Millennial Generation and the Mobile Internet Devices in Shopping Activities

The Millennial Generation and the technology revolution using MID’s are changing business interactions with customers. Despite the fact Millennials are purchasing through MID’s and using these devices to support their purchasing decision, in Dominican Republic there is no available data to explain this consumer trend. The purpose of this study is to explore what Millennials value the most in the purchase process using MID’s. For this study a phenomenological interview approach, contrasting two main elements: “Social Management” and “Consumer Empowerment”, using the framework described in “The Meaning of Shopping Experiences Augmented by Mobile Internet Devices” from Brian Spaid and Daniel Flint, was used to collect data. An outcome of this study is the finding that the Millennial Generation spend time sharing and validating information as well as reading reviews through social networks in order to seek other’s opinions which in turn impacts on their purchase decision. Also seeking product information, comparing prices and having control of the purchase decision, make Millennials feel they can trust their shopping experience for value and smart shopping. This consumer trend in the Dominican Republic to use MID’s may change the way companies interact with customers requiring they adapt their businesses model to connect with consumer behaviors and buying patterns of Millennials

Climate risk and food availability in Guatemala

In this paper, we use a computable general equilibrium model to simulate the effects of drought and a decrease in agricultural productivity caused by climate change in Guatemala. A reduction in agricultural productivity would mean a considerable drop in crop and livestock production, and the resulting higher prices and lower household income would mean a significant reduction in the consumption of agricultural goods and food. The most negative effects of a drought would be concentrated in agriculture, given its intensive use of water. Because agricultural production is essential to ensuring food availability, these results suggest that Guatemala needs a proper water-distribution regulatory framework.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale

Predation on invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina) by native Australian rodents

© 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. The success of an invasive species can be reduced by biotic resistance from the native fauna. For example, an invader that is eaten by native predators is less likely to thrive than one that is invulnerable. The ability of invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina) to spread through Australia has been attributed to the toad’s potent defensive chemicals that can be fatal if ingested by native snakes, lizards, marsupials and crocodiles. However, several taxa of native insects and birds are resistant to cane toad toxins. If native rodents are also capable of eating toads (as suggested by anecdotal reports), these large, abundant and voracious predators might reduce toad numbers. Our field observations and laboratory trials confirm that native rodents (Melomys burtoni, Rattus colletti and Rattus tunneyi) readily kill and consume cane toads (especially small toads), and are not overtly affected by toad toxins. Captive rodents did not decrease their consumption of toads over successive trials, and ate toads even when alternative food types were available. In combination with anecdotal reports, our data suggest that rodents (both native and invasive) are predators of cane toads in Australia. Despite concerns about the decline of rodents following the invasion of toads, our data suggest that the species we studied are not threatened by toads as toxic prey, and no specific conservation actions are required to ensure their persistence

