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An efficient Radar Cross Section (RCS) gradient evaluation method based on the adjoint method is presented. The Method of Moments is employed to solve the Combined Field Integral Equation (CFIE) and the corresponding derivatives computing routines are generated by the program transformation Automatic Differentiation (AD) technique. The differential code is developed using three kinds of AD mode: tangent mode, multidirectional tangent mode, and adjoint mode. The differential code in adjoint mode is modified and optimized by changing the "two-sweeps" architecture into the "inner-loop two-sweeps" architecture. Their efficiency and memory consumption are tested and the differential code using modified adjoint mode demonstrates the great advantages in both efficiency and memory consumption. A gradient-based shape optimization design method is established using the adjoint method and the mechanism of RCS reduction is studied. The results show that the sharp leading can avoid the specular back-scattering and the undulations of the surface could change the phases which result in a further RCS reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Serbian Journal of Management is the property of Serbian Journal of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2017, the mathematics assessments that are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program underwent a transformation shifting the administration from paper-and-pencil formats to digitally-based assessments (DBA). This shift introduced new interactive item types that bring rich process data and tremendous opportunities to study the cognitive and behavioral processes that underlie test-takers' performances in ways that are not otherwise possible with the response data alone. In this exploratory study, we investigated the problem-solving processes and strategies applied by the nation's fourth and eighth graders by analyzing the process data collected during their interactions with two technology-enhanced drag-and-drop items (one item for each grade) included in the first digital operational administration of the NAEP's mathematics assessments. Results from this research revealed how test-takers who achieved different levels of accuracy on the items engaged in various cognitive and metacognitive processes (e.g., in terms of their time allocation, answer change behaviors, and problem-solving strategies), providing insights into the common mathematical misconceptions that fourth- and eighth-grade students held and the steps where they may have struggled during their solution process. Implications of the findings for educational assessment design and limitations of this research are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to explore and assess the point of view on digital transformations of companies who are currently in the transformation program and running digital transformation projects. The study collects data from diverse top companies across Baltics region across various industries. Within the study the descriptive research method is in use. The statistical population of this study is an extended list of companies from the Coface study for Baltic top 50 ranking for 2019. The sampling for the study was based on purpose selective approach which includes 11 companies from the statistical population. The data collection was carried out by an online questionnaire and afterwards through interviews with the respondents to validate the data provided. The results of the research is the outlook created which includes a number of aspects to be considered for future research: (1) Currently, the competence level of transformation processes in flagship companies and respectively in rest of the companies in the market needs to be improved; (2) Business demand for knowledgeable digital transformation experts with comprehensive modern business processes management knowledge is relatively higher rather one with pure technical expertise in cutting cutting edge technologies; (3) To boost digital transformation toward the operational concept of Intelligent Enterprise, support and guidance from the global digital transformation advisory partners is highly recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the important historical turning points of states is the change of political power. The parties to change have implemented different policies, especially in the socio-cultural field, even if they have similar ideologies. In the reform of the republic, where the state changed with almost every dynamics that formed it change brought with it a great transformation. Kemalism, which basically incorporates Turkish nationalism, is the ideology that plans and programs this transformation. In line with the idea of nationalism in its core, it can be said that the main problematic of Kemalism is to determine the historical process in which the national origin will be launched. Early republican era historiography tries to solve the problem by ignoring the Ottoman Empire and reaching the history of Central Asian Turkish. Thus, the Ottoman Empire becomes a process that is a thing of the past. It is inevitable that this new view of history will directly affect the type of novel that takes its subject from history. n the historical novel published between 1923 and 1938, the Ottomans take part in largely negative images as a requirement of the new perception of history. This situation, which exemplifies the dominant effect of official ideologies on the cultural field, reduces the period and the human reality to which it was preceded by pure literature. n the novel of the period, the Ottoman appears in a picture of a historical process in which historical / fictive novel people, who have no particular side, repeat the same behaviors in the same