NEXT LEVEL: A COURSE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM BASED ON CAREER INTERESTS

Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidates’ competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the job market. Furthermore, the study found that while 96% of chief academic officers believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree [11]. An implication of the misalignment is that college graduates lack the skills that companies need and value. Fortunately, the rise of skills-based hiring provides an opportunity for universities and students to establish and follow clearer classroom-to-career pathways. To this end, this paper presents a course recommender system that aims to improve students’ career readiness by suggesting relevant skills and courses based on their unique career interests

Cosmology of a higher derivative scalar theory with non-minimal Maxwell coupling

Higher derivative scalar field theory in curved space-time belongs to the GLPV theory coupled non-minimally to the Maxwell field is considered. We will show that the theory admits two independent exact de Sitter solutions in the FRW background, one driven by the cosmological constant and the other by the GLPV scalar field. The dynamical system analysis of the theory shows that these two exact solutions are stable fixed points. Also, cosmological perturbations over these solutions shows that the cosmological constant based solution is healthy at linear level but the GLPV based solution suffers from a gradient instability in the scalar sector. This proves that the cosmological constant is needed in the GLPV-Maxwell system in order to have a healthy de Sitter solution.Comment: 16 page

Constraints on Neutrino Mass and Light Degrees of Freedom in Extended Cosmological Parameter Spaces

From a combination of probes including the cosmic microwave background (WMAP7+SPT), Hubble constant (HST), baryon acoustic oscillations (SDSS+2dFGRS), and supernova distances (Union2), we have explored the extent to which the constraints on the effective number of neutrinos and sum of neutrino masses are affected by our ignorance of other cosmological parameters, including the curvature of the universe, running of the spectral index, primordial helium abundance, evolving late-time dark energy, and early dark energy. In a combined analysis of the effective number of neutrinos and sum of neutrino masses, we find mild (2.2 sigma) preference for additional light degrees of freedom. However, the effective number of neutrinos is consistent with the canonical expectation of 3 massive neutrinos and no extra relativistic species to within 1 sigma when allowing for evolving dark energy and relaxing the strong inflation prior on the curvature and running. The agreement improves with the possibility of an early dark energy component, itself constrained to be less than 5% of the critical density (95% CL) in our expanded parameter space. In extensions of the standard cosmological model, the derived amplitude of linear matter fluctuations sigma_8 is found to closely agree with low-redshift cluster abundance measurements. The sum of neutrino masses is robust to assumptions of the effective number of neutrinos, late-time dark energy, curvature, and running at the level of 1.2 eV (95% CL). The upper bound degrades to 2.0 eV (95% CL) when further including the early dark energy density and primordial helium abundance as additional free parameters. Even in extended cosmological parameter spaces, Planck alone could determine the possible existence of extra relativistic species at 4 sigma confidence and constrain the sum of neutrino masses to 0.2 eV (68% CL).Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Minor refinements, reflects version accepted for publication in PRD (slow to get the paper published because of sickness

The Most Important Performing Arts Arisen from \u3cem\u3eShahnameh\u3c/em\u3e of Ferdowsi: \u3cem\u3eShahnameh-khani\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eNaqqali\u3c/em\u3e of \u3cem\u3eShahnameh\u3c/em\u3e

Shahnameh of Ferdowsi is the Iranian national epic, which reflects the history, cultural values, sense of nationhood, and ancient religions of Persia by the only use of Persian pure words in the age of Arabic influence on the literature and science language. The footprint of this voluminous masterpiece has been seen in the different kinds of arts since its compilation and up to now; one of them is the penetration of Shahnameh’s verses in the art of storytelling that resulted in the formation of two types of performing arts: “Shahnameh-khani—singing the exact verses of Shahnameh from memory or from a book without any manipulation—and Naqqali of Shahnameh—narrating the stories of Shahnameh with special tone, feelings, expression, gestures, and movements.” These two forms of performing art have obvious differences but occasionally have been applied incorrectly. Shahnameh-khani and Naqqali of Shahnameh have had a prominent position in Persia, and there is a lot of evidence, such as Iranologists’ statements, travelers’ reports, and Iranian kings’ considerations, that clarifies their importance. Various formats and accompanied elements depend on the political policies of governments, time period, and geographical regions, which have led to creating four basic types of these two performing arts whose main differences are in the theme of the poems, accompaniment or non-accompaniment of music, and expression of the narrators and singers

Depth of anesthesia control using internal model control techniques

The major difficulty in the design of closed-loop control during anaesthesia is the inherent patient variability due to differences in demographic and drug tolerance. These discrepancies are translated into the pharmacokinetics (PK), and pharmacodynamics (PD). These uncertainties may affect the stability of the closed loop control system. This paper aims at developing predictive controllers using Internal Model Control technique. This study develops patient dose-response models and to provide an adequate drug administration regimen for the anaesthesia to avoid under or over dosing of the patients. The controllers are designed to compensate for patients inherent drug response variability, to achieve the best output disturbance rejection, and to maintain optimal set point response. The results are evaluated compared with traditional PID controller and the performance is confirmed in our simulation