481 research outputs found
Rethinking the EU Budget: Three Unavoidable Reforms. CEPS Paperbacks. November 2007
No full textThis study consider the main weaknesses of the EU’s financial framework and what needs to be done to reinforce the legitimacy and added value of the EU’s actions. The author, an official at the European Court of Auditors, argues that the review of the EU budget represents an opportunity to put in place three unavoidable reforms: a revenue system that, in whatever form, is applicable to all member states in the same way; the funding of policies with verifiable objectives and sufficient resources, making the EU’s action meaningful and visible; and a clear identification of responsibilities as to the use of taxpayers’ money
Evoking the Possibility of Presence:Textual and Ideological Effects of Linguistic Negation in Written Discourse
No full textThis thesis explores the textual and ideological effects of linguistic negation in written texts. It argues that when language users process negation, understanding its use in context is as much about the possibility of presence as it is about the actuality of absence. This gives rise to a variety of effects in texts from contributing to the construction of fictional characters to potentially influencing readers’/hearers’ view of the world they inhabit. This thesis brings together research on the theoretical aspects of how negation works to present a new approach to linguistic negation in written discourse. It also demonstrates how this approach can be applied in the analysis of the conceptual practice of negating. The approach presented is made up of three main elements; negation is presuppositional, is realised through a wide variety of linguistic forms beyond the morphosyntactic core forms (not, no, never, none, un-, in-, and so on) and includes semantic and pragmatically implied forms. These two elements combine to give rise to implied meaning in context. Having outlined this approach to negation, it is then applied in the analysis of literary and non-literary texts to explain the textual and ideological effects that arise from its use
Improving classification in protein structure databases using text mining
No full textBackground: The classification of protein domains in the CATH resource is primarily based on structural comparisons, sequence similarity and manual analysis. One of the main bottlenecks in the processing of new entries is the evaluation of 'borderline' cases by human curators with reference to the literature, and better tools for helping both expert and non-expert users quickly identify relevant functional information from text are urgently needed. A text based method for protein classification is presented, which complements the existing sequence and structure-based approaches, especially in cases exhibiting low similarity to existing members and requiring manual intervention. The method is based on the assumption that textual similarity between sets of documents relating to proteins reflects biological function similarities and can be exploited to make classification decisions.Results: An optimal strategy for the text comparisons was identified by using an established gold standard enzyme dataset. Filtering of the abstracts using a machine learning approach to discriminate sentences containing functional, structural and classification information that are relevant to the protein classification task improved performance. Testing this classification scheme on a dataset of 'borderline' protein domains that lack significant sequence or structure similarity to classified proteins showed that although, as expected, the structural similarity classifiers perform better on average, there is a significant benefit in incorporating text similarity in logistic regression models, indicating significant orthogonality in this additional information. Coverage was significantly increased especially at low error rates, which is important for routine classification tasks: 15.3% for the combined structure and text classifier compared to 10% for the structural classifier alone, at 10(-3) error rate. Finally when only the highest scoring predictions were used to infer classification, an extra 4.2% of correct decisions were made by the combined classifier.Conclusion: We have described a simple text based method to classify protein domains that demonstrates an improvement over existing methods. The method is unique in incorporating structural and text based classifiers directly and is particularly useful in cases where inconclusive evidence from sequence or structure similarity requires laborious manual classification
The development of English-language hymnody and its use in worship : 1960-1995.
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN039276 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Botanising in Linnaean Britain : a study of Upper Teesdale in northern England.
No full textSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN017259 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
The United Nations international multidisciplinary development advisory teams and the United Nations multinational operational center programmes
No full textThe document discusses the United Nations International Multidisciplinary Development Advisory Teams (UNDATs) and the United Nations Multinational Operational Centers (MOCs) programs, established to assist developing countries in development planning, public administration, and management. The UNDATs, initially set up in the early 1970s, support and supplement the work of UN technical cooperation experts, focusing on multinational projects. Three UNDATs were established in Africa (Yaoundé, Niamey, and Lusaka), each serving specific regions and working closely with intergovernmental organizations. The document outlines their activities, including studies and projects in transport, agriculture, industry, and manpower development. It also mentions financial challenges and recommendations for the program's continuation, including the creation of new teams and their integration with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)
Visualizing Set Relations and Cardinalities Using Venn and Euler Diagrams
No full textIn medicine, genetics, criminology and various other areas, Venn and Euler diagrams are used to visualize data set relations and their cardinalities. The data sets are represented by closed curves and the data set relationships are depicted by the overlaps between these curves. Both the sets and their intersections are easily visible as the closed curves are preattentively processed and form common regions that have a strong perceptual grouping effect. Besides set relations such as intersection, containment and disjointness, the cardinality of the sets and their intersections can also be depicted in the same diagram (referred to as area-proportional) through the size of the curves and their overlaps. Size is a preattentive feature and so similarities, differences and trends are easily identified. Thus, such diagrams facilitate data analysis and reasoning about the sets. However, drawing these diagrams manually is difficult, often impossible, and current automatic drawing methods do not always produce appropriate diagrams.
This dissertation presents novel automatic drawing methods for different types of Euler diagrams and a user study of how such diagrams can help probabilistic judgement. The main drawing algorithms are: eulerForce, which uses a force-directed approach to lay out Euler diagrams; eulerAPE, which draws area-proportional Venn diagrams with ellipses. The user study evaluated the effectiveness of area- proportional Euler diagrams, glyph representations, Euler diagrams with glyphs and text+visualization formats for Bayesian reasoning, and a method eulerGlyphs was devised to automatically and accurately draw the assessed visualizations for any Bayesian problem. Additionally, analytic algorithms that instantaneously compute the overlapping areas of three general intersecting ellipses are provided, together with an evaluation of the effectiveness of ellipses in drawing accurate area-proportional Venn diagrams for 3-set data and the characteristics of the data that can be depicted accurately with ellipses
Three replicable models of internationalized curricula
No full textThis document outlines the operational strategy of internationalization within UNITA. On one hand,
a set of international learning activities is proposed to the students of the alliance, supporting the
personalization of their study paths. This is promoted thanks to the use of the UNITA Diploma
Supplement. On the other hand, a strategy to massively increase the institutional
internationalization of curricula is initiated: matching events are organized, bringing together
directors of department or faculties, and vice-rectors in Education. In parallel to the workshop
sessions, models of internationalized curricula are presented. The description of the actions in the
continuity of the current efforts conclude the report with some perspectives.UNITA Grant number 10100408
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