The Doing Business 2020 study shows that developing economies are catching up with developed economies in ease of doing business.
Still, the gap remains wide. An entrepreneur in a low-income economy typically spends around 50 percent of the country's per-capita income to launch a company, compared with just 4.2 percent for an entrepreneur i...
This book describes the extensive contributions made toward the advancement of human assessment by scientists from one of the world's leading research institutions, Educational Testing Service. The book's four major sections detail research and development in measurement and statistics, education policy analysis and evaluation, scienti...
This book introduces new methods for measuring and analyzing residential segregation. It begins by placing all popular segregation indices in the "difference of group means" framework wherein index scores can be obtained as simple differences of group means on individual-level residential attainments scored from area racial composition. ...
If you know how to program with Python and also know a little about probability, you're ready to tackle Bayesian statistics. With this book, you'll learn how to solve statistical problems with Python code instead of mathematical notation, and use discrete probability distributions instead of continuous mathematics. Once you get the math o...
This open book trains the next generation of scientists representing different disciplines to leverage the data generated during routine patient care. It formulates a more complete lexicon of evidence-based recommendations and support shared, ethical decision making by doctors with their patients.
Diagnostic and therapeutic technologies continue ...
Ability to use information and communication technologies (ICT) is an imperative for effective participation in today's digital age. Schools worldwide are responding to the need to provide young people with that ability. But how effective are they in this regard? The IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) responded t...
This book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where "search" can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected ...
This book presents a systematic investigation into internationally comparable data gathered in ICILS 2013. It identifies differences in female and male students' use of, perceptions about, and proficiency in using computer technologies. Teachers' use of computers, and their perceptions regarding the benefits of computer use in education, ...
This book presents current knowledge about ecosystem services (ES) in urban planning, and discusses various urban ES topics such as spatial distribution of urban ecosystems, population distribution, and physical infrastructure properties. The book addresses all these issues by: i) investigating to what extent ecosystem services are currently includ...
Good education changes lives. It is therefore unsurprising that improved schooling plays a central part in most development strategies. At the same time, the expansion of school attainment alone is not sufficient to guarantee improved welfare. This book focuses on one country in West Africa, Togo, to explore what a country that has successfully inc...
This open-access book focuses on trends in educational inequality using twenty years of grade 8 student data collected from 13 education systems by the IEA's Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) between 1995 and 2015. While the overall positive association between family socioeconomic status (SES) and student achievement is well doc...
This book presents a person-centered exploration of student profiles, using variables related to motivation to do school mathematics derived from the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data. Statistical cluster analysis is used to identify groups of students with similar motivational profiles, across grades and...
This book presents a multitude of different, yet related, innovations in educational measurement and provides insight in their practical possibilities.The book not only addresses several improvements in the quality of educational measurement and innovations in (inter)national large scale assessments, but also several advances in psychometrics and i...
The IEA's International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 21st century. ICCS 2016 is the second cycle of a study initiated in 2009.This report from ICCS focuses on data collected in the 15...
It argues that the main purpose of educational research is to improve student learning, and that international comparative studies are no exception....
This book presents the results from the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). Using data from 24 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, the study investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens in a range of countries in the second decade of the 2...
This book looks at how a democracy can devolve into a post-factual state.The media is being flooded by populist narratives, fake news, conspiracy theories and make-believe. Misinformation is turning into a challenge for all of us, whether politicians, journalists, or citizens. In the age of information, attention is a prime asset and may be convert...
This open access textbook is the first to provide Business and Economics Ph.D. students with a precise and intuitive introduction to the formal backgrounds of modern financial theory. It explains Brownian motion, random processes, measures, and Lebesgue integrals intuitively, but without sacrificing the necessary mathematical formalism, making them...
This book describes the results of natural language processing and machine learning methods applied to clinical text from electronic patient records.It is divided into twelve chapters. Chapters 1-4 discuss the history and background of the original paper-based patient records, their purpose, and how they are written and structured. These initial ch...
The Early Years analyzes the development of Latin American and Caribbean children and makes a compelling case for government intervention in what is instinctively a family affair. Spending on effective programs for young children is an investment that, if done well, will have very high returns, while failure to implement such programs will lower th...
Learn how graph algorithms can help you leverage relationships within your data to develop intelligent solutions and enhance your machine learning models. With this practical guide, developers and data scientists will discover how graph analytics deliver value, whether they're used for building dynamic network models or forecasting real-world ...
This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art i...
This open access report presents findings from the five Latin American countries that participated in the second cycle of the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016). ICCS 2016 investigated the ways in which a range of countries are preparing their young people to undertake their roles as citizens during the second decad...
This book introduces the human development model to define disability and map its links with health and wellbeing, based on Sen's capability approach. The author uses panel survey data with internationally comparable questions on disability for Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. It presents evidence on the prevalence of disability and its ...
This book summarizes the key findings from the second cycle of IEA's International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), conducted in 2018. ICILS seeks to establish how well schools around the globe are responding to the need to provide young people with the necessary digital participatory competencies. Effective use of information ...
For medical and health workers this book is a must-have, because statistical methods in these fields are vital, and no equivalent work is available. For medical and health students this is equally true.A unique point is its low threshold, textually simple and at the same time full of self-assessment opportunities. Other unique points are the succin...
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python teaches you how to program in the Python language. Each chapter gives you the complete source code for a new game, and then teaches the programming concepts from the examples. Games include Guess the Number, Hangman, Tic Tac Toe, and Reversi. This book also has an introduction to making games with 2D graph...
A comprehensive open book for research methods classes. A peer-reviewed inter-institutional project....
This open book shows you how to set up a Raspberry Pi to play classic games, and a whole lot more. Build your own portable console, full-size arcade cabinet, and pinball machine with our step-by-step guides. And learn how to program your own games, using Python and Pygame Zero.
- Set up your Raspberry Pi for retro gaming
- Emulate classic computers...
This self-contained textbook covers fundamental aspects of sequence analysis in evolutionary biology, including sequence alignment, phylogeny reconstruction, and coalescent simulation. It addresses these aspects through a series of over 400 computer problems, ranging from elementary to research level to enable learning by doing. Students solve the ...
This book introduces readers to the basic principles of bioinformatics and the practical application and utilization of computational tools, without assuming any prior background in programming or informatics. It provides a coherent overview of the complex field and focuses on the implementation of online tools, genome databases and software that c...
This book approaches the study of critical care with teaching in mind. In medicine "teachable moments" usually occur in clinical context, where the engagement in a real case exemplifies principles of diagnosis or therapy. In order to replicate the teaching method, selected cases are presented within each chapter offering the reader an opp...