places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Model transformations play a key role in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Testing model transformation is an important activity to ensure the quality and correctness of the generated models. However, during the evolution and maintenance of these model transformation programs, frequently testing them by running a large number of test cases can be costly. Regression test selection is a form of testing, which selects tests from an existing test suite to test a modified program. Aim: The aim of the paper is to present a test selection approach for the regression testing of model transformations. The selected test case suite should be smaller in size than the full test suite, thereby reducing the testing overhead, while at the same time the fault detection capability of the full test suite should not be compromised. Method: approach is based on the use of a traceability mapping of test cases with their corresponding rules to select the affected test items. The approach is complemented with a tool that automates the proposed process. Results: Our experiments show that the proposed approach succeeds in reducing the size of the selected test case suite, and hence its execution time, while not compromising the fault detection capability of the full test suite. Conclusion: The experimental results confirm that our regression test selection approach is cost-effective compared to a retest strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained wide popularity both in academic and industrial contexts. Unlike traditional embedded devices with specialized firmwares, modern IoT devices accommodate general‐purpose operating systems, allowing developers to run more sophisticated applications written in high‐level languages like JavaScript. Because IoT devices are subject to resource constraints like available battery power, we need to dynamically migrate a running process between different devices to prevent losing state. However, it is challenging to apply migration techniques using memory snapshots across the heterogeneous pool of IoT devices. We present ThingsMigrate, a middleware providing platform‐independent migration of JavaScript processes across IoT devices. Prior to execution, ThingsMigrate instruments the source code of a given program to expose its internal state. During run‐time, the transformed program produces on demand a JSON snapshot of its current state, from which new code is generated to resume execution. Thus, ThingsMigrate enables process migration entirely in the application space without any modifications to the underlying virtual machine (VM), providing VM‐independence. We present three versions of ThingsMigrate, each building on the previous to optimize for run‐time latency and memory consumption. We report on the experience of building each successive version and discuss the insights gained and the learning outcomes. We evaluated ThingsMigrate against standard benchmarks, over two IoT platforms and a cloud‐like environment. We show that it can migrate even highly CPU‐intensive applications, with average run‐time latency overhead of 33% and memory overhead of 78%. ThingsMigrate supports multiple subsequent migrations without introducing additional overhead over each subsequent migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transformation revolution has been crawling toward almost all aspects of our lives. One form of the digital transformation revolution appears in the transformation of our routine everyday tasks into computer executable programs in the form of web, desktop and mobile applications. The vast field of software engineering that has witnessed a significant progress in the past years is responsible for this form of digital transformation. Software development as well as other branches of software engineering has been affected by this progress. Developing applications that run on top of mobile devices requires the software developer to consider the limited resources of these devices, which on one side give them their mobile advantages, however, on the other side, if an application is developed without the consideration of these limited resources then the mobile application will neither work properly nor allow the device to run smoothly. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid approach for program optimization. It succeeded in optimizing the search process for the optimal program transformation sequence that targets a specific optimization goal. In this research we targeted the program size, to reach the lowest possible decline rate of the number of Lines of Code (LoC) of a targeted program. The experimental results from applying the hybrid approach on synthetic program transformation problems show a significant improve in the optimized output on which the hybrid approach achieved an LoC decline rate of 50.51% over the application of basic genetic algorithm only where 17.34% LoC decline rate was reached.

