Evaluating a digital library self-archiving service: The BDBComp user case study

In this article, we present an overview of a self-archiving service for the Brazilian Digital Library of Computing (BDBComp) and describe a user experiment conducted to evaluate it. This experiment involved several potential real users, including computer science graduate students and professors, and archivists/librarians. The results of this study and their implications for similar services are described and analyzed, following sound statistical principles, which can serve as a basis for other similar studies. These results and their analysis indicate that we have successed in building a usable, efficient and learnable self-archiving service, properties which are essential to bring users to the system.     

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nepantla: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Queer Fruit of Aztec Philosophy

A particular twenty-first-century understanding of the Aztec concept nepantla, one which has recently taken hold in critical education thanks to the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, does not accurately reflect traditional Aztec history and philosophy. This essay reveals why this is the case, demonstrating in detail the meaning of nepantla within the broader Aztec ontology. It then asks education researchers and practitioners to instead use the theoretical framework of malinalli, the Aztec philosophical concept which best aligns with transformative social justice goals.     

The impact of the French policy mix on business R&D: How geography matters

Based on a spatial extension of an R&D investment model, this paper measures the macroeconomic impact of the French R&D policy mix on business R&D using regional data. Our measure takes into account not only the direct effect of policies but also indirect effects generated by the existence of spatial interaction between regions. Using a unique database containing information on the levels of various R&D policy instruments received by firms in French NUTS3 regions over the period 2001–2011, our estimates of a spatial Durbin model with structural breaks and fixed effects reveal the existence of a negative spatial dependence among R&D investments in regions. In this context, while a-spatial estimates would conclude that all instruments have a crowding-in effect, we show that national subsidies are the only instrument that is able to generate significant crowding-in effects. On the contrary, it seems that the design, size and spatial allocation of funds from the other instruments (tax credits, local subsidies, European subsidies) lead them to act (in the French context) as beggar-thy-neighbor policies.     

Comparison of three-dimensional lower extremity running kinematics of young adult and elderly runners

The objective of this study was to compare the three-dimensional lower extremity running kinematics of young adult runners and elderly runners. Seventeen elderly adults (age 67-73 years) and 17 young adults (age 26-36 years) ran at 3.1 m x s(-1) on a treadmill while the movements of the lower extremity during the stance phase were recorded at 120 Hz using three-dimensional video. The three-dimensional kinematics of the lower limb segments and of the ankle and knee joints were determined, and selected variables were calculated to describe the movement. Our results suggest that elderly runners have a different movement pattern of the lower extremity from that of young adults during the stance phase of running. Compared with the young adults, the elderly runners had a substantial decrease in stride length (1.97 vs. 2.23 m; P = 0.01), an increase in stride frequency (1.58 vs. 1.37 Hz; P = 0.002), less knee flexion/extension range of motion (26 vs. 33 degrees ; P = 0.002), less tibial internal/external rotation range of motion (9 vs. 12 degrees ; P < 0.001), larger external rotation angle of the foot segment (toe-out angle) at the heel strike (-5.8 vs. -1.0 degrees ; P = 0.009), and greater asynchronies between the ankle and knee movements during running. These results may help to explain why elderly individuals could be more susceptible to running-related injuries.     

Replication crisis or an opportunity to improve scientific production?

Science is undergoing a crisis that has been referred to, since the early 21st century, as a crisis of confidence and a crisis of replication. This article reviews questions pertaining to the replication crisis; questions addressing the quality and credibility of the sciences; specifically, questions linked to what are known as false positives, null results, and questionable research practices (p-hacking, harking, cherry-picking). As an outcome of our review and analysis, a set of recommendations to strengthen the elaboration of reliable and valid research studies is provided. Changes are needed in order to foment meta-research, open science practices and replication studies; notably, changes are needed in the instruction of research methods; in the use and interpretation of statistical data, as well as in research culture in general. We conclude that the replication crisis presents an opportunity to improve research practices and the quality of scientific production in all fields of research, including research in education.     

Dependency parsing with finite state transducers and compression rules

This article proposes a syntactic parsing strategy based on a dependency grammar containing formal rules and a compression technique that reduces the complexity of those rules. Compression parsing is mainly driven by the ‘single-head’ constraint of Dependency Grammar, and can be seen as an alternative method to the well-known constructive strategy. The compression algorithm simplifies the input sentence by progressively removing from it the dependent tokens as soon as binary syntactic dependencies are recognized. This strategy is thus similar to that used in deterministic dependency parsing. A compression parser was implemented and released under General Public License, as well as a cross-lingual grammar with Universal Dependencies, containing only broad-coverage rules applied to Romance languages. The system is an almost delexicalized parser which does not need training data to analyze Romance languages. The rule-based cross-lingual parser was submitted to CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The performance of our system was compared to the other supervised systems participating in the competition, paying special attention to the parsing of different treebanks of the same language. We also trained a supervised delexicalized parser for Romance languages in order to compare it to our rule-based system. The results show that the performance of our cross-lingual method does not change across related languages and across different treebanks, while most supervised methods turn out to be very dependent on the text domain used to train the system.     

Improving performance aligning business analytics with process orientation

How to align business analytics with process orientation initiatives and how management can influence a synergistic accomplishment of these two elements in order to streamline organizational performance is a foremost managerial issue. By means of a quantitative research effort, a study was designed to investigate the relationships among these constructs. Empirical data were collected in 2011 from a survey of 368 large and mid-sized industrial and service companies headquartered in Brazil. A quantitative analysis was performed, and both the reliability and validity of the scales were evaluated prior to using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that the direct effects among BPO, analytical indicators and performance can be taken as statistically significant. The findings also demonstrate that BPO and analytical indicators can be taken as predictors of performance. The paper discusses these results and their managerial implications, as well as some research paths for future studies on the topic.