Futuring Perspectives and Practices for Urban Extension

Extension is well-positioned to engage strategically with urban communities now and in the future. A century of collaboration and proven impact provides Extension with a valuable foundation focused on relevant service accessible to all people; applied science and co-discovery; respectful and inclusive engagement; and commitment to community well-being. An exploration of the literature on the future, from the Extension perspective and from external viewpoints, informs a contemporary approach to focus on the future of urban Extension. An interplay of Extension professionals with diverse community stakeholders and dynamic technologies bridges past perspective and current context with practical methods to address the future. Essential practices for urban Extension professionals include developing futuring literacy, experimenting with innovative futuring approaches, managing decision making as Extension creates the future, and entrepreneurially addressing change throughout the futuring process. Increasing growth and diversity in metropolitan areas present an opportunity to blend familiar planning paradigms with a more emergent model for urban Extension in which change is continuous, and leadership is agile (Doyle & Brady, 2018)

Rapport : a fact-based question answering system for portuguese

Question answering is one of the longest-standing problems in natural language processing. Although natural language interfaces for computer systems can be considered more common these days, the same still does not happen regarding access to specific textual information. Any full text search engine can easily retrieve documents containing user specified or closely related terms, however it is typically unable to answer user questions with small passages or short answers. The problem with question answering is that text is hard to process, due to its syntactic structure and, to a higher degree, to its semantic contents. At the sentence level, although the syntactic aspects of natural language have well known rules, the size and complexity of a sentence may make it difficult to analyze its structure. Furthermore, semantic aspects are still arduous to address, with text ambiguity being one of the hardest tasks to handle. There is also the need to correctly process the question in order to define its target, and then select and process the answers found in a text. Additionally, the selected text that may yield the answer to a given question must be further processed in order to present just a passage instead of the full text. These issues take also longer to address in languages other than English, as is the case of Portuguese, that have a lot less people working on them. This work focuses on question answering for Portuguese. In other words, our field of interest is in the presentation of short answers, passages, and possibly full sentences, but not whole documents, to questions formulated using natural language. For that purpose, we have developed a system, RAPPORT, built upon the use of open information extraction techniques for extracting triples, so called facts, characterizing information on text files, and then storing and using them for answering user queries done in natural language. These facts, in the form of subject, predicate and object, alongside other metadata, constitute the basis of the answers presented by the system. Facts work both by storing short and direct information found in a text, typically entity related information, and by containing in themselves the answers to the questions already in the form of small passages. As for the results, although there is margin for improvement, they are a tangible proof of the adequacy of our approach and its different modules for storing information and retrieving answers in question answering systems. In the process, in addition to contributing with a new approach to question answering for Portuguese, and validating the application of open information extraction to question answering, we have developed a set of tools that has been used in other natural language processing related works, such as is the case of a lemmatizer, LEMPORT, which was built from scratch, and has a high accuracy. Many of these tools result from the improvement of those found in the Apache OpenNLP toolkit, by pre-processing their input, post-processing their output, or both, and by training models for use in those tools or other, such as MaltParser. Other tools include the creation of interfaces for other resources containing, for example, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, or the creation of lists of, for instance, relations between verbs and agents, using rules

The Cowl - v.64 - n.6 - Oct 12, 2000

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 64 - No. 2 - September 14, 2000. 28 pages

Protótipo de procura semântica aplicado a um motor de busca documental

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major Automação). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

A series of realist evaluations of multi-component programmes with disengaged young people: What works, for whom, and in what contexts?

Periods spent in the absence of education, employment, or training (NEET) are associated with adverse psychological wellbeing, poverty, social marginalisation, criminal behaviour, and premature mortality. As such, implementing effective programmes to re-engage young people who are classified, or are at risk of becoming classified, as NEET is of great importance to these individuals, family, and society more broadly. To this end, the aim of the current thesis was to conduct three realist evaluations to understand how and under which circumstances multi-component programmes may impact the engagement, behavioural, and psychosocial outcomes of disengaged students and young people who are not in education, employment, or training. Study 1 consisted of a realist evaluation of a six-month multi-component programme for year ten (aged 14-15 years) disengaged students across three schools. In Study 2, the findings and refined programme theories from Study 1 were subsequently tested through a 10-week multi-component programme with disengaged year eight (aged 12-13 years) students and evaluated over ten months. Informed by the findings from the first two studies, the final study comprised the development, implementation, and evaluation of a four-week multi-component programme utilising appreciative inquiry as a theoretical framework to re-engage young people (aged 17-23 years) who were outside of education, employment, and training. Overall, the findings from the three studies highlighted the potential benefits of utilising a multi-component programme to re-engage young people. Specifically, context-mechanism-outcome configurations and refined programme theories relating to the development of trust, positions of authority, the power of collective experience, exploration of possible life directions, active learning, deviant peer contagion, and the reinforcement and enactment of hegemonic masculine identities were developed. Collectively, the results provide a detailed and practical understanding of the architecture of programmes that can benefit disengaged young people and help advance the implementation of future programmes for working with disengaged populations

What\u27s News At Rhode Island College

https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/whats_news/1566/thumbnail.jp

Why Sales Managers Matter: How Supervisory Coaching Affects Salespeople\u27s Job Performance

Today’s business environment is very competitive, forcing companies to make additional efforts to develop and keep sustainable advantages. Thus, research aimed at finding ways to increase company performance has become critical. One specific managerial tool, sales coaching, has been hailed by academics and practitioners alike as vital to improving a salesperson’s job performance. With a company’s survival dependent on the success of their salespeople, research on sales coaching is crucial. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the relationship between sales coaching and a salesperson’s work-related attitudes and behaviors. Using self-determination theory, this research examines how a quality coaching relationship with one’s sales manager influences a salesperson’s sale creativity and job performance. This research uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to investigate the direct, mediated, and moderated relationships among the variables studied using data from 332-salespeople working in the United States. Results suggest that a quality coaching experience does positively influence a salesperson’s sales creativity and job performance. Theoretical and managerial implications as well as directions for future research are provided

Annual reports of the selectmen, treasurer, school board and all other officers and committees for the town of Chichester, New Hampshire.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

Tradução comentada de um artigo de revisão e elaboração de um glossário sobre autodomesticação

O presente projeto foi realizado no âmbito do Mestrado de Tradução Especializada da Universidade de Aveiro. Consiste primeiro na tradução e comentário de um artigo de revisão científica sobre a Autodomesticação humana, publicado na revista de artigos de revisão científica Anual Reviews of Psychology como Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality. O tema abordado no artigo é o da autodomesticação do ser humano e a autodomesticação em geral, através da demonstração e comparação de resultados de investigações em várias espécies. Em segundo lugar, consiste também na elaboração de um glossário bilingue a partir de um levantamento terminológico da terminologia presente no artigo, algo que se demonstrou necessário dada a sua densidade e especialização. Este glossário em anexo apresenta os termos em inglês e português e ainda as fontes consultadas para obter as traduções dos mesmos.This project was carried out under the Masters in Specialized Translation of the University of Aveiro. It consists at first of the translation and commentary of a scientific review article on human Self-domestication, published in the scientific review journal Annual Reviews of Psychology as Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality. The subject covered in the article is human self-domestication and self-domestication in general, through the demonstration and comparison of results of investigations on various species. Secondly, it also consists in the construction of a bilingual glossary based on a terminological extraction of the terminology present in the article, something that proved necessary given its density and specialization. This attached glossary contains the terms in English and Portuguese and also the sources consulted for their translations.Mestrado em Tradução Especializad