Of late, attempts are being made to optimise production system problems by minimum cost. A good available device in this area is response surface methodology. This methodology combines experimental designs and statistical techniques for empirical model building and optimising. In most situations simulated models for real world problems are non‐linear multi‐response, while responses are conflicting. The simultaneous optimisation of several conflicting responses is computationally expensive. So this makes the problem solving extremely complex. Since few attempts have been made to scrutinise this domain, in this paper the nonlinear continuous multi‐response problem is investigated. In order to tackle multi‐response optimisation difficulties, we propose a new hybrid meta heuristic based on the imperialist competitive algorithm. It simulates a socio–economical procedure, imperialistic competition. When there are some non‐dominated solutions in searching space, a technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution is used to identify which non‐dominated solutions are imperialists and which ones belong to colonial societies. A particle swarm‐like mechanism is employed to model the influence of imperialists on colonies. The algorithm will continue until only one imperialist obtains all countries’ possessions. In order to prevent carrying out extensive experiments to find optimum parameters of the algorithm, we apply the Taguchi approach. Since there is no standard benchmark in this field, we use three case studies from distinguished papers in the multi‐response optimisation field. Comparing the results with some works mentioned in the literature reveals the superiority of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rapid increase of Asian immigrant students in Canadian classrooms demands more systematic and increased language support to ensure all English language learners (ELLs) achieve success in school. However, research has found mixed results on the usefulness of current English as a Second Language (ESL) support programs and a growing dissatisfaction among students and parents about ESL, suggesting further investigation is needed to improve the provision of ESL in the schools. This paper details how one school and one ESL teacher responded to the needs of newly arrived Asian (i.e., Chinese) ELL students by documenting the school’s and teacher’s journey in revamping the pull-out ESL program into a culturally responsive English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program with a focus on immersion, community engagement, and a pedagogy of cultural reciprocity. The case has important implications for redesigning current ESL programs in the context of changing immigration.

The census was, however, not unconnected to the project of statisticizing America that Didier describes. The sociology of statistics has a reputation not only for being a vibrant field of inquiry in its own right, but also for being one that affords an innovative look at long-standing debates in other fields. Didier convincingly shows that the development of representative sampling does not spring from the disinterested truth seeking of pure science, but is instead intimately tied to different forms of statehood and models of citizenship. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal of Management & Economics Research is the property of Journal of Management & Economics Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

High-level transformation languages like Rascal include expressive features for manipulating large abstract syntax trees: first-class traversals, expressive pattern matching, backtracking, and generalized iterators. We present the design and implementation of an abstract interpretation tool, Rabit, for verifying inductive type and shape properties for transformations written in such languages. We describe how to perform abstract interpretation based on operational semantics, specifically focusing on the challenges arising when analyzing the expressive traversals and pattern matching. Finally, we evaluate Rabit on a series of transformations (normalization, desugaring, refactoring, code generators, type inference, etc.) showing that we can effectively verify stated properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Malaysia's most recent public service reform has improved service delivery and governmental performance. It also endeavors to identify critical success factors that explain reform performance and draw lessons based on the Malaysian experience. Design/methodology/approach: The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on data from both primary and secondary sources. Besides a thorough review of official documents and existing literature, the author conducted 20 individual interviews with key informants representing government officials, academics and civil society organizations. Findings: The study shows that despite some pitfalls and misgivings, the Government Transformation Program (GTP) has produced concrete improvements in service delivery areas where previous reforms failed. One of the factors that underpin GTP's relative success is the detailed performance management framework, which helped foster inter-agency collaboration and enforce accountability for results at various levels. Practical implications: The GTP success highlights the significance of adapting reform content to local situations especially when reforms are based on external models; sanctions from the highest political office; a dedicated unit to drive the implementation and an effective performance management framework through which individuals and agencies would be held to account for results achieved. Originality/value: Despite many and varied reform initiatives attempted in the past, cases of successful reform are rare, especially in developing countries. Little is known on what makes a reform work, a gap exacerbated by notable absence of systematic research on this topic. The paper contributes to address this by reviewing Malaysia's innovative approach to reform and the insights that the Malaysian experience offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Organic Solid Waste (OSW) generation have experienced high growth in the last decades. Moreover, the treatment and management of them have become a priority in the environmental policy of many cities, due to the sanitary and environmental problems related to the OSW elimination. Between 2 and 3 metric tons per day of organic residues are generated in the local market square of Fusagasugá-Colombia, without having any transformation program or technological alternatives for their decomposition. This paper presents the design and implementation