Impact of question-answering tasks on search processes and reading comprehension

This study examined the effect of (a) high- and low-level questions and (b) reading the text before the questions asked on performance, delayed text recall, and deep text comprehension, as well as on specific text-inspection patterns. Participants were 37 undergraduate students who answered either high- or low-level questions using the software Read&Answer to read and answer questions on the computer screen. Additionally, half of the sample read first a text and then answered the questions (reading-first condition), whereas the other half answered the questions without having read the text in advance (no-reading-first condition). All participants had the text available to search for the answer. Results indicated that high-level questions facilitated deep comprehension but not immediate performance or delayed recall of text, independently of the reading condition, and that high- and low-level questions differentially affected text-inspection patterns.     

Framing Refuge: Media,Framing, and Sanctuary Cities

The refugee sanctuary movement in the United States has shifted to include undocumented immigrants fleeing violence and economic strife. Given the negative tenor of coverage of undocumented immigration, and ties between framing and policy views on immigration, how the media frames sanctuary cities is likely to impact public perceptions of these cities and their policies. To assess media coverage of sanctuary policies, we analyzed articles from five national newspapers from 1980 to 2017 with both human content analysis and dictionary-based computational analysis. We find that framing around religion/morality and conflict has decreased, while stories focusing on crime and partisanship have increased. We discuss implications for public opinion and the likelihood that the American public will take their cues from media framing and elite discourse when it comes to sanctuary policies.     

Global exact tracking for uncertain MIMO linear systems by output feedback sliding mode control

This paper presents a solution to the problem of global exact output tracking for uncertain MIMO (multiple-input–multiple-output) linear plants with non-uniform arbitrary relative degree using output feedback sliding mode control. The key idea to overcome the relative degree obstacle is to generalize our previous hybrid estimation scheme to a multivariable version by combining, through switching, a standard linear lead filter with a non-linear one based on robust exact differentiators, achieving uniform global exponential practical stability and exact tracking.     

Advances in the identification and measurement of Intellectual Capital and future developments in the Intellectual Capital research agenda: experience of the Intellectus Model and proposal of a synthetic index

Knowledge Management Research & Practice - Nowadays knowledge has become a key asset for firms in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage. The environment changes quickly and...     

Reducing Children's Implicit Racial Bias Through Exposure to Positive Out‐Group Exemplars

Studies with adults suggest that implicit preferences favoring White versus Black individuals can be reduced through exposure to positive Black exemplars. However, it remains unclear whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for these biases to be changed. This study included 369 children and examined whether their implicit racial bias would be reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars. Results showed that children's implicit pro‐White bias was reduced following exposure to positive Black exemplars, but only for older children (M_age = ~10 years). Younger children's (M_age = ~7 years) implicit bias was not affected by this intervention. These results suggest developmental differences in the malleability of implicit racial biases and point to possible age differences in intervention effectiveness.     

A small-gain theorem with applications to input/output systems, incremental stability, detectability, and interconnections

A general input-to-state stability (ISS)-type small-gain result is presented. It specializes to a small-gain theorem for ISS operators, and it also recovers the classical statement for ISS systems in state-space form. In addition, we highlight applications to incrementally stable systems, detectable systems, and to interconnections of stable systems.     

An unsupervised heuristic-based approach for bibliographic metadata deduplication

Digital libraries of scientific articles contain collections of digital objects that are usually described by bibliographic metadata records. These records can be acquired from different sources and be represented using several metadata standards. These metadata standards may be heterogeneous in both, content and structure. All of this implies that many records may be duplicated in the repository, thus affecting the quality of services, such as searching and browsing. In this article we present an approach that identifies duplicated bibliographic metadata records in an efficient and effective way. We propose similarity functions especially designed for the digital library domain and experimentally evaluate them. Our results show that the proposed functions improve the quality of metadata deduplication up to 188% compared to four different baselines. We also show that our approach achieves statistical equivalent results when compared to a state-of-the-art method for replica identification based on genetic programming, without the burden and cost of any training process.     

The rating of perceived exertion predicts intermittent vertical jump demand and performance

The aims of this study were (a) to assess the ability of the rating of perceived exertion (RPE) to predict performance (i.e. number of vertical jumps performed to a fixed jump height) of an intermittent vertical jump exercise, and (b) to determine the ability of RPE to describe the physiological demand of such exercise. Eight healthy men performed intermittent vertical jumps with rest periods of 4, 5, and 6 s until fatigue. Heart rate and RPE were recorded every five jumps throughout the sessions. The number of vertical jumps performed was also recorded. Random coefficient growth curve analysis identified relationships between the number of vertical jumps and both RPE and heart rate for which there were similar slopes. In addition, there were no differences between individual slopes and the mean slope for either RPE or heart rate. Moreover, RPE and number of jumps were highly correlated throughout all sessions (r = 0.97-0.99; P < 0.001), as were RPE and heart rate (r = 0.93-0.97; P < 0.001). The findings suggest that RPE can both predict the performance of intermittent vertical jump exercise and describe the physiological demands of such exercise.     

Effect of positioning on the accuracy of decision making of association football top-class referees and assistant referees during competitive matches

Abstract The aim of this study was to examine the effect of positioning on the correctness of decision making of top-class referees and assistant referees during international games. Match analyses were carried out during the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Confederations Cup 2009 and 380 foul play incidents and 165 offside situations were examined. The error percentage for the referees when indicating the incidents averaged 14%. The lowest error percentage occurred in the central area of the field, where the collaboration of the assistant referee is limited, and was achieved when indicating the incidents from a distance of 11-15?m, whereas this percentage peaked (23%) in the last 15-min match period. The error rate for the assistant referees was 13%. Distance of the assistant referee to the offside line did not have an impact on the quality of the offside decision. The risk of making incorrect decisions was reduced when the assistant referees viewed the offside situations from an angle between 46 and 60°. Incorrect offside decisions occurred twice as often in the second as in the first half of the games. Perceptual-cognitive training sessions specific to the requirements of the game should be implemented in the weekly schedule of football officials to reduce the overall error rate.