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From active to activist parenting: educational struggle and the injuries of institutionalised misrecognition
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We don’t want to be waging this war; we do it because it’s the right thing, we have no choice morally. I can’t sleep at night because it makes me feel sick. I said, ‘I can either be Adrian Mole or you can be Erin Brockovich.’ You can either sit there and cry about it and write in your diary and have a breakdown over how terrible the world and the situation and the reality … and just let that swarm you, or you can actually go: ‘No. I am going to question this; I am going to get answers; and I want to make this right.’ (Molly, Crowley Parents Campaign)[...]
[1] An introspective, intellectual character appearing in a series of novels written by Sue Townsend....[...
Reducing the dependency of having prior domain knowledge for effective online information retrieval
Get PDFSometimes Internet users struggle to find what they are looking for on the Internet due to information overload. Search engines intend to identify documents related to a given keyphrase on the Internet and provide suggestions. Having some background knowledge about a topic or a domain will help in building effective search keyphrases that will lead to accurate results in information retrieval. This is further pronounced among students that rely on the internet to learn about a new topic. Students might not have the required background knowledge to build effective keyphrases and find what they are looking for. In this research, we are addressing this problem, and aim to help students find relevant information online. This research furthers existing literature by enhancing information retrieval frameworks through keyphrase assignment, aiming to expose students to new terminologies, therefore reducing the dependency of having background knowledge about the domain under study. We evaluated this framework and identified how it can be enhanced to suggest more effective search keyphrases. Our proposed suggestion is to introduce a keyphrase Ranking Mechanism that will improve the keyphrase assignment part of the framework by taking into consideration the part-of-speech of the generated keyphrases. To evaluate the proposed approach, various data sets were downloaded and processed. The results obtained showed that our proposed approach produces more effective keyphrases than the existing framework
Development and validation of the Music Cognitive Test: A music-based cognitive screening test
Get PDFSpecific tools to measure the cognitive benefits of music therapy and music-rehabilitation training available to music therapists are few and empirically weak: they are mostly psychometrically unrefined or based on unclear tasks and scoring protocols; they do not take into consideration distinct cognitive functions or are based on exclusively observational protocols. To overcome these limitations, we developed a 15-min cognitive screening tool suitable for music therapists, MCT (Music Cognitive Test), which assesses cognitive abilities stimulated by music-making activities (e.g., attentional, verbal and executive functions, short- and long-term memory) by including music-based items. MCT was validated with 335 participants (aged 18-100y.o.) presenting a range of cognitive levels, from healthy cognition to severe impairment. MCT correlated strongly and positively with well-known tests: MMSE (Mini-Mental State Examination), MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) and SMMSE (Severe Mini-Mental State Examination). MCT also displayed excellent sensitivity in identifying impaired individuals according to both MMSE and MoCA diagnostic criteria (99.4% and 93.0%, respectively), and excellent specificity in identifying healthy participants based on MMSE (93.5%) and MoCA (97.8%) criteria. Overall, results highlight the reliability of this novel brief music-focused cognitive screening test, to enable music therapists to independently and consistently monitor the effectiveness of their intervention on cognitive functions
Pay and employee intrapreneurialism in Russia, 1994-2015: a longitudinal study
Get PDFWe examine whether a high wage-high employee intrapreneurial inputs model remains a significant feature of the Russian economy. We do so by estimating the evolution of employee ‘intrapreneurial’ contributions to companies in Russia,1994-2015, using Akerlof’s theory of ‘partial gift exchange’. Akerlof (1982) suggests that employee discretionary contributions to organisational capacities rise when pay exceeds employee perceptions of ‘fair’ pay in comparable employment. Using the extensive Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), we find that overall employee intrapreneurial contributions significantly declined, 1994-2015, mirroring the declining Akerlof wage premium. Intrapreneurialism in highly-informalized sectors was associated with labour market pressures. We extend Akerlof’s theory to recognize intrapreneurial activity associated with coercive labour market pressures in the secondary labour market
An innovative blockchain-based traceability framework for industry 4.0 cyber-physical factory