of an experimental reactor for composting that includes a measurement stage, signal conditioning, data acquisition (DAQ), and data storage, together with a control and telemetric supervision system through a Human-Machine Interface (HMI), which allows manipulation of some key variables of the composting process remotely via the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a participatory qualitative research project using the Delphi consensus technique aided by Internet technology for successful transition of academic endeavors during and the post COVID era. The study aimed to derive a holistic competency matrix for an optometry program for transformation of the program to competency-based education. Design/methodology/approach: This study combined a scoping review of literature for developing a baseline competency framework, along with derivation of an E-Delphi consensus within a panel of diverse stakeholders to achieve the objective of plotting a detailed competency matrix. Findings: The involvement of all stakeholders of educational system in Delphi study resulted in a valid and all-inclusive competency framework with 18 competency units and 97 competency elements. This framework provided a strong base for redesigning pedagogy and assessment methods during COVID-19 crisis. Practical implications: The paper highlights the feasibility and utility of adopting a participatory approach during COVID-19 outbreak. The Delphi technique aided by Internet technology was employed to develop a competency-based curriculum. Social implications: The paper narrates a suitable, feasible and scientific method for rapid transition in academia, following the restrictions and social distancing norms imposed during the COVID-19 outbreak. Originality/value: Although there is good evidence for use of the Delphi technique in curriculum development, this paper adds value by focusing on a participatory approach in using it. The suggested method here shows ways to gain optimum scientific output with minimum resources in constrained situations such as COVID-19 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Patient satisfaction is the ultimate goal in any healthcare system. Together with other traditional quality indicators, patient satisfaction must be addressed to improve the quality of health care. The strategic objectives of the Ministry of Health (MOH) formulated by the Saudi National Transformation Program are to improve the quality of healthcare services, expand privatization of governmental services, and create an attractive environment for both local and international investors. The objective of this study was to apply Kano model to determine quality attributes of patient care at primary healthcare centers in Saudi Arabia. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted at primary healthcare centers (PHCs) under the MOH in Saudi Arabia between October 2018 and February 2019. Study included all Saudi adult patients aged 18 years or older attending the selected PHCs of MOH. Patients who had difficulty in comprehending were excluded. Data was collected by using a structured questionnaire based on the Kano model for the assessment of patients' expectations of the quality of care and provided services. Data was entered and analysed using SPSS. Chi-square test and t-test were used to test for statistical significance. RESULTS: The study included a total of 243 patients from 10 PHCs, 51% from consulting PHCs and 49% from nonconsulting PHCs. Response rate was 97.2%, and 44.9% respondents were males. Of the 18 attributes chosen for our study, 14 were one-dimensional, three belonged to the attractive type, and one was indifferent type. The top three one-dimensional attributes were "friendliness and respectfulness of the clinic receptionist," "friendliness and respectfulness of the nurses and laboratory staff," and "care and attention of the doctor". CONCLUSION: The investors and policymakers need to turn their attention to assisting in the privatization of governmental services by creating a good climate for both local and international investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The herbal industry has been recognized as a significant source of economic growth in Malaysia. It has been identified as one of the Entry Point Project (EPP1) under the New Key Economic Areas (NKEA) in the Economic Transformation Program (ETP), initiated in early 2011. This is parallel to the increase in the global market demand for herbal products. However, the utilization of local herbs in Malaysia is primarily focusing on pharmaceutical, medicinal research and development (R&D), and health products, whilst minimal attention is given to the realm of culinary practices, particularly in the development of innovative culinary products. This review discusses the current herbal industry scenario and outlines the undervalued and neglected paradox of local herbs in Malaysia, mainly in terms of culinary practices. In addition, this review highlights several issues and challenges of local herbs in the development of herbal-based culinary products. The information gained from this review can be beneficial for related policymakers to take initiatives on improving the market segmentation, as highlighted under the EPP1, which neglected the potential of local herbs in culinary product development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing a course of academic English for 94 teachers to teach 1,200 students based in different parts of the world might present a challenge to any course development team. Add into that mix the transformation of a program from traditional face-to-face delivery, to a course delivered fully online, with teachers in different time zones using unfamiliar technology, and only 16 weeks to produce all the teaching and training materials. This is exactly what happened in the summer of 2020 at Warwick University in Coventry, United Kingdom. The following is the story of what happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecotour guides play many roles within ecotourism, making them an important part of the industry. However, ecotour guides often do not possess all the skills necessary to fulfill their roles. Training programs can help ecotour guides improve their skills, though it remains unclear which training methods are most effective. The purpose of this case study was to explore how a specific guide training program based in South Africa influences guides, and which training methods and characteristics account for that influence. