1,982 research outputs found
Erratum: Hoover, K.D. 2020. The Discovery of Long-Run Causal Order: A Preliminary Investigation. <i>Econometrics</i> 8: 31
No full textThe author would like to make the following correction to the article by Kevin D [...
Productivity in Higher Education/ Kevin Stange, Kevin Strange, Caroline M. Hoxby.
No full textIn English.How do the benefits of higher education compare with its costs, and how does this comparison vary across individuals and institutions? These questions are fundamental to quantifying the productivity of the education sector. The studies in Productivity in Higher Education use rich and novel administrative data, modern econometric methods, and careful institutional analysis to explore productivity issues. The authors examine the returns to undergraduate education, differences in costs by major, the productivity of for-profit schools, the productivity of various types of faculty and of outcomes, the effects of online education on the higher education market, and the ways in which the productivity of different institutions responds to market forces. The analyses recognize five key challenges to assessing productivity in higher education: the potential for multiple student outcomes in terms of skills, earnings, invention, and employment; the fact that colleges and universities are "multiproduct" firms that conduct varied activities across many domains; the fact that students select which school to attend based in part on their aptitude; the difficulty of attributing outcomes to individual institutions when students attend more than one; and the possibility that some of the benefits of higher education may arise from the system as a whole rather than from a single institution. The findings and the approaches illustrated can facilitate decision-making processes in higher education.Hoxby, Caroline M. / Stange, Kevin -- Staiger, Douglas -- Hoxby, Caroline M. -- Minaya, Veronica / Scott-Clayton, Judith -- Riehl, Evan / Saavedra, Juan E. / Urquiola, Miguel -- Altonji, Joseph G. / Zimmerman, Seth D. -- Courant, Paul N. / Turner, Sarah -- Vlieger, Pieter De / Jacob, Brian / Stange, Kevin -- Deming, David J. / Lovenheim, Michael / Patterson, Richard -- Carrell, Scott E. / Kurlaender, Michal -- Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / 1. What Health Care Teaches Us about Measuring Productivity in Higher Education / 2. The Productivity of US Postsecondary Institutions / 3. Labor Market Outcomes and Postsecondary Accountability: Are Imperfect Metrics Better Than None? / 4. Learning and Earning: An Approximation to College Value Added in Two Dimensions / 5. The Costs of and Net Returns to College Major / 6. Faculty Deployment in Research Universities / 7. Measuring Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education / 8. The Competitive Effects of Online Education / 9. Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road to Four- Year College Success / Contributors -- Author Index -- Subject Index1 online resource (392 p.)
The Effectiveness of 3-D Compared to 2-D Signage on Recycling Behaviour
No full textUsing 3-D objects as examples, rather than 2-D icons on signs, to help people learn recycling categories has shown mixed results in observational studies, so an online experimental study was conducted to attempt to clarify the findings. The main hypothesis was that participants would perform faster and more accurately if they learned the recycling categories through images of 3-D objects rather than by 2-D icons. Furthermore, several exploratory hypotheses were suggested: Participants given both types of signage—3-D + 2-D—would perform better than the 3-D and 2-D conditions on their own, and subjective workload and user engagement would predict differences in performance between conditions. An ANOVA found no differences between any of the three conditions in terms of accuracy of sorting performance, subjective workload, or user engagement. However, the 3-D + 2-D condition demonstrated a significant, small-to-medium sized increase in sorting speed when compared to the other two conditions, suggesting that combined 3-D + 2-D signage speeds up decision making without negatively impacting accuracy. One possible explanation is that redundancy of information in the combined condition reduced uncertainty and led to increased speed. However, replication of this result is required because of some limitations inherent to the current study
Does biodiversity protect humans against infectious disease?
