Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leadership for Learning: Does Collaborative Leadership Make a Difference in School Improvement?

Although there has been a sizable growth spurt in empirical studies of shared leadership over the past decade, the bulk of this research has been descriptive. Relatively few published studies have investigated the impact of shared leadership on school improvement, and even fewer have studied effects on student learning. This longitudinal study examines the effects of collaborative leadership on school improvement and student reading achievement in 192 elementary schools in one state in the USA over a 4-year period. Using latent change analysis, the research found significant direct effects of collaborative leadership on change in the schools’ academic capacity and indirect effects on rates of growth in student reading achievement. In addition, the study identified three different growth trajectories among schools, each characterized by variations in associated school improvement processes. The study supports a perspective on leadership for learning that aims at building the academic capacity of schools as a means of improving student learning outcomes.
The Case for Biome Stewardship Councils

Protecting global ecosystems is often hindered by the problem of insufficient political will within countries and the need for effective cross-boundary management. We propose here a novel solution in which the biome itself (i.e., large ecosystems with similar climate, soils, plants, and animals) becomes the basic governance unit. Biome Stewardship Councils would comprise groups of individuals elected or nominated by local community organizations that reside in the regions making up their respective biomes, including a few government officials who are deemed to be particularly sensitive to ecosystem protection. The goal of Biome Stewardship Councils would be to maximize ecosystem protection and human welfare within a biome. They would lead regional collaboration to characterize threats to ecosystem services within the biome and develop and apply strategies to restore and maintain healthy services.
Food-grade Selection Markers in Lactic Acid Bacteria -

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are generally regarded as safe (GRAS) microorganisms and widely used in industry and medicine. We are trying to add additional properties to them by gene engineering. However, the genetically modified bacteria are not acceptable to use in food and medicine due to the presence of antibiotic resistance genes in plasmids. Thus, it is necessary to develop food-grade selection markers. Food-grade markers can be divided into three classes based on their selected characteristics: dominant, complementary and sugar fermentation markers. The developments on these food-grade selection markers were reviewed in order to provide valuable references for the further study.
Non-Life Insurance Economic Performances - an Empirical Investigation

The purpose of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the determinants of economic performances in the insurance industry. To this end, we test the impact of several firm characteristics, such as dimension, capital structure and investment policies on economic performance for a panel of non-life insurance firms operating in the main European markets spanning from 2004 to 2012. Empirical findings suggest that various factors contribute to the performance measured by return on equity and return on asset and, additionally, the insurance specific characteristics interact with country institutional features in determining profitability. In particular, the profitability of equity appears to be strongly linked to the profitability of assets, which is therefore investigated separately. The three main areas that constitute the core insurance activity (insurance in its narrower sense, financial and reinsurance activities) strongly influence profitability, but reinsurance does not seem to contribute either positively or negatively to performance. Further investigations are needed and welcome, therefore, to better understand the dynamics of performance and shed additional insight on the insurance industry.
Comparisonof Background Models for VideoSurveillance

Backgroundmodellingis a commonform of motiondetectionemployedby manyautonomousvideosurveillance systems.Accurately modellingthe background is a challengingtask,particularly for outdoorsceneswhere factors such as backgroundmotion and camera shake can cause the mistaken detectionof foreground objects. Recentresearch has developedbackground modelsthat are capableof detectingforegroundmotionin real-timewhile ignoring mostof the backgroundmotion,but it is not clear how well thesemodelswould perform on outdoor scenesthat exhibit typical videosurveillanceproblems.Theaim of this paperis to assessthe performanceof leadingbackground models(namely , theHybrid DetectionAlgorithm,and Three-frameTemporal Difference),usingvideosequences that containproblemswhich troubleexistingvideosurveillancesystems. Thestrengthsandweaknesses of thesebackgroundmodelsare reportedand analysed,with the aim of identifyingsuitabledirectionsfor thedevelopmentof robust backgroundmodelsfor motiondetectionin outdoorvideo surveillancesystems.
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF TEMPERATURE CHANGES IN ISRAEL: AN APPLICATION OF CHANGE POINT DETECTION AND ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES

