Does (in)formal learning enhance employability?

Not much is known about the actual contribution of informal learning to employability over and above formal learning activities. This paper presents the findings of a research project among 215 university non-academic staff members. Findings indicate that employability is enhanced by a mix of formal and informal learning opportunities. Possibilities for networking appear to be significant for employability

The development of children's comprehension and appreciation of riddles

Humor appreciation and understanding is important for children’s social relationships. The current study examined the associations between riddle comprehension, riddle appreciation, and smiling/laughter in children from a wide age-range aged 4 to 11 years old, as well as how cognitive processing style relates to riddle comprehension. Style was distinguished between local and global language processing at the sentence level. The results showed that only children above the age of 8 years old showed a reliable relationship between humor comprehension and smiling/laughter. These findings show that laughter should not be taken as an automatic indicator of explicit understanding. In addition, higher vocabulary ability was independently associated with better humor comprehension. This demonstrates a separable role language proficiency in humor comprehension and suggests avenues for future research in atypical populations known to have difficulties in this area

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

CMB-S4: Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves

CMB-S4---the next-generation ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment---is set to significantly advance the sensitivity of CMB measurements and enhance our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe, from the highest energies at the dawn of time through the growth of structure to the present day. Among the science cases pursued with CMB-S4, the quest for detecting primordial gravitational waves is a central driver of the experimental design. This work details the development of a forecasting framework that includes a power-spectrum-based semi-analytic projection tool, targeted explicitly towards optimizing constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r$, in the presence of Galactic foregrounds and gravitational lensing of the CMB. This framework is unique in its direct use of information from the achieved performance of current Stage 2--3 CMB experiments to robustly forecast the science reach of upcoming CMB-polarization endeavors. The methodology allows for rapid iteration over experimental configurations and offers a flexible way to optimize the design of future experiments given a desired scientific goal. To form a closed-loop process, we couple this semi-analytic tool with map-based validation studies, which allow for the injection of additional complexity and verification of our forecasts with several independent analysis methods. We document multiple rounds of forecasts for CMB-S4 using this process and the resulting establishment of the current reference design of the primordial gravitational-wave component of the Stage-4 experiment, optimized to achieve our science goals of detecting primordial gravitational waves for $r > 0.003$ at greater than $5\sigma$, or, in the absence of a detection, of reaching an upper limit of $r < 0.001$ at $95\%$ CL.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables, submitted to ApJ. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1907.0447

The effects of online social networking on retail consumer dynamics in the attractions industry: The case of ‘E-da’ theme park, Taiwan

Purpose of this study is to examine the trends in retail consumers’ consumption dynamics and patterns of purchase behavior within this new-technology-mediated environment. A behavioral purchase model was developed and tested to understand the ways social networks influence the decision making of individuals planning to visit a theme park. In particular, the proposed model delineates how online social networking (OSN) experience factors affect actual use (AU) of social media for purchasing of theme park services through an assessment of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU). An electronic survey was conducted with members of a theme park’s brand fan page on the Facebook social media site namely, the E-da World Theme park in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. Smart PLS 3, a partial least squares analysis, was employed to examine a series of eleven research hypotheses. The findings revealed a series of statistically significant influences from five exogenous variables on PU and PEOU, as well as the mediating role of PU on the PEOU – AU relationship. The results also provide important practical implications both for academics and practitioners by shedding light on the way social media works to encourage and support online purchasing of amusement services.

Patient Safety in Internal Medicine

AbstractHospital Internal Medicine (IM) is the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnosis and non-surgical treatment of diseases, providing the comprehensive care in the office and in the hospital, managing both common and complex illnesses of adolescents, adults, and the elderly. IM is a key ward for Health National Services. In Italy, for example, about 17.3% of acute patients are discharged from the IM departments. After the epidemiological transition to chronic/degenerative diseases, patients admitted to hospital are often poly-pathological and so requiring a global approach as in IM. As such transition was not associated—with rare exceptions—to hospital re-organization of beds and workforce, IM wards are often overcrowded, burdened by off-wards patients and subjected to high turnover and discharge pressure. All these factors contribute to amplify some traditional clinical risks for patients and health operators. The aim of our review is to describe several potential errors and their prevention strategies, which should be implemented by physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals working in IM wards