5,532 research outputs found

    An investigation into interdental arch relationship outcomes of 5-Year-Olds born with a Unilateral Cleft Lip and Palate using the Modified Huddart Bodenham Index following the centralisation of cleft services within the United Kingdom

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    Aim: To investigate the interdental arch relationship outcomes of 5-year-old children withunilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP) before and after centralisation of cleft services in theUnited Kingdom (UK) using the Modified Huddart-Bodenham Index (MHBI).Design: Retrospective cross-sectional study.Setting: Evaluation of 3D orthodontic study models of children with a complete UCLP.Participants: All available 5-year-old orthodontic study models of participants with UCLP fromthe pre-centralisation (Clinical Standard Advisory Group CSAG n=107) and post-centralisation(Cleft Care UK CCUK n=195) studies.Outcome measure: Differences between the interdental arch relationship outcomes for theCSAG and CCUK cohorts were assessed using the Modified Huddart-Bodenham Index (MHBI).This index scored the buccal/palatal or labial/palatal relationships of 8 maxillary deciduousteeth with the opposing mandibular dentition. The anterior segment (deciduous centralincisors), buccal (deciduous canine, first and second deciduous molar) cleft segment and noncleft segment scores were calculated along with the sum of the three segments combined tocalculate the total arch MHBI scores.Results: The inter- and intra-examiner reliability had a high level of agreement. Statisticallysignificant differences in the anterior segment, buccal non cleft segment, and total arch MHBI3scores were found between CCUK and CSAG cohorts, with CCUK performing better. There wasno difference in the buccal cleft segment scores.Conclusions: There were improved transverse and anterior interdental arch relationshipspost centralisation (CCUK) of cleft services in the UK, suggestive of better primary surgicaloutcomes post CSAG

    Automated Mapping of Adaptive App GUIs from Phones to TVs

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    With the increasing interconnection of smart devices, users often desire to adopt the same app on quite different devices for identical tasks, such as watching the same movies on both their smartphones and TV. However, the significant differences in screen size, aspect ratio, and interaction styles make it challenging to adapt Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) across these devices. Although there are millions of apps available on Google Play, only a few thousand are designed to support smart TV displays. Existing techniques to map a mobile app GUI to a TV either adopt a responsive design, which struggles to bridge the substantial gap between phone and TV or use mirror apps for improved video display, which requires hardware support and extra engineering efforts. Instead of developing another app for supporting TVs, we propose a semi-automated approach to generate corresponding adaptive TV GUIs, given the phone GUIs as the input. Based on our empirical study of GUI pairs for TV and phone in existing apps, we synthesize a list of rules for grouping and classifying phone GUIs, converting them to TV GUIs, and generating dynamic TV layouts and source code for the TV display. Our tool is not only beneficial to developers but also to GUI designers, who can further customize the generated GUIs for their TV app development. An evaluation and user study demonstrate the accuracy of our generated GUIs and the usefulness of our tool.Comment: 30 pages, 15 figure

    Are magnetic fields universal in O-type multiple systems?

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    Although significant progress has been achieved in recent surveys of the magnetism in massive stars, the origin of the detected magnetic fields remains to be the least understood topic in their studies. We present an analysis of 61 high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations of 36 systems with O-type primaries, among them ten known particle-accelerating colliding-wind binaries exhibiting synchrotron radio emission. Our sample consists of multiple systems with components at different evolutionary stages with wide and tight orbits and different types of interactions. For the treatment of the complex composite spectra of the multiple systems, we used a special procedure involving different line masks populated for each element separately. Out of the 36 systems, 22 exhibit in their LSD Stokes V profiles definitely detected Zeeman features, among them seven systems with colliding winds. For fourteen systems the detected Zeeman features are most likely associated with O-type components whereas for three systems we suggest an association with an early B-type component. For the remaining five systems the source of the field is unclear. Marginal evidence for the detection of a Zeeman feature is reported for eleven systems and non-detection for three systems. The large number of systems with definitely detected Zeeman features presents a mystery, but probably indicates that multiplicity plays a definite role in the generation of magnetic fields in massive stars. The newly found magnetic systems are supreme candidates for spectropolarimetric monitoring over their orbital and rotation periods to obtain trustworthy statistics on the magnetic field geometry and the distribution of field strength.Comment: 21 pages, 2 tables, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

    Board gender diversity and corporate social responsibility: A bibliometric analysis.