Get PDFIndustry 4.0 is currently transforming the industrial landscape through the use of innovative technologies and novel data management approaches. The incorporation of Industry 4.0 brought new dimensions of improvement and autonomy into the existing industrial manufacturing processes which has also led to increased expectations for traceability in manufacturing. Traceability enables the tracking of every part and product of the manufacturing process giving insights into each manufactured component and its full history across each operation step that helps manufacturers improve quality and efficiency. Despite the huge potential in facilitating the optimization of the production lines, product traceability has remained a challenging topic in mass manufacturing. Hence, in this paper, an innovative Blockchain-based framework is proposed to integrate the processes of a real production line using the Industry 4.0 Festo Cyber-Physical Factory located at London Digital Twin Research Centre, Middlesex University. Blockchain technology is a distributed and shared database of events for a product life cycle that is encrypted in blocks or smaller data units. This paper introduces a viable blockchain-based framework implemented within a real smart product assembly for internal traceability within the production process in order to improve the security by preventing counterfeiting, identify specific problems on the production line and provide objective proof for product quality assurance
Managing human resource management tensions in project-based organisations: evidence from Bangalore
Get PDFWe examine human resource management (HRM) in a large Bangalore project-based software company. Diverse adaptations of organisation-level HRM exist in projects, generating heterogeneous HRM practices across the organisation, resulting in management–employee tensions. Paradoxes are managed through a comprehensive, detailed and complementary set of structural and relational coping mechanisms, designed to promote employee commitment. These mechanisms were only partially successful, largely because of ongoing client interventions in project management. The motivations for and directions of client interventions are closely linked to the type of work undertaken in projects. Service market imperatives limit managers' scope to negotiate such interventions
Multisensory 360° videos under varying resolution levels enhance presence
Get PDFOmnidirectional videos have become a leading multimedia format for Virtual Reality applications. While live 360◦ videos offer a unique immersive experience, streaming of omnidirectional content at high resolutions is not always feasible in bandwidth-limited networks. While in the case of flat videos, scaling to lower resolutions works well, 360◦ video quality is seriously degraded because of the viewing distances involved in head-mounted displays. Hence, in this paper, we investigate first how quality degradation impacts the sense of presence in immersive Virtual Reality applications. Then, we are pushing the boundaries of 360◦ technology through the enhancement with multisensory stimuli. 48 participants experimented both 360◦ scenarios (with and without multisensory content), while they were divided randomly between four conditions characterised by different encoding qualities (HD, FullHD, 2.5K, 4K). The results showed that presence is not mediated by streaming at a higher bitrate. The trend we identified revealed however that presence is positively and significantly impacted by the enhancement with multisensory content. This shows that multisensory technology is crucial in creating more immersive experiences
An auto-ethnographic reflection on the nature of nursing in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic
Get PDFIn this article I discuss the effects on the patient experience of isolation nursing during the CoronaVirus Disease (COVID)-19 pandemic. An unintended consequence of isolation nursing has been to distance patients from nurses and emphasise the technical side of nursing while at the same time reducing the relational or affective potential of nursing (Goddard, 1953). Such distanced forms of nursing (May et al., 2001; May et al., 2006) normalise the distal patient in hospital. I consider ways in which this new form of distanced nursing has unwittingly contributed to the continued commodification of nursing care in the British NHS. Autoethnography is used to describe and reflect on the illness experience, the experiences of caregivers and the sociocultural organization of health care. The findings discuss three areas of the illness experience: intimate nursing care; communication; the ‘distanced’ patient experience
The subversion of women's anger in travel guidebooks
Get PDFGuidebooks have a privileged role in tourism as they direct bodily engagement with destinations, and yet few feminist leisure scholars have analysed guidebooks. This paper applies a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) to explore Lonely Planet’s online travel advice for women. The results of the FCDA reveal that Lonely Planet advice acts to subvert women travellers’ anger, particularly when confronted with gender-based violence such as sexual harassment. The guidance offered to women travellers transmits the message that anger at gender-based violence is not legitimate and suggests that feeling anger when abroad is culturally inappropriate. This paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating that women’s anger is routinely subverted, particularly in contexts where freedom is ostensibly promised, such as leisure. The findings of this paper illustrate the value in applying FCDA to instances of otherwise hidden subversion and oppression and should inform future advice offered to women travellers
Feminist new materialist approaches to childhood studies
No full textThere is a growing body of feminist scholarship that has taken up “new” materialisms to research childhoods. Feminist “new” materialisms, as the name suggests, are marked by a renewed attention to matter. In previous feminist research, such as those informed by feminist post-structuralist and sociocultural approaches, matter was assigned an inert, passive, and determinate role; a substrate on which language and discourse acted upon. In contrast, new materialist ontology views matter as lively, active, and indeterminate, and inseparable from the discursive as expressed in the concatenated term “materialdiscursive.