Major Subareas Research Articles

Implementing Sexual Violence Primary Prevention Programs: A Case Study of Implementer Perspectives

Sexual violence prevention programs are important for addressing sexual violence and are often implemented in local community and university settings. However, program implementer perspectives are often missing from academic research literature, limiting access to practical knowledge that can provide insights to improving programs and prevention. This study illustrates the landscape of sexual violence primary prevention work in a Midwestern metropolitan area. Seven interviews with community and university implementers took place in 2020, providing information about local prevention programs and expert insights to community prevention culture. Geographic data about implementation locations was also collected to visually assess coverage of preventive services and confirm that the major sub-areas of the metropolitan area were represented by this research. Interviews provided descriptions of local programs implemented with adolescents and young adults which usually took place in school or university settings and focused on healthy relationships. Capacity was most often cited as a challenge faced internally, whereas broader outer contexts may inhibit or support prevention externally. Findings capture the perspectives of sexual violence prevention program implementers, including discussion of tensions related to adaptation versus fidelity and how implementation contexts specific to this programming may influence implementation.

Children in marketing: A review, synthesis and research agenda

AbstractChildren have received much research attention in many different academic disciplines within social sciences, including marketing. The main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the marketing literature to investigate the historical evolution of the studies on “children” and shed light on possible gaps which could serve as new research areas for future studies. To the authors' best knowledge, there have been a few attempts on the topic, mostly with a narrow focus on only some aspects of this important concept. The significance of this current research is that it reviews 423 articles from marketing‐related journals and evaluates the development of thought on “children” from every marketing‐based perspective that once has been a subject of scholarly attention. In this study, we examined leading articles, authors and institutions, methodologies used, countries data collected from, and the age of the sample. In addition, an auto‐correlation map is created to identify all the research domains in marketing literature related to children. Our correlation matrix indicates that major subareas in children and marketing literature are children's consumer socialization and role in family decision‐making, materialism, vulnerability and ethics, food, brands, and advertising. Findings revealed that while marketing scholars have shown great attention to children during the last two decades and a wide array of articles have been frequently published on the eight sub‐areas mentioned, marketing literature is still underdeveloped on three aspects: sustainability, technology and digitalization, and cross‐cultural differences.

A Survey on the Applications of Convolutional Neural Networks for Synthetic Aperture Radar: Recent Advances

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have drawn considerable attention for the analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. In this study, major subareas of SAR data analysis that have been tackled by CNNs are systematically reviewed, such as automatic target recognition, land use and land cover classification, segmentation, change detection, object detection, and image denoising. Special emphasis has been given to practical techniques such as data augmentation and transfer learning. Complex-valued CNNs, which have been introduced to exploit phase information embedded in SAR complex images, have also been extensively reviewed. To conclude this review paper, open challenges and future research directions are highlighted.

Approximate Computing: Evolutionary Methods for Functional Approximation of Digital Circuits

Approximate computing deviates from long-held paradigm and attracted towards intrinsic application resilience to enhance the efficiency by relaxing the parameter of full accuracy. The specifications of digital circuits are violated while explicitly designing. The benefits are in terms of area, performance, power consumption, and speed. For approximating circuit, synthesis tools depend on available technique to check whether the synthesized circuit meets the set parameters and provides the quality. Mostly used approach is circuit simulator for analyzing responses received from all input variables but it is an exhaustive approach and can be used only for a small number of inputs. So this paper focuses on techniques, methods used to approximate circuits and to use formal methods for solving challenges faced by traditional methods. The use of evolutionary methods for circuits has led to the promising results. Major challenges in these methods are the ability to automatically synthesize approximation circuits without relying on the skill of designers. Strategies for generating approximate circuits, methodologies for evaluating the error with benchmarks used are tabulated in paper. The exact circuit, error and their approximate threshold are required for simplification which leads to selecting synthesis techniques for circuit transformations. The criteria of selection of approximate logic synthesis method are based on error analysis, number input and desired output, use of types of application and digital circuits like adder, multiplier, FIR, FFT etc. Introduction, principle, methods of approximate computing with major sub-areas of research work conducted in field of functional approximation which are apropos for designing and testing of circuits are main concern of paper.

