This work aims to elaborate a governance composite index for research laboratories in public university. This index is composed by an indicator of responsible liberalism associating effectiveness and ethics, to which are added an organizational management indicator and a strategic management indicator. To achieve the above aim, several methods are…

Journal impact factors are a metric often used to evaluate journals; they are calculated by considering a journal's citation and publication rates during a specified time period. In some cases, impact factors can be misleading because they do not take into account the publication of different types of papers. In the "Journal of Chemical…

Information retrieval techniques have been applied to biomedical research for a variety of purposes, such as textual document retrieval and molecular data retrieval. As biomedical research evolves over time, information retrieval is also constantly facing new challenges, including the growing number of available data, the emerging new data types,…

For the past decade, the accountability model associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasized proficiency on end of year tests; with Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) the emphasis on proficiency within statewide testing programs, though now integrated with other measures of student learning, nevertheless remains a primary metric for…

We present "study navigator," an algorithmically-generated aid for enhancing the experience of studying from electronic textbooks. The study navigator for a section of the book consists of helpful "concept references" for understanding this section. Each concept reference is a pair consisting of a concept phrase explained…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

Test-retest studies for assessing stability and change are widely used in different domains and allow improved or additional individual estimates of interest to be obtained. However, if these estimates are to be validly interpreted the responses given at Time-2 must be free of retest effects, and the fulfilment of this assumption must be…

This article focuses on the study of intergenerational educational mobility in Greece. The primary purpose is to represent quantitatively the transitions of individuals, in order to determine whether and to what extent the educational levels attained are influenced by parental education. The authors use data drawn from the European Union…

In this paper, principal components methodology is used to derive simplified and cost effective indexes of water poverty. Using a well known data set for 147 countries from which an earlier five-component water poverty index comprising of "Resources," "Access," "Capacity," "Use" and "Environment" was constructed, we find that a simplified…

Having returned to teaching the basics of pricing fixed-income securities after several years, the author recalls the difficulty students have in understanding the total return provided by fixed-income securities that are purchased at either a discount or premium from face value. This teaching note attempts to clarify the concept by suggesting…

Most high school students are at an age when they are learning to drive. They often want to offer input when their parents decide on what vehicle to purchase, so the activity described in this article should have direct personal interest for them. It allows students to use technology and mathematics to determine the environmental impacts of…

Inspired by a white paper produced by the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, this study uses different measures of calculating the cost of a college degree at an upstate community college in New York. Departmental cost per credit hour, direct instructional costs, and full costs are all explained. A…

This article discusses the impact of changing student demographics on financing education and on our national wellbeing. We begin by examining the research of current student demographics and their relationship to learning and education costs. We then calculate a 1% cost factor from the average per-pupil expenditure based on the 2011 "Digest…

A heuristic approach to explaining of the Black-Scholes option pricing model in undergraduate classes is described. The approach draws upon the method of protocol analysis to encourage students to "think aloud" so that their mental models can be surfaced. It also relies upon extensive visualizations to communicate relationships that are…

Large-scale testing programs involving classification decisions typically have multiple forms available and conduct equating to ensure cut-score comparability across forms. A test developer might be interested in the extent to which an examinee who happens to take a particular form would have a consistent classification decision if he or she had…