on economic growth, this article explores these development viewpoints with particular focus on capacity building in policymaking (the non-financial aspect), and the need for these to be further supported by more aggressive global partnership efforts (the financial aspect). By doing so, we are able to examine some transformation experiences in Africa as well as policy options that envisage greater inclusiveness, equality and sustainability.
Combining Content Information with an Item-Based Collaborative Filter

This paper describes an attempt to use content information to improve an item-based collaborative filter for recommending anime. A recommendation engine is a system with the goal of determining how a user would rate an item in the database based on how he/she has rated previous items. Recommendation engines are classified based on the additional information they use to make predictions. Content information and social information are two common sources of information used by a recommender. Content-based recom - menders use information about the items in the database and look at the similarity between items that the user has seen and the item it is trying to evaluate. Collaborative filters look at ratings from other users and find similarities between the user’s ratings and other users’ ratings in either a user-to-user comparison or an item-to-item comparison. This paper looks at a content-based filter, a user-based collaborative filter, and an item-based collaborative filter implemented to work in the domain of anime and compares that to a hybrid implementation that uses both content and collaborative information. As expected, this project found that the hybrid implementation showed an improvement over the item-based collaborative filtering implementation. However, item-based collaborative filtering was shown to perform worse in the domain than user-based collaborative filtering, which was the best implementation for the domain.
UAV Mathematical Modeling, Analysis and Fuzzy Controller Design

: The objective of this work is to introduce the design, simulation and control of a quad rotor, equipped with Inertial Sensors, as an example of unmanned aerial vehicle. To fulfill this objective a mathematical model of the quad rotor has been developed, using Newton-Euler Formulation. The simulation of the model and controller design is developed in MATLAB/Simulink environment. It is intended to make the model flexible and easily modified to be used with any similar model. In order to evaluate the real model mass and mass moment of inertia, a solid model had been built using Autodesk Inventor software package. To validate the proposed model output results, a comparison with published research has been carried out which showed a good agreement. Finally, a fuzzy controller is designed to control the quad rotor altitude and the three Euler angles of roll, pitch and yaw. The controller showed a good controllability within a certain range of the controlled parameter.
Social Trust in the Middle East and North Africa: The Context-Dependent Impact of Citizens’ Socio-Economic and Religious Characteristics

Our knowledge of social trust's drivers in the MENA region is limited and there are good reasons to expect that theories based on Western countries cannot be copied to the MENA one-to-one. Arguing for a broader and at the same time context-sensitive comparative approach, I translate the ‘societal winners’, social capital, and religious beliefs mechanisms explaining trust to the MENA context. Moreover, I acknowledge intraregional diversity and test how the impact of these factors also differs among MENA countries. Empirically, I synchronize 47 surveys from 15 MENA countries, which provides the broadest and most systematic assessment of trust in the MENA to date. The results show that the societal-winner mechanism does not hold: employed, higher education and wealthier citizens are not more trusting. However, higher-educated citizens distrust other citizens more, particularly in the strongest autocracies. Religiosity seems pivotal too. Among others, service-attending citizens are more trusting, mainly where regimes regulate religious affairs. Overall, this study provides insight into what shapes generalized social trust in the Middle East and North Africa and it underscores that at a comparative level we need to consider inter-regional and intra-regional forms of context-dependency were we to formulate a broadly applicable theoretical framework of trust's drivers.
QoE-Driven Efficient Resource Utilisation for Video Over Critical Communication Systems

Research in network resource utilisation introduced several techniques for more efficient power and bandwidth consumption. The majority of these techniques, however, were based on Quality of Service (QoS) and network parameters. Therefore, in this study a different approach is taken to investigate the possibility of a more efficient resource utilisation if resources are distributed based on users’ Quality of Experience (QoE), in the context of 3D video transmission over WiMAX access networks. In particular, this study suggests a QoE-driven technique to identify the operational regions (bounds) for Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS). A mobile 3D video transmission is simulated, through which the correlation between receiver’s Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and perceived video quality is identified. The main conclusions drawn from the study demonstrate that a considerable saving in signal power and bandwidth can be achieved in comparison to QoS-based techniques.
Advancing our understanding of nursing work and work role effectiveness: is the Irish nursing minimum data set for mental health psychometrically robust and can it be used to inform nursing sensitive patient outcomes?

