On tit for tat: Franceschini and Maisano versus ANVUR regarding the Italian research assessment exercise VQR 2011-2014

The response by Benedetto, Checchi, Graziosi & Malgarini (2017) (hereafter "BCG&M"), past and current members of the Italian Agency for Evaluation of University and Research Systems (ANVUR), to Franceschini and Maisano's ("F&M") article (2017), inevitably draws us into the debate. BCG&M in fact complain "that almost all criticisms to the evaluation procedures adopted in the two Italian research assessments VQR 2004-2010 and 2011-2014 limit themselves to criticize the procedures without proposing anything new and more apt to the scope". Since it is us who raised most criticisms in the literature, we welcome this opportunity to retrace our vainly "constructive" recommendations, made with the hope of contributing to assessments of the Italian research system more in line with the state of the art in scientometrics. We see it as equally interesting to confront the problem of the failure of knowledge transfer from R&D (scholars) to engineering and production (ANVUR's practitioners) in the Italian VQRs. We will provide a few notes to help the reader understand the context for this failure. We hope that these, together with our more specific comments, will also assist in communicating the reasons for the level of scientometric competence expressed in BCG&M's heated response to F&M's criticism

English Instruction in Credit System for Senior High School Students

Abstract One of the important parts of the educational system is the instructional system. The instructional system should be formulated well so that the effective and efficient education can be reach. The effective and efficient instructional system is expected to be able to guide the whole instructional process so that the instruction can reach the instructional goals. Credit system is one of the innovations related to the instructional system. In the system, the students are able to decide their own study capacity and the subjects in each semester. However, actually, it is not a new instructional system since there are some rules that have described the system for a long time. In Indonesia, the guideline in implementing credit system for Senior High School students has been launched by Badan Standard Nasional Pendidikan (BSNP). It describes the policy, the concept and the principals in implementing the credit system related to the process of deciding the learning capacity, arranging the curriculum structure, facilitating the choices of learning capacities and the subjects, and arranging the schedule. The rules are helpful for the curriculum implementer at schools. In conjunction with the explanation, the English instruction should also be designed based on the rules. Keywords: English instruction, credit syste

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in the Nineties: An Example of Incremental Innovations in an Ongoing Longitudinal Study

The main aim of the present paper is to historically reappraise the development of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) in the 1990s after the first six waves had been collected. This development was closely connected to the opening of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Wall separating the two German states. In addition to its relevance for the SOEP, this study is also of interest in relation to the contemporary history of science.SOEP, German unification, immigration studies, research governance, survey methods

Congressional Record S. 419 - Mansfield Amendment re: Return of Obscene Mail

Congressional Record S. 419 - Mansfield Amendment re: Return of Obscene Mai

Lines in the sand: pre-interview rank and probability of receiving admission to medical school

Background: We provide an examination of one medical school’s attempt to determine whether their cut-off point for number of interviews offered is congruent with the probability these applicants’ have for admission post-interview. Methods: Offer probability was determined by organizing pre-interview rankings from 2013-2017 (n = 2,659) applicant cohorts into bins of 50 applicants and finding the quotient of successful and total applicants in each bin.A linear-by-linear association Chi-square test and adjusted standardized residuals with an applied Bonferroni correction were used to determine if the observed frequencies in each bin were different than expected by chance. A Spearman Correlation analysis between pre- and post-interview ranks was conducted. Results: All applicants have between a 50.0% and 76.4% chance of admission. Observed frequencies are different than chance (χ(1)=50.835, p<.001), with a significantly greater number of offers seen in the bins between 1 and 100 (p<.001 for both bins). There is a weak positive relationship between pre- and post-rank, rs(2657)= 0.258, p<.001. Conclusion: The results indicate the number of interviews conducted does not exceed a threshold wherein individuals with a relatively low chance of admission are interviewed. Findings are interpreted with respect to ethical resource allocation for both programs and applicants

In Vitro And In Silico Studies On Selected Malaysia Culinary Plants Against Dengue Ns2b-Ns3 Protease

Di Malaysia, statistik jangkitan denggi setakat tahun 2015 sudah melebihi 100,000 kes. Walaubagaimanapun sehingga kini tidak ada calon vaksin dan ubat untuk denggi yang boleh didapati di pasaran. Oleh itu, penemuan ubat untuk denggi adalah penting untuk mencari calon ubat yang sesuai. In Malaysia, dengue infection was reported more than 100,000 cases in year 2015. To date there is no marketed drug candidate available for Dengue disease. Therefore, drug discovery for dengue is important to find a suitable drug candidate. This study involves characterization of chemical constituent, in vitro experiment and in silico simulation for antidengue from culinary plants in Malaysia

Mining educational data to improve students' performance: a case study

Educational data mining concerns with developing methods for discovering knowledge from data that come from educational domain. In this paper we used educational data mining to improve graduate students’ performance, and overcome the problem of low grades of graduate students. In our case study we try to extract useful knowledge from graduate students data collected from the college of Science and Technology–Khanyounis. The data include fifteen years period [1993-2007]. After preprocessing the data, we applied data mining techniques to discover association, classification, clustering and outlier detection rules. In each of these four tasks, we present the extracted knowledge and describe its importance in educational domain

MCMC Algorithm for Bayesian Heterogeneous Coefficients of Panel Data Model

Panel data models have been applied widely in many subject areas related to economic, social, and epidemiology. In some cases (e.g. epidemiology studies), the phenomena encountered have a complex relationship structured. The risk factors such as house index, healthy behaviour index, rainfall and the other risk factors of particular infectious disease may have different effect on the outcome due to the heterogeneity of cross-section units. The effect of the covariates on outcome could vary over individual and time units. This condition is called as a non-stationary or instability relationship problem. This problem leads to bias and inefficient of the estimators. It is important to examine the heterogeneous coefficients model for avoiding inefficient estimator. We present in detail a statistical estimation procedure of the heterogeneous coefficients for fixed effect panel data model by means of the hierarchical Bayesian estimation approach. The challenges of the Bayesian approaches are finding the joint posterior distribution and developing the algorithm for estimating the parameters of interest. We find that the joint posterior distribution of the heterogeneous coefficients fixed effect panel data model does not follow any standard known distribution form. Consequently, the analytical solution cannot be applied and simulation approach of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) was used. We present the MCMC procedure covering the derivation of the full conditional distribution of the parameters model and present step-by-step the Gibbs sampling algorithm. The idea of this preliminary research can be applied in various fields to overcome the nonstationary proble