Education level and disability type as causes for the discernible wage divergence for people with disabilities

In Cyprus, disabled people face many difficulties in accessing employment, as more than 10,000 people with appropriate qualifications remain unemployed. According to worldwide estimates, disabled people receive lower wages compared to individuals without disabilities due to being either unemployed or underemployed more frequently. Using other countries with similar cultural and legal environments, this study examined the correlation between disabled people's wage levels and their disability types and educational levels. In order to gather primary data used for this correlational and regression study, 117 online questionnaire responses were collected from 6,000 registered members with physical disabilities in related organizations in Cyprus. The study examined the effect of education and disability type, on wages for disabled individuals in Cyprus using a cross-sectional survey utilizing judgment sampling (purposive sampling), in order to identify possible relationships between them, and hence see if education and disability cause a lower wage. According to the results, the two variables are not significantly associated with disability wages in Cyprus. These coefficients differ, however, between the variables 'education' and 'type of disability,' showing that in Cyprus education predicts the wage levels for disabled workers, as it is for other groups

Ellogon: A New Text Engineering Platform

This paper presents Ellogon, a multi-lingual, cross-platform, general-purpose text engineering environment. Ellogon was designed in order to aid both researchers in natural language processing, as well as companies that produce language engineering systems for the end-user. Ellogon provides a powerful TIPSTER-based infrastructure for managing, storing and exchanging textual data, embedding and managing text processing components as well as visualising textual data and their associated linguistic information. Among its key features are full Unicode support, an extensive multi-lingual graphical user interface, its modular architecture and the reduced hardware requirements.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures. Will be presented to the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - LREC 200

Employees Perception on Performance Appraisal Effectiveness in The Cyprus Public Sector (EAC)

Performance appraisals are important for effective evaluation and management of personnel. This research investigates the Electricity Authority of Cyprus’ employees’ perceptions of performance appraisal. Data were collected from 161 employees of the Organization, using an online semi-structured questionnaire, and analyzed using SPSS; the qualitative data were analyzed manually. The results of the study highlighted respondents’ perceptions with regard to the Organization’s performance management practices, which have a created a culture of mistrust towards the performance management system in use. The Organization’s present performance appraisal system seems to posit more shortcomings than strengths and it doesn’t seem to be integrated or linked with the organizational goals and missions of the Authority’s. The research has delivered some information on what needs to be changed in order to improve the current system. The findings have serious managerial implications for redesigning the performance appraisal system so as to be more effective, more credible and more transparent. These implications include actions towards introducing new methods, training the appraisers, increasing motivation and provision of resources for effective performance appraisal

Switching between forest and trees: Opposite relationship of progesterone and testosterone to global–local processing

AbstractSex differences in attentional selection of global and local components of stimuli have been hypothesized to underlie sex differences in cognitive strategy choice. A Navon figure paradigm was employed in 32 men, 41 naturally cycling women (22 follicular, 19 luteal) and 19 users of oral contraceptives (OCs) containing first to third generation progestins in their active pill phase. Participants were first asked to detect targets at any level (divided attention) and then at either the global or the local level only (focused attention). In the focused attention condition, luteal women showed reduced global advantage (i.e. faster responses to global vs. local targets) compared to men, follicular women and OC users. Accordingly, global advantage during the focused attention condition related significantly positively to testosterone levels and significantly negatively to progesterone, but not estradiol levels in a multiple regression model including all naturally cycling women and men. Interference (i.e. delayed rejection of stimuli displaying targets at the non-attended level) was significantly enhanced in OC users as compared to naturally cycling women and related positively to testosterone levels in all naturally cycling women and men. Remarkably, when analyzed separately for each group, the relationship of testosterone to global advantage and interference was reversed in women during their luteal phase as opposed to men and women during their follicular phase. As global processing is lateralized to the right and local processing to the left hemisphere, we speculate that these effects stem from a testosterone-mediated enhancement of right-hemisphere functioning as well as progesterone-mediated inter-hemispheric decoupling

unsupervised detection of argumentative units though topic modeling techniques

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