The aim of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health to determine its usability in the clinical setting. A secondary aim of this study was to explore the ability of the tool to capture nursing sensitive outcomes of care, conceptualised and defined according to change in the patient’s condition mediated by nursing interventions. The research methodology was guided by a measurement error concept map. The validity of the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health was established through the implementation of a number of studies to test for construct validity, content validity, face validity and discriminative validity. The reliability of the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health was established through tests of internal consistency, factorial stability and interrater reliability. A secondary analysis of the study data was carried out to establish whether the tool could be used to investigate nursing sensitive outcomes of care. This analysis was guided by a model of nursing role effectiveness and implemented using structural equation path analysis. The overall findings of the study inferred that the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health possessed relatively good levels of construct validity, content validity, face validity and discriminative validity. Further research is required to add to the knowledge base regarding the construct validity of the tool in particular. While some level of reliability of the tool was established, further investigation of its interrater reliability is recommended. The findings of the outcomes analysis inferred that the Irish Nursing Minimum Data Set for mental health has potential to yield useful information regarding the unique contribution that mental health nurses make to patient/client outcome achievement.
Lidar-based Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles

Today, agricultural vehicles are available that can drive autonomously and follow exact route plans more precisely than human operators. Combined with advancements in precision agriculture, autonomous agricultural robots can reduce manual labor, improve workflow, and optimize yield. However, as of today, human operators are still required for monitoring the environment and acting upon potential obstacles in front of the vehicle. To eliminate this need, safety must be ensured by accurate and reliable obstacle detection and avoidance systems. In this thesis, lidar-based obstacle detection and recognition in agricultural environments has been investigated. A rotating multi-beam lidar generating 3D point clouds was used for point-wise classification of agricultural scenes, while multi-modal fusion with cameras and radar was used to increase performance and robustness. Two research perception platforms were presented and used for data acquisition. The proposed methods were all evaluated on recorded datasets that represented a wide range of realistic agricultural environments and included both static and dynamic obstacles. For 3D point cloud classification, two methods were proposed for handling density variations during feature extraction. One method outperformed a frequently used generic 3D feature descriptor, whereas the other method showed promising preliminary results using deep learning on 2D range images. For multi-modal fusion, four methods were proposed for combining lidar with color camera, thermal camera, and radar. Gradual improvements in classification accuracy were seen, as spatial, temporal, and multi-modal relationships were introduced in the models. Finally, occupancy grid mapping was used to fuse and map detections globally, and runtime obstacle detection was applied on mapped detections along the vehicle path, thus simulating an actual traversal. The proposed methods serve as a first step towards full autonomy for agricultural vehicles. The study has thus shown that recent advancements in autonomous driving can be transferred to the agricultural domain, when accurate distinctions are made between obstacles and processable vegetation. Future research in the domain has further been facilitated with the release of the multi-modal obstacle dataset, FieldSAFE.
Exploring the current status of water governance and outcomes of community-based monitoring across the Oak Ridges Moraine, Southern Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACT Community-based monitoring (CBM) activities are becoming increasingly prevalent in response to multiple factors, including reduced governmental capacity and increased public interest in environmental management. This research aims to explore how CBM has evolved in the Oak Ridges Moraine (ORM), southern Ontario, including an examination of strengths and challenges. Interviews with CBM stakeholders, provincial government staff, and conservation authority staff were combined with document analysis to explore the evolution and outcomes of ORM CBM activities. Results indicate that there is active CBM on the ORM and conservation authorities play a role in the shaping of CBM activities, although significant barriers remain to civil society participation in water governance. The case study results from the ORM were also considered in light of research emerging from the Nova Scotia experience of numerous civil society organisations involved in CBM.
Cutback management in Canadian cities

