29,294 research outputs found
Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps
For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions
Response to the Loss of a Romantic Relationship: Differences by Time Since the Loss, Gender, and Attachment Style
Approximately 25% of college students experience the loss of a romantic relationship each year. It has been proposed that such a loss results in a grief reaction similar to that experienced after a death. Theory also suggests that such major life events are an opportunity for growth. But very little research has been conducted to date to test these propositions. The review of the literature also suggested that gender and interpersonal attachment style are related to differential responses to romantic loss. This study tested Schneider’s (1984) mode! of response to loss, which predicts that the degree of involvement in three response-tasks of discovering: What\u27s Lost (grief), What’s Left (healing), and What’s Possible (growth) is related to time since the loss.
Three hundred and sixteen college students were surveyed, using a research version (RTL-Short) of the Response to Loss Inventory (RTL). Information regarding the participants interpersonal attachment style was also gathered. A between-subjects, ex post facto and correlational design utilizing Pearson product-moment correlations, ANOVA and graphic/regression was used to analyze the data. The internal consistency reliability estimates of the RTL-S subscales were excellent.
Results generally supported the three-task model. Involvement in What’s Lost (grief) was higher for those with relatively recent losses. Regression analysis suggested a curvilinear relationship between time and What’s Left (healing), with those participants having either recent or distant losses scoring lower than those with losses of an intermediate time. Involvement in What’s Possible (growth) was higher for those with more distant losses. There was no evidence for gender differences in What’s Lost or What’s Possible. Those with dismissing avoidant and secure attachment styles experienced the least grief, while those with fearful avoidant and preoccupied styles experienced the most grief. Those with preoccupied attachment also were involved in What’s Possible (growth) with less intensity than the other participants
Ghost doctors - absenteeism in Bangladeshi health facilities
The authors report on a study in which unannounced visits were made to health clinics in Bangladesh with the intention of discovering what fraction of medical professionals were present at their assigned post. This survey represents the first attempt to quantify the extent of the problem on a nationally representative scale. Nationwide the average number of vacancies over all types of providers in rural health centers is 26 percent. Regionally, vacancy rates (unfilled posts) are generally higher in the poorer parts of the country. Absentee rates at over 40 percent are particularly high for doctors. When separated into level of facility, the absentee rate for doctors at the larger clinics is 40 percent, but at the smaller sub-centers with a single doctor, the rate is 74 percent. Even though the primary purpose of this survey is to document the extent of the problem among medical staff, the authors also explore the determinants of staff absenteeism. Whether the medical provider lives near the health facility, access to a road, and rural electrification are important determinants of the rate and pattern of staff absentee rates.Public Health Promotion,Gender and Health,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Housing&Human Habitats,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Housing&Human Habitats,Gender and Health,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems
DISCOVERING INTERESTING PATTERNS FOR INVESTMENT DECISION MAKING WITH GLOWER C - A GENETIC LEARNER OVERLAID WITH ENTROPY REDUCTION
Prediction in financial domains is notoriously difficult for a number of reasons. First, theories tend to be
weak or non-existent, which makes problem formulation open-ended by forcing us to consider a large
number of independent variables and thereby increasing the dimensionality of the search space. Second, the
weak relationships among variables tend to be nonlinear, and may hold only in limited areas of the search
space. Third, in financial practice, where analysts conduct extensive manual analysis of historically well
performing indicators, a key is to find the hidden interactions among variables that perform well in
combination. Unfortunately, these are exactly the patterns that the greedy search biases incorporated by
many standard rule algorithms will miss. In this paper, we describe and evaluate several variations of a new
genetic learning algorithm (GLOWER) on a variety of data sets. The design of GLOWER has been motivated
by financial prediction problems, but incorporates successful ideas from tree induction and rule learning.
We examine the performance of several GLOWER variants on two UCI data sets as well as on a standard
financial prediction problem (S&P500 stock returns), using the results to identify and use one of the better
variants for further comparisons. We introduce a new (to KDD) financial prediction problem (predicting
positive and negative earnings surprises), and experiment withGLOWER, contrasting it with tree- and rule-induction
approaches. Our results are encouraging, showing that GLOWER has the ability to uncover
effective patterns for difficult problems that have weak structure and significant nonlinearities.Information Systems Working Papers Serie
Seeing by exploring
The classical notion of how things are seen is that perception is passive, that the eyes are windows, and in floods reality. Physiological work of the 19th century cast doubt on this view that perception is passive acceptance of reality. Perception is not at the present time a popular topic for philosophers. This must be partly because scientific accounts of perception have now gone a long way away from appearances. They depend on physiological and psycho-physical experiments which require technical investigation and do not fall within traditional concepts of philosophy. Theories of visual perception are examined, both from a physical and psycho-physical standpoint
Technical report and user guide: the 2010 EU kids online survey
This technical report describes the design and implementation of the EU Kids Online survey of 9-16 year old internet using children and their parents in 25 countries European countries
Civic norms, social sanctions and voting turnout
This study views voter participation as a collective action problem overcome chiefly by means of "solidary" and "purposive" selective incentives. It is argued that these incentives are primarily in the form of civic or societal norms, rather than special interest norms associated with partisan or group loyalties. The emphasis on civic norms is supported by positive correlations between turnout and other socially cooperative behaviors such as responding to the census, participating in PTA's, and giving to charities. Data on interpersonal pressures to vote are found to support the hypothesis that "enforcement" of voting norms via social sanctions significantly enhances turnout. The American turnout decline is interpreted in terms of a weakening of social ties adversely affecting the socialization and enforcement of norms responsible for generating civic participation
Child relationships in the middle grades
Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit
Evaluating deterministic motif significance measures in protein databases
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Assessing the outcome of motif mining algorithms is an essential task, as the number of reported motifs can be very large. Significance measures play a central role in automatically ranking those motifs, and therefore alleviating the analysis work. Spotting the most interesting and relevant motifs is then dependent on the choice of the right measures. The combined use of several measures may provide more robust results. However caution has to be taken in order to avoid spurious evaluations.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>From the set of conducted experiments, it was verified that several of the selected significance measures show a very similar behavior in a wide range of situations therefore providing redundant information. Some measures have proved to be more appropriate to rank highly conserved motifs, while others are more appropriate for weakly conserved ones. Support appears as a very important feature to be considered for correct motif ranking. We observed that not all the measures are suitable for situations with poorly balanced class information, like for instance, when positive data is significantly less than negative data. Finally, a visualization scheme was proposed that, when several measures are applied, enables an easy identification of high scoring motifs.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>In this work we have surveyed and categorized 14 significance measures for pattern evaluation. Their ability to rank three types of deterministic motifs was evaluated. Measures were applied in different testing conditions, where relations were identified. This study provides some pertinent insights on the choice of the right set of significance measures for the evaluation of deterministic motifs extracted from protein databases.</p
- …