International handbook of teacher education

This chapter sets out to provide an overview of various aspects of Malta’s social, cultural and economic characteristics, focusing in particular on the role played by education in forging the island’s fortunes and identity, and specifically on the initial preparation of teachers in the light of reforms to educational provision aimed towards the country’s aspiration that ‘all children may succeed’ (Ministry of Education, Youth and Employment, 2005).peer-reviewe

Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 tests costs and reimbursement tariffs readjustments during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While laboratories have been facing limited supplies of reagents for diagnostic tests throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, national and international health plans, as well as billing costs, have been constantly adjusted in order to optimize the use of resources. We aimed to assess the impact of SARS-CoV-2 test costs and reimbursement tariff adjustments on diagnostic strategies in Switzerland to determine the advantages and disadvantages of different costs and resource saving plans. We specifically assessed the cost of diagnostic SARS-COV-2 RT-PCR using five different approaches: i) in-house platform, ii) cobas 6800® (Roche, Basel, Switzerland), iii) GeneXpert® SARS-CoV-2 test (Cepheid, Sunnyvale, CA, USA), iv) VIASURE SARS-CoV-2 (N1 + N2) Real-Time PCR Detection Kit for BD MAX™ (Becton Dickinson, Franklin Lake, NJ, USA), v) cobas® Liat® SARS-CoV-2 & Influenza A/B (Roche, Basel, Switzerland). We compared these costs to the evolution of the reimbursement tariffs. The cost of a single RT-PCR test varied greatly (as did the volume of tests performed), ranging from as high as 180 CHF per test at the beginning of the pandemic (February to April 2020) to as low as 82 CHF per test at the end of 2020. Depending on the time period within the pandemic, higher costs did not necessarily mean greater benefits for the laboratories. The costs of molecular reagents for rapid tests were higher than of those for classic RT-PCR platforms, but the rapid tests had reduced turnaround times (TATs), thus improving patient care and enabling more efficient implementation of isolation measures, as well as reducing the burden of possible nosocomial infections. At the same time, there were periods when the production or distribution of these reagents was insufficient, and only the use of several different molecular platforms allowed us to sustain the high number of tests requested. Cost-saving plans need to be thoroughly assessed and constantly adjusted according to the epidemiological situation, the clinical context and the national resources in order to always guarantee that the highest performing diagnostic solutions are available. Not all cost-saving strategies guarantee good analytical performance

Modern slavery in business: The sad and sorry state of a non-field

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research

The development of EPSAS: contributions from the literature

EPSAS are being considered in the EU context where a need for harmonisation in Governmental Accounting (GA) has been recognised as important to increase the reliability of sources of information to the National Accounts (NA) figures. However, GA and NA are two different and parallel reporting systems at national level, even if, within the European context, EPSAS intend to contribute for their convergence. The relationship between GA and NA has been recurrently addressed in the literature over the last two decades, with professionals being more proactive while academics have been more reactive in the debate. Several issues have been raised. This paper recaptures and revises these issues, synthesising academic and practitioner literature, archival documents and reports of EU working groups, from 1996 to 2018. The analysis highlights the more controversial areas, and those that seemed already settled but yet are now, within the context of EPSAS development, being raised again. Specifically, the paper calls attention to (1) the need to manage between two different conceptual frameworks of GA and NA; (2) the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between the professionals involved, namely accountants, public administrators and statisticians; (3) the role of budgetary accounting and the alignment required between reporting in GA and NA, reducing and harmonising adjustments to be made when translating data from one into the other; and (4) the need to address auditing issues, as EPSAS on their own may not be enough to ensure reliability of the information reported.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

X'inhija l-poeżija?

L-awtur jistħarreġ dwar id-definizzjoni tal-poeżija kif inhi espress minn diversi studjużi u poeti ta’ qabilna.peer-reviewe

Conic Multi-Task Classification

Traditionally, Multi-task Learning (MTL) models optimize the average of task-related objective functions, which is an intuitive approach and which we will be referring to as Average MTL. However, a more general framework, referred to as Conic MTL, can be formulated by considering conic combinations of the objective functions instead; in this framework, Average MTL arises as a special case, when all combination coefficients equal 1. Although the advantage of Conic MTL over Average MTL has been shown experimentally in previous works, no theoretical justification has been provided to date. In this paper, we derive a generalization bound for the Conic MTL method, and demonstrate that the tightest bound is not necessarily achieved, when all combination coefficients equal 1; hence, Average MTL may not always be the optimal choice, and it is important to consider Conic MTL. As a byproduct of the generalization bound, it also theoretically explains the good experimental results of previous relevant works. Finally, we propose a new Conic MTL model, whose conic combination coefficients minimize the generalization bound, instead of choosing them heuristically as has been done in previous methods. The rationale and advantage of our model is demonstrated and verified via a series of experiments by comparing with several other methods.Comment: Accepted by European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD)-201