Elaboration on the Culturally Informed Iranian Hierarchical Wisdom Model: Comparison With Sternberg’s ACCEL Model

Using a grounded theory approach to the study of historical texts and an expert interview, we developed the Iranian hierarchical wisdom model (IHWM; Karami & Ghahremani, 2016). According to IHWM, there are three levels to wisdom: practical intelligence, wise, and sage. In this article, we discuss the model and elaborate on it. Next, we examine how the IHWM is connected to Sternberg’s Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership Model (ACCEL; Sternberg, 2017). We discuss the importance of advanced thinking skills in both models. The other similarity between the two models is the importance of making positive, meaningful, and enduring differences to the world. However, the IHWM’s priority is self-actualization and personal integrity. Further, IHWM as a culturally informed wisdom model perceives teaching as the best means to achieve this goal, rather than leadership positions.     

Biological activities of chamomile （Matricaria chamomile） flowers＇ extract against the survival and egg laying of the cattle fever tick （Acari Ixodidae）

In the present work, the potential of acaricidal activity of chamomile flowers＇ extract was studied against engorged Rhipicephalus annulatus tick under laboratory condition. For this purpose, the engorged females ofRhipicephalus annulatus were exposed to two-fold serial dilutions of chamomile flowers＇ extract （0.5%, 1.0%, 2.0%, 4.0% and 8.0%） using ＂dipping method＂ in vitro. The engorged ticks were immersed in different plant dilutions （five ticks for each dilution） for l rain and they were immediately incubated in separate Petri dishes for each replicate at 26℃ and 80% relative humidity. Mortality rate for each treatment was recorded 5 d after incubation. The mortality rate caused by different dilutions of chamomile flowers＇ extract ranged from 6.67% to 26.7%, whereas no mortality was recorded for non-treated control group. The mass of produced eggs varied from 0.23 g （in 8.0% solution） to 0.58 g （in control）, with no statistical differences between the treatments and control （/＇〉0.05）. Also the chamomile flowers＇ extract in highest concentration used （8.0%） caused 46.67% failure in egg laying in engorged females while no failure was observed for non-treated control group. Macroscopic observations indicated that in effective concentrations of plant （4.0% and 8.0%）, patchy hemorrhagic swelling appeared on the skin of treated ticks. The results presented for the first time in this study imply that chamomile may be considered as a promising plant for biocontrol of cattle fever tick disease in the field condition.     

Year-long Undergraduate Research Projects

Abstract

Undergraduate research has become the centerpiece of many institutions of higher education’s efforts to attract and recruit high school graduates. Since 1987, throughout my tenure at Bloomsburg University, I have involved over 20 students in my research. In my experience, there is clear evidence that students of mathematics substantially benefit if they engage in research during their undergraduate studies. Whether the student plans to apply for employment after graduation or continue with graduate studies, the undergraduate research experience has a tremendous effect on the student’s success. In this paper, I will provide some personal insight on my experience in working with undergraduate students. In most cases, my experience has been in working with one student on a long term (one semester or mostly year-long) research problems. I will discuss my approach to identifying students, the type of projects, providing guidance, and finally the challenges that we face in supervising undergraduate research. To exemplify, emphasis will be placed on the status of a recent 1-year research project, which was funded by the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and a senior undergraduate student worked on it for one year.     

The accuracy of student self-assessments of English-Chinese bidirectional interpretation: a longitudinal quantitative study

The accuracy of self-assessment has long been examined empirically in higher education research, producing a substantial body of literature that casts light on numerous potential moderators. However, despite the growing popularity of self-assessment in interpreter training and education, very limited evidence-based research has been initiated to shed insight into the formative assessment of language interpretation. This longitudinal study was therefore conducted to investigate to what extent student self-assessments of English-Chinese interpretation are accurate and how the accuracy level would change over time. Major findings are: (1) in general self-assessment accuracy improved over time for both interpreting directions; (2) regarding the three scoring dimensions of information completeness, fluency of delivery and target language quality, there was greater self-assessment accuracy for English-to-Chinese interpretation than in the other direction; (3) while information completeness was most accurately self-assessed in English-to-Chinese direction, the pattern was reversed in the opposite direction; and (4) the students tended to over-score the three quality dimensions for Chinese-to-English interpretation at each time point. These results are discussed in the light of the accuracy issue, its longitudinal trend and potential factors affecting the self-assessment of bidirectional interpretation.     

An extended discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm for the dynamic facility layout problem

We extended an improved version of the discrete particle swarm optimization （DPSO） algorithm proposed by Liao et al.（2007） to solve the dynamic facility layout problem （DFLP）. A computational study was performed with the existing heuristic algorithms, including the dynamic programming （DP）, genetic algorithm （GA）, simulated annealing （SA）, hybrid ant system （HAS）, hybrid simulated annealing （SA-EG）, hybrid genetic algorithms （NLGA and CONGA）. The proposed DPSO algorithm, SA, HAS, GA, DP, SA-EG, NLGA, and CONGA obtained the best solutions for 33, 24, 20, 10, 12, 20, 5, and 2 of the 48 problems from （Balakrishnan and Cheng, 2000）, respectively. These results show that the DPSO is very effective in dealing with the DFLP. The extended DPSO also has very good computational efficiency when the problem size increases.     

Non-iterative pole placement technique: A step further

This paper comes back to the hard problem of pole placement by static output feedback: let a triplet of matrices {A;B;C}∈R^n×n×R^n×m×R^p×n be given, find a matrix K∈R^m×p such that the spectrum of A+BKC equals a specified set. More precisely, this article focuses on the derivation of non-iterative techniques, based upon the notion of eigenstructure assignment, to solve the problem, especially when Kimura's condition does not hold. Some solutions can sometimes be found.     

On frequency distribution of impulsive feedback control times

The present work considers an impulsive feedback control problem governed by a system of ODEs defined on a class of isolated time scales. The control is activated once the unique solution’s trajectory leaves a bounded connected domain. A periodicity of the controlled system’s solution in the context of shift-invariant time scales are discussed. Making use of the Δ-measure theory, a cumulative distribution of the control times is introduced. Then with the help of dynamic inequalities on time scales such as Opial-type inequality, upper estimations for the occurrence frequency of the control times are obtained. A uniform distribution of the control times mod 1 is studied and a necessary condition for the uniformity of distribution of control times in terms of critical dynamic of the controlled system is obtained.