Impact of Principals' Managerial Roles Under School-based Management on School Improvement at Urban Secondary Schools of Bangladesh

This article aims al observing the relationship between principals' managerial roles and the improvement of schools and the impacts of principals' managerial roles toward school improvement based on the school-based management. This research uses 127 principals and 694 teachers of urban secondary schools of Bangladesh as the sample. Schools are becoming better when the principals give more emphasizing on strategic plan, supportive and comprehensive roles but less emphasizing on shared decision making. The findings of this study offer valuable information for policy makers and educational managers, especially the principals and teachers. Key words: Principals managerial roles, school-based management, teachers' Professional development activities, school improvement &nbsp

Derived crop coefficients for winter wheat using different reference evpotranspiration estimates methods

This paper reports the results of using three empirical methods (Makkink, Priestley-Taylor and Hargreaves) for estimating the reference evapotranspiration (ET0) in the semi-arid region of Tensift Al Haouz, Marrakech (center of Morocco). The Penman-Monteith equation, standardized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO-PM), is used to evaluate the three empirical methods. The obtained ET0 data were used to estimate crop water requirement (ET) of winter wheat using the crop coefficient (K-c) approach and results were compared with ET measured by the Eddy Covariance technique. The result showed that using the original empirical coefficients a, alpha and C-m in Hargreaves, Priestley-Taylor and Makkink equations, respectively, the Hargreaves method agreed fairly well with FAO-PM method at the test site. Conversely, the Priestley-Taylor and Makkink methods underestimate the ET by about 20 and 18 %. After adjustment of the original values of two parameters alpha and C-m coefficients in Priestley-Taylor and Makkink equations, the underestimation of ET was reduced to 9% and 4% for the Priestley Taylor and Makkink methods, respectively, which led to an improvement of 55% and 76% of the obtained values compared with the original values

The Use of Social Media in Endourology: An Analysis of the 2013 World Congress of Endourology Meeting

Objective: To examine the use of social media within Endourology by reporting on its utilization during the 2013 World Congress of Endourology (WCE) annual meeting. Materials and Methods: Two social media platforms were analyzed for this study: Twitter (San Francisco, CA) and LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA). For Twitter, a third-party analysis service (Tweetreach) was used to quantitatively analyze all tweets with the hashtags #WCE2013 and #WCE13 during a 7-day period surrounding the WCE. Two reviewers independently classified tweet content using a predefined Twitter-specific classification system. Tweet sentiment was determined using sentiment analysis software (Semantria, Inc., Amherst, MA). Finally, the penetration of Twitter and LinkedIn within the WCE faculty was assessed by means of a manual search. Results: During the study period, 335 tweets had the hashtag #WCE2013 or #WCE13. Content originated from 68 users resulting in a mean of 47 tweets/day and 4.9 tweets/contributor. Conference-related tweets had a reach of 38,141 unique Twitter accounts and an online exposure of 188,629 impressions. Physicians generated the majority of the content (63%), of which 55.8% were not attending the meeting. More tweets were informative (56.7%) versus uninformative (43.3%), and 17.9% had links to an external web citation. The mean sentiment score was 0.13 (range ?0.90 to 1.80); 13.1%, 57.0%, and 29.9% of tweets were negative, neutral, and positive in sentiment, respectively. Of 302 WCE meeting faculty, 150 (49.7%) had registered LinkedIn accounts while only 52 (17.2%) had Twitter accounts, and only 19.2% tweeted during the meeting. Conclusions: Despite a relatively low number of Twitter users, tweeting about the WCE meeting dramatically increased its online exposure with dissemination of content that was mostly informative including engagement with physicians not attending the conference. While half of faculty at WCE 2013 had LinkedIn accounts, their social media footprint in Twitter was limited.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140078/1/end.2014.0329.pd

Uncertainty in the Tail of the Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Epidemic in the UK

Despite low case numbers the variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease epidemic poses many challenges for public health planning due to remaining uncertainties in disease biology and transmission routes. We develop a stochastic model for variant CJD transmission, taking into account the known transmission routes (food and red-cell transfusion) to assess the remaining uncertainty in the epidemic. We use Bayesian methods to obtain scenarios consistent with current data. Our results show a potentially long but uncertain tail in the epidemic, with a peak annual incidence of around 11 cases, but the 95% credibility interval between 1 and 65 cases. These cases are predicted to be due to past food-borne transmissions occurring in previously mostly unaffected genotypes and to transmissions via blood transfusion in all genotypes. However, we also show that the latter are unlikely to be identifiable as transfusion-associated cases by case-linking. Regardless of the numbers of future cases, even in the absence of any further control measures, we do not find any self-sustaining epidemics

Justification of Filter Selection for Robot Balancing in Conditions of Limited Computational Resources

The paper considers the problem of mathematical filter selection, used for balancing of wheeled robot in conditions of limited computational resources. The solution based on complementary filter is proposed

The Slavic NBN founder mutation: a role for reproductive fitness?

