7,802 research outputs found

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure

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    A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium

    Analyzing Eurocities’ role in the Urban Agenda for the EU. Empowering cities in sustainable urban governance

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    Màster en Diplomàcia i Organitzacions Internacionals, Centre d'Estudis Internacionals. Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2022-2023. Tutora: Andrea NoferiniThis investigation aims to analyze the role of Eurocities’ network in the UAEU. Unveiling the implications this framework has for empowering cities and local entities within the urban governance structure at the EU level

    Therapeutic/Expressive Writing and Resilience Promotion for Nurses to Reduce Burnout Syndrome

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    COVID-19 accelerated the rate in which nurses were unable to maintain resilience and reduce burnout. This evidence-based DNP project obtained data from a therapeutic/expressive writing intervention and group resilience discussion with Women’s Care Center (WCC) nurses to improve resilience acuity and reduce symptoms associated with burnout syndrome. A review of previous studies indicated therapeutic/expressive writing and group resilience discussions have been beneficial in improving resilience and reducing burnout. A demographic and two preintervention surveys were completed by WCC nurses in the hospital relaxation room or skills lab. The Connor-Davidson RISC-25© was used to determine resilience scores for morning and evening shift nurses. The Maslach Burnout Inventory© (MBI) Survey for Medical Personnel was used to assess emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal achievement (PA) in the same groups. Participants (n =20) nurses completed the pre-intervention resilience and burnout surveys. Day and night shift nurses (n= 19) resilience mean average increased after the intervention 2.65 mean score (M = 83.31, SD =9.86) for the Connor-Davidson RISC-25© survey which is in the intermediate range: 50% of the population. The burnout mean for the morning shift nurses, EE (M = 21.88), DP (M = 4.88), and PA (M = 39.27) which indicated moderate burnout for all categories. The burnout means for evening shift nurses, EE (M = 17.33), DP (M = 7.22), and PA (M = 40.00), which fell within the moderate burnout range

    What issues do school staff describe as important when introducing a whole school attachment-based approach? A Reflexive Thematic Analysis

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    Research demonstrates that supporting children’s emotional needs promotes better learning outcomes (Geddes, 2018). In the United Kingdom, hundreds of schools are trained in whole school approaches that have a basis in attachment theory. These approaches emphasise the relational needs of pupils and prioritise their sense of safety. They are often referred to by schools and in the limited literature as ‘attachment aware’ approaches. The current study took place in a deprived inner East London borough. It has one of the highest proportions of children with social, emotional, and mental health needs in the country. Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) was used to provide an answer to the following research question: “What issues do school staff describe as important when introducing a whole school attachment-based approach?” Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted in three schools with a range of staff including senior leaders, teachers and support staff. The researcher constructed five overarching themes to organise 13 themes that reflected patterns in participant experience. These five overarching themes were ‘Context Affects Delivery’, ‘Training Must Resonate’, ‘Scope and Remit of School and School Staff Widens’, ‘Permission to Feel’ and ‘Not Running Alone with Them’. In the current climate, emotionally focused “approaches could be referred to as an addon to the real business of education” (Parker & Levinson, 2018: 9). This research argues that emotionally focused approaches such as whole school attachment-based approaches are well placed to meet the needs of the entire school community and promote increased pupil engagement. This study adds to the exponentially growing body of research on whole school attachment-based approaches. The research has implications for local and national practice due to the priority given to trauma-based approaches in recent government guidance

    The nexus between e-marketing, e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-loyalty: a cross-sectional study within the context of online SMEs in Ghana

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    The spread of the Internet, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have given impetus to online shopping in Ghana and the subregion. This situation has also created opportunities for SMEs to take advantage of online marketing technologies. However, there is a dearth of studies on the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty in terms of online shopping, thereby creating a policy gap on the prospects for business success for online SMEs in Ghana. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the main independent variable, e-marketing and the main dependent variable, e-loyalty, as well as the mediating roles of e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The study adopted a positivist stance with a quantitative method. The study was cross-sectional in nature with the adoption of a descriptive correlational design. A Structural Equation Modelling approach was employed to examine the nature of the associations between the independent, mediating and dependent variables. A sensitivity analysis was also conducted to control for the potential confounding effects of the demographic factors. A sample size of 1,293 residents in Accra, Ghana, who had previously shopped online, responded to structured questionnaire in an online survey via Google Docs. The IBM SPSS Amos 24 software was used to analyse the data collected. Positive associations were found between the key constructs in the study: e-marketing, e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-Loyalty. The findings from the study gave further backing to the diffusion innovation theory, resource-based view theory, and technology acceptance model. In addition, e-service quality and e-satisfaction individually and jointly mediated the relationship between e-marketing and e-loyalty. However, these mediations were partial, instead of an originally anticipated full mediation. In terms of value and contribution, this is the first study in a developing economy context to undertake a holistic examination of the key marketing performance variables within an online shopping context. The study uniquely tested the mediation roles of both e-service quality and e-satisfaction in the link between e-marketing and e-loyalty. The findings of the study are novel in the e-marketing literature as they unearthed the key antecedents of e-loyalty for online SMEs in a developing economy context. The study suggested areas for further related studies and also highlighted the limitations

    Data Tiling for Sparse Computation

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    Many real-world data contain internal relationships. Efficient analysis of these relationship data is crucial for important problems including genome alignment, network vulnerability analysis, ranking web pages, among others. Such relationship data is frequently sparse and analysis on it is called sparse computation. We demonstrate that the important technique of data tiling is more powerful than previously known by broadening its application space. We focus on three important sparse computation areas: graph analysis, linear algebra, and bioinformatics. We demonstrate data tiling's power by addressing key issues and providing significant improvements---to both runtime and solution quality---in each area. For graph analysis, we focus on fast data tiling techniques that can produce well-structured tiles and demonstrate theoretical hardness results. These tiles are suitable for graph problems as they reduce data movement and ultimately improve end-to-end runtime performance. For linear algebra, we introduce a new cache-aware tiling technique and apply it to the key kernel of sparse matrix by sparse matrix multiplication. This technique tiles the second input matrix and then uses a small, summary matrix to guide access to the tiles during computation. Our approach results in the fastest known implementation across three distinct CPU architectures. In bioinformatics, we develop a tiling based de novo genome assembly pipeline. We start with reads and develop either a graph or hypergraph that captures internal relationships between reads. This is then tiled to minimize connections while maintaining balance. We then treat each resulting tile independently as the input to an existing, shared-memory assembler. Our pipeline improves existing state-of-the-art de novo genome assemblers and brings both runtime and quality improvements to them on both real-world and simulated datasets.Ph.D
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