Breastfeeding knowledge, practice, attitudes, and influencing factors: Findings from a selected sample of breastfeeding mothers in Bemidji, Minnesota

Breastfeeding is generally considered by health professionals as the ideal feeding practice for infants. It is the first communication pathway between the mother and her infant. This study was designed to describe breastfeeding knowledge, attitudes, practice and influencing factors among breastfeeding mothers in Bemidji, MN. This cross-sectional study allowed the researcher to determine trends and other information about the sample in the Bemidji area. The participants for this study were breastfeeding mothers who gave a birth at Sanford Health located in Bemidji, MN. A written data collection instrument containing forty nine questions was used to collect data. The findings of this study showed that the participants were knowledgeable about breastfeeding and that they had positive attitudes toward breastfeeding. Also, the findings indicated that most of the mothers had received help from hospital staff regarding breastfeeding practice and most of the mothers had breastfed their baby just after birth or in less than one hour after birth

Approximations for Performance Analysis in Wireless Communications and Applications to Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

In the last few decades, the field of wireless communications has witnessed significant technological advancements to meet the needs of today’s modern world. The rapidly emerging technologies, however, are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the process of investigating their performance and assessing their applicability in the real world is becoming more challenging. That has aroused a relatively wide range of solutions in the literature to study the performance of the different communication systems or even draw new results that were difficult to obtain. These solutions include field measurements, computer simulations, and theoretical solutions such as alternative representations, approximations, or bounds of classic functions that commonly appear in performance analyses. Field measurements and computer simulations have significantly improved performance evaluation in communication theory. However, more advanced theoretical solutions can be further developed in order to avoid using the ex- pensive and time-consuming wireless communications measurements, replace the numerical simulations, which can sometimes be unreliable and suffer from failures in numerical evaluation, and achieve analytically simpler results with much higher accuracy levels than the existing theoretical ones. To this end, this thesis firstly focuses on developing new approximations and bounds using unified approaches and algorithms that can efficiently and accurately guide researchers through the design of their adopted wireless systems and facilitate the conducted performance analyses in the various communication systems. Two performance measures are of primary interest in this study, namely the average error probability and the ergodic capacity, due to their valuable role in conducting a better understanding of the systems’ behavior and thus enabling systems engineers to quickly detect and resolve design issues that might arise. In particular, several parametric expressions of different analytical forms are developed to approximate or bound the Gaussian Q-function, which occurs in the error probability analysis. Additionally, any generic function of the Q-function is approximated or bounded using a tractable exponential expression. Moreover, a unified logarithmic expression is proposed to approximate or bound the capacity integrals that occur in the capacity analysis. A novel systematic methodology and a modified version of the classical Remez algorithm are developed to acquire optimal coefficients for the accompanying parametric approximation or bound in the minimax sense. Furthermore, the quasi-Newton algorithm is implemented to acquire optimal coefficients in terms of the total error. The average symbol error probability and ergodic capacity are evaluated for various applications using the developed tools. Secondly, this thesis analyzes a couple of communication systems assisted with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). RIS has been gaining significant attention lately due to its ability to control propagation environments. In particular, two communication systems are considered; one with a single RIS and correlated Rayleigh fading channels, and the other with multiple RISs and non-identical generic fading channels. Both systems are analyzed in terms of outage probability, average symbol error probability, and ergodic capacity, which are derived using the proposed tools. These performance measures reveal that better performance is achieved when assisting the communication system with RISs, increasing the number of reflecting elements equipped on the RISs, or locating the RISs nearer to either communication node. In conclusion, the developed approximations and bounds, together with the optimized coefficients, provide more efficient tools than those available in the literature, with richer capabilities reflected by the more robust closed-form performance analysis, significant increase in accuracy levels, and considerable reduction in analytical complexity which in turns can offer more understanding into the systems’ behavior and the effect of the different parameters on their performance. Therefore, they are expected to lay the groundwork for the investigation of the latest communication technologies, such as RIS technology, whose performance has been studied for some system models in this thesis using the developed tools

Hub Network Design and Discrete Location: Economies of Scale, Reliability and Service Level Considerations

In this thesis, we study three related decision problems in location theory. The first part of the dissertation presents solution algorithms for the cycle hub location problem (CHLP), which seeks to locate p-hub facilities that are connected by means of a cycle, and to assign non-hub nodes to hubs so as to minimize the total cost of routing flows through the network. This problem is useful in modeling applications in transportation and telecommunications systems, where large setup costs on the links and reliability requirements make cycle topologies a prominent network architecture. We present a branch and-cut algorithm that uses a flow-based formulation and two families of mixed-dicut inequalities as a lower bounding procedure at nodes of the enumeration tree. We also introduce a greedy randomized adaptive search algorithm that is used to obtain initial upper bounds for the exact algorithm and to obtain feasible solutions for large-scale instances of the CHLP. Numerical results on a set of benchmark instances with up to 100 nodes confirm the efficiency of the proposed solution algorithms. In the second part of this dissertation, we study the modular hub location problem, which explicitly models the flow-dependent transportation costs using modular arc costs. It neither assumes a full interconnection between hub nodes nor a particular topological structure, instead it considers link activation decisions as part of the design. We propose a branch-and-bound algorithm that uses a Lagrangean relaxation to obtain lower and upper bounds at the nodes of the enumeration tree. Numerical results are reported for benchmark instances with up to 75 nodes. In the last part of this dissertation we study the dynamic facility location problem with service level constraints (DFLPSL). The DFLPSL seeks to locate a set of facilities with sufficient capacities over a planning horizon to serve customers at minimum cost while a service level requirement is met. This problem captures two important sources of stochasticity in facility location by considering known probability distribution functions associated with processing and routing times. We present a nonlinear mixed integer programming formulation and provide feasible solutions using two heuristic approaches. We present the results of computational experiments to analyze the impact and potential benefits of explicitly considering service level constraints when designing distribution systems