Detection of opinion spam with character n-grams

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18117-2_21In this paper we consider the detection of opinion spam as a stylistic classi cation task because, given a particular domain, the deceptive and truthful opinions are similar in content but di ffer in the way opinions are written (style). Particularly, we propose using character ngrams as features since they have shown to capture lexical content as well as stylistic information. We evaluated our approach on a standard corpus composed of 1600 hotel reviews, considering positive and negative reviews. We compared the results obtained with character n-grams against the ones with word n-grams. Moreover, we evaluated the e ffectiveness of character n-grams decreasing the training set size in order to simulate real training conditions. The results obtained show that character n-grams are good features for the detection of opinion spam; they seem to be able to capture better than word n-grams the content of deceptive opinions and the writing style of the deceiver. In particular, results show an improvement of 2:3% and 2:1% over the word-based representations in the detection of positive and negative deceptive opinions respectively. Furthermore, character n-grams allow to obtain a good performance also with a very small training corpus. Using only 25% of the training set, a Na ve Bayes classi er showed F1 values up to 0.80 for both opinion polarities.This work is the result of the collaboration in the frame-work of the WIQEI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP7 Marie Curie. The second author was partially supported by the LACCIR programme under project ID R1212LAC006. Accordingly, the work of the third author was in the framework the DIANA-APPLICATIONS-Finding Hidden Knowledge inTexts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) project, and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Hernández Fusilier, D.; Montes Gomez, M.; Rosso, P.; Guzmán Cabrera, R. (2015). Detection of opinion spam with character n-grams. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing: 16th International Conference, CICLing 2015, Cairo, Egypt, April 14-20, 2015, Proceedings, Part II. Springer International Publishing. 285-294. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18117-2_21S285294Blamey, B., Crick, T., Oatley, G.: RU:-) or:-(? character-vs. word-gram feature selection for sentiment classification of OSN corpora. Research and Development in Intelligent Systems XXIX, 207–212 (2012)Drucker, H., Wu, D., Vapnik, V.N.: Support Vector Machines for Spam Categorization. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 10(5), 1048–1054 (2002)Feng, S., Banerjee, R., Choi, Y.: Syntactic Stylometry for Deception Detection. Association for Computational Linguistics, short paper. ACL (2012)Feng, S., Xing, L., Gogar, A., Choi, Y.: Distributional Footprints of Deceptive Product Reviews. In: Proceedings of the 2012 International AAAI Conference on WebBlogs and Social Media (June 2012)Gyongyi, Z., Garcia-Molina, H., Pedersen, J.: Combating Web Spam with Trust Rank. In: Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, vol. 30, pp. 576–587. VLDB Endowment (2004)Hall, M., Eibe, F., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., Witten, I.: The WEKA Data Mining Software: an Update. SIGKDD Explor. Newsl. 10–18 (2009)Hernández-Fusilier, D., Guzmán-Cabrera, R., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Rosso, P.: Using PU-learning to Detect Deceptive Opinion Spam. In: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pp. 38–45 (2013)Hernández-Fusilier, D., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Rosso, P., Guzmán-Cabrera, R.: Detecting Positive and Negative Deceptive Opinions using PU-learning. Information Processing & Management (2014), doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2014.11.001Jindal, N., Liu, B.: Opinion Spam and Analysis. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining, pp. 219–230 (2008)Jindal, N., Liu, B., Lim, E.: Finding Unusual Review Patterns Using Unexpected Rules. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2010, pp. 210–220(October 2010)Kanaris, I., Kanaris, K., Houvardas, I., Stamatatos, E.: Word versus character n-grams for anti-spam filtering. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 16(6), 1047–1067 (2007)Lim, E.P., Nguyen, V.A., Jindal, N., Liu, B., Lauw, H.W.: Detecting Product Review Spammers Using Rating Behaviours. In: CIKM, pp. 939–948 (2010)Liu, B.: Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining. Synthesis Lecture on Human Language Technologies. Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2012)Mukherjee, A., Liu, B., Wang, J., Glance, N., Jindal, N.: Detecting Group Review Spam. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, pp. 93–94 (2011)Ntoulas, A., Najork, M., Manasse, M., Fetterly, D.: Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis. Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 83–92 (2006)Ott, M., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Hancock, J.T.: Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by any Stretch of the Imagination. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Portland, Oregon, USA, pp. 309–319 (2011)Ott, M., Cardie, C., Hancock, J.T.: Negative Deceptive Opinion Spam. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pp. 309–319 (2013)Raymond, Y.K., Lau, S.Y., Liao, R., Chi-Wai, K., Kaiquan, X., Yunqing, X., Yuefeng, L.: Text Mining and Probabilistic Modeling for Online Review Spam Detection. ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems 2(4), Article: 25, 1–30 (2011)Stamatatos, E.: On the robustness of authorship attribution based on character n-gram features. Journal of Law & Policy 21(2) (2013)Wu, G., Greene, D., Cunningham, P.: Merging Multiple Criteria to Identify Suspicious Reviews. In: RecSys 2010, pp. 241–244 (2010)Xie, S., Wang, G., Lin, S., Yu, P.S.: Review Spam Detection via Time Series Pattern Discovery. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, pp. 635–636 (2012)Zhou, L., Sh, Y., Zhang, D.: A Statistical Language Modeling Approach to Online Deception Detection. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 20(8), 1077–1081 (2008

