Mental toughness, servant leadership, and the collegiate distance runner

Mental toughness is commonly associated with successful performance in the realm of athletics. However, despite the prevalence of its usage, the concept remains somewhat ambiguous in its definition and practical application. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between mental toughness and running performance amongst collegiate distance runners, a population that has yet to be the center of a mental toughness investigation. Of additional interest was to determine how a coach\u27s servant leadership attributes interacts with athletes\u27 mental toughness. Participants (n = 334) were males and females from 64 collegiate track teams from all divisions of the NCAA. Participants completed the Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48 (MTQ48; Clough et al; 2002), the Revised Servant Leadership Profile for Sport (RSLP- S; Hammermeister et al; 2008), and provided their current three- and five-kilometer personal best track times. Additionally, participants that competed in selected five- kilometer events had their race times recorded. Statistical analysis employed the ANOVA, ANCOVA, and Pearson r correlation techniques. Significant differences were discovered in both reported three- and five-kilometer personal best times, with the mentally tough group running faster than the non-mentally tough group. A significant difference was also found on the MTQ48 for the servant leader groups, with athletes that perceived their coaches to be servant leaders being more mentally tough than athletes in the non-servant leader group. Results are discussed in terms of theory, research, and practice --Document

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Landslide susceptibility assessment by bivariate methods at large scales: Application to a complex mountainous environment

International audienceStatistical assessment of landslide susceptibility has become a major topic of research in the last decade. Most progress has been accomplished on producing susceptibility maps at meso-scales (1:50,000–1:25,000). At 1:10,000 scale, which is the scale of production of most regulatory landslide hazard and risk maps in Europe, few tests on the performance of these methods have been performed. This paper presents a procedure to identify the best variables for landslide susceptibility assessment through a bivariate technique (weights of evidence, WOE) and discusses the best way to minimize conditional independence (CI) between the predictive variables. Indeed, violating CI can severely bias the simulated maps by over- or under-estimating landslide probabilities. The proposed strategy includes four steps: (i) identification of the best response variable (RV) to represent landslide events, (ii) identification of the best combination of predictive variables (PVs) and neo-predictive variables (nPVs) to increase the performance of the statistical model, (iii) evaluation of the performance of the simulations by appropriate tests, and (iv) evaluation of the statistical model by expert judgment. The study site is the north-facing hillslope of the Barcelonnette Basin (France), affected by several types of landslides and characterized by a complex morphology. Results indicate that bivariate methods are powerful to assess landslide susceptibility at 1:10,000 scale. However, the method is limited from a geomorphological viewpoint when RVs and PVs are complex or poorly informative. It is demonstrated that expert knowledge has still to be introduced in statistical models to produce reliable landslide susceptibility maps

Thai Digital Chart Production and Quality Control

Thai Hydrographic Department (Thai HD), founded in 1919 and under control of the Royal Thai Navy (RTN), is a Thai governmental organisation whose primary mission is the provision of nautical charts, hydrographic, oceanographic and other related products and service to the RTN and private sectors concerned with maritime activities. It has traditionally produced its charts using manual production methods since it was founded. Chart production using traditional techniques is time-consuming, labour-intensive and error prone work. Due to the efficiency and usefulness of the digital chart production being implemented in a number of national Hydrographic Offices (HOs) worldwide, Thai HD has realised the potential of such capability. Furthermore, common agreements by the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) request that member governments have their national hydrographic office produce digital chart data and the associated updating service as soon as possible and ensure the quality of such data which will be exchanged between HOs. Responding to these pressures, Thai HD, as a governmental charting agency and a IHO member, has recently started planning to move from manual chart production to digital production. It is expected that the new digital production will fulfil its requirements by reducing time and cost of the production and by providing more accurate and better quality charts and information related to them. Introducing such a digital production system is likely to cause organisational, legal and financial problems as well as technical ones. These should be investigated, studied and fully understood at the early stage of development. This thesis forms one of these investigations. This thesis presents the initial move of Thai HD from the traditional chart production to the digital production. It proposes the possible digital chart production flowline to produce digital chart data, quality control procedures and quality assessment procedures to control and assure the quality of such digital chart data. These have been initially tested and proved workable. It is hoped that in a new production flow, such quality control and quality assessment procedures will be accepted and implemented within Thai HD allowing it to fulfil its requirements in the future

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~ COMMUNICATIONSThis book originally was published by Peer-to-Peer Communications. It is out ofprint and the rights have reverted to the authors, who hereby place it in the public domain. Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.

