2,177 research outputs found
Predicting Students’ Financial Knowledge from Attitude towards Finance
Attitude towards finance and financial attitude are very different constructs. Despite the popularity of the latter, it has recently been subject to criticism. Following Di Martino & Zan (2010), the former explicitly considers emotions and beliefs (about self and finance) and the mutual relationship between them. At present, there is a paucity of evidence on how ‘attitude toward finance’ may impact financial knowledge: this is a new area of inquiry in academic literature. Research is at a preliminary stage, although the jigsaw of financial literacy is receiving greater attention worldwide. This study measures individual attitudes towards finance and determines the effects of this profile on financial knowledge level. It uses about 500 economics students in Italy as sample respondents. It is based on a structured questionnaire survey as a data collection method. The data is analysed using Structural Equation Modeling. A significant positive correlation is found between financial knowledge and attitude toward finance. The direction of causality is found to be from attitude toward finance to financial knowledge, and this finding suggests that attitude toward finance can play an important role in financial education. Among the various dimensions of attitude toward finance, emotional disposition towards finance, and secondly, the self-confidence level, are the most influential factors on economic students’ financial knowledge level. Gender is also found to be closely correlated to both financial knowledge and attitude toward finance. Findings mainly suggest the importance of attitude toward finance on financial knowledge. For policymakers, the results of this study could indicate new ways of solving the financial illiteracy problem
Synthetic Training Set Generation using Text-To-Audio Models for Environmental Sound Classification
In recent years, text-to-audio models have revolutionized the field of automatic audio generation. This paper investigates their application in generating synthetic datasets for training data-driven models. Specifically, this study analyzes the performance of two environmental sound classification systems trained with data generated from text-to-audio models. We considered three scenarios: a) augmenting the training dataset with data generated by text-to-audio models; b) using a mixed training dataset combining real and synthetic text-driven generated data; and c) using a training dataset composed entirely of synthetic audio. In all cases, the performance of the classification models was tested on real data. Results indicate that text-to-audio models are effective for dataset augmentation, with consistent performance when replacing a subset of the recorded dataset. However, the performance of the audio recognition models drops when relying entirely on generated audio
Financial competence and the role of non-cognitive factors
This study assesses students’ opinions towards finance, their financial self-confidence and their emotional disposition towards finance – collectively referred to as the attitude towards finance. Data have been collected using a structured questionnaire and have been analyzed with structural equation modelling. Findings show that there is a strong relationship between attitude towards finance and students’ financial competence. The results also suggest that attitude do affect financial knowledge and thus a better attitude toward finance may increase students’ financial knowledge. This result emphasizes the need to redefine financial education practices to include an initial diagnosis and an eventual restoration of learners’ attitude towards finance, to improve and optimize their long-run financial education process
"The love that made hell, paradise." Ouida re-writing the Paolo and Francesca theme in Held in Bondage
The bestselling Victorian author Ouida reveals in her novels, and, in particular, Held in Bondage, an extraordinary knowledge od Dante, by using characters and themes from the Commedia. The Paolo and Francesca theme actually constitutes part of the plot of the novel and is to be found in many of her other works, short stories and non-fiction writing
HERStory Makers 2023: Francesca Fotheringham
Francesca Fotheringham is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Edinburgh studying educational psychology with a focus on neurodiversity. She took part in HERStory Makers 2023.What is HERStory Makers?HERStory Makers is a social media competition for female-identifying early career researchers to share their research, their career journeys, and to inspire the next generation. Winners are selected by public vote. HERStory Makers is also part of EXPLORATHON, Scotland's contribution to European Researchers' Night.In 2022-23, EXPLORATHON Francescasupported by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/X020762/1].Author contributions to contentFrancesca conceived, planned, and recorded the video content. Kirsty Ross edited the video content to insert HERStory Maker credits, added subtitles, and reduce video length to below Twitter/X limit of 2 mins and 20 secs.</p
Medicina illuminata. La Biblioteca Lancisiana di Roma
L'articolo presenta i codici miniati della Biblioteca Lancisiana di Roma. La prima parte, del coautore, è dedicata alla Biblioteca. La seconda parte, di F. Manzari, tratta dei manoscritti miniati, costituiti da due codici con le opere di Avicenna e dal Liber fraternitatis della Confraternita dell'Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia a Roma.The article introduces the illuminated manuscripts of the Biblioteca Lancisiana in Rome. The first part of the article, by the co-author, is dedicated to the Library. The second part, by Francesca Manzari, illustrates the manuscipts; these are two manuscripts with the works of Avicenna and the Liber fraternitatis of the Confraternity of the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome
