Foxes, hounds, and horses : Who or which?

Writers of English can choose whether to mark a high level of sentience in a nonhuman animal by selecting the word who rather than which. An examination of texts relating to foxhunting on the world wide web showed that, in reference to the nonhuman animals involved in foxhunting, writers were most likely to use who in reference to foxes, and least likely to use it in reference to horses. Those who support foxhunting are more likely to recognize the sentience of the fox than those who oppose foxhunting. This may be because those who enjoy foxhunting present the fox as an active creator of the hunt, and as a worthy opponen

Inside Success: Strategies of 25 Effective Small High Schools in NYC

For decades, New York City's high school graduation rates hovered at or below 50 percent. In attempt to turn around these disappointing results, the NYC Department of Education enacted a series of large-scale reforms, including opening hundreds of new "small schools of choice" (SSCs). Recent research by MDRC has shown that these schools have had large and sustained positive effects on students' graduation rates and other outcomes. How have they done it? What decisions -- made by the educators who created, supported, and operated these schools -- have been critical to their success? What challenges do these schools face as they try to maintain that success over time? The Research Alliance set out to answer these questions, conducting in-depth interviews with teachers and principals in 25 of the most highly effective SSCs. Educators reported three features as essential to their success:Personalization, which was widely seen as the most important success factor. This includes structures that foster strong relationships with students and their families, systems for monitoring student progress -- beyond just grades and test scores, and working to address students' social and emotional needs, as well as academic ones.High expectations -- for students and for educators -- and instructional programs that are aligned with these ambitious goals.Dedicated and flexible teachers, who were willing to take on multiple roles, sometimes outside their areas of expertise.The findings, presented in this report, paint a picture of how these features were developed in practice. The report also describes challenges these schools face and outlines lessons for other schools and districts that can be drawn from the SSCs' experience. These include the need to avoid teacher burnout, improving the fit between schools and external partners, and expanding current notions of accountability

The role of Intangible Assets in the Relationship between HRM and Innovation: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

This paper, as far as known, provides a first attempt to explore the role of intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management (KM) in an integrative way between the relationship of human resource (HR) practices and two types of innovation (radical and incremental). More specifically, the study investigates two sub-components of IC – human capital and organizational social capital. At the same time, four KM channels are discussed, such as knowledge creation, acquisition, transfer and responsiveness.\ud The research is a part of a bigger project financed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the province of Overijssel in the Netherlands. The project studies the ‘competencies for innovation’ and is conducted in collaboration with innovative companies in the Eastern part of the Netherlands. \ud An exploratory survey design with qualitative and quantitative data is used for\ud investigating the topic in six companies from industrial and service sector in the region of Twente, the Netherlands. Mostly, the respondents were HR directors. The findings showed that some parts of IC and KM configurations were related to different types of innovation. To make the picture even more complicated, HR practices were sometimes perceived interchangeably with IC and KM by HR directors. Overall, the whole picture about the relationships stays unclear and opens a floor for further research

Investigating knowledge management factors affecting Chinese ICT firms performance: An integrated KM framework

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in the Journal of Information Systems Management, 28(1), 19 - 29, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10580530.2011.536107.This article sets out to investigate the critical factors of Knowledge Management (KM) which are considered to have an impact on the performance of Chinese information and communication technology (ICT) firms. This study confirms that the cultural environment of an enterprise is central to its success in the context of China. It shows that a collaborated, trusted, and learning environment within ICT firms will have a positive impact on their KM performance

A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy

Towards a Two-Dimensional Framework for User Models

The focus if this paper is user modeling in the context of personalization of information systems. Such a personalization is essential to give users the feeling that the system is easily accessible. The way this adaptive personalization works is very dependent on the adaptation model that is chosen. We introduce a generic two-dimensional classification framework for user modeling systems. This enables us to clarify existing as well as new applications in the area of user modeling. In order to illustrate our framework we evaluate push and pull based user modeling

Multi-Armed Bandits for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

We present an approach to Intelligent Tutoring Systems which adaptively personalizes sequences of learning activities to maximize skills acquired by students, taking into account the limited time and motivational resources. At a given point in time, the system proposes to the students the activity which makes them progress faster. We introduce two algorithms that rely on the empirical estimation of the learning progress, RiARiT that uses information about the difficulty of each exercise and ZPDES that uses much less knowledge about the problem. The system is based on the combination of three approaches. First, it leverages recent models of intrinsically motivated learning by transposing them to active teaching, relying on empirical estimation of learning progress provided by specific activities to particular students. Second, it uses state-of-the-art Multi-Arm Bandit (MAB) techniques to efficiently manage the exploration/exploitation challenge of this optimization process. Third, it leverages expert knowledge to constrain and bootstrap initial exploration of the MAB, while requiring only coarse guidance information of the expert and allowing the system to deal with didactic gaps in its knowledge. The system is evaluated in a scenario where 7-8 year old schoolchildren learn how to decompose numbers while manipulating money. Systematic experiments are presented with simulated students, followed by results of a user study across a population of 400 school children

Platforms, the First Amendment and Online Speech: Regulating the Filters

In recent years, online platforms have given rise to multiple discussions about what their role is, what their role should be, and whether they should be regulated. The complex nature of these private entities makes it very challenging to place them in a single descriptive category with existing rules. In today’s information environment, social media platforms have become a platform press by providing hosting as well as navigation and delivery of public expression, much of which is done through machine learning algorithms. This article argues that there is a subset of algorithms that social media platforms use to filter public expression, which can be regulated without constitutional objections. A distinction is drawn between algorithms that curate speech for hosting purposes and those that curate for navigation purposes, and it is argued that content navigation algorithms, because of their function, deserve separate constitutional treatment. By analyzing the platforms’ functions independently from one another, this paper constructs a doctrinal and normative framework that can be used to navigate some of the complexity. The First Amendment makes it problematic to interfere with how platforms decide what to host because algorithms that implement content moderation policies perform functions analogous to an editorial role when deciding whether content should be censored or allowed on the platform. Content navigation algorithms, on the other hand, do not face the same doctrinal challenges; they operate outside of the public discourse as mere information conduits and are thus not subject to core First Amendment doctrine. Their function is to facilitate the flow of information to an audience, which in turn participates in public discourse; if they have any constitutional status, it is derived from the value they provide to their audience as a delivery mechanism of information. This article asserts that we should regulate content navigation algorithms to an extent. They undermine the notion of autonomous choice in the selection and consumption of content, and their role in today’s information environment is not aligned with a functioning marketplace of ideas and the prerequisites for citizens in a democratic society to perform their civic duties. The paper concludes that any regulation directed to content navigation algorithms should be subject to a lower standard of scrutiny, similar to the standard for commercial speech

Boston Hospitality Review: Fall 2018 

Table of contents: Airbnb and the Hotel Industry: The Past, Present, and Future of Sales, Marketing, Branding, and Revenue Management By Makarand Mody and Monica Gomez -- Creating Community One Meal at a Time By Dana Searle -- Restaurant Delivery: Are the "ODP" the Industry's "OTA"? Part I & II By Christopher Muller -- My Head in the Clouds (Computing): A Case Study of a Restaurant Group Embracing Off-Site Technology By Tyler Titheringto