Detecting Positive and Negative Deceptive Opinions using PU-learning

[EN] Nowadays a large number of opinion reviews are posted on the Web. Such reviews are a very important source of information for customers and companies. The former rely more than ever on online reviews to make their purchase decisions, and the latter to respond promptly to their clients’ expectations. Unfortunately, due to the business that is behind, there is an increasing number of deceptive opinions, that is, fictitious opinions that have been deliberately written to sound authentic, in order to deceive the consumers promoting a low quality product (positive deceptive opinions) or criticizing a potentially good quality one (negative deceptive opinions). In this paper we focus on the detection of both types of deceptive opinions, positive and negative. Due to the scarcity of examples of deceptive opinions, we propose to approach the problem of the detection of deceptive opinions employing PU-learning. PU-learning is a semi-supervised technique for building a binary classifier on the basis of positive (i.e., deceptive opinions) and unlabeled examples only. Concretely, we propose a novel method that with respect to its original version is much more conservative at the moment of selecting the negative examples (i.e., not deceptive opinions) from the unlabeled ones. The obtained results show that the proposed PU-learning method consistently outperformed the original PU-learning approach. In particular, results show an average improvement of 8.2% and 1.6% over the original approach in the detection of positive and negative deceptive opinions respectively. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work is the result of the collaboration in the framework of the WIQEI IRSES project (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie. The work of the third author was in the framework the DIANA-APPLICATIONS-Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) project, and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Hernández Fusilier, D.; Montes Gómez, M.; Rosso, P.; Guzmán Cabrera, R. (2015). Detecting Positive and Negative Deceptive Opinions using PU-learning. Information Processing and Management. 51(4):433-443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2014.11.001S43344351

Estilos de aprendizaje del alumnado de ingeniería: curso, rendimiento y género

Los Estilos de Aprendizaje son el conjunto de rasgos cognitivos, fisiológicos y afectivos indicadores de cómo el alumnado percibe, interacciona y responde a los diferentes ambientes del aprendizaje. Cada alumno/a tiene su propio estilo de aprendizaje de adquirir los conocimientos. Los estudiantes, además de utilizar sus habilidades cognitivas y meta cognitivas, han de saber también jerarquizar, organizar y priorizar su aprendizaje. Si bien el estudio de los Estilos de Aprendizaje es muy común en los niveles de educación obligatoria, son menos los trabajos realizados en la enseñanza superior. En el presente estudio se reconoce a los estilos de aprendizaje como recursos didácticos imprescindibles para orientar un aprendizaje significativo. El estudio se ha llevado a cabo con alumnos universitarios de ingeniería. Se emplea un diseño metodológico descriptivo, no experimental y de corte transversal realizado en la carrera Ingeniería Forestal de la Universidad de Pinar del Río (Cuba). Un total de 120 estudiantes universitarios participaron en este estudio (53.3% mujeres y 46.6 % hombres). Los participantes han realizado el Cuestionario Honey-Alonso de Estilos de Aprendizaje (CHAEA). Las respuestas permitieron determinar el perfil de estilos de aprendizaje del alumnado, siendo el estilo reflexivo el de mayor representatividad, seguido de los estilos teórico, activo y pragmático. No se detectaron diferencias estadísticamente significativas en los estilos de aprendizaje entre los años académicos para los varones, pero sí se detectaron para las mujeres. Se evidencia una evolución de los estilos reflexivo y teórico con el nivel de profesionalización de los alumnos en la medida que transitan por los cursos académicos, estando en correspondencia con los mejores rendimientos académicos alcanzados. El estudio evidenció se trata de un valioso recurso que enriquece la orientación de la enseñanza en función de la diversidad y la mejora de los aprendizajes. Se analizan sus efectos sobre la formación de los ingenieros y se discute las fortalezas y debilidades en el campo aplicado de la enseñanza superio

Cancer Mortality in Older Mexican Individuals (2000 – 2010)

Objective: Given the trends in aging worldwide, in Mexico, we determined trends in adjusted mortality rates due to cancer and 11 cancer subtypes in older individuals (>65 years) from 2000 to 2010. Methods: For this retrospective study, we collected data on mortality due to cancer from the registries of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. Adjusted rates were calculated with a direct method based on the world standard population. Trend analysis was performed with a linear regression of the natural logarithm of the adjusted rate, and trends were evaluated with the Student´s t test. Results: During the studied period, the cancer mortality rates significantly declined from 630.21 to 573.03 (per 100,000 inhabitants) in the overall population. Similar declines were observed in women (from 548.81 to 490.09) and men (from 726.03 to 672.94). Significant declines in mortality rates were observed across several cancer subtypes, including esophageal, gastric, colorectal-anal, liver-biliary, pancreatic, and tracheal-bronchial-lung cancers. Significant increases in mortality rates were observed in colorectal and breast cancer, but no changes were observed in mortality rates due to prostate, ovarian, bladder, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancers. Conclusion: Mortality due to cancer in older Mexicans was lower than that observed in developed countries, and it significantly declined over the study period. Men had higher mortality rates than women. The highest mortality rates were due to breast and prostate cancer subtypes in older individuals