Liderazgo innovador en la gestión y desarrollo de la innovación en el siglo XXI

La innovación es cada vez más necesaria en un mundo globalizado, dinámico y complejo, estando en juego la supervivencia de las organizaciones. Entonces, para adentrarse en la innovación, se propone un modelo basado en el liderazgo innovador que se encargue impulsar y desarrollar una estrategia de innovación, bajo las condiciones exigibles en el siglo XXI. Por una parte, los líderes innovadores, respecto de su persona y organización, deberán desarrollar la inteligencia emocional, gestionar la innovación, dirigir a su equipo innovador y desarrollar una cultura innovadora, así como potenciar las habilidades que le son propias. Por otro lado, los líderes innovadores serán los artífices en establecer una estrategia de innovación, clarificando su propósito, mentalidad, cultura del cambio, aprovechar oportunidades y pasar a la acción. Se concluirá con que la innovación no requiere de ideas grandes, sino servirse de una pequeña y transformarlo en grande, sabiendo que toda innovación es el resultado de aprovechar una oportunidad

Smart contracts from a legal perspective

Smart contracts are a new technology emerging with force due to the opportunities and benefits it can offer. The main innovation is that the terms parties agree to regulate their relations are executed automatically by a computer program. The intention of this Paper is to examine if the Spanish Contract Law is prepared for smart contracts or its modification is needed. First, it is necessary to understand the blockchain technology it can deploy on and the features of smart contracts. Then, under a legal perspective, it analyses if they comply with the essential contract elements -consent, object and cause- and main concerns during its existence regarding formation, performance and breach. Finally, it concludes by recognizing that smart contracts go along with existing Contract Law principles, offers some remedies and encourage legislators and jurists not to ignore these contracts for legal security

Tight Logarithmic Approximations and Bounds for Generic Capacity Integrals and Their Applications to Statistical Analysis of Wireless Systems

We present tight yet tractable approximations and bounds for the ergodic capacity of any communication system in the form of a weighted sum of logarithmic functions, with the focus on the Nakagami and lognormal distributions that represent key building blocks for more complicated systems. A minimax optimization technique is developed to derive their coefficients resulting in uniform absolute or relative error. These approximations and bounds constitute a powerful tool for the statistical performance analysis as they enable the evaluation of the ergodic capacity of various communication systems that experience small-scale fading together with the lognormal shadowing effect and allow for simplifying the complicated integrals encountered when evaluating the ergodic capacity in different communication scenarios. Simple and tight closed-form solutions for the ergodic capacity of many classic and timely application examples are derived using the logarithmic approximations. The high accuracy of the proposed approximations is verified by numerical comparisons with existing approximations and with those obtained directly from numerical integration methods.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Generalized Karagiannidis–Lioumpas Approximations and Bounds to the Gaussian Q-Function with Optimized Coefficients

We develop extremely tight novel approximations, lower bounds and upper bounds for the Gaussian Q-function and offer multiple alternatives for the coefficient sets thereof, which are optimized in terms of the four most relevant criteria: minimax absolute/relative error and total absolute/relative error. To minimize error maximum, we modify the classic Remez algorithm to comply with the challenging nonlinearity that pertains to the proposed expression for approximations and bounds. On the other hand, we minimize the total error numerically using the quasi-Newton algorithm. The proposed approximations and bounds are so well matching to the actual Q-function that they can be regarded as virtually exact in many applications since absolute and relative errors of 10-9 and 10-5, respectively, are reached with only ten terms. The significant advance in accuracy is shown by numerical comparisons with key reference cases.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Job Satisfaction Among Faculty Members at Yarmouk University

This study measured and analyzed job satisfaction among faculty members at Yarmouk University in relation to gender, marital status, age, annual salary, years of experience, academic rank, academic activity, faculty affiliation, country in which the last degree was received, tenure status, and nationality. The population consisted of 350 full-time faculty members. A total of 216 (61.7%) faculty members participated in this study. The data collecting instruments consisted of the faculty data sheet and the Job Descriptive Index. Frequencies, percentages, means, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were employed to analyze the data. The level of significance was set at 0.05. A Scheffe method of multiple comparison was used for follow-up investigation. Although the results of the study indicate that there were no significant differences in job satisfaction among faculty members with regard to gender, marital status, academic activity, and the country in which the faculty member received the last degree, significant differences were found with regard to age, annual salary, nationality, years of experience, rank, tenure status, and faculty affiliation