1,817 research outputs found
A Woman\u27s Touch in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u27s Tender is the Night: Pulling the Women Out of the Background
This is a critical study of F. Scott Fitzgeraldâs Tender Is the Night focusing primarily on the lack of examination and criticism surrounding the women characters. Included are reviews of Fitzgeraldâs personal and professional life from the publication of his critically acclaimed The Great Gatsby until the publication of his last complete novel, Tender Is the Night, discussion of the contemporary and current criticism of the novel, and a feminist reading of the novel in order to focus more significant critical attention upon the women characters in order to create a fuller understanding of Fitzgeraldâs novel
Adaptive EAGLE dynamic solution adaptation and grid quality enhancement
In the effort described here, the elliptic grid generation procedure in the EAGLE grid code was separated from the main code into a subroutine, and a new subroutine which evaluates several grid quality measures at each grid point was added. The elliptic grid routine can now be called, either by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to generate a new adaptive grid based on flow variables and quality measures through multiple adaptation, or by the EAGLE main code to generate a grid based on quality measure variables through static adaptation. Arrays of flow variables can be read into the EAGLE grid code for use in static adaptation as well. These major changes in the EAGLE adaptive grid system make it easier to convert any CFD code that operates on a block-structured grid (or single-block grid) into a multiple adaptive code
How do foreign institutional investors enhance firm innovation?
We examine the effect of foreign institutional investors on firm innovation. Using firm-level data across 26 non-U.S. economies between 2000 and 2010, we show that foreign institutional ownership has a positive, causal effect on firm innovation. We further explore three possible underlying mechanisms through which foreign institutions affect firm innovation: Foreign institutions act as active monitors, provide insurance for firm managers against innovation failures, and promote knowledge spillovers from high-innovation economies. Our article sheds new light on the real effects of foreign institutions on firm innovation
Collecting Samples From Online Services: How to Use Screeners to Improve Data Quality
Increasingly, marketing and consumer researchers rely on online data collection services. While actively-managed data collection services directly assist with the sampling process, minimally-managed data collection services, such as Amazonâs Mechanical Turk (MTurk), leave researchers solely responsible for recruiting, screening, cleaning, and evaluating responses. The research reported here proposes a 2 Ă 2 framework based on sampling goal and methodology for screening and evaluating the quality of online samples. By sampling goals, screeners can be categorized as selection, which involves matching the sample with the targeted population; or as accuracy, which involves ensuring that participants are appropriately attentive. By methodology, screeners can be categorized as direct, which screens individual responses; and as statistical, which provides quantitative signals of low quality. Multiple screeners for each of the four categories are compared across three MTurk samples, two actively-managed data collection samples (Qualtrics and Dynata), and a student sample. The results suggest the need for screening in every online sample, particularly for the MTurk samples, with the fewest supplier-provided filters. Recommendations are provided for researchers and journal reviewers that provide greater transparency with respect to sample practices
L'importance des ilĂŽts forestiers de savane humide pour la conservation de la faune de forĂȘt dense en CĂŽte d'Ivoire
Inequities in access to healthcare: analysis of national survey data across six Asia-Pacific countries
© 2013 Meyer et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background
Evidence suggests that there is a link between inequitable access to healthcare and inequitable distribution of illness. A recent World Health Organization report stated that there is a need for research and policy to address the critical role of health services in reducing inequities and preventing future inequities. The aim of this manuscript is to highlight disparities and differences in terms of the factors that distinguish between poor and good access to healthcare across six Asia-Pacific countries: Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Methods
A population survey was undertaken in each country. This paper is a secondary analysis of these existing data. Data were collected in each country between 2009 and 2010. Four variables related to difficulties in access to healthcare (distance, appointment, waiting time, and cost) were analysed using binomial logistic regression to identify socio- and demographic predictors of inequity.
Results
Consistent across the findings, poor health and low income were identified as difficulties in access. Country specific indicators were also identified. For Thailand, the poorest level of access appears to be for respondents who work within the household whereas in Taiwan, part-time work is associated with difficulties in access. Within Hong Kong, results suggest that older (above 60) and retired individuals have the poorest access and within Australia, females and married individuals are the worst off.
Conclusion
Recognition of these inequities, from a policy perspective, is essential for health sector policy decision-making. Despite the differences in political and economic climate in the countries under analysis, our findings highlight patterns of inequity which require policy responses. Our data should be used as a means of deciding the most appropriate policy response for each country which includes, rather than excludes, socially marginalised population groups. These findings should be of interest to those involved in health policy, but also in policy more generally because as we have identified, access to health care is influenced by determinants outside of the health system
Operationalising the Theory of Social Quality: analysis of the reliability of an instrument to measure social quality
The Theory of Social Quality (TSQ) has not yet had extensive empirical testing due to the difficulty of developing a validated and reliable tool to âmeasureâ social quality. A
survey investigating social quality was piloted (n = 33) and analysed for test-retest and
inter-item reliability in Australia, August 2009. Questions were considered reliable if the
results from the test-retest analyses (Kappa, or Spearman Correlation tests) and the inter-item
reliability test (Cronbachâs α) were statistically significant (p †0.05) or the coefficients
were (â„ 0.70) for any of the questionnaire items. Two questions and 34 items were
removed from the survey. These preliminary data support the reliability and validity of the
survey as an instrument for measuring social quality. In addition, the tool provides a
means for operationalising the TSQ in future empirical research
Asynchronous Training of Word Embeddings for Large Text Corpora
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language and have been
widely popular in numerous tasks in information retrieval and text mining.
Training embeddings over huge corpora is computationally expensive because the
input is typically sequentially processed and parameters are synchronously
updated. Distributed architectures for asynchronous training that have been
proposed either focus on scaling vocabulary sizes and dimensionality or suffer
from expensive synchronization latencies.
In this paper, we propose a scalable approach to train word embeddings by
partitioning the input space instead in order to scale to massive text corpora
while not sacrificing the performance of the embeddings. Our training procedure
does not involve any parameter synchronization except a final sub-model merge
phase that typically executes in a few minutes. Our distributed training scales
seamlessly to large corpus sizes and we get comparable and sometimes even up to
45% performance improvement in a variety of NLP benchmarks using models trained
by our distributed procedure which requires of the time taken by the
baseline approach. Finally we also show that we are robust to missing words in
sub-models and are able to effectively reconstruct word representations.Comment: This paper contains 9 pages and has been accepted in the WSDM201
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