it is a well-known result in both environmental economics and natural resources managementthat you will not be able to manage what you are not able to measure. this paper presents a dichotomous-choicecontingent valuation survey that analyses individuals’ preferences for the implementation of a rural developmentprogram (rdp) that fosters the provision of non-commodity outputs in rural areas in s...

Estimating reliability for scales or factors is an essential data analysis step in much of the research in developmental science. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of using the appropriate statistical method and underlying correlation matrix to estimate reliability for dichotomous data that represent a normally-distributed latent factor. We used an example case of three waves of ad...

Major theories for explaining the organization of semantic memory in the human brain are premised on the often-observed dichotomous dissociation between living and nonliving objects. Evidence from neuroimaging has been interpreted to suggest that this distinction is reflected in the functional topography of the ventral vision pathway as lateral-to-medial activation gradients. Recently, we obser...

This study provides a method that identifies problematic responses which make automated speech scoring difficult. When automated scoring is used in the context of a high stakes language proficiency assessment, for which the scores are used to make consequential decisions, some test takers may have an incentive to try to game the system in order to artificially inflate their scores. Since many a...

This paper investigates the feasibility of automated scoring of spoken English proficiency of non-native speakers. Unlike existing automated assessments of spoken English, our data consists of spontaneous spoken responses to complex test items. We perform both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of these features using two different machine learning approaches. (1) We use support vector m...

SUMMARY A new scoring system is proposed in order to assist surgeons with the complex analysis associated with non-union surgery. Patients with non-union are rarely easily compared with one another and this has frustrated research in this field. We have therefore attributed values to clinical features based on clinical experience and research evidence, so that patients of similar complexity can...

This paper presents a method for identifying non-English speech, with the aim of supporting an automated speech proficiency scoring system for non-native speakers. The method uses a popular technique from the language identification domain, a single phone recognizer followed by multiple languagedependent language models. This method determines the language of a speech sample based on the phonot...

Protein sequence similarity searching programs like BLASTP, SSEARCH (UNIT 3.10), and FASTA use scoring matrices that are designed to identify distant evolutionary relationships (BLOSUM62 for BLAST, BLOSUM50 for SEARCH and FASTA). Different similarity scoring matrices are most effective at different evolutionary distances. "Deep" scoring matrices like BLOSUM62 and BLOSUM50 target alignments with...