1,078 research outputs found
A Living Wage for All Manitobans?: Perspectives from the Private Sector
In response to the growing problem of working poverty around the world, a grassroots movement has emerged and spread internationally in the last two decades. This movement proposes the adoption of living wage policies and practice as part of a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy in the context of the neoliberal retrenchment of social safety nets. While successful at the local government level in the USA and the U. K., the movement has struggled to make inroads into the private sector, which is where the bulk of sub-living-wage jobs are situated. Using a qualitative methodology informed by critical theory, this study endeavours to uncover the underexplored perspective of private sector employers in a jurisdiction where living wage legislation is still absent. On the eve of the launch of Manitoba’s living wage campaign, it seeks to understand the perspectives of Manitoban employers in key industries with large numbers of sub-living wage workers. It contributes valuable insight into the factors that must be considered when attempting to engage the elusive private sector in voluntary adoption of living wage practices
An Ontology-Based Recommender System with an Application to the Star Trek Television Franchise
Collaborative filtering based recommender systems have proven to be extremely
successful in settings where user preference data on items is abundant.
However, collaborative filtering algorithms are hindered by their weakness
against the item cold-start problem and general lack of interpretability.
Ontology-based recommender systems exploit hierarchical organizations of users
and items to enhance browsing, recommendation, and profile construction. While
ontology-based approaches address the shortcomings of their collaborative
filtering counterparts, ontological organizations of items can be difficult to
obtain for items that mostly belong to the same category (e.g., television
series episodes). In this paper, we present an ontology-based recommender
system that integrates the knowledge represented in a large ontology of
literary themes to produce fiction content recommendations. The main novelty of
this work is an ontology-based method for computing similarities between items
and its integration with the classical Item-KNN (K-nearest neighbors)
algorithm. As a study case, we evaluated the proposed method against other
approaches by performing the classical rating prediction task on a collection
of Star Trek television series episodes in an item cold-start scenario. This
transverse evaluation provides insights into the utility of different
information resources and methods for the initial stages of recommender system
development. We found our proposed method to be a convenient alternative to
collaborative filtering approaches for collections of mostly similar items,
particularly when other content-based approaches are not applicable or
otherwise unavailable. Aside from the new methods, this paper contributes a
testbed for future research and an online framework to collaboratively extend
the ontology of literary themes to cover other narrative content.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, minor revision
A requirements framework for novice web developers
This paper introduces a requirements framework intended to guide novice web developers. The work is based on two earlier studies which found that the requirements phase is not well served in web development methods and that there is no agreed set of requirements from practitioners as to what they would like to see in a web development method. The requirements framework outlined here is developed by novice practitioners and later evaluated by them as flexible, simple and easy to use
Cardiorespiratory fitness, oxygen uptake efficency slope and endothelial function in male adolescents
Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is a independent risk factor for CVD and all-cause mortality. Maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max), is considered the gold standard measurement of CRF. Due to its effort dependency, a true plateau in VO2 during incremental exercise is often not attained, particularly in overweight and obese pediatric populations 1. The oxygen uptake efficiency slope (OUES) has been proposed as an objective and effort independent submaximal measure of cardiopulmonary reserve. Studies in healthy and obese children have reported a strong positive relation between OUES and VO2max. Children with high CRF have higher OUES values than those with low CRF 2. Furthermore, improvements in CRF following exercise training, are associated with restoration of endothelial function (EF) in obese children 3. The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between OUES, VO2max and EF in healthy male adolescents. ad
Fisher's exact test explains a popular metric in information retrieval
Term frequency-inverse document frequency, or tf-idf for short, is a
numerical measure that is widely used in information retrieval to quantify the
importance of a term of interest in one out of many documents. While tf-idf was
originally proposed as a heuristic, much work has been devoted over the years
to placing it on a solid theoretical foundation. Following in this tradition,
we here advance the first justification for tf-idf that is grounded in
statistical hypothesis testing. More precisely, we first show that the
one-tailed version of Fisher's exact test, also known as the hypergeometric
test, corresponds well with a common tf-idf variant on selected real-data
information retrieval tasks. We then set forth a mathematical argument that
suggests the tf-idf variant approximates the negative logarithm of the
one-tailed Fisher's exact test P-value (i.e., a hypergeometric distribution
tail probability). The Fisher's exact test interpretation of this common tf-idf
variant furnishes the working statistician with a ready explanation of tf-idf's
long-established effectiveness.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, 1 tables, minor revision
Opening Our Eyes : How film contributes to the culture of the UK
Opening our eyes looks at how films are consumed and the factors which affect people’s viewing choices. It also covers the relationships audiences report between film and other activities. It goes on to explore the sorts of effects which film has upon people, their sense of identity and relationship with the world. Finally it looks at the various effects which individual films have had on those surveyed and reaches a number of conclusions.Final Published versio
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