Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Faculty Diversity: Problems and Solutions

Acknowledgments Introduction and Organization of the Book Part One: Problems 1. Succeeding as a Professor on a Majority Campus 2. Succeeding Outside the Ivy Walls 3. Extra Disadvantages for Colonized Minorities Part Two: Solutions 4. Good Practices in Recruitment 5. Good Practices in Retention 6. Good Practices in Mentoring 7. Other Remedies: Macrocosmic and Microcosmic Part Three: Items for Discussion, Analysis, and Practice 8. Minority and Majority Faculty Speak 9. Bad Practices Conclusion Bibliography Appendix: Checklist of Chapter Contents Index Bibliography
The microbiology and clinical characteristics of bacterial and fungal meningitis in a Chinese hospital

Introduction: The aim was to investigate the distribution, antibiotic resistance, initial clinical and laboratory characteristics of pathogens isolated from the cerebrospinal fluid samples (CSF). Material and methods: The CSF were subjected for identification. The minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of antimicrobial agents were tested. The initial clinical and laboratory characteristics were collected. Results: The rate of positive yield of pathogen meningitis in our study was 8.16% . Among the 1994 non-repetitive pathogens, Gram-positive pathogen was the most common (71.71%), followed by Gram-negative pathogen (20.36%), fungal (6.62%) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis (1.30%). Coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS) was the most common Gram-positive pathogen and Acinetobacter baumannii (Ab) was the most common Gram-negative pathogen. As to fungal pathogen, Cryptococcus neoformans (CN) was the most common. The main CNS showed higher antimicrobial resistant rate for Penicillin G, oxacillin, clindamycin and erythromycin. Acinetobacter baumannii resistant to the most tested antibiotics and only showed considerable rate of resistance to cefoperazone/sulbactam, tigecycline and amikacin. All CN were susceptible to 5-fluorocytosine and only 3.6% CN were resistance to fluconazole. Long days of hospital stay, fever and meningeal irritation signs were common symptoms in the bacterial and fungal meningitis. Head injury, disturbance of consciousness, the pupil size of both eyes was not equal, pupillary reaction to light was slow or absent were more common in the Ab meningitis. The CSF protein concentration and white blood cells count as well as glucose concentration can be used in guiding initial treatment and further microbiological investigation. Conclusions: The main pathogens showed higher antimicrobial resistant rate and the selection of empiric antibiotics should take into consideration local epidemiology, antibiotic resistance patterns and the suspected causative microorganism.
Personal Analytics Explorations to Support Youth Learning

While personalized learning environments often include systems that automatically adapt to inferred learner needs, other forms of personalized learning exist. One form involves the use of personal analytics in which the learner obtains and analyzes data about himself/herself. More known in informatics communities, there is potential for use of personal analytics for design of instruction. This chapter provides two cases of personal analytics learning explorations to demonstrate their range and potential. One case is of a high school student examining how sleep influences her mood. The other case is of a sixth-grade class of students examining how deviations from typical walking behavior change distributional shape in plotted step data. Both cases show how social support and direct experience with data correction are intimately involved in how youth can learn through personal analytics activities.
Il valore delle leggi statistiche nella fisica e nelle scienze sociali di Ettore Majorana. Ovvero: una percezione del «liberto» arbitrio

I. Cenni biografici su Ettore Majorana Il fisico Ettore Majorana nacque a Catania il 5 agosto 1906. Il cognome della sua famiglia, gia segnalato sin dal Seicento – epoca nella quale si puo rintracciarne il capostipite –, era divenuto celebre in fine secolo XIX grazie alla figura di spicco del suo «vero antenato», il nonno Salvatore Majorana Calatabiano, nato a Militello Val di Catania nel 1825. A partire dalla sua personalita prorompente – pare fosse «economista, giurista, ragionatore, scritt.
Newly Proposed ALBI Grade and ALBI-T Score as Tools for Assessment of Hepatic Function and Prognosis in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients

Background: Because of the rapid progression of antiviral treatment options and the increasing frequency of nonviral-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) due to the aging of society, the number of HCC patients with good hepatic function has been increasing and a more detailed method of assessment of hepatic function is needed. The Child-Pugh classification (CP) is used worldwide as an assessment tool for hepatic reserve function, even though it has some weaknesses. Recently, the albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) grade, calculated based on only albumin and total bilirubin, was proposed, and recent investigations have suggested that ALBI grade instead of CP can be used as an assessment tool for hepatic function as part of therapeutic strategies such as Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer staging and a practical guideline presented by the Japan Society of Hepatology as well for total staging scoring systems. There has been an increasing number of reports showing that it has better capability than CP for HCC patients who undergo not only curative but also palliative treatments. Transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) is a major palliative treatment used for unresectable HCC, and the idea of TACE-refractory status has been proposed to indicate the possibility of switching to a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). However, TKI administration requires a maintained hepatic reserve function, thus the importance of assessment of hepatic function in patients undergoing TACE treatments has increased. We consider that ALBI grade might also play a significant role as part of a detailed assessment of relative changes in hepatic function during treatment. In this review, we evaluate the practical usefulness of ALBI grade for assessing hepatic function and HCC prognosis. Key Message: A detailed assessment of hepatic function is required for recent HCC therapeutic strategies. ALBI grade may be a powerful tool to improve treatment options for affected patients.
Healthcare Monitoring System Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Health monitoring of patients is a common task in healthcare areas from nursing homes to hospitals. Medical staff needs to monitor patients closely and collects their monitoring body parameters. This proposal will help the medical staff to control the overall state of monitored patients in autonomous, real-time and remotely way. The application of healthcare wireless Sensor networks to these scenarios could perform this job. Through a network it is possible to reach each one of the patients’ nodes anytime anywhere as long as a network terminal is accessible. Here the main idea is to propose a reliable continuous monitoring solution of hospitalized patients (in a hospital infirmary) based on a healthcare wireless sensor network (HWSN) with mobility support. The patients carry a batch of body sensors (according to their pathology needs) to collect their body parameters. Medical staff evaluates the overall state of each patient and analyzes the values gathered by these nodes.
A Prototype of Interactive Decision Support System with Automatic Prompter

Engineering optimization problems mostly has more than one contradictory criteria. For solving such problems mathematically one can use multiple criteria decision making methods that provide finding compromise solution. This work contributes with nonlinear multiobjective optimization methods, where interactive methods comparing to others is more informative. Using the interactive methods contributes Interactive Decision Support Systems which provide user friendly interface and helps to make decisions. In the paper are described and approved opportunities then Interactive Decision Support System assist Decision Maker in preference information defining. This realized with an Automatic Prompter which determining preference information of the interactive method for the next iteration. The Automatic Prompter adaptable for the different interactive methods and has independence from strategy how to provide preference information. Using the Automatic Prompter the Decision Maker can verify whether it is possible to achieve a desired solution and what should be preference information. Determined preference information by the Automatic Prompter provides more information about a problem and the Decision Maker learning process is more effective. The Automatic Prompter was implemented and approbated as part of a prototype of the Interactive Decision Support System. Experiments with using the Automatic Prompter demonstrate that the Decision Maker has obtained more effective solutions.
Implementación de un Hardware reconfigurable de los Bloques de un Sistema RSA

En este trabajo se presenta el diseno en hardware reconfigurable de los sub-bloques que constituyen un sistema RSA de criptografia. Se presentan las diferentes arquitecturas que reproducen los algoritmos seleccionados y los resultados de simulacion comportamental obtenidos a partir de la especificacion en lenguajes de descripcion de hardware. De igual forma se presentan algunos analisis de desempeno de los bloques constituyentes mencionados.
La place des firmes dans la tradition et l’actualité géopolitiques

