The impacts of fundraising periods and geographic distance on financing music production via crowdfunding in Brazil

We conduct an analysis of 1835 pledges to 10 music production projects hosted on the largest Brazilian crowdfunding platform, namely the Catarse Web site, and we assess the relation between the fundraising accumulation period, the donor–entrepreneur distance and the propensity of donors to back projects. Our results suggest a significantly negative association between distance and the value of capital pledged to projects, which is consistent with the notion that the entrepreneur’s network of close contacts might play a central role in funding. Furthermore, our results contradict the idea that crowdfunding reduces the inhibiting effect of donor–entrepreneur distance. In addition, the results show that a long project exposure is associated with higher values of pledges. These results suggest practical implications for the study of crowdfunding as a financing platform. This study contributes to the literature on the use of crowdfunding as an alternative funding source in a major emerging market.     

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.     

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...     

An investigation into turn-away among information technology professionals in Brazil

Two important problems have been observed fairly frequently among information technology (IT) professionals, namely turn-over – where the IT professional moves to another company but still remains in the IT sector – and turn-away, in which the IT professional abandons the area in order to occupy a position in a different area, either in the same company or in another, sometimes assuming a managerial function. Few research papers were found with respect to the latter phenomenon. Based on that, the main thrust of this work is to understand how and why IT professionals in Brazil abandon their area, identifying typical characteristics in their career transition. Thus, from a literature review about career development and the analysis of the data collected, eight research hypotheses were developed in order to be analyzed by the researchers. A multiple case study method with several units of analysis was applied in two large companies in Brazil. In-depth interviews were conducted with IT professionals who had migrated to other areas within their organizations, they being considered the unit of analysis. The results accrued from this research reveal that IT professionals in Brazil need to have more growth opportunities than either their companies have been able to offer them or it is possible to offer within the technical arena.     

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 somatic marker as a “short cut” to verbal immediacy

This study examined the relationships between the somatic‐marker hypothesis, developed by Damasio (1994) as it relates to homophily and verbal immediacy in the classroom. Damasio has hypothesized that when particular events occur in one's life, there is a “memory” of that event in the brain. As a result, when a similar event occurs, the somatic marker recreates that first event. Students were provided three different scenarios about the first day of a communication class. In the scenarios, the instructor presented information about himself. One instructor provided only autobiographical, demographic data (the control). Another provided information hozu he had had difficulty with public speaking (the selfish marker). The third provided information about how the instructor had helped someone else who had difficulty in public speaking (the altruistic marker). The results indicated that while homophily differences were not significant, there was a significant difference between the control group and the altruistic marker.     

Comprender para aprender: Un programa para mejorar la comprensión y el aprendizaje de textos informativos

Aunque los objetivos curriculares actuales se plantean la enseñanza del lenguaje escrito de modo que permita utilizarlo como instrumento para el aprendizaje, el hecho es que esta enseñanza de la lectoescritura como medio se contempla como un fin en sí mismo, es decir, con materiales y contenidos literarios y no de áreas disciplinares específicas en que el niño se tendrá que mover a lo largo de toda la escolaridad. En este artículo se presenta un programa experimentado con éxito en las áreas de ciencias naturales y sociales para mejorar en los alumnos estas necesarias estrategias de comprensión y estudio.     

Aprender matemáticas con ordenadores

Utilizar el ordenador en la escuela no es una garantía de éxito didáctico si no se cumplen algunos requisitos, pero constituye una ayuda no suficientemente explorada en la mayoría de las materias. En el caso de las matemáticas, el ordenador permite diseñar actividades altamente motivadoras para el niño, a la vez que facilitar la integración de diferentes tipos de códigos, objetivos ambos difíciles de conseguir en los formatos de papel y lápiz habituales en las didácticas tradicionales. El autor de este artículo pasa revista a una serie de micromundos informáticos que permiten al profesor y al alumno librarse de tareas rutinarias y dedicarse a la exploración de las posibilidades del lenguaje matemático, a la verdadera tarea de aprender.     

The Use of Different Translation Devices to Analyze Knowledge-Building in a University Chemistry Classroom

Research in Science Education - This research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand the epistemic dimension of the higher education classroom discourse of a professor who is well...