Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Faculty & Research Working Paper Long-term Effectiveness of a Transitional Leadership Development Program: An Exploratory Study

Although leadership development programs are in high demand, research into their long-term outcomes has been sparse. The main purpose of this article is to explore how a transformational leadership development program can affect the lives of its participants. We address three fundamental questions: (1) what do transformational leadership programs transform? , (2) how does the change process occur? , and (3) how are behavioral changes maintained over time? To set the stage for this research, we begin by looking at why executives attend leadership development programs. Subsequently, we present the results of an exploratory longitudinal outcome study of a leadership development program for senior executives. Changes are evaluated both quantitatively through test-retest results of a 360° survey across 12 key leadership dimensions, taken by 11 senior executives in 2005 and again in 2006. We also explore change qualitatively through semi-structured interviews with the executives in our sample. The results of this exploratory study show that, for one cohort of participants who have completed the program, individual 360° ratings one year post-program in several GELI dimensions have improved. Dimensions that show marked increase in ratings included rewarding and feedback and emotional intelligence—we posit that this indicates an enhanced level of self-awareness among participants. We identified several positive change factors mentioned consistently by participants in this program: involvement in group coaching; realistic action plans; acting out and experimenting with new behaviors; and follow-up partnerships in a learning community. We look at the best practices that enhance individual development and change, and discuss limitations of this study as well as implications for future research.
All Users are (Not) Created Equal

Relatively little work has empirically examined use and non-use of social technologies as more than a dichotomous binary, despite increasing calls to do so. This paper compares three different forms of non/use that might otherwise fall under the single umbrella of Facebook "user": (1) those who have a current active account; (2) those who have deactivated their account; and (3) those who have considered deactivating but not actually done so. A subset of respondents (N=256) from a larger, demographically representative sample of internet users completed measures for usage and perceptions of Facebook, Facebook addiction, privacy experiences and behaviors, and demographics. Multinomial logistic regression modeling shows four specific variables as most predictive of a respondent's type: negative effects from "addictive" use, subjective intensity of Facebook usage, number of Facebook friends, and familiarity with or use of Facebook's privacy settings. These findings both fill gaps left by, and help resolve conflicting expectations from, prior work. Furthermore, they demonstrate how valuable insights can be gained by disaggregating "users" based on different forms of engagement with a given technology.
Cognitive network science quantifies feelings expressed in suicide letters and Reddit mental health communities

Writing messages is key to expressing feelings. This study adopts cognitive network science to reconstruct how individuals report their feelings in clinical narratives like suicide notes or mental health posts. We achieve this by reconstructing syntactic/semantic associations between conceptsin texts as co-occurrences enriched with affective data. We transform 142 suicide notes and 77,000 Reddit posts from the r/anxiety, r/depression, r/schizophrenia, and r/do-it-your-own (r/DIY) forums into 5 cognitive networks, each one expressing meanings and emotions as reported by authors. These networks reconstruct the semantic frames surrounding 'feel', enabling a quantification of prominent associations and emotions focused around feelings. We find strong feelings of sadness across all clinical Reddit boards, added to fear r/depression, and replaced by joy/anticipation in r/DIY. Semantic communities and topic modelling both highlight key narrative topics of 'regret', 'unhealthy lifestyle' and 'low mental well-being'. Importantly, negative associations and emotions co-existed with trustful/positive language, focused on 'getting better'. This emotional polarisation provides quantitative evidence that online clinical boards possess a complex structure, where users mix both positive and negative outlooks. This dichotomy is absent in the r/DIY reference board and in suicide notes, where negative emotional associations about regret and pain persist but are overwhelmed by positive jargon addressing loved ones. Our quantitative comparisons provide strong evidence that suicide notes encapsulate different ways of expressing feelings compared to online Reddit boards, the latter acting more like personal diaries and relief valve. Our findings provide an interpretable, quantitative aid for supporting psychological inquiries of human feelings in digital and clinical settings.
A Multilevel Perspective on the Design and Analysis of Intervention Studies

The level (pupil, classroom or school) at which an educational intervention is assigned affects both the kinds of questions which can be answered in evaluation research, and the statistical methods used to answer them. This paper sets out ways of analysing different kinds of designs using multilevel models. It also considers practical issues such as the method used to allocate interventions, leakage, integrity of delivery, and cost, and how these interact with the more technical issues of model specification. These practical issues are illustrated by two recent British intervention studies. Resume Le niveau - eleve, classe ou ecole - auquel s'adresse une intervention educative affecte tout a la fois le genre de questions qui peuvent trouver reponse dans la recherche evaluative et les methodes statistiques pour y repondre. Cet article presente des voies pour analyser differents types de "design" qui utilisent des modeles a plusieurs niveaux. Il traite aussi de certains aspects pratiques tels que la methode.
Satisfaction of Graduate Students with Their Distance Learning Experiences