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews were employed to illuminate the guide training's methods and characteristics, which included experiential learning, role modeling, employment of exceptional instructors, diverse learning experiences, and feedback to improve program outcomes. Two outcomes in particular – transformation of program participants and increased environmentally responsible behavior – stood out, and two program limitations were also identified. These findings can assist in the development of training programs and help shape future research questions, including the need to further investigate the temporal components of ecotour guide training, the longevity of learning outcomes, and the occupational pressures that may limit an ecotour guide training program's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Program specialization is mainly recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing software systems. Nonetheless, it can also be productively employed in other application areas. This paper presents an assertion-guided program specialization methodology for efficiently imposing safety properties on software systems. The program specializer takes as input a set A of logical assertions that specifies the expected system behavior plus a software system that is modeled as a Maude program R that may violate some of the assertions in A . The outcome is a safe refinement R ▹ of R in which every system computation is a good run of R , i.e., it satisfies the assertions in A . The specialization technique has been fully automated in the ÁTAME system and ensures that no good run of R is removed from R ▹ , while the number of bad runs is reduced to zero. The efficiency and scalability of our technique is empirically demonstrated by means of a thorough experimental evaluation of the ÁTAME system, which shows fast specialization times and good performance of the computed specializations, even for large assertion sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Multiple distributed stream queries, which are executed on stream processing systems, need to be fine‐tuned to the compute cluster in order to harness the full potential of the hardware they run on. In this paper, we describe an automatic technique for conducting such stream query optimization in the presence of multiple stream jobs. During this autotuning process, we identify the structure of each program and conduct automatic program transformation to generate optimized unified streaming jobs. The operators on the unified secondary sample application are grouped into processing elements considering their performance characteristics and the stream graph topology structure to produce high performance stream query network. We implemented this multiple stream query optimization technique on a mechanism called Tahitica. We demonstrate our approach's ability for producing optimized stream query performance by comparing it to naive deployments using two real‐world stream processing applications in the domains of health care and search advertising. Our stream query optimization approach reported 7.1% throughput performance improvement compared to a naive deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financing is an important aspect of any program for successful transformation. Financial commitment of government is considered to be the highest form of commitment for successful work. Without budgetary provision, no program can achieve the desired target. The role of health financing of central government, international donor agencies, provincial government, and local bodies have been identified. The paper focused on monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for health financing in the context of recent developments. Health financing models have been discussed to gain an understanding about relation of financing and overall healthcare development. The search engines like PubMed, Scopus, Web of Sciences, and jstor (journal storage) were consulted to unearth the mechanism of health finances for development of good health. The paper put forth various themes and sub-themes according to financial implications on health structure of India. All healthcare programs need a continuous stream of resources like medicine, workforce, physical infrastructure, monitoring, and evaluation to achieve good health. Whereas, different stakeholders also need financial support to evolve with great vigour and vivacity. There is a pressing need to infuse financial resources into public health system for achievement of universal health care rather than incremental growth in traditional financial processes spreading over several decades. The specific roles and responsibilities of central, provincial, local governments, and international donors have to be delineated to expedite resource mobilisation. However, while implementing programs, there should be coordination among all the stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media are one of the forms of technological development that prevailed in the world because of its characteristics that make it brings together all languages and cultures and