Syntactic Sugar Programming Languages' Constructs

Software application development is a daily task done by developers and code writers all over the world. A valuable portion of developers‘ time is spent in writing repetitive keywords, debugging code, trying to understand its semantic, and fixing syntax errors. These tasks become harder when no integrated development environment (IDE) is available or developers use remote access terminals like UNIX and simple text editors for code writing. Syntactic sugar constructs in programming languages are found to offer simple and easy syntax constructs to make developers' lives easier and smoother. In this study we propose a new set of syntactic sugar constructs, and try to find if they really can help developers in reducing syntax errors, make code shorter, more readable, easier to write, and can help in debugging and semantic understanding. Our methodology was to construct a new syntactic sugar constructs set extracted from existing programming languages' syntax in addition to other syntactic enhancements proposed by us, then we verified the efficiency of the new syntactic sugar constructs set through executing an exploratory case study with students and professional programmers. The exploratory case study results showed positive indicators for using the new proposed syntactic sugar constructs set to write programs' syntax. They helped in reducing syntax errors, making the code more readable, easier to write, and to understand.تطوير البرمجيات التطبيقية ىي ميمة يومية يقوم بيا المطورون والمبرمجون في كافة انحاء العالم، و ييدر جزء ال بأس بو من وقت المبرمجين في كتابة كممات مفتاحية بشكل متكرر في الجمل التركيبية لمبرامج وتصحيح األخطاء في بناء الجمل التركيبية، و محاولة فيم دالالت البرامج. ىذه الميام تصبح أكثر صعوبة إذا لم تكن ىناك بيئة تطوير متكاممة متاحة لإلستخدام، أو عندما يقوم المطورون بكتابة البرامج بإستخدام محررات نصوص بسيطة، وكذلك في حالة تطوير البرامج عن بعد بإستخدام برمجيات االتصال الطرفي كما في نظام التشغيل يونيكس مثلا. لقد أوجدت محسنات بناء الجمل التركيبية في لغات البرمجة لتقدم تركيبات نصية بسيطة وسيمة وجعل حياة المطورين أسيل. بناءاٌ عمى ذلك، نقترح في ىذه الدراسة مجموعة جديدة من محسنات بناء الجمل التركيبية، ونحاول معرفة ما إذا كانت ىذه المحسنات تساىم في التقميل من االخطاء اكثر وضوحاا النصية وجعل تركيب الجمل في لغات البرمجة ابسط و واسيل لمق ارءة والكتابة والتتبع وفيم دالالت البرامج. منيجية البحث المتبعة في ىذه الدراسة تقوم عمى إيجاد مجموعة من محسنات بناء الجمل التركيبية والمستخرجة من بعض لغات البرمجة المستخدمة ، إضافة الى عدد من التحسينات المقترحة، ومن ثم محاولة التحقق من فعالية ىذه المحسنات من خلل إجراء دراسة حالة استكشافية مع عدد من الدارسين والمطورين ذوي الخبرة. ولقد اظيرت نتائج الدراسة مؤشرات ايجابية واضحة حول استخدام محسنات بناء الجمل التركيبية في كتابة البرمجيات، ولقد ساعدت ىذه المحسنات في الحد من األخطاء النصية وجعل تركيب الجمل في لغات البرمجة اكثر وضوحاا واسيل لمق ارءة والكتابة والتتبع وفيم الدالالت

