Different Sources Of Information Research Articles

Impact of Information Sources on Promoting Tourism in a Rural Region: The Case of the Roman Villa of Noheda

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the tools provided by the internet (social networks, websites, etc.) and traditional media (television, newspapers, word of mouth, etc.) in terms of their impact on the promotion of a tourism resource in a rural area: the Roman villa of Noheda (Cuenca). Both of the aforementioned sources of information play a relevant role in promoting such archaeological destinations and influencing tourists’ decision-making when planning their visit. The literature suggests that social networks as well as other electronic channels can attract large numbers of tourists; however, this has not happened in the case of the archaeological site under study. It has become known through coverage in more traditional media such as television and the national and international press. Knowledge of the use of internet tools to promote these heritage sites is still very limited; thus, this study collected information through a questionnaire on the different sources of information (traditional and online) that tourists used when deciding to visit this site. An ANOVA analysis has been used to determine the relationship between the different sources of information and the place of residence and between said information sources and the overnight stays near Noheda. The results point to strategies that can be developed to promote these cultural resources in order to achieve the economic development of rural regions such as the Alcarria of Cuenca.

Improved Tolerance Limits by Combining Analytical and Experimental Data: An Information Integration Methodology

We propose a coherent methodology for integrating different sources of information on a response variable of interest, in order to accurately predict percentiles of its distribution. Under the assumption that one of the sources is more reliable than the other(s), the approach combines factors formed from the data into an additive linear regression model. Quantile regression, designed for quantifying the goodness of fit precisely at a desired quantile, is used as the optimality criterion in model-fitting. Asymptotic confidence interval construction methods for the percentiles are adopted to compute statistical tolerance limits for the response. The approach is demonstrated on a materials science case study that pools together information on failure load from physical tests and computer model predictions. A small simulation study assesses the precision of the inferences. The methodology gives plausible percentile estimates. Resulting tolerance limits are close to nominal coverage probability levels.

Legal Information Needs of Lawyers of Tehran City

Objective: Access to the right legal information at the right time is necessary for the community and for lawyers. The use of information by lawyers and attorneys is strongly influenced by their information needs. These requirements determine the type of information needed, where the information can be found, and how to access it. Lawyers use a variety of methods to access information. Legal information is the most important source for the law and legal professions, and without the right legal information, these professions do not perform well. Methodology: The purpose of this study was to determine the legal information needs of Tehran's lawyers. Legal information needs are met through the use of information resources and formal or semi-formal channels of information and services offered by libraries and information centers. This research is a survey. The statistical population includes all lawyers in Tehran whose names are registered with the Center for Justice Lawyers. From a total of 8000 statistical population, 367 individuals were selected using Krejcie and Morgan's table by random sampling. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of two sections: general information and special information. In order to improve the validity of the research instrument, previously tested and validated questions asked in the questionnaires of previous studies conducted in the field of information needs were used in a similar context; and Cronbach's alpha was used to determine the reliability of the questionnaire. Assessment and selection of sources and barriers to the information process were over 0.70 and acceptable. Data were analyzed using the Friedman Ranking Test and Bivariate Chi-square test in the SPSS software version 25. Findings: The results indicated that the most important reasons for seeking information for lawyers were promoting specialized knowledge, and the most important sources for meeting the legal information needs of legal entities, were attending law courses and scientific journal articles. The most important problems for lawyers were access to updated information, dissemination of legal information in different sources, the outdated nature of many sources, and the inadequate sources of law. Conclusion: The most important reason for searching information was to update specialized knowledge and then write a research paper, which shows the scientific attitude of the lawyers towards their specialized field. Books (both printed and electronic) and scientific journals were the most important information sources for meeting the information needs of lawyers. Among informal sources, the library of a legal organization or institution was the most important source of informal acquisition of information; and the Google search engine was the most common search engine used by lawyers. Also, going to the library and visiting the new library resources were the most important ways to update information after reading specialized publications. The suggestions of the study are as follows: (i) the fact that many people today use the Internet to find answers to their questions, lawyers are not an exception. One way to help them is to make legal online databases accessible and expandable; (ii) due to the diffusion of legal information in different sources, the legality of many legal information sources, and the inadequate legal information sources, one of the most important problems for lawyers in accessing information is the need to take appropriate measures; (iii) since legal libraries are one of the places of interest for lawyers to access the information, libraries or legal organizations should select law librarians as managers for courthouse libraries/court law libraries; and (iv) the findings showed that the level of French and English language of lawyers was poor.