Patentes prioritárias depositadas no Brasil e com proteção na via Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT)

Introdução: A patente apresenta importância tanto na esfera informacional como econômica. O Tratado de Cooperação de Patentes (PCT) é uma forma de estender a proteção do depósito de patentes e é a partir dele que o estudo se consolida. Objetivos: Trata-se de uma análise patentométrica com o objetivo caracterizar os pedidos de patentes prioritárias brasileiras depositadas na via PCT, e para este fim, utilizando a abordagem quantitativa-descritiva, a partir da base Derwent Innovation Index (DII). Metodologia: Os dados foram coletados em três etapas. Primeiro, buscou-se todas as patentes depositadas no Brasil no período de 2004 a 2019, resultando em 381.598 registros, formando o corpus principal. Deste corpus, foram extraídas as patentes com registro prioritário no Brasil, resultando em 263.104 registros. Por último, foi realizada a extração das patentes com o primeiro depósito prioritário no Brasil com extensão via PCT, resultando em 12.073 registros. Resultados: Deste resultado final, identificou-se 4,5% das patentes via PCT eram prioritárias no Brasil, e que os principais depositantes por essa via, a temporalidade dos registros e a classificação das patentes. Os principais depositantes são em sua maioria empresas multinacionais, provenientes dos Estados Unidos, China, Suécia, França, Japão, Alemanha e Itália, e universidades, no caso do Brasil. As publicações apresentam oscilação no período estipulado, mantendo uma média de 794 patentes ao ano. Os depósitos concentram-se principalmente em três grandes áreas: necessidades humanas, processos, operações e transportes e eletricidade. Conclusão: Conclui-se que a extensão da proteção pela via PCT não é uma prática recorrente pelos requerentes que depositam prioritariamente em território brasileiro.

Application of expert system with fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence (AI) for recognizing Alzheimer

The paper shows the adaptation of Fuzzy Logic and AHP to recognize Alzheimer’s disease at early stages. Alzheimer disease (AD) is a neurological disease which is mostly seen in the age of 65 years and above, when they have problems like memory loss, decline in cognitive abilities and changes in moo d and personality. We all know that human behavior is mostly based on qualitative facts, which are hard to be measured and cannot be judged easily. Fuzzy logic and AI are certain latest methods to approximate and to bring out a decision or an inference. Through this method, certain linguistic terms are used like very high, high, low, very low etc. and the weights are calculated accordingly, via the response. During final interpretation, the identified parameters are diagnosed through mapping and framing a hierarchy of major subareas to arrive at a subsequent decision. A set of governing parameters are framed and then subparametrs been identified, creating a hierarchy. Thus this tool can be used for final diagnosis of the Alzheimer disease as it is Yes Or No for the concerned patient.

Dynamics of Solitary Predation by Myxococcus xanthus on Escherichia coli Observed at the Single-Cell Level.

The predatory behavior of Myxococcus xanthus has attracted extensive attention due to its unique social traits and inherent biological activities. In addition to group hunting, individual M. xanthus cells are able to kill and lyse prey cells; however, there is little understanding of the dynamics of solitary predation. In this study, by employing a bacterial tracking technique, we investigated M. xanthus predatory dynamics on Escherichia coli at the single-cell level. The killing and lysis of E. coli by a single M. xanthus cell was monitored in real time by microscopic observation, and the plasmolysis of prey cells was identified at a relatively early stage of solitary predation. After quantitative characterization of their solitary predatory behavior, M. xanthus cells were found to respond more dramatically to direct contact with live E. coli cells than heat-killed or UV-killed cells, showing slower predator motion and faster lysing of prey. Among the three contact-dependent killing modes classified according to the major subareas of M. xanthus cells in contact with prey, leading pole contact was observed most. After killing the prey, approximately 72% of M. xanthus cells were found to leave without thorough degradation of the lysed prey, and this postresidence behavior is described as a lysis-leave pattern, indicating that solitary predation has low efficiency in terms of prey-cell consumption. Our results provide a detailed description of the single-cell level dynamics of M. xanthus solitary predation from both prey and predator perspectives.IMPORTANCE Bacterial predation plays multiple essential roles in bacterial selection and mortality within microbial ecosystems. In addition to its ecological and evolutionary importance, many potential applications of bacterial predation have been proposed. The myxobacterium Myxococcus xanthus is a well-known predatory member of the soil microbial community. Its predation is commonly considered a collective behavior comparable to a wolf pack attack; however, individual M. xanthus cells are also able to competently lead to the lysis of a prey cell. Using a bacterial tracking technique, we are able to observe and analyze solitary predation by M. xanthus on Escherichia coli at the single-cell level and reveal the dynamics of both predator and prey during the process. The present study will not only provide a comprehensive understanding of M. xanthus solitary predation but also help to explain why M. xanthus often displays multicellular characteristic predatory behaviors in nature, while a single cell is capable of predation.

