A Statistical Comparison between a Distance Learning Environment and a Traditional Teaching Environment

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Science & Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Industrial Technology by David Ledford Flora on April 11, 2005

Thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) ≥2.5mU/l in early pregnancy: prevalence and subsequent outcomes

Objective: There remains controversy over how women with abnormal thyroid function tests in pregnancy should be classified. In this study we assessed the proportion of women with thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) ≥ 2.5 mU/l in a large obstetric cohort, and examined how many have gone on to develop thyroid disease in the years since their pregnancy. Study design: 4643 women were recruited and samples taken in early pregnancy between 2007 and 2010. Thyroid function tests were analysed in 2014; in women with raised TSH computerised health records and prescription databases were used to identify thyroid disease detected since pregnancy. Results: 58 women (1.5%) had a TSH over 5 mU/l and 396 women (10.3%) had TSH between 2.5 and 5 mU/l. Women with TSH > 5mU/l delivered infants of lower birthweight than those with TSH < 2.5 mU/l; there were no other differences in obstetric outcomes between the groups. Of those who have had thyroid tests since their pregnancy, 78% of those with TSH > 5 mU/l and 19% of those with TSH between 2.5 and 5 mU/l have gone on to be diagnosed with thyroid disease. Conclusions: Using a TSH cut-off of 2.5 mU/l in keeping with European and US guidelines means that over 12% of women in this cohort would be classified as having subclinical hypothyroidism. Treatment and monitoring of these women would have major implications for planning of obstetric services

Transfer Learning for Thermal Comfort Prediction in Multiple Cities

HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system is an important part of a building, which constitutes up to 40% of building energy usage. The main purpose of HVAC, maintaining appropriate thermal comfort, is crucial for the best utilisation of energy usage. Besides, thermal comfort is also crucial for well-being, health, and work productivity. Recently, data-driven thermal comfort models have got better performance than traditional knowledge-based methods (e.g. Predicted Mean Vote Model). An accurate thermal comfort model requires a large amount of self-reported thermal comfort data from indoor occupants which undoubtedly remains a challenge for researchers. In this research, we aim to tackle this data-shortage problem and boost the performance of thermal comfort prediction. We utilise sensor data from multiple cities in the same climate zone to learn thermal comfort patterns. We present a transfer learning based multilayer perceptron model from the same climate zone (TL-MLP-C*) for accurate thermal comfort prediction. Extensive experimental results on ASHRAE RP-884, the Scales Project and Medium US Office datasets show that the performance of the proposed TL-MLP-C* exceeds the state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, precision and F1-score

INDOT Network Pavement Data Collection Status

INDOT has significantly altered its corporate intent relative to the usage of pavement condition data, and that alteration is resulting in changes in how we collect, process, and use this data. This session will briefly present those changes, including the different distresses collected, data process changes, the effects of various data aggregation lengths, and the pavement-roadway program decision-support information derived from the data. These changes are ongoing

The Scientist–Reporter Collaboration: A Guide to Working with the Press

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to the public can be challenging. Often, the language that researchers use among themselves is technical and difficult for non-experts to decipher. But as you probably know, communicating your research to non-experts is becoming mandatory. In a direct sense, funding agencies often require outreach for grant fulfillment. There are indirect benefits as well: Conveying the joy of discovery and the relevance of scientific results builds scientific literacy among the public---which of course includes both students who will eventually do research of their own and people who elect the policy makers who allocate funding. How many people know that what scientists do can be fun and interesting

Behavioral Recovery and Early Decision Making in Patients with Prolonged Disturbance in Consciousness after Traumatic Brain Injury

The extent of behavioral recovery that occurs in patients with traumatic disorders of consciousness (DoC) following discharge from the acute care setting has been under-studied and increases the risk of overly pessimistic outcome prediction. The aim of this observational cohort study was to systematically track behavioral and functional recovery in patients with prolonged traumatic DoC following discharge from the acute care setting. Standardized behavioral data were acquired from 95 patients in a minimally conscious (MCS) or vegetative state (VS) recruited from 11 clinic sites and randomly assigned to the placebo arm of a previously completed prospective clinical trial. Patients were followed for 6 weeks by blinded observers to determine frequency of recovery of six target behaviors associated with functional status. The Coma Recovery Scale-Revised and Disability Rating Scale were used to track reemergence of target behaviors and assess degree of functional disability, respectively. Twenty percent (95% confidence interval [CI]: 13-30%) of participants (mean age 37.2; median 47 days post-injury; 69 men) recovered all six target behaviors within the 6 week observation period. The odds of recovering a specific target behavior were 3.2 (95% CI: 1.2-8.1) to 7.8 (95% CI: 2.7-23.0) times higher for patients in MCS than for those in VS. Patients with preserved language function ("MCS+") recovered the most behaviors (p ≤ 0.002) and had the least disability (p ≤ 0.002) at follow-up. These findings suggest that recovery of high-level behaviors underpinning functional independence is common in patients with prolonged traumatic DoC. Clinicians involved in early prognostic counseling should recognize that failure to emerge from traumatic DoC before 28 days does not necessarily portend unfavorable outcome