The US is not developing its knowledge capital at the rate of many other nations. While other nations are dramatically increasing their knowledge base by increasing the percentage of their population with graduate degrees, the US level of citizens with graduate degrees is remaining stagnant (Hicks, 2004). To have the most immediate effect on levels of US workers with graduate education and to reach the greatest number of workers who have left academia and have established themselves in careers, education must be delivered in a manner that is the least disruptive to their lifestyles. The difficulty in availing themselves of campus-based learning may make distance education the most desirable option for graduate students due to its convenience. To develop our employment workforce with the graduate education that is required, we must address student satisfaction. This study surveyed graduate students across a research-intensive university taking distance courses in the fall of 2007 to address their satisfaction with the constructs of management, organization, membership, and instruction. The response rate was 47.2 percent. The demographic factors of age, external responsibilities, personal technical capability, and proximity to campus were included in a Manova to measure the effect of those factors on satisfaction with the five constructs. Age categories, levels of external responsibilities and commitment, and proximity to campus were not significant in predicting satisfaction among adult graduate students with their distance learning experience. The level of prior experience with distance learning was the only significant predictor of satisfaction.
Dual-Task Gait as a Predictive Tool for Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults: A Systematic Review

The use of the dual-task model as a cognitive-motor interface has been extensively investigated in cross-sectional studies as a training task in cognitive impairment. However, few existing longitudinal studies prove the usefulness of this tool as a clinical marker of cognitive impairment in older people. What is the evidence in prospective studies about dual-task gait as a predictor of cognitive impairment in older adults? This study aims to review and discuss the current state of knowledge in prospective studies on the use of dual-task gait as a predictive tool for cognitive impairment in older adults. The methodology used was a systematic review, according to the PRISMA criteria for the search, summarize and report. A search in 3 databases (Pubmed, Web of Science, and Scopus) was carried out until April 2021. The search terms used were: “(gait OR walking) AND (cognitive decline) AND (dual-task) AND (follow-up OR longitudinal OR long-term OR prospective OR cohort OR predict). ” We included prospective research articles with older people with cognitive evaluation at the beginning and the end of the follow-up and dual-task gait paradigm as initial evaluation associated with the presentation of cognitive impairment prediction using any dual-task gait parameters. After exclusion criteria, 12 studies were reviewed. The results indicate that eight studies consider dual-task gait parameters a useful cognitive-motor tool, finding that some of the evaluated parameters of dual-task gait significantly correlate with cognitive impairment over time. The most promising DT parameters associated with cognitive impairment prediction seem to be gait speed, speed cost, DT time, numbers of words during DT, among others. In sum, this study reviews the variety of dual-task gait parameters and their relevance as a simple tool for early cognitive impairment screening, opening a diagnostic window for the screening of cognitive impairment in older people.
Skeletal calcite in living scleractinian corals: microboring fillings, not primary skeletal deposits.

1. For reviews, see S. Appelle, Psychol. Bull. 78, 266 (1971); M. M. Taylor, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 53,763 (1963). 2. Although the fact of orientation anisotropy is well established, its incidence has not been documented, as far as we are aware. Two earlier studies of anisotropy [H. Leibowitz, N. A. Myers, D. A. Grant, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 45, 76 (1955); J. C. Ogilvie and M. M. Taylor, ibid. 49, 898 (1955)] used a total of 11 subjects. Of these subjects, one showed no difference in performance for different orientations and two performed better for obliques. 3. M. H. Segall, D. T. Campbell, M. J. Herskovits, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1966). 4. R. C. Annis and B. Frost, Science 182, 729 (1973). 5. Titmus Optical Company, Petersburg, Virginia. 6. Subjects with prescribed corrective lenses were required to wear them during testing. If any subjects scored below normal values on the T-O vision tester or exhibited large differences in acuity for orthogonal gratings in the experimental situation, we attempted to improve their performance to normal with lenses. Those with obvious amblyopias were dropped from the sample. Since we did not refract our subjects to ensure a perfect optical correction, we were concerned that some cases of uncorrected astigmatism might have influenced our results. However, when we computed an astigmatism ratio by dividing the acuity for one axis by that for the orthogonal axis, the distribution for both Chinese and Caucasian samples approximated that reported for normal subjects by D. E. Mitchell et al. (11). Thus, we conclude that the differences between Chinese and Caucasian scores reported here were not produced by systematic differences in astigmatism. 7. Contrast is defined as Lmax -Lmn
CSPN++: Learning Context and Resource Aware Convolutional Spatial Propagation Networks for Depth Completion