Aspect Term Extraction using Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning

Aspect based Sentiment Analysis is a major subarea of sentiment analysis. Many supervised and unsupervised approaches have been proposed in the past for detecting and analyzing the sentiment of aspect terms. In this paper, a graph-based semi-supervised learning approach for aspect term extraction is proposed. In this approach, every identified token in the review document is classified as aspect or non-aspect term from a small set of labeled tokens using label spreading algorithm. The k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) for graph sparsification is employed in the proposed approach to make it more time and memory efficient. The proposed work is further extended to determine the polarity of the opinion words associated with the identified aspect terms in review sentence to generate visual aspect-based summary of review documents. The experimental study is conducted on benchmark and crawled datasets of restaurant and laptop domains with varying value of labeled instances. The results depict that the proposed approach could achieve good result in terms of Precision, Recall and Accuracy with limited availability of labeled data.

Age but no sex effects on subareas of the amygdala

The amygdala, an anatomical composite of several nuclei that have been grouped anatomically and functionally into three major subareas, has been reported to decrease in size with increasing age and to differ in size between male and female brains. However, findings are rather inconsistent across existing studies, possibly reflecting differences in the cohorts examined or the approaches chosen to define and measure the dimensions of the amygdala. Here, we investigated possible effects of age and sex on the amygdala as well as age-by-sex interactions in 100 healthy subjects (50 men/50 women) aged 18-69 years. For this purpose, we enhanced conventional imaging-based information with microscopically defined cytoarchitectonic probabilities to discriminate between different subareas. We observed significant negative correlations between age and all subareas of the amygdala indicating decreases over time, but with subarea-specific trajectories. In addition, we detected a significant quadratic association with age for the left superficial subarea suggesting an accelerating volume loss over time. Such regional information may serve as a frame of reference in future studies, not only for normative samples but also potentially for clinical populations known to present with an atypical atrophy of the amygdala. There were no sex differences and no interactions between sex and age, suggesting that the size of the amygdala is similar in male and female brains (at least when properly accounting for total intracranial volume) and that its age-related decline follows a similar trajectory in both sexes.

Is there a\xa0\u2018German school\u2019 of comparative politics? An institutional perspective

Looking at scientific research in terms of ‘schools’ marks an established way of evaluating larger research areas. In this paper, we deliberately use a soft concept of ‘school’, designed to capture possible peculiarities of the discipline of Comparative Politics in Germany, and its impact at the international level of political research. The focus of our inquiry is on three major sub-areas of comparative political studies—comparative executive politics, comparative legislative research, and comparative federalism research—which can be meaningfully subsumed under the label of institution-centred comparative political research. Moreover, we focus basically on the developments of the past decade. We find that the size of the German, or German-language, community of comparative politics has long worked to keep the pressure for German or Germany-based scholars to publish their research in English low, though the language of publication alone cannot be considered a valid indicator of either scientific excellence or parochialism. Data collected for the past decade, measuring the share of contributions by German or Germany-based scholars in the internationally leading specialist journals of the sub-areas examined, suggest that the discipline has ‘opened up’ and ‘reached out’ more recently. That said, for the time being, the German comparative politics community in the three sub-areas studied continues to be considerably stronger at the receiving end, in terms of paying reasonable attention to the theoretical and empirical developments at the international level, than at actively shaping the international debate. As in other areas, exceptions prove the rule.

The Dermatology Milestone Project

The educational Milestones represent a developmental framework from less to more advanced for each of the 6 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies. They are outcome-based descriptors and targets for resident performance as the resident moves from entry into residency through graduation. In the Next Accreditation System (NAS), dermatology resident achievement of the educational Milestones also will be 1 of several indicators of the educational effectiveness of dermatology residency programs, and the Dermatology Residency Review Committee (RRC) will examine Milestone performance data to determine whether residents overall are progressing.

Scenario-Based Forecast of Regional Water Demands in Northeastern Illinois

This paper reviews the principles of scenario-based planning and illustrates an application of this approach in a study of a regional water supply and demand in northeastern Illinois. The scenario-based planning has been adopted over the traditional approaches because the scenario approach facilitates an explicit consideration of uncertainty in both supply and demand. An important component of the study was the development of scenario-based forecasts of water demand for major user sectors and geographical subareas within the 11-county region which, includes the city of Chicago and 250 municipalities. The study revealed that the increase in total withdrawals in 2050, under baseline scenario, would be 530 mgd (millions of gallons per day) (36 %) and could reach as high as 949 mgd (64 %) under high demand growth scenario. Thus, meeting these additional demands would require large capital outlays for water infrastructure and would likely have significant impacts on some of the regional sources of water supply...

