Effects of reduced disruptive behavior upon academic performance in the classroom

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between disruptive behavior and academic performance. Using an ABA design the experimenter trained a teacher of a disruptive class to use precision teaching technique to reduce the incidence of out-of-seat and talking-out behaviors. The experiment was conducted during the history period. The effects of the experiment upon academic performance in history were measured by equivalent weekly history tests. Students participated in goal setting and selection of reinforcement. Students reached their behavioral goals during 4 of the 5 weeks of treatment. Percentage of occurrence of target behaviors was reduced by 4:1 for talking-out, and 17:1 for out-of-seat, as recorded by outside observers. The mean percentage of correct responses on weekly history tests increased by 36% under treatment conditions. During the reversal phase a slight increase in target behaviors occurred. Single subject analysis showed that all students improved in performance during the treatment phases. A return to baseline conditions brought an incomplete reversal; 19 decreased slightly in academic performance, 12 continued to improve. Results suggest that the children who will benefit most from such interventions are those who, in a disruptive class, have a low or moderate level of academic performance

Culturally Relevant Programming in Action: A Case Study of a Marriage Education Program for African American Couples

The purpose of this study was to understand how a preventive intervention, specifically a marriage education program, was designed to meet the needs of African American couples

Permissive strategies in timed automata and games

Timed automata are a convenient framework for modelling and reasoning about real-time systems. While these models are now well-understood, they do not offer a convenient way of taking timing imprecisions into account. Several solutions (e.g. parametric guard enlargement) have been proposed over the last ten years to take such imprecisions into account. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for handling robust reachability, based on permissive strategies. While classical strategies propose to play an action at an exact point in time, permissive strategies consider intervals of possible dates when to play the selected action. In other words, the controller specifies an interval of time delays for actions to be executed in a more flexible way. With such a permissive strategy, we associate a penalty, which is the inverse of the length of the proposed interval, and accumulates along the run. We show that in that setting, optimal strategies can be computed in polynomial time for one-clock timed automata

Stellar Populations and Radial Migrations in Virgo Disk Galaxies

We present stellar age profiles for 64 Virgo cluster disk galaxies whose analysis poses a challenge for current galaxy formation models. Our results can be summarized as follows: first, and contrary to observations of field galaxies, these cluster galaxies are distributed almost equally amongst the three main types of disk galaxy luminosity profiles (I/II/III), indicating that the formation and/or survival of Type II breaks is suppressed within the cluster environment. Second, we find examples of statistically-significant inversions ("U-shapes") in the age profiles of all three disk galaxy types, reminescent of predictions from high-resolution simulations of classically-truncated Type II disks in the field. These features characterize the age profiles for only about a third (<36%) of each disk galaxy type in our sample. An even smaller fraction of cluster disks (~11% of the total sample), exhibit age profiles which decrease outwards (i.e., negative age gradients). Instead, flat and/or positive age gradients prevail (>50%) within our Type I, II and III sub-samples. These observations thus suggest that while stellar migrations and inside-out growth can play a significant role in the evolution of all disk galaxy types, other factors contributing to the evolution of galaxies can overwhelm the predicted signatures of these processes. We interpret our observations through a scenario whereby Virgo cluster disk galaxies formed initially like their bretheren in the field but which, upon falling into the cluster, were transformed into their present state through external processes linked to the environment. Current disk galaxy formation models fail to reproduce these results, thus calling for adequate hydrodynamical simulations of dense galaxy environments, for which the current paper provides many constraints. [Abridged]Comment: 47 pages, 10 figures. ApJ, in press. Full resolution version available at http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~courteau/papers/migrations2012.pd

Test-Retest Reliability of the Repetitive Step Test in Community Dwelling Older Adults

Each year one in every three adults over the age of 65 experience a fall resulting in serious injury and in some instances death. In this population, falling injuries are the leading cause of death and are associated with the greatest number of nonfatal injuries and trauma hospital admissions. Since balance and muscle performance decreases as one ages, it is vitally important to assess these factors as part of a comprehensive strategy to monitor and predict fall risk. Previous data analysis of the Repetitive Step Test (RST) has shown that there is a significant performance difference between non-fallers and recurrent fallers in particular stepping conditions, and that significant inter-limb differences exist in non-fallers.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/dpt_symposium/1033/thumbnail.jp