ABSTRACT This study looks at the views of municipal managers in Canada about cutback management, using data from a national survey conducted in two waves: 2009 and 2015. The first period reflects the onset of the Great Recession, and the second its aftermath. We argue that the choice of cutback management strategies and tools in Canadian cities is driven by two concerns: taking actions that can be justified and avoiding losses in services. Other considerations include easy to use tools, having council support, and employing New Public Management practices. Municipal managers view increases in taxes and user fees to be very important. Improving in-house management practices are also very important. Targeted cuts, such as cuts to capital expenditures, are somewhat important. Cuts to human resources that involve large losses for employees and likely service reductions, are less important. Changes to the city's mission that reduce services and programmes are unimportant.
Local invariant feature based object retrieval in a supermarket

Experienced decades of rapid development on digital imaging sensors and storage devices, today's world is flooded with digital images. The methods which retrieve images by the text information annotated to each image become less efficient. During the past decade, contentbased image retrieval has been paid much attention to and has made significant progress. Inspired by the recent success of content-based image retrieval with local invariant features, this work builds up a retrieval system which can efficiently localize an object in a big supermarket by using its visual information. In contrast to those in the literature, the object retrieval in this work needs to retrieve the images containing extremely strong background clutters and multiple copies of identical objects. Furthermore, there is significant scale difference between a query image and the images in the database. To meet these challenges, this work discusses the deficiency of the existing retrieval methods on this object retrieval task and develops a new similarity measure and a multiple scales retrieval approach to better handle the above problems. In order to achieve high retrieval speed, the mechanisms of the visual word and the invert file borrowed from the text retrieval are applied to the retrieval in this work. In addition, a visual word based spatial check method is proposed to conduct the post-verification in a more efficient way. Through extensive experimental study, this work demonstrates the advantages of the proposed methods over the existing ones for this object retrieval task, as well as the excellent object retrieval performance achieved by this system.
A panel-data analysis of the explanatory power of factor premiums on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)

ABSTRACT A large portion of South African asset pricing literature considers the identification of investment styles present on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Unfortunately, the identification of an ‘investment style’ does not necessarily entail that the said style is an ‘explanatory factor’ where ‘explanatory’ implies that the said factor is able independently to explain a portion of the cross-sectional variation in share returns. This study considers a number of popularised investment styles which have been documented in local and international literature, namely size, value, momentum, low beta, currency risk, low volatility and liquidity. As opposed to applying portfolio sorts based on styles and estimating factor premiums via Fama-Macbeth regressions, this study applies panel data methods on a share-by-share basis. The benefit of such an approach is the ability to test numerous styles in a multivariate parametric framework despite a limited investable universe of shares. The results of the study indicate that size, value, momentum and low-market beta are priced factors that explain the average cross-sectional variation in share returns on the JSE.
User experience research and development of knowledge in the field of human-computer interaction

The aim of the article is to present the impact of User Experience Research on the development of knowledge in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The article uses the Narrative Literature Review Method. The article uses literature and scientific articles on the subjects analyzed in its issues. Based on the analysis, it was found that User Experience Research influences the development of knowledge in the area of Human-Computer Interaction by: providing results of the research related to the issues that are of a significant interest to the HCI; the applicative character of the UX research results, allowing to improve the interaction between a human and a computer; providing new research methods to the HCI discipline.
The Nexus between Government Investment Expenditure and Private Investment in Ghana

This study employs both ARDL model and Granger causality test to examine and test the direction of causality between government investment expenditure and private investment in Ghana for the period 1970 to 2013. The study revealsthat, in both long run and short run, government investment expenditure has an insignificant negative impact on private investment. It is also established that there isa bi-causal relationship between government investment expenditure and private sector investment in Ghana. Based on the bi-causal relationship, the study advocates the need for government to invest more in physical infrastructure and human capital in order to reverse the negative and insignificant effect of government investment expenditure on private investment.