1,689 research outputs found
What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world?
Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises
around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these
programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the goal of
synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the
areas in which more work is needed. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the length,
content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated. Many evaluations suffer
from low statistical power, measure impacts only within a year of training, and experience problems
with survey attrition and measurement of firm profits and revenues. Over these short time horizons,
there are relatively modest impacts of training on survivorship of existing firms, but stronger evidence
that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. Most studies find
that existing firm owners implement some of the practices taught in training, but the magnitudes of
these improvements in practices are often relatively modest. Few studies find significant impacts on
profits or sales, although a couple of the studies with more statistical power have done so. Some studies
have also found benefits to microfinance organizations of offering training. To date there is little
evidence to help guide policymakers as to whether any impacts found come from trained firms
competing away sales from other businesses versus through productivity improvements, and little
evidence to guide the development of the provision of training at market prices. We conclude by
summarizing some directions and key questions for future studies
Introduction
Husserlâs philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science
The Query Complexity of Mastermind with l_p Distances
Consider a variant of the Mastermind game in which queries are l_p distances, rather than the usual Hamming distance. That is, a codemaker chooses a hidden vector y in {-k,-k+1,...,k-1,k}^n and answers to queries of the form ||y-x||_p where x in {-k,-k+1,...,k-1,k}^n. The goal is to minimize the number of queries made in order to correctly guess y.
In this work, we show an upper bound of O(min{n,(n log k)/(log n)}) queries for any real 10. Thus, essentially any approximation of this problem is as hard as finding the hidden vector exactly, up to constant factors. Finally, we show that for the noisy version of the problem, i.e., the setting when the codemaker answers queries with any q = (1 +/- epsilon)||y-x||_p, there is no query efficient algorithm
Towards Optimal Moment Estimation in Streaming and Distributed Models
One of the oldest problems in the data stream model is to approximate the p-th moment ||X||_p^p = sum_{i=1}^n X_i^p of an underlying non-negative vector X in R^n, which is presented as a sequence of poly(n) updates to its coordinates. Of particular interest is when p in (0,2]. Although a tight space bound of Theta(epsilon^-2 log n) bits is known for this problem when both positive and negative updates are allowed, surprisingly there is still a gap in the space complexity of this problem when all updates are positive. Specifically, the upper bound is O(epsilon^-2 log n) bits, while the lower bound is only Omega(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits. Recently, an upper bound of O~(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits was obtained under the assumption that the updates arrive in a random order.
We show that for p in (0, 1], the random order assumption is not needed. Namely, we give an upper bound for worst-case streams of O~(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits for estimating |X |_p^p. Our techniques also give new upper bounds for estimating the empirical entropy in a stream. On the other hand, we show that for p in (1,2], in the natural coordinator and blackboard distributed communication topologies, there is an O~(epsilon^-2) bit max-communication upper bound based on a randomized rounding scheme. Our protocols also give rise to protocols for heavy hitters and approximate matrix product. We generalize our results to arbitrary communication topologies G, obtaining an O~(epsilon^2 log d) max-communication upper bound, where d is the diameter of G. Interestingly, our upper bound rules out natural communication complexity-based approaches for proving an Omega(epsilon^-2 log n) bit lower bound for p in (1,2] for streaming algorithms. In particular, any such lower bound must come from a topology with large diameter
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