Abstract
Policy-making in local public administrations is still largely based on intuition rather than being backed up by data and evidence. The goal of this work is to introduce the methodology and ...software tools for contributing toward transforming the existing intuition-based paradigm of policy-making into an evidence-driven approach enabled by heterogeneous sources of data already available in the city. More specifically, methods for data collection, efficient data storage, and data analysis are implemented to measure the economic activity, assess the environmental impact and evaluate the social consequences of certain policy decisions. Subsequently, the extracted pieces of evidence are used to inform, advise, monitor, evaluate, and revise the decisions made by policy planners. Our contribution in this work is on outlining and deploying an easily extendable system architecture to harmonize and analyze heterogeneous data sources in ways that are found to be useful for policy-makers. For evaluating this architecture, we examine the case of a controlled parking system in the city of Thessaloniki and try to optimize its operation by balancing effectively between economic growth, environmental protection, and citizen satisfaction.
Social media have been increasingly embraced by social actors inhabiting a wide range of social worlds, including the world of professional sports. This paper argues that Twitter has become an ...indispensible resource for sociologists seeking to better understand these worlds. Using data collected for a study of the Canadian Football League (CFL), the paper contrasts traditional interviews and Twitter as sources of data. This is followed by a discussion of both the unique advantages and limitations of Twitter data in research. The paper ends by encouraging an expansion of sociology’s methodological toolbox to include this form of social media.
A BRIEF ON BIG DATA: LESSONS FROM 10 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE Xanthidis, Dimitrios; Nikolaidis, Pavlos; Koutzampasopoulou, Ourania
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology,
06/2016, Letnik:
88, Številka:
2
Journal Article
In this review study, one of the most important technological trend, i.e. big data, is explained together with some of the main terminology relative to the field emerging from it. Some of the ...challenges and opportunities that it brings along are described and a list of new research sub-fields is also suggested as well as recommendations for the universities to embrace the new technologies and incorporate them in their curriculum in an effort to properly train the experts of the new big data era.
Rationale Despite their inherently pervasive limitations, data from observational studies are increasingly relied upon by health care decision makers to fill critical information gaps created by ...lack of evidence from randomized controlled trials.
Aim and objective The aim and objective of this article was to revisit the major issues associated with observational studies from secondary data sources.
Method The method of this article was canvass of the literature.
Results Sources of bias are highlighted and steps intended to minimize bias are summarized.
Conclusion Efforts should be made to improve causal inference of treatment effects from observational studies found in secondary data sources. Extra care and caution should be exercised in the interpretation and reporting of results from these studies.
An analytical description of the employment generation process in the Indian economy and a critical assessment of the concepts and definitions used in various sources of data on employment are ...presented. Using the data since early 1970s from the National Sample Survey, linear trend regressions on rates of employment, unemployment, labour force participation and employment status (i.e., being self-employed, in regular wage and salary employment and in casual employment) are estimated. They show no sustained trend in the growth and structure of employment. Nearly 60% of the usually employed persons in rural areas and little over 40% in urban areas were self-employed even as recently as 2005–2006.
The pursuit of a strategy of capital intensive industrialization founded on insulating the economy from domestic and import competition underlies the poor employment performance. Reforms of strategy began hesitantly in the mid-80s and became more systemic and extensive 1990–1991. Reforms accelerated aggregate growth considerably but had little effect on employment. Only further and deeper reforms can generate sustained and rapid growth of productive employment.
This The paper presents the transformation and use of data into various types of objects within business web applications. Business models use diverse data sources and require successive ...transformations to be included in various applications used within business enterprises. An efficient way of using heterogeneous data is to transform it into objects that can then be used as templates in applications built on the basis of high-performance, object-oriented programming languages. There are various challenges in the case of large volumes of data accumulated within companies, which require transformations into objects and templates, and then making the content available quickly and efficiently to users of various application modules. Data formatting is an important stage in their transformation, in the case of large volumes of heterogeneous data, and then follows the stage of indexing and optimization for quick retrieval and easy use in various modules within applications. Complex business applications require retrieval operations for large volumes of data, which can be used for updating, implementation, and reporting. These operations require fast retrieval of data, across various types or patterns, even for large volumes of data, and depend on how to integrate into objects and content templates. The interconnection of data from different sources is a problem that can be solved by transforming the data into objects and templates so that some common standards are respected that can be extended to large volumes of data. Complex business applications require flexibility in handling and using data, and templating helps structure it into standard data types such as numeric, real, character, string, and item-type structures. These transformations can be applied to large volumes of data, using extraction, transformation, and validation mechanisms so that data flows follow business rules and feed application modules continuously for high availability to all users. Mechanisms for retrieving data present in large volumes must be efficient and respect the structure of objects created as templates to instantiate values. These rules will ensure a specific standard for objects and thus the paradigm specific to object-oriented languages can be applied, which ensures a high availability and flexibility necessary for economic applications that must comply with business rules.
Despite the laborious process of gathering the data and some limitations due to selective incompleteness, catasti and estimi (fiscal cadastres) provide precious information on demographic differences ...within Italy during the Late Middle Ages and early Modern Age. The authors compare three areas: the countryside surrounding Lucca in 1411 (Tuscany, 5,792 individuals) and Varese in 1530 (Lombardy, 2,703), and the “quasi-city” of Legnago in 1430 (Veneto, 2,101), reconsidering also the Florentine catasto of 1427. Family-type distribution, age at marriage, and residence after marriage are noticeably different, showing that the territorial diversity in family of nineteenth-century Italy was already present four centuries earlier.
In many large e-commerce organizations, multiple data sources are often used to describe the same customers, thus it is important to consolidate data of multiple sources for intelligent business ...decision making. In this paper, we propose a novel method that predicts the classification of data from multiple sources without class labels in each source. We test our method on artificial and real-world datasets, and show that it can classify the data accurately. From the machine learning perspective, our method removes the fundamental assumption of providing class labels in supervised learning, and bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised learning.
This paper argues that if rebuilding of ecosystems is adopted as the goal for fisheries management, recent disputes over political interference in the scientific process would be reduced in severity ...through a clarification of objectives and procedures. The use of an ecosystem approach enables alternative end states of current harvesting policy to be evaluated more objectively. Moreover, support from the general public for fisheries policy is likely to be greater when they are given a clear and important role to play as sentinels reporting upon the status of a wide range of organisms in aquatic ecosystems.
I contend that although the Luborsky et al. findings on the Dodo bird verdict are noteworthy, the methodology on which they are based is significantly delimited. Amplifying Luborsky et al.'s moderate ...recognition of that delimitation, I propose a qualitative complement to the extant research. I call this complement “amalgamated” qualitative research and propose that it will deepen, clarify, and contextualize Luborsky et al.'s enigmatic findings. Until this amalgam is implemented, therapy research will be relegated to impressions rather than fine‐grained illuminations.
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