to see the issues that concern members of society, and there is no doubt that social media have had a significant impact in the presentation and discussion of media campaigns related to awareness of the transformation program National 2020. Identify the research problem: The current study seeks to know" role of electronic media campaigns on social media in raising awareness of the National Transformation Program 2020" Objectives of the study: Identifying the study sample exposure rate for the electronic media campaigns related to the National Transformation Program 2020 on social media, and identifying the reasons for the study sample exposure to the electronic media campaigns related to awareness of the National Transformation Program 2020, and identifying the type of knowledge the study sample acquired on the National Transformation Program 2020. Study concepts: E-media campaigns - social media - outreach - National Transformation Program 2020 Type and methodology of the study: It is one of the descriptive studies and it depends on the methodology of the survey in the field. Sample of the study: The study relies on an intentional sample of 200 individuals distributed (100 males - 100 females) who are between the ages of 18-21 years.. Data collection tool: Questionnaire Results of the study: The study revealed that there are statistically significant differences between male and female study sample in the degree of follow-up to the media campaigns of the National Transformation Program 2020 on social networking sites, and came from the most important reasons for university youth exposure to electronic media campaigns for the national transformation program 2020 is to follow the Kingdom's achievements in achieving the Kingdom's vision Saudi Arabia 2020 with a relative importance of 79%, and the results also indicated a high percentage of the study sample opinion in electronic media campaigns about confirming their role in educating university youth on the national transformation program 2020 by 69.5%, while 30.5% of them do not see this role in awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model transformations play an important role in the evolution of systems in various fields such as healthcare, automotive and aerospace industry. Thus, it is important to check the correctness of model transformation programs. Several approaches have been proposed to generate test cases for model transformations based on different coverage criteria (e.g., statements, rules, metamodel elements, etc.). However, the execution of a large number of test cases during the evolution of transformation programs is time-consuming and may include a lot of overlap between the test cases. In this paper, we propose a test case selection approach for model transformations based on multi-objective search. We use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to find the best trade-offs between two conflicting objectives: (1) maximize the coverage of rules and (2) minimize the execution time of the selected test cases. We validated our approach on several evolution cases of medium and large ATLAS Transformation Language programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Family physician program (FPP) and health transformation plan (HTP) are two major reforms that have been implemented in Iran's health system in recent. The present study was aimed at evaluating the impact of these two reforms on the level of service utilization and cost of health care services.Methods: This longitudinal study was conducted on people insured by social security organization in Fars province during 2009-2016. The data on the utilization of services and costs of general practitioner visits, specialist visits, medications, imaging, laboratory tests, and hospitalization were collected. Interrupted time series analysis was used to analyze the effect of the two mentioned reforms.Results: FPP resulted in a significant reduction in the number of specialist visits, imaging, and laboratory tests in the short term, and in the number of radiology services, laboratory tests, and hospitalization in the long term. In contrast, HTP significantly increased the utilization of radiology services and laboratory tests both in the short term and long term. Concerning the costs, FPP resulted in a reduction in costs in short and long term except general practitioners' and specialist visit, and medication in long term. However, HTP resulted in an increase in health care costs in both of the studied time periods.Conclusions: FPP has been successful in rationalizing the utilization of services. On the other hand, HTP has improved people's access to services by increasing the utilization; but it has increased health care costs. Therefore, policymakers must adopt an agenda to revise and re-design the plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to automatically infer the resource consumption of programs, analyzers track how data sizes change along program's execution. Typically, analyzers measure the sizes of data by applying norms which are mappings from data to natural numbers that represent the sizes of the corresponding data. When norms are defined by taking type information into account, they are named typed-norms. This article presents a transformational approach to resource analysis with typed-norms that are inferred by a data-flow analysis. The analysis is based on a transformation of the program into an intermediate abstract program in which each variable is abstracted with respect to all considered norms which are valid for its type. We also present the data-flow analysis to automatically infer the required, useful, typed-norms from programs. Our analysis is formalized on a simple rule-based representation to which programs written in different programming paradigms (e.g., functional, logic, and