623,457 research outputs found

    A training needs analysis of health care providers within Malta’s Primary Health Department : a boon or a bane?

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    In 2009, the Practice Development Unit and the Specialist Training Programme in Family Medicine within Malta’s Primary Health Department carried out a training needs analysis of health care providers working in government primary health centres and clinics so as to investigate their educational requirements. Method: After a questionnaire was developed as a tool, a pilot study was conducted in a particular health centre to test its validity. The amended version of the questionnaire was then mailed individually to all health providers working at that time in the various health centres and peripheral clinics. Out of the 498 questionnaires sent, 215 were completed and returned, with a resulting response rate of 43%. One main finding was that, irrespective of one’s discipline, the programme topic and the lecturer were the important decisive factors of whether one attended a training course or not. On the other hand, specific obstacles to training emerged that are directly related to one’s profession: these included shortage of staff, lack of time and other commitments. From the information revealed by the training needs analysis, the department revamped its training strategy to consist of three-monthly Saturday seminars dealing with topics relevant to primary health care, with such activities being oversubscribed and well-received. In this manner a thriving continuing professional development programme was designed and delivered for health care professionals within Malta’s Primary Health Departmentpeer-reviewe

    Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

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    We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

    High quality topic extraction from business news explains abnormal financial market volatility

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    Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical, environmental, social, financial, economic, etc.) affect trading and the pricing of firms in organized stock markets. In this article, we seek to address this issue by performing an analysis of more than 24 million news records provided by Thompson Reuters and of their relationship with trading activity for 206 major stocks in the S&P US stock index. We show that the whole landscape of news that affect stock price movements can be automatically summarized via simple regularized regressions between trading activity and news information pieces decomposed, with the help of simple topic modeling techniques, into their "thematic" features. Using these methods, we are able to estimate and quantify the impacts of news on trading. We introduce network-based visualization techniques to represent the whole landscape of news information associated with a basket of stocks. The examination of the words that are representative of the topic distributions confirms that our method is able to extract the significant pieces of information influencing the stock market. Our results show that one of the most puzzling stylized fact in financial economies, namely that at certain times trading volumes appear to be "abnormally large," can be partially explained by the flow of news. In this sense, our results prove that there is no "excess trading," when restricting to times when news are genuinely novel and provide relevant financial information.Comment: The previous version of this article included an error. This is a revised versio

    Building Health Equity One Institution at a Time: The Research Infrastructure in Minority Institutions Project

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    Developing a well-trained workforce interested in, and prepared for, conducting health equity research is an important national priority. Scientists from Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) bring unique perspectives and experiences with racial, ethnic and social inequities in health and health status but often lack access to training and mentoring opportunities, which is crucial for increasing the diverse pool of investigators who are adequately prepared to conduct health disparities research and to compete for National Institutes of Health research funding. The focus of the California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) Research Infrastructure in Minority Institutions (RIMI) Project was to: (a) enhance CSULB’s infrastructure and research capacity, (b) conduct applied community health research on health conditions disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations, and (c) support faculty to embark on careers in reducing health disparities. Faculty received training, mentorship, and release time support to participate in research-related activities. Select faculty also received funding to conduct a two-year health disparities research project. Within a relatively short period of time, the RIMI Project made important strides toward strengthening the research infrastructure at CSULB by enhancing faculty capacity, improving research utilization to address health disparities, and strengthening campus and community collaborations. MSIs are encouraged to apply for opportunities to build their institution’s research capacity. The lessons learned from this project may be used as a guide for other teaching institutions that have the goal to develop minority faculty researchers

    Review of: Sociology of Work - An Encyclopedia

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    This reference resource with versions available in a twovolume print edition as well as online, consists of 335 entries from leading scholars and subject experts. The entries cover a broad spectrum of international topics ranging from “alienation” to “working poor.” Entries in both formats include “see also” references and “further readings,” while the online version includes links to cited articles
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