Award-Winning Architecture and Urban Revitalization: The Case of “Olympic Arenas” in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

This paper investigates socioeconomic impacts of three multifunctional sports arenas situated in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany. The three arenas are chosen with respect to their potential to contribute to a process of revitalization of their economically deprived neighbourhood. Impact is assessed by conducting hedonic analyses of standard land values under consideration of spatial spill-over effects. To confirm results and to provide a more comprehensive interpretation we employ a differences-in-differences approach to check for structural breaks in development of rents and selected socioeconomic variables within determined areas of potential impact. Our results suggest that arenas emanate positive externalities and apparently have accelerated the process of gentrification going on in Prenzlauer Berg. However, evidence also supports neighbourhood activists´ concerns that congestion problems may adversely affect property values, at least when not addressed appropriately during the period of planning.Stadium Impact, Stadium Architecture, Gentrification, Hedonic Regression, Spatial Autocorrelation

An adaptive technique for content-based image retrieval

We discuss an adaptive approach towards Content-Based Image Retrieval. It is based on the Ostensive Model of developing information needs—a special kind of relevance feedback model that learns from implicit user feedback and adds a temporal notion to relevance. The ostensive approach supports content-assisted browsing through visualising the interaction by adding user-selected images to a browsing path, which ends with a set of system recommendations. The suggestions are based on an adaptive query learning scheme, in which the query is learnt from previously selected images. Our approach is an adaptation of the original Ostensive Model based on textual features only, to include content-based features to characterise images. In the proposed scheme textual and colour features are combined using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combination. Results from a user-centred, work-task oriented evaluation show that the ostensive interface is preferred over a traditional interface with manual query facilities. This is due to its ability to adapt to the user's need, its intuitiveness and the fluid way in which it operates. Studying and comparing the nature of the underlying information need, it emerges that our approach elicits changes in the user's need based on the interaction, and is successful in adapting the retrieval to match the changes. In addition, a preliminary study of the retrieval performance of the ostensive relevance feedback scheme shows that it can outperform a standard relevance feedback strategy in terms of image recall in category search

The housing ladder and Hong Kong housing market\u27s boom and bust cycle

This paper presents evidence, based on the recent Hong Kong experience, for the existence of a “housing ladder effect.” An increase of housing equity at the bottom of the ladder tends to translate into a trading up activity that will both increase housing market turnover and buoy up the entire housing market. Based on a natural experiment through the introduction of a public housing privatization scheme, this papers presents evidence supporting this story using a logit model and a price-volume causality test

Spots of interaction: an investigation on the relationship between firms and universities in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Spots of interaction summarize the nature of partial connections (between science and technology) operating in the Brazilian system of innovation. A pilot study in Minas Gerais, Brazil, uses two new research tools (for immature NSIs) and presents a database with research groups located in universities and a database built upon an adapted version of the pioneering Yale and Carnegie Mellon Surveys. These complementary databases identify spots of interaction, indicating how economic sectors use specific science and engineering fields. This investigation identifies a dual role of universities in immature NSIs, as substitutes and/or complements firms R&D.systems of innovation, underdevelopment, interactions between science and technology, surveys, universities

Problems and Promises of Using LMS Learner Analytics for Assessment: Case Study of a First-Year English Program

Learning management systems (LMS) are widely used in education. They offer the potential for assessing student learning, but the reality of using them for this is problematic. This case study chronicles efforts by librarians at Marquette University to use LMS data to assess students’ information literacy knowledge in Marquette’s first-year English program

Rating scale development: a multistage exploratory sequential design

The project chosen to showcase the application of the exploratory sequential design in second/ foreign (L2) language assessment comes from the context of rating scale development and focuses on the development of a set of scales for a suite of high-stakes L2 speaking tests. The assessment of speaking requires assigning scores to a speech sample in a systematic fashion by focusing on explicitly defined criteria which describe different levels of performance (Ginther 2013). Rating scales are the instruments used in this evaluation process, and they can be either holistic (i.e. providing a global overall assessment) or analytic (i.e. providing an independent evaluations for a number of assessment criteria, e.g. Grammar, Vocabulary, Organisation, etc.). The discussion in this chapter is framed within the context of rating scales in speaking assessment. However, it is worth noting that the principles espoused, stages employed and decisions taken during the development process have wider applicability to performance assessment in general

The use of implicit evidence for relevance feedback in web retrieval

In this paper we report on the application of two contrasting types of relevance feedback for web retrieval. We compare two systems; one using explicit relevance feedback (where searchers explicitly have to mark documents relevant) and one using implicit relevance feedback (where the system endeavours to estimate relevance by mining the searcher's interaction). The feedback is used to update the display according to the user's interaction. Our research focuses on the degree to which implicit evidence of document relevance can be substituted for explicit evidence. We examine the two variations in terms of both user opinion and search effectiveness