A novel algorithm for detection of tuberculosis bacilli in sputum smear fluorescence images

This work proposes an algorithm aimed at recognizing and accounting Koch bacilli in digital images of microbiological sputum samples stained with auramine, in order to determine the degree of concentration and the state of the disease (tuberculosis). The algorithm was developed with the main objective of maximizing the sensitivity and specificity of the analysis of microbiological samples (recognition and counting of bacilli) according to each preparation method (direct and diluted pellets) in order to reduce the subjectivity of the visual inspection applied by the specialist at the time of analyzing the samples. The proposed algorithm consists of a background removal, an image improvement stage based on consecutive morphological closing operations, a segmentation stage of objects of interest based on thresholdization and a classification stage based on SVM. Each algorithmic stage was developed taking into account the method of preparation of the sample to be processed, being this aspect the main contribution of the proposed work, since it was possible to achieve very satisfactory results in terms of specificity and sensitivity. In this context, sensitivity levels of 91.24% and 93.79% were obtained. Specificity levels of 90.33% and 94.85% were also achieved for direct and diluted pellet methods respectively

An algorithm for detection of tuberculosis bacilli in Ziehl-Neelsen sputum smear images

This work proposes an algorithm oriented to the detection of tuberculosis bacilli in digital images of sputum samples, inked with the Ziehl Neelsen method and prepared with the direct, pellet and diluted pellet methods. The algorithm aims at automating the optical analysis of bacilli count and the calculation of the concentration level. Several algorithms have been proposed in the literature with the same objective, however, in no case is the performance in sensitivity and specificity evaluated for the 3 preparation methods. The proposed algorithm improves the contrast of the colors of interest, then thresholds the image and segments by labeling the objects of interest (bacilli). Each object then has its geometrical descriptors and photometric descriptors. With all this, a characteristic vector is formed, which are used in the training and classification process of an SVM. For the training 225 images obtained by the 3 preparation methods were used. The proposed algorithm reached, for the direct method, a sensitivity level of 93.67% and a specificity level of 89.23%. In the case of the Pellet method, a sensitivity of 92.13% and a specificity of 82.58% was obtained, while for diluted Pellet the sensitivity was 92.81% and the specificity 83.61%

Aplicación de gestión de inventario para mejorar la productividad en el área de almacén de la Empresa Estilos S.R.L. Independencia, 2021

La presente investigación de tesis titulada “gestión de inventarios para mejorar la productividad en el área de almacén de la empresa Estilos S.R.L. independencia, 2021”, se ha estructurado con la finalidad de demostrar que la aplicación de la gestión de inventarios por medio de sus técnicas, mejora la productividad en el almacén de la empresa Estilos S.R.L. Esta investigación tiene como objetivo general mejorar la productividad en el área de almacén, lo cual será medido a través de los tiempos utilizados en despachar los pedidos programados, como eficiencia y eficacia de los pedidos despachados, durante el estudio Y aplicación de la propuesta se ha llevado a cabo en definir la problemática actual y medir los niveles de inventarios y su cobertura respectiva, para darle corrección aquellos procedimientos incorrectos que se lleva a cabo dentro del área del almacén. El método que se utilizó para esta tesis, fue el tipo aplicativo, cuantitativo y con un diseño cuasi experimental, la población y muestra estuvo conformado por el número de pedidos programados, los instrumentos que se utilizaron fueron, la técnica de observación, data del sistema. De la misma forma la validación de los instrumentos fue realizada por 3 expertos de la universidad cesar vallejo. Es importante mencionar que la muestra siguió un orden paramétrico comprobada a través del test de shapiro-wilk utilizando el spss versión 25. Concluyendo que la propuesta de la aplicación de una gestión de inventarios incrementa la productividad de un 67,05% a un 91,70% ; además, la eficiencia se incrementó de un 81,73,05% a un 93,73%, fijando una manera de abastecimiento en el inventario con mayor cobertura de stock y rotación cubriendo así una mayor demanda generando así con mayor atención de pedidos