The main goal of this study is to present and apply recently developed nonparametric change point detection and estimation techniques for confirming patterns of regional changes in temperature. Utilizing these methods, monthly temperatures (mean, mean maximum, mean minimum) and diurnal temperature ranges in different regions of Israel have been investigated over a period of 37-years, (1967-2003). The results were supported also by traditional statistical methods. The temperature and the diurnal temperature range analyses reveal a complex pattern of change. In particular, we found an increase in the monthly mean temperatures in the warm season in all areas of Israel approximately from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, namely, the summers have become warmer. Also detected was a significant increase in the monthly mean minimum temperature in Israel's coastal plain area for all months of the year. Whereas, in mountainous and desert areas a significant increase in the monthly mean minimum temperature was detected only in months of the warm season. The winters have become warmer in the Israeli coastal plain and have not significantly changed in its mountainous and desert areas. In addition, in Israel's coastal plain the monthly mean DTRs are decreasing, while in mountainous and desert areas the situation is reversed, that is, monthly mean DTRs are increasing.
Association between spectator and other roles in school bullying

Introduction: The school bullying is characterized by repetitiveness of aggression and the intentionality to injure or cause suffering to others. The bystanders to this phenomenon tend to be mainly responsible for the course that bullying will take and its results. Objective: To analyse the association between the role of bystander with the other possible roles played in bullying. Method: A total of 409 children from the third to seventh grade participated in this study, with an average age of 11 years (SD = 1.61), enrolled in two municipal public schools in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The instruments used were: one of the scales of the Questionnaire for the Study of Violence Among Peers, to identify bystanders, and the Olweus Questionnaire, to describe the possible roles played in school bullying. Results: It was found that most of the participants assumed the role of bystander in school bullying. However, an association was found with regard to gender and being a bystander. Also, strong association was found between being a bystander and the other roles played in bullying, primarily in relation to the bullies. Conclusion: These results reinforce the importance of bystanders in these aggressions, not only because they represent most of the participants, but mainly because of the positive or negative reinforcement they can offer in these aggressive behaviours. Therefore, the incentive and the encouragement of these students to denounce the aggressors, as well as defending the victims is essential to reduce school bullying.
Wage inequality in Spain: A regional perspective

The research examines wage inequality in the Spanish labour market from a regional perspective, drawing on stochastic dominance techniques. The field of study is of particular interest because wage determination in Spain incorporates an important territorial component, facilitated by certain specific institutional elements, given that Spain is one of the few developed countries in which collective bargaining is mainly developed through industry-wide agreements on an infra-national scale applied exclusively to provinces or regions. The main empirical findings are that wage inequality exhibits a significant regional heterogeneity and that both regional differences in workforce heterogeneity and the mix of jobs and workplaces and differences in their wage returns are influential factors in the explanation of regional heterogeneity in the levels of wage inequality. Consequently, the infrequent regional dimension of collective bargaining on an industry level implies the presence in Spain of wage determination mechanisms that are differentiated by region, which give rise to the existence of significant differences in regional wage structures.
Forecasting Dry Bulk Freight Index with Improved SVM

An improved SVM model is presented to forecast dry bulk freight index (BDI) in this paper, which is a powerful tool for operators and investors to manage the market trend and avoid price risking shipping industry. The BDI is influenced by many factors, especially the random incidents in dry bulk market, inducing the difficulty in forecasting of BDI. Therefore, to eliminate the impact of random incidents in dry bulk market, wavelet transform is adopted to denoise the BDI data series. Hence, the combined model of wavelet transform and support vector machine is developed to forecast BDI in this paper. Lastly, the BDI data in 2005 to 2012 are presented to test the proposed model. The 84 prior consecutive monthly BDI data are the inputs of the model, and the last 12 monthly BDI data are the outputs of model. The parameters of the model are optimized by genetic algorithm and the final model is conformed through SVM training. This paper compares the forecasting result of proposed method and three other forecasting methods. The result shows that the proposed method has higher accuracy and could be used to forecast the short-term trend of the BDI.
Fault Detection in Continuous and Periodic Industrial Chemical Processes with Hidden Markov Models

The development of automatic and reliable fault detection systems is still a challenge nowadays. Chemical processes are complex by nature by presenting non linear dynamics, multiple modes with constant interchanges, and spatial and serial correlations, to mention a few. To address these issues, this work explores the hidden Markov model (HMM) technique to construct a fault detection system for continuous and periodic processes. The DAMADICS actuator benchmark, with thirty four abrupt fault scenarios, was used for evaluation purposes. Abrupt faults of low magnitude are challenging and of great interesting in practice. The results obtained with the proposed methodology were compared to classical multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) techniques. They show a significant higher performance leading to earlier fault detection given a fixed false alarm rate of 1%.
The Transitional Role of the Glottal Stop in the Development of Glottalized Diminutives