No full textControl of human infectious disease has been promoted as a valuable ecosystem service arising from the conservation of biodiversity. There are two commonly discussed mechanisms by which biodiversity loss could increase rates of infectious disease in a landscape. First, loss of competitors or predators could facilitate an increase in the abundance of competent reservoir hosts. Second, biodiversity loss could disproportionately affect non-competent, or less competent reservoir hosts, which would otherwise interfere with pathogen transmission to human populations by, for example, wasting the bites of infected vectors. A negative association between biodiversity and disease risk, sometimes called the "dilution effect hypothesis," has been supported for a few disease agents, suggests an exciting win-win outcome for the environment and society, and has become a pervasive topic in the disease ecology literature. Case studies have been assembled to argue that the dilution effect is general across disease agents. Less touted are examples in which elevated biodiversity does not affect or increases infectious disease risk for pathogens of public health concern. In order to assess the likely generality of the dilution effect, we review the association between biodiversity and public health across a broad variety of human disease agents. Overall, we hypothesize that conditions for the dilution effect are unlikely to be met for most important diseases of humans. Biodiversity probably has little net effect on most human infectious diseases but, when it does have an effect, observation and basic logic suggest that biodiversity will be more likely to increase than to decrease infectious disease risk
Roles and mechanisms of parasitism in aquatic microbial communities
No full textNext Generation Sequencing technologies are increasingly revealing that microbial taxa likely to be parasites or symbionts are probably much more prevalent and diverse than previously thought. Every well studied free-living species has parasites; parasites themselves can be parasitized. As a rule of thumb, there is an estimated 4 parasitic species for any given host, and the better a host is studied the more parasites are known to infect it. Therefore, parasites and other symbionts should represent a very large number of species and may far outnumber those with 'free-living' lifestyles. Paradoxically, free-living hosts, which form the bulk of our knowledge of biology, may be a minority! Microbial parasites typically are characterized by their small size, short generation time, and high rates of reproduction, with simple life cycle occurring generally within a single host. They are diverse and ubiquitous in the environment, comprising viruses, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. This Frontiers Research Topic sought to provide a broad overview but concise, comprehensive, well referenced and up-to-date state of the art for everyone involved with microbial parasites in aquatic microbial ecology
globalbioticinteractions/hechinger2011: prepare for publication to zenodo
No full textDiscover data in Ryan F. Hechinger, Kevin D. Lafferty, John P. McLaughlin, Brian L. Fredensborg, Todd C. Huspeni, Julio Lorda, Parwant K. Sandhu, Jenny C. Shaw, Mark E. Torchin, Kathleen L. Whitney, and Armand M. Kuris 2011. Food webs including parasites, biomass, body sizes, and life stages for three California/Baja California estuaries. Ecology 92:791–791. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/10-1383.1
Teleliteracy in the neighborhood:Seeking an educative pedagogical framework andfinding an encoded praxis of mutual humanization in"Mister Rogers Talks about Learning"
No full textLiteracy education today involves more than the development of reading and writing proficiencies; literacy today also requires the augmentation of skills needed to read many forms of audiovisual text. Finding a conceptual framework for all of the different kinds of media in which people engage today, however, presents a daunting challenge to the field; seeking and finding this conceptual framework seems urgent considering that young people especially tend to draw heavily from popular music, television, film, and internet sites in their struggles to understand themselves and their world. This study focuses specifically on teleliteracy education. While good teleliteracy pedagogical frameworks exist, significant advancements in teleliteracy education seem to be mired in problems. Most notably, members of the field debate the value of engaging young people in controversial television content. Some scholars claim that this engagement "dumbs-down" learning and diminishes life; others claim that it promotes learning and enriches life when the engagement occurs in democratic learning spaces. Another problem is that existing teleliteracy frameworks seem to concentrate on helping learners to become more critically minded but perhaps overly cynical of the television content in which they engage. In an attempt to strengthen existing teleliteracy frameworks, this study presents an analysis of "Mister Rogers Talks about Learning" (1992), a theme of the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood series comprised of five one-half hour programs. In the study, the author critiques Rogers' work through a theoretical framework that merges Dewey's (1938) and Freire's (1993/1970) philosophies of what constitutes an educative experience within a mutually humanizing praxis. The author also employs Guba and Lincoln's (1989) articulation of constructivist inquiry as a theoretical framework for his methodology, drawing from Freire's (1993/1970) ideas on deconstructing a coded situation and Carby's (1993) work on decoding media text that has pedagogic intent and didactic tone. From the analysis, the author suggests that Rogers' educative and humanizing pedagogy provides insights on how young people might be invited to integrate their learning experiences into their everyday lives in order to navigate positively and confidently, but not cynically, the popular media in which they engage more broadly the challenging issues of a growingly complex world
Continuous metadata flows for distributed multimedia
No full textThe practical use of temporal multimedia has increased markedly in recent years as enabling technologies for the distribution and streaming of media have become available. As a part of this trend, hypermedia systems and models have adapted accordingly to incorporate such distributed multimedia for presentation. Structured interpretation of information has long been a fundamental feature of both open hypermedia systems and knowledge systems. Metadata, in its many forms, has become the cornerstone for providing this structured knowledge above and beyond basic data and information. This thesis presents the rationale and requirements for continuous metadata, which supports the metadata accompanying distributed multimedia throughout the lifecycle of streamed media, from generation, through distribution, to presentation. Throughout this process it is the temporal and continuous nature of the metadata which is paramount. A conceptual framework for continuous metadata is proposed to encapsulate these principles and ideas. Continuous metadata and the associated framework enable the development, in particular, of real-time, collaborative, semantically enriched distributed multimedia applications. Experience building one such system using continuous metadata is evaluated within the framework. An ontology is developed for the system to enable the collation, distribution, and presentation of structure aiding navigation of multimedia, and it is shown how continuous metadata utilising the ontology can be distributed using multicas
Pollution can drive marine diseases
No full textHumans pollute the marine environment biologically, chemically, and physically, which can potentially drive or facilitate the emergence, proliferation, or impact of disease. This chapter synthesizes what is known about the effects of biological (e.g., wastewater), chemical (e.g., pharmaceuticals), and physical (e.g., sound/light) pollution on marine disease dynamics. The presence of these pollutants has been found to alter disease prevalence, increase host susceptibility to infection, and alter the spread and host range of different diseases. Despite the importance of the marine environment as a primary food source for humans, many complexities linking disease ecology and pollution are yet to be explored. Future investigation of these connections would benefit from an integrated approach using experimental, environmental, molecular, and pathological methods
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