Evaluating the impact of the Erasmus programme: skills and European identity

The primary purpose of this study lies in the evaluation of what students acquire from studies abroad in the context of credit mobility, in terms of competence development and personal growth, compared with that gained by students completing their study or internship in their home country. A pre-post test design, with both an experimental group and a control group, was employed for students participating in the Erasmus programme and those continuing their regular course of study at their home university. The findings obtained suggest that study abroad programmes have a positive impact on the perception of university students. The highest values among Erasmus students in terms of outcomes were attributed to cultural enhancement, personal development and foreign language proficiency. Study abroad has, furthermore, a Europeanising impact inasmuch as it affects the self-identity of students.     

Inter-letter spacing,inter-word spacing,and font with dyslexia-friendly features: testing text readability in people with and without dyslexia

Over the last years, several studies have suggested a possible link between dyslexia and deficits in low-level visual processing (e.g., excessive crowding). At the same time, specially designed “dyslexia-friendly” fonts appeared on the market. This class of fonts presents two main features: the particular graphic characteristics of the letterform designed to avoid confusion between similarly shaped letters, and wider inter-letter and inter-word spacing to limit crowding. The literature testing the efficacy of “dyslexia-friendly” fonts in improving reading accuracy and increasing reading speed is controversial. We evaluated the impact of letterform (with vs. without dyslexia-friendly graphic features), inter-letter spacing (standard vs. increased), and inter-word spacing (standard vs. increased) on reading accuracy and speed. Two groups of 64 children each, with and without dyslexia, read aloud 8 equivalent texts. The data collected failed to show any effect from the letterform. As regards spacing, the data showed that reading speed is impaired by an increase in inter-letter spacing not combined with an adequate increase in inter-word spacing.     

Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets

Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we describe a new Twitter entity disambiguation dataset, and conduct an empirical analysis of named entity recognition and disambiguation, investigating how robust a number of state-of-the-art systems are on such noisy texts, what the main sources of error are, and which problems should be further investigated to improve the state of the art.     

Critical review of the TEMAS: A step within the development of thematic apperception instruments

The TEMAS (acronym for Tell‐Me‐a‐Story)—an objectively scored, projective thematic personality instrument for children and adolescents—is analyzed, reviewed, and critiqued with regard to theoretical underpinnings and rationale for development, administration, scoring, psychometric properties, and research to date. The TEMAS appears to be an improvement over existing projective personality measures used by school psychologists. Although it requires more training than other projective techniques, competency in administration, scoring, and interpretation can be achieved within a one semester course in personality assessment. The test has evidence of reliability and validity, and it is a multicultural alternative to the TAT and other thematic apperception instruments. The use of the TEMAS by psychologists may achieve more accurate assessment of Black and Hispanic children. Limitations include geographically limited standardization samples and little research conducted by individuals other than the authors. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The CIGR project for the harmonization of Agricultural Engineering University Curricula

Abstract

A project for the harmonization of Agricultural Engineering University Curricula was started in 1989 at European level. This project led to two seminars (in 1991 and 1992) and to a survey of current University organization and Curricula of Agricultural Engineering in 25 Countries. The harmonization project is still under way and has achieved world-wide interest. In this paper the main results already obtained, together with possible future developments, are presented.     

Exploring Kid Space in the wild: a preliminary study of multimodal and immersive collaborative play-based learning experiences

Educational technology research and development - Parents recognize the potential benefits of technology for their young children but are wary of too much screen time and its potential deficits in...     

Could light meal jeopardize laboratory coagulation tests?

Background:

Presently the necessity of fasting time for coagulation tests is not standardized. Our hypothesis is that this can harm patient safety. This study is aimed at evaluating whether a light meal (i.e. breakfast) can jeopardize laboratory coagulation tests.

Materials and methods:

A blood sample was firstly collected from 17 fasting volunteers (12 h). Immediately after blood collection, the volunteers consumed a light meal. Then samples were collected at 1, 2 and 4 h after the meal. Coagulation tests included: activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT), prothrombin time (PT), fibrinogen (Fbg), antithrombin III (AT), protein C (PC) and protein S (PS). Differences between samples were assessed by Wilcoxon ranked-pairs test. The level of statistical significance was set at P < 0.05. Mean % differences were determined and differences between and baseline and 1, 2 and 4h samples were compared with reference change value (RCV).

Results:

A significantly higher % activity of AT was observed at 1 h and 4 h after meal vs. baseline specimen [113 (104–117) and 111 (107–120) vs. 109 (102–118), respectively; P = 0.029 and P = 0.016]. APTT at 2 h was found significantly lower than baseline samples [32.0 (29.9–34.8) vs. 34.1 (32.2–35.2), respectively; P = 0.041]. The results of both Fbg and PS tests were not influenced by a light meal. Furthermore, no coagulation tests had significant variation after comparison with RCV.

Conclusion:

A light meal does not influence the laboratory coagulation tests we assessed, but we suggest that the laboratory quality managers standardize the fasting time for all blood tests at 12 hours, to completely metabolize the lipids intake.     

Periodic disturbance rejection with unknown frequency and unknown plant structure

This paper deals with asymptotic rejection of a multi-sinusoidal signal for linear single-input single-output stable systems with unknown structure. An adaptive orthogonal signals generator is used to both reconstruct the disturbance and cancel its effect on the system output. An interesting feature is that the disturbance is removed by the generated internal signals with no additional dynamics in the cancellation algorithm. A fractional-order controller is designed which guarantees the closed-loop stability of the system if the location of the plant frequency response at the estimated frequencies lies in a half-plane passing through the origin of the complex plane, i.e. no information about the order of the system to be controlled, the relative degree, the nature of its poles and zeros, is required. The case of multi-sinusoidal disturbance is also analyzed. Simulations and comparisons with existing approaches are presented that highlight the performances of the proposed method.