Academic institutions across the world face the challenge of providing new intakes of students with appropriate orientation and counseling services to better help students cope with the changes and challenges of life at university or college. These sessions are often based on measurements of the students' technical skills or Intelligence Quotient (IQ) levels such as mathematical computation and communications abilities. However, Emotional Intelligence (E.I.) tests, which have become an essential tool and an integral part of the recruiting, orientation, and counseling strategies of many individuals and organizations, are not often part of these evaluation schemes. At some academic institutions, a partial test of those skills is conducted but may not provide a holistic view of the emotional intelligence of each individual. In this paper, a set of EI tests covering four general areas of EI is proposed to evaluate the emotional intelligence of the new intakes at the HCT Dubai Colleges. These tests will help identify students who lack experience with non-cognitive capabilities including competencies and skills that may influence their abilities to succeed in coping with educational environmental demands and pressures. A fuzzy-based emotional intelligence modeling and processing framework is also proposed to better model and capture uncertainties in surveys of new intakes, and which will deal well with the complexities of the classification system. This new system is expected to help the HCT Dubai Colleges better design and prepare orientation and counseling interventions which will help students develop their abilities to perceive, to access and generate emotions to promote their emotional and intellectual growth.

MOTIVATION: This article presents Thresher, an improved technique for finding peak height thresholds for automated rRNA intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) profiles. We argue that thresholds must be sample dependent, taking community richness into account. In most previous fragment analyses, a common threshold is applied to all samples simultaneously, ignoring richness variations among samples and thereby compromising cross-sample comparison. Our technique solves this problem, and at the same time provides a robust method for outlier rejection, selecting for removal any replicate pairs that are not valid replicates. RESULTS: Thresholds are calculated individually for each replicate in a pair, and separately for each sample. The thresholds are selected to be the ones that minimize the dissimilarity between the replicates after thresholding. If a choice of threshold results in the two replicates in a pair failing a quantitative test of similarity, either that threshold or that sample must be rejected. We compare thresholded ARISA results with sequencing results, and demonstrate that the Thresher algorithm outperforms conventional thresholding techniques. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The software is implemented in R, and the code is available at http://verenastarke.wordpress.com or by contacting the author. CONTACT: [email protected] or http://verenastarke.wordpress.com SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Nonassociative division algebras have been recently proposed as an alternative way to design fully-diverse space-time codes. In particular, nonassociative cyclic algebras provide division algebras more easily than their associative counter-part. In this paper, we propose a few space-time code constructions coming from both associative and nonassociative cyclic algebras of degree 4, suitable for 4 transmit and 2 receive antennas, which furthermore exhibit good fast-decodability.