690 research outputs found
What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world?
Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises
around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these
programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the goal of
synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the
areas in which more work is needed. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the length,
content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated. Many evaluations suffer
from low statistical power, measure impacts only within a year of training, and experience problems
with survey attrition and measurement of firm profits and revenues. Over these short time horizons,
there are relatively modest impacts of training on survivorship of existing firms, but stronger evidence
that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. Most studies find
that existing firm owners implement some of the practices taught in training, but the magnitudes of
these improvements in practices are often relatively modest. Few studies find significant impacts on
profits or sales, although a couple of the studies with more statistical power have done so. Some studies
have also found benefits to microfinance organizations of offering training. To date there is little
evidence to help guide policymakers as to whether any impacts found come from trained firms
competing away sales from other businesses versus through productivity improvements, and little
evidence to guide the development of the provision of training at market prices. We conclude by
summarizing some directions and key questions for future studies
A new framework for the design and evaluation of a learning institutionâs student engagement activities
In this article we explore the potential for attempts to encourage student engagement to be conceptualised as behaviour change activity, and specifically whether a new framework to guide such activity has potential value for the Higher Education (HE) sector. The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) (Michie, Susan, Maartje M van Stralen, and Robert West. 2011. âThe Behaviour Change Wheel: A New Method for Characterising and Designing Behaviour Change Interventions.â Implementation ScienceâŻ: IS 6 (1): 42. doi:10.1186/1748-5908-6-42) is a framework for the systematic design and development of behaviour change interventions. It has yet to be applied to the domain of student engagement. This article explores its potential, by assessing whether the BCW comprehensively aligns with the state of student engagement as currently presented in the HE literature. This work achieves two things. It firstly allows a prima facie assessment of whether student engagement activity can be readily aligned with the BCW framework. It also highlights omissions and prevalence of activity types in the HE sector, compared with other sectors where behaviour change practice is being successfully applied
Component-based software engineering: a quantitative approach
Dissertação apresentada para a obtenção do Grau de Doutor em InformĂĄtica pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiĂȘncias e TecnologiaBackground: Often, claims in Component-Based Development (CBD) are only supported by qualitative expert opinion, rather than by quantitative data. This contrasts with the normal practice in other sciences, where a sound experimental validation of claims is standard practice. Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) aims to bridge this gap. Unfortunately, it is common to find experimental validation efforts that are
hard to replicate and compare, to build up the body of knowledge in CBD.
Objectives: In this dissertation our goals are (i) to contribute to evolution of ESE, in
what concerns the replicability and comparability of experimental work, and (ii) to apply our proposals to CBD, thus contributing to its deeper and sounder understanding.
Techniques: We propose a process model for ESE, aligned with current experimental
best practices, and combine this model with a measurement technique called
Ontology-Driven Measurement (ODM). ODM is aimed at improving the state of practice
in metrics definition and collection, by making metrics definitions formal and executable,without sacrificing their usability. ODM uses standard technologies that can be well adapted to current integrated development environments.
Results: Our contributions include the definition and preliminary validation of a process model for ESE and the proposal of ODM for supporting metrics definition and
collection in the context of CBD. We use both the process model and ODM to perform
a series experimental works in CBD, including the cross-validation of a component
metrics set for JavaBeans, a case study on the influence of practitioners expertise in
a sub-process of component development (component code inspections), and an observational study on reusability patterns of pluggable components (Eclipse plug-ins).
These experimental works implied proposing, adapting, or selecting adequate ontologies,
as well as the formal definition of metrics upon each of those ontologies.
Limitations: Although our experimental work covers a variety of component models and, orthogonally, both process and product, the plethora of opportunities for using our quantitative approach to CBD is far from exhausted.
Conclusions: The main contribution of this dissertation is the illustration, through
practical examples, of how we can combine our experimental process model with ODM to support the experimental validation of claims in the context of CBD, in a repeatable and comparable way. In addition, the techniques proposed in this dissertation
are generic and can be applied to other software development paradigms.Departamento de InformĂĄtica of the Faculdade de CiĂȘncias e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL); Centro de InformĂĄtica e Tecnologias da Informação of the FCT/UNL; Fundação para a CiĂȘncia e Tecnologia through the STACOS project(POSI/CHS/48875/2002); The Experimental Software Engineering Network (ESERNET);Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO); Association forComputing Machinery (ACM
Recovery within long running transactions
As computer systems continue to grow in complexity, the possibilities of failure increase. At the
same time, the increase in computer system pervasiveness in day-to-day activities brought along
increased expectations on their reliability. This has led to the need for effective and automatic error
recovery techniques to resolve failures. Transactions enable the handling of failure propagation
over concurrent systems due to dependencies, restoring the system to the point before the failure
occurred. However, in various settings, especially when interacting with the real world, reversal
is not possible. The notion of compensations has been long advocated as a way of addressing this
issue, through the specification of activities which can be executed to undo partial transactions.
Still, there is no accepted standard theory; the literature offers a plethora of distinct formalisms
and approaches.
In this survey, we review the compensations from a theoretical point of view by: (i) giving a
historic account of the evolution of compensating transactions; (ii) delineating and describing a
number of design options involved; (iii) presenting a number of formalisms found in the literature,
exposing similarities and differences; (iv) comparing formal notions of compensation correctness;
(v) giving insights regarding the application of compensations in practice; and (vi) discussing
current and future research trends in the area.peer-reviewe
Coalition Battle Management Language (C-BML) Study Group Final Report
Interoperability across Modeling and Simulation (M&S) and Command and Control (C2) systems continues to be a significant problem for today\u27s warfighters. M&S is well-established in military training, but it can be a valuable asset for planning and mission rehearsal if M&S and C2 systems were able to exchange information, plans, and orders more effectively. To better support the warfighter with M&S based capabilities, an open standards-based framework is needed that establishes operational and technical coherence between C2 and M&S systems
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