Temporal expert profiling: With an application to T-shaped expert finding

Cost optimization continues to be a critical concern for many human resources departments. The key is to balance between costs and business value. In particular, computer science organizations prefer to hire people who are expert in only one skill area and have a slight superficial knowledge in other areas that gives them the ability to collaborate across different aspects of project. Community Question Answering networks provide good platforms for people and organizations to share knowledge and find experts. An important issue in expert finding is that an expert has to constantly update his knowledge after being saturated in his field of expertise to still be identified as expert. A person who fails to preserve his expertise is likely to lose his expertise. This work justifies this question that does take the concept of time into account improve the quality of expertise retrieval. We propose a new method for T-shaped expert finding that is based on temporal expert profiling. The proposed method takes the temporal property of expertise into account to mine the shape of expertise for each candidate expert based on his profile. To this end, for each candidate expert, we take snapshots of his expertise trees at regular time intervals and learn the relation between temporal changes in different expertise trees and candidates’ profile. Finally, we use a filtering technique that is applied on top of the profiling method, to find shape of expertise for candidate experts. Experimental results on a large test collection show the superiority of the proposed method in terms of quality of results in comparison with state-of-the-art.     

Sexual Socialization Messages in Television Programming Produced for Adolescents

This study examined sexual content in American prime-time programs popular among the tween (9–14 years of age) audience on broadcast networks and programs aired on the most popular adolescent TV networks—an understudied area of media research. Consistent with past research, the majority of broadcast shows contained sexual talk and behaviors, as did adolescent shows. No significant difference was observed between the two types of shows regarding the frequency with which sexual behaviors were presented in a given hour of TV programming. The amount of scene focus paid to sexual themes varied, but studio audiences were almost always heard positively reinforcing these messages. The findings are discussed with respect to social cognitive and cultivation theories.     

Reading and writing ability and drop out in the Swedish upper secondary school

A three-year programme in upper secondary school is compulsory in Sweden. In reality, some youngsters refrain from applying to the upper secondary school (8 per cent) or drop out in advance (9 per cent). In Stockholm the Youth Centre has been assigned to arrange individual programmes for these pupils. The aim of this study is to investigate their reading and writing ability and to relate this retrospectively to their school experience. Instruments measuring reading comprehension, vocabulary and dictation were carried out on 286 respondents; in addition, background information concerning school attainment was collected. Ten respondents were selected, five high and five low achievers. An unstructured interview was used to investigate their home background, school and reading experiences. Students attending individual programmes at the Youth Centre had lower than average reading and writing abilities in comparison to students at the vocational programmes in upper secondary school. The whole group is characterized by low marks, immigrant background and partial school attendance. The analyses of interview statements reveal a common category - powerlessness - for those with and without reading disabilities. Separate categories were for high achievers - boredom - and for low achievers - lack of opportunity.     

Student victimization by peers in elementary schools: individual, teacher-class, and school-level predictors

Objectives

This study examined individual and contextual factors that explain students’ victimization by peers among 4th- through 6th-grade Jewish and Arab students.

Method

A total of 120 homeroom teachers and 3,375 students from 47 schools participated. The study explored how students’ reports of violence are influenced by individual factors (gender, age, perception of school climate, victimization by teachers, and fear) teacher-class factors (school climate, homeroom teachers’ characteristics such as self-efficacy, and education) and cultural affiliation as a school level factor.

Results

The results showed that levels of victimization vary significantly between classes and between schools. However, the vast majority of variation in students’ victimization lay at the individual level. Factors such as fear, physical and emotional victimization by teachers, and gender affected levels of students’ victimization by peers.

Conclusions

Students victimized by peers are more likely to be victimized by their teachers and to miss school because of their fear of violence. Further research should be conducted to investigate additional teacher, class and school factors that can predict levels of students’ victimization.