Old and New Ideas for Data Screening and Assumption Testing for Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis

We provide a basic review of the data screening and assumption testing issues relevant to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis along with practical advice for conducting analyses that are sensitive to these concerns. Historically, factor analysis was developed for explaining the relationships among many continuous test scores, which led to the expression of the common factor model as a multivariate linear regression model with observed, continuous variables serving as dependent variables, and unobserved factors as the independent, explanatory variables. Thus, we begin our paper with a review of the assumptions for the common factor model and data screening issues as they pertain to the factor analysis of continuous observed variables. In particular, we describe how principles from regression diagnostics also apply to factor analysis. Next, because modern applications of factor analysis frequently involve the analysis of the individual items from a single test or questionnaire, an important focus of this paper is the factor analysis of items. Although the traditional linear factor model is well-suited to the analysis of continuously distributed variables, commonly used item types, including Likert-type items, almost always produce dichotomous or ordered categorical variables. We describe how relationships among such items are often not well described by product-moment correlations, which has clear ramifications for the traditional linear factor analysis. An alternative, non-linear factor analysis using polychoric correlations has become more readily available to applied researchers and thus more popular. Consequently, we also review the assumptions and data-screening issues involved in this method. Throughout the paper, we demonstrate these procedures using an historic data set of nine cognitive ability variables

LOCATION AS A CORRELATE OF PRINCIPALS’ PERCEPTIONS ON COST EFFICIENCY IN PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN BOMET COUNTY, KENYA

Most public secondary schools in Kenya do not have adequate funds to meet the demands of providing education to learners. These financial challenges call for cost efficiency management of resources in schools. However, this has not been the case, as evidenced by the low cost of efficiency in schools in Bomet County.  The low-cost efficiency could be due to the school's location, given that it has been cited as one of its correlates. This inquiry explored the relationship between school location and principals’ perceptions of cost efficiency in public secondary schools in Bomet County, Kenya. The study employed a correlational research design. It utilised purposive, stratified, proportionate and simple random sampling techniques to choose 5 Sub-County Directors of Education (SCDE) and 175 principals who participated in the study. Data was gathered using a principals’ questionnaire and SCDEs’ interview guide. The Chi-Square test was used to determine the relationship between school location and principals’ perceptions on cost efficiency. The findings indicated that over three-quarters (76.4%) of the schools were located in rural areas, while the rest (23.6%) were situated in urban settings. The results also indicated that the majority (74.8%) of the principals perceived that the cost efficiency of schools was low, while the others were of the view that it was moderate (20.3%) and high (4.9%). The SCDEs believed that school principals adopt cost reduction and saving strategies. However, they did not explain how these strategies affected cost efficiency. Further, the results revealed that the relationship between school location and perceptions of cost efficiency was statistically significant, χ2 (2, N = 143) = 8.25, p < .05. The study concludes that most public secondary schools in Bomet County are located in rural areas. Their cost efficiencies were perceived to be low. The study also concludes that school location correlates with cost efficiency perceptions and a pointer that it affects principals’ management of school resources.  Article visualizations

The relationship between caregiver sensitivity and infant pain behaviors across the first year of life.

Recent research has begun to examine discrete caregiver pain management behaviors in the infant immunization context. However, there is a dearth of research exploring more global caregiving constructs, such as emotional availability, which can be used to examine the overall sensitivity of caregiver pain management. The aim of the present study was to examine the relationships between caregiver sensitivity (emotional availability) and infant pain behavior (baseline, immediately postneedle, 1 minute after needle) over the first year of life. Parents and infants were a part of a Canadian longitudinal cohort (The OUCH cohort) followed during their 2-, 4-, 6- and 12-month immunizations (current n=731). Both 'within-age' group analyses and 'over-age' analyses were performed. Results indicated that: 1) over age, previous infant pain behavior predicts future infant pain behavior, but this varied depending on timing of pain response and age of infant; 2) over age, previous caregiver sensitivity strongly predicts future caregiver sensitivity; and 3) the concurrent relationship between caregiver sensitivity and every type of infant pain response is only consistently seen at the 12-month immunization. Caregiver sensitivity to the infant in pain is predicted most reliably from previous caregiver sensitivity, not infant pain behaviour. The significant concurrent relationship between caregiver sensitivity and infant pain behaviours is not seen until 12 months, replicating patterns in the infant development literature regarding the time at which the attachment relationship between parent and child can be reliably measured. Discussion addresses implications for both researchers and clinicians who work with infants in pain