Oakton Community College

Asymmetry is a fundamental feature of data dealing with medical treatment in settings involving complex dependencies, such as cholesterol cardiology risk preventive studies. However, typical measures of dependence, like the correlation coefficient, are symmetric. This severe oversymmetrization brings several biases. To overcome this gap, we develop better dependence modeling and provide statistical guidelines for research on preventative cardiology, bone mineral density, and general medicine. By using pseudo-exponential, pseudo-normal, Marshall-Olkin bivariate exponential, and Hanagal bivariate Weibull models, we demonstrate the ability to discover important latent relationships emerging in recent studies in cardiology. For example, an excessively high level of HDL cholesterol can be dangerous, as can the use of different units for cholesterol and blood pressure measurements. These models eliminate erroneous oversymmetrization while providing greater flexibility than asymmetric copulas. We illustrate the usage of the newly developed dependence models on data from the Framingham Heart Study, the University of Victor Babes study, and the Study of Osteoporotic Fracture (SOF). We create new pseudo-exponential and pseudo-lognormal models and a graphical method for goodness-of-fit for certain bivariate models. We also derive the pseudo-exponential copula and densities for these models.

The police require legitimacy in order to function. It is argued that this legitimacy can be attained through procedural justice; that is, fairness. An ethnographic study of street-level policing was undertaken to explore this idea. From this study issues embedded in policing emerged (discretion, threat, and cynicism). Broader issues also emerged. For example, officers function as street-level bureaucrats. However, officers suffer from extreme stress and suicide. Also, officers feel they handle society’s “dirty work.” In employing procedural justice, officers do not usually impose their will on citizens. Rather, they negotiate an acceptable outcome in most situations. However, outside influences impinge on the police.

Research in second language acquisition has shown that vocabulary growth is beneficial for reading (Qian 1999, 2000), listening comprehension (Staehr 2009), and has a positive influence on writing and speaking performances (Johnson et al. 2016; Levelt 1995). Vocabulary learning is hence a central pillar in the second language classroom. The activities used to enable the acquisition of new vocabulary play a crucial role in the learners' path to proficiency. In this regard, the textbooks used are important since they can largely influence what types of vocabulary activities are used by the teachers in the classroom (Allen 2008; Tavakoli and Wright 2020; Woodward 1989). Nation (2013) provides a useful framework to analyze such activities. He identifies four strands that should be used in a balanced way to provide students with a comprehensive variety of tools to learn and apply new vocabulary. This study explores to what extent the four strands of activities are present in mainstream textbooks of Italian as a Foreign Language. This study also bridges a gap in the literature, since little research on vocabulary instruction has been done on the textbooks used for languages other than English. The result of our analysis shows that the Italian textbooks mostly focus on vocabulary aspects such as form-meaning mapping and grammar, leaving less room for meaning focused input and output. Furthermore, no activities that aimed at fluency development were found.

Complex model, say C3, of "para-space" as alternative to the real M4 Minkowski space-time for both relativistic and classical mechanics was shortly introduced as reference to our previous works on that subject. The actual aim, however, is an additional analysis of the physical and para-physical phenomena' behavior as we formally transport observable mechanical phenomena [motion] to non-real interior of the complex domain. As it turns out, such procedure, when properly set, corresponds to transition from relativistic to more classic (or, possibly, just classic) kind of the motion. This procedure, we call the "Newtonization of relativistic physical quantities and phenomena", first of all, includes the mechanical motion's characteristics in the C3. The algebraic structure of vector spaces was imposed and analyzed on both: the set of all relativistic velocities and on the set of the corresponding to them "Galilean" velocities. The key point of the analysis is realization that, as a matter of fact, the relativistic theory and the classical are equivalent at least as for the kinematics. This conclusion follows the fact that the two defined structures of topological vector spaces i.e., the structure imposed on sets of all relativistic velocities and the structure on set of all "Galilean" velocities, are both diffeomorphic in their topological parts and are isomorphic as the vector spaces. As for the relativistic theory, the two approaches: the hyperbolic ("classical" SR) with its four-vector formalism and Euclidean, where SR is modeled by the complex para-space C3, were analyzed and compared.