Efectos de la implementación de un programa de balonmano playa para mejorar la condición física y la motivación hacia la práctica de este deporte

Actualmente uno de los principales problemas en los jóvenes, resulta ser la baja condición física y la falta de motivación de los estudiantes durante las clases de Educación Física. Por lo que el objetivo principal del presente estudio fue implementar un programa de balonmano playa para mejorar la condición física y la motivación a la práctica de este deporte de los estudiantes de primero de Bachillerato del Colegio Camilo Gallegos Domínguez. El estudio utilizado fue cuasiexperimental de tipo correlacional-causal, en el cual participaron 60 estudiantes de entre 15 -16 años de edad, conformándose dos grupos: el grupo de control (29 estudiantes) y; el grupo experimental (31 estudiantes). La condición física fue evaluada mediante la batería Eurofit; mientras que, la motivación fue evaluada mediante el Cuestionario de Motivación en la Educación Física (CMEF), el programa de intervención consistió llevar a cabo clases de Educación Física fundamentadas en la enseñanza de los aspectos básicos del balonmano playa a partir de actividades que trabajen las diferentes capacidades físicas. Los resultados demostraron que luego de la intervención 7 de las 8 pruebas de la batería Eurofit mejoraron significativamente en el grupo de intervención; mientras que, en cuanto a la motivación, los resultados evidenciaron que mejoraron notablemente en la motivación intrínseca y que existió una leve mejora en la motivación extrínseca. Se concluye que, aplicar el balonmano como un deporte alternativo durante las clases de Educación Física resulta ser bastante efectivo para mejorar la condición física y la motivación de los estudiantes de bachillerato.Currently, one of the main problems in young people is the low physical condition and lack of motivation of students during Physical Education classes. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to implement a beach handball program to improve the physical condition and the motivation to practice this sport of first year high school students of the Camilo Gallegos Domínguez School. The study used was a quasi-experimental study of correlational-causal type, in which 60 students between 15-16 years of age participated, forming two groups: the control group (29 students) and the experimental group (31 students). Physical condition was evaluated by means of the Eurofit battery, while motivation was evaluated by means of the Motivation Questionnaire in Physical Education (CMEF). The intervention program consisted of carrying out Physical Education classes based on the teaching of the basic aspects of beach handball through activities that work on the different physical capacities. The results showed that after the intervention, 7 of the 8 tests of the Eurofit battery improved significantly in the intervention group; while, in terms of motivation, the results showed that there was a significant improvement in intrinsic motivation and a slight improvement in extrinsic motivation. It is concluded that the application of handball as an alternative sport during Physical Education classes is quite effective in improving the physical condition and motivation of high school students.0000-0003-2128-876

Instituto de capacitación y exposición para la comprensión de la moda en Lima

Nuestro tema “Instituto de Capacitación y Exposición para la Comprensión de la Moda en Lima”, se inscribe en el sector educativo – cultural – productivo. El proyecto a desarrollar se ubicará en un amplio terreno que nos dará la facilidad de tener espacios bien diseñados donde se puedan desarrollar estos tipos de actividades. La búsqueda para nuestra investigación consiste en obtener todas las condicionantes requeridas para la creación de un objeto arquitectónico adecuado a las necesidades específicas de un instituto de este tipo. El “Instituto de Capacitación y Exposición para la Comprensión de la Moda en Lima”, tiene como fin la formación profesional del estudiante en el diseño de moda textil, con especialización en la alta costura y en la producción en masa. Además en la formación de técnicos profesionales especializados en el patronaje, la confección y métodos de difusión. Por la misma naturaleza de la formación académica, se generará una producción de vestuario considerable a lo largo de los periodos de estudio; dos colecciones anuales; que será destinada a una exposición, para luego buscar que sean adquiridas por empresarios y/o personas cercanas al rubro. Las vestimentas que no se logren vender en la exposición serán destinadas a la caridad.Tesi