Feature-based multi-criteria recommendation system using a weighted approach with ranking correlation

With the increase of online businesses, recommendation algorithms are being researched a lot to facilitate the process of using the existing information. Such multi-criteria recommendation (MCRS) helps a lot the end-users to attain the required results of interest having different selective criteria – such as combinations of implicit and explicit interest indicators in the form of ranking or rankings on different matched dimensions. Current approaches typically use label correlation, by assuming that the label correlations are shared by all objects. In real-world tasks, however, different sources of information have different features. Recommendation systems are more effective if being used for making a recommendation using multiple criteria of decisions by using the correlation between the features and items content (content-based approach) or finding a similar user rating to get targeted results (Collaborative filtering). To combine these two filterings in the multicriteria model, we proposed a features-based fb-knn multi-criteria hybrid recommendation algorithm approach for getting the recommendation of the items by using multicriteria features of items and integrating those with the correlated items found in similar datasets. Ranks were assigned to each decision and then weights were computed for each decision by using the standard deviation of items to get the nearest result. For evaluation, we tested the proposed algorithm on different datasets having multiple features of information. The results demonstrate that proposed fb-knn is efficient in different types of datasets.

Hospital staff perspectives: medication reconciliation responsibility and barriers at a tertiary teaching hospital in Jordan

Abstract Objectives To explore hospital staff perspective on the responsibility and barriers to medicine reconciliation (MedRec) at a leading internationally renowned teaching hospital in Jordan. Methods A cross-sectional study using a self-completed questionnaire was conducted at Jordan University Hospital (JUH). The target sample was members of the health team caring for patients across various locations and settings. A convenient sample of physicians, pharmacists and nurses was targeted. Those were approached at various days, shifts, locations to scop various views and practices across JUH. Key findings Two hundred questionnaires were included in the analysis, of which 41 (20.5%) completed by physicians, 23 (11.5%) by pharmacists and 136 (68.0%) by nurses. For most steps, physicians were seen as the prim responsible health providers. Nurse perceived their role to come second. Whilst pharmacists perceived limited or no role of nurses in a number of steps. The main barriers reported are heavy workload 158 (79%), followed by lack of time 152 (76%) and communication between health care providers 140 (70%). Pharmacists highlighted lack of knowledge, clarity and training as leading barriers too. Conclusions Physicians are perceived as the leading provider responsible for all MedRec steps. MedRec as a process involve overlapping functions with various skill-based steps. A number of steps allocated potentially to nurses or pharmacists, particularly comparing different sources of information, constructing medication lists or written summaries upon discharge. Barriers to MedRec might be overcome by interdisciplinary discussions and mapping MedRec process clearly.

Virtual laboratories, an educational resource as a strategy for quality education

Virtual laboratories are considered the simulation of a real laboratory, where the behavior of a certain is studied using mathematical models, and although it does not interact physically with the processes or systems, experimentation with simulated models it is comparable to reality. The objective is to recognize the benefits that virtual laboratories offer the student, as a tool in problem solving, linking theory with practice, and developing teamwork, all within distance learning. Therefore, a compilation of different sources of information regarding virtual laboratories was made, where it is stated that the interviewees who make use of this tool for their learning obtained a favorable response by identifying that they develop skills that prepare them for their experimental participation in a future. Therefore, it is considered a strategy for quality teaching.

Of pathogens and party lines: Social conservatism positively associates with COVID-19 precautions among U.S. Democrats but not Republicans.