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    The objective of this study to analyze developments in relating to board gender diversity (BGD) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) research and provide future researchers with new avenues for research in the field. A bibliometric analysis was conducted by focusing on the most productive articles, authors, journals, institutions, sponsors, and countries and as co-occurrence analyses based on 1961 peer-reviewed articles published between January 1966 and April 2021 in the Scopus database. Results revealed that the number of publications relevant to BGD and CSR has been gradually increasing, and a significant increase has been observed since 2010. Keywords such as "gender," "gender equality," "sustainable development," and "corporate social responsibility" reveal the key themes in BGD and CSR research. Cluster analysis revealed three clusters: Cluster 1 focused primarily on the board composition and board structure, Cluster 2 focused on board composition and its connection to CSR or philanthropy, and Cluster 3 (comprising more recent articles) mainly stressed the impact of gender diversity on CSR or sustainability initiatives. Results also provided different implications with future research directions. It reveals the collaboration between authors in conducting research in the domain of BGD and CSR is still lacking, suggesting further research in collaboration different authors in CSR and BGD. Journal of business ethics, Corporate governance: an international review, and Academy of management journal were the top-ranking journals in term of source co-citation, and thus journals ought to be further expanded more research in CSR and BGD to enhance their source co-citations. The most productive sponsors and institutions were in developed countries, while country co-authorship analysis revealed more research need to cooperatively be undertaken in developing countries

    Exploring Strategies to Protect Nonprofit Organizations’ Assets From Fraud

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    Community action agencies serve low-income individuals, families, and communities. Community action agencies may be at risk of fraud if they do not have board members with the knowledge to implement effective governance strategies to protect the organization\u27s assets from fraud. Grounded in agency theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore effective governance strategies that some community action board members use to protect their organization\u27s assets from fraud. The participants were three board members of two community action agencies in New Jersey who implemented effective governance strategies to protect the organization\u27s assets from fraud. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of organizational documents. Through Yin\u27s five phase data analysis process, three themes emerged: board competencies, internal and external controls, and the organization\u27s culture. A key recommendation is for board members to follow a formal recruitment process based on board member competencies. The implications for positive social change include opportunities to improve best practices and policy changes to prevent fraud and to reduce the diversion of assets from mission-driven work by community action agencies serving low-income individuals, families, and communities

    Narrowing the Achievement Gap by Increasing Student Opportunities in an Outdoor Project-Based Learning Environment

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    The nation’s lack of student achievement on standardized tests is a result of the insufficient number of opportunities a student has to interact with their environment. Research indicates racial and economic disparities limit the number of chances these groups have to build the wide range of background knowledge needed to support the academic demands in the classroom. As a result, their performances show a widening of the achievement gap. Therefore, this project speaks to perspectives centered around constructivism as a way to explain how students acquire knowledge over time. The author contends that reading diverse texts, writing for different purposes, collaborating through conversations, and interacting with nature encourages the construction of knowledge and deepens student understanding. Implementing student-centered educational experiences in the form of a project-based learning unit is likely to create opportunities for student engagement and a narrowing of the achievement gap for our most disadvantaged students

    Growing old together: What we know about the influence of diet and exercise on the aging host's gut microbiome

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    The immune system is critical in defending against infection from pathogenic microorganisms. Individuals with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly, are more susceptible to infections and developing autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The gut microbiome contains a plethora of bacteria and other microorganisms, which collectively plays a significant role in immune function and homeostasis. Gut microbiota are considered to be highly influential on host health and immune function. Therefore, dysbiosis of the microbiota could be a major contributor to the elevated incidence of multiple age-related pathologies. While there seems to be a general consensus that the composition of gut microbiota changes with age, very little is known about how diet and exercise might influence the aging microbiome. Here, we examine the current state of the literature regarding alterations to the gut microbiome as hosts age, drawing particular attention to the knowledge gaps in addressing how diet and exercise influence the aging microbiome. Further, we will demonstrate the need for more controlled studies to investigate the roles that diet and exercise play driving the composition, diversity, and function of the microbiome in an aging population

    Assessing the species boundary and ecological niche in freshwater gastropods of the family Physidae (Gastropoda, Hygrophila)

