1,720,960 research outputs found
Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: history and archaeology between the sixth and eighth centuries
No full textCyprus was a thriving and densely populated late antique province. Contrary to what used to be thought, the Arab raids of the mid-seventh century did not abruptly bring the island’s prosperity to an end. Recent research instead highlights long-lasting continuity in both urban and rural contexts. This volume brings together historians and archaeologists working on diverse aspects of Cyprus between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss topics as varied as rural prosperity, urban endurance, artisanal production, civic and private religion and maritime connectivity. The role of the imperial administration and of the Church is touched upon in several contributions. Other articles place Cyprus back into its wider Mediterranean context. Together, they produce a comprehensive impression of the quality of life on the island in the long late antiquity
Exploring the reasons for aberrant response patterns in classroom maths tests
Get PDFThis study has focused on the investigation of the reasons for aberrant response patterns in classroom maths tests. Data were collected from high schools in Cyprus over two academic years. The assessment instruments used included: three Maths Tests, a Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI) and a shorter version of it, an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) scale and a Maths Self-Esteem Scale. Results showed no associations between any of the factors investigated and misfit when tests with polytomous items were used. Factors investigated included: student and teacher gender, item order, different schools, different teachers, ability, test anxiety, ADHD, maths self-esteem, motivation, language competency, interest in maths, private tuition in maths, study time and class revision. This finding has led to the investigation whether misfit is an inherent characteristic of students and the conclusion that it is not. The only factors that showed some association with misfit were ability (p = 0.022), the interaction of gender with test anxiety (p = 0.018) and different teachers (p = 0.027), and the first two were only for the test containing 12 (out of 16) dichotomous items. Further investigation of these factors is suggested. Analyses of interviews of 21 misfitting students showed that the main reason given for unexpected responses among high ability students was, as expressed by them, carelessness and among low scorers prior knowledge and to a lesser degree cheating and special preference. The two mean square statistics, infit and outfit were also investigated, and an explanation is given for why high infit is considered more of a threat to measurement than high outfit. The researcher finally argues that students with misfitting patterns with high outfit values should not be considered as invalidly measured without further investigation. Similarly, items with high outfit should not be considered as malfunctioning and removed without further investigatio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Coefficient Alpha
No full textHeavy reliance on Cronbach’s alpha has been standard practice in many validation studies. However, there seem to be two misconceptions about the interpretation of alpha. First, alpha is mistakenly considered as an indication of unidimensionality and second, that the higher the value of alpha the better. The aim of this study is to clarify these misconceptions with the use of real data from the educational setting. Results showed that high alpha values can be obtained in multidimensional scales or tests given a sufficient number of items. Therefore, alpha cannot be an indication of unidimensionality. At the same time, after a certain point, higher values of alpha do not necessarily mean higher reliability and better quality scales or tests. In fact very high values of alpha could be an indication of lengthy scales, parallel items or a narrow coverage of the construct under consideration. Researchers are advised to apply caution when reporting alpha
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
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