Search results for "Election"

Do fee-shifting rules affect plaintiffs’ win rates? A theoretical and empirical analysis

2021

Abstract This article studies whether fee-shifting rules can affect plaintiffs’ win rates. Beyond theoretical modeling, this study goes a step further and provides empirical evidence on this issue, thanks to the study of a real change in Spanish legislation. Spain applied the so-called English rule in 2011 in the administrative jurisdiction. This study explores whether plaintiffs were more or less successful when litigating against public administrations since then. After controlling for several other factors, it is shown that the new rule considerably increased plaintiffs’ win rate (while also reducing litigation). The paper also presents a theoretical model explaining that the English rul…

Evaluating a hierarchical approach to landscape-level harvest scheduling

2018

Forest planning at the landscape level has the potential to become a large intractable problem. In Finland, Metsähallitus (the state enterprise that manages federally owned land) creates strategic plans to determine the appropriate harvest level. While these plans are feasible, they are not implementable in practice as the harvests are scattered temporally and spatially. Requiring that harvests be organized both temporally and spatially for practical implementation can result in an intractable problem. Through a hierarchical approach, the problem can be organized into steps in which the intractable problem is broken down into smaller easily solvable parts. As an approximation technique, th…

'Maleducados/Ill-mannered' during the #A28 political campaign on Twitter: A metapragmatic study of impoliteness labels and comments in Spanish

2020

AbstractThis paper approaches the study of conflict through an examination of Spanish metapragmatic labels and comments of impoliteness on Twitter. The aim is twofold. It first aims to confirm the attributed importance of the labelmaleducado/ill-mannered in the specific context of Twitter and of digital discourse more generally, on quantitative and comparative grounds; then, it investigates this label, and the metapragmatic comments where it occurred, in a contextualized corpus of tweets compiled during the political campaign of Spain’s General Elections of April 28, 2019. The study draws from fivead hoccorpora specifically compiled from Twitter, and a general corpus of Spanish digital disc…

The ontogenetic evolution of verbal behavior

2020

Behavior interacts with its environment both during an organism’s lifetime and across generations through natural selection. Speech is a natural event that comes down to sounds that affect the beha...

2019

Worries about possible harmful effects of new technologies (modern health worries) have intensely been investigated in the last decade. However, the comparability of translated self-report measures across countries is often problematic. This study aimed to overcome this problem by developing psychometrically sound brief versions of the widely used 25-item Modern Health Worries Scale (MHWS) suitable for multi-country use. Based on data of overall 5,176 individuals from four European countries (England, Germany, Hungary, Sweden), Ant Colony Optimization was used to identify the indicators that optimize model fit and measurement invariance across countries. Two scales were developed. A short (…

Short Form of the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2

2020

Abstract. The purpose of the present study was to develop a short form of the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2) based on the German STAXI-2. Item selection was performed based on exploratory factor analyses (EFA) using descriptive statistical parameters and content-related considerations on calibration samples ( N1 = 215, N2 = 310). The factorial structure of the final extracted scales was validated via confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) ( N3 = 216, N4 = 310). Overall, results present an economic and reliable questionnaire with a total length of 24 items: State Anger short scales Feeling Angry, Verbal Anger Impulse, and Physical Anger Impulse (3 items each), that can be ag…

Effectiveness of child protection practice models : a systematic review

2020

Background Attempts to improve child protection outcomes by implementing social work practice models embedded in a particular theory and practice approach, have increased internationally over the past decade. Objective To assess the evidence of the effectiveness of child protection practice models in improving outcomes for children and families. Participants and setting Children < 18 years and their families involved in child protection services. Methods A systematic review was conducted to synthesize evidence regarding the effectiveness of child protection practice models. Systematic searches across 10 electronic databases and grey literature were conducted to identify quasi-experimental s…

Fuzzy Portfolio Selection Models for Dealing with Investor’s Preferences

2017

This chapter provides an overview of the authors’ previous work about dealing with investor’s preferences in the portfolio selection problem. We propose a fuzzy model for dealing with the vagueness of investor preferences on the expected return and the assumed risk, and then we consider several modifications to include additional constraints and goals.

Evaluation in Political Discourse Addressed to Women: Appraisal Analysis of Cosmopolitan's Coverage of the 2014 US Midterm Elections

2017

Abstract Before the US midterm elections of November 2014, the well-known women’s magazine Cosmopolitan decided to include politics in its contents. The editorial board stated that their aim was to encourage readers to vote and to be engaged with women’s rights advocay in the election process. To that end, Cosmopolitan created a new website, CosmoVotes, with content ranging from discussion of political issues to endorsement of specific candidates who were believed to advance women’s issues. Topics include labour rights, abortion, contraception, health, minimum wage and social equity. This paper evaluates the discourse of this new section of the Cosmopolitan website, together with readers’ r…

Learning from learners: a non-standard direct approach to the teaching of writing skills in EFL in a university context

2016

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. 'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing,1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions…