Developments in the Frequency of Ratings and Evaluation Tendencies: A Review of German Physician Rating Websites

Background: Physician rating websites (PRWs) have been developed to allow all patients to rate, comment, and discuss physicians’ quality online as a source of information for others searching for a physician. At the beginning of 2010, a sample of 298 randomly selected physicians from the physician associations in Hamburg and Thuringia were searched for on 6 German PRWs to examine the frequency of ratings and evaluation tendencies. Objective: The objective of this study was to examine (1) the number of identifiable physicians on German PRWs; (2) the number of rated physicians on German PRWs; (3) the average and maximum number of ratings per physician on German PRWs; (4) the average rating on German PRWs; (5) the website visitor ranking positions of German PRWs; and (6) how these data compare with 2010 results. Methods: A random stratified sample of 298 selected physicians from the physician associations in Hamburg and Thuringia was generated. Every selected physician was searched for on the 6 PRWs (Jameda, Imedo, Docinsider, Esando, Topmedic, and Medführer) used in the 2010 study and a PRW, Arztnavigator, launched by Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse (AOK). Results: The results were as follows: (1) Between 65.1% (194/298) on Imedo to 94.6% (282/298) on AOK-Arztnavigator of the physicians were identified on the selected PRWs. (2) Between 16.4% (49/298) on Esando to 83.2% (248/298) on Jameda of the sample had been rated at least once. (3) The average number of ratings per physician ranged from 1.2 (Esando) to 7.5 (AOK-Arztnavigator). The maximum number of ratings per physician ranged from 3 (Esando) to 115 (Docinsider), indicating an increase compared with the ratings of 2 to 27 in the 2010 study sample. (4) The average converted standardized rating (1=positive, 2=neutral, and 3=negative) ranged from 1.0 (Medführer) to 1.2 (Jameda and Topmedic). (5) Only Jameda (position 317) and Medführer (position 9796) were placed among the top 10,000 visited websites in Germany. Conclusions: Whereas there has been an overall increase in the number of ratings when summing up ratings from all 7 analyzed German PRWs, this represents an average addition of only 4 new ratings per physician in a year. The increase has also not been even across the PRWs, and it would be advisable for the users of PRWs to utilize a number of PRWs to ascertain the rating of any given physician. Further research is needed to identify barriers for patients to rate their physicians and to assist efforts to increase the number of ratings on PRWs to consequently improve the fairness and practical importance of PRWs

Green Technology Commercialization An Analysis of the EPA’s SBIR Program

The purpose of this project was to identify how the EPA SBIR program can effectively utilize its limited funding by selecting and supporting small green business entrepreneurs with the greatest potential for bringing products to market. We interviewed representatives both from companies that successfully and unsuccessfully commercialized their technologies. Our team additionally contacted managers of similar programs, including other federal agencies’ SBIR programs, a green technology accelerator, and a venture capitalist company. We also distributed an electronic questionnaire to principal investigators. From the collected data, we developed a list of recommendations for the EPA’s SBIR selection and support processes

Impacts of the Teach For America Investing in Innovation Scale-Up

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up grant of $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education. Using a rigorous random assignment design to examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the i3 scale-up, Mathematica Policy Research found that first- and second-year corps members recruited and trained during the scale-up were as effective as other teachers in the same high-poverty schools in both reading and math. To estimate the effectiveness of TFA teachers relative to the comparison teachers, we compared end-of-year test scores of students assigned to the TFA teachers and those assigned to the comparison teachers. Because students in the study were randomly assigned to teachers, we can attribute systematic differences in achievement at the end of the study school year to the relative effectiveness of TFA and comparison teachers, rather than to the types of students taught by these two different groups of teachers. In addition to the impact analysis described in this report, the evaluation included an implementation analysis that describes key features of TFA's program model and its implementation of the i3 scale-up

Helpfulness Guided Review Summarization

User-generated online reviews are an important information resource in people's everyday life. As the review volume grows explosively, the ability to automatically identify and summarize useful information from reviews becomes essential in providing analytic services in many review-based applications. While prior work on review summarization focused on different review perspectives (e.g. topics, opinions, sentiment, etc.), the helpfulness of reviews is an important informativeness indicator that has been less frequently explored. In this thesis, we investigate automatic review helpfulness prediction and exploit review helpfulness for review summarization in distinct review domains. We explore two paths for predicting review helpfulness in a general setting: one is by tailoring existing helpfulness prediction techniques to a new review domain; the other is by using a general representation of review content that reflects review helpfulness across domains. For the first one, we explore educational peer reviews and show how peer-review domain knowledge can be introduced to a helpfulness model developed for product reviews to improve prediction performance. For the second one, we characterize review language usage, content diversity and helpfulness-related topics with respect to different content sources using computational linguistic features. For review summarization, we propose to leverage user-provided helpfulness assessment during content selection in two ways: 1) using the review-level helpfulness ratings directly to filter out unhelpful reviews, 2) developing sentence-level helpfulness features via supervised topic modeling for sentence selection. As a demonstration, we implement our methods based on an extractive multi-document summarization framework and evaluate them in three user studies. Results show that our helpfulness-guided summarizers outperform the baseline in both human and automated evaluation for camera reviews and movie reviews. While for educational peer reviews, the preference for helpfulness depends on student writing performance and prior teaching experience

