Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Active Learning Methods in Nursing Education – A New Paradigm?

The overall aim of the ongoing research project is to develop new learning environments in nursing education, adapted to latest technology and active learning methods. The present research focuses on the students’ satisfaction with the active learning methods used in the course "Basic Nursing Skills" in which theoretical and practical elements are included. Blended learning environments have been used, which are represented by traditional classroom teaching, self-directed studies, written assignments and the flipped classroom. The research has a qualitative research design and the sample used is the first-year students in the English Degree Programme in Nursing at Novia University of Applied Sciences. Finland is a bilingual country with Finnish as the language for the majority and Swedish is the minority language. Novia UAS is a University with Swedish as main language and the English Degree Programmes at Novia UAS are few and small. The study applies constructivism as the underpinning philosophy of active learning, and coaching as the approach to teaching. Contact teaching consists mainly of an introduction, supervision, and evaluation. The students receive carefully designed guides for expected learning outcomes. Regarding the practical parts, the students have access to instruction films and a laboratory environment for practice. The students decide when they are ready for their given practical procedure to be evaluated, and record the procedure with their own devices. The students’ videos are uploaded as unlisted on YouTube and sent to the teacher, who subsequently evaluates the students’ performances of the given procedure. The study also investigates student views on the flipped classroom-technique where the classroom is transferred to a bed ward with several, mainly elderly, bedridden patients at a local health care center. The overall student response is positive, the students felt that the methods used provided a good way of attaining deep insights into the subject and that the variety of methods and tasks stimulated learning.
Panel Unit Root Tests and Spatial Dependence

This paper studies the performance of panel unit root tests when spatial effects are present that account for cross-section correlation. Monte Carlo simulations show that there can be considerable size distortions in panel unit root tests when the true specification exhibits spatial error correlation. These tests are applied to a panel data set on net real income from the 1000 largest French communes observed over the period 1985-1998.
Self-care Activation, Social Support, and Self-care Behaviors among Women Living with Heart Failure

ABSTRACT Background: Three million U.S. women live with heart failure (HF). Purpose: This study investigated relationships among self-care activation, social support, and self-care behaviors of women living with HF. Methods: A 52-item web-based survey was completed by 246 women living with HF. Results: Women reported a mean body mass index (BMI) of 30.8 ± 7.8 kg/m2, exercising a mean 106.5 ± 141.1 min/week, and consuming 3.25 ± 1.9 mean servings fruit/vegetables each day. Significant predictors of weekly physical activity minutes included self-care activation, activities of daily living (ADLs) total score, and current tobacco use. Low self-care activation, poor self-perceived health, greater ADL limitations, and more years living with HF were statistically significantly associated with having a higher BMI. Self-perceived health status and education and income levels were significant predictors of daily fruit/vegetable servings. Discussion: Although self-care activation was positively associated with health behaviors among women living with HF, self-care management of health behaviors remained suboptimal. Evaluating self-perceived health status of women with HF may identify appropriate interventions for improving self-care behaviors. Translation to Health Education Practice: Certified Health Education Specialists are encouraged to tailor their education to raising self-care activation, improving self-perceived health, underscoring the value of tangible physical activities (climbing stairs, walking, carrying groceries), and referring women with HF to cardiac rehabilitation.
The Color-Magnitude Diagram & Luminosity Function of the ACT-J 0235 Galaxy Cluster

We present a study of the Color-Magnitude Diagram and the Luminosity Function of the ACT-J0235 galaxy cluster (z=0.43±0.07), using images taken from the GMOS/Gemini-South. The data was reduced using SExtractor automatized software and a completeness of detection study is used to find the limiting magnitude of our measurements. We found, by applying statistical criteria, that the data had in fact a lower and upper limiting magnitude of m1r = 18.7 and m 2 r = 22.9, which define our range of statistically significant study. We also study the Color-Magnitude Diagram of the cluster and determined the slope of the red sequence to be −0.042 ± 0.015, which is in good agreement with the values found in the literature. The Schechter’s Luminosity Function of the cluster is also studied, and provided very valuable information about the mass distribution on the cluster. The parameters adjusted to the LF where Φ = 3048.63 ± 1566.14 square degrees, M∗ = 20.26 ± 0.44 and α = −1.145 ± 0.069. Our final conlusion is that, according to the data, the cluster is mainly dominated by early-type galaxies.
Enhancing the Secured Software Framework using Vulnerability Patterns and Flow Diagrams

