Development of word reading fluency along primary education: a six-year follow-up / El desarrollo de la fluidez en la lectura de palabras en educación primaria: un seguimiento longitudinal de seis años

Word reading fluency is a key component in the process of reading. In order to understand its acquisition it is crucial to conduct longitudinal studies. The aim of this work was to describe the development of word recognition in Spanish, considering accuracy and speed, from a longitudinal perspective. A group of 31 children were followed for six years. Reading performance was assessed with a list of 72 stimuli in which lexicality, frequency and length were manipulated. Results show that initial gains in reading accuracy occurred very rapidly. However, the growth of reading speed was found to be more difficult and complex, and automatic word recognition remains low at the end of Grade 6. Low frequency, long words were the most difficult stimuli. High stability in reading speed was observed and it was a relevant indicator that differentiates between good and poor readers. The findings also highlighted the need to develop training programs with the specific aim of improving word reading fluency throughout primary education.     

Estimating Mortality in War‐Time Iraq: A Controversial Survey with Important Lessons for Students

In teaching introductory quantitative methods in sociology, I have used a controversial survey of mortality in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion to highlight to students the power of simple questionnaires, the role of ambiguity in statistics and the place of politics in the framing of statistical results. This brief report summarizes Roberts et al.'s (2004) estimate that the invasion of Iraq resulted in 98,000 (95% CI = 8000–194,000) deaths, as well as the intriguing reaction that the survey received in the press. Statistics teachers should find the Roberts et al. study to be an effective way to introduce students to more controversial – and political – aspects of statistical research.     

Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

This paper relates and analyses the experience of various Brazilian institutions organized in a consortium with the aim of providing integration and unified access, via a web gateway, to full-text electronic theses already available at different Brazilian universities. The rise and impact of free electronic academic publishing on scientific communication and the development of science is analyzed. The results of a pilot programme, developed under the coordination of IBICT, as well as technical and technological aspects of information system models adopted, are presented. Aspects such as metadata sets and formats, protocols for automatic gathering of metadata, union catalogue databases, user interfaces and integration with other Brazilian STI systems, are analyzed. Finally, future developments and the enlargement of the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations are discussed.     

Sources of productivity growth in the Spanish pharmaceutical industry (1994-2000)

The Spanish pharmaceutical industry underwent an important transformation during the 1990s. To survive under the new market conditions, labs had to refocus their competitive strategies towards increasing productive efficiency or reinforcing research and development (R&D) activities. This paper analyzes the evolution of the productive patterns in a sample of 80 pharmaceutical laboratories that operated in Spain from 1994 to 2000. We estimate Malmquist productivity indexes and decompose them into four sources of productivity change. The results suggest that pure technical efficiency change and the scale change of the technology explain most of the productivity growth observed during the period. The contribution of technical change to productivity growth is negligible, indicating a poor result from R&D activities at least in the groups of Small and Medium-sized labs.     

Evaluating research efficiency within National R&D Programmes

Relying on efficiency analysis, we evaluate to what extent policy makers have been able to promote the establishment of consolidated and comprehensive research groups to contribute to the implementation of a successful innovation system for the Spanish food technology sector, oriented to the production of knowledge based on an application model. Using data envelopment analysis techniques that allow calculation of a generalized version of the traditional distance function model for productive efficiency, we find pervasive levels of inefficiency and a typology of different research strategies. Among these, in contrast to what has been assumed, established groups do not play the pre-eminent benchmarking role; rather, partially oriented, specialized and “shooting star” groups are the most common patterns. These results correspond with an infant innovation system, where the fostering of higher levels of efficiency and the promotion of the desired research patterns are ongoing.     

Influence of leg preference on bilateral muscle activation during cycling

The purpose of this study was to investigate asymmetry of muscle activation in participants with different levels of experience and performance with cycling. Two separate experiments were conducted, one with nine cyclists and one with nine non-cyclists. The experiments involved incremental maximal and sub-maximal constant load cycling tests. Bilateral surface electromyography (EMG) and gross and net muscle efficiency were assessed. Analyses of variance in mixed linear models and t-tests were conducted. The cyclists in Experiment 1 presented higher gross efficiency (P < 0.05), whereas net efficiency did not differ between the two experiments (21.3 ± 1.4% and 19.8 ± 1.0% for cyclists and non-cyclists, respectively). The electrical muscle activity increased significantly with exercise intensity regardless of leg preference in both experiments. The coefficient of variation of EMG indicated main effects of leg in both experiments. The non-preferred leg of non-cyclists (Experiment 2) presented statistically higher variability of muscle activity in the gastrocnemius medialis and vastus lateralis. Our findings suggest similar electrical muscle activity between legs in both cyclists and non-cyclists regardless of exercise intensity. However, EMG variability was asymmetric and appears to be strongly influenced by exercise intensity for cyclists and non-cyclists, especially during sub-maximal intensity. Neural factors per se do not seem to fully explain previous reports of pedalling asymmetries.     

Incorporating group recommendations to recommender systems: Alternatives and performance

In collaborative filtering recommender systems recommendations can be made to groups of users. There are four basic stages in the collaborative filtering algorithms where the group’s users’ data can be aggregated to the data of the group of users: similarity metric, establishing the neighborhood, prediction phase, determination of recommended items. In this paper we perform aggregation experiments in each of the four stages and two fundamental conclusions are reached: (1) the system accuracy does not vary significantly according to the stage where the aggregation is performed, (2) the system performance improves notably when the aggregation is performed in an earlier stage of the collaborative filtering process. This paper provides a group recommendation similarity metric and demonstrates the convenience of tackling the aggregation of the group’s users in the actual similarity metric of the collaborative filtering process.     

On delay-dependent stability conditions for Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems

This paper presents new less conservative stability analysis conditions for Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy systems subject to interval time-varying delay. The methodology is based on the direct Lyapunov method allied with an appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional choice and the use of the integral inequalities, Finsler lemma, Newton–Leibniz formula manipulations and convex combination properties. Particularly, the main result differs from previous ones since the positiveness of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional is guaranteed by new relaxed conditions. Two examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.     

广东高职院校图书馆英语沙龙探究

调查分析广东省75所高职院校图书馆英语沙龙和英语角情况。以广东农工商职业技术学院图书馆英语沙龙活动为例,阐述英语沙龙的组织实施、存在问题及启示。     

Perceptions of the Media and the Public and their Effects on Political Participation in Colombia

This study investigates whether perceptions of the media and the public are related to political participation in Colombia. Communication researchers have built a large body of literature on hostile media perceptions and the projection effect, respectively. This study links these perceptual effects with each other and with political participation. Analyzing survey data from a representative sample of Colombian adults in urban areas, we show a direct relationship between hostile media perceptions and participation but no direct relationship between projection and participation. Hostile media perceptions and projection are negatively related. Results suggest that perceived media bias attenuates projection but increases political engagement.