Meme si l’economie est integree a la reflexion geopolitique depuis Friedrich Ratzel au moins, la geopolitique classique accorde une place marginale aux acteurs economiques en tant que tels. Cependant, les mutations contemporaines de l'ordre international (notamment la fin de la guerre de froide et le retrait de l’Etat consecutif a l’influence de la pensee liberale) ont remis en question cette position. Au-dela de la creation de la geoeconomie qui propose un changement de paradigme radical, la geopolitique contemporaine accorde un poids croissant aux firmes multinationales et aux acteurs financiers et remet en question cette perspective "georealiste". Cette evolution reflete l’actualite des rapports de pouvoir alors que, de plus en plus, les firmes s’affichent non seulement comme des acteurs majeurs, mais aussi comme des structures concurrencant de plus en plus l’Etat et l’ordre geopolitique westphalien.
Adaptive Subdivision Surface Reconstruction for Scattered Data in Reverse Engineering Based on GPU

Reconstructing geometry models from scattered data is an important task in reverse engineering. An adaptive subdivision surface reconstruction method was proposed to construct complex models rapidly. This method includes several steps: triangulation on scattered data; mesh segmentation and simplification; computing the subdivision depth according to the specified error. The last step is computing mesh control net by fitting subdivision functions and construct subdivision surface adaptively. In order to improve the efficiency of the algorithm, we implemented the reconstruction algorithm on GPU in parallel way and tested the program on several large scale data sets. Our adaptive subdivision method can save storage space and gain high efficiency simultaneously.
Karakia Mäori: Mäori Invocations to Spiritual Authorities

Kupu whakataki I te ‘tupuranga ake’ o te Maori, ahakoa he tirohanga na te Uru nei, kua noho te korero a-waha hei kaupapa tohe ma nga kaiwhakangungu Maori mo nga tau wha tekau, neke atu, i te wa i uia ai e nga matanga o te Uru mena he hua to nga tangata mohoao hei tuku korero a-waha (Na Buck i ta Cox, 1993: 12). E kitea mai ai te pono o te toi a-waha, pena i te karakia, hei momokorero a-waha e tino ora nei, me ona hua maha. Ka wetehia tetehi tauira o te karakia kia whakaaturia atu ai te mana o ia kupu ki te kawe i te aria, i te whakapono o tua whakarere, a, ma te piki, ma te heke o te tangi o te waha ka kawea atu taua matauranga, aua whakaaro ki tua o te atea, o te wa, a, ora rawa ake nei. Heoi ano ra, ko ta tenei atikara he whakapumau i te mana o te korero a-waha ma te tuhituhi tonu, ana, ko te tuhi tonu ra te hanga e patu nei i te oranga tonutanga o te korero a-waha. Kati, he tohu noa iho nei pea no te huringa o te wa me te rereketanga o te korero a-waha a te Maori i tenei wa. Abstract With the development of Maori, albeit from a Western viewpoint, orality has been a subject of advocacy by Maori educationalists for some forty years or more since Western scholars questioned the capacity of “uncivilised peoples to transmit information orally” (Buck in Cox, 1993: 12). The validity of oral arts, by way of karakia, as one of those living oral forms and its multiplicity of potential are reiterated. One sample karakia is examined to demonstrate the potential of individual words to encapsulate concepts and beliefs from a bygone era and, by way of the rise and fall of the voice, to push that knowledge and thought across space and time, thus affording it a perpetual existence. Ironically, this article seeks to preserve the status of orality through writing, the very medium that threatens its oral maintenance; however, perhaps this is merely representative of the transitional residual orality phase Maoridom is facing.
BADD phase II: DDS information management architecture