X-ray analysis of the accreting supermassive black hole in the radio galaxy PKS 2251+11
We investigate the dichotomy between jetted and non-jetted Active Galactic
Nuclei (AGNs), focusing on the fundamental differences of these two classes in
the accretion physics onto the central supermassive black hole (SMBH). Our aim
is to study and constrain the structure, kinematics and physical state of the
nuclear environment in the Broad Line Radio Galaxy (BLRG) PKS 2251+11. The high
X-ray luminosity and the relative proximity make such AGN an ideal candidate
for a detailed analysis of the accretion regions in radio galaxies. We
performed a spectral and timing analysis of a 64 ks observation of PKS
2251+11 in the X-ray band with XMM-Newton. We modeled the spectrum considering
an absorbed power law superimposed to a reflection component. We performed a
time-resolved spectral analysis to search for variability of the X-ray flux and
of the individual spectral components. We found that the power law has a photon
index , absorbed by an ionized partial covering medium with
a column density cm, a ionization
parameter erg s cm and a covering factor
. Considering a density of the absorber typical of the Broad Line
Region (BLR), its distance from the central SMBH is of the order of
pc. An Fe K emission line is found at 6.4 keV, whose intensity shows
variability on time scales of hours. We derived that the reflecting material is
located at a distance , where is the Schwarzschild
radius. Concerning the X-ray properties, we found that PKS 2251+11 does not
differ significantly from the non-jetted AGNs, confirming the validity of the
unified model in describing the inner regions around the central SMBH, but the
lack of information regarding the state of the very innermost disk and SMBH
spin still leave unconstrained the origin of the jet
A DH-Leavened Musicological Toolbox
Graduate-level training in music research methodologies tends to ignore digital humanities work and overlook the use of digital tools created in support of new forms of reading. Training instead focuses on source material in the student’s area of interest. This material includes secondary and primary (archival) resources, as well as information resources, such as: monuments of music and critical editions; indexes; bibliographies and thematic catalogs; dictionaries and encyclopedias; digital libraries of scores or editions; and databases of period-specific newspapers or journals. Graduate students taking research methods courses already have a toolbox built from their experiences as musicians and students of music, including the ability to read and interpret music notation, to understand theoretical and analytical concepts in music, as well as a command of music history, including the canon of musical works.
Digital humanities has become a major area of academic endeavor at the “interface of technological development, epistemological change and methodological concerns." An important characteristic of digital humanities research has been its interdisciplinarity. We argue that graduate training in musicology needs to include coverage of methodologies applied by digital humanists in support of new forms of reading, not only to broaden the canon of research topics in musicology, but also to build common ground with researchers of other disciplines. We propose that librarians are well positioned to provide this expertise and training
A Twitter Case Study for Assessing Digital Sound
Academic and cultural heritage institutions around the world have made measurable strides in the development of digital sound archives oriented towards research and access, but their impact on scholarship and society has been little studied. Traditionally, impact has been measured by citations; yet these are problematic metrics for non-traditional outputs like sound recordings. Social media data provide a promising avenue of investigation for measuring scholarly as well as societal impact. Twitter in particular has been shown to provide a high number of references for cultural and research outputs in all disciplines. This study analyzes Twitter references pertaining to the collections of five digital sound archives: British Library Sounds, Europeana Sounds, the Internet Archive Audio Archive, PennSound and UbuWeb. Using text analysis methods to identify high frequency events and trends, and labeling them with a rubric designed for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources, this study provides preliminary insights on user values as they relate to digital sound collections. Despite the limitations of using social media data, the evidence gathered in this case study characterizes aspects of the use of digital sound collections, and may point to future priorities for the digital preservation of sound.Peer reviewe
Against the Grain: Reading for the Challenges of Collaborative DH Pedagogy
This article provides a critical review of the past five years of literature in digital humanities pedagogy and faculty-librarian collaboration, commingled with reflections on personal practice, which extend findings from the literature. Faculty-librarian partnerships in DH pedagogy reflect a rapidly evolving area of engagement calling for expertise in teaching, subject knowledge, scholarly communication, digital technologies, and DH research methodologies. Although there is a rapidly expanding body of literature on these partnerships, the challenges of the work tend to be minimized. This article expands upon commonly encountered difficulties, and it points to potential solutions and best practices.Peer reviewe
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