Reviews of Academic English Listening Tests for Non-Native Speakers

This article presents a review of 20 tests designed for assessing the academic English listening skill of second or foreign language learners. The available test information has been systematically condensed in purpose, listening construct, task characteristics, and validity evidence. It was found that most of the tests were developed for proficiency and placement purposes in academic contexts, with few of the tests serving for making workplace decisions. Also, global, local, and inferential skills constitute the construct in most listening comprehension tests. A practical approach for justifying the uses of these tests for different stakeholders is discussed. This review is a valuable resource for educators, administrators, test developers, and researchers looking for a comprehensive analysis of existing English tests that assess listening comprehension in second or foreign language learners.     

External knowledge search,absorptive capacity and radical innovation in high-technology firms

Open innovation and absorptive capacity are two concepts based on the idea that companies can leverage the knowledge generated externally to improve their innovation performance. The aim of this paper is to analyse the joint effect of open innovation and absorptive capacity on a firm's radical innovation. Open innovation is expressed in terms of external search breadth and depth strategies and absorptive capacity is described by distinguishing between potential and realized absorptive capacity. In order to test our hypotheses, we carried out empirical research in firms operating in high-technology industries. The results indicate that internal routines and processes for absorbing external knowledge help explain radical innovation as they show a significant effect of potential and realized absorptive capacity. Also, there is a moderating effect of absorptive capacity on open innovation. Specifically, potential absorptive capacity exerts a positive effect on the relationship between external search breadth and depth and radical innovation. Realized absorptive capacity moderates the influence of external search breadth. These findings confirm the complementary nature of absorptive capacity and open innovation search strategies on radical innovation.     

Applying kaizen to the schedule in a concurrent environment

Not only ETO (Engineering to Order), but even serial production industry should know how to deal with projects and their schedule: plant commissioning, shutdown, introducing new products and similar circumstances should be managed with adequate planning and resource allocation techniques to create a schedule useful in decision making during the execution. The current complex reality, with evolving technologies and fierce pressure to reach the market as soon as possible, pushes the project managers to use more advanced techniques than waterfall planning, such as agile or lean. It also requires them to take a holistic view and manage concurrent tasks in complex projects. The contributions of this paper are two: the proposal to control specific parallel groups of waterfall activities under uncertain environments, which can lead to iterations and reworks, as a single concurrent Activity Managed by Kanban Methods (AMKM). This activity can be subsequently embedded into traditional scheduling approaches as CPM-PERT. The second contribution is the feasibility of its application in industrial environments due to the affordability of simulation software. Two use cases are shown as evidence. It is not a disruptive proposal, but a kaizen action based on very mature technologies. Finally, it is suggested some improvements to be implemented in Project Management Software due to this ‘kaizen’ proposal.     

International and intercultural issues in English teaching textbooks: the case of Spain

The sociocultural content of foreign language textbooks has become a concern of scholars and practitioners owing to the fact that the traditional emphasis on purely linguistic issues has been expanded to embrace a language in context approach. This paper studies the English‐speaking communities that are described in English language teaching textbooks marketed in Spain. It examines to what extent an international and/or intercultural approach is a constituent element in their design.     

Demographic Shifts in the Czech Republic after 1989: A Second Demographic Transition View

A dramatic change in fertility,family formation and living arrangements tookplace in the Czech Republic over the 1990s. Theestablishment of democracy, profound socialtransformation and transition to the marketeconomy affected the values and demographicbehaviour of the young Czech generation. Thispaper examines whether these demographic shiftscan be interpreted within the framework of thesecond demographic transition. The theoreticalpart discusses the idea of the transition,outlining three distinctive conceptualisations.Two of them – the view of the transition as aprogression of characteristic interrelateddemographic changes and a broader viewstressing the importance of underlyingideational factors – fit the Czech situationvery well. A comparison with the Netherlandsreveals that the onset of the transition in theCzech Republic may be clearly located in thefirst half of the 1990s, lagging two decadesbehind the Netherlands.     

Local spatial data infrastructure, Trujillo-Peru

The development of a Municipal Information System, or currently better known as a local spatial data infrastructure, is considered complex due to the required inter-institutional relationships. In many developing countries Geographical Information Systems (GISs) are introduced but the benefits are modest as no changes take place in technical and organisational structure of organisations. Digital databases and computer-aided design (CAD) maps are mushrooming in great variety within different private and public institutions, municipal organisations and even within single departments and with structures similar to the paper period and thus operating on a stand-alone basis.Many national mapping agencies are not able to provide large-scale digital urban base maps, while the absence or low quality of cadastres makes those basic core data sets unavailable or inaccessible. The result is that duplication and incompatible data are frequently observed and also donor-driven stand-alone projects have a limited impact through the lack of institutional embedding and are not able to mature from the project to the institutional level. However, a positive sign is that there is an increasing awareness among data producers and consumers that investments in the development of digital data sets should be combined to reduce costs and increase benefits from especially GIS, and information and communication technology (ICT) in general.Within Trujillo a long-term vision was developed to make full use of ICT and GIS to modernise all operations of the Municipality to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its tasks. However, large investments are not feasible due to the very limited municipal budgets. To guarantee the support of the municipal council, short-term results are required. This paper describes three ‘products’ as part of the vision to develop through a step-by-step approach a local spatial data infrastructure for Trujillo.The three, rather different, products are:

1. fiscal cadastre, to increase municipal revenues through property taxation;

2. an ‘environmental atlas’ based on a compatible spatial and attribute data sets from a variety of organisations; and

3. a municipal website with interactive GIS and meta data information.

The paper concludes with some comments on the institutional and political requirements for the successful development of a local spatial data infrastructure and stresses that such an infrastructure is not a product but an incremental development process that will progress only in case such a process is simple, cost effective, user-friendly, and flexible with clear products.Political interest and institutional stability and genuine interest for inter-institutional cooperation will add much to the success of this process.     

Some results on optimality in models with heteroscedastic errors from partial optimum designs

This paper studies optimum designs for linear models when the errors are heteroscedastic. Sufficient conditions are given in order to obtainD-, A- andE-optimum designs for a complete regression model from partial optimum designs for some sub-parameters. A result about optimality for a complete model from the optimality for the submodels is included. Supported by Junta de Andalucía, research group FQM244.