The application of clustering analysis to international private indebtedness

The main goal of this paper is to apply a combination of statistical and connectionist schemes to examine, via clustering analysis, private indebtedness in different countries. Thirty-nine such experiences are used. The relationship between private debts and some macroeconomic variables are discussed in some detail. The clustering performance is improved by taking advantage of specific properties and capacities of each method. The procedures are also applied to a controlled numerical example.

Existence, continuity and utility representation of strictly monotonic preferences on continuum of goods commodity spaces

It is an easy task for most commodity spaces, to find examples of strictly monotonic preference relations. For example, in the space of bounded sequences of real numbers.. However, it is not easy for spaces like the space of bounded functions defined in the real interval [0, 1]. In this note we investigate the roots of this difficulty. We show that strictly monotonic preferences on the space of bounded function on any set K always exist. However, if K is uncountable no such preference is continuous and none of them have a utility representation.utility representation/ strictly monotonic preferences

An Application of Clustering Analysis to International Private Indebtedness

This paper presents a procedure for clustering analysis that combines Kohone’s Self organizing Feature Map (SOFM) and statistical schemes. The idea is to cluster the data in two stages: run SOFM and then minimize the segmentation dispersion. The advantages of proposed procedure will be illustrated through a synthetic experiment and a real macroeconomic problem. The procedure is then used to explore the relationship between private indebtedness and some macroeconomic variables commonly used to measure macroeconomic performance. The experiences of thirty-nine countries in the early nineties are analyzed. The procedure outperformed others clustering techniques in the job of identifying consistent groups of countries from the economic and statistical viewpoints. It found out similarities in different countries concerning their respective levels of private indebtedness when added to well accepted parameters to measure macroeconomic performance.Vector quantization, Clustering, Self-Organizing Feature Map,Macroeconomic Performance, Private Indebtedness.

A Contabilidade de Gestão nas Empresas de Grande Dimensão de Cabo Verde

O presente estudo é uma abordagem das empresas cabo-verdianas para a compreensão da situação da contabilidade de gestão, evidenciando os sistemas de custeio utilizados, a adequação das informações obtidas e os benefícios da sua utilização. Deste modo, para atingirmos os objectivos foi formulada uma questão de investigação e respectivas hipóteses de investigação. Verificou-se pela literatura que no mundo a contabilidade de gestão tem sofrido várias alterações de forma a responder as mudanças do meio envolvente onde as empresas estão inseridas. No entanto, as técnicas contemporâneas têm sido adoptadas de uma forma muito lenta. A metodologia utilizada foi quantitativa, onde aplicamos um questionário para a recolha de dados, enviado por correio electrónico e respondido presencialmente, à amostra constituida por 164 empresas consideradas de grande dimensão, pertencentes aos três grandes sectores de actividade, tendo recebido em tempo útil, 54 respostas (32,9%). Contudo, destas 54 empresas que responderam apenas 14 possuem contabilidade de gestão. De acordo com os resultados obtidos, concluímos que as técnicas tradicionais de contabilidade de gestão são as mais utilizadas nas empresas estudadas, como por exemplo, o orçamento e a análise de desvios. No entanto, algumas empresas já utilizam técnicas contemporâneas, mas em simultâneo com as tradicionais.The main objective of this study is to analyze the situation of management accounting in Capeverdean companies. To characterize the situation of management accounting we formulated a research question and hypothesis in order to: analyze the cost system used, the quality of the information and the benefits of adopting a management accounting system. The literature shows that management accounting has been through many modifications and has steadily evolved so that it fits the environment where companies are implanted. However, the adoption of contemporary management accounting techniques has proven to be a slow process. The methodology used to gather data was through a survey. Some questionnaires were answered at the companies and the others were sent through e-mail to the sample of 164 large companies, belonging to the three main sectors. The response rate was of 18, 94% (54 companies). However, from those 54 companies just 14 have management accounting. According to the results, we have concluded that the companies we study have a management accounting system that relies on the use of the traditional techniques, like budget and budget control. Yet, some of those already use contemporary techniques, alongside the traditional techniques

Using Twitter to Support Students' Design Thinking

The goal of the short-term study abroad course “International Perspectives on Biomedical Engineering Design” is to enable students to consider sociotechnical factors in designing clinically translatable solutions. In addition, comparison of healthcare systems in Europe and the United States enables students to see the impact of culture on healthcare because people in these locations have similar medical resources. Students seek to define an actionable problem statement that summarizes the needs and insights identified through interviews with healthcare professionals. Methods recommended for formulating actionable problem statements include creating a Madlib or want ad. However, such approaches did not resonate with our student group. In this presentation, we describe our experiences using Twitter as a method for students to succinctly write actionable problem statements that spur creative problem solving.Cockrell School of Engineerin

HandSpy - a system to manage experiments on cognitive processes in writing

Experiments on cognitive processes require a detailed analysis of the contribution of many participants. In the case of cognitive processes in writing these experiments require special software tools to collect gestures performed with a pen or a stylus, and recorded with special hardware. These tools produce different kinds of data files in binary and proprietary formats that need to be managed on a workstation file system for further processing with generic tools, such as spreadsheets and statistical analysis software. The lack of common formats and open repositories hinders the possibility of distributing the work load among researchers within the research group, of re-processing the collected data with software developed by other research groups, and of sharing results with the rest of the cognitive process research community. This paper presents HandSpy, a collaborative environment for managing experiments in cognitive processes in writing. This environment was designed to cover all the stages of the experiment, from the definition of tasks to be performed by participants, to the synthesis of results. Collaboration in HandSpy is enabled by a rich web interface developed with the Google Web Toolkit. To decouple the environment from existing hardware devices for collecting written production, namely digitizing tablets and smart pens, HandSpy is based on the InkML standard, an XML data format for representing digital ink. This design choice shaped many of the features in HandSpy, such as the use of an XML database for managing application data and the use of XML transformations. XML transformations convert between persistent data representations used for storage and transient data representations required by the widgets on the user interface. This paper presents also an ongoing use case of HandSpy where this environment is being used to manage an experiment involving hundreds of primary schools participants that performed different tasks

Health, human capital and economic growth in Brazil

The main objective of the research is to analyze the relationship between population health status, and processes of economic growth and social development in Brazil by exploring the use of the population's nutritional and health variables to assess the quality of human capital and the mechanisms through which these variables may impact the country’s economic performance in terms of human capital formation, long-term economic growth, and social development. This research includes considerations on recent advances in the economic growth theory that contains the relationship between health, human capital, and long-term economic growth, as well as empirical evidence obtained from the analysis of an important Brazilian database, the Living Standards Measurement Survey, (Pesquisa de Padrao de Vida - PPV), a household survey conducted between 1996 and 1997 in both the Southeast and Northeast Regions of Brazil. The first part of the study focuses on information from individuals belonging to the group of economically active population (people between 19 and 59 years-old, both genders) to analyze the connection of individuals' health variables, such as height and health status, with socioeconomic variables, like income and educational attainment, controlling by area of residence (rural vs urban) and region (Northeast vs Southeast) The second part of the study focuses on information from individuals belonging to the group of economically active population (19 to 59 years-old both genders) with at least one child to support (2 to 21 years-old, both genders) in order to evaluate the intergenerational transmission of human capital, that is, analyzing the relations among parents data on health and nutritional status, income and educational attainment and the investment he/she is providing to the formation of human capital of his/her own child, controlling by area of residence (rural vs urban) and region (Northeast vs Southeast). Results lead to the conclusion that improvements generated through human capital investments made in one individual by the family do not finish at the individual himself, but are propagated to the next generations, independently from mechanisms of income. That is, relevant investments in human capital development, as educational attainment, nutrition, and health, create better opportunities to the individual in terms of employment and income. However, beyond these primary effects, there are secondary effects, mainly based on the transmission of human capital formation through generations, that result in population lifestyle changes, economic growth and development.