\u3cem\u3eIslands\u3c/em\u3e by Blaise Cendrars

Translated from the French with commentary by Victoria Le

The Impacts of Pension Privatization in Latin American: A Cross-Country Comparison of Pension Reforms and the Introduction of Individual Accounts. An analysis modeled after the six guiding core principles of Social Security

Latin America was the world’s pioneering nation in the privatization of pensions. In 1981, Chile’s pension system underwent a reform making it the first country to replace a public defined-benefit pay-as-you-go pension scheme with a fully funded defined-contribution pension scheme based on individual accounts. This project assesses the impacts and results of pension privatization in Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. As indicators of a prosperous system, my analyses are made using the six core guiding principles of Social Security: i) Coverage; ii) Equal Treatment and Social Solidarity; iii) Gender Equity; iv) Adequacy of Benefits; v) Administrative Costs; vi) and, Financial Sustainability[1]. This project uses historical data from the three countries, including periods before the reform, in order to adequately compare the two systems and determine which has proven to be more efficient. The main findings of this paper are the positive impacts associated with pensions privatization with respect to the six core guiding principles of Social Security. [1] Mesa-Lago, Reassembling Social Security: A Survey of Pensions and Health Care Reforms in Latin America, 200

Experience with Ada on the F-18 High Alpha Research Vehicle Flight Test Program

Considerable experience was acquired with Ada at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Facility during the on-going High Alpha Technology Program. In this program, an F-18 aircraft was highly modified by the addition of thrust-vectoring vanes to the airframe. In addition, substantial alteration was made in the original quadruplex flight control system. The result is the High Alpha Research Vehicle. An additional research flight control computer was incorporated in each of the four channels. Software for the research flight control computer was written in Ada. To date, six releases of this software have been flown. This paper provides a detailed description of the modifications to the research flight control system. Efficient ground-testing of the software was accomplished by using simulations that used the Ada for portions of their software. These simulations are also described. Modifying and transferring the Ada for flight software to the software simulation configuration has allowed evaluation of this language. This paper also discusses such significant issues in using Ada as portability, modifiability, and testability as well as documentation requirements

Relationship-builders or rule-followers? Trust challenges for Norwegian managers in China

Masteroppgave i bedriftsøkonomi – Universitetet i Nordland, 201

Predicting the difficulty of multiple choice questions in a high-stakes medical exam

Predicting the construct-relevant difficulty of Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) has the potential to reduce cost while maintaining the quality of high-stakes exams. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the difficulty of MCQs from a high-stakes medical exam, where all questions were deliberately written to a common reading level. To accomplish this, we extract a large number of linguistic features and embedding types, as well as features quantifying the difficulty of the items for an automatic question-answering system. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms various baselines with a statistically significant difference. Best results were achieved when using the full feature set, where embeddings had the highest predictive power, followed by linguistic features. An ablation study of the various types of linguistic features suggested that information from all levels of linguistic processing contributes to predicting item difficulty, with features related to semantic ambiguity and the psycholinguistic properties of words having a slightly higher importance. Owing to its generic nature, the presented approach has the potential to generalize over other exams containing MCQs

ShopSmart 4 Health - protocol of a skills-based randomised controlled trial promoting fruit and vegetable consumption among socioeconomically disadvantaged women

BackgroundThere is a need for evidence on the most effective and cost-effective approaches for promoting healthy eating among groups that do not meet dietary recommendations for good health, such as those with low incomes or experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage. This paper describes the ShopSmart 4 Health study, a randomised controlled trial conducted by Deakin University, Coles Supermarkets and the Heart Foundation, to investigate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a skill-building intervention for promoting increased purchasing and consumption of fruits and vegetables amongst women of low socioeconomic position (SEP).Methods/designShopSmart 4 Health employed a randomised controlled trial design. Women aged 18&ndash;60 years, holding a Coles store loyalty card, who shopped at Coles stores within socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhoods and met low-income eligibility criteria were invited to participate. Consenting women completed a baseline survey assessing food shopping and eating habits and food-related behaviours and attitudes. On receipt of their completed survey, women were randomised to either a skill-building intervention or a wait-list control condition. Intervention effects will be evaluated via self-completion surveys and using supermarket transaction sales data, collected at pre- and post-intervention and 6-month follow-up. An economic evaluation from a societal perspective using a cost-consequences approach will compare the costs and outcomes between intervention and control groups. Process evaluation will be undertaken to identify perceived value and effects of intervention components.DiscussionThis study will provide data to address the currently limited evidence base regarding the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of skill-building intervention strategies aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable consumption among socioeconomically disadvantaged women, a target group at high risk of poor diets.<br /

Cognitive processing of multiword expressions in native and non-native speakers of English: evidence from gaze data

Gaze data has been used to investigate the cognitive processing of certain types of formulaic language such as idioms and binominal phrases, however, very little is known about the online cognitive processing of multiword expressions. In this paper we use gaze features to compare the processing of verb - particle and verb - noun multiword expressions to control phrases of the same part-of-speech pattern. We also compare the gaze data for certain components of these expressions and the control phrases in order to find out whether these components are processed differently from the whole units. We provide results for both native and non-native speakers of English and we analyse the importance of the various gaze features for the purpose of this study. We discuss our findings in light of the E-Z model of reading

Using gaze data to predict multiword expressions

In recent years gaze data has been increasingly used to improve and evaluate NLP models due to the fact that it carries information about the cognitive processing of linguistic phenomena. In this paper we conduct a preliminary study towards the automatic identification of multiword expressions based on gaze features from native and non-native speakers of English. We report comparisons between a part-ofspeech (POS) and frequency baseline to: i) a prediction model based solely on gaze data and ii) a combined model of gaze data, POS and frequency. In spite of the challenging nature of the task, best performance was achieved by the latter. Furthermore, we explore how the type of gaze data (from native versus non-native speakers) affects the prediction, showing that data from the two groups is discriminative to an equal degree. Finally, we show that late processing measures are more predictive than early ones, which is in line with previous research on idioms and other formulaic structures.Na