Washington State Ferries 20-Year Long-Range Plan

The long-range plan of Washington State Ferries is the culmination of several years of effort to develop a 20-year service and investment strategy based on sound transportation data and forecast-model techniques and to incorporate local and regional expectations of ferry service. Components of the plan are set out in a sequence of necessary investments that address current and anticipated terminal and vessel deficiencies. Six new passenger-only vessels, four new vehicle and passenger vessels, and several major new multimodal terminals are included in the plan. Three alternative service strategies were analyzed for each of the four service subareas. From these, a single draft plan was prepared that took into account reasonable assumptions about financial constraints. A thorough public and agency review has resulted in several proposed changes to the plan. These revisions include a reallocation of additional vehicle carrying capacity from an area where there was not consensus on the solution to areas where there was consensus that the draft plan was deficient. The final plan identifies several major strategies for the four major geographical subareas within the ferry system’s service area to accommodate the projected increase in traffic growth and is balanced within likely farebox and tax revenue constraints.

EDI — The Grand Daddy of Electronic Commerce

Electronic data interchange (EDI) has been around for more than a decade. It addresses a fundamental and enduring business problem — the exchange of data between the computer systems of organisations. It is currently the cornerstone of a number of successful global companies. However, its future lies with new 'trusted third parties' which combine data management with public key infrastructure, offering enhanced message switching and message translation in response to market trends. 'eBusiness' has a number of forms — business to consumer, now growing fast as 'Web-shopping', consumer to consumer, and business to business, the longest established. In the last category there is a major sub-area of 'upply-chain-driven' trading. This was the first area of automation and was initiated by the process-driven industries such as retail distribution, automotive manufacture and international logistics. Indeed, whole industries are today totally dependent on EDI-driven processes.

A model for the software engineering component of a computer science curriculum

Software engineering is considered to be one of the major subareas of computer science. Therefore, regardless of what academic unit computer science is housed in, software engineering should play an essential role. Also, an increased interest in accrediting software engineering degree programs, and in licensing software engineers as professional engineers, has led to increased interest in software engineering by computer science programs. This paper examines how software engineering can be effectively integrated into a computer science curriculum. A model based on a four-course sequence is presented and discussed. This model is then compared to the software engineering component of the computer science undergraduate degree program at Texas Tech University, which implements most of the recommendations made. Finally, a discussion of how this model can be used in other types of computer science programs is included.

Mean annual growth increments for male West Coast rock lobsterJasus lalandii, 1969-1993

This note reviews all moult increment information available for male West Coast rock lobster (published and unpublished) and collates these data into a single long-term growth record for each of the major subareas along the South African west coast. The data synthesized highlight the complexity of the growth information available for J. lalandii. The factors influencing direct comparisons of the data are discussed and the possible problems arising from the different techniques used during the study period are examined. The manuscript also incorporates increments of negative growth which were ignored previously.

Artificial intelligence and software engineering: a survey of possibilities

This paper is a broad-based review of the area of overlap between the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and software engineering (SE). A taxonomy of this overlap area is developed and related to other major attempts to address the interaction between these two fields. Each of the three major subareas — AI-based support environments; AI mechanisms and techniques in practical software; and software engineering tools and techniques in AI software — is described and illustrated with representative examples. Finally, it is noted that the area of overlap is changing and thus any current attempt to map out the possibilities is to be viewed as speculation.

A note on the stabilities of work trip travel demands in Toronto

The 1971 and 1981 census journey-to-work data are used to examine the temporal and spatial stabilities of home-based work trip travel demands in the Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA). Regression analysis is used to establish consistent trip generation equations at the census tract level using population, household, and dwelling unit data; the stabilities of alternative equations over time are examined. All of the partial regression coefficients shifted over time, reflecting the substantial changes that have occurred in household structure, female labour force participation, and the characteristics of the housing market. The spatial distributions of the residuals are examined in terms of the spatial differentiation that exists in the household sector in the Toronto CMA in terms of variables such as household size, population age, and occupation status. The use of traditional trip generation techniques is difficult to sustain given the temporal and spatial variations in the trip generation rate. It is concluded that travel demands can only be estimated from a careful consideration of the residential dynamics of the major subareas in a region.

Research at The University of Texas

Research in artificial intelligence at the University of Texas at Austin is diverse. It is spread across many departments(Computer Science, Mathematics, the Institute for Computer Science and Computer Applications, and the Linguistics Research Center) and it covers most of the major subareas with AI (natural language, theorem proving, knowledge representation, languages for AI, and applications). Related work is also being done in several other departments, including EE (low-level vision), Psychology, Linguistics, and the Center for Cognitive Science.

Patterns of Landscape Modification in Relation to Agricultural Practice in Central Chile

On the basis of published information and the Authors' own experience in the field, a schema of land deterioration in 5 major sub-areas of Central Chile is proposed. The 5 sub-areas are: 1. Coastal Marine terraces; 2. Coastal ranges; 3. Andean foothills; 4. Central valley and river valleys; and 5. Norte Chico.