Search results for "collection"

The Impact of Barriers on Export Behavior of a Developing Country Firms: Evidence from Tanzania

2012

The purpose of this paper is to identify main export barriers and to test empirically their impact on export behavior. A survey of 122 manufacturing firms was conducted in Tanzania between October 2008 and February 2009. The survey data were analyzed using factor analysis and the Tobit regression model. Factor analysis identified five significant barrier factors: lack of export market knowledge and information, export supply capacity constraints, inadequate export financing, inefficient regulatory framework, and poor infrastructure. The impact of the barriers on export behavior was then tested using the Tobit regression model. The results of the Tobit estimation indicated that the lack of e…

Inclusive educational practices as perceived by prospective special education teachers in Estonia, Finland, and the United States.

1997

A survey of 125 prospective special education teachers assessed perceptions and beliefs about inclusive education in Estonia, Finland, and the United States (Michigan). The attitudes toward inclusion were rather critical. The Estonians were the most critical group, the Finns the least critical. The meanings attached to a student with severe mental retardation were related to the educational setting assessed as the best for this student. The findings suggest that special educators perceptions about inclusion are related to the prevailing implementation of inclusive education. The results support also the idea that the meanings attached to a person with a disability are connected with behavio…

Criminal networks analysis in missing data scenarios through graph distances

2021

Data collected in criminal investigations may suffer from issues like: (i) incompleteness, due to the covert nature of criminal organizations; (ii) incorrectness, caused by either unintentional data collection errors or intentional deception by criminals; (iii) inconsistency, when the same information is collected into law enforcement databases multiple times, or in different formats. In this paper we analyze nine real criminal networks of different nature (i.e., Mafia networks, criminal street gangs and terrorist organizations) in order to quantify the impact of incomplete data, and to determine which network type is most affected by it. The networks are firstly pruned using two specific m…

Mothers’ non-standard working and childcare-related challenges : A comparison between lone and coupled mothers

2016

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to particularly focus on lone-mother families, comparing the childcare-related challenges experienced by working lone mothers and coupled mothers in three European countries in the context of a 24/7 economy and non-standard working hours (e.g. evening, night and weekend work). Design/methodology/approach – This study utilises survey data from Finnish, Dutch and British working mothers (n=1,106) collected as part of the “Families 24/7” research project. Multivariate regression analysis is used to analyse the associations between childcare-related challenges, maternal non-standard working, lone motherhood and country of residence. Findings – The results…

Activité physique et prévention des chutes chez les personnes âgées

2015

Les chutes chez les personnes âgées sont fréquentes : près d’une personne de plus de 65 ans sur trois et une personne de plus de 80 ans sur deux chutent chaque année. L’état de santé, les capacités fonctionnelles, les facteurs comportementaux ou les caractéristiques de l’environnement constituent autant de facteurs de risque. Au-delà des traumatismes physiques et psychologiques tels que la peur de tomber qui en résultent, les chutes peuvent entraîner des limitations fonctionnelles, une diminution de la qualité de vie, une perte d’autonomie voire une entrée en institution.Dans un contexte de vieillissement de la population, la prévention des chutes et la préservation de l’autonomie dans les …

Variation in situation-specific engagement among lower secondary school students

2018

The majority of previous research has examined school engagement as an overall student characteristic. The present study contributes to the field by examining variation in students' situation-specific engagement from one lesson to another and by investigating situational determinants of such variation. An intensive one-week lesson-to-lesson data collection was conducted in four lower secondary school classrooms. Students rated their situation-specific engagement at the end of each lesson with a mobile-based InSitu instrument. Data comprising a total of 57 students and 1328 ratings were analyzed with two-level hierarchical multivariate model (between students, and within students between les…

Basic Statistical Techniques

2012

A probabilistic estimation and prediction technique for dynamic continuous social science models: The evolution of the attitude of the Basque Country…

2015

In this paper, a computational technique to deal with uncertainty in dynamic continuous models in Social Sciences is presented.Considering data from surveys,the method consists of determining the probability distribution of the survey output and this allows to sample data and fit the model to the sampled data using a goodness-of-fit criterion based the χ2-test. Taking the fitted parameters that were not rejected by the χ2-test, substituting them into the model and computing their outputs, 95% confidence intervals in each time instant capturing the uncertainty of the survey data (probabilistic estimation) is built. Using the same set of obtained model parameters, a prediction over …

Helminth Microbiota Profiling Using Bacterial 16S rRNA Gene Amplicon Sequencing: From Sampling to Sequence Data Mining

2021

Symbiont microbial communities play important roles in animal biology and are thus considered integral components of metazoan organisms, including parasitic worms (helminths). Nevertheless, the study of helminth microbiomes has thus far been largely overlooked, and symbiotic relationships between helminths and their microbiomes have been only investigated in selected parasitic worms. Over the past decade, advances in next-generation sequencing technologies, coupled with their increased affordability, have spurred investigations of helminth-associated microbial communities aiming at enhancing current understanding of their fundamental biology and physiology, as well as of host-microbe intera…

FIRST

2018

Thanks to the collective action of participating smartphone users, mobile crowdsensing allows data collection at a scale and pace that was once impossible. The biggest challenge to overcome in mobile crowdsensing is that participants may exhibit malicious or unreliable behavior, thus compromising the accuracy of the data collection process. Therefore, it becomes imperative to design algorithms to accurately classify between reliable and unreliable sensing reports. To address this crucial issue, we propose a novel Framework for optimizing Information Reliability in Smartphone-based participaTory sensing (FIRST) that leverages mobile trusted participants (MTPs) to securely assess the reliabil…