Case‐Oriented Configura‐Tional Research: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Qca), Fuzzy Sets, and Related Techniques

Author(s):  
Benoît Rihoux

This article investigates the tradition of case-oriented configurational research, focusing specifically on qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as a tool for causal inference. It first presents two analytic procedures commonly used by comparative researchers. A short description of the state-of-the-art of QCA applications is offered, in terms of discipline, types of cases, models, combinations with other methods, and software development. It then reviews different uses of QCA, as well as generic ‘best practices’. Some key recent evolutions are illustrated: on the one hand the development, beyond dichotomous ‘crisp set’ QCA (csQCA), of multi-value QCA (mvQCA), fuzzy sets, and fuzzy-set QCA (fsQCA), and on the other hand technical advances and refinements in the use of the techniques. Finally, the article gives some concluding reflections as to expected developments, upcoming innovations, remaining challenges, expansion of fields of application, and cross-fertilization with other approaches.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-494
Author(s):  
Ian Greener

This article examines Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Commonwealth Funding data to explore the relationship between the level and means of funding of 11 different healthcare systems, on the one hand, and overall equity and health outcome measures, on the other. It utilises qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and the idea of ‘fitness landscapes’ for the clusters of funding combinations and outcomes they present. It finds that health systems with relatively high levels of voluntary health insurance tend to be associated with poor outcomes almost across the board, but healthcare systems with higher overall expenditures combined with low voluntary insurance levels offer combinatory possibilities for achieving both high equity and high outcomes. The article also explores how ‘contradictory cases’ can be used to explore how systems falling short of the outcomes of others with the same funding patterns, might find improvements.


Res Publica ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-171
Author(s):  
Benoît Rihoux ◽  
Sakura Yamasaki

This contribution explores the reciprocal links between the organisational transformation of Western European Green parties and the access of some of these parties to national government participation. On the one hand, a series of hypotheses with regard to the possible link between prior organisational adaptation and eventual access to governmental participation are examined. On the other hand, the opposite question is addressed : that of the potential impact of governmental participation on further organisational adaptation.  Following both a qualitative and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), one does ultimately identify a link between prior organisational adaptation and eventual access to government, but a much more indirect and contrasted link between governmental participation and further organisational adaptation.


1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Giovanni B. Garibotto

The paper is intended to provide an overview of advanced robotic technologies within the context of Postal Automation services. The main functional requirements of the application are briefly referred, as well as the state of the art and new emerging solutions. Image Processing and Pattern Recognition have always played a fundamental role in Address Interpretation and Mail sorting and the new challenging objective is now off-line handwritten cursive recognition, in order to be able to handle all kind of addresses in a uniform way. On the other hand, advanced electromechanical and robotic solutions are extremely important to solve the problems of mail storage, transportation and distribution, as well as for material handling and logistics. Finally a short description of new services of Postal Automation is referred, by considering new emerging services of hybrid mail and paper to electronic conversion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110227
Author(s):  
Yingzi Wang ◽  
Thoralf Klein

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China’s political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party’s propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party’s propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms.


Database ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifan Shao ◽  
Haoru Li ◽  
Jinghang Gu ◽  
Longhua Qian ◽  
Guodong Zhou

Abstract Extraction of causal relations between biomedical entities in the form of Biological Expression Language (BEL) poses a new challenge to the community of biomedical text mining due to the complexity of BEL statements. We propose a simplified form of BEL statements [Simplified Biological Expression Language (SBEL)] to facilitate BEL extraction and employ BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) to improve the performance of causal relation extraction (RE). On the one hand, BEL statement extraction is transformed into the extraction of an intermediate form—SBEL statement, which is then further decomposed into two subtasks: entity RE and entity function detection. On the other hand, we use a powerful pretrained BERT model to both extract entity relations and detect entity functions, aiming to improve the performance of two subtasks. Entity relations and functions are then combined into SBEL statements and finally merged into BEL statements. Experimental results on the BioCreative-V Track 4 corpus demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in BEL statement extraction with F1 scores of 54.8% in Stage 2 evaluation and of 30.1% in Stage 1 evaluation, respectively. Database URL: https://github.com/grapeff/SBEL_datasets


1998 ◽  
Vol 08 (01) ◽  
pp. 21-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. M. P. VAN DER AALST

Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses the use of Petri nets in the context of workflow management. Petri nets are an established tool for modeling and analyzing processes. On the one hand, Petri nets can be used as a design language for the specification of complex workflows. On the other hand, Petri net theory provides for powerful analysis techniques which can be used to verify the correctness of workflow procedures. This paper introduces workflow management as an application domain for Petri nets, presents state-of-the-art results with respect to the verification of workflows, and highlights some Petri-net-based workflow tools.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9&10) ◽  
pp. 747-765
Author(s):  
F. Orts ◽  
G. Ortega ◽  
E.M. E.M. Garzon

Despite the great interest that the scientific community has in quantum computing, the scarcity and high cost of resources prevent to advance in this field. Specifically, qubits are very expensive to build, causing the few available quantum computers are tremendously limited in their number of qubits and delaying their progress. This work presents new reversible circuits that optimize the necessary resources for the conversion of a sign binary number into two's complement of N digits. The benefits of our work are two: on the one hand, the proposed two's complement converters are fault tolerant circuits and also are more efficient in terms of resources (essentially, quantum cost, number of qubits, and T-count) than the described in the literature. On the other hand, valuable information about available converters and, what is more, quantum adders, is summarized in tables for interested researchers. The converters have been measured using robust metrics and have been compared with the state-of-the-art circuits. The code to build them in a real quantum computer is given.


1967 ◽  
Vol 71 (677) ◽  
pp. 342-343
Author(s):  
F. H. East

The Aviation Group of the Ministry of Technology (formerly the Ministry of Aviation) is responsible for spending a large part of the country's defence budget, both in research and development on the one hand and production or procurement on the other. In addition, it has responsibilities in many non-defence fields, mainly, but not exclusively, in aerospace.Few developments have been carried out entirely within the Ministry's own Establishments; almost all have required continuous co-operation between the Ministry and Industry. In the past the methods of management and collaboration and the relative responsibilities of the Ministry and Industry have varied with time, with the type of equipment to be developed, with the size of the development project and so on. But over the past ten years there has been a growing awareness of the need to put some system into the complex business of translating a requirement into a specification and a specification into a product within reasonable bounds of time and cost.


Author(s):  
Fareed Moosa

Sections 45 and 63 of the Tax Administration Act 28 of 2011 (TAA) confer drastic information gathering powers on officials of the South African Revenue Service (SARS). On the one hand, section 45 permits warrantless routine (non-targeted) and non-routine (targeted) inspections by a SARS official in respect of records, books of accounts and documents found at premises where a taxpayer is reasonably believed to be conducting a trade or enterprise. The purpose of such inspection is to determine whether there has been compliance with specific obligations by the taxpayer. Section 63, on the other hand, permits, on the grounds of urgency and expediency in exceptional circumstances only, warrantless non-routine (targeted) searches by a senior SARS official of a taxpayer and of third parties associated with a taxpayer, as well as searches of a taxpayer's premises and those of third parties. In addition, section 63 permits the seizure of relevant material found at premises searched. All searches and seizures must occur for the purposes of the efficient and effective administration of tax Acts generally. A comparative analysis of sections 45 and 63 of the TAA reveals the existence of key differences in the substance and practical operation of their provisions. This article distils these differences through an in-depth discussion of the nature and extent of the powers of inspection and search conferred by these provisions, as well as by conceptualising the terms “inspection” and “search” for the purposes of sections 45 and 63 respectively.    


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