This article describes the process of simplifying the software security classification. The inputs of this process include a reference model from previous researcher and existing Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) database. An interesting aim is to find out how we can make the secured software framework implementable in practice. In order to answer this question, some inquiries were set out regarding reference model and meta-process for classification to be a workable measurement system. The outputs of the process are the results discussion of experimental result and expert’s validation. The experimental result use the existing CVE database which serves as an analysis when a) the framework is applied on three mix datasets, and b) when the framework is applied on two focus datasets. The first explains the result when the framework is applied on the CVE data randomly which consist mix of vendors and the latter is applied on the CVE data randomly but on selective vendors. The metric used in this assessment are precision and recall rate. The result shows there is a strong indicator that the framework can produce acceptable output accuracy. Apart from that, several experts’ views were discussed to show the correctness and eliminate the ambiguity of classification rules and to prove the whole framework process.
Role of Multidisciplinary Approach in the Management of Cancer Pain

The continuum of cancer pain, the most feared complication of cancer, begins with the diagnosis and happens to be with patient as well as their families throughout the treatment, post-treatment, and till the end of the life. Chronic cancer pain not only bothers the patient physically leading to reduced physical activity and function, fatigue, lethargy, and peripheral neuropathy, but also interacts with his emotions and may result in anxiety, mood disorder, psychological stress, depression, hopelessness, insomnia, dejection, uncertainty, fatigue, tiredness, apprehension, attention deficit, memory lapses, and irritability, having a devastating effect on his life. Cancer pain affect patient’s psychological, cognitive, social, and spiritual domains of patients' lives and this, in turns, may lead to a desire to end life. Hence, relieve from chronic pain is a must in cancer patients to improve the quality of life [1]. Twenty to more than fifty percent patients with cancer have pain during the time of illness/ treatment (59%) as well as post-treatment (33%). 80% of the advanced-stage cancer patients have moderate to severe pain. Pain and flare-ups of pain are more in younger patients as compared to the old patients. Pain in cancer patients may be due to cancer therapies, including radiation (brachytherapy, tissue damage and delayed repair, mucositis, dermatitis, inflammation), chemotherapy (infusion related venous spasm, chemical phlebitis, vesicant extravasation, anthracycline-associated flare, venous flare reaction, severe mucositis due to myeloablative chemotherapy and standard-intensity therapy, musculoskeletal pain, pain due to dermatological conditions), surgery, targeted therapy, supportive care therapies (use of bisphosphonate and steroids), diagnostic procedures and metastasis [2]. Ninety percent of patients with pain are supposed to be managed by medical interventions [3]; however, truly, less than 50% experience effective pain relief [4]. Thus, there is a need of better understanding and intensive approach to understand and intervene, to provide a better quality of life to cancer patients in pain.
Broadband reflectionless metasheets: Frequency-selective transmission and perfect absorption

Energy of propagating electromagnetic waves can be fully absorbed in a thin lossy layer, but only in a narrow frequency band, as follows from the causality principle. On the other hand, it appears that there are no fundamental limitations on broadband matching of thin absorbing layers. However, known thin absorbers produce significant reflections outside of the resonant absorption band. In this paper we explore possibilities to realize a thin absorbing layer which produces no reflected waves in a very wide frequency range, while the transmission coefficient has a narrow peak of full absorption. Here we show, both theoretically and experimentally, that a wide-band-matched thin resonant absorber, invisible in reflection, can be realized if one and the same resonant mode of the absorbing array unit cells is utilized to create both electric and magnetic responses. We test this concept using chiral particles in each unit cells, arranged in a periodic planar racemic array, utilizing chirality coupling in each unit cell but compensating the field coupling at the macroscopic level. We prove that the concept and the proposed realization approach also can be used to create non-reflecting layers for full control of transmitted fields. Our results can have a broad range of potential applications over the entire electromagnetic spectrum including, for example, perfect ultra-compact wave filters and selective multi-frequency sensors.
The effect of the spatial repellent metofluthrin on landing rates of outdoor biting anophelines in Cambodia, S.E. Asia

collections. The principal anophelines collected varied between locations. Anopheles minimus s.l. was the most common mosquito in Pailin, An. maculatus s.l in Veal Veng and An. sinensis in Kroh Salau. Among all species collected in Pailin landing rates were reduced by 50% (95% CI 55-44%) when a single emanator was used and by 58% (95% CI 63- 52%) when four were used. The effect was greater in An.minimus s.l 51% ( 95% CI 54-47%) and 70% (72%-66%) respectively. A similar result was obtained in Pursat, where 67% (95% CI 66- 42%) reductions were observed when four emanators were in use, but no significant reduction was observed in Koh Kong. Although the results show promise it is argued that the product needs further development.
Experimental investigation of relationships between anxiety, negative attitudes, and allowable distance of robots

