Student interactions in online discussion forums: their perception on learning with business simulation games

Digital technology offers new teaching methods with controversial results over learning. They allow students to develop a more active participation in their learning process although it does not always drive to unequivocal better learning outcomes. This study aims to offer additional evidence on the contribution of business simulation games to students' learning outcomes, considering student interactions in online discussion forums. We conducted a qualitative research with the online discussion forums of 5 different courses at bachelor and master levels, which involves 41 students' teams. The final sample was composed of 3681 messages posted by the students. The results reveal that some generic and specific managerial skills exert a positive influence on learning outcomes. Students mostly highlighted teamwork, decision-making, information processing, reaching agreements, and dealing with uncertainty as the most relevant contributions of the game towards their learning. These results have instructional and pedagogical implications for determining the best way to enhance students' motivation and learning outcomes when using digital technology methods, which involves recommendations that affect their design and monitoring

International Transmission of Medium-Term Technology Cycles: Evidence from Spain as a Recipient Country

This paper documents stylized facts of international medium-term business cycles by exploring the pattern of comovement between a catching-up economy, Spain, and each of the obvious candidate countries to technological leadership of the 1950-2007 period, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. A remarkable feature of the international medium-term business cycle is the strong, positive lead displayed by the U.S. technology and terms of trade cycles over Spain's macroeconomic aggregates. The corresponding evidence when the counterpart to Spain is a large European economy is weaker, particularly in the case of Europe's medium-term technology cycles. Non-parametric tests results suggest that, over the medium-term cycle, a shift towards more economic integration may not necessarily be associated with increased international comovement.Medium-term business cycles; Stylized facts; International comovement; Technology diffusion.

Generalizing the Convex Hull of a Sample: The R Package alphahull

This paper presents the R package alphahull which implements the ñ-convex hull and the ñ-shape of a finite set of points in the plane. These geometric structures provide an informative overview of the shape and properties of the point set. Unlike the convex hull, the ñ-convex hull and the ñ-shape are able to reconstruct non-convex sets. This flexibility make them specially useful in set estimation. Since the implementation is based on the intimate relation of theses constructs with Delaunay triangulations, the R package alphahull also includes functions to compute Voronoi and Delaunay tesselations. The usefulness of the package is illustrated with two small simulation studies on boundary length estimation.

Putting health in all policies: The National Institute for Welfare Enhancement

Welfare is a rather vague term whose meaning depends on ideology, values and judgments. Material resources are just means to enhance people’s well-being, but growth of the Gross Domestic Production is still the standard measure of the success of a society. Fortunately, recent advances in measuring social performance include health, education and other social outcomes. Because “what we measure affects what we do” it is hoped that social policies will change. The movement Health in all policies and its associated Health Impact Assessment methodology will contribute to it. The task consists of designing transversal policies that consider health and other welfare goals, the short term and long-term implications and intergenerational redistributions of resources. As long as marginal productivity on health outside the healthcare system is higher than inside it, efficiency needs cross-sectoral policies. And fairness needs them even more, because in order to reduce social inequalities in health, a wide social and political response is needed. Unless we reduce the well-documented inefficiencies in our current health care systems the welfare states will fail to consolidate and the overall economic wellbeing could be in serious trouble. In this article we sketched some policy solutions such as pricing according to net benefits of innovation and public encouragement of radical innovation besides the small type incremental and market-led innovation. We proposed an independent agency, the National Institute for Welfare Enhancement to guarantee long term fair and efficient social policies in which health plays a central role.Public health policies; Health Impact Assessment; Welfare; Health in All Policies.

Application of Species Distribution Modeling for Avian Influenza surveillance in the United States considering the North America Migratory Flyways.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) has recently (2014-2015) re-emerged in the United States (US) causing the largest outbreak in US history with 232 outbreaks and an estimated economic impact of $950 million. This study proposes to use suitability maps for Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza (LPAI) to identify areas at high risk for HPAI outbreaks. LPAI suitability maps were based on wild bird demographics, LPAI surveillance, and poultry density in combination with environmental, climatic, and socio-economic risk factors. Species distribution modeling was used to produce high-resolution (cell size: 500m x 500m) maps for Avian Influenza (AI) suitability in each of the four North American migratory flyways (NAMF). Results reveal that AI suitability is heterogeneously distributed throughout the US with higher suitability in specific zones of the Midwest and coastal areas. The resultant suitability maps adequately predicted most of the HPAI outbreak areas during the 2014-2015 epidemic in the US (i.e. 89% of HPAI outbreaks were located in areas identified as highly suitable for LPAI). Results are potentially useful for poultry producers and stakeholders in designing risk-based surveillance, outreach and intervention strategies to better prevent and control future HPAI outbreaks in the US

Feature Selection for Big Visual Data: Overview and Challenges

International Conference Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2018, Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal

the use of global and contextual information by individuals with autism

The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether individuals with autism lack a natural drive towards central coherence as predicted by weak central coherence theory (Frith, 1989). To investigate the nature of this difficulty, two main areas of proposed impairment, context (Experiments 1-9) and global processing (Experiment 10), were separated out. In Experiments 1-3 a method was developed to test the ability to use context information in the visual and verbal domains. Results showed that the performance of individuals with autism was facilitated by the provision of visual and verbal context information. Experiment 4 showed that the same children were able to use semantic category information to aid recall. However in Experiment 5 the same individuals had difficulties with a sentence processing task when using sentence context to disambiguate homographs. Experiments 6-9 examined two possible alternative explanations for the difficulties in Experiment 5. The results of these experiments indicated that the difficulties in Experiment 5 were not due to a failure is using context when targets are embedded in the context (Experiment 6). It remains to be tested whether the difficulties are related to the processing of ambiguous information as Experiments 8-9 failed to develop a method to examine this possibility. Having established that the impairment in using context was highly specific to the use of sentence context to disambiguate homographs, Experiment 10 moved away from examining context to study a different measure of central coherence, global processing by use of a face recognition task. The results of this study have confirmed that there is a deficit in the ability to process global information in autism. However further confirmation of a global impairment will be needed by use of non-facial tasks. In summary, the findings fail to support the claim of a general impairment in autism regarding central coherence

Modeling the live-pig trade network in Georgia: Implications for disease prevention and control.

Live pig trade patterns, drivers and characteristics, particularly in backyard predominant systems, remain largely unexplored despite their important contribution to the spread of infectious diseases in the swine industry. A better understanding of the pig trade dynamics can inform the implementation of risk-based and more cost-effective prevention and control programs for swine diseases. In this study, a semi-structured questionnaire elaborated by FAO and implemented to 487 farmers was used to collect data regarding basic characteristics about pig demographics and live-pig trade among villages in the country of Georgia, where very scarce information is available. Social network analysis and exponential random graph models were used to better understand the structure, contact patterns and main drivers for pig trade in the country. Results indicate relatively infrequent (a total of 599 shipments in one year) and geographically localized (median Euclidean distance between shipments = 6.08 km; IQR = 0-13.88 km) pig movements in the studied regions. The main factors contributing to live-pig trade movements among villages were being from the same region (i.e., local trade), usage of a middleman or a live animal market to trade live pigs by at least one farmer in the village, and having a large number of pig farmers in the village. The identified villages' characteristics and structural network properties could be used to inform the design of more cost-effective surveillance systems in a country which pig industry was recently devastated by African swine fever epidemics and where backyard production systems are predominant