Multidimensional poverty in the EU: rethinking AROPE through a multi-criteria analysis

At risk of poverty or social exclusion rate (AROPE) constitutes the pivotal indicator of living conditions and poverty in the European Union. Nevertheless, as a multidimensional poverty measure, it has some drawbacks that significantly reduce its utility. In this paper, we propose an alternative multi-criteria approach that provides some innovations for the computation of multidimensional poverty in the European countries. We first propose a normalization formula for each dimension by using a double point of reference. We then put forward alternative aggregation functions that permit diverse degrees of substitutability across dimensions. This new formulation allows us to go beyond focusing merely on the rate of people classified as AROPE, making it possible to evaluate aspects such as the intensity of multidimensional poverty and how changes over time are distributed across population in terms of shared prosperity, as showed in an illustration for the EU28 countries.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Geographies and cultures of international student experiences in higher education: Shared perspectives between students from different countries

Updated research is required on the geographies of the cultural issues that shape international students’ experiences. The growing number of students traveling to different countries implies a need to cater to cultures and values from different parts of the world. Apart from cultural and geographical aspects, there is scarce knowledge about similarities between students’ experiences abroad that takes into account their countries of origin (and, to some extent, their cultures) within those mobility flows. Using a probabilistic topic model on 59,662 international student reports from 167 countries on their mobility experiences, we examine links between the students’ experiences and their countries of origin. The results show that the geographical features of the reports are connected not only to cultural issues, but also to other factors that might affect their international experience

Chinese and Indian higher education students go abroad: listening to them to determine what their needs are

This paper voices the opinions of international students’ from China and India, and highlights the intentional process of integrating their perceptions of internationalization into a strategic service delivery plan. Data on those perceptions were analysed using a probabilistic model. We clustered 766 international students’ opinions into categories that enabled us to determine the main ideas that constituted their perceptions. The findings enabled us to draw comparisons between two major sending countries and to formulate a series of recommendations for stakeholders in higher education institutions that receive Chinese and Indian students, as well as for policymakers. Primary differences relate to factors such as learning and internship opportunities for Chinese students and service provision for Indian ones. In conclusion, this study offers the next step in the analysis of Chinese and Indian international students’ needs providing with an innovative way of determining students concerns with a view to empowering them within the internationalization process of higher education institution

Microblog retrieval challenges and opportunities

In recent years microblogging services have changed the way we communicate. Microblogs are a reduced version of web-blogs which are characterised by being just a few characters long. In the case of Twitter, messages known as \textit{tweets} are only 140 characters long, and are broadcasted from followees to followers organised as a social network. Microblogs such as tweets, are used to communicate up to the second information about any topic. Traffic updates, natural disaster reports, self-promotion, or product marketing are only a small portion of the type of information we can find across microblogging services. Most importantly, it has become a platform that has democratised the communication channels and empowered people into voicing their opinions. In fact, it is a very well known fact that the use Twitter amongst other social media services tilted the balance in favour of ex-president Obama when he was elected president of the USA in 2012. However, whilst the widespread use of microblogs has undoubtedly changed and shaped our current society, it is still very hard to effectively perform simple searches on such datasets due to the particular morphology of its documents. The limited character count and the ineffectiveness of state of the art retrieval models in producing relevant documents for queries, thus prompted TREC organisers to unite the research community into addressing these issues in 2011 during the first Microblog 2011 Track. This doctoral work is one of such efforts, and its focused on improving the access to microblog documents through ad-hoc searches. The first part of our work individually studies the behaviour of the state of the art retrieval models when utilised for microblog ad-hoc retrieval. First we contribute with the best configurations for each of the models studied. But more importantly, we discover how query term frequency and document length relates to the relevance of microblogs. As a result, we propose a microblog specific retrieval model, namely MBRM, which significantly outperforms the state of the art retrieval models described in this work. Furthermore we define an informativeness hypothesis in order to better understand the relevance of microblogs in terms of the presence of their inherent features or dimensions. We significantly improve the behaviour of a state of the art retrieval model by taking into consideration these dimensions as features into a linear combination re-ranking approach. Additionally we investigate the role that structure plays in determining the relevance of a microblog, by encoding the structure of relevant and non-relevant documents into two separate state machines. We then devise an approach to measure the similarity of an unobserved document towards each of these state machines, to then produce a score which is utilised for ranking. Our evaluation results demonstrate how the structure of microblogs plays a role in further differentiating relevant and non-relevant documents when ranking, by showing significantly improved results over a state of the art baseline. Subsequently we study the query performance prediction (QPP) task in terms of microblog ad-hoc retrieval. QPP represents the prediction of how well a query will be satisfied by a particular retrieval system. We study the performance of predictors in the context of microblogs and propose a number of microblog specific predictors. Finally our experimental evaluation demonstrates how our predictors outperform those in the literature in the microblog context. Finally, we address the ``vocabulary mismatch'' problem by studying the effect of utilising scores produced retrieval models as an ingredient in automatic query expansion (AQE) approaches based on pseudo relevance feedback . To this end we propose alternative approaches which do not rely directly on such scores and demonstrate higher stability when determining the most optimal terms for query expansion. In addition we propose an approach to estimate the quality of a term for query expansion. To this end we employ a classifier to determine whether a prospective query expansion term falls into a low, medium or high value category. The predictions performed by the classifier are then utilised to determine a boosting factor for such terms within an AQE approach. Then we conclude by proving that it is possible to predict the quality of terms by providing statistically enhanced results over an AQE baseline

Qualificação da Atenção à Saúde da Criança de Zero Até 72 Meses de Idade na Policlínica Dr. Alberto Lima, Santana/AP