The DARPA Battlefield Awareness and Data Dissemination (BADD) Phase II Program will provide the next generation multimedia information management architecture to support the warfighter. One goal of this architecture is proactive dissemination of information to the warfighter through strategies such as multicast and 'smart push and pull' designed to minimize latency and make maximum use of available communications bandwidth. Another goal is to support integration of information from widely distributed legacy repositories. This will enable the next generation of battlefield awareness applications to form a common operational view of the battlefield to aid joint service and/or multi-national peacekeeping forces. This paper discusses the approach we are taking to realize such an architecture for BADD. Our architecture and its implementation, known as the Distributed Dissemination Serivces (DDS) are based on two key concepts: a global database schema and an intelligent, proactive caching scheme. A global schema provides a common logical view of the information space in which the warfighter operates. This schema (or subsets of it) is shared by all warfighters through a distributed object database providing local access to all relevant metadata. This approach provides both scalability to a large number of warfighters, and it supports tethered as well as autonomous operations. By utilizing DDS information integration services that provide transparent access to legacy databases, related information from multiple 'stovepipe' systems are now available to battlefield awareness applications. The second key concept embedded in our architecture is an intelligent, hierarchical caching system supported by proactive dissemination management services which push both lightweight and heavyweight data such as imagery and video to warfighters based on their information profiles. The goal of this approach is to transparently and proactively stage data which is likely to be requested by the warfighter in caches which are physically close to the warfighter. Through a global schema and intelligent caching, the BADD DDS architecture will provide a virtual information repository in which warfighter access to information is both fast and transparent with respect to its original source.
SOFT-CONSTRAINED SUBBAND BEAMFORMING FOR SPEECH ENHANCEMENT

New speech acquisition applications are emerging as a result of advances in technology and the prevalence of mobile communication. While today voice control of consumer equipment is becoming a reality, communication technology has extended voice connectivity to personal computers and mobile communication devices with the aim of enabling natural communication in a variety of environments such as cars, restaurants and offices. The comfort and flexibility provided through the hands-free acquisition of speech in mobile telephony, speech recognition and hearing aids require robust techniques to deal with problems of environmental noise, reverberation, acoustic feedback and other interfering sounds which corrupt the received speech. For mobile environments, speech enhancement techniques should also provide an adaptation capacity to speaker motion with no perceptible degradations of the original speech. In this thesis, multi-microphone techniques for speech enhancement are developed. First, a framework for constrained beamforming is introduced. This framework allows us to control the tradeoff relationship between noise reduction, dereverberation and speech degradation. A constraint on the power minimization of the beamformer’s output is formulated to guarantee the integrity of the desired signal. It is shown that the robustness towards microphone mismatch of the soft-constrained beamforming structure is guaranteed by modeling the source as spatially spread. A subband recursive least-squares (RLS) beamformer is investigated and evaluated in real handsfree acoustical environments. The proposed methodology is defined to perform background noise and interference reduction, while a soft constraint built from calibration data in low noise conditions guarantees the undistorted filtering of the desired signal. This adaptive structure allows for a tracking of the noise characteristics, so as to efficiently accomplish its attenuation. A subband beamforming structure is used to improve the performance of the system and reduce the computational complexity. A real-time DSP implementation is described and evaluated for dual microphone speech enhancement. Furthermore, a novel blind soft-constrained beamforming approach for moving source speech enhancement is presented. It is based on a soft constraint defined for a delay-spread corresponding to a volume around the speech source location. A new speech-oriented time-delay estimation algorithm is combined with the beamformer to allow for speaker movement. The proposed method does not require any calibration data, knowledge of the array manifold or any other characteristics of the acoustical environment. Hence, it provides means to blindly enhance a dominant speaker in adverse noise conditions. This structure is further developed to allow for the detection and enhancement of multiple dominant speakers in a mixture of interferences and background noise. The use of a frequency-dependent constraint region opens the path for a trade-off between noise suppression and speech integrity.
Learning with augmented reality: a platform for higher education learning applications.

