Join the animal health information specialists

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Reflections on supporting research and being a researcher

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A review of professionalism within LIS

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of professionalism within Library and Information Science (LIS) and in doing so draw comparisons with the education and medicine professions. Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides a review of the extant literature from the three professions and gives a brief review of the theoretical constructs of professional knowledge using the work of Eisner and Eraut to explore knowledge types. It then relates these definitions to knowledge use within LIS, education and medicine, before examining the roles that professional associations have on the knowledge development of a profession. It concludes with a reflection on the future of professionalism within LIS. Findings: The literature suggests a fragmented epistemological knowledge-base and threats to its practices from outside professions. It does, however, find opportunities to redefine its knowledge boundaries within the phronetic practices of LIS and in socio-cultural uses of knowledge. It finds strengths and weaknesses in professionalism within LIS and its practitioners. Originality/value: This review provides a contemporary update to several earlier, related, works and provides useful context to current efforts to professionalise LIS by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

Credit cycle and adverse selection effects in consumer credit markets -- evidence from the HELOC market

The authors empirically study how the underlying riskiness of the pool of home equity line of credit originations is affected over the credit cycle. Drawing from the largest existing database of U.S. home equity lines of credit, they use county-level aggregates of these loans to estimate panel regressions on the characteristics of the borrowers and their loans, and competing risk hazard regressions on the outcomes of the loans. The authors show that when the expected unemployment risk of households increases, riskier households tend to borrow more. As a consequence, the pool of households that borrow on home equity lines of credit worsens along both observable and unobservable dimensions. This is an interesting example of a type of dynamic adverse selection that can worsen the risk characteristics of new lending, and suggests another avenue by which the precautionary demand for liquidity may affect borrowing.Home equity loans ; Risk

Ethics and the Role of PKSB in Research

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Ethics and the Role of PKSB in Research

No abstract available

Discerning Empirical Relationships Between The Natural Environment and Prehistoric Site Location: An Example From the Watts Bar Reservoir, East Tennessee

The Watts Bar Reservoir study area is an artificially defined region of 13,815 hectares, demarcated by the resevoir boundary of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Following completion of the Watts Bar Dam in 1942, the reservoir impounded 95 river miles of the main Tennessee River, in addition to portions of the Clinch, Emory and Piney rivers, as well as several smaller tributaries. Since the mid-nineteenth century archaelolgical investigations have been conducted in the region. However, the sporadic nature of these research endeavors has created a somewhat fragmented picture of the regions prehistory. Following Smith\u27s (1978b) model of the linear bandinog of environmental zones adjacent to the course of meandering streams. this thesis addresses the site location in the reservoir. Specifically, the main river channels of the Tennessee and Clinch rivers were divided into one kilometer tracts in order to delineate the natural distribution of environmental variables. A comparison of tracts containing archaelolgical sites and those without sites was made using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit test. Although the use of random sampling methods to obtain negative information has been strongly advocated (i.e., Binford 1964;Thomas 1973; Kvamme 1985; Kellog 1987), I chose to use all the tracts to offset the biases in the archaeological record due to the sporadic nature of the region\u27s research. A separate and additional test was conducted for the delineation of patterns of natural shelter selection

Extending RSS to meet central bank needs.

The Federal Reserve wanted to use RSS to represent not only news, such as press releases, but also data, such as exchange rates. The Fed hoped to use one set of feeds to accommodate two different audiences for RSS; human readers (at one remove) and self-contained automated processes. While the different RSS specifications provide elements for traditional news items, they require extensions to handle data. Since central banks all tend to report the same sorts of information, the Fed joined with other central banks to create an extended specification that met their needs. This specification extends RSS 1.0, which is the more readily extended RSS specification. The extension uses elements from established metadata standards wherever it can, such as for language and audience, and adds elements when subjects are not found in those standards or are more particular to central banks, such as (monetary) currency. Although the central banks intend these new elements to be used primarily by machine processes, the element names have sufficient semantic transparency so that they can be understood by human readers

Stochastic MPC with Dynamic Feedback Gain Selection and Discounted Probabilistic Constraints

This paper considers linear discrete-time systems with additive disturbances, and designs a Model Predictive Control (MPC) law incorporating a dynamic feedback gain to minimise a quadratic cost function subject to a single chance constraint. The feedback gain is selected from a set of candidates generated by solutions of multiobjective optimisation problems solved by Dynamic Programming (DP). We provide two methods for gain selection based on minimising upper bounds on predicted costs. The chance constraint is defined as a discounted sum of violation probabilities on an infinite horizon. By penalising violation probabilities close to the initial time and ignoring violation probabilities in the far future, this form of constraint allows for an MPC law with guarantees of recursive feasibility without an assumption of boundedness of the disturbance. A computationally convenient MPC optimisation problem is formulated using Chebyshev's inequality and we introduce an online constraint-tightening technique to ensure recursive feasibility. The closed loop system is guaranteed to satisfy the chance constraint and a quadratic stability condition. With dynamic feedback gain selection, the conservativeness of Chebyshev's inequality is mitigated and closed loop cost is reduced with a larger set of feasible initial conditions. A numerical example is given to show these properties.Comment: 14 page