Social liberals tend to be less pathogen-avoidant than social conservatives, a pattern consistent with a model wherein ideological differences stem from differences in threat reactivity. Here we investigate if and how individual responses to a shared threat reflect those patterns of ideological difference. In seeming contradiction to the general association between social conservatism and pathogen avoidance, the more socially conservative political party in the United States has more consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This puzzle offers an opportunity to examine the contributions of multiple factors to disease avoidance. We investigated the relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautionary behavior in light of the partisan landscape of the United States. We explored whether consumption of, and attitudes toward, different sources of information, as well as differential evaluation of various threats caused by the pandemic-such as direct health costs versus indirect harms to the economy and individual liberties-shape partisan differences in responses to the pandemic in ways that overwhelm the contributions of social conservatism. In two pre-registered studies, socially conservative attitudes correlate with self-reported COVID-19 prophylactic behaviors, but only among Democrats. Reflecting larger societal divisions, among Republicans and Independents, the absence of a positive relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautions appears driven by lower trust in scientists, lower trust in liberal and moderate sources, lesser consumption of liberal news media, and greater economic conservatism.

СТАВЛЕННЯ СТУДЕНТІВ ДО ВИВЧЕННЯ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ ТА КРИТИЧНОГО ЧИТАННЯ ЯК СКЛАДНИКА ЧИТАЦЬКОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ

The article is devoted to the research of students’ attitude towards learning English and critical reading as the reading competence component. The aim of this study is to define the students’ motives and attitude to learning English as well as to reading and completing tasks to the texts. The tasks of this paper are: 1) to carry out the constating experiment to find out the motives to learning English; 2) to research their reading culture of different sources of information; 3) to establish the students’ attitude towards reading tasks and critical reading tasks in particular. 42 Choreography students took part in the constating stage of an experimental study which included two questionnaires in writing and an oral interview. The first questionnaire aimed at defining the students’ attitude towards learning English and contained 13 items to mark the agreement with. The results of the questionnaire revealed the prevalence of instrumental motives over the integrative ones with communication with foreigners, travel and career being the most significant ones. Studying the English literature appeared to be the least valuable motive for students. The second questionnaire on frequency of reading different sources of information aimed at showing the students’ reading experience. The results demonstrated low frequency of reading books and the lack of interest in reading in general with the Internet sources having the highest mention and newspapers the lowest. The following interview carried out to find out the commonest and the most favorite reading tasks the students had to deal with at the English lessons revealed that they chose defining true/false statements and answering fact questions which do not usually require analytical skills. Expressing standpoints and opinion tasks were mentioned as the least favorite ones. The main reasons why the students found them complicated were stated as insufficient level of command of English vocabulary, the lack of critical reading skills and questioning the reliability of information. Thus, the study showed that the students have poor experience in dealing with critical reading tasks which leads to the lack of curiosity while reading texts. Designing of a foreign texts critical reading training course to develop students’ general reading competence is considered to be perspective for the following research.

Tracking short-term seasonally flooded areas to understand the dynamics of the Coatzacoalcos River in Veracruz, Mexico

The monitoring of rivers based on remote sensing data provides an opportunity for the observation of the natural dynamics of water and flood conditions. Taking advantage of the availability of radar data, we describe a methodology used to detect the river’s water surface flooding patterns and the size of floods using observations from Sentinel-1 imagery. With the proposed methodology, characteristics of the river’s normal average riverbed surface are determined, as well as the flood footprint. As a case study, it shows the annual and interannual water variability at the lower Coatzacoalcos Basin in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. This site was chosen after considering the evidence of seasonal flooding and the changes that happened during the 2015 to 2017 period. Our paper details the results on surface changes during this time period. The results on water surface cover have been validated through different sources of information to confirm the ability to differentiate flood areas and know the maximum flood extensions. An agreement above 92% is estimated to be reached with the use of the evaluated maps of binary water/no-water. Recurrent flood areas were detected where water remained during one or several weeks during the month of October, both in 2015 and 2017. Finally, a change in the extent of water maps in the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals is achieved with the integration of historical data over time and space of the natural behavior of the rivers in the case study.