Practice implication

Based on the study's results, efforts to deal with school violence should be targeted to students and school staff. It is essential to design and implement a “whole school” approach that includes participation of the entire school community. Furthermore, intensive individual treatment should be given to victimized students to improve their sense of safety and protection on school property. In addition, the findings emphasized the need to design and implement school intervention programs in a sensitive way that takes into consideration children's developmental stages and other factors that affect their levels of victimization. The results showed that younger children do not take advantage of the many positive effects that can be achieved from positive school policy and good relationships with staff. It might be that more efforts should be made to raise victimized students’ awareness by emphasizing that schools have rules that are there to protect them.     

Validation of the short form of the career development inventory with an Iranian high school sample

A short 33-item form of the Career Development Inventory was validated on a sample of 310 Iranian high school students. Factor analysis indicated that attitude and cognitive subscale items loaded on their respective factors, and that internal reliability coefficients at all levels were satisfactory to good. Support for validity was demonstrated by associations in the expected direction for career decidedness and career decision-making self-efficacy. This short form of the inventory shows promise as a measure of career maturity with students from a non-Western country.     

Finite element analysis and modeling of water absorption by date pits during a soaking process

Date pits for feed preparation or oil extraction are soaked in water to soften before milling or extrusion. Knowledge of water absorption by the date pits helps in better managing the soaking duration. In this research, the process of water absorption by date pits was modeled and analyzed using Fick's second law of diffusion, finite element approach, and Peleg model. The moisture content of the pits reached to its saturation level of 41.5% (wet basis) after 10 d. The estimated coefficient of diffusion was 9.89×10-12 m2/s. The finite element model with a proposed ellipsoid geometry for a single date pit and the analytical model fitted better to the experimental data with R2 of 0.98. The former model slightly overestimated the moisture content of the pits during the initial stages of the soaking and the latter model generally underestimated this variable through the entire stages of soaking process.     

Bread wheat varieties as influenced by different nitrogen levels

INTRODUCTION Dera Ismail Khan lies in Pakistan’s arid zone (71.07° longitude, 31.57° latitude and 500 m above sea level). This zone is in the extreme south of (NWFP) Pakistan at the bank of the River Indus. Dera Ismail Khan is bounded by Sulaiman Range to the West, the Indus River on the East, Marwat and Bhit- tani Ranges on the North and Vehowa Nala (Punjab) on the South. Besides certain local variability the area is comprised of four basic divisions viz mountains, a series …     

An integrated, multiparametric flow cytometry chip using ��microfluidic drifting�� based three-dimensional hydrodynamic focusing

In this work, we demonstrate an integrated, single-layer, miniature flow cytometry device that is capable of multi-parametric particle analysis. The device integrates both particle focusing and detection components on-chip, including a “microfluidic drifting” based three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic focusing component and a series of optical fibers integrated into the microfluidic architecture to facilitate on-chip detection. With this design, multiple optical signals (i.e., forward scatter, side scatter, and fluorescence) from individual particles can be simultaneously detected. Experimental results indicate that the performance of our flow cytometry chip is comparable to its bulky, expensive desktop counterpart. The integration of on-chip 3D particle focusing with on-chip multi-parametric optical detection in a single-layer, mass-producible microfluidic device presents a major step towards low-cost flow cytometry chips for point-of-care clinical diagnostics.     

An integrated, multiparametric flow cytometry chip using "microfluidic drifting" based three-dimensional hydrodynamic focusing

In this work, we demonstrate an integrated, single-layer, miniature flow cytometry device that is capable of multi-parametric particle analysis. The device integrates both particle focusing and detection components on-chip, including a "microfluidic drifting" based three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic focusing component and a series of optical fibers integrated into the microfluidic architecture to facilitate on-chip detection. With this design, multiple optical signals (i.e., forward scatter, side scatter, and fluorescence) from individual particles can be simultaneously detected. Experimental results indicate that the performance of our flow cytometry chip is comparable to its bulky, expensive desktop counterpart. The integration of on-chip 3D particle focusing with on-chip multi-parametric optical detection in a single-layer, mass-producible microfluidic device presents a major step towards low-cost flow cytometry chips for point-of-care clinical diagnostics.