This study focuses on the transitional role of the glottal stop in the development of glottalized diminutives. First, this study compares the historical development of two types of widely-observed diminutives (nasalized diminutives and glottalized diminutives) in southeastern Chinese dialects, with special focus given to the transitional stages, CVN and *CVk. While CVN can be easily gathered in synchronic dialects, it seems impossible for *CVk to exist in the dialects of Min and Wu. Then, the asymmetry between CVN and *CVk is explored in terms of sonority as well as the emergence of the unmarked. This study further suggests that, because of the internal glottal stop and its special articulatory characteristic, diminutives with middle glottal stop insertion (middle-GSI) can be viewed as the transitional stage in the development of glottalized diminutives in southeastern Chinese dialects. Finally, the immigration history between Min and Hakka also shows that the view proposed in this study can be historically supported.
Incorporating judgement with DSGE models Draft , Work in progress ⋆

Central bank policymakers often cast judgement in reduced form terms, often based on off-model information, not easily represented in terms of DSGE models. We show how to compute forecasts conditioned on policymaker judgement, that are the most likely conditional forecasts from the perspective of the DSGE model, maximising the influence of the model structure on the forecasts. We suggest using a simple implausibility index that tracks the magnitude and type of policymaker judgement based on the structural shocks required to return policymaker judgement. We show how to use the methods for practical use in the policy environment and also apply the techniques to condition DSGE model forecasts on: (i) the long history of published forecasts from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand; (ii) constant interest rate forecasts; and (iii) inflation forecasts from a Bayesian VAR currently in use in the policy environment at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
Response of phytoplankton to nutrient enrichment with high growth rates in a tropical monsoonal estuary - Zuari estuary, India

Present study is about the impact of macronutrient enrichment on phytoplankton biomass and community structure in a tropical monsoonal estuary. In situ experiments carried out during the pre-monsoon period (February-March 2006), showed that the response time of phytoplankton to nutrient enhancement was 24-32 h. Phytoplankton biomass increased sizably, indicating nitrate and silicate limitation for phytoplankton growth. An increase in 23µg chl a l -1 resulted in an uptake of 10µM nitrate, 0. 6µM phosphate and 17µM silicate. Phytoplankton showed high growth rates with an average value of 1. 36µg chl l -1 d -1 . This phytoplankton community was largely dominated by diatoms (>96%), particularly chain forming species. Relative preference index (RPI) value for nitrate was >1, suggesting that, irrespective of the ambient ammonium concentration, estuarine autotrophs preferred nitrate. Few species like Skeletonema costatum and Thalassionema nitzschioides exhibited the ability to withstand hypoxic condition.
Moist Baroclinic Instability in the Presence of Surface–Atmosphere Coupling

Abstract The influence of convective heating on baroclinic instability in the presence of surface sensible heat and moisture fluxes is investigated. Following previous numerical work, a two-dimensional continuous model on an f plane incorporates diabatic heating effects due to cumulus convection and surface sensible heat flux using parameterizations based on a wave-induced unstable boundary layer and associated moist convective destabilization. The temperature-damping effect of surface sensible heat flux is assumed to decrease exponentially with height, and the vertical distribution of convective heating uses a prescribed profile. The atmosphere is assumed to overlie an oceanic surface. In this configuration, convective heating occurs in the wave’s cold sector. General forms of the dispersion relation and eigenfunction are derived analytically. Results show that the most unstable wave is modified by the effect of convective latent heating. With weak convection, the wave’s structure does not change much, w.
The Ontology of Quantum Theory

An interpretation of the quantum theory is proposed, allowing an explanation of the origins of the theory principles and its mathematical formalism. In contrast to the hitherto interpretations it is based on the ontology assuming existence of omniscience. The interpretation proposed explains ‐ in consistence with the relativity theory ‐ the results of the correlation experiments implying that an unobserved elementary particle does not exist objectively (beyond our consciousness) or that a quantum system makes o non-divisive unity bound through non-spacetime interactions. According to this interpretation, both these possibilities occur simultaneously.
Statistical Tests for Neutrality : Review Nötralite İçin İstatistiksel Testler