The vast majority of patients with Nijmegen Breakage Syndrome (NBS) are of Slavic origin and carry a deleterious deletion (c.657del5; rs587776650) in the NBN gene on chromosome 8q21. This mutation is essentially confined to Slavic populations and may thus be considered a Slavic founder mutation. Notably, not a single parenthood of a homozygous c.657del5 carrier has been reported to date, while heterozygous carriers do reproduce but have an increased cancer risk. These observations seem to conflict with the considerable carrier frequency of c.657del5 of 0.5% to 1% as observed in different Slavic populations because deleterious mutations would be eliminated quite rapidly by purifying selection. Therefore, we propose that heterozygous c.657del5 carriers have increased reproductive success, i.e., that the mutation confers heterozygote advantage. In fact, in our cohort study of the reproductive history of 24 NBS pedigrees from the Czech Republic, we observed that female carriers gave birth to more children on average than female non-carriers, while no such reproductive differences were observed for males. We also estimate that c.657del5 likely occurred less than 300 generations ago, thus supporting the view that the original mutation predated the historic split and subsequent spread of the 'Slavic people'. We surmise that the higher fertility of female c.657del5 carriers reflects a lower miscarriage rate in these women, thereby reflecting the role of the NBN gene product, nibrin, in the repair of DNA double strand breaks and their processing in immune gene rearrangements, telomere maintenance, and meiotic recombination, akin to the previously described role of the DNA repair genes BRCA1 and BRCA2

Report 36: Modelling ICU capacity under different epidemiological scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic in three western European countries

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has placed enormous strain on healthcare systems, particularly intensive care units (ICUs), with COVID-19 patient care being a key concern of healthcare system planning for winter 2020/21. Ensuring that all patients who require intensive care, irrespective of COVID-19 status, can access it during this time is essential. This study uses an integrated model of hospital capacity planning and epidemiological projections of COVID-19 patients to estimate the spare capacity of key ICU resources under different epidemic scenarios in France, Germany and Italy across the winter period of 2020/21. In particular, we examine the effect of implementing suppression strategies of varying effectiveness, triggered by different numbers of COVID-19 patients in ICU. The use of a ‘dual-demand’ (COVID-19 and non-COVID-19) patient model and the consideration of multiple ICU resources that determine capacity (beds, doctors, nurses and ventilators) and the interdependencies between them, provides a detailed insight into potential capacity constraints this winter. Without sufficient mitigation, we estimate that COVID-19 ICU patient numbers will exceed those seen in the first peak, resulting in substantial capacity deficits, with beds being consistently found to be the most constrained resource across countries. Lockdowns triggered based on ICU capacity could lead to large improvements in spare capacity during the winter season, with pressure being most effectively alleviated when lockdown is triggered early and implemented at a higher level of suppression. In many cases, maximum deficits are reduced to lower levels which can then be managed by expanding supply-side hospital capacity, to ensure that all patients can receive treatment. The success of such interventions also depends on baseline ICU bed numbers and average non-COVID-19 patient occupancy. We find that lockdowns of longer duration reduce the total number of days in deficit, but triggering lockdown earlier when COVID-19 ICU occupancy is lower is more effective in minimising deficits. Our results highlight the dependencies between different metrics, suggesting that absolute benefits of different strategies must be weighed against the feasibility and drawbacks of different amounts of time spent in lockdown

Software for Spatial Statistics

We give an overview of the papers published in this special issue on spatial statistics, of the Journal of Statistical Software. 21 papers address issues covering visualization (micromaps, links to Google Maps or Google Earth), point pattern analysis, geostatistics, analysis of areal aggregated or lattice data, spatio-temporal statistics, Bayesian spatial statistics, and Laplace approximations. We also point to earlier publications in this journal on the same topic