640,144 research outputs found
Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM
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
A training needs analysis of health care providers within Malta’s Primary Health Department : a boon or a bane?
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
High quality topic extraction from business news explains abnormal financial market volatility
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
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
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Emotion, empathy and exit: reflections on doing ethnographic qualitative research on sensitive topics
Within ethnography, observation and participation are interwoven as sociological research practice that involves watching, listening and asking questions about people’s daily lives and experiences, and the meaning they attach to these. For ethnographic researchers a close and regular engagement with participants raises both practical and ethical challenges related to intrusion, relationship boundaries and issues of ‘attachment’ on leaving the field. Research that has the added dimension of profound sensitivity may also present the researcher with the challenge of managing the impacts on them of emotional stress caused by watching people’s discomfort and suffering. This article discusses the author’s methodological reflections on an ongoing ethnographic study of a cancer drop-in centre, focusing on the ways in which emotion and empathy shape researcher-respondent rapport. An underpinning theme of the discussion is the potential for emotion deluge and fatigue on the part of the researcher and the consequent need to establish self-care strategies
Review of: Sociology of Work - An Encyclopedia
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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Online engagement from the grassroots: Reflecting on over a decade of ePetitioning experience in Europe and the UK
The official published verison of this chapter can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 SpringerExtensive debate on Internet and formal politics has concentrated on whether authorities should focus their efforts on high-volume activities such petitioning or crowdsourcing. Those engagement tools seem to be consistent with the ambition of many networked citizens to influence policy making through ad hoc and mostly single-issue movements. Therefore, certain interesting questions emerge: can authorities organise their engagement activities to respond and act upon this call? Can citizens in-deed influence policy making in a few clicks? This chapter draws together material from different uses of ePetitioning tools in Europe, mainly focusing on the integrated UK experience at national and local level. The analysis suggests that those initiatives can provide valuable feedback to authorities and be effectively complemented by other forms of deeper engagement. Yet, political organisations should pay close attention on how the public views such exercises and be prepared to support partici-pants in different ways and on a regular basis
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