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    The present thesis contributed to increasing the knowledge about the diversity of the neotropical freshwater mollusks. Through the use of different methodologies for analyzing molecular and geographical occurrence data, we address important taxonomic issues and show new paths for future taxonomic research on the Physidae family. This family for a long time had classification proposals based only on morphological characters of the shell and, later, on the anatomy of the soft parts. The application of molecular delimitation methods based on coalescence showed the inadequacy of morphological criteria in discriminating intraspecific variability (overestimating family diversity) and in detecting the existence of cryptic species complexes (underestimating family diversity). The data on the occurrence along with the use of georeferencing tools, modeling, and ecological niche analyses applied to South American physid species, indicated the possibility of errors in species identification and the need to reassess the distribution of these physids using other operational criteria such as molecular approaches to access the actual family diversity and distribution for the continent.A presente tese contribuiu para ampliar o conhecimento sobre a diversidade da malacofauna dulcícola neotropical. Através do emprego de diferentes metodologias de análise de dados moleculares e de ocorrência geográfica abordamos importantes questões taxonômicas e mostramos novos caminhos para futuras pesquisas taxonômicas da família Physidae. Família essa que por muito tempo teve propostas de classificação embasadas apenas em caracteres morfológicos da concha e, posteriormente, na anatomia das partes moles. A aplicação de métodos de delimitação molecular baseados em coalescência, evidenciou a insuficiência dos critérios morfológicos em discriminar a variabilidade intraespecífica (superestimando a diversidade da família) e, em detectar a existência de complexos de espécies crípticas (subestimando a diversidade da família). A abordagem de busca intensiva por dados de ocorrência junto a utilização de ferramentas de georreferenciamento, modelagem e análises de nicho ecológico aplicadas às espécies de fisídeos sul-americanos, indicaram a possibilidade de erros de identificação de espécies e a necessidade de reavaliar a distribuição desses fisídeos usando outros critérios operacionais, incluindo abordagens moleculares, para acessar a diversidade e distribuição reais da família para o continente

    Variability-aware Neo4j for Analyzing a Graphical Model of a Software Product Line

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    A Software product line (SPLs) eases the development of families of related products by managing and integrating a collection of mandatory and optional features (units of functionality). Individual products can be derived from the product line by selecting among the optional features. Companies that successfully employ SPLs report dramatic improvements in rapid product development, software quality, labour needs, support for mass customization, and time to market. In a product line of reasonable size, it is impractical to verify every product because the number of possible feature combinations is exponential in the number of features. As a result, developers might verify a small fraction of products and limit the choices offered to consumers, thereby foregoing one of the greatest promises of product lines — mass customization. To improve the efficiency of analyzing SPLs, (1) we analyze a model of an SPL rather than its code and (2) we analyze the SPL model itself rather than models of its products. We extract a model comprising facts (e.g., functions, variables, assignments) from an SPL’s source-code artifacts. The facts from different software components are linked together into a lightweight model of the code, called a factbase. The resulting factbase is a typed graphical model that can be analyzed using the Neo4j graph database. In this thesis, we lift the Neo4j query engine to reason over a factbase of an entire SPL. By lifting the Neo4j query engine, we enable any analysis that can be expressed in the query language to be applicable to an SPL model. The lifted analyses return variability-aware results, in which each result is annotated with a feature expression denoting the products to which the result applies. We evaluated lifted Neo4j on five real-world open-source SPLs, with respect to ten commonly used analyses of interest. The first evaluation aims at comparing the performance of a post-processing approach versus an on-the-fly approach computing the feature expressions that annotate to variability-aware results of lifted Neo4j. In general, the on-the-fly approach has a smaller runtime compared to the post-processing approach. The second evaluation aims at assessing the overhead of analyzing a model of an SPL versus a model of a single product, which ranges from 1.88% to 456%. In the third evaluation, we compare the outputs and performance of lifted Neo4j to a related work that employs the variability-aware V-Soufflé Datalog engine. We found that lifted Neo4j is usually more efficient than V-Soufflé when returning the same results (i.e., the end points of path results). When lifted Neo4j returns complete path results, it is generally slower than V-Soufflé, although lifted Neo4j can outperform V-Soufflé on analyses that return short fixed-length paths
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