When people interact with robots in daily life, each individual has different attitude and emotion toward the robots, which cause different behavior toward them. Thus, we should empirically investigate influences of attitudes and emotions into human--robot interaction, in particular, those of negative attitudes and anxiety which may directly affect behaviors toward robots. For this aim, an experiment was conducted to investigate relationships between negative attitudes and anxiety toward, and allowable distance of a robot. The results revealed that negative attitudes and anxiety toward robots affected allowable distances between the subjects and the robot, and the subjects' anxiety toward robots changed before and after the experiment session, depending on the robot's behavioral characteristics such as its walking speed.
Application of a Novel Tongue Resin Replication System for in vitro Biofilm Studies

the impressed laboratory microorganism culture count and ABSTRACT Aims: Biofilms present a strategy for microorganisms to survive and resist adverse conditions. In order to further our understanding of this resistance mechanism, it is of much importance to develop new methodologies in order to assess such biofilm activities. One of the most defined biofilms is dental plaque. However, the oral cavity contains a different class of biofilm, the precise structural nature of which is dependent on its site of development. Indeed, tongue-coated biofilms have remained a focus for in vitro studies, especially since they represent the major source of oral malodor. The aim of this research was to investigate the growth of a biofilm on a tongue replication constructed from a resin material, and its use in further experimental investigations. Methods: The model used for this study involved an adapted CDC biofilm reactor in order to achieve this; Staphylococcus aureus was used as the test organism. Results: Biofilm culturing techniques employed demonstrated a positive growth from the microbes retrieved from the tongue-impressed resin material. Moreover, results acquired confirmed that the resin-based tongue replication harbored significantly greater levels of S. aureus than those of unimpressed resin, plastic and stainless steel controls. Conclusions: Therefore, this study provides evidence that the employment of a CDC biofilm reactor in combination with a resin tongue device creates an oral biofilm model which provides valuable information regarding our understanding of how the roughness of the dorsal lingual surface affects microbial populations in patients suffering from oral malodor.
Auto‐configuring radial basis function networks for chaotic time series and flood forecasting

The learning strategy of the radial basis function network (RBFN) commonly uses a hybrid learning process to identify the structure and then proceed to search the model parameters, which is a time‐consuming procedure. We proposed an evolutionary way to automatically configure the structure of RBFN and search the optimal parameters of the network. The strategy can effectively identify an appropriate structure of the network by the orthogonal least squares algorithm and then systematically search the optimal locations of centres and the widths of their corresponding kernel function by the genetic algorithm. The proposed strategy of auto‐configuring RBFN is first testified in predicting the future values of the chaotic Mackey‐Glass time series. The results demonstrate the superiority, on both effectiveness and efficiency, of the proposed strategy in predicting the chaotic time series. We then further investigate the model's suitability and reliability in flood forecast. The Lan‐Young River in north‐east Taiwan is used as a case study, where the hourly river flow of 23 flood events caused by typhoons or storms is used to train and validate the neural networks. The back propagation neural network (BPNN) is also performed for the purpose of comparison. The results demonstrate that the proposed RBFN has much better performance than the BPNN. The RBFN not only provides an efficient way to model the rainfall‐runoff process but also gives reliable and precise one‐hour and two‐hour ahead flood forecasts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Markov Chain Resulting from the States of the Bitcoin

In this paper, we revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoins security against selﬁsh-mine attack introduced by I. Eyal and E. G. Sirer in [5]. We study the state machine of Bitcoin’s network under the inﬂuence of one pool miner adopting the self-ish mine strategy while the rest of the community following the standard protocol. We prove that the process following by the states of Bitcoin’s system is a irreducible, positive-recurrent, ape-riodic, and discrete Markov chain. We give an invariant (stationary) distribution for this Markov chain and deduce easily the rate of convergence towards the stationary equilibrium situation.
P-spline ANOVA-type interaction models for spatio-temporal smoothing

In recent years, spatial and spatio-temporal modelling have become an important area of research in many fields (epidemiology, environmental studies, disease mapping, etc.). However, most of the models developed are constrained by the large amounts of data available. We propose the use of penalized splines ( -splines) in a mixed model framework for smoothing spatio-temporal data. Our approach allows the consideration of interaction terms which can be decomposed as a sum of smooth functions similarly as an analysis of variance decomposition. The properties of the bases used for regression allow the use of algorithms that can handle large amount of data. We show that on imposing the same constraints as in a factorial design it is possible to avoid identifiability problems. We illustrate the methodology for Europe ozone levels in the period 1999–2005.
Canid vs. canid: Insights into coyote–dog encounters from social media

