1,721,362 research outputs found
The Labor Market of Italian Politicians
Full text linkThe ruling class plays a major role in society. Historically, economists devoted far less attention than sociologists to the study of ruling classes. Using the theoretical tools of economists, this volume provides an understanding of what drives the formation of a ruling class, and the relationship between politics and business firms. Focusing on Italy, it uses labour economics to analyse the selection of the ruling class, and the labour market of politicians. It uses detailed information on personal characteristics, incomes, performance in office, and career paths (both before and after the Parliamentary mandate) of all the politicians elected to the Italian Lower Chamber (Camera) between 1948 and 2008. This is the first time that this information has been gathered and summarized in key indicators
Autotraction versus passive traction: an open controlled study in lumbar disc herniation
No full textAutotraction (AT) is a treatment for low-back pain syndrome of benign etiology that uses a specically designed traction table divided into two movable sections. While lying on the table, the pelvis secured, the patient controls the traction forces by grasping and pulling the bars at the head of the table. There are controls for the therapist to apply, through movable sections of the table, rotation and bending forces to help restore mobility to the lumbar spine without inducing pain. The present study is based upon a randomized treatment trial comparing conventional passive traction (PT) to AT. The following outcome indicators were used: (1) subjective response concerning overall improvement, (2) pain intensity (visual analog scale, 0-100), (3) qualitative pain severity (McGill Pain Questionnaire, short-form, 0-45), and (4) pain related disability (Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Score, 0-100). The favorable response to AT was 75% (30 of the 40 patients) versus the 22% (6 of 27 patients) to PT (p < 0.001). After 3 months, 19 of the 30 responders to AT (63%) reported continued improvement. In these patients, pain ratings remained stable and the disability scores decreased to 0 to 23% of the pretreatment value (median and mean respectively, p < 0.001)
Adaptive mobile computing: advances in processing mobile data sets
No full textAdaptive Mobile Computing: Advances in Processing Mobile Data Sets explores the latest advancements in producing, processing and securing mobile data sets. The book provides the elements needed to deepen understanding of this trend which, over the last decade, has seen exponential growth in the number and capabilities of mobile devices. The pervasiveness, sensing capabilities and computational power of mobile devices have turned them into a fundamental instrument in everyday life for a large part of the human population. This fact makes mobile devices an incredibly rich source of data about the dynamics of human behavior, a pervasive wireless sensors network with substantial computational power and an extremely appealing target for a new generation of threats. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
