Food for Thought in Restaurant Reviews

Coverage of food journalism has increased in contemporary media and restaurant reviews are a regular feature in newspapers. The reaction to a rating of zero for a restaurant in The Weekend Australian newspaper in 2016 highlighted the role and expectations of critics. It also raised the issue of whether this form of lifestyle journalism included traditional journalistic objectives, or was influenced more by commercial factors. In this environment, it is therefore valuable to explore whether restaurant reviews are more aligned with detached journalism or an extension of marketing. Utilising a content analysis, this pilot study examines the ratings of food critics in four broadsheet/quality newspapers in Australia and the United Kingdom. During the three years of the data collection, 550 restaurant reviews were coded. The pattern of review marks suggested more supportive judgements than critical ones, and was consistent with the softer side of journalism.     

Users as service innovators: The case of banking services

Many services can be self-provided. An individual user or a user firm can, for example, choose to do its own accounting - choose to self-provide that service - instead of hiring an accounting firm to provide it. Since users can ‘serve themselves’ in many cases, it is reasonable to suspect that they can also innovate with respect to the services they self-provide - possibly without the assistance of service providers.In this paper, we conduct the first quantitative exploration of the importance of services innovation by users, focusing on the field of commercial and retail banking services. We find that 55% of today's computerized commercial banking services were first developed and implemented by non-bank firms for their own use, and 44% of today's computerized retail banking services were first developed and implemented by individual service users rather than by commercial financial service providers. Manual precursors to these services - manual procedures that carried out functions similar to computerized services in our sample - were almost always developed by users as self-services.Our empirical findings differ significantly from prevalent producer-centered views of service development. We speculate that the patterns we have observed in banking with respect to the major role of users in service development will prove to be quite general. If so, this will be an important matter: on the order of 75% of GDP in advanced economies today is derived from services. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice in service development.     

Retrieval constraints and word frequency distributions a log-logistic model for IR

We first present in this paper an analytical view of heuristic retrieval constraints which yields simple tests to determine whether a retrieval function satisfies the constraints or not. We then review empirical findings on word frequency distributions and the central role played by burstiness in this context. This leads us to propose a formal definition of burstiness which can be used to characterize probability distributions with respect to this phenomenon. We then introduce the family of information-based IR models which naturally captures heuristic retrieval constraints when the underlying probability distribution is bursty and propose a new IR model within this family, based on the log-logistic distribution. The experiments we conduct on several collections illustrate the good behavior of the log-logistic IR model: It significantly outperforms the Jelinek-Mercer and Dirichlet prior language models on most collections we have used, with both short and long queries and for both the MAP and the precision at 10 documents. It also compares favorably to BM25 and has similar performance to classical DFR models such as InL2 and PL2.     

Using clinical guidelines to assess the potential value of laboratory medicine in clinical decision-making

IntroductionIt is often quoted that 70% of clinical decisions are based on laboratory results, but the evidence to substantiate this claim is lacking. Since clinical guidelines aim to document best-practice decision making for specific disease conditions, inclusion of any laboratory test means that the best available evidence is recommending clinicians use it. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the world’s most common cause of mortality, so this study reviewed all CVD guidelines published by five national/international authorities to determine what proportion of them recommended laboratory testing.Materials and methodsFive leading CVD guidelines were examined, namely the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the Australian Heart Foundation (AHF) and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSANZ).ResultsA total of 101 guidelines were reviewed. Of the 33 individual ESC guidelines relating to CVD, 24/33 made a direct reference to the use of clinical laboratory tests in either diagnosis or follow-up treatment. The same applied to 15/20 of NICE guidelines, 24/32 from the ACC and 15/16 from the AHF/CSANZ. Renal function and blood count testing were the most recommended (39 and 26 times), with lipid, troponin and natriuretic peptide measurement advocated 25, 19 and 19 times respectively.ConclusionsThis study has shown that laboratory testing is advocated by between 73% and 94% of individual CVD guideline recommendations from five national/international authorities. This provides an index to assess the potential value of laboratory medicine to healthcare.     

Functional fragmentation in city hall and Twitter communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Atlanta,San Francisco,and Washington,DC

The organization of city government into specialized departments allows cities to accomplish an array of service delivery tasks. Government reformers argue this fragmentation creates coordination challenges when problems spillover the lines of specialized agencies. Functional fragmentation also poses coordination challenges for government communication with the public through social media. The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and COVID-19 disease provide an opportunity to investigate the consequences of functional fragmentation in city government for social media communication about public health and pandemic response. A comparative case analysis of three cities using data from city agency Twitter accounts and key informant interviews demonstrates the consequences of fragmentation for internal coordination, as well as public outreach. The experiences of Atlanta, San Francisco, and Washington, DC in the early days of the pandemic provide pragmatic insights for city officials and illustrate the theoretical importance of giving attention to whole of government approaches to city social media communication.     

《一条叫旺达的鱼》

A Fish Called Wanda is a British comedy that＇s directed by Charles Crichton. It stars John Cleese and Michael Palin （both ex-members of Monty Python） and American actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. Kline won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Otto.     

美妙世界布里斯托尔

布里斯托尔是英格兰西南部最棒的城市。这里是演员加里·格兰特的故乡、克利夫顿吊桥的所在地（由闻名遐迩的结构工程师伊桑巴德·金德姆·布鲁内尔设计）,并且英格兰一所顶尖的大学也坐落于此。快来了解布里斯托尔更多的信息吧。     

歌曲欣赏：《爱很残忍》

Everyday I wake up tired, At times, it＇s hard just to face another day, It seems my life is going in circles, Too much of the same, and too little loving. Yeah.And why is it when you least expect it, Someone picks you up and turns you around, yeah, And why can＇t it always be that easy, yeah, Cos when you need it most love can＇t be found.