A Saúde da Criança deve envolver aspectos relativos à qualificação do crescimento e do desenvolvimento, à atenção ao recém-nascido, à promoção, proteção e apoio ao aleitamento materno, prevenção de violências/acidentes e vigilância da mortalidade infantil. Dessa forma, é fundamental que seja uma ação programática que seja integral, humanizada, acolhedora e universal. Com base nessas considerações e associadas à análise situacional que mostrou essa necessidade, escolheu-se este foco de intervenção. Assim, a intervenção realizada na UBS/ESF Policlínica Dr. Alberto Lima, Santana / AP teve como objetivos ampliar a cobertura e a adesão; melhorar a qualidade dos serviços de saúde; melhorar o registro das informações; mapear as crianças de risco e promover a Saúde no programa. Assim, foram estabelecidos objetivos e indicadores a fim de avaliar a intervenção no período de três meses, empregando-se os instrumentos disponibilizados pelo curso, ficha espelho e planilha de coleta de dados. Antes da intervenção, os registros estavam defasados, mas, segundo a Vigitel, estimam-se 732 crianças de 0 a 72 meses residentes na área de abrangência. Como principais resultados se destacaram o cadastramento de 200 crianças (27, 3%), busca ativa de todas as crianças que faltaram em alguma consulta, avaliação do crescimento e do desenvolvimento, avaliação de risco, orientações aos pais/responsáveis sobre aleitamento materno e prevenção de acidentes na infância. Entretanto, as atividades da Saúde Bucal devem ser qualificadas, iniciando-se pela contratação de dentista que agregará à equipe. Assim, de acordo com os resultados, pode-se verificar que a intervenção foi um passo inicial para ampliar o cadastramento e o acompanhamento de crianças na unidade de saúde e para melhorar ainda mais o serviço de saúde, sendo necessário apoio entre os trabalhadores da UBS, a comunidade e a gestão para sua consolidação

OMeBa: Online Media Behaviour Analytics

OMeBa (Online Media Behaviour Analytics) was developed by CREATe to bring together the Online Copyright Infringement (OCI) Tracker surveys carried out by Kantar (until 2018) and AudienceNet (2019-) on behalf of Ofcom and the Intellectual Property Office. The surveys explore online behaviour, copyright infringement and digital consumption in relation to six main types of online content: music, film, TV programmes, books, video games and computer software. The surveys were originally developed as a response to the obligation on Ofcom in the Digital Economy Act 2010 to monitor copyright infringement

Madurez ciudadana. Requisito para la consolidación de una democracia ética

La ciudadanía, decían los filósofos griegos, es la condición por la que el hombre puede, en lugar de limitarse a vivir, aspirar a una vida buena. La teoría política enseña que los ciudadanos son importantes sencillamente porque son la esencia y existencia de todo Estado. Sin ciudadanos no hay Estado. ¿Cuál es la situación del ciudadano en la actualidad? ¿Cuál es su nivel de participación y compromiso con los fines del Estado? Ser ciudadano supone desarrollar el sentido de identidad y pertenencia en el lugar en el que se interactúa socialmente; implica desenvolverse con responsabilidad, lo cual nos conduce al meollo de la ciudadanía: la participación política. La participación ciudadana en política se asocia estrechamente al concepto de democracia, la cual se caracteriza por la necesidad de conciliar las exigencias de la participación con la gobernabilidad. Pero para lograr una actitud de compromiso y participación se requiere de una ciudadanía madura. En la antigüedad se decía que el “ciudadano virtuoso” era aquel ciudadano libre y bien formado, con capacidad crítica, que actuaba con ética y responsabilidad, participando en la decisión sobre los derroteros de su comunidad. Para volver a ese ciudadano virtuoso, libre y activo, que se evocaba en la antigüedad, es necesario desenmarañar el entramado actual y salir del laberinto creado por la sociedad de consumo. Indudablemente, es fundamental que cada individuo encuentre o recupere su libertad. Quienes participamos en la obra Madurez ciudadana y gobernanza para la consolidación de una democracia ética invitamos a la ciudadanía a caminar en ese sentido

Prior Design for Dependent Dirichlet Processes: An Application to Marathon Modeling

This paper presents a novel application of Bayesian nonparametrics (BNP) for marathon data modeling. We make use of two well-known BNP priors, the single-p dependent Dirichlet process and the hierarchical Dirichlet process, in order to address two different problems. First, we study the impact of age, gender and environment on the runners’ performance. We derive a fair grading method that allows direct comparison of runners regardless of their age and gender. Unlike current grading systems, our approach is based not only on top world records, but on the performances of all runners. The presented methodology for comparison of densities can be adopted in many other applications straightforwardly, providing an interesting perspective to build dependent Dirichlet processes. Second, we analyze the running patterns of the marathoners in time, obtaining information that can be valuable for training purposes. We also show that these running patterns can be used to predict finishing time given intermediate interval measurements. We apply our models to New York City, Boston and London marathons

Programming temporal morphing of self-actuated shells

Advances in shape-morphing materials, such as hydrogels, shape-memory polymers and light-responsive polymers have enabled prescribing self-directed deformations of initially flat geometries. However, most proposed solutions evolve towards a target geometry without considering time-dependent actuation paths. To achieve more complex geometries and avoid self-collisions, it is critical to encode a spatial and temporal shape evolution within the initially flat shell. Recent realizations of time-dependent morphing are limited to the actuation of few, discrete hinges and cannot form doubly curved surfaces. Here, we demonstrate a method for encoding temporal shape evolution in architected shells that assume complex shapes and doubly curved geometries. The shells are non-periodic tessellations of pre-stressed contractile unit cells that soften in water at rates prescribed locally by mesostructure geometry. The ensuing midplane contraction is coupled to the formation of encoded curvatures. We propose an inverse design tool based on a data-driven model for unit cells’ temporal responses