University of Zielona Góra
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Impact bias in student evaluations of higher education
No full textIn the context of Higher Education (HE), this study examines the extent to which affective evaluations of the student experience are influenced by the point at which they are made (i.e. before the experience begins, whilst it is happening, and after it has ended). It adopts a between-group quantitative analysis of the affective evaluations made by 360 future, current and past postgraduate students of a UK business school. The study validates the proposition that affective forecasts and memories of the student experience are considerably inflated in prospect and retrospect; a finding that implies a significant impact bias (Wilson, Meyers and Gilbert, 2003). It is concluded that the impact bias may have important implications for influencing the effectiveness of student decision-making, the timing and comparability of student course evaluations, and the nature and effects of word-of-mouth communication regarding the student experience
Enriching News Events with Meta-knowledge Information
No full textGiven the vast amounts of data available in digitised textual form, it is important to provide mechanisms that allow users to extract nuggets of relevant information from the ever growing volumes of potentially important documents. Text mining techniques can help, through their ability to automatically extract relevant event descriptions, which link entities with situations described in the text. However, correct and complete interpretation of these event descriptions is not possible without considering additional contextual information often present within the surrounding text. This information, which we refer to as meta-knowledge, can include (but is not restricted to) the modality, subjectivity, source, polarity and specificity of the event. We have developed a meta-knowledge annotation scheme specifically tailored for news events, which includes six aspects of event interpretation. We have applied this annotation scheme to the ACE 2005 corpus, which contains 599 documents from various written and spoken news sources. We have also identified and annotated the words and phrases evoking the different types of meta-knowledge. Evaluation of the annotated corpus shows high levels of inter-annotator agreement for five meta-knowledge attributes, and moderate level of agreement for the sixth attribute. Detailed analysis of the annotated corpus has revealed further insights into the expression mechanisms of different types of meta-knowledge, their relative frequencies and mutual correlations
K-Stability for Fano Manifolds with Torus Action of Complexity 1
No full textWe consider Fano manifolds admitting an algebraic torus action with general orbit of codimension one. Using a recent result of Datar and Szekelyhidi, we effectively determine the existence of Kähler-Ricci solitons for those manifolds via the notion of equivariant K-stability. This allows us to give new examples of Kähler-Einstein Fano threefolds, and Fano threefolds admitting a non-trivial Kähler-Ricci soliton
Practical Conservatism
No full textWe explore the extent to which general considerations about the nature of social and political organization and the role of conventions in political life might provide a defence for the systematic status-quo orientation that we take to characterize conservatism. We term this strand of conservative thought “practical conservatism” because the conservatism in question is a practical response to certain facts about human society rather than deriving from any specifically conservative value or conservative attitude towards values.<br/
Growth of MRSA and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a fine-celled foam model containing sessile commensal skin bacteria
No full textSessile cultures of the skin bacteria Staphylococcus saprophyticus and Corynebacterium xerosis were grown using novel fine-celled foam substrata to test the outcome of challenge by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or Pseudomonas aeruginosa under three growth medium regimens (simulated sweat, simulated serum or simulated sweat substituted with simulated serum during the microbial challenge). S. saprophyticus and C. xerosis significantly limited MRSA and P. aeruginosa immigration respectively, under the simulated sweat and serum medium regimes. Under the substitution medium regime however, MRSA and P. aeruginosa integrated into pre-established biofilms to a significantly greater extent, attaining cell densities similar to the axenic controls. The outcome of challenge was influenced by the medium composition and test organism but could not be predicted based on planktonic competition assays or growth dynamics. Interactions between skin and wound isolates could be modelled using the fine-celled foam-based system. This model could be used to further investigate interactions and also in preclinical studies of antimicrobial wound care regimens
