Evaluation at the Endgame: Evaluating Sustainability and the SDGs by Moving Past Dominion and Institutional Capture

Three facts underlay this chapter. First, the human system and all our ambitions for improving the human system depend on sustainable natural systems. Second, we do not have much time. On track to fall well short of all sustainability goals, the climate and sustainability crises grow and extinction looms. Third, up to this point evaluation has shown little interest in sustainability, yet evaluation potentially addresses the very questions that are central to informing and guiding rapid adaptation of human behavior to successfully surmounting extinction.Business-as-usual evaluation will not suffice. At the endgame with extinction looming, we need an evaluation that is more nimble, keeps up with rapidly accelerating knowledge, is relentlessly use-seeking and that guides the way to joined-up approaches. The evaluation we need will systematically mainstream sustainability across all evaluations and interventions, in all evaluation criteria and standards. For this, all evaluations will always address nexus where human and natural systems join and incorporate knowledge and methods from both systems. Existing evaluation knowledge is well suited to this task, as are knowledges in biophysical sciences. We know and promote knowledge processes for integrative evaluation and are starting to shift toward the requirements for evaluation at the nexus. As this chapter shows, the anchors holding us back are political, not technical.

NASca and NASes: Two Monolingual Pre-Trained Models for Abstractive Summarization in Catalan and Spanish

Most of the models proposed in the literature for abstractive summarization are generally suitable for the English language but not for other languages. Multilingual models were introduced to address that language constraint, but despite their applicability being broader than that of the monolingual models, their performance is typically lower, especially for minority languages like Catalan. In this paper, we present a monolingual model for abstractive summarization of textual content in the Catalan language. The model is a Transformer encoder-decoder which is pretrained and fine-tuned specifically for the Catalan language using a corpus of newspaper articles. In the pretraining phase, we introduced several self-supervised tasks to specialize the model on the summarization task and to increase the abstractivity of the generated summaries. To study the performance of our proposal in languages with higher resources than Catalan, we replicate the model and the experimentation for the Spanish language. The usual evaluation metrics, not only the most used ROUGE measure but also other more semantic ones such as BertScore, do not allow to correctly evaluate the abstractivity of the generated summaries. In this work, we also present a new metric, called content reordering, to evaluate one of the most common characteristics of abstractive summaries, the rearrangement of the original content. We carried out an exhaustive experimentation to compare the performance of the monolingual models proposed in this work with two of the most widely used multilingual models in text summarization, mBART and mT5. The experimentation results support the quality of our monolingual models, especially considering that the multilingual models were pretrained with many more resources than those used in our models. Likewise, it is shown that the pretraining tasks helped to increase the degree of abstractivity of the generated summaries. To our knowledge, this is the first work that explores a monolingual approach for abstractive summarization both in Catalan and Spanish.

Grading versus Reliability: how Academia perspectives evaluation on MOOCs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced in recent years a significant growth in courses'offer and the number of enrolled students. Nevertheless, the controversy regarding if its quality is reliable, namely in student evaluation and assessment, has not found closure. In this study, we aim at establishing an initial prospection of the academic teaching professionals' perspective regarding the quality of the most common/usual evaluation methods and tools used in MOOCs. After the elaboration of a questionnaire and its implementation to an international sample of academic professors, the analysis of the answers allows perceiving which MOOC grading methods are acceptable in presential Higher Education courses and its eventual acceptable weight in the final grade. Further, within certain constraints, a large percentage of the inquired academics presented no problem with the inclusion of MOOC grading methods on their non-online courses. Overall, within those constraints, the academics felt the quality of the academic orthodox courses was maintained, a perspective that can contribute to change eventual suspicious attitudes regarding MOOCs evaluation methodologies and their student assessment.

Internal Deterioration of Mortars in Freeze-Thawing: Non-Destructive Evaluation by Means of Electrical Impedance

In this work, different mortars with different degrees of damage brought about by the action of the freeze-thawing cycles are evaluated. Analysis of its state is carried out by different usual evaluation methods. Results obtained through these methods are compared with the electrical impedance spectroscopy. Moreover, this non-destructive technique is employed to evaluate the state of mortars and the amount of internal damage.

Evaluating Emergency Risk Communications: A Dialogue With the Experts

Evaluating emergency risk communications is fraught with challenges since communication can be approached from both a systemic and programmatic level. Therefore, one must consider stakeholders' perspectives, effectiveness issues, standards of evidence and utility, and channels of influence (e.g., mass media and law enforcement). Evaluation issues related to timing, evaluation questions, methods, measures, and accountability are raised in this dialogue with emergency risk communication specialists. Besides the usual evaluation competencies, evaluators in this area need to understand and work collaboratively with stakeholders and be attuned to the dynamic contextual nature of emergency risk communications. Sample resources and measures are provided here to aid in this emerging and exciting field of evaluation.

