1,354,629 research outputs found

    What a Difference a DV Makes ... The Impact of Conceptualizing the Dependent Variable in Innovation Success Factor Studies

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    The quest for the "success factors" that drive a company's innovation performance has attracted a great deal of attention among both practitioners and academics. The underlying assumption is that certain critical activities impact the innovation performance of the company or the project. However, the findings of success factor studies lack convergence. It has been speculated that this may be due to the fact that extant studies have used many different measures of the dependent variable "innovation performance". Our study is the first to analyze this issue systematically and empirically: we analyze the extent to which different conceptualizations of the dependent variable (a firm's innovation performance) lead to different innovation success factor patterns. In order to do so, we collected data from 234 German firms, including well-established success factors and six alternative measures of innovation performance. This allowed us to calculate whether or not success factors are robust to changes in the measurement of the dependent variable. We find that this is not the case: rather, the choice of the dependent variable makes a huge difference. From this, we draw important conclusions for future studies aiming to identify the success factors in companies' innovation performance

    Bundled Fragments of First-Order Modal Logic: (Un)Decidability

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    Quantified modal logic is notorious for being undecidable, with very few known decidable fragments such as the monodic ones. For instance, even the two-variable fragment over unary predicates is undecidable. In this paper, we study a particular fragment, namely the bundled fragment, where a first-order quantifier is always followed by a modality when occurring in the formula, inspired by the proposal of [Yanjing Wang, 2017] in the context of non-standard epistemic logics of know-what, know-how, know-why, and so on. As always with quantified modal logics, it makes a significant difference whether the domain stays the same across possible worlds. In particular, we show that the predicate logic with the bundle "forall Box" alone is undecidable over constant domain interpretations, even with only monadic predicates, whereas having the "exists Box" bundle instead gives us a decidable logic. On the other hand, over increasing domain interpretations, we get decidability with both "forall Box" and "exists Box" bundles with unrestricted predicates, where we obtain tableau based procedures that run in PSPACE. We further show that the "exists Box" bundle cannot distinguish between constant domain and variable domain interpretations

    Code readability: A proposal on the effects of psychology and comprehension in software development and maintenance

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    Because of the diversity and complexity of the hundreds of coding languages out there, code readability has become more and more of an issue as the years have passed and as the popularity of technology that required built-in computers has increased. With so many different formats, styles, and restrictions on each language, even a developer with experience in only a few common languages may have trouble remembering which language allows for certain indentation, which language requires variable instantiation, which language requires return statements at the end of functions. While I can appreciate the diversity and efficiency that having many different languages provides, the pure amount of rules and restrictions provided by the thousands of people that constructed these languages to their preferences can make for a chaotic, confusing minefield of rights and wrongs in the coding world. With this problem in mind, I would like to dig deep into research on the topic of code readability, hoping to gain some insight into what makes code “readable” or what makes the difference between “good code” and “bad code”. I believe that there is a strong psychological element at play, and because the world of coding is so widespread and free-form at times, it may be hard for people to truly score code on it’s readability. A lot of it will come down to personal opinion, which is unlike most modern spoken languages have strict rules of grammar. While there are strict rules to compiling code and most languages, there are usually many ways to get a program to run “correctly”, albeit potentially inefficiently. However, most experienced coders can look at a block of code and give an approximation as to how “correct” the code may be. That is the aspect that I want to investigate. I would like to see if I can nail down what choices have to be made in the programming process to make code that is considering good by the general public (which in this case would be the programming community.

    THE EFFECT OF MUSIC ON READING SKILL: A META-ANALYSIS STUDY

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    This study aims to make a comparison as to what aspects of reading skills are affected by music with its different functions. For this purpose, a total of 31 experimental/quasi-experimental studies published between 2010-2021 investigating the effect of music on reading skills were analyzed by meta-analysis method. Effect size calculations of the studies, heterogeneity analysis, publication bias and moderator analysis were performed through the statistical program Comprehensive Meta-Analysis v2.0 (CMA). As a result of the heterogeneity test, the data obtained from the studies were interpreted in accordance with the random effects model. It was concluded that music had a small effect size (Hedge’s g=0.269, 95%CI=0.058-0.481) on the academic success of students' reading skills compared to a quiet learning environment. Moderator variable analysis indicated that the effect size values did not show a statistically significant difference according to how music was used and the duration of the experimental process while these values showed a statistically significant difference according to the reading sub-skills/learning areas, the field of study and the level of education in which the implementation was carried out. This study examines the effect of music, in a comparative way, on reading skills in terms of reading aloud skill, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary and grammatical accuracy, which are sub-skills/learning areas of reading skill, as well as considering each different function of music use. The study is expected to make an important contribution to the literature as it makes a comprehensive synthesis of the studies investigating the effect of music on reading skills with respect to these intermediate variables. Keywords: music, reading skill, meta-analysis

    Average Causal Response with Variable Treatment Intensity

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    In evaluation research, an average causal effect is usually defined as the expected difference between the outcomes of the treated, and what these outcomes would have been in the absence of treatment. This definition of causal effects makes sense for binary treatments only. In this paper, we extend the definition of average causal effects to the case of variable treatments such as drug dosage, hours of exam preparation, cigarette smoking, and years of schooling. We show that given mild regularity assumptions, instrumental variables independence assumptions identify a weighted average of per-unit causal effects along the length of an appropriately defined causal response function. Conventional instrumental variables and Two-Stage Least Squares procedures can be interpreted as estimating the average causal response to a variable treatment.

