Search results for "convergence"
showing 10 items of 655 documents
Information Systems Development as an Intellectual Process: Designers’ Perceptions of Users
2010
The modern society is transformed by digital convergence towards a future where technologies embed themselves and disappear into the fabric of everyday life. This ongoing merging of social and technological infrastructures provides and necessitates new possibilities to renovate past notions, models and methods of information systems development (ISD) that accommodates humans as actors within the infrastructure.
Diversity of Higher Education Institutions in Networked Knowledge Societies: A Comparative Examination
2016
Within and across many expanded and diversified higher education systems, the recognition and understanding of differences between institutions becomes especially challenging. Forms of both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ differentiation frequently exist alongside each other, though with increasing attention given to the former. Institutional boundaries become more porous within intra-sector and cross-sector collaborations, as networks become increasingly important in both. Do the ways in which different kinds of higher education institutions interact within networks, as well as the nature of those networks, differ? To what extent do network configurations become platforms for distinct knowledg…
On the Convergence of Affective and Persuasive Technologies in Computer-Mediated Health-Care Systems
2015
This paper offers a portrayal of how affective computing and persuasive technologies can converge into an effective tool for interfacing biomedical engineering with behavioral sciences and medicine. We describe the characteristics, features, applications, present state of the art, perspectives, and trends of both streams of research. In particular, these streams are analyzed in light of the potential contribution of their convergence for improving computer-mediated health-care systems, by facilitating the modification of patients’ attitudes and behaviors, such as engagement and compliance. We propose a framework for future research in this emerging area, highlighting how key constructs and …
Three (marginal?) questions regarding convergence
2004
This paper focuses on three (marginal?) questions surrounding the analysis of economic convergence and uses Spanish provinces as a means of illustration. The three questions in hand are the following: (i) given that the geographical units of analysis are usually quite different in economic size, is the weighting of economic units relevant in convergence analysis? (ii) the average per capita income of a given region, or country, is the first moment in the distribution of income, but what about the second moment, inequality? Have we converged in inequality? and (iii) an aggregate welfare index must take into account, at least, the evolution of the first two moments of the distribution of inco…
Efficiency and productive specialization: an application to Spanish regions
2000
MAUDOS J., PASTOR J. M. and SERRANO L. (2000) Efficiency and productive specialization: an application to the Spanish regions, Reg. Studies 34, 829-842. This paper shows the importance of the composition of production (productive specialization) and sector inefficiencies when evaluating efficiency in aggregate production. For this purpose, a new approach is proposed for obtaining efficiency scores which enables two components to be differentiated: one associated with the degree of efficiency within each sector (intra-sector efficiency); and another associated with the composition of production (composition efficiency). The application of this approach and its breakdown for the Spanish regio…
Family Stability and Labor Market Gender Convergence
2009
The present paper examines the historical development in the structure of the family in terms of marriage, divorce, fertility and labor 1886-2007 in order to map quantitative changes. The paper draws new information from novel Norwegian data. Along with the changing family relations we also quantify the closing of the gender gap by converging trends for both labor participation rates and wages. The paper concludes that there is a clear correspondence between gender convergence in the labor market and less stable family relations.
Total Factor Productivity Convergence Amongst Italian Regions: Some Evidence from Panel Unit Root Tests
2009
Byrne J. P., Fazio G. and Piacentino D. Total factor productivity convergence among Italian regions: some evidence from panel unit root tests. Regional Studies. This paper employs panel unit root tests to investigate convergence in total factor productivity (TFP) among Italian regions. These tests provide an inference valid in the presence of heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence, and when the cross-sectional dimension is smaller than the time dimension, allowing the investigation of convergence among different subsets of regions. The results add a further dimension to the conventional view on growth dynamics in the Italian peninsula depicting a lack of regional TFP convergence not o…
Size-intensive decomposition of orbital energy denominators
2000
We introduce an alternative to Almlöf and Häser’s Laplace transform decomposition of orbital energy denominators used in obtaining reduced scaling algorithms in perturbation theory based methods. The new decomposition is based on the Cholesky decomposition of positive semidefinite matrices. We show that orbital denominators have a particular short and size-intensive Cholesky decomposition. The main advantage in using the Cholesky decomposition, besides the shorter expansion, is the systematic improvement of the results without the penalties encountered in the Laplace transform decomposition when changing the number of integration points in order to control the convergence. Applications will…
The Method of Fundamental Solutions in Solving Coupled Boundary Value Problems for M/EEG
2015
The estimation of neuronal activity in the human brain from electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals is a typical inverse problem whose solution pro- cess requires an accurate and fast forward solver. In this paper the method of fundamental solutions is, for the first time, proposed as a meshfree, boundary-type, and easy-to-implement alternative to the boundary element method (BEM) for solving the M/EEG forward problem. The solution of the forward problem is obtained by numerically solving a set of coupled boundary value problems for the three-dimensional Laplace equation. Numerical accuracy, convergence, and computational load are investigated. The proposed met…
Weak convergence to the coalescent in neutral population models
1999
For a large class of neutral population models the asymptotics of the ancestral structure of a sample of n individuals (or genes) is studied, if the total population size becomes large. Under certain conditions and under a well-known time-scaling, which can be expressed in terms of the coalescence probabilities, weak convergence in D E ([0,∞)) to the coalescent holds. Further the convergence behaviour of the jump chain of the ancestral process is studied. The results are used to approximate probabilities which are of certain interest in applications, for example hitting probabilities.