The main goal of this research note is to educate business researchers on how to automatically scrape financial data from the World Wide Web using the R programming language. This paper is organized into the following main parts. The first part provides a conceptual overview of the web scraping process. The second part educates the reader about the Rvest package—a popular tool for browsing and downloading web data in R. The third part educates the reader about the main functions of the XBRL package. The XBRL package was developed specifically for working with financial data distributed using the XBRL format in the R environment. The fourth part of this paper presents an example of a relatively complex web scraping task implemented using the R language. This complex web scraping task involves using both the Rvest and XBRL packages for the purposes of retrieving, preprocessing, and organizing financial and nonfinancial data related to a company from various sources and using different data forms. The paper ends with some concluding remarks on how the web scraping approach presented in this paper can be useful in other research projects involving financial and nonfinancial data.
This paper reports on an ongoing project between members of the computer science and special education departments of Bradley University and Murray State University, detailing the robotic platforms developed and investigated as a potential tool to improve social interactions among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Development of a fourth generation robotic agent is described, which uses economically available robotic platforms (Lego NXT) as Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), combined with direct instruction pedagogy and social scripts to support an alternative educational approach to teaching social behavior. Specifically, in this fourth generation, changes to the physical design of the robots were made to improve the maintainability, reliability, maneuverability, and aesthetics of the robots. The software architecture was designed for modularity, configurability, and reusability of the software.
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