Source discernment – the root of all information literacy?

Is source discernment at the root of all information literacy? In today’s media landscape, finding information is easy. Finding information that is scientifically correct and trustworthy is much more difficult. An added problem for students today is that all this available information come in similar formats. When all information is presented as a pdf on your screen, how do you know what you ́re reading? How is a first year student with no previous academic experience really supposed to discern between a scholarly article, a book chapter, a conference article, a white paper, a popular science article, a scientific report and a doctoral thesis? And yet the ability to do so is fundamental for the information evaluation process. If you are not sure what you are reading, how can you evaluate the quality of the information? To ease our students’way into academic writing we now start our information literacy teaching with identifying different sources of information. Reference writing and information searching are then taught from this angle. Student assignments and feedback from teachers show that this seems to improve the quality of the sources the students use in their work as well as their ability to write correct references. We would like to discuss this with colleagues from other universities with similar or other experiences. The questions we would like to focus on are: How a first year student with no previous academic experience is really supposed to discern between different types of scholarly and non-scholarly information materials and how we as library instructors can help our students with this? What are the experience of other librarians and are there any good examples of strategies or classroom exercises?

Economic Downturns and the Informativeness of Management Earnings Forecasts

ABSTRACTEconomic downturns create uncertainty about a firm's operations and make it disproportionately harder for outside market participants to assess the firm's prospects. We posit that in this environment, management earnings forecasts will be more informative to investors and analysts. Consistent with this prediction, we find larger stock price reactions and analyst forecast revisions to news in management forecasts during downturns. Holding the amount of news in forecasts constant, stock price reactions to management forecasts are also greater than those to analyst forecasts. We also find that relative to analyst forecasts, management forecast accuracy increases during downturns, suggesting that investors justifiably assess management forecasts as more informative. Overall, we document that macroeconomic conditions create time‐series variation in the informativeness of different sources of information to outside market participants.

Women in the teaching union command: gender and power relations

The present text is a brief synthesis of the doctoral research, still in progress. The general objective of the research is to analyze the trajectories of female teaching union leaders who occupy or have occupied positions of female presidents in the basic education teaching unions, highlighting the relations of gender and power and the construction of identities. Consistent with the object of this study, the historical-dialectical materialist method was chosen with the choice of a qualitative approach of the case study type by consulting different sources of information: review of the relevant literature; semi-structured interviews with the leaders of the teaching unions. To analyze the data collected, we opted for content analysis. The preliminary results of the research inform that, in Brazil, women are still minorities in the presidential seats in the teaching unions.

Building a transnational biodiversity geo-database of the protected areas in the Adriatic-Ionian Macro-Region: approaches and results from the IMPRECO Project.

BackgroundThe main objective of the project Common strategies and best practices to IMprove the transnational PRotection of ECOsystem integrity and services - IMPRECO is to enhance the safeguarding of ecosystems and ecosystem services. Additionally, the aim of this project is to tackle their environmental vulnerability by strengthening the potential of the Protected Areas in biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services conservation. This is expected to be addressed by maintaining it through their transnational networking located in the European Adriatic-Ionian Macro-Region.New informationThe aim of this research is: 1) to characterise the habitats and ecosystems involved in the coastal-marine protected areas considered; 2) to set a biodiversity baseline; 3) to understand what current ecosystems’ conditions are; 4) to build up a transnational biomonitoring programme of target species and habitats and 5) to assess their response to pilot actions. To do so, a transnational inventory of species, habitats, ecosystems and ecosystem services was established, starting with the seven coastal-marine protected areas involved in the project. Data collection was carried out using different sources of information: scientific literature, officially available data from NATURA 2000 Standard Data Forms, checklists from local biomonitoring programmes, personal observations and citizen science, historical maps and data from new in-field analyses. Data were filled in the transnational biodiversity geo-databases according to the NATURA 2000 standards about habitat features, species protection level and species features. The presence of alien species (non-indigenous species, NIS) was also acknowledged and references about data collection were provided in the databases according to the Darwin Core standards.