Students in higher education face a lot of challenges with the conventional learning methods and there is a lot of scope for improvement. Technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) can be used to help them enhance their practical learning experience. Augmented Reality (AR), is a ​technology that allows computer-generated virtual imagery information to be overlaid onto the real-world environment in real time. ​The application and platform developed as part of this thesis project works as a proof of concept for having AR applications as a higher education learning tool. This project describes how AR can be utilized for education and training, and the potential impact on the future of education. A usability testing of the application developed was conducted with first and second year dental science students, focusing on dental anatomy. For this study, pre-experience and post-experience surveys data was collected, where the students experiences using the application for learning enhancements, its usability and the potential of AR technology was measured. The results of the usability study conducted shows that such AR tools would be very helpful for the students in higher education; also, the positive responses shows that there are good future prospects.
“Marriage is Half of Faith and the Rest is Fear Allah”

Understanding the problem of woman abuse requires attention to the cultural context in which it occurs. American Muslim women are a group whose culturally specific experiences of abuse in families have remained largely unstudied. To address this gap in knowledge, this study examined the cultural context of abuse among American Muslim women using an interpretive approach. This article examines culturally specific marriage practices and the ways that these practices interwine with women's abuse experiences. Findings indicate that American Muslim women's marriage practices are distinctly different from dominant American practices and that these practices significantly shape abuse experiences over time.
Introduction to Synthetic Aperture Sonar

SONAR is an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging. The basic principle of sonar is to use sound to detect or locate objects, typically in the ocean. Sonar technology is similar to other technologies such as: RADAR = RAdio Detection And Ranging; ultrasound, which typically is used with higher frequencies in medical applications; and seismic processing, which typically uses lower frequencies in the sediments. There are many good books that cover the topic of sonar (Burdic, 1984; Lurton, 2010; Urick, 1983). There are also a large number of books that cover the theory of underwater acoustics more thoroughly (Brekhovskikh & Lysanov, 1982; Medwin & Clay, 1998). The principle of Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) is to combine successive pings coherently along a known track in order to increase the azimuth (along-track) resolution. A typical data collection geometry is illustrated in Fig. 1. SAS has the potential to produce high resolution images down to centimeter resolution up to hundreds of meters range. This makes SAS a suitable technique for imaging of the seafloor for applications such as search for small objects, imaging of wrecks, underwater archaeology and pipeline inspection. SAS has a very close resemblance with synthetic aperture radar (SAR). While SAS technology is maturing fast, it is still relatively new compared to SAR. There is a large amount of SAR literature (Carrara et al., 1995; Cumming & Wong, 2005; Curlander & McDonough, 1991; Franceschetti & Lanari, 1999; Jakowatz et al., 1996; Massonnet & Souyris, 2008). This chapter gives an updated introduction to SAS. The intended reader is familiar with sonar but not SAS. The only difference between traditional sonar and synthetic aperture is
Dopaje y nanoestructuración de láminas delgadas de ZnO mediante sputtering magnetrón reactivo

El objetivo fundamental de esta tesis ha sido la modificacion de las propiedades estructurales y opticas de laminas delgadas de ZnO depositadas por sputtering magnetron reactivo siguiendo dos estrategias: el dopaje con Titanio y la nanoestructuracion mediante la utilizacion de substratos de Alumina nanoporosa. Entre las principales aportaciones realizadas estan el estudio del mecanismo de incorporacion de Titanio en la estructura de ZnO y la obtencion de capas nanoestructuradas de ZnO mediante un metodo relativamente barato como es el sputtering magnetron reactivo, capaz de reproducir estructuras de hasta 15nm como rasgo caracteristico fundamental. Se ha buscado principalmente la relacion entre las propiedades estructurales y composicion de capas basadas en ZnO y su comportamiento optico para, finalmente, presentar un estudio comparativo entre los distintos materiales crecidos en lamina delgada, de gran interes desde el punto de vista de la eleccion de uno u otro material segun la aplicacion que se requiera. Palabras clave: ZnO Sputtering reactivo Propiedades opticas