    ‛Him, and ourselves, and it’: On the meaning of the ‛evidence poem’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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    Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugÀnglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Pronouns have an indexical or deictic function. Their reference is variable, in the case of personal pronouns depending on pragmatic factors such as who is speaking to whom and who is being talked about, and it can be adjusted quite flexibly to textual and contextual, or conversational needs. So, while their anaphoric qualities make them an important instrument for creating textual cohesion, which under normal circumstances (i.e., on unmarked levels of interpretation) is a prerequisite for contextual coherence, their referential variability can result in vagueness and fluctuating uncertainty. What is locally cohesive can thus still be contextually incoherent. Proper names, on the other hand, are normally used as rigid designators. Quoted forms can be viewed as a specific class of (proper) names individualizing particular forms as relocations of their category (I cannot go into more detail here about the different kinds of nominalizations and their effects); quotation can thus be regarded as a means of transforming variable designators into rigid ones. In the enigmatic poem to be discussed, Lewis Carroll makes ample use of this instrument; as the English past tense doesn't have person or number agreement (cf. I/You/He/She/It went), he can easily avoid explicitly noting the difference between quoted and unquoted (anaphoric) forms, and can rather draw specifically on the resulting ambiguity. His virtuosity in handling the different levels of designation illustrates how human symbolic abilities allow him (and us) to introduce new levels of meaning and to stimulate our search for possible interpretations by obscuring the seemingly obvious

    Causes that Make a Difference

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    Biologists studying complex causal systems typically identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background conditions. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often foreground genes and relegate the cellular milieu to the background. But factors in the milieu are as causally necessary as genes for the production of phenotypic traits, even traits at the molecular level such as amino acid sequences. Gene-centered biology has been criticized on the grounds that because there is parity among causes, the “privileging” of genes reflects a reductionist bias, not an ontological difference. The idea that there is an ontological parity among causes is related to a philosophical puzzle identified by John Stuart Mill: what, other than our interests or biases, could possibly justify identifying some causes as the actual or operative ones, and other causes as mere background? The aim of this paper is to solve this conceptual puzzle and to explain why there is not an ontological parity among genes and the other factors. It turns out that solving this puzzle helps answer a seemingly unrelated philosophical question: what kind of causal generality matters in biology

    Degree of explanation

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    Partial explanations are everywhere. That is, explanations citing causes that explain some but not all of an effect are ubiquitous across science, and these in turn rely on the notion of degree of explanation. I argue that current accounts are seriously deficient. In particular, they do not incorporate adequately the way in which a cause’s explanatory importance varies with choice of explanandum. Using influential recent contrastive theories, I develop quantitative definitions that remedy this lacuna, and relate it to existing measures of degree of causation. Among other things, this reveals the precise role here of chance, as well as bearing on the relation between causal explanation and causation itself

    When Do Opponents of Gay Rights Mobilize? Explaining Political Participation in Times of Backlash against Liberalism

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    Existing research suggests that supporters of gay rights have outmobilized their opponents, leading to policy changes in advanced industrialized democracies. At the same time, we observe the diffusion of state-sponsored homophobia in many parts of the world. The emergence of gay rights as a salient political issue in global politics leads us to ask, “Who is empowered to be politically active in various societies?” What current research misses is a comparison of levels of participation (voting and protesting) between states that make stronger and weaker appeals to homophobia. Voters face contrasting appeals from politicians in favor of and against gay rights globally. In an analysis of survey data from Europe and Latin America, we argue that the alignment between the norms of sexuality a state promotes and an individual’s personal attitudes on sexuality increases felt political efficacy. We find that individuals who are tolerant of homosexuality are more likely to participate in states with gay-friendly policies in comparison with intolerant individuals. The reverse also holds: individuals with low education levels that are intolerant of homosexuality are more likely to participate in states espousing political homophobia

    From truth to computability I

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    The recently initiated approach called computability logic is a formal theory of interactive computation. See a comprehensive online source on the subject at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html . The present paper contains a soundness and completeness proof for the deductive system CL3 which axiomatizes the most basic first-order fragment of computability logic called the finite-depth, elementary-base fragment. Among the potential application areas for this result are the theory of interactive computation, constructive applied theories, knowledgebase systems, systems for resource-bound planning and action. This paper is self-contained as it reintroduces all relevant definitions as well as main motivations.Comment: To appear in Theoretical Computer Scienc
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