FORMATION OF INFORMATION AND DIGITAL COMPETENCE OF FUTURE PRIMARY TEACHERS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

The article considers the problem of formation of information and digital competence of future primary school teachers; the essence of the concept of «information and digital competence» is revealed, its components are defined. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the theoretical foundations and practical possibilities of forming information and digital competence of future primary school teachers in higher education institutions. It was found that a contemporary primary school teacher should navigate in the information space, receive information and operate it in accordance with their own needs and requirements of professional activity (create text documents, tables, pictures, diagrams, presentations; use Internet technologies, local networks, databases develop their own electronic products (electronic lesson development; electronic textbooks, training programs, demonstration material); must acquire new knowledge and skills that will help to work comfortably and be competitive in the educational space of the information society. At the stage of theoretical research the curricula of training specialists in the field of knowledge 01 Education / Pedagogy in the specialty 013 Primary Education of Precarpathian National University named after Vasyl Stafanyk are analyzed. The content of academic disciplines, which occupy a paramount place in the formation of information and digital competence, is substantiated. It is concluded that as a result of the formed information and digital competence future teachers will be able to work with computers and multimedia technologies, use different sources of information, use new information technologies and software that will make the educational process flexible, mobile, differentiated and individual.

A strategy to impute age at onset of a particular condition from external sources.

A key hypothesis in epidemiological studies is that time to disease exposure provides relevant information to be considered in statistical models. However, the initiation time of a particular condition is usually unknown. Therefore, we developed a multiple imputation methodology for the age at onset of a particular condition, which is supported by incidence data from different sources of information. We introduced and illustrated such a methodology using simulated data in order to examine the performance of our proposal. Then, we analyzed the association of gallstones and fatty liver disease in the Maule Cohort, a Chilean study of chronic diseases, using participants' risk factors and six sources of information for the imputation of the age-occurrence of gallstones. Simulated studies showed that an increase in the proportion of imputed data does not affect the quality of the estimated coefficients associated with fully observed variables, while the imputed variable slowly reduces its effect. For the Chilean study, the categorized exposure time to gallstones is a significant variable, in which participants who had short and long exposure have, respectively, 26.2% and 29.1% higher chance of getting a fatty liver disease than non-exposed ones. In conclusion, our multiple imputation approach proved to be quite robust both in the linear/logistic regression simulation studies and in the real application, showing the great potential of this methodology.

Comparing Hydric Erosion Soil Loss Models in Rainy Mountainous and Dry Flat Regions in Portugal

Soil erosion is a severe and complex issue in the agriculture area. The main objective of this study was to assess the soil loss in two regions, testing different methodologies and combining different factors of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) based on Geographical Information Systems (GIS). To provide the methodologies to other users, a GIS open-source application was developed. The RUSLE equation was applied with the variation of some factors that compose it, namely the slope length and slope steepness (LS) factor and practices factor (P), but also with the use of different sources of information. Eight different erosion models (M1 to M8) were applied to the two regions with different ecological conditions: Montalegre (rainy-mountainous) and Alentejo (dry-flat), both in Portugal, to compare them and to evaluate the soil loss for 3 potential erosion levels: 0–25, 25–50 and >50 ton/ha·year. Regarding the methodologies, in both regions the behavior is similar, indicating that the M5 and M6 methodologies can be more conservative than the others (M1, M2, M3, M4 and M8), which present very consistent values in all classes of soil loss and for both regions. All methodologies were implemented in a GIS application, which is free and available under QGIS software.