While the relationship between coyotes (Canis latrans) and house cats (Felis catus) may be characterized as one between predators and their prey, coyote interactions with domestic dogs (C. lupus familiaris) appear to be more varied and may include behaviors associated with canid sociality. While encounters between coyotes and dogs are difficult to observe, we capitalized on publicly available video recordings of coyote–dog encounters to observe canid behaviors and examined 35 video clips downloaded from YouTube during fall 2014. We identified coyote–dog interactions that were playful, agonistic, or predatory; those that we could not clearly categorize were labeled as other/undetermined. We found that both species were recorded directing play to the other species, which led to mutual play bouts. We observed a similar number of agonistic encounters, which included dogs biting coyotes and coyotes biting dogs. The main difference in agonistic behavior was that coyotes usually showed defensive aggression while dogs did not show defensive aggression. We also observed coyotes ambushing and bite-shaking small dogs in 3 video clips, from which the dogs escaped, but we did not see predatory behavior of dogs toward coyotes. Dog size may be related to types of interactions. No small dogs were involved in agonistic interactions, and only 1 small dog was observed playing with a coyote. From these videos, we conclude that the relationship between coyotes and dogs cannot be simply described as predator–prey; indeed, much of it appears to be social behavior divided between playful and agonistic. Future work that aims to explain the proximate correlates of play and aggression would provide more information for managers who wish to educate humans to reduce human–wildlife conflicts.
Methane emission from Siberian arctic polygonal tundra: eddy covariance measurements and modeling

Eddy covariance measurements of methane flux were carried out in an arctic tundra landscape in the central Lena River Delta at 72°N. The measurements covered the seasonal course of mid‐summer to early winter in 2003 and early spring to mid‐summer in 2004, including the periods of spring thaw and autumnal freeze back. The study site is characterized by very cold and deep permafrost and a continental climate with a mean annual air temperature of −14.7 °C. The surface is characterized by wet polygonal tundra, with a micro‐relief consisting of raised moderately dry sites, depressed wet sites, polygonal ponds, and lakes. We found relatively low fluxes of typically 30 mg CH4 m−2 day−1 during mid‐summer and identified soil temperature and near‐surface atmospheric turbulence as the factors controlling methane emission. The influence of atmospheric turbulence was attributed to the high coverage of open water surfaces in the tundra. The soil thaw depth and water table position were found to have no clear effect on methane fluxes. The excess emission during spring thaw was estimated to be about 3% of the total flux measured during June–October. Winter emissions were modeled based on the functional relationships found in the measured data. The annual methane emission was estimated to be 3.15 g m−2. This is low compared with values reported for similar ecosystems. Reason for this were thought to be the very low permafrost temperature in the study region, the sandy soil texture and low bio‐availability of nutrients in the soils, and the high surface coverage of moist to dry micro‐sites. The methane emission accounted for about 14% of the annual ecosystem carbon balance. Considering the global warming potential of methane, the methane emission turned the tundra into an effective greenhouse gas source.
The Impacts of State Performance Funding Systems on Higher Education Institutions: Research Literature Review and Policy Recommendations

Over the past three decades policymakers have been seeking new ways to secure improved performance from higher education institutions. One popular approach has been performance funding, which involves use of a formula to tie funding to institutional performance on specified indicators. This report reviews findings from studies on performance funding programs in a multitude of states. The studies suggest that tying funding to outputs has immediate impacts on colleges in the form of changes in funding, greater awareness by institutions of state priorities and of their own institutional performance, and increased status competition among institutions. Because of these immediate impacts, performance funding produces intermediate institutional changes in the form of greater use of data in institutional planning and policymaking and in changes in academic and student service policies and practices that promise to improve student outcomes. However, claims that performance funding does indeed increase ultimate outcomes—in the form of improved rates of retention, completion of developmental education, and graduation—are not validated by solid data. In the face of this finding, this report identifies obstacles to the effective functioning of performance funding, as well as unintended impacts. The report closes by providing recommendations for overcoming the many obstacles to the effective functioning of performance funding and addressing the unintended impacts documented by the studies reviewed.
Developmental perspectives on Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from the production of wh-questions by Greek SLI children over time

This study investigates the performance of seven Greek SLI children on the production of wh-questions at two points in their linguistic development. In particular, it compares and discusses the results of two experiments on the production of subject and object wh-questions; the second experiment was carried out 5 years after the first one. Despite the SLI children's significant improvement in the production of subject and object wh-questions, the results indicated persistent problems with specific grammatical operations. Adopting a developmental perspective, issues concerning the linguistic deficits in SLI are discussed.