Consumers’ willingness to pay for safer, cleaner and animal friendlier beef

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências Veterinárias. Especialidade de Produção AnimalThe variety of food products available in supermarkets shelves is endless, fulfilling necessities that go beyond the need for food. In such perspective, there are an infinite number of products that might be valued by consumers, but are not available in markets, i.e. non-market goods. Alongside these potential, consumers have increased levels of awareness and concern about the way food is produced, namely food products of animal origin. Some consumer segments are even willing to pay more for products produced under standards they consider to meet their concerns. Within this framework, this thesis’ research topic involves the economic valuation of beef products which are differentiated through the presence of attributes related with beef safety, animal welfare an environmental protection. Therefore, the question central to this research is: Are consumers willing to pay for beef products with specific attributes such as food safety, animal welfare or environmental standards, going beyond legally imposed minimums? This question was answered having in mind the following specific goals: the review of the most relevant technical issues still to be solved and worth analyzing; the discussion during focus groups of consumers’ main concerns regarding animal welfare, food safety and the environment related with beef production and beef products; the implementation of a choice-experiment survey to allow estimating how much, on average, are consumers’ willing to sacrifice from their households’ budgets in order to buy this differentiated beef product, through the use of a MNL model. Our sample of Portuguese consumers stated they are willing to pay a premium for differentiated beef. A high significance for the MNL estimates was achieved and we found evidence of the need to jointly value closely related attributes namely due to the expected presence of very significant negative interactions. Additional conclusions include the suggestion that some of the stated consumer preferences are in fact citizens’ preferences, which may arise from the undisputable public nature of food safety, animal welfare and the environment. Finally, from a corporate perspective, this research shows some potentially differentiating strategies that could be implemented based on attributes such as national origin and traditional production systems.RESUMO - A variedade de produtos alimentares disponíveis nas prateleiras dos supermercados é interminável, satisfazendo necessidades que vão muito além da necessidade alimentar. Nesta perspetiva, há uma infinidade de produtos que podem ser valorizados pelos consumidores, mas que não estão disponíveis nos mercados. Paralelamente a este potencial, os consumidores têm aumentado os seus níveis de consciência e preocupação com a forma como os alimentos são produzidos, nomeadamente em relação a produtos alimentares de origem animal. Alguns segmentos de consumidores estão mesmo dispostos a pagar mais por produtos produzidos sob padrões que eles consideram atender às suas preocupações. Neste contexto, o tema de investigação desta tese envolve a valoração económica de produtos de carne bovina, que são diferenciados pela presença de atributos relacionados com a segurança sanitária da carne, bem-estar animal e proteção ambiental. Portanto, a questão central desta pesquisa é: estarão os consumidores dispostos a pagar por produtos de carne de bovino com atributos específicos, tais como a segurança sanitária, bem-estar animal ou normas ambientais, que vão além dos requisitos mínimos legalmente impostos? Esta pergunta foi respondida tendo em vista os seguintes objetivos específicos: a revisão das questões técnicas mais relevantes a serem resolvidas tendo em conta a sua relevância para os consumidores; a realização de grupos de discussão para avaliar quais as principais preocupações dos consumidores sobre bem-estar animal, segurança sanitária da carne e meio ambiente no contexto da produção de carne de bovino; a implementação de um estudo de experiências de escolha para permitir estimar (através da utilização de um modelo MNL) o quanto, em média, estão os consumidores dispostos a sacrificar dos seus orçamentos familiares, a fim de comprarem esta carne diferenciada. Esta amostra de consumidores portugueses declarou estar disposta a pagar mais pela carne diferenciada. A elevada significância das estimativas MNL alcançada sugere a necessidade de valorar em conjunto atributos intimamente relacionados, nomeadamente devido à presença esperada de interações negativas muito significativas. As conclusões incluem a sugestão de que algumas das preferências dos consumidores são na realidade preferências de cidadãos, o que pode advir da indiscutível natureza pública da segurança sanitária, bem-estar animal e meio ambiente. Finalmente, do ponto de vista empresarial, esta pesquisa mostra algumas estratégias de diferenciação possíveis, que podem ser implementadas com base em atributos como a origem nacional e os sistemas de produção tradicionais.This work was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, grant SFRH/BD/37715/200

The effect of a flaxseed-oil enhanced diet on the shelf life and sensory characteristics of farmed brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis)

The effect of dietary modification with flaxseed-oil (Flax) enhanced feed on the sensory characteristics and shelf life of brook trout fillets was examined. The diets were composed of a commercial feed supplemented with either fish oil (control diet, CD) or Flax (treatment diet)

Adaptive Methods for Robust Document Image Understanding

A vast amount of digital document material is continuously being produced as part of major digitization efforts around the world. In this context, generic and efficient automatic solutions for document image understanding represent a stringent necessity. We propose a generic framework for document image understanding systems, usable for practically any document types available in digital form. Following the introduced workflow, we shift our attention to each of the following processing stages in turn: quality assurance, image enhancement, color reduction and binarization, skew and orientation detection, page segmentation and logical layout analysis. We review the state of the art in each area, identify current defficiencies, point out promising directions and give specific guidelines for future investigation. We address some of the identified issues by means of novel algorithmic solutions putting special focus on generality, computational efficiency and the exploitation of all available sources of information. More specifically, we introduce the following original methods: a fully automatic detection of color reference targets in digitized material, accurate foreground extraction from color historical documents, font enhancement for hot metal typesetted prints, a theoretically optimal solution for the document binarization problem from both computational complexity- and threshold selection point of view, a layout-independent skew and orientation detection, a robust and versatile page segmentation method, a semi-automatic front page detection algorithm and a complete framework for article segmentation in periodical publications. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated on large datasets consisting of real-life heterogeneous document scans. The obtained results show that a document understanding system combining these modules is able to robustly process a wide variety of documents with good overall accuracy