The Effects of Financial Literacy on Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship contributes to the economic well-being of every country. Specifically, the level of individual entrepreneurship is crucial in the process of developing and building economic potential, especially in Central European countries. Among the several factors impacting entrepreneurship, the ability to access the necessary external sources of financing need to be considered crucial. The financial literacy of the entrepreneur plays a crucial role in the relationship between the lender and the borrower. In this paper, we investigate the effects of financial literacy on sustainable entrepreneurship. We based our analysis on the framework proposed by the World Economic Forum. We present an OLS model that adopts entrepreneurship, financial literacy and macroeconomic variables. The analysis is carried out on individual and national data from different sources of information (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, World Bank, and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The results show a positive and statistically significant relationship between financial literacy and sustainable entrepreneurial activity. This evidence supports the increasing number of financial education initiatives and the inclusion of topics related to economic and financial culture in school education systems. We identify internationally valid policy implications. In the context of the growth strategies of Central European countries, financial literacy takes on even greater importance. The introduction of financial education in the national curricula could strengthen entrepreneurial skills and accelerate the inclusive growth process across Europe.

Combination in the theory of evidence via a new measurement of the conflict between evidences

The Belief Function theory (BFT) has been frequently used to combine or aggregate different sources of information. In the BFT, a lot of rules to combine the available pieces of evidence have been proposed. The first one of them was Dempster’s rule of combination (DRC). It presents several drawbacks principally motivated by the normalization process used via a measure of conflict-based-combination between two pieces of evidence. This measure must be differentiated from conflict as an uncertainty-based-information measure of a piece of evidence in BFT. Many combination rules have been developed to solve the drawbacks that DRC presents, but each of them also has non-desirable behaviors in certain situations. In this work, we propose a set of mathematical properties that must be satisfied by every combination rule in BFT; we analyze some of the most known combination rules proposed in the literature, taking into account properties and behaviors. On the other hand, in this research, we present a new hybrid rule that verifies the required mathematical properties and does not present undesirable behaviors that other rules suffer. Finally, we show that the results of our proposal when it is used in practical applications are coherent.

Exposure to Campus Messages about Dating and Sexual Violence: A Latent Class Analysis.

This study investigates college students' exposure to messages about campus dating and sexual violence (DSV) to discover classes of students based on the message source. Latent class analysis was performed with data assessing 5,284 students' exposure to 16 different sources of information regarding DSV, from having a professor discuss these topics to participating in related campus events. Several variables were included in the analysis to understand students' class membership in relation to pertinent student demographic factors. The best model indicated that there are five classes of students based on their exposure to messages, with some subgroups of students having high exposure to various sources of messages about DSV while others have low exposure. Still other subgroups are primarily exposed to messages through nonactive or noninstitutional sources of information. Subgroups of students, based on their exposure to DSV messaging, also differ regarding demographic makeup. The implications from these results include the need to tailor DSV programming on campus to subgroups of students based on their varying baseline levels of message exposure. As students are exposed to messaging through differing sources, including passive and noninstitutional, institutions can use this information when designing outreach efforts to better fit with the needs of various subgroups of students.

Pitch accents create dissociable syntactic and semantic expectations during sentence processing

The language system uses syntactic, semantic, as well as prosodic cues to efficiently guide auditory sentence comprehension. Prosodic cues, such as pitch accents, can build expectations about upcoming sentence elements. This study investigates to what extent syntactic and semantic expectations generated by pitch accents can be dissociated and if so, which cues take precedence when contradictory information is present. We used sentences in which one out of two nominal constituents was placed in contrastive focus with a third one. All noun phrases carried overt syntactic information (case-marking of the determiner) and semantic information (typicality of the thematic role of the noun). Two experiments (a sentence comprehension and a sentence completion task) show that focus, marked by pitch accents, established expectations in both syntactic and semantic domains. However, only the syntactic expectations, when violated, were strong enough to interfere with sentence comprehension. Furthermore, when contradictory cues occurred in the same sentence, the local syntactic cue (case-marking) took precedence over the semantic cue (thematic role), and overwrote previous information cued by prosody. The findings indicate that during auditory sentence comprehension the processing system integrates different sources of information for argument role assignment, yet primarily relies on syntactic information.