Semantic, phonologic, and verb fluency in Huntington's disease

Verbal fluency tasks have been identified as important indicators of executive functioning impairment in patients with frontal lobe dysfunction. Although the usual evaluation of this ability considers phonologic and semantic criteria, there is some evidence that fluency of verbs would be more sensitive in disclosing frontostriatal physiopathology since frontal regions primarily mediate retrieval of verbs. Huntington's disease usually affects these circuitries. Objective: To compare three types of verbal fluency task in the assessment of frontal-striatal dysfunction in HD subjects. Methods: We studied 26 Huntington's disease subjects, divided into two subgroups: mild (11) and moderate (15) along with 26 normal volunteers matched for age, gender and schooling, for three types of verbal fluency: phonologic fluency (F-A-S), semantic fluency and fluency of verbs. Results: Huntington's disease subjects showed a significant reduction in the number of words correctly generated in the three tasks when compared to the normal group. Both controls and Huntington's disease subjects showed a similar pattern of decreasing task performance with the greatest number of words being generated by semantic elicitation followed by verbs and lastly phonologic criteria. We did not find greater production of verbs compared with F-A-S and semantic conditions. Moreover, the fluency of verbs distinguished only the moderate group from controls. Conclusion: Our results indicated that phonologic and semantic fluency can be used to evaluate executive functioning, proving more sensitive than verb fluency. However, it is important to point out that the diverse presentations of Huntington's disease means that an extended sample is necessary for more consistent analysis of this issue.

Brake Lights at the Border: Going International Twenty–Two Miles Away1

Russ Clark is a successful NAPA Auto Parts franchisee in Yuma County, Arizona. He sees opportunity in the neighboring Mexican city of San Luis Rıo Colorado. But crossing the border with an after-market auto parts store will require building relationships with others, lots of learning to overcome the significant barriers, and some savvy decision-making in addition to the usual evaluation of business opportunities. Clark must consider a location decision, product mix, human resource issues, and how to promote the new business in an uncertain and unfamiliar context. Clearly, his current American business model will require a great degree of adaptation to make the venture a success. This case was developed from extensive field interviews and shadowing Mr. Clark for a day. In addition, Mr. Clark and his store manager, Rigoberto made classroom presentations describing their experiences surrounding the case situation.

Direct observation of strain distribution in InP/In1−xGaxP heterointerfaces by CAT method

The characteristics of electronic and optical devices, which have been developed utilizing a strained superlattice composed of multilayered structure accommodating lattice mismatch, are considerably affected by the strain distribution at the heterointerfaces. It has been, however, very difficult to measure the nanometer areas due to poor spatial resolution of the usual evaluation methods such as X-ray diffraction, Raman scattering, photoluminescence.The authors proposed a new transmission electron microscopy based on the compositional analysis by thickness-fringe (CAT) which was successfully applied for evaluating the compositional profiles in GaAs/AlxGa1−xxAs superstructures with a high spatial resolution of 0.4 nm. In this study, the CAT method is applied to evaluate the strain distribution with high spatial resolution and sensibility. The intensity distribution of the thickness fringe is affected not only by the composition but also by the Bragg conditions of electron diffraction. The lattice planes near the heterointerface bend due to the lattice distortion between two crystals with different lattice constant. The change of Bragg condition at the bent plane can be detected in the CAT image as the shift of thickness fringe.

A simplification in the calculation of motions near a propagating dislocation

abstract From Haskell's (1969) integral representations for the near-field displacements due to a propagating strike-slip and dip-slip dislocation, a solution is obtained for a dislocation “line source” by an analytic integration in the direction of the fault propagation. This reduces the numerical integration from a surface integral required for the usual evaluation of the near-field motion, to a one-dimensional integration over the fault width. Since the dislocation function modeled here is a Heaviside step function, these results may be extended to any arbitrary source time-function by convolving these displacements with the time derivative of the desired source function.

The Theology of Emil Brunner

As a theologian, Emil Brunner has always had two main concerns: firstly the exposition of the special revelation of God, which culminated in Christ, and its maintenance as something distinct from the general revelation of God in nature, conscience and history; and, secondly, the evaluation of this general revelation from the standpoint of faith in the special revelation. Like Barth and most of his contemporaries in theological study, Brunner started in the liberal camp, and his first important book, Mysticism and the Word (1927), was a critical discussion of the whole trend of Protestant theology since the collapse of verbal inspirationism. In it, a short study of the wide and difficult field of mysticism is followed by a detailed examination of the theology of Schleiermacher, who is taken as the chief representative of Protestant theology since the days of the Enlightenment. Although Mysticism and the Word has not been translated into English, the loss to the English-reading public is lessened by the fact that much of the argument is recapitulated with less detailed reference to Schleiermacher in Brunner's next book, The Mediator. This is divided into three parts; the first is entitled “Presuppositions”, and the second and third deal respectively with the person and work of the Mediator. In the first part Brunner argues that the usual evaluation of Schleiermacher's theological work is false. It has been customary to contrast him with Kant and Hegel. Kant found that faith in God was one of the postulates of the practical reason, or the will.