Copyright © 2017 by Türkiye Klinikleri ABSTRACT Neutrality tests are used to test whether there is balance in the populations. And they are also used to test whether there is selection on an allele from a large number of alleles in the populations. Statistical tests for neutrality are important and useful tools for population genetics. Since the development of molecular genetics techniques allowed to obtain nucleotide sequences for the study of population genetics, a number of neutrality tests have been developed with the objective to facilitate the interpretation of an increasing volume of molecular data. Since Motoo Kimura (1968) first suggested that most polymorphisms are selectively neutral testing the neutral hypothesis has been one of the prime objectives of molecular population genetics. A number of statistical tests for neutrality have been developed in recent decades. Statistical tests for neutrality have been widely used in population genetics analyses, not only to reject the neutral theory but also as summary statistics to facilitate the interpretation of DNA sequence data in populations. Although most of these tests were originally developed to detect the effect of positive selection, they are also affected by demographic processes. An important family of neutrality tests is based on the frequency spectrum of nucleotide polymorphisms. The classical tests of this family are proposed by Tajima (1989), Fu and Li (1993), Fay and Wu (2000) and by Zeng (2006). This article focuses on describing these statistical methods and their rationale. Simulations indicate that Tajima’s test is generally most powerful among tests within this class.
Coding of intraspecific nucleotide polymorphisms: A tool to resolve reticulate evolutionary relationships in the ITS of beech trees (Fagus L., Fagaceae)

Abstract The internal transcribed spacers ITS1 and ITS2 of the nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA) have recently been found to display remarkable intraspecific polymorphism, a feature suggested as limiting their value for phylogenetic reconstructions. A comparative study of oligonucleotide motives and intraindividual nucleotide variability across all species of the tree genus Fagus (beech) shows, however, that this intraspecific ITS polymorphism follows a particular pattern, which can be used to detect reticulation and ancient polymorphism within the genus. Coding ITS polymorphisms as phylogenetically informative characters, moreover, resulted in better‐resolved phylogenies than traditional ‘base‐per‐base’ maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood analyses.
COASTAL RISKS, NATURE-BASED DEFENSES AND THE ECONOMICS OF ADAPTATION: AN APPLICATION IN THE GULF OF MEXICO, USA

The need to reduce risks from coastal storms and climate change in coastal areas has given rise to efforts to make greater use of integrated ecosystem-based approaches. Assessment of the role and cost efficiency of adaptation measures is increasingly demanded. Applying the Economics of Climate Adaptation framework in the US Gulf Coast, we compare nature-based defenses, artificial defenses, and policy measures for adaptation and risk reduction and quantify their costs and benefits under a variety of economic growth and climate change scenarios. Our analyses are spatially explicit and all models, tools and information are open source. The framework includes (i) a probabilistic assessment of hazards, (ii) estimation of damages and (iii) assessment of adaptation and risk reduction measures. We perform sensitivity analyses to understand the parameters that created the most variation in risk assessment and most influenced estimates of cost effectiveness. We find that high rates of economic growth and coastal development are likely to create greater risks in the near term than climate change, due to the increase in exposed assets. Nature-based solutions such as oyster reef and marsh restoration are particularly cost effective, but their cost-effectiveness is highly dependent on where these measures are used. As decision-makers look for the most cost effective group of measures for adaptation and risk reduction, these approaches and results should be particularly useful for informing management priorities.
A new proof of Markov's braid theorem

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new proof of Markov’s braid theorem, in terms of Seifert circles and Reidemeister moves. This means that the proof will be of combinatorial and essentially 2-dimensional nature. One characteristic feature of our approach is that nowhere in the proof will we use or refer to the braid axis. This allows for greater flexibility in various transformations of the diagrams considered. Other proofs of Markov’s theorem can be found in [2], [3], [4] and [5]. As in Vogel’s paper [6], ”closed braid” will be understood to mean a special kind of diagram of an oriented link: the diagram lives on a 2-dimensional sphere and is supposed to have Seifert circles that are nested in one another forming a single chain of concentric circles with compatible orientations. Let us recall that every diagram may be transformed into a closed braid (this is called Alexander’s theorem, see [1]). One particularly nice way to do it is by using reducing moves of Vogel, see [6]. Such a move is simply a type II Reidemeister move that is performed on two arcs belonging to different Seifert circles with orientations as in figure 1. Reduction moves will be the main tool in our proof of Markov’s theorem.
Anaphora Analysis based on ABBYY Compreno Linguistic Technologies

This paper presents an anaphora analysis system that was an entry for the Dialog 2014 anaphora analysis competition. The system is based on ABBYY Compreno linguistic technologies. For some of the tasks of this competition we used basic features of the Compreno technology, while others required building new rules and mechanisms or making adjustments to the existing ones. Below we briefly describe the mechanisms (both basic and new) that were used in our system for this competition.