User Review Analysis for Requirement Elicitation: Thesis and the framework prototype's source code

Online reviews are an important channel for requirement elicitation. However, requirement engineers face challenges when analysing online user reviews, such as data volumes, technical supports, existing techniques, and legal barriers. Juan Wang proposes a framework solving user review analysis problems for the purpose of requirement elicitation that sets up a channel from downloading user reviews to structured analysis data. The main contributions of her work are: (1) the thesis proposed a framework to solve the user review analysis problem for requirement elicitation; (2) the prototype of this framework proves its feasibility; (3) the experiments prove the effectiveness and efficiency of this framework. This resource here is the latest version of Juan Wang's PhD thesis "User Review Analysis for Requirement Elicitation" and all the source code of the prototype for the framework as the results of her thesis

Essays on Resource and Environmental Economics: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, Laboratory Experiment, and Scenario Forecasting

This dissertation examines impacts of product information and environmental events on individual behavior and the economy. This is done using a causal inference econometric approach, an eye-tracking laboratory experiment, and scenario forecasting. The first essay evaluates the effects of unit-based pricing (UBP) of municipal solid waste and a mandatory recycling (MR) policy on waste reduction, recycling, and illegal waste dumping in Taiwan. The results suggest that the UBP policy curbed the quantity of unsorted waste and increased disposal of biodegradable waste but did not significantly increase the quantity of recycling. In contrast, the MR policy boosted biodegradable waste and recycling but did not necessarily decrease the amount of unsorted waste. The UBP policy also stimulated a temporary increase in illegal dumping. The second essay applies an eye-tracking experiment to investigate how consumers react to honey product origin, adulteration, and review information. The experimental results suggest that the certified local honey seal and honey adulteration information independently raise WTP for local honey but do not interact to jointly raise WTP. The results also show that negative honey product reviews cause a much larger reduction in WTP than the increase produced by positive reviews. The third essay reports on an investigation of how rice yield increases over time are influenced by climate, CO2 fertilization, and research investment. To allow identification of CO2 effects, the study integrates FAO reported yield data with data from the free air carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) experiments. The result suggests that an increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration has made a significant contribution to rice yield increases, amounting to about 52% of the observed rice yield growth. The result also shows that increasing precipitation and temperature cause reductions in rice yields, implying that CO2 mitigation and climate change are yield growth depressing factors. On the other hand, the result indicates that research investments increase yields, and this finding raises a potential need for more investment in agricultural research and development if society is to offset CO2 mitigation and climate change effects

Children with Dyslexia: Spelling as a Constraint on Writing Development

Background. Developmental dyslexia is characterised as a specific learning difficulty with written language: namely, reading and spelling. To date, little research has been conducted to examine the role of spelling when writing and, in particular, in the writing of young children with dyslexia. This is surprising when considering that spelling is an active process used when transcribing written text. Thus, this thesis aimed to investigate the impact of spelling ability in four areas: the quality of the written compositions produced, spelling error analyses, vocabulary choice when writing, and handwriting execution. Method. Thirty-one children with dyslexia (15 boys, 16 girls; 9 years) were compared to two typically developing groups: the first matched by age and the second by spelling-ability. Participants completed tasks that assessed cognitive ability, spelling, reading, working memory, narrative writing, vocabulary level, motor skill, and handwriting performance. A digital writing tablet was used to record and identify the temporal characteristics of handwriting. Results. Children with dyslexia scored significantly below their peers for written text quality, wrote less overall, and demonstrated a higher number of phonetically and orthographically inaccurate spelling errors. Limited vocabulary choices and a more disfluent handwriting profile were characteristics of the writing by children with dyslexia. These children with dyslexia did not have motor difficulties and demonstrated that handwriting execution speed was in fact similar to their peers. Rather, children with dyslexia paused more frequently before misspellings and within-words, a similar pattern to the younger spelling-ability matches. Spelling ability was found to predict a large proportion of variance in handwriting speed, written vocabulary choice, and the quality of the written text produced by children with dyslexia. Conclusions. A new model of the interacting writing processes was proposed, emphasising the importance of acquiring strong foundations in proficient spelling for writing to progress. The proposed model relates to atypical and typical development. The findings are related to theories of dyslexia and avenues for future research are discussed in relation to expanding the new writing model

How companies can leverage crowd sourcing

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-66).Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular phenomenon where companies solicit the help of the public in helping accomplish some of the activities commonly performed by employees or contractors. These activities can range from solving scientific problems that baffle the in-house experts to repetitive and boring tasks that are deemed too mundane for the employees. Other activities include content generation, product design, idea generation, and product reviews. The explosive growth of the internet has made the world a more connected place. One consequence of that is that crowdsourcing can now be carried out efficiently and inexpensively through websites. This thesis presents a survey of activities commonly crowdsourced and examines some popular websites that exemplify these types of crowdsourcing.by Sunny Cheung.S.M.in Engineering and Managemen