imperative) can be automatically translated. Experimental results on standard benchmarks used by other type-based analyzers show that our approach is both efficient and accurate in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disintegration is a relation on measures and a transformation on probabilistic programs that generalizes density calculation and conditioning, two operations widely used for exact and approximate inference. Existing program transformations that find a disintegration or density automatically are limited to a fixed base measure that is an independent product of Lebesgue and counting measures, so they are of no help in practical cases that require tricky reasoning about other base measures. We present the first disintegrator that handles variable base measures, including discrete-continuous mixtures, dependent products, and disjoint sums. By analogy with type inference, our disintegrator can check a given base measure as well as infer an unknown one that is principal. We derive the disintegrator and prove it sound by equational reasoning from semantic specifications. It succeeds in a variety of applications where disintegration and density calculation had not been previously mechanized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jurnal Pendidikan Malaysia is the property of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Study abroad, integrative studies, and service learning are three pedagogical approaches recognized by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as high-impact practices (Kuh, 2008). This paper draws on published literature and the experiences of faculty and students at a regional, comprehensive university in the Southeastern United States who worked alongside Nicaraguan community partners to explore the theoretical and practical implications of methodologies that have the potential for exponential impact. Study abroad and service learning programs target the transformation of students into critically thinking, socially aware, civic-minded adults who are more inclined to embrace diversity (Miller, 2014), and they complement integrative approaches to academic content. In addition, increasing attention toward combined global and local pedagogies leads students to recognize the interplay between the transnational and their own neighborhoods (Brooks & Normore, 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Istanbul Commerce University Journal of Social Sciences / İstanbul Ticaret Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Istanbul Commerce University Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The organizations desiring to adapt the developing technologies and to meet continuously changing and increasing customer demands, and to survive in a competitive environment should be able to manage the process of their organizational change. Extensive changes have been carried out in the health sector in order to keep up with the developing technologies and to meet increasing qualified service demands of the people. The most current changes in the health sector in Turkey have been accomplished by means of the Health Transformation Program that was realized in the periods of 2003-2009 and 2009-2014, and is composed of two-phases. The aim of the study is to determine the perceptions of healthcare personnel toward the organizational change process during the Health Transformation Program. For this purpose, a research is carried out by means of questionnaire technique in the Burdur State Hospital. According to the findings of the questionnaire that is analyzed with the SPSS software, it is found that the organizational change in the hospital is composed of service-providing methods, hospital procedures, human resources and technological fields. It is determined that the primary objective of the organizational change process in the hospital is to increase the customer satisfaction level of patients and their relatives, and that the healthcare professionals are informed during the process. It is also determined also that the most important cause of the resistance against the organizational change is the possibility of change in present routines after the change process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Turkish health system has undergone a radical change, called reform, with the Health Transformation Program (HTP) launched in 2003. With the HTP, the manner of rule in the delivery and organization of primary health care services has been redesigned and the Family Medicine System (FMS) has been introduced. Thanks to the FMS, it is planned to facilitate access to primary healthcare in Turkey and to increase the quality and efficiency in primary healthcare institutions. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of the community health centers and family practice centers, one of the primary health care facilities, on a provincial basis before and after the FMS. According to the findings, the technical efficiency of family practice centers has increased after the FMS. However, it is concluded that the increase in technology is not high and therefore there is no significant improvement in total factor productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims at developing software more productively by using models as the main artifacts. Here, the models with high abstraction levels must be transformed into lower levels and finally executable models, i.e., source code. As a result, model transformation languages/tools play a main role on realizing the MDD goal. The Object-Management Group (OMG) presented the Query/View/Transformation (QVT) as a standard for the Meta-Object Facility (MOF)-based model transformation languages. However, implementing a model transformation language, which supports the full features of the QVT proposal requires a formal model of the underlying