Depth Completion deals with the problem of converting a sparse depth map to a dense one, given the corresponding color image. Convolutional spatial propagation network (CSPN) is one of the state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods of depth completion, which recovers structural details of the scene. In this paper, we propose CSPN++, which further improves its effectiveness and efficiency by learning adaptive convolutional kernel sizes and the number of iterations for the propagation, thus the context and computational resources needed at each pixel could be dynamically assigned upon requests. Specifically, we formulate the learning of the two hyper-parameters as an architecture selection problem where various configurations of kernel sizes and numbers of iterations are first defined, and then a set of soft weighting parameters are trained to either properly assemble or select from the pre-defined configurations at each pixel. In our experiments, we find weighted assembling can lead to significant accuracy improvements, which we referred to as "context-aware CSPN", while weighted selection, "resource-aware CSPN" can reduce the computational resource significantly with similar or better accuracy. Besides, the resource needed for CSPN++ can be adjusted w.r. t. the computational budget automatically. Finally, to avoid the side effects of noise or inaccurate sparse depths, we embed a gated network inside CSPN++, which further improves the performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSPN++on the KITTI depth completion benchmark, where it significantly improves over CSPN and other SoTA methods.
Role of NGF/TrkA signaling milieu in depressogenic induction of rat brain

Objectives: Stress-induced helplessness in rodents constitutes a well-defined model to investigate neurobiological mechanism of depression. In the present investigation, we investigated the correlation between stress induced helplessness and NGF, its receptor TrkA with two of its principal downstream signaling molecule ERK1, 2 and Akt. Background: Nerve Growth factor (NGF) regulates many physiological functions in the brain, alteration of which has been well associated with the pathogenesis of depression. Method: NGF level was measured by Sandwich ELISA and its cognate receptor TrkA and downstream molecules ERK 1, 2, Akt were assayed by Western blot. Result: Chronic stressed rats exhibited down regulation of NGF and TrkA along with ERK1, 2 and Akt. This parallels with the decreased escape behavior. The antidepressant drug Fluoxetine hydrochloride (FLX) treated rats exhibited significant increase in escape deficit in stress induced Learned helplessness. This was correlated with the restoration of NGF levels, its cognate receptor TrkA and expression of its down stream signaling molecules ERK1, 2 and Akt in hippocampus of rat brain. Conclusion: This supports the notion that pharmacological restoration of NGF and its receptor TrkA may be of therapeutic value for the treatment of depression.
Predictive Mapping of Transmission Risk of a Soil-Transmitted Helminth across East Africa: Findings from Community Prevalence Surveys

Background: Despite being identified as a major health concern and neglected tropical disease, Ascariasis, caused by Ascaris lumbricoides , a soil-transmitted helminth, ranks among the most common infections worldwide. Â Methods: Based on prevalence data from the community surveys across East Africa for 1975-2009, we used ecological niche modeling to summarize and predict the spatial distribution of A. lumbricoides â€™ transmission risk. Â Results: Projection of this model across East Africa identified 51.4% of the region as suitable for A. lumbricoides transmission, with least suitable areas in the Sahara and the Somali-Chalbi deserts. Partial area under the curve (AUC) tests based on independent data showed that our model predictions were better than random expectations in predicting infection risk of A. lumbricoides ; the model successfully identified areas of high and low infection risk in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Â Conclusions: Although preliminary, this occurrence-environment mapping approach provides predictions that can guide education and mitigation efforts in the broader East African region.
Corn Processing Coproducts from Ethanol Production

Increase in demand for ethanol as a fuel additive has resulted in growth in ethanol production. Ethanol is produced from corn by either wet milling or dry grind processing. In wet milling, the corn kernel is fractionated into different components, resulting in several coproducts. Wet mill plants are capital intensive because of equipment requirements and typically are corporate owned. In dry grind processing, the corn kernel is not fractionated and only one coproduct, distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), is generated. Dry grind plants require less equipment and capital than wet mills. They typically are producer owned and add direct benefits to rural economies. Most of the increase in ethanol production during the past decade is attributed to growth in the dry grind industry. The marketing of coproducts provides income to offset processing costs. For dry grind plants, this is especially important, because only one coproduct is available. Several issues affect DDGS marketing. The increasing volume of DDGS accompanying ethanol production could reduce market value; high phosphorus content could limit use of DDGS, because of animal waste disposal issues. Technologies to remove germ and fiber from DDGS could produce a coproduct suitable for feeding to nonruminants; this would expand the markets for DDGS. Reducing phosphorus in DDGS would sustain markets for conventional DDGS. New technologies could contribute to long term stability of dry grind plants.
Cauchy-Schwarz Regularized Autoencoder

