1,557,462 research outputs found

    An overview of consumer data and credit reporting

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    For some time, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has sought to obtain more detailed and timely information on the debt status, loan payment behavior, and overall credit quality of U.S. consumers. For decades, information of this type has been gathered by credit reporting companies primarily to assist creditors in evaluating the credit quality of current and prospective customers. To evaluate the potential usefulness of these data, the Federal Reserve Board engaged one of the three national consumer reporting companies to supply the credit records, without personal identifying information, of a nationally representative sample of individuals. This article describes the way the credit reporting companies compile and report their data and gives background on the regulatory structure governing these activities. This description is followed by a detailed look at the information collected in credit reports. Key aspects of the data that may be incomplete, duplicative, or ambiguous as they apply to credit evaluation are highlighted in the analysis. The article concludes with a discussion of steps that might be taken to address some of the issues identified. ; Also identified as FRB Philadelphia Payment Cards Center Discussion Paper 03-03Credit cards ; Consumer behavior

    Towards a Theory of Current Accounts

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    The current accounts data of industrial countries exhibits some strong patterns that are inconsistent with the intertemporal approach to the current account. This is the basic model that international economists have been using for more than two decades to think about current account issues. This paper shows that it is possible to go a long way towards reconciling the theory and the data by introducing two additional features to the basic model: investment risk and adjustment costs to investment. Moreover, these extensions generate new and unexpected theoretical predictions that receive substantial support in the data. The overall message is therefore positive: with a couple of reasonable modifications, the intertemporal approach to the current account provides a fairly good description of the industrial country data.

    Methodological Approaches to Investigating Task-Based Language Teaching

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    This chapter provides an overview of key methods that are used to examine the role of tasks in second language performance and development. For each method, I provide a short description of the area(s) of research in which it is typically used, followed by examples to demonstrate how the method can be employed to investigate task-related issues. I also highlight and discuss the advantages and limitations associated with each method, and consider how potential limitations might be mitigated through careful design and implementation. Next, I turn to a discussion of some current issues in task-based language teaching research methodology, such as the tension between internal and ecological validity, the need for more developmental and longitudinal research to complement the current focus on task-based performance, the value of investigating task-based processes besides products, the advantages and challenges of triangulating data sources, and the importance of thorough data reporting and transparency

    Uniting software tools for the archival, management and analysis of linguistic data: lessons from developing the Language Data Repository

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    Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 29).The complex tasks involved in both the production and use of linguistic data tend to be highly repetitive and tedious. These are the tasks at which computers excel, and at which humans perform very poorly. In this thesis I will begin by describing the current state of the art in computational support for the documentation and description of language. To do this I will outline the three major areas in which computers are currently being used to support linguistic research: data archiving, data analysis and data management, discuss some of the current projects and tools in each of these areas, and present a summary of work currently being conducted by the Open Language Archive Community to support open web based access to the resources available to the linguistic community. Following this I will describe some of the limitations presented by the current approach to this field and present a vision for system that will support analysis, management and archival of linguistic data in a single "universally" accessible system, providing specific examples from the system I have been working to develop, the Language Data Repository (LDR). I will conclude by laying out areas of future work, both for the development of the LDR and for the community in general

    Effective retrieval and new indexing method for case based reasoning: Application in chemical process design

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    In this paper we try to improve the retrieval step for case based reasoning for preliminary design. This improvement deals with three major parts of our CBR system. First, in the preliminary design step, some uncertainties like imprecise or unknown values remain in the description of the problem, because they need a deeper analysis to be withdrawn. To deal with this issue, the faced problem description is soften with the fuzzy sets theory. Features are described with a central value, a percentage of imprecision and a relation with respect to the central value. These additional data allow us to build a domain of possible values for each attributes. With this representation, the calculation of the similarity function is impacted, thus the characteristic function is used to calculate the local similarity between two features. Second, we focus our attention on the main goal of the retrieve step in CBR to find relevant cases for adaptation. In this second part, we discuss the assumption of similarity to find the more appropriated case. We put in highlight that in some situations this classical similarity must be improved with further knowledge to facilitate case adaptation. To avoid failure during the adaptation step, we implement a method that couples similarity measurement with adaptability one, in order to approximate the cases utility more accurately. The latter gives deeper information for the reusing of cases. In a last part, we present a generic indexing technique for the base, and a new algorithm for the research of relevant cases in the memory. The sphere indexing algorithm is a domain independent index that has performances equivalent to the decision tree ones. But its main strength is that it puts the current problem in the center of the research area avoiding boundaries issues. All these points are discussed and exemplified through the preliminary design of a chemical engineering unit operation

    Challenges Associated with Cataloguing Electronic Resources in Selected University Libraries in Southwest Nigeria

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    The study examined the challenges associated with cataloguing electronic resources in six randomly selected university libraries in Southwest Nigeria. A questionnaire was administered to current cataloguers and those who had worked in the cataloguing sections of the selected university libraries. A total of one hundred and ten (110) copies of the questionnaire were distributed, out of which a hundred were found usable for this study. A descriptive survey method was used and the data collected was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results are presented in tables using simple percentages and mean while the Pearson correlation method was used for the hypothesis. This study highlighted some challenges associated with cataloguing electronic resources such as lack of adequate physical description of some electronic resources, inadequate workflow in cataloguing sections, copyright issues among others

    Integrating public transportation data: creation and editing of GTFS data

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    Presented at the 2014 World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST'14). Serie - Advances in intelligent systems and computing, vol. 276The current state of standardization related to representa tion and exchange of data about public transportation systems is still at its infancy, which leads to severe interoperability issues in projects that depend on the data from several diverse sources. In many cases, the interoperability issues arise from the use of rudimentary information systems, or even paper-based procedures, to manage operational data such as schedules and tariffs. In these cases, exchanging data with external systems is very difficult. This paper describes the development of a web-based application aiming to simplify the creation and editing of public transportation data that could be easily exchanged in a normalized format. This description is preceded by a discussion about a data model that could ease data interoperability. Here, the GTFS reference, with some adjustments, is used as a guideline for the definition of such transportation data model.Research group supported by FEDER Funds through the COMPETE and National Funds through FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under the projects n. 13843 and PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014
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