Quality Audits as a Tool for Quality Improvement in Selected European Higher Education Libraries

From the beginning of the 1990s, different types of quality management and evaluation systems have become integrated into higher education institutes throughout Europe due to the creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This has meant that the university libraries have had to learn how to evaluate their services and improve their quality. Quality audits are one tool that can be used in quality management approaches to assess how well an organization is being managed. This paper describes and benchmarks the use of external and internal auditing in three European academic libraries, i.e. the Medical Library of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (Germany), the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Library (Spain) and the University of Eastern Finland Library (Finland). The results reveal the best practices of auditing in these institutions; and recommendations are provided for the further development of library auditing and ways to improve co-operation between libraries.     

The effects of service convenience and perceived quality on perceived value,satisfaction and loyalty in low-cost fitness centers

Due to its importance in fitness centers, a number of authors have explored and analyzed loyalty. However, two characteristics not yet examined are service convenience in fitness center chains and low-cost fitness centers (an emerging business model). In the present study, the authors sought to understand the relationship among perceived quality and service convenience on perceived value, satisfaction, and client loyalty in low-cost fitness centers. Clients (N = 763; 381 women and 382 men) from three low-cost Spanish fitness centers were surveyed, revealing a positive relationship among the variables studied. Findings demonstrate the importance of proper management of non-monetary sacrifices and perceived quality by the managers of these sport organizations, since client loyalty could depend on factors of these emerging sport models.     

高职生英语听力学习动机、策略和成绩的相关研究

本文通过问卷对高职院校英语专业二年级140名学生听力学习动机、听力学习策略和听力成绩进行调查研究。结果发现：高职生的听力学习动机以应试动机为最高,其次是实用动机和兴趣动机;最常用的听力学习策略是意义策略和社会/情感策略;高职生的学习成绩与学习动机基本呈显著正相关;各种学习策略也与学习成绩呈显著正相关。     

The internet as a tool to learn a second language in a technical environment

Second language acquisition is a hard task for teachers, since to achieve the motivation from students to practice a language simulating a real context is very difficult. On the one hand, students are often influenced by their mother tongue and more when they are practising a second language with a partner from the same nationality. On the other, technology is part of our lives and teachers should use all the tools in order to motivate students to learn any topic. So, if we integrate technology in the methodology we use when teaching a second language and students can practise with international partners, the results can be surprising. Chats, scanning texts, games, filling forms, etc. are just some of the activities our students can do in order to improve their command of a second language and also these activities can be used by content teachers in order to complement content learning. In the present paper, we provide some examples of activities designed by collaborating with content teachers based on websites, and then we analyse the effect they produced on students. We contrast the methodology used to propose tasks based on websites and those based on texts, and finally, evaluate their effect on the motivation of students.     

The planarity of the stickface motion in the field hockey hit

The field hockey hit is an important but poorly understood stroke. In this study, we investigated the planarity of the stickface motion during the downswing to better characterize the kinematics and to assess the suitability of planar pendulum models for simulating the hit. Thirteen experienced female field hockey players were filmed executing hits with a single approach step, and the kinematics of the centre of the stickface were measured. A method was developed for identifying how far back from impact the stickface motion was planar. Orthogonal regression was used to fit least-squares planes to the stickface path during sections of the downswing of varying length, with each section ending at impact. A section was considered planar if the root mean square residual between the stickface path and the fitted plane was less than 0.25% of the distance travelled by the stickface during that period. On average, the stickface motion was planar for the last 83 ± 12% of its downswing path, with the length of the planar section ranging from 1.85 m to 2.70 m. The suitability of a planar model for the stickface motion was supported, but further investigation of the stick and arm kinematics is warranted.     

A collaborative filtering similarity measure based on singularities

Recommender systems play an important role in reducing the negative impact of information overload on those websites where users have the possibility of voting for their preferences on items. The most normal technique for dealing with the recommendation mechanism is to use collaborative filtering, in which it is essential to discover the most similar users to whom you desire to make recommendations. The hypothesis of this paper is that the results obtained by applying traditional similarities measures can be improved by taking contextual information, drawn from the entire body of users, and using it to calculate the singularity which exists, for each item, in the votes cast by each pair of users that you wish to compare. As such, the greater the measure of singularity result between the votes cast by two given users, the greater the impact this will have on the similarity. The results, tested on the Movielens, Netflix and FilmAffinity databases, corroborate the excellent behaviour of the singularity measure proposed.     

Generation of virtual models of cultural heritage

Different techniques and tools currently exist to generate three-dimensional models of small elements, buildings and cities. Apart from being easier to interpret than two-dimensional drawings, these models facilitate data necessary for reconstruction projects, preservation or rehabilitation of the architectural or archaeological heritage. Traditional surveying only enables us to obtain discrete information of the characteristic lines that define each surface, edge, slope change etc. whereas work with massive capture techniques allows us to obtain continuous points of the surfaces. Photogrammetry or laser scanning combined with conventional photography provides information of the building in addition to its geometry. We carried out a review of the different techniques showing the advantages and disadvantages of each technique as well as the information that can be obtained by applying these techniques to the survey of the great Gate of Antioch in the town of Aleppo, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986, in Syria.     

Hirsch-type characteristics of the tail of distributions. The generalised h-index

In this paper a generalisation of the h-index and g-index is given on the basis of non-negative real-valued functionals defined on subspaces of the vector space generated by the ordered samples. Several Hirsch-type measures are defined and their basic properties are analysed. Empirical properties are illustrated using examples from the micro- and meso-level. Among these measures, the h-index proved the most, the arithmetic and geometric g-indices, the least robust measures. The μ-index and the harmonic g-index provide more balanced results and are still robust enough.