Recent work in unsupervised learning has focused on efficient inference and learning in latent variables models. Training these models by maximizing the evidence (marginal likelihood) is typically intractable. Thus, a common approximation is to maximize the Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) instead. Variational autoencoders (VAE) are a powerful and widely-used class of generative models that optimize the ELBO efficiently for large datasets. However, the VAE's default Gaussian choice for the prior imposes a strong constraint on its ability to represent the true posterior, thereby degrading overall performance. A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) would be a richer prior, but cannot be handled efficiently within the VAE framework because of the intractability of the Kullback-Leibler divergence for GMMs. We challenge the adoption of the VAE framework on this specific point in favor of one with an analytical solution for Gaussian mixture prior. To perform efficient inference for GMM priors, we introduce a new constrained objective based on the Cauchy-Schwarz divergence, which can be computed analytically for GMMs. This new objective allows us to incorporate richer, multi-modal priors into the auto-encoding framework.We provide empirical studies on a range of datasets and show that our objective improves upon variational auto-encoding models in density estimation, unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised learning, and face analysis.
Quality-of-service (QoS) for virtual networks in OpenFlow MPLS transport networks

Network virtualization presents a new networking paradigm that allows to accommodate multiple isolated virtual networks in one physical network. OpenFlow-based switches are a promising technology to achieve isolation in the transport network. However, these lack carrier-grade QoS support. On the contrary, MPLS is a scalable transport network technology with carrier-grade QoS support. It can isolate multiple QoS classes. Still, when accommodating multiple virtual networks with carrier-grade QoS support, we need to now isolate virtual networks in the same QoS class. MPLS lacks programmability to do that. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to isolate virtual networks in the same QoS class, by using OpenFlow in combination with MPLS in order to utilize the merits offered by both technologies. The core of our proposal does not need modification in the architecture from both. In addition, we also present extensions for faster response in the transport network. The evaluation of our proposal on a prototype proves the validity of our scheme as well as its usefulness in future networks.
Multiple cerebral thrombosis in fletcher factor (prekallikrein) deficiency: A case report

Despite markedly prolonged activated partial thromboplastin times (APTT) patients with Fletcher factor (prekallikrein) deficiency do not clinically bleed. However, there is one reported case of myocardial infarction associated with prekallikrein deficiency. These clinical observations suggest that the contact mechanism has a minor role in normal in vivo hemostatic function. We report a further two cases of prekallikrein deficiency in Caucasian siblings. The propositus presented with multipie cerebral thrombosis. Cautious anticoagulation resulted in massive cerebral hemorrhage and death of this patient. The sibling was investigated in an attempt to establish a possible defective fibrinolytic pathway in vivo. New sensitive tests for fibrinolysis were used. These included radioimmunoassay of fibrin degradation product “D,” Bβ 15‐42, and in vitro 125I‐labelled fibrin lysis assays. The plasma half‐life of prekallikrein in this patient was calculated to be 58 hr. Family studies of heterozygotes were also performed. Prekallikrein deficiency is found not to be important in normal in vivo fibrinolysis, which possibly operates via tissue or vessel wall fibrinolytic activator release.
Does Variation in Malaria Vector Collection Methods Significantly Affect Entomologic Inoculation Rates

Background: Entomologic Inoculation Rate (EIR), the product of vector biting rate and the sporozoites rate or the proportion of mosquitoes with sporozoites in the salivary glands has been strongly correlated with malaria prevalence. This study was undertaken to determine whether mosquito collection method significantly affected EIR estimates. Method: Study was conducted in 7 local Government Areas (LGAs) of Bayelsa State, across 3 eco-vegetational zones (fresh water forest, brackish water swamp forest, mangrove coastal water forest). Three methods were used for mosquito collections: Pyrethrum Spray Catch (SPC), Human Bait Catch (HBC) (Indoor), Human Bait Catch (Outdoor). EIR was calculated as per standard method. Results: EIR means obtained by PSC and HBC (Outdoor) methods were not significantly different (F=4.989; df=2; p<0.05), but significant differences were obtained between PSC and HBC (Indoor) estimates. These differences were also significantly influenced by eco-vegetational zones (F=3.92; df=2' p<0.05). Conclusions: It is advisable to compare EIRs obtained by the same mosquito collection methods as indices of malaria prevalence.