concepts. Having common terminology and a formal, precise, and consistent specification facilitates developing dependable transformation languages/tools. This paper aims to provide a formal specification of the main characteristics of a QVT-Relations (QVTr) model transformation language using the Z notation. The proposed formal model can be adapted for formalizing other domain and language concepts too. To show the applicability of the proposed formalism, a simplified version of the classic object-relational transformation is specified. Additionally, we show how the semantics clarifies some outstanding semantic issues in QVTr. The proposed formalism of this paper will pave the way to building support tools for model transformations in a unified manner in MDD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malaysia plans to become a high-income economy in the coming years via what is called the ETP (Economic Transformation Program). To achieve this, Malaysia requires a sufficient level of foreign capital and thus is implementing appropriate investment initiatives to stimulate economic activity. So far, Malaysia has only been able to attract a small number of foreign investors. With a relatively small amount of FDI flowing into the country, the expectations of the Economic Transformation Program (ETP) that heavily rely on FDI may be challenged. The current paper analyses how selected macroeconomic factors might impact the flow of FDI into Malaysia. The ARDL (Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag) technique was used together with the VAR (Vector Autoregressive Model) on annual data (1970-2017). The study has found that over time, appreciation of the local currency, openness, inflation and labour cost had a significant negative impact on the inward flow of FDI. Conversely, over the longer term, real interest rate and GDP growth produced substantial positive effects on FDI. The findings suggest that when aiming to create an attractive for FDI environment, it is necessary for governments to closely consider macroeconomic policies that lower both production and transaction costs of multinational enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Java programming language version eight introduced several features that encourage the functional style of programming, including the support for lambda expressions and the Stream API. Currently, there is a common wisdom that refactoring legacy code to introduce lambda expressions, besides other potential benefits, simplifies the code and improves program comprehension. Aims: The purpose of this work is to investigate this belief, conducting an indepth study to evaluate the effect of introducing lambda expressions on program comprehension. Method: We conducted this research using a mixedmethod approach. For the quantitative method, we quantitatively analyzed 158 pairs of code snippets extracted directly either from GitHub or from recommendations from three tools (RJTL, NetBeans, and IntelliJ). We also surveyed practitioners to collect their perceptions about the benefits on program comprehension when introducing lambda expressions. We asked practitioners to evaluate and rate sets of pairs of code snippets. Results: We found contradictory results in our research. Based on the quantitative assessment, we could not find evidence that the introduction of lambda expressions improves software readability--one of the components of program comprehension. Our results suggest that the transformations recommended by the aforementioned tools decrease program comprehension when assessed by two stateoftheart models to estimate readability. Differently, our findings of the qualitative assessment suggest that the introduction of lambda expression improves program comprehension in three scenarios when: we convert anonymous inner classes to a lambda expression, use structural loops with inner conditional to an anyMatch operator, and apply structural loops to filter operator combined with a collect method. Implications: We argue in this paper that one can improve program comprehension when he/she applies particular transformations to introduce lambda expressions (e.g., replacing anonymous inner classes with lambda expressions). Also, the opinion of the participants highlights which kind of transformation for introducing lambda might be advantageous. This might support the implementation of effective tools for automatic program transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper arose from empirical investigations of practitioner views of both governance and program definitions together with investigations of practitioner reference documents. These investigations indicated that some confusion had arisen in infrastructure project management as a result of approaches used in IT. This paper contributes to the literature evaluating project standards and methodologies by conducting an examination of the suitability of one such source (MSP) for use in engineering infrastructure program management. A deductive definitional approach is taken to identify features that could cause difficulty. Eight features were examined, and six were found to have difficulty in application to engineering infrastructure. The remaining two were found to be terminology differences that are unlikely to cause too much difficulty. The features causing difficulty include an inappropriate definition of a program, use of a non-generic process flow unsuitable for rolling programs, confusion of transformation projects with programs, the presumption of a board governance model, and confusion of large projects with programs. The paper concludes that MSP is quite poorly suited to managing rolling programs, whether they are in engineering infrastructure or IT. Various changes to MSP and PMI publications are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]