Employment Supports for Adults With Disabilities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Campbell Systematic Review

Objective: To identify, appraise, and synthesize studies of interventions to improve labor market outcomes of adults in developing countries with physical and/or sensory disabilities. Method: Systematic review methods, following Campbell Collaboration guidelines, were utilized. A comprehensive search was used to identify relevant studies published between 1990 and 2013, which were graded for study quality and a narrative approach used to synthesize the research evidence. Results: Fourteen studies covering a wide range of interventions met the inclusion criteria. Although individual studies reported improvements in outcomes, heterogeneity was high and studies were generally of poor methodological quality. Conclusions: There is a lack of high-quality research evidence to inform decision-making in this area. Stakeholders should be cautious when interpreting the results of the current evidence base

Employment Supports for Adults With Disabilities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Objective: To identify, appraise, and synthesize studies of interventions to improve labor market outcomes of adults in developing countries with physical and/or sensory disabilities. Method: Systematic review methods, following Campbell Collaboration guidelines, were utilized. A comprehensive search was used to identify relevant studies published between 1990 and 2013, which were graded for study quality and a narrative approach used to synthesize the research evidence. Results: Fourteen studies covering a wide range of interventions met the inclusion criteria. Although individual studies reported improvements in outcomes, heterogeneity was high and studies were generally of poor methodological quality. Conclusions: There is a lack of high-quality research evidence to inform decision-making in this area. Stakeholders should be cautious when interpreting the results of the current evidence base

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Bildungswahl und gleicher Zugang zu frühkindlicher Bildung und Betreuung in Deutschland

Der Beitrag trägt zu den Diskussionen bei, wie unterschiedlich ausgestaltete Systeme frühkindlicher Bildung, Betreuung und Erziehung (FBBE) mit elterlicher Wahlfreiheit, Qualität und Gleichheit in Verbindung stehen. Basierend auf einer kurzen Skizzierung von generellen Ausgestaltungsoptionen von FBBE in Europa und ihrer Umsetzung in Deutschland wird dargelegt, dass die genrelle Gesetzgebung auf nationaler Ebene hierzulande sowohl elterliche Wahlfreiheit als auch gleichen Zugang zu qualitativ hochwertigen Angeboten für alle Kinder zu gewährleisten scheint. Allerdings verdeckt die ausschließliche Betrachtung auf Landesebene Segregationsprozesse auf lokaler Ebene, die zu Ungleichheiten führen. Der Beitag illustriert trägerspezifische Segregationsmuster auf kommunaler Ebene auf der Basis von Daten der Schuleingangsuntersuchung einer mittelgroßen Stadt in Nordrhein-Westfalen.This paper wants to contribute to the political and scientific debate that focuses on the question, how different early childhood education and care (ECEC) system features relate to aspects of parental choice, quality, and equity. In order to do so, it discusses different aspects of ECEC configurations in Europe in general and their implementation in Germany against the background of educational equality. Despite the issue of biased access, within its general framework legislation German ECEC policies seem to allow parents to choose and to ensure equal access to high quality services at the same time. However, a perspective on system characteristics at country level conceals processes at local level that lead to inequalities, such as segregation. Based on data of one example municipality in North Rhine-Westphalia, the paper illustrates such segregation patterns at the local level. As these relate to the type of provider of ECEC services, this is discussed against the background of market mechanisms.<br

Building communities and their legal implications - A German case study

In the form of an innovative adaptation of older concepts, the German real estate market has witnessed over the last 15 years a substantial growth in the number of developments that are led by groups of private individuals. The reasons for this trend towards so-called building communities (German terminology - "Baugemeinschaften") are manifold, including the financial motivation to save the developer's margin, the quest for alternative architectural products not provided by the professional market, as much as the creation of long-lasting social connections through the participation in a communal planning, design and construction effort. This paper, jointly authored by an urban designer and a lawyer, focuses on the identification of the German case-studies' major legal issues and their implications on architectural and urban questions. The reason for a multi-disciplinary approach is based on the desire to uncover and highlight the interplay of social and economic forces that otherwise might remain hidden behind the specialists' separations. Ultimately, the practical aim is to help identify the critical moments in the building communities' development process, in which a modification of the legal system might be productive, or the interference of the public sector helpful

Schulträger im Wandel. Zur neuen Rolle des Schulträgers in der Reform des Schulsystems.

Berkemeyer N, Otto J, Olschewsky C. Schulträger im Wandel. Zur neuen Rolle des Schulträgers in der Reform des Schulsystems. In: Böttcher W, Dicke JN, Hogrebe N, eds. Evaluation, Bildung und Gesellschaft. Steuerungsinstrumente zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Münster: Waxmann; 2010: 229-240

Forschung zu Segregation im Elementarbereich: Die Rekonstruktion von Kita-Kompositionen anhand von Daten der Schuleingangsuntersuchung

In dem Beitrag wird das Potenzial von Daten aus der Schuleingangsuntersuchung (SEU) für Sekundäranalysen im Kontext von Segregationsforschung aufgezeigt. Für die Erforschung von differenziellen Lern- und Entwicklungsmilieus im Elementarbereich sind Informationen über die Zusammensetzung von frühkindlichen Betreuungseinrichtungen erforderlich. Diese anhand von Primärdaten zu erheben ist forschungsökonomisch und forschungspraktisch aufwendig, weshalb sich Sekundäranalysen von bereits vorhandenen Daten anbieten. In der jährlichen SEU werden umfangreiche Individualdaten erhoben, anhand derer auch die Zusammensetzung von Kindertageseinrichtungen (Kitas) abgebildet werden kann. Aber auch die Erfassung der Kita-Kompositionen anhand von SEU-Daten steht aufgrund der Altersheterogenität der Kindergruppen und unterschiedlichen Besuchsdauern vor methodischen Herausforderungen, die bislang kaum thematisiert wurden. Anhand des DFG-Projekts „Kompositionseffekte in Kindertageseinrichtungen (KomiK) – Sprachkompetenzen von Kindern zu Schulbeginn“ (HO 5561/1-1

Performance Evaluation of the Q Exactive HF‑X for Shotgun Proteomics

Progress in proteomics is mainly driven by advances in mass spectrometric (MS) technologies. Here we benchmarked the performance of the latest MS instrument in the benchtop Orbitrap series, the Q Exactive HF-X, against its predecessor for proteomics applications. A new peak-picking algorithm, a brighter ion source, and optimized ion transfers enable productive MS/MS acquisition above 40 Hz at 7500 resolution. The hardware and software improvements collectively resulted in improved peptide and protein identifications across all comparable conditions, with an increase of up to 50 percent at short LC–MS gradients, yielding identification rates of more than 1000 unique peptides per minute. Alternatively, the Q Exactive HF-X is capable of achieving the same proteome coverage as its predecessor in approximately half the gradient time or at 10-fold lower sample loads. The Q Exactive HF-X also enables rapid phosphoproteomics with routine analysis of more than 5000 phosphopeptides with short single-shot 15 min LC–MS/MS measurements, or 16 700 phosphopeptides quantified across ten conditions in six gradient hours using TMT10-plex and offline peptide fractionation. Finally, exciting perspectives for data-independent acquisition are highlighted with reproducible identification of